Augmenting Urban Experiences : From Interface To Interspace Carola Moujan

AugmentingurbAn experiences:

From

Carola Moujan Independent designer

Lecturer & Associate Researcher

École Camondo & UVHC (France)

interspace

21 balançoires by Daily Tous les jours (Montréal, 2011)

interface to

AugmentingplAces

technical device or aesthetic experience?

Image Theodore Lee / Flickr

# 1“The real places on the earth [...] are susceptible to continuous readings, which is almost certainly to say complex and ambiguous ones. It seems to be a characteristic of them, too, that they have extraordinary changeability, sometimes of use,

almost certainly of size”

Kent Bloomer & Charles W. Moore,Body, Memory and Architecture (1977)

# 2“Every place [...] is a not in the meshwok. The

knot [...] does not contain life but is rather formed of the very lines along which life is lived. These lines are bound together in the

knot, but they are not bound by it. ”

Tim Ingold, Lines. A Brief History (2007)

places are not ready-made experiences contained in a

physical location; places are events that

emerge whithin a particular site at a given time

Image Michael Yan / Flickr

placemaking = creating the conditions of

emergence of an event

“An event emerges from chaos provided that some kind of sieve intervenes”

Gilles Deleuze, The Fold (1988)

# 3

origin

an agent through which the site’s underlying forces are polarised and directed, allowing the emergence of the spatial form we name “place“

“It is not the object itself that is percieved, but the world, polarised in such a way that

the situation makes sense”

Gilbert Simondon, L’individuation psychique et collective (1989)

# 4

augmenting places=

articulating the relationship between

data and origin

A mAtteroF

relAtionships

“In a world where practicality and functionality can be taken for granted, the aesthetics of the post-optimal object could provide new

experiences of everyday life, new poetic dimensions.“

Anthony Dunne, Herzian Tales (1997)

# 5

informationor experience ?

An experience of origin,

not just its narrative

Adapted from Sharon Zukin’s Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places (2010)

Two ForMs

Left : Totem Urbain (JC Decaux, 2007)

Right: iGirouette (Vincent Autin / Biin, 2009)

oNe FUNCTioN

From interFAce

to interspAce

information : a goalvs

information as a triggerfor experiences

interspace:experience of multiple dimensions co-existing

within a unified perception of reality

“An experience has a unity that gives it its name, that meal, that storm, that rupture of friendship. The existence of this unity is

constituted by a single quality that pervades the entire experience in spite of the variation of its

constituent parts”

John Dewey, Art As experience (1934)

# 6

being guidedor

“being there” ?

Top : A smartphone displaying

Google Maps®

Right: No Place Like Home GPS shoes

(Dominic WIlcox, 2011)

Image William Hook / Flickr Images © Dominic WIlcox

“Design is [...] the integration of technological, social and economic requirements, biological necessities, and the psychophysical effects of

materials, shape, color, volume and space: thinking in relationships”

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion (1947)

# 7

thank youwww.carolamoujan.net

cmoujan@graphicstreet.net

Twitter: @carolamoujan