Urban Tapestries is a software platform developed by Proboscis, that combines mobile and Internet technology with geographic information systems to allow people to tag space with stories, pictures, sounds and videos. It aims at supporting the collaborative mapping and the sharing of knowledge in order to build new relationships between space and people.
The system is composed by a client, installed on mobile phone or handheld, and a content server that hosts the maps of the city. The client communicates with the server through the wireless network and is able to tag the location with media content, thanks to the interaction with the GPS system. As result, the different spaces that compose the city are enriched by a set of invisible annotations that can be shared with other people. The platform has been tested in different prototypes and is now part of a research program, called Social Tapestries, whose aim is to investigate the potentialities of the framework as a supporting tool for emerging social practices.
This project encompasses a lot of interesting and challenging themes for design and connects to the discussion on the difference between space and place and how human experience affects the physical contexts. Human Geography, a branch of the traditional Geography, studied how space becomes place and what are its constitutional dimensions. According to this approach, place is a lived space composed not only by a physical dimension but a personal and socio-cultural one as well. Urban Tapestries explores the importance of affecting the spaces we live with our experiences and memories. It allows people to claim their places, transforming the territory into an interface, in a “container for traces and fragmentary personal histories” (Thackara, 2005:84). These annotation are not just information but play an important role in the very definition of the contexts they are attached to: they are “new way of enhancing the ability of all citizens to engage in meaningful dialogue about their environment” (Thackara, 2005:81).
The possible scenarios of use for these annotations are different. We could think of the possibility of attaching personal content, like the memories or feelings that place evokes in us, but we can also reflect about the social and culture opportunities this platform would open: for instance, the possibility of leaving a text or a video about the history of the area, its traditions and social habits. Urban Tapestries allows people to claim back their own spaces and it reckons the importance of what Thackara calls locality, that is the influence context has on every process contained into it.Another important point this project addresses is what Proboscis developers call public authoring. They underline that these annotations are not the result of a single author but the fruit of a creative collaboration of different people.The role of the author in the production of a text has been widely investigated by Semiotics (Eco, 1990), for which even a place constitutes a text that can be analysed in its structure and communicative aims. In the contemporary society, we are assisting at a gradual changing of the production of texts. Thanks to the new media the role of the author is not exclusive anymore. With blogs, commenting and web communities, everybody can produce her own text. Urban Tapestries goes beyond the break with the broadcasting system: individuals not only produce their own content, they link it to the very physical environment.
The whole idea of public authoring is based on the possibilities of a collaborative production where we cannot identify a single author but a network of different producers. This collaborative creation is then a reaction to a media-driven fruition and underlines the active role of the individual. In this sense, Urban Tapestries adopts a critical approach to the narrative production, questioning the actual values and looking at a radical alternative:
“We contrast the concept of a publicly authored knowledge and experience commons to the traditional way in which information is passed from a centre to the margins – the broadcast model of newspapers, television and radio” (urbantapestries.net)
Another important point about Urban Tapestries is the one addressed by Jonas Löwgren in his exploration of the use qualities of digital products and services. The quality involved here is the social actability, the property of generating platforms and digital structures capable of supporting the development of arenas and forums of discussion, open to different possibilities and uses (Löwgren, 2006). As support for knowledge production and sharing, Urban Tapestries promote the social actability by creating a network of narrations everyone can participate to. It also underlines that a powerful and versatile platform is not enough until everyone is granted the same opportunities. In this sense, Urban Tapestries makes a hidden statement underlining the importance of participation and in the end of democracy.
On one hand, Urban Tapestries is a piece of experimental design that show how human habits can be supported and enriched by mobile technologies; but on the other, it contests the authority of the author and implicitly the whole establishment of media systems. In doing so, it is able to create new scenarios of participation that are not located in the cyberspace but in places where people daily live and interact.
REFERENCES
Eco, U., 1990. I limiti dell’interpretazione. Milano: Bompiani.
Löwgren, J., 2006. Articulating the use qualities of digital designs. In Fishwick, P. (ed.) Aesthetic computing, pp. 383–403. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Thackara, J. 2005. In the Bubble. Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press.
