Sophie Sampson

I continue to investigate the question of what can make being in a particular place better, and am still fascinated by the idea of revealing the historical layers of a place. I picked up Penelope Lively‘s City of the Mind a few days ago, which is a wonderfully contemplative book about London, both from the perspective of psychogeography and its physical fabric, where the past is so intricately interwoven with the present. It is remarkable for its spareness and clarity, and is a good lesson in how to strip away unnecessary furniture.

It’s a book where very little happens, but people think and notice a lot. The protagonist is an architect concerned with both historical conversions and new build skyscrapers, which means that his view of the city is constantly shaped by other past Londons. As he walks around the city he’s always looking up, noticing the details of brickwork, and these historical layers bleed into the prose around him – his story is interleaved with interstitial scenes from other people who have inhabited the same places at different times. The book becomes a meditation about the physical city, has space to consider where things came from before they were here, where people came from:

“It is 2:21 and Matthew Halland is at last reaching Cobham Square. It is also, in another sense, 1823, when the square was built, and when a considerable tonnage of bricks was hauled from brick fields not too far away and assembled into walls of Flemish bond, some shrouded in stucco, some not, most of which still stand precisely as they were constructed. Matthew drives around the square impatiently searching for a parking slot.”

The shifts in time are simple – unexplained, but clearly signposted in the prose. This first timeshift is signalled by a tiny explanation and a date – we’re still largely in Matthew’s head. A few pages later is the first proper one, heralded only by two empty lines in a book that otherwise marks its paragraphs with an indent only. And the fact that we’ve slipped to a different time creeps up on you – we start with the familiar and timeless but then:

“Coming into the square, Jim Prothero sees that the trees have almost lost their leaves. He stands for a moment, tired at the end of his day, the noise of the print works still ringing in his ears, and sees the sparse branches, with the small blunt buds from which, eventually, spring will come. The world is turning still, here in the dishevelled, stricken city. There is glass over the road, where windows were blown out last night, and a crater in the next street where the UXB fell a month ago, but the leaves are falling.”

So in those three sentences we establish that this is a man who sees the same signs of spring I see, but in an unrecognisable version of my city where streets violently change on a daily basis. And there are three paragraphs of his London and then two empty lines and then back to “Three twenty-eight (and 1823) as Matthew Halland gets back into his car in Cobham Square, and starts the engine…”

It’s so precisely written that no other signalling or explanation is really required, and the process of realisation as you read those three sentences feels like a little flowering of understanding, an aha! that wouldn’t have taken place if the paragraph had been headed ‘Cobham Square 1942′. It becomes part of the rules of the book that timeshifts will happen, and you start to read alertly when new characters are introduced to understand where and when they are. That attention is rewarded with more tiny moments of revelation, almost a little game the author is playing with us.

So it’s a book where not much happens, but things are constantly shifting. Perhaps it’s partly about how the city is a physical repository of memory – we are constantly remaking its fabric, but the signs are there if you know where to look.

This is interesting: Bluebrain, makers of The National Mall describe it as a “location aware album” that is designed to change seamlessly as you move around a particular space. It’s lovely because it was designed actually on the ground, and is an entirely ambient experience. If I’ve understood the UI correctly, there is no hunting for the next location and then ‘collecting’, it simply knows where you are and reacts.

It’s something that is really familiar from 3d videogames, which always *just know* where your avatar is. Open world games are really fertile grounds for understanding location-specific stuff – they are basically human scaled worlds where every pixel and interaction has been designed to be fun. Parkland is probably our closest comparison in the real world – it’s designed to be pleasant and varied to walk through, to have moments to pause and things to draw you into the distance. Constantly changing music feels like an excellent level of interaction – it accompanies you as you explore and rewards you for going further, without demanding your full attention.

My only sadness is being the wrong side of the atlantic to experience this in person, especially as they have just launched a Central Park version.

(This is the talk I gave yesterday – it synthesises a lot of the design work I did this summer into a set of rules of thumb for making this kind of work)

These are interesting times for publishers, the very notion of what a book is is being broken down. People have said it’s like the Wild West and you can do anything, anyone can be a publisher. My contention is that just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

I’ve spent part of the last year making location-specific stories and games on an Iphone platform called Placewhisper and testing them on the ground with real people. I’m going to talk to you about what I’ve learned – through real experience – and then consider why this sort of work might be interesting to publishers.

Location-specific content is really good at one thing, which is making you feel like you’ve stepped into a narrative. Moments of emotional connection. I started to understand this while making quite a different kind of game – a playground game about the Battle of Hastings for the BBC.

