Space and Place

I've been doing a bit more research in relation to the DE project, which we'll hopefully be finding out more about next week. I've tried to divide my research into three main areas:

• People (and their behaviour)
• The space and it's environment 
• The object or interactive system involved.

I found this paper, which deals with social interactions in public spaces. It was geared towards researching possible frameworks for mobile information systems. I like how they have structured their research and hopefully I can take some of this into how we manage our task as a group.

Whilst thinking about people's behaviour in space I remembered a blog entry I came across last year on desire paths. I always find these desire paths captivating, it helped me realised how people will make a space work for them, even if the design of it impedes them. It's visual evidence of where a designer has "imposed their own will onto the site, as opposed to finding a solution that accounts for the wants and “desires” of the users." I think it will be interesting to also look into urban, environmental and architectural design in relation to the project.

Desire Path - Flickr

In relation to objects and interactive systems, I am often drawn back to my roots in interaction design. I find it hard to get away from looking at big interactive systems like display screens and a lot of the examples on Interactive Architecture. I do like a lot of this stuff, although sometimes I feel these interactive pieces can verge too much on the art side of things and fail to acknowledge an actual requirement.

I did find this blog Interactive Displays in Public Spaces, which had some interesting insights, particularly in regards to zones and behaviours around the displays. There's a link to a good write-up on SlideShare, with some useful diagrams.

Diagram of interactive display in public space