The Infrastructure of Experience and the Experience of Infrastructure: Meaning and Structure in Everyday Encounters with Space

Abstract

Although the current developments in ubiquitous and pervasive computing are driven largely by technological opportunities, they have radical implications not just for technology design but also for the ways in which we experience and interact with computation. In particular, the move of computation ‘off the desktop’ and into the world, whether embedded in the environment around us or carried or worn on our bodies, suggests that computation is beginning to manifest itself in new ways as an aspect of the everyday environment. One particularly interesting issue in this transformation is the move from a concern with virtual spaces to a concern with physical ones. Basically, once computation moves off the desktop, computer science suddenly has to be concerned with where it might have gone. Whereas computer science and human-computer interaction have previously been concerned with disembodied cognition, they must now look more directly at embodied action and bodily encounters between people and technology. In this paper, we explore some of the implications of the development of ubiquitous computing for encounters with space. We look on space here as infrastructure—not just a technological infrastructure, but an infrastructure through which we experience the world. Drawing on studies of both the practical organization of space and the cultural organization of space, we begin to explore the ways in which ubiquitous computing may condition, and be conditioned by, the social organization of everyday space.

Small Data, Data Infrastructures and Big Data

“…As Dourish and Bell (2007) contend, databases and infrastructures then cannot be considered in purely instrumental terms as they are thoroughly cultural, economic and 20 cognitive in nature and steeped in social significance. They thus suggest two lenses through which to understand data infrastructures.…”

Awareness, Transience and Temporality: Design Opportunities from Rah Island

“…The network coverage space is essential to characterize the mobile phone conversational space because, if nothing else, it delimits it. Network coverage can be explicitly manipulated as in the case of deploying cell signal dampeners in public places, such as churches and libraries [29]. This is an example of how a social norm can be enforced through technology.…”

“…When looking at the act of mobile phone mediated communication through social translucence, we can see social dynamics in the physical space that would benefit from the properties of visibility, awareness and accountability. Some authors have commented on the impact of mobile communication in institutions, their role in condensing or otherwise restructuring concepts of time and space, and how they have changed global markets or mediated experiences of remote places [27][28][29]. Our focus is rather on the ways that mobile communications shape individual actions.…”

Creating Friction: Infrastructuring Civic Engagement in Everyday Life

“…As they increasingly extend into everyday spaces, infrastructures are shaped by the spaces of everyday life and shape our encounters with those spaces; they are increasingly experienced spatially [19]. Infrastructures of civic engagement, then, must also contend with these spatiorelational experiences insofar as they engage with everyday space and the physical environment (e.g., [40]).…”