Aca-articles: Digital Creativity - Mobile Ubiquity in Public and Private Spaces

This issue of Digital Creativity entitled Mobile Ubiquity in Public and Private Spaces seeks to examine cultural formations, practices, processes and movements related to the presence and deployment of ubiquitous information in the lived spaces and recesses of human culture today.

This issue includes: (see all articles here)

• Towards a theory of pervasive ludology: reflections on gameplay, rules, and space (Bo Kampmann Walther)
• Ubiquitous apps: politics of openness in global mobile cultures (Gerard Goggin)
• Urban fictions: a critical reflection on locative art and performative geographies (Petra Gemeinboeck & Rob Saunders)
• Mobile innovation: designing and evaluating situated simulations (Gunnar Liestøl, Terje Rasmussen & Tomas Stenarson)
• Good grief: the role of social mobile media in the 3.11 earthquake disaster in Japan (Larissa Hjorth & Kyoung-Hwa Yonnie Kim)
• Provoking the city—touch installations for urban space (Heidi Tikka, Sandra Viña, Giulio Jacucci & Teemu Korpilahti)

Excerpt from the introduction by Lily Díaza & Ulrik Ekman.

It has been more than fifteen years since Mark Weiser’s and his Xerox Parc colleagues’ seminal and trans-disciplinary work on a vision for a ‘calm’ and human-centred kind of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) for the twenty-first century. Although its ongoing realisation is in a number of respects quite different from the original vision, that vision is now considerably more of an actual fact.

Its very realisation, as well as the differences, are due in part to interim economic and technical advances, such as affordable, multifaceted microscale sensors and actuators and an expansion of decentralised networking capacities via new Internet protocol practices for the billions of computational entities worldwide, thus paving the way for an adequate ubicomp infrastructure and an actual Internet of Things. Partly, ubicomp has become real in new and different ways because a miniaturisation of components and a global cultural acceptance in practice have permitted mobile wireless devices (such as mobile phones, iPods and other MP3 players (Bull 2007), PDAs and Blackberrys, iPads, notebooks) to achieve an unprecedented distributed pervasiveness—outnumbering humans globally, perhaps only superseded technically by embedded computational units.

This special issue emerges from activities instantiated through ‘The Culture of Ubiquitous Information’, a Nordic Research Network devoted to the analysis and evaluation of ubiquitous computing as a contemporary technocultural development. As suggested by the title (‘Mobile Ubiquity in Public and Private Spaces’), this issue seeks to examine cultural formations, practices, processes and movements related to the presence and deployment of ubiquitous information in the lived spaces and recesses of human culture today. Some of the articles included are the result of the workshop held in Helsinki (January 2011) and an open call posted by the research network.

During the workshop, academics, artists, designers and media theorists came together to discuss topics such as: What is the character, place and reach of the new interfaces and types of interaction design for ubicomp? How do social mobile media platforms mediate proximity and intimacy? What do contextualisation and personalisation mean considering technical contextawareness and individuals’ adoption of mobile devices? What is the conceptualisation of agency for creative individuals in a ubicomp culture, and how is this agency transformed through collaborative innovative work (Hemment 2006, Townsend 2006, Tuters and Varnelis 2006)? What different worlds now come together in the practices of art and design, especially with regard to the new digital instruments? How do the multiple dimensions of human experience, such as identity, affect and emotion, sensation, perception, and conscious expression and interpretation, find an outlet in the mobile social experience?

See all articles in this issue of Digital Creativity here.