The influence of locative media on social information sharing: a review

Mobile phones and social media enable people to share information with others whenever they want, wherever they want. More recent developments allow people to augment their sharing experience by geo-tagging their information through GPS enabled phones. These 'locative media' can be used to facilitate navigation, way finding or to obtain information about a physical place or object. Other services let the users tag, rate public spaces and recommend them to other people. Furthermore, people can tell their stories by attaching their own context to a physical location. This report is a literature review in the field of locative media. In order to get a complete overview of the research that is done on location-based social networking, the most recent developments in the field are investigated. We also look at research methods used to test the user experience of this type of social media systems. Furthermore, we investigate the influence of location based media on the sharing habits and social practices of the users of these systems. The conclusions of this exploration in the field of locative media research lead to design guidelines and research methods that will be used in a user evaluation of a system for location based smart photo sharing

Locative Media and Sociability:Using Location-Based Social Networks to Coordinate Everyday Life

Foursquare was a mobile social networking application that enabled people to share location with friends in the form of “check-ins.” The visualization of surrounding known social connections as well as unknown others has the potential to impact how people coordinate social encounters and forge new social ties. While many studies have explored mobile phones and sociability, there is a lack of empirical research examining location-based social network’s (LSBNs) from a sociability perspective. Drawing on a dataset of original qualitative research with a range of Foursquare users, the paper examines the application in the context of social coordination and sociability in three ways. First, the paper explores if Foursquare is used to organize certain social encounters, and if so, why. Second, the paper examines the visualization of surrounding social connections and whether this leads to “serendipitous encounters.” Lastly, the paper examines whether the use of Foursquare can produce new social relationships

A place for locative media: A theoretical framework for assessing locative media use in urban environments

By 2050, three quarters of the world’s population will live in large urban conurbations. Within these environments, we see the rise of locative media – mobile technologies that capture and deliver location- and time-specific content and connections to their users. The key attribute of locative media that distinguishes them from other mobile media is location. Yet ideas of how locative media influence our relationship to the spaces we inhabit remain undertheorized. This gap arises because of an absence of interrogation into how and why people come to develop a connection with these spaces – how and why a space becomes a place to which its inhabitants ascribe meaning and in which social relations occur among them. This thesis proposes a theoretical framework for interrogating locative media in the context of everyday, embodied and mobile urban place-making, to better analyze the opportunities and challenges afforded through locative media

Contextual mobile adaptation

Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) involves systems that attempt to fit in with users’ context and interaction. Researchers agree that system adaptation is a key issue in ubicomp because it can be hard to predict changes in contexts, needs and uses. Even with the best planning, it is impossible to foresee all uses of software at the design stage. In order for software to continue to be helpful and appropriate it should, ideally, be as dynamic as the environment in which it operates. Changes in user requirements, contexts of use and system resources mean software should also adapt to better support these changes. An area in which adaptation is clearly lacking is in ubicomp systems, especially those designed for mobile devices. By improving techniques and infrastructure to support adaptation it is possible for ubicomp systems to not only sense and adapt to the environments they are running in, but also retrieve and install new functionality so as to better support the dynamic context and needs of users in such environments. Dynamic adaptation of software refers to the act of changing the structure of some part of a software system as it executes, without stopping or restarting it. One of the core goals of this thesis is to discover if such adaptation is feasible, useful and appropriate in the mobile environment, and how designers can create more adaptive and flexible ubicomp systems and associated user experiences. Through a detailed study of existing literature and experience of several early systems, this thesis presents design issues and requirements for adaptive ubicomp systems. This thesis presents the Domino framework, and demonstrates that a mobile collaborative software adaptation framework is achievable. This system can recommend future adaptations based on a history of use. The framework demonstrates that wireless network connections between mobile devices can be used to transport usage logs and software components, with such connections made either in chance encounters or in designed multi–user interactions. Another aim of the thesis is to discover if users can comprehend and smoothly interact with systems that are adapting. To evaluate Domino, a multiplayer game called Castles has been developed, in which game buildings are in fact software modules that are recommended and transferred between players. This evaluation showed that people are comfortable receiving semi–automated software recommendations; these complement traditional recommendation methods such as word of mouth and online forums, with the system’s support freeing users to discuss more in–depth aspects of the system, such as tactics and strategies for use, rather than forcing them to discover, acquire and integrate software by themselves

PokéStops and Other Spaces of Our Lives: Co-Creation of Social Spatiality Through Consumption of Pokémon GO

The tremendous Pokémon GO craze got the world by surprise in July 2016. Within a couple of days this location-based mobile game gathered a record-breaking number of downloads and transformed the urban environment into a game board by driving people outside their homes to catch imaginary creatures. Combining the physical reality and imagination, this ‘pervasive’ game can be thought of as a new instance of digital virtual consumption (DVC) that could have an enhanced potential to simulate consumer fantasies. While there is a decade of research on how the urban environment can be experienced differently through location-aware technologies, most of it is outdated. Furthermore, little attention has been paid to the full spectrum of social spaces following Lefebvre’s (1991) triad that extends beyond behavior in the observable environment. The aim of this research is to help fill those gaps in understanding how consumers participate in the co-creation of social spaces through the next-generation location-based mobile games as a part of their daily lives. Moreover, the goal is to examine how the interface between the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’ is being experienced, and what kind of a role gamification plays in the equation. The research problem is approached through qualitative research methods leaning on the philosophical assumptions of interpretivism and phenomenology, that view the world as socially constructed and only understood through one’s ‘being’ in it. The research lies within the field of Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) that explores the dynamic interplay of consumer behavior, environment and culture through contextual, symbolic and experiential aspects of consumption. Consequently, the aim is to describe the phenomenon rather than to find an explanation for it. The research identifies three main themes that together describe the experience of co-creating social spaces through game play. These are labelled as I) trusting the community to fill in the blanks, II) negotiation between spaces of play and duty, and III) making the most of both worlds. Together they draw a picture of a constant struggle between the player community and the game over agency in creating the experience; transformation of spaces and places through the practice of ‘mapping’; un-controlled switches between spaces of nostalgia and responsibility due to loss of anonymity in the physical reality; and developing alternative game interfaces to optimally integrate the game into players’ everyday spaces. Furthermore, the findings imply an emergence of a new form of gamification, where the core ‘service’ being gamified is, in fact, an individual life as a whole

