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Northern Urban Lights: Emplaced Experiences of Urban Lighting as Digital Augmentation

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Book cover Architecture and Interaction

Part of the book series: Human–Computer Interaction Series ((HCIS))

Abstract

The shift towards interactivity in the design of spaces and places has persuaded both architects and HCI practitioners to acknowledge that there is a need to work together. However, there is little knowledge of how we actually experience dynamic adaptation, informational services and interactivity in the built environment. As such, there is a pressing need to empirically study actual implementations of media architecture, urban interaction design and urban computing from an emic perspective. Consequently, this article examines participant experiences of an interactive urban lighting pilot, Urban Echoes (UE), which took place in a northern urban park. Collected as video and audio recorded material in walking interviews and semi-structured interviews, we examine the emplaced experiences of two differing participant groups, young adults (20–29 years old) and seniors (over 65 years old). Furthermore, we argue that the concept of emplacement, which highlights the importance of place and the embodied mind, can be a useful tool both as an analytical lens and as an effective way to conceptualize and communicate some essential aspects of architectural thinking in the interdisciplinary arena of media architecture and urban interaction design. Finally, building on the work of Paul Dourish on embodied interaction design, we argue for emplaced interaction design.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Experience is a nebulous concept which escapes easy definitions; thus, we approach it from a very broad perspective, through the theoretical lens explained in Chap. 3, where we explain the theoretical underpinnings of our work.

  2. 2.

    Here we are mainly interested with individuals’ everyday mobilities. For a seminal text on the study of mobilities in general, see Urry (2000).

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our participants, the Academy of Finland for their support of the UBI Metrics and the Adaptive Urban Lighting projects, as well as the Nokia Foundation for their support. Special thanks to Dr. Tiina Suopajärvi, Dr. Aulikki Herneoja, Dr. Jonathan Hale, MSc. (Arch.) Toni Österlund, MSc. (Arch.) Anniina Valjus, MSc. (Arch) Tuulikki Tanska, and the students from the Multimedia Systems Course at the University of Oulu Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Figure 13.1 copyright Toni Österlund and Henrika Pihlajaniemi, Figs. 13.2, 13.3, 13.4, 13.5, 13.6, 13.7, and 13.8 copyright Henrika Pihlajaniemi.

Fig. 13.8
figure 8

Walking interviews in the park with Urban Echoes

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland

    Anna Luusua, Henrika Pihlajaniemi & Johanna Ylipulli

Authors
  1. Anna Luusua
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  2. Henrika Pihlajaniemi
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  3. Johanna Ylipulli
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Correspondence to Anna Luusua .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept of Comp Sci & Digi Tech, University of Northumbria, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom

    Nicholas S. Dalton

  2. Mixed Reality Laboratory,Dep of Comp Sc, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom

    Holger Schnädelbach

  3. Department of Informatics, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden

    Mikael Wiberg

  4. The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, London, United Kingdom

    Tasos Varoudis

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Luusua, A., Pihlajaniemi, H., Ylipulli, J. (2016). Northern Urban Lights: Emplaced Experiences of Urban Lighting as Digital Augmentation. In: Dalton, N., Schnädelbach, H., Wiberg, M., Varoudis, T. (eds) Architecture and Interaction. Human–Computer Interaction Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30028-3_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30028-3_13

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-30026-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-30028-3

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