situated content toolkit

Going back to the earliest days of Mobile MUSE our tireless leader David Vogt had a vision for an 'Art Grid', a digital framework through which the public could tag and curate art in public spaces -- sanctioned or unsanctioned -- so theoretically anything from a permanent art installation to a particularly evocative tree)

metroCode's work with the Vancouver Sculpture Biennale has been a step in this direction, with a cell phone tour that offered participatory features such as voting and commenting via voice, text message, or multimedia message. In terms of uptake of the participatory features voting was the most popular (approximately 5% of those who dialled into the system cast a vote for their favourite sculpture), with voice messages falling a distant second, and virtually no uptake on the text or multimedia commenting. As

the rich media add-on was approached as part of the applied R&D side of Mobile MUSE we are able to assess the relevance and feasibility of these types of features for future implementations and further refine our work in the area of mobile user experience.

In parallel with the professionally-created content that constituted the bulk of the Biennale cell phone tour, metroCode worked with new media students from UBC and SFU on a pilot project called The Grid. The results and additional background on the project can be found here:

http://www.metrocode.net/thegrid.html

The idea behind Grid is that of a digital creative commons, a place where anyone can use their portable/mobile media device to post rich  media content about places and things that they find interesting and/or significant. The content can then be accessed by passersby, on their cellphones.  At present, unless there is physical signage of some sort that marks a site or object of interest a passerby would not know that content exists in that place. With the Biennale sculptures there was official physical signage (the result of an apparently a long, involved process with the Parks Board and the City, something that the organizers of the art exhibit dealt with, vs metroCode).  Most of us are familiar with projects such as Yellow Arrow (www.yellowarrow.net), in which a more 'outlaw' approach to marking locations is taken. Our dilemma is that it's difficult to be both government funded * and * outlaw.  (Pick one or the other...or prepare to incur the wrath of the side you didn't pick.)

An alternative to physical signage would be electronic alerts, an area that is being investigated by the team at the MAGIC lab at the UBC. The idea here is that in lieu of plaques or stickers pings or pop ups on our mobile devices would let us know that we have entered a rich media content zone. And if we're interested we can explore things further. Again, a nice theory but how many pings and pop ups could you endure before they became a nuisance factor vs an enhancing experience. So perhaps the issue becomes one of customization and information management; e.g. only alert me when i'm in a content zone related to sports, or local history, or modern art. The trouble here is that serendipity is removed from the equation, and one of the key features of urban life is happening upon things we don't expect to. Unpredictability. Otherness. What the heck was that-ness. These are complex issues to factor into our design decisions and certainly ones that are worthy of further examination.  In the meantime we invite you to check out our pilot project of The Grid, courtesy of metroCode and the students of Communications 386 (SFU, Fall 2006) and UBC's Multimedia Certificate Program (Fall/Winter 2006). 

A downloadable map that identifies the locations of the community-created rich media content will be posted shortly. We encourage you to sample the very thoughtful work that has been created, whether on your cell phone or on the web (where we promise the carriers won't sting you).