fisharepeopletoo

The Secret Life of Cumbria

"What Makes Cumbria Special and Why?

Is it the people in Maryport, the scenery in Ambleside or the festivals in Ulverston?

Here is what some people have already said:

“Ulverston – a night out at the Bird in Hand with Irish Session music (Ali and Friends) and then onto the UV for a bit of Irish Punk. Dancing was great!”

“Maryport – a hot coffee on a windswept but sunny morning at Ma's Pantry.”

“Loughrigg tarn - so beautiful and tranquil even on a bank holiday and easy to escape to after work in Windermere.”

Everyone in Cumbria can have their say about what makes it such a special place.

All that is needed is a mobile phone. To take part, just start a text with Cumbria then a space, then what you think makes it special (no more than 1 text long) and send it to 07786 202 994

It is a normal text number, so on a contract with free texts it's free to take part, if not, it only costs the same as sending a text to a friend's phone.

Your number will never be shown, so you can write about anything in Cumbria, and you will not be signed up for anything, ever.

All the answers sent in by text will appear on a new website called The Secret Life of Cumbria, www.secretlife.org.uk. The web site has been funded by Cumbria County Council to give people the chance to have their say about the things they really care about, and find out what is seen as positive about Cumbria.

The messages sent in will be used to help the council decide what is important to the region, so it’s vital that people in Cumbria record their own views about what makes it a special place, and it only takes one text message to do it."*

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*That's the press release for the Secret Life of Cumbria, which is one of my day jobs at the moment, though no less interesting for that.

Academic Enquiry*

i/ We want to understand what might be effective tools and techniques
for creating satisfying location aware play/narratives** [and assuming our version of it to be
technologically enabled in some way]

ii/ From the run of Five Trees Forest events (in two office buildings and a sixth form college), start to isolate [in a repeatable and demonstrable way] what those tools and techniques might be.

iii/ Measure how effectively Five Trees Forest deploys those tools and
techniques.

iv/ use that measurement to inform new location aware play.

My guess as to what the effective tools and techniques might be (not
all deployed in Five Trees Forest), is some combination of:

location sensing technology (which technologies might be better or
worse? - is NFC better than GPS, is an SMS keyword better than NFC?)
shared public space
narrative
game play
rules
individual creativity and self expression
communal activity
real world identity/anonymity
presence
peer pressure
face-to-face interactions
web sites
printed paper
mobile phones
archives and databases
screens
sense of place
sense of belonging

which is the sort of list that includes just about everything, ever.

*We've been enquiring into this since 2002 if not before, but not academically.
** My half-arsed (though based on a great deal of practical experience) observations on "What is location aware play?" coming shortly. Whether it's a meaningful or valuable thing to try and create, I might skip for the time being.

That's One Interaction That Needs A Very Long Spoon

"Developing connections between critical theory and HCI is a major
undertaking that will likely require much work. This workshop is
designed to bring together some of the people interested in doing it."

from the British HCI mailing list.

HCI 2008 Workshop: Evaluating Player Experiences in Location Aware Games

I'm reviewing papers for a workshop at the UK Human Computer Interaction conference, Evaluating Player Experiences in Location Aware Games. More details on the IPcity website here

The conference is in Liverpool, and has the theme of Culture, Creativity, Interaction, (the website is here), chosen to tie in with the Capital of Culture I guess, and interestingly the theme of the Liverpool Biennial is Made Up, which is about "art’s capacity to transport us, to suspend disbelief and generate alternative realities".

That's sort of the aim of technologically supported mixed realities when used as storytelling or entertainment mediums?

Blink in Chinese

Some of Blink's work appears in a new book called Contemporary Art of Science and Technology by Chinese new media artist and academic Zhang Yanxiang.





















The book is funded by the China Association for Science and Technology and the National Philosophy & Social Innovation Base for Sci-Tech History & Sci-Tech Civilization (China), both of which sound pretty hard core to me.








I don't honestly know what that says but it looks good and I'm just pleased that something we've done has got from a small former mill town in the north of England, all the way to China.

Here are the snakes and ladders looking cool as ever, even in black and white:












In glorious technicolour here they are

And if you read Chinese, here are the full details of the book:

Contemporary Art of Science and Technology
ISBN:        978-7-03-020415-8
Press name:  Science Press
Language:      Chinese
660 pages (62 pages in color)

Word to the Wise

This is the green Thumbprint: thumbprintcity.com

It won't be green much longer, so if you can say "I remember Thumbprint when it was still green", then who knows, you might be able to dine out on it in years to come.

Thumbprint London starts on the Day of Monsters, Friday 13th of June, and it won't be green by then, so click quick, while you've still got chance.

Muscle Memory of Cities

A really nice remark by Matt Jones during the Urban and Social Media presentations at Futuresonic :

"we get a kind of muscle memory of cities, like where is the best place to cross the road. Can we surface this for each other" using the streams of data we now generate.

I Have Seen the Future of the Mobile Web

And it's still the text message.

Amazon have started doing shopping by SMS:

"Amazon TextBuyIt, which launched late Tuesday, lets people text the name of a product, its description or its UPC or ISBN to 262966 (that’s “Amazon” on the keypad) from anywhere their cell phones work — including from inside physical stores."

I don't think we've seen the half of this kind of stuff yet.

People know how to send text messages, and no one is scared of doing it.

So as soon as you start to think of text messages as peer-to-database, or peer-to-database-to-peer, as well as peer-to-peer, a whole other world opens up.

The only reason things like text shopping won't happen is if people love their mobiles and the intimacy of SMS so much they shy away from using texting as a functional tool.

Let's Enchant Us!

"Finally, the third looks at artistic endeavours to re-enchant and contest the urban informational landscape of urban sentience." says Professor Stephen Graham.

Enchant - what a great word.*

To cast a spell over; bewitch.

To attract and delight; entrance.

We could use poems, or monsters, or sprites and witches.

Or anything you want.

"Be not afeard.
                        The isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked, I cried to dream again."

Caliban, The Tempest, William Shakespeare, Act III Scene 2, Lines 138-146

* and let's even let the Professor off with that "re-" [academics love their "re-" "I will now re-heat this pizza, and we will critically contest the extra slice."]

A Nest of Nokia NFC Phones

A nest of Nokia NFC phones to use in Five Trees Forest.

As everyone knows, sprites like to live in mobile phones when they are hiding from the witches because the warm batteries are cosy, and the radio waves make them giggle.

Artists in Residence in World of Warcraft

My friends and DRU colleagues Alison Mealey and Tom Betts are going to be artists in residence in World of Warcraft.

To get the job they had to journey many leagues to a pig farm in the game (not sure why a pig farm) and be interviewed by a panel of wizards, dwarves and other mythical characters, possibly riding giant chickens.

I've never played World of Warcraft, and don't really understand what goes on except it's lots of fighting and you get to travel by chicken, but for some reason I really enjoy hearing about it, it seems to have its own language and lore that are fun to follow in a way that I don't feel about Second Life, which seems, from the same viewpoint of total ignorance, to lack silliness.

Valentine's Day Text Message Love Poems

If you've forgotten to buy a Valentine's card, or want to follow it up with even more luurve, there is a selection of text message sized love poems here (click "thumb love").

SPARKLERS
I write your name:
in traces in the dark;
on flat, wet sand;
in breath on windowpanes.