Fortnight [Bristol]

Fortnight is a two-week long, fully immersive, experience based in the interactions and communications of daily life. Up to 200 participants sign up to receive messages that are sent to their mobile phones, email, and home address; these messages contain a series of poetic nudges that encourage those participating to question their sense of place. Participants also receive daily invitations to visit locations throughout their city where they can pause to reflect on what it means to be here now. Fortnight enables the experience of “theatre” to penetrate beneath a seemingly brittle aesthetic surface of performance, deep into the consciousnesses of our participants as they begin to interact with and perceive world around us as the performance itself; the place where we act out our own daily lives. In Fortnight, the spectator becomes participant; the journey becomes narrative. Fortnight therefore subverts the notion of an audience, in which each spectator’s perspective is forced to examine not the situation and setting of performers on a stage, but rather the situation and setting of our own sense of place and the meaning we apportion to our everyday lives. Fortnight uses various forms of ubiquitous technology such as: Radio Frequency Identification (aka, RFID tags of the type contained in key fobs), which are used in badges sent to each participant that allow them to interact with real-world “portals” to trigger certain effects in their surroundings; QR technology (in the form of barcodes on posters that reveal additional hidden messages, should the participant choose to delve further; SMS messages; email; and, Twitter. Alongside this, older modes of communication such as handwritten letters, give Fortnight a decidedly low-fi aesthetic. Throughout Fortnight, participants are encouraged to explore the creative possibilities of pervasive and communicative media without reverting to mere technological fetishism. In Fortnight, each mode of communication is used not only for its functionality but also as symbols that bind the project and the participant together, rooting them to the here and now with the everyday tools of modern society. The mediated messages within Fortnight lead participants down a living, breathing rabbit hole where the familiar becomes unfamiliar and reality distorts. The project becomes an experience for the participant that is as immersive as their own life; creating an alternative reality, that not only co-exists alongside their own everyday realities, but also merges with them.This is a performance with shared responsibilities, reflecting the actions and consequences of our daily lives: what we put in, we get out

The Underwhelming Effects of Automatic Location-Awareness on Collaboration in a Pervasive Game

In this paper we seek to empirically study the use of location-awareness of others in the context of mobile collaboration. We report on a field experiment carried out using a pervasive game we developed called CatchBob!. Using both quantitative and qualitative data, we show the underwhelming effects of automating location-awareness. Our results indeed shows that automating this process does not necessarily improve the task performance and that it can be detrimental to socio-cognitive processes involved in collaboration such as communication or the modeling of partners’ intents. The paper concludes with some potential impacts for location-based application practitioners

Digital social norms and mobile-based social networking applications : a study of urban Chinese young people's use of WeChat

Ph.D. ThesisToday, the advent of mobile-based social networking applications is dramatically changing how urban Chinese young people socialise with each other, as well as how they experience the world. In particular, WeChat – the most popular Chinese mobile-based social networking application – has been launched onto the market, attracting millions of young users in urban China. The ways in which young people use this application are inextricably linked to the dynamics of their urban living experiences, forming the digital social norms to which they adhere in their everyday lives. In this thesis, I develop an interdisciplinary approach which synthesises affect/new materialism and traditional cultural studies (e.g. symbolic interactionism) in order to understand the digital social norms emerging with urban Chinese young people’s everyday use of WeChat. In particular, Chinese college students are a representative group of young people, who are early adopters of WeChat and lead the trend of its usage in China. Through a year-long netnographic enquiry with 19 college students recruited from a chosen university in China, the research uncovers: 1) how the affective design of WeChat attracts urban Chinese young people’s attention and influences their everyday practices; 2) how these young people practise self-presentation through their personalisation of space; 3) how these young people socialise with close-by strangers; as well as 4) how these young people preserve their spatial privacy. The outcomes of the discussion not only help to understand the digital social norms emerging with this particular form of technology among urban Chinese younger generation but also develop an in-depth understanding of the relationship between culture and technology that speaks to a broader audience

The Construction of Locative Situations: the Production of Agency in Locative Media Art Practice

This thesis is a practice led enquiry into Locative Media (LM) which argues that this emergent art practice has played an influential role in the shaping of locative technologies in their progression from new to everyday technologies. The research traces LM to its origins at the Karosta workshops, reviews the stated objectives of early practitioners and the ambitions of early projects, establishing it as a coherent art movement located within established traditions of technological art and of situated art practice. Based on a prescient analysis of the potential for ubiquitous networked location-awareness, LM developed an ambitious program aimed at repositioning emergent locative technologies as tools which enhance and augment space rather than surveil and control. Drawing on Krzysztof Ziarek\u27s treatment of avant-garde art and technology in The Force of Art , theories of technology drawn from Science and Technology Studies (STS) and software studies, the thesis builds an argument for the agency of Locative Media. LM is positioned as an interface layer which in connecting the user to the underlying functionality of locative technologies offers alternative interpretations, introduces new usage modes, and ultimately shifts the understanding and meaning of the technology. Building on the Situationist concept of the constructed situation, with reference to an ongoing body of practice, an experimental practice-based framework for LM art is advanced which accounts for its agency and, it is proposed, preserves this agency in a rapidly developing field