Style Guide for Situated Content

 Adam Sandler’s movie “Click” creates a public daydream about our emerging desire for an intimate relationship with the world through our mobile devices.  That thing in your hand is no longer an inanimate object - it is a dynamic extension of your self.

MobileMuse.ca in the process of defining a joint program of mobile media consumption research with Nokia and one of the more interesting experimental design factors is the ‘burning in’ period during which subjects need to build an effective and affective relationship with a new device.  There’s no point to user behaviour research while the subject and the device are strangers.  A relationship can’t be built overnight and in most cases it will go well beyond casual dimensions of friendship.  Marketers know that people begin to project their relationship with their device, along with their hopes and dreams for what it will achieve for them socially in the world, with the very first advertisements they see.  It’s similar to the way we begin to project our social selves through prospective mates from the first time we see them.

Stephanie Regier, who has been a big part of the design and deployment of this web site and should be writing a blog of her own here, I think, has sent us a link to a site that I hadn't come across before: "experientia ". These folks scan the world for information on, as they put it: "DAILY INSIGHTS ON EXPERIENCE DESIGN, USER EXPERIENCE AND INNOVATION." They seem to do very well on their mobile phone/mobile experience coverage, and the most recent set of posts provides some links with a great deal of insight for mobilemuse researchers:

Ants and bees build amazing homes, but no creature can match the human obsession for augmenting living landscapes with built structures. And you haven’t seen anything yet.  Think about our deeper obsession with media.  What happens when we’re able to augment our built environments with media structures? Cities formed of bricks and glass are about to be reformed with media and meaning. Welcome to the semantic city.

The world is experiencing an interesting reversion of power from nation-states back to city-states.  While recent world is flat thinking focuses on the growth of a planet-state, the real phenomenon is that nation-states are diminishing with respect to both the planet-state and city-states, so that creative city-states are peaking strongly on a flattening landscape.  So yes, the world is already city-spiky.  And the spikes will get much sharper as mobile media begin to reinvent urban experience.  How and why?  Urban lifestyle potentials will expand enormously as the semantic web couples with ambient culture and built infrastructure.