Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
to purchase while in a shop, a quick look online will help define our opinion in ways
that can be very powerful. If we receive a message on our smartphone, our mood
could change for the rest of the day.
Situated and ubiquitous information is able to powerfully transform, in real-time,
the ways in which we experience places, objects and services, by providing the wide
accessibility of other people's stories, emotions, expectations and visions.
This scenario is the one we have tried to address in our research: the conceptu-
alization, design and implementation of a tool for urban navigation, in which the
emotional narratives expressed by people while inhabiting and using urban places,
spaces and objects become instantly and radically available, accessible and usable,
to design new types of affordances for our cities.
We have decided to start from the idea of a Compass.
14.2
The Compass
The compass is a historically understood, ubiquitously known object dedicated to
navigation and orientation: it finds the direction in which one wants to go.
Compasses are very easy to use (or, at least, to understand how they work) and are
capable of providing direct, immediately accessible insights about the information
they convey.
Different cultures and civilizations have used compasses for very different
reasons, such as in the case of the Qibla compass, which is used by Muslims to
show the direction to Mecca for prayers, or the Feng Shui compass, through which
one is able to understand how to better orient houses' furniture and elements to
obtain optimal energies.
The Feng Shui example is of particular relevance for the objectives our research.
In its construction, the cardinal points are matched with an overwhelming amount of
other information: over 40 concentric circles of writing and detail used to define the
Bagua
of your home, the ways in which energy flows. In the Feng Shui compass, the
cardinal directions are combined with information coming from entirely different
domains, and this combination gives rise to a completely different concept of
orientation.
This is the idea that we wanted to explore in our research.
Is it possible to use the ubiquitous
infoscape
(the informational landscape)
which is constantly produced by human beings on social networks to design novel
forms of urban navigation? Novel ways of experiencing places? New ways for
making decisions, for relating to one another, for consuming, for expressing and
understanding emotions?
We started from the idea of emotions.
How is an emotional compass made?
How do you create a compass which harvests in real-time as much data about the
ways in which human beings express their emotions on social networks, and uses it
to have insightful emotional experiences in the city?