I spent a lot of time looking at diagrams like this:

And by the time the game was made and I was travelling around the country playtesting it in schools. I happened to do a test in Hastings, and on a whim hopped off the train and went to see the site of the battle itself. Which looks like this:

The thing that slightly blew my mind was how steep it is. In all my years of studying the period and hours of looking at squiggly diagrams, that fact had never got through to me. And suddenly the Normans at the bottom with a seemingly impossible task ahead, the Anglo Saxons snugly at the top with everything in their favour, made more sense than it ever had before.

It wasn’t that being in the place was somehow intrinsically better than looking at the diagrams. Without knowing the diagrams it would just have been a field. But the point is that knowing the diagrams made being in the field better. Being in the field deepened my understanding of the diagrams. That multiplication is the nub of what’s important about making location-specific content.

Whatever you are offering people has to make their experience of going to a place better, otherwise why are you asking them to go there? This sounds really obvious when you just say it, but it has huge implications in design terms. The bargain you make with the person who accesses your content is really different to the one you make when you are making web content or physical books, where people have absolute control over where they are when they access it. There’s a physicality to the experience which needs to be considered.

This is sculptor, Anthoney Gormley’s Another Place. It’s a really poetic piece that interacts with the environment beautifully. It stands on the boundary between land and sea, and as the tide goes in and out it reveals and conceals metal casts of the sculptor’s body that all look out towards the horizon. And every year the coastguard get called out several times to rescue people who have got into difficulties while looking at the artwork

Gormley’s take on this (as it kind of has to be) is that people can look after themselves while they’re looking at art, and they don’t lose their critical faculties.  This is possibly true with art, but I know from making pervasive games that as soon as there’s an element of interaction that’s no longer true – people expect you’ve got their back while you concentrate on the challenge you’ve set them.

It’s tempting to make location based work the easy way – google maps, google earth, from the top down. You can’t. Initial research has to include *pounding pavements*

However, there are really positive reasons to make this kind of work, and it’s really not necessary to risk drowning your punters. I wanted to talk about those reasons through the lens of Watch the Water, a project I made this summer with Coney. It was commissioned by Trigger for the Edinburgh Art Festival.

Watch the Water was a location-specific iphone app, made on PlaceWhisper.

It’s a work of fiction: eerie audio placed on places with open drains, which told the story of the engineering that underpins the city with a Lovecraftian twist. (For those that don’t know it, Edinburgh is built on an extinct volcano and the railway station is in a drained lake – how it doesn’t fill up with water whenever it rains is a constant wonder to me).

Five design decisions that made this really work for the people that tried it.

One of the really smart things about the commission is that there was a really clear funnel into the start of the experience – it was designed for people visiting one of six galleries as part of the Art Festival we knew where they would be physically and where they would be going.

It’s a comfortable space to be on foot, day or night.

But mainly, Edinburgh is hugely atmospheric – you get awesome  hi res 3d graphics for free. Let’s just dwell on that for a moment, *for Free.*

You could consume the audio clips – and the story – in any order you wanted. This gives people a bit more agency, allows it to fit in with their other plans rather than having to set aside a certain time to do your experience.

I’m a big believer in doing this with audio. It means there’s no screen between you and the exciting stuff. Instead of looking down at your phone, you’re looking up at the world. Again, it’s all about making connections with what you’re standing in front of, otherwise what’s the point?

Watch the Water was 9 pieces of audio in the space of less than a mile. Each between 40 seconds and a minute and a half. The points could have been more densely packed in the space, but the area didn’t want to be larger – that’s already a lot of walking.

There’s something about making invisible things tangible that people really respond to. The mechanism of discovery gives people a sense of ownership of the work.

This is a new way of delivering content, but it’s something that can fit into traditional publishing models. I have a couple of examples:

Imagine: Everyone at a literary festival is invited to download a free app from the app store, with a story from a new writer mapped onto popular locations at the festival. It’s promoted through the festival as something to do between talks. Those who try feel that sense of ownership, and word of mouth is created. There’s a route to buy the book direct from the app.

Or: A popular crime writer deeply associated with a particular city – like Ian Rankin in Edinburgh, or Henning Mankell in Ystad – spends two weeks writing a short whodunnit you can play in that city over about 2 hours.

It sells for £4.99 in the app store to the writer’s fans and tourists visiting the city who want a ‘different’ ‘authentic’ experience. Not only can this become profitable in itself, people who play feel more ownership of that writer’s stories. People discover more about their back catalogue and in a couple of clicks can buy books that mention particular places they’ve been.

What I’ve learned from all my work with location-specific content is that it isn’t always the right answer. In the right kind of circumstances, though – and there aren’t many of them – it gives you so much for free: hundreds of extras, thousandss of years of history, and the best visuals money can buy.

Most importantly, it reminds the consumer how much you value their imagination.

I’m looking to make more of this type of project, so if you have a situation where there are a lot of people physically in a particular place, do get in touch.

