Latest Articles

Rough Guide to: In-Game Advertising

In-Game Advertising offers marketers a cost-effective way to specifically target key audiences, industry players claim. New Media Knowledge talked to one in-game advertising network to see how businesses can deploy and benefit from the technology.

more

Alexander McCall-Smith Engages Web 2.0

The Daily Telegraph is in the middle of a 20-week serialisation of an online book created by author Alexander McCall-Smith, his first such project. New Media Knowledge caught up with the organisers to discuss ‘Corduroy Mansions’.

more

Business Brief: Video Advertising Looks to Future

Google has announced it will incentivise advertisers on its video properties as well as launching research programmes into how Web users consume Internet video material. New Media Knowledge spoke to a number of industry players to gauge their views on where the video advertising market is going.

more

• ‘Virtual Home’ for Ex-Pats in London Established
• Rough Guide to: Social Media and the Law
• Record Visits for UK Blog Sites
• Clearing Congestion
• Rough Guide to: Pay-Per-Click Advertising
• Opinion: What Happens to Newspapers?
• LinkedIn Adds Business Applications

Related Articles

• The Last Mile to Digital Cities

  The idea of wireless digital cities has been around for as long as wireless networks. But somehow they haven’t worked. Ian Delaney reports on a new solution to the problem. more

• Social Tapestries Release Atlas Book

  The Social Tapestries initiative of the Urban Tapestries project has unveiled the latest incarnation of its work - a new publication titled 'An Atlas of Enquiry' which traces the landscape and outcomes of their recent projects... more

• Urban Tapestries Report Released

  Public authoring, place and mobility were explored and studied in this ambitious project organised by Proboscis. Now the findings and anaylsis of this geotagging experiment have been released in downloadable reports... more

GeoTagging The City

Urban Tapestries geotagging project, prototyping pervasive technologies in everyday social contexts, innovates place and mobile technology convergence explains Giles Lane of Proboscis...

"From Urban Tapestries To Social Tapestries"

The innovative Urban Tapestries project developing pervasive technologies for use in everyday settings, and its forthcoming follow-up Social Tapestries, are outlined by Giles Lane of Proboscis...

[Register and post your own comments on this article below...]


What is Urban Tapestries?

Urban Tapestries nature is twofold:
• A framework for exploring and sharing experience and knowledge, for leaving and annotating ephemeral traces of peoples’ presence in the geography of the city.
• A research project that has explored the social and cultural uses of the convergence of place and mobile technologies.

The research has been via building an experimental platform for the authoring and access of place-based content (text, audio, pictures), and transdisciplinary research, i.e. many different skills working together rather than in disciplinary isolation.

Research on Place & Mobility

• place not just location – understanding the complex relationships that define urban life, individuals and communities.
• public authoring not just consumption – taking ‘ownership’ of public spaces through cocreative marking and mapping territory electronically.
• social knowledge not just entertainment – using ICTs to enrich social and cultural life by sharing everyday, informal knowledges.

Articulating Knowledge & Experience

Making legible and tangible relationships, associations and connections between people, places, things that are often invisible, unspoken.

Adding persistence to the knowledges and experiences of individuals (and groups) that enable further opportunities for social encounters and connections beyond the present of day-to-day life.

Presence

• Exploring broader definitions and understandings of presence beyond simple proximity.
• Maintaining remote connections to physically distant places and communities through a kind of asynchronous inhabitation of place.
• Creating a platform for people to make their voice present in a community who are shy of social encounters – discrete presence.

Paper Prototyping

Bodystorming Experiences
Proboscis uses a technique for rapid iteration and testing of ideas, interactions and uses through lo-tech paper prototyping. Bodystorming Experiences enable us to give people a physical, tactile and tangible experience of what using a spatial annotation system might be like, and why and what they might use it for.

We have run many events with people from technology, policy, arts and social sciences, as well as local people such as senior citizens and teenagers. These events have given us unique insights into the relationships people form with each other through place, and have had a major influence on the technical development of the Urban Tapestries system.

Trials & Tests

• December 2003: 100 person public trial of first prototype using PocketPC PDAs and an 802.11b WiFi mesh network in Bloomsbury.
• June 2004: 10 person field trial using Symbian smartphones over GPRS network across 3km2 area of Central London.

View the Current Iteration and Initial Iteration

To support the project we also launched the UT Web Browser and UT Location-based RSS Feeds

Next Iterations:
• Major System upgrade (to ‘version 2’)
• Public Web Authoring Interface covering 10km2 of Central London
• New Symbian Client for 3G device using multimodal positioning capabilities ….plus some exciting things to follow…

Team:
Giles Lane, Alice Angus, Danny Angus, John Paul Bichard, Michael Golembewski, Katrina Jungnickel, Paul Makepeace, Rachel Murphy, George Papamarkos, Victoria Peckett, Zoe Sujon, Sarah Thelwall and Nick West with Huw Jeffries, Nigel Palmer and James Wilkes.

