Nisi et al 2008: Location-Aware Multimedia Stories
From Inventiopedia
Nisi, Valentina; Ian Oakley and Mads Haahr (2008) "Location-Aware Multimedia Stories: Turning Spaces into Places" in Álvaro Barbosa (ed.) ARTECH 2008: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Digital Arts, Porto: Universidade Católica Portuguesa, pp. 72-82.
This is a highly interesting paper about a project exploring locative narrative as a means of raising place-awareness in a Dublin neighbourhood. The authors created a set of place-based multimedia narratives about characters at various locations in the neighbourhood, in order to explore the potential for increased immersion and "contributing to the formation of a sense of place".
Of particular interest here is the consise argument about the nature of place vs space, and how stories embedded into spaces can contribute to place-making. The reference list of this article should be valuable for further research into these questions.
The authors conducted evaluations of their project with small groups of users with varying knowledge of the neighbourhood, and based on this they propose various design recommendations for similar projects, which should also be of interest to Inventio projects. In my opinion (anderssl) the evaluation shows primarily that this kind of project has a high potential for working as a "place-enhancer" and "story catalyst", whereas the idea of immersion seems quite useless here (as it may well be in most contexts, but that's a longer discussion). Why should users want to be immersed in a handheld video-screen telling them about the place they are in, if it is the place itself which is supposed to be at the centre of interest? Certainly the idea of immersion seems to run contradictory to the goals of story catalysm and place enhancement. Interestingly, although all three user groups interviewed seem to report problems of this kind, and also explicitly suggest replacing video with audio-only stories, the authors don't seem willing to reconsider the primacy of video content in their design recommendations.
The most interesting recommendations are to be careful to make the connections between place and text/media explicit, and that screen UI should be used primarily for visualization, rather than interaction (which of course could be made more radical: use the screen as little as possible, and rely on audio in stead).
Despite my critical remarks about immersion and video, this article is highly recommended!
--Anders Sundnes Løvlie 13:52, 21 November 2008 (UTC)
Found this other paper about the same project, haven't had the time to read it yet: A Mediated Portrait of the Dublin Liberties --Anders Sundnes Løvlie 19:12, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
