Public Authoring in the Wireless City

Urban Tapestries is a framework for understanding the social, cultural, economic and political implications of pervasive location-based mobile and wireless systems. To investigate these issues, we are building an experimental location-based wireless platform to allow people to access and author location-specific content (text, audio and pictures). It is a forum for exploring and sharing experience and knowledge, for leaving and annotating ephemeral traces of peoples’ presence in the geography of the city.

Urban Tapestries allows people to author their own virtual annotations of the city, enabling a community’s collective memory to grow organically, allowing ordinary citizens to embed social knowledge in the new wireless landscape of the city. People will be able to add new locations, location content and the ‘threads’ which link individual locations to local contexts, which are accessed via handheld devices such as PDAs and mobile phones.

We have recently completed a Public Trial of our prototype – participant feedback can be found on our project weblog – and will be posting evaluation and future directions in the near future.

http://www.proboscis.org.uk/urbantapestries/