Dimensions
of Information: Giles Lane & Rachel Murphy
Urban Tapestries: Public Authoring in the Museum
Urban Tapestries differs from these preceding concepts of interactive technologies on a number of levels:
- it posits people, not users by trying to imagine both how and why they might use public authoring systems.
- it is a communications platform primarily for the co-creation and sharing of information rather than a means of accessing pre-authored experiences.
- it is designed to be flexible to the needs of people – allowing them to design their own applications.
- it looks ahead about 10 years to a time when pervasive mobile devices are as ubiquitous and 'invisible' as (or almost) pen and paper are today – augmentations of everyday life, not the focus of experiences themselves.
- it acts as a fulcrum for co-operative knowledge sharing between people, and is designed to be accretive: building up layers of knowledge and experience (perhaps for future museum conservators to 'excavate').
Urban Tapestries is a research project and conceptual framework which aims to allow users to become co-creators of the digital environment in their own right, and provide a basic platform for them to design their own applications for pervasive technologies to suit their own needs and desires.
We have sketched out some simple scenarios to begin to explore how such public authoring systems might benefit people who visit museums:
- School Children
- Different Cultures
- Amateurs, Scholars & Experts
- Creative Interventions
