Urban Tapestries

Última actualización o 4 / Maio/ 2006

Un proxecto francamente interesante: Urban Tapestries é unha matriz social que combina antropoloxía, telecomunicacións, socioloxía, programación e net-art para que os cidadáns elaboren un mapa social do territorio a través dos seus múltiples dispositivos móbiles. Deste xeito, a cidade cúbrese de invisíbeis e wireless capas sociais de coñecemento compartido. A inspiración é esa necesidade tan mamífera de marcar o espazo con símbolos culturais. Como din os promotores:

The Urban Tapestries software platform 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 can 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.

Urban Tapestries seeks to understand why people would use emerging pervasive technologies, what they could do with them and how we can make this possible. It seeks to enable people as their own authors and agents, not merely as consumers of content provided to them by telecoms and media corporations. The project centres on a fundamental human desire to ‘map’ and ‘mark’ territory as part of belonging and of feeling a sense of ownership of our environment.