- In her influential book Plans and Situated Action, Lucy Suchman (1987) argues for an understanding of social conduct as emerging from a direct response to the immediate circumstances of interaction–a perspective labelled “situated action.”
- In a frequently cited article, Harrison and Dourish (1996) critically explore the use of space as a basis for design. According to them, the way we manage collaborative activity is not rooted in space at all, but in a mutual cultural understanding of behavior and action. Place is space with invested understandings of behavioral appropriateness and cultural expectations: “space is the opportunity; place is the understood reality” (Harrison & Dourish, 1996, p. 67).
- The architect Malcolm McCullough (2004) goes further, dismissing the notion of the Internet as a place for immersive inhabitance altogether and seeing it as a “societally enacted myth.”
- In essence, the world would become the interface.
- In addition, it has been suggested from an architectural perspective that the spatial structures of urban environments embody cultural patterns of interaction that form the basis for socially intelligible conduct (McCullough - Digital Ground, 2004)
- One stream of current research that, implicitly or explicitly, refers to place from a broadened view of use context islocation-aware systems.
- Ciolfi (2004) has successfully applied a perspective of place drawn from the phenomenological vein in human geography to the design of augmentations of physical environments in the form of interactive museum installations.
- For example, Dourish (2001b) as well as Ciolfi (2004) define space as the physical and mechanical elements of the world that are devoid of meaning. Björgvinsson resists this view of physical artifacts and environmental elements as discrete and separate, and claims that a physical environment without meaning is inconceivable.
- The bottom line here is that the construction of meaning is neither located in the technology nor in the social, but in the interaction between humans and non-human elements, or what he terms socio-material assemblages.
- This is a position against social constructionism on the one hand and technological determinism on the other, and places Björgvinsson’s argument in line with human geographers like Malpas who claim that place is primary to the construction of meaning.
- See for example Ciolfi (2004) for a summary of how the concept of place has been understood in environmental psychology
- Ciolfi, L., & Bannon, L. (2003, December 12-13). Space, place and the design of technologically enhanced physical environments. Paper presented at the Workshop on Space, Spatiality and Technologies. Edinburgh, UK.
- Another observation [ of Dourish] is that meaning arises in the course of action. This is to say that meaning is not inherent in the technology, and therefore not determined by the designer Rather, meaning emerges through the encounter with technology, making it open for various appropriations and adaptations as it is incorporated into a community of practice.
- David Seamon regards bodily mobility as the key component to understanding place. Repeated movements such as walking to the mailbox or reaching for a pair of scissors in a drawer are established as time-space routines (Cresswell, 2004, pp. 33-34). Seamon uses a dance metaphor, describing these habitual movements as “body ballet.” From the collective effort of many time-space routines performed within a certain location, a “place-ballet” emerges that, according to Seamon, provides a strong sense of place.
- Furthermore, for this position to be able to constructively contribute to informing design practice, we also need ways of constructing an account of the place-specific that avoids being caught in generalizations and vague typologies, and at the same time enables transcending the specific design situation to support the development of place-specific computing as a genre of interaction design
- A source particularly relevant for understanding practice in relation to space and place is Michel de Certeau’s (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life, in which language is used as a guiding metaphor to describe our practices around place.
- In short, to de Certeau space is a practiced place. Place is pre-structured and we follow its rules of grammar, i.e., we cannot walk through walls and we do not walk down the middle of a street. But our possibilities of operating within these structures are still as infinite as the expressive power of language. [ sounds like space syntax ]
- To conclude, two important issues for place-specific computing thus become: (1) to develop an understanding of practice as developed under the specific structuring conditions of (a particular) place; and (2) to understand what roles applications of place-specific computing can play as part of such practices, and consequently as part of a larger social process of place construction.
- The philosophically oriented geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (1977) has defined place through a comparison with space that suggests a wide range of scales for place. Place is about stopping, becoming involved and developing emotional attachment, whereas space is about openness, freedom and movement
- Consequently, place is something that exists on many scales, according to Tuan – from the corner of a room to the whole of the earth. However, such an unbounded definition of place becomes problematic in the case of place-specific computing.
Makes we wonder about things like ecological validity and Living labs...
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