This is a post that’s here largely as an aide memoire. I’m giving a talk about location-specific storytelling at the Frankfurt Book Fair soon, and the thing I keep coming back to is Jim Kosem’s Spomenik project; a ‘Pervasive Memorial’. It’s important because it deals with important subject matter and location simply and well.

The reason there’s a memorial is simple and devastating. There are some woods – fairly ordinary woods – in Slovenia which are the site of an atrocity. At the end of the Second World War many people were shot and their bodies left in mass graves in caves there. Just one of the many war crimes that happen in secluded woods across the world. Memorialising this is a form of holocaust prevention for the local population – the children need to know what happened so they can make different choices if such conditions arise again. So there are memorials in the trees, and teenagers are taken on school trips there as part of their history lessons, to see the place that this happened.

What the Spomenik project adds is some small signs with a phone number you can call to hear audio accounts from people with a personal connection to the atrocity, narrating you through the space. You call the number from your mobile and start to understand more about what actually happened.

This adds a layer to what you are looking at, and makes it feel personal using very simple design decisions. Delivering via audio, so you have to look at what the words are describing, in a phonecall, which is such a familiar gesture from our daily lives. You don’t need a smartphone or a dataplan, and it forces you to look around and understand the meaning of the things you are seeing. Jim says when describing the experience “This is usually where people fell silent, once the guy started narrating and you started seeing crosses carved into trees everywhere.”

[Caveat: this is a bit of a rambling brain dump to get it out of my head and start looking at it from another angle]

I’ve spent part of this summer hanging around on street corners, experimenting with location-specific content using Digital Flapjack’s PlaceWhisper service. It’s an app that anyone with an iPhone can use to set up location-specific text, images and audio for anyone else to pick up using the app.

Which led to me framing the simplest possible question for myself “what’s interesting about only being able to access a piece of data in a specific place?”

I’m know I’m not the only person who feels augmented reality isn’t answering the right questions yet. I have drunk the Hide&Seek kool aid, and have taken to designing to stop people being mesmerised by the magic phone screen instead of their surroundings. I’ve found the conversation around designing for two screens really useful here – the phone is definitely the secondary screen because the real world, with its high res, real time 3dness and added smell-o-vision, is the thing I want you to engage with. Otherwise there’s no point forcing you to be in a particular place, it’s just a barrier to entry. I’m making things that add to the enjoyment in small and subtle ways, not try and hog your whole attention.

It seems like there’s two things this virtual annotation is great for:

making invisible things visible

seeing things which are visible already more fully. I’m not making street corners into spimes exactly, but they are in the back of my mind.

So, if you can annotate any physical place with a static piece of data, where’s the fun? What data is actually interesting to find?

There’s an interesting divide between treating places as generic types or specific entities.  Adrian Hon’s Wanderlust with 4square was a great response to that fascinating database of types of place. It delineates that this is a [bar], this is a [restaurant], this is a [museum], and Wanderlust uses those places as free amplification of atmosphere. It tries to get at the core of what unites jazz bars in New Orleans, and basement pubs in Edinburgh, and grand hotel bars in St Petersburg.

However, I’m getting more and more drawn to the things that make them different. I trained as a designer originally, and teasing out the decisions and conditions that caused something to end up with the physical form it did is second nature, and adding some of the research that teases that out is one interesting way of using this for people like me. There’s a basic fascination in finding out what previous iterations of a place were like and why.

So it’s very easy to use location specific data to make a travel guide to a place. What I’ve also been attempting to explore is how to use the platform to do more than that, to change how you feel about what you’re seeing.

I got a lot out of watching In Bruges and Don’t Look Now – both films that take pretty, tourist-infested cities and make them sinister characters in a narrative. What’s already in your brain affects how you see things so much. It’s an effect I saw so clearly the day after last week’s riots, where because I’m a ridiculous optimist I spent time on Bethnal Green Road buying food and thinking how quickly everything had got back to normal. But #bethnalgreen on twitter showed me that other people taking exactly the same walk at the same time were commenting how scary the street was. We were interpreting the same cues and physical space completely differently. None of us were wrong. Just different.

So with those principles in mind, a couple of experimental projects are going live soon. Watch the Water is an ambient audio piece made with Coney and Trigger for the Edinburgh Art Festival, which attempts to give voice to hidden parts of Edinburgh and really make you look at the mental way the city has accreted over the years.

The newest iteration of Time Trails on London’s South Bank will go live in a couple of weeks. It locates the positions of pavillions at the Festival of Britain in 1951, and attempts to put them in the context of what came before. The frantic gaiety of the Festival makes so much more sense when you see it through the lens of the Blitz and the desperate greyness of the Austerity years that came after – when the war had been won but rationing became more and more severe.

I’m going to be investigating where we can push this idea more in the autumn, but in the mean time if you’re going to be in London or Edinburgh, feel free to download them from the app store (they’re both free, just search for the project names) and let me know your thoughts.