ABSTRACT
It may be said that a Copernican turn in media is underway. Increasingly, we are set free from the physical constraints of traditional media locations for our regular information feed, be it the cinema house, the TV set, the radio, or our favorite reading chair. Instead, information in its many forms and the interfaces we activate to access, produce, and share it, gravitate around us as individuals. They follow us everywhere, and always, and, importantly, they do so as we move. This gives new meaning to the significance of location and perspective. Added to these dimensions is the further condition that dynamic information media engage us with the sensorial in the situations of their use. While earlier media were conceived as sensorial extensions of our nervous system (as championed by McLuhan 1964), now the metaphor applies to the handheld media devices themselves. These terminals are no longer only subordinate augmentations of our human sensory system, but have their own complex sensorial capabilities as well. We may say, then, that we are experiencing the age of situated and sensory media. This turn away from the physical restrictedness and immobility of traditional media hardware to the individual body of the users and their always-on mobile devices will most probably cause changes in the power of place and perspective (Bratton 2009). In the following pages we explore these consequences in the context of an urban design case from Scandinavia that concerns the placement and selection of a new national museum within wider processes of urban change. The addition of location-based technologies and dynamic situated media (that are processed and interpreted on site) raises a number of challenges in negotiating relations between place, position, perspective, and perception. The use of these new technologies and related negotiations around them may open up issues for cultural policy and decision making. Consequently, they may also have some bearing on our understanding of sites of public cultural communication. Below, we first describe the basic features of the digital platform we have been experimenting with over the last several years: We have called this situated simulations (sitsim), and it has been identified as a form of indirect augmented reality (Wither et al. 2011). Alongside this is the potential inclusion of yet another mode of visual, spatial, and now dynamic situated communication as
part of urban planning and change (Schnädelbach 2009). Digital platforms like sitsims are becoming part of the tools we employ to imagine our cities culturally and technically (Donald 1999; Williams and Dourish 2006; Farman 2012). Location-based technologies provide us with additional technical and spatial affordances for positioning designs for the built environment in situ (e.g., Felix et al. 2008). They also open out for further extensions of our projections and perceptions of the multimodally mediated designs of architects, cultural institutions, and planning agencies. This is already apparent, for example, in debates surrounding developments on delicate cultural and political sites such as the World Trade Center in New York. It reaches into the online mediation of leading architectural museum complexes such as the Tate Modern in London and the new National Museum of 21st Century Arts (MAXXI) in Rome (Pierroux and Skjulstad 2011). Architectural competition finalists are also often featured in research and design publications as exemplars of emergent and contemporary innovation in materials, computing, form, and aesthetics. Competitions for public buildings, especially large cultural institutions such as national museums, are filled with political contest; they are sites of significant mediation as part of highly competitive processes of selection and award. National museums often become cultural landmarks that are architectural as much as they are known by their collections, curatorial prowess, and quality of exhibitions. These architectural competitions are foregrounded in complex processes that entail the projected cultural location of prestige projects that will eventually be lodged in the built environment. We draw on a developmental approach to research by design, which involves making and analyzing over time and with reference to emerging mobile technologies. In contrast to social science mobilities research (e.g., Büscher et al. 2011; Hjorth et al. 2012) influenced by sociology and studies of technological systems, our inquiries and productions are also closely related to practices and published research in the digital humanities (Morrison and Mainsah 2012). We draw on these as resources in designing and communicating how the sitsim redefines mediation of place and perspective. Next, we present the core case in which we have applied sitsim with respect to the planned building of the new national museum in downtown Oslo. Here we particularly focus on the public visualization of the new architecture and briefly contextualize it in terms of cultural debates, policies, and decision making. We then move on to describing the features of the sitsim and its design and trial evaluation with international students on location. This leads to a discussion of the results in context of place and perspective. Finally, we place the findings in a wider frame of interaction design, mediated communication, and cultural discourse and suggest further experiments and scenarios for this kind of experimental research and development.
