Digital Storytelling and History Lines: Community Engagement in a Master-Planned Development

The introduction of new media and information and communication technology enables a greater variety of formats and content beyond conventional texts in the application and discourse of public history projects. Multimedia and personalised content requires public historians and cultural community developers to grasp new skills and methods to make representations of and contributions to a collective community memory visible. This paper explores the challenge of broadening and reinvigorating the traditional role of the public historian working with communities via the facilitation, curation and mediation of digital content in order to foster creative expression in a residential urban development. It seeks to better understand the role of locally produced and locally relevant content, such as personal and community images and narratives, in the establishment of meaningful social networks of urban residents. The paper discusses the use of digital storytelling and outlines the development of a new community engagement application we call History Lines

Restrictions and constraints in mobile narratives for place-based community engagement

The usage of the mobile Internet increased tremendously within the last couple of years, and thereby the vision of accessing information anytime, anywhere became more realistic and a dominant design principle for providing content. However, this paper presents work-in-progress that challenges this paradigm of unlimited and unrestricted access, and explores and tests how constraints and restrictions may positively influence the motivation and enticement of mobile users to engage with location-specific content. Restrictions, such as a particular time or location that enables a user to access content, may be used to foster community participation and engagement, as well as to support locative media production and to enhance the user’s experience. In the end, we outline the timeline of our current work and further studies planned in order to verify our hypothesis

Introducing a Framework to Capture and Reuse Tacit Knowledge in Software Project Management

In rapidly growing global companies, comprehensive training programs as well as in depth sharing of knowledge are essential factors to maintain the quality of human capital despite rapid expansion. Different dimensions of Knowledge management address the need and approach to leverage dispersed knowledge in order to make it visible and accessible for everyone to improve organizational performance. However, there has been a scarcity of successful and holistic models that define and categorize tacit knowledge in order to capture and distribute it for the benefit of others. This paper focuses on developing a framework in order to capture experiences regarding software project management and to provide a platform for managers to inherit knowledge from and bequeath their learning to others at large organizations. In order to build up and enhance the framework, the majority of information was gleaned from intensive interviews with top software project managers at Infosys, a well-known global company in the field of software development and consulting services. The final framework we developed can act as a comprehensive data-repository for capturing, storing, searching, and distributing tacit knowledge of project managers

The Embodied Hybrid Space: Designing for Digital Encounters in Physical Environments

The emergence of mobile and ubiquitous computing has created what is referred to as a hybrid space – a virtual layer of digital information and interaction opportunities that sits on top and augments the physical environment. The increasing connectedness through such media, from anywhere to anybody at anytime, makes us less dependent on being physically present somewhere in particular. But, what is the role of ubiquitous computing in making physical presence at a particular place more attractive? Acknowledging historic context and identity as important attributes of place, this work embarks on a ‘global sense of place’ in which the cultural diversity, multiple identities, backgrounds, skills and experiences of people traversing a place are regarded as social assets of that place. The aim is to explore ways how physical architecture and infrastructure of a place can be mediated towards making invisible social assets visible, thus augmenting people’s situated social experience. Thereby, the focus is on embodied media, i.e. media that materialise digital information as observable and sometimes interactive parts of the physical environment hence amplify people’s real world experience, rather than substituting or moving it to virtual spaces

The embodied hybrid space: Designing for digital encounters in physical environments

The emergence of mobile and ubiquitous computing has created what is referred to as a hybrid space – a virtual layer of digital information and interaction opportunities that sits on top and augments the physical environment. The increasing connectedness through such media, from anywhere to anybody at anytime, makes us less dependent on being physically present somewhere in particular. But, what is the role of ubiquitous computing in making physical presence at a particular place more attractive? Acknowledging historic context and identity as important attributes of place, this work embarks on a ‘global sense of place’ in which the cultural diversity, multiple identities, backgrounds, skills and experiences of people traversing a place are regarded as social assets of that place. The aim is to explore ways how physical architecture and infrastructure of a place can be mediated towards making invisible social assets visible, thus augmenting people’s situated social experience. Thereby, the focus is on embodied media, i.e. media that materialise digital information as observable and sometimes interactive parts of the physical environment hence amplify people’s real world experience, rather than substituting or moving it to virtual spaces

Social navigation and local folksonomies: Technical and design considerations for a mobile information system

Web services such as wikis, blogs, podcasting, file sharing and social networking are frequently referred to by the term Web 2.0. The innovation of these services lies in their ability to enable an increasing number of users to actively participate on the Internet by creating and sharing their own content and help develop a collective intelligence. In this paper we discuss how we use Web 2.0 techniques such as 'folksonomy' and 'geo-tagging' in a mobile information system to collect and harness the everyday connections and local knowledge of urban residents in order to support their social navigation practices

Mobile spatial interaction and mediated social navigation

The increasing ubiquity of location and context-aware mobile devices and applications, geographic information systems (GIS) and sophisticated 3D representations of the physical world accessible by lay users is enabling more people to use and manipulate information relevant to their current surroundings (Scharl & Tochtermann, 2007). The relationship between users, their current geographic location and their devices are summarised by the term 'mobile spatial interaction' (MSI), and stands for the emerging opportunities and affordances that location sensitive and internet capable devices provide to its users

A review of locative media, mobile and embodied spatial interaction

Highlights ► Provides a review of the history and development of locative media. ► Outlines different human-computer interaction techniques applied in locative media. ► Discusses how locative media applications have changed interaction affordances in and of physical spaces. ► Discusses practices of people in urban settings that evolved through these new affordances. ► Provides an overview on methods to investigate and elaborate design principles for future locative media

Checking-in at the library: Designing an ambient media system for social learning and collaboration opportunities

The knowledge economy of the 21st century requires skills such as creativity, critical thinking, problem solving, communication and collaboration (Partnership for 21st century skills, 2011) – skills that cannot easily be learnt from books, but rather through learning-by-doing and social interaction. Big ideas and disruptive innovation often result from collaboration between individuals from diverse backgrounds and areas of expertise. Public libraries, as facilitators of education and knowledge, have been actively seeking responses to such changing needs of the general public..