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of urban life. Work in data science is necessary and challenging: how to
aggregate, organize, visualize, and make sense of the large amount of data
that can be collected. By energizing citizen scientists and gaining access to
heretofore unavailable data from government sources, citizens and govern-
ment can work together to make much more “sense” of the data we have
and can collect.
How might these various media and affordances help us to design dra-
matic interactions? Each opens up new opportunity spaces. The speed of
technological development means that what we may envision as far in the
future could be possible soon—or now. The near future may involve great
new imaginings for applications and experiences, architectures, and affor-
dance. It will certainly also be about discovering ways to use brilliant tech-
nological affordances to do a lot of imaginable things better.
In Chapter 1, I argued that “the representation is all there is.” But in
augmented and mixed reality, what do we make of the part of the real
world on which things are overlaid? We can think of the actual world as
forming part of the representation in that it becomes setting and environ-
ment. In combination with what we have designed, we impart new mean-
ing to the actual world—meaning that works within the representational
context. Just like real humans in interactive experiences, the real world be-
comes part of a larger representation that we are co-creating.
Looking back at some of the heuristics we defi ned in Chapter 5, we can
see opportunities for enhancement with some of the media and methods
we described earlier. One example is the idea of couching interaction in the
context of the representation. Aspects of VR, AR, and sensor technologies
can help us bring virtual objects and characters into physical and embodied
contexts. I think of a game based on
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
em-
bedded in Huntington Gardens (a project I once proposed at Art Center).
Would you follow the White Rabbit? (I did.) A combination of sensors, AR,
and spatialized sound could bring the dramatic potential of the story to
life.
7
Strategic and emotional analysis of the central actions of Alice's ad-
ventures would help us lay out pathways and cues to predispose action
7. In the 1980s and 1990s, Antenna Theatre pioneered the use of audio in natural and built
environments to embed plots and stories into an interactor's experience of a place.