Partners & Collaborators:
• Proboscis (project initiator & manager)
• London School of Economics (social research)
• France Telecom R&D UK (symbian programming)
• Ordnance Survey (cartography & GIS)
• Orange UK (mobile network access)
• Hewlett-Packard Research Labs (device support)

Funders:
• Department of Trade & Industry
• Arts Council England
• Daniel Langlois Foundation, Montreal
www.proboscis.org.uk / www.urbantapestries.net

Where Next: Social Tapestries

Social Tapestries is a research initiative to develop experimental uses of public authoring which demonstrate the social and cultural benefits of local knowledge sharing enabled by new mobile technologies, in collaboration with other civil society organisations.
• to create and support relationships that transcend existing social and cultural boundaries;
• enable the development of new social and creative practices based around place, identity and community;
• understand the benefits and the limits of knowledge mapping and sharing.

The initiative will operate in 4 areas: education, community & arts, housing & local government.

Social Tapestries: Experiments

Proboscis collaborated with Kingswood High School near Hull to design a set of tools and activities that introduced the concept of local knowledge gathering, mapping and sharing with Year 7 students (11-12 year olds).

The aim of the project is to impact the relevance of learning by making it proximate to the environment in which the students live. Students will be asked throughout the year to gather and map specific phenomena which can then be studied across the curriculum.

Proboscis aims to develop a model and toolkit for other schools to apply this approach to associative learning, as well as to make the process sustainable and transferable.

Education & Learning 2: STAMPS
System for TAgging Messages, Post-inferential Semantics Proboscis is collaborating with researchers from the CRAFT (Computer Supported Collaborative Learning) Lab at EPFL Lausanne (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) on a 3 year PhD research project exploring the cognitive processes used by people to infer elements of spatialised communications.

EPFL will use Urban Tapestries as their test platform running 2-3 trials over 2 years in order to develop intelligent algorithms based on semantic descriptions of spatialised communication to enable smart meta data to be automatically added to spatial annotations.

The first trial with an estimated 10 participants is anticipated to run in London for up to 2 months during Spring 2005.

Community & Arts: Robotic Feral Public Authoring
Proboscis has won an EPSRC award to host the renown artist/engineer Natalie Jeremijenko of UC San Diego on a Visiting Fellowship during 2004/05. We will be collaborating with Natalie to adapt her Feral Robots (toy robot dogs reconfigured to act as independent mobile pollution sensors) to create a model for using hobbyist robotics and public authoring as social activism, and as triggers for new social and cultural encounters.

We are just embarking on partnerships with SPACE Studios and the London Knowledge Lab to begin working with a local community in Hackney with whom we will identify a local environmental condition and develop a prototype feral robot to sense and map the pollution as part of a public event to raise awareness of and focus attention on the issue.

Community & Arts: Neighbourhood Games
John Paul Bichard is leading a research project exploring the feasibility of gaming as a social tool. The project will look at ways in which social multiplayer games can be developed and sustained in a local neighbourhood environment. The aim is to develop a games methodology that has the potential to allow a broad demographic to play in the everyday environment across race, age and gender.

A fundamental part of human social activity is play, whether private or shared, solitary or in groups. Play functions on a number of levels, one of which could be as a means of exploring, testing and defining the ‘neighbourhood’ as both a social place and an interpersonal mechanism. Neighbourhood Games looks at a way of developing simple games layers within familiar environments – in relation to the research carried out to date in UT, it will draw on notions of community, age separation and hidden stories with an aim to establish clear directions for ongoing research and development.

Active Citizenship: Eyes on the Street
Proboscis is developing a collaborative project with Citizens Online and the Community Development Foundation to explore the potential and appropriateness of social technologies to help address issues of liveability, and community engagement in community safety.

The intention is to work with people in a specific neighbourhood to investigate the potential for systems like Urban Tapestries to meet the needs of people in a community to have effective 'eyes on the street’, creating possibilities for new approaches to neighbourliness, community reporting on local environmental conditions and other social interactions.

The design process will be adaptive and people-centred, with the intention of creating appropriate uses and interfaces for people with different lifestyles, capabilities and levels of interest.

About Urban Tapestries:

Urban Tapestries is a Proboscis project exploring social and cultural uses of the convergence of place and mobile technologies through transdisciplinary research. Facilitating virtual annotations of the city, and allowing ordinary citizens to embed social knowledge in the new wireless landscape of the city, it seeks to enable people as their own authors and agents, not merely as consumers of content provided to them by telecoms and media corporations. This article is adapted from a presentation on Urban Tapestries given by Giles Lane on behalf of Proboscis and its research programme Social Matrices (SoMa) at the Pervasive and Locative Arts Network (PLAN) event at the ICA, London on 1st & 2nd February 2005, and is available with graphics at the Urban Tapestreies weblog.