NEW HYBRID URBAN SPATIALITIES

NEW HYBRID URBAN SPATIALITIES P.Mantzou1, X.Bitsikas2 1 School of Architecture, Democritus University of Thrace, Greece, Ktirio Bibliothikis, Kimmeria, 67100, Xanthi, Greece, pmantzou@arch.duth.gr 2 Department of Fine Arts and Art Sciences, University of Ioannina, Greece, University Campus, 45110, Ioannina, Greece, xbitsika@uoi.gr Abstract Open public spaces are becoming more and more the scenery for the implantation of digital interactive technologies. Through a short and selective examination of specific paradigms of media incorporation in open public space and reference to issues such as the inclusion of narrative, the insertion of duration or the incorporation of interactivity in the design procedure, a basic analysis for the project presented is offered. The project refers to the creation of an augmented scenario where a story is told. Urban spaces or historic sites can host transparent media that interact with their visitors, wearing activators, upon demand and configure an expanded, intelligent, environment, where different temporalities, as well as realities, are fused, so that the subject can interact, by means of construction of non-linear events, not only with the factual present but also with a narration that takes place at the virtual past. Keywords: interactive, public space, design, media, architecture Theoretical context Public space has always functioned as a representation of the society that produced it. In other words, it always reflected its principles, its possibilities and its structure. Nevertheless, there is a relative inertia in reference to the changes that occur to society and their reflection in public space as materiality has always been slow and gradual in adapting to new conditions and requisites. The city has been traditionally characterised by the dichotomy between static structures and mobile subjects, but this is a dichotomy referent to the analogical era. Digital technologies have provoked a significant number of alterations in traditional conceptions, marking a true revolution in many aspects of every day life. This revolution has been up to now, only fragmentarily reflected in public space but there is an escalating tendency to insert digital technologies in open, urban public spaces and this is gradually becoming an everyday experience. These digital technologies can give way to new hybrid spatialities that question the conventional dipoles and offer novel means of interaction between the subject and its environment and at the same time among the subjects themselves as they function as an additional intermediary. The contemporary interplay between digital media and public space can be better understood in the framework of a long chronological trajectory that articulates the subject’s relation with the public space through the use of specific media platforms. Former platforms were structured upon former technologies, less complicated and effective than digital ones but equally impressive and powerful for the specific moment in time and the society in which they were developed. From the Baudelerian flâneur and the Simmel’s blasé individual to the Neil Leach’s wallpaper person and from the Benjamin’s passages to the mallification (Boyer 1996: 153-160) and the thematization of the public space there are important intermediate phases that have questioned and progressively altered the subject’s relation with the urban public space. In each of these phases, technology and society’s evolutions and changes were mirrored in the structure and function of public space. Two of those moments, worth to be mentioned in the present context as they not only appear mostly relevant in a theoretical level, but at the same time reveal how a specific technology can be used through entirely different paths and goals and result in completely different but yet very similar, in various ways, results. On one hand, the situationist psychogeographic lecture of the city, which inserts the dérive, the détournement, but most importantly the construction of situations and the activation of a constantly playful behaviour of the subject and, on the other hand, the Disneyland world which present several similarities but is also clearly distinct as it separates the organizers from those who are organized, following and maybe even generating the rules of the spectacle society, to which the situationists were so directly opposed. Nevertheless, these are two specific visions of the need to rethink the outdoor social interaction, especially in relation to the audiovisual technologies and the fabrication of events. In the case of the situationists everyday life is reinvented and the public space is animated with the construction of situations which disrupt the ordinary and normal in order to jolt people out of their customary ways of thinking and acting. The urban flow of acts and encounters (dérive), the rerouting of events and images (détournment) the insertion of games that the subject invents in order to relate to the public space, are some of the experimental techniques used to emphasize the relationship between events, the environment and its participant (Debord 1996: 80). The Disneyland example with the construction of a parallel world, which is a fabrication of a secure, sterilised, fairylike and controlled reality, does not operate upon the public space but offers a reflection, a mirror image of what appears as public, although obviously it is a kind of public life that you have to pay for (Moore 1978: 115140). Disney creates through extraction, redaction and recombination, this fairy world and prepares it as a consumption package for its guests, allowing them to consume most of all symbolic images through the creation of a convention; everything has to be reassuringly real and the guests have to be willing to play along. The centrality of the guest is crucial for the Disney experience, the guest appears as a spectator and a protagonist at the same time of a well organized show where details are carefully designed in order to present a reassuring, nonstop spectacle. There is of course a tremendous gap between the situationists and the Disney procedures, which is mostly focused on the fact that Disney offers as a preorganized and prepackaged product to be consumed by the passive customer what the situationists understand as the result of the activation of the subject and its proactive and playful behaviour. In both cases the urban space is the background, although it is a make-believe space in the case of Disneyland, and the animation of the public life through leisure activities is the objective, although it is not quite public in the case of Disneyland. These two lectures of how public space can be animated and public life can be reinvigorated in the leisure and spectacle society, form a kind of dipole very present in all sorts of current interventions in public space. The possibility of having, intertwined to physical space, technologies that are progressively becoming more and more interactive has also marked a significant change and a new type of emerging public spaces. In the last two decades, the Tower of Winds (Toyo Ito, 1986), the Water Pavilion (the saltH2Oexpo designed by Kas Oosterhuis and the freshH2Oexpo designed by Lars Spuybroek, 1998), the Blur Building, a media Pavilion (Diller+Scofidio, 2002), the Serpentine Pavilion (Rem Koolhaas, 2006), are only few examples of interactive cutting edge technology which evolves rapidly, allowing gradually the insertion of a new aspect, the story telling, the narration. This is a critical issue for the new mixed environments where digital technologies are fused with the conventional material architecture in order to produce multi-levelled human-computer interaction platforms. The narrative is one of our most important means of comprehension, the embodiment of culture, education and communication. Digital technologies can provide sensor-enabled, people driven, media-augmented interactive indoors or outdoors spaces that convey information as three dimensional, audiovisual, stories. The design process is altered, this unexpected unfolding of possibilities make necessary the collaboration of an interdisciplinary team of architects, engineers, artists and story-tellers. The digital technologies interweaved to the urban space and almost invisible to the naked eye when needed, can create a web of event points so that a story can be told, a story that depends a lot on the way the visitor interacts with the environment. Narrative, one of the oldest human activities can be understood as a design tool for interactive installations (Cooper 2007: 110). To achieve a high-level embedding of computational intelligence into the built environment it is important to consider the obvious implications for the material features of the environment, incorporating an awareness of cultural-historical context, accrued social-collective connotations and the temporality of the spatial experience. Interactive digital technologies involve the construction of a plot, a scenario, in a far more intense way that the construction of plain, stipulated events. The plot as a significant part of the design, inserts the parameter of time and duration which becomes an additional aspect, essential in the planning process (Tuan 1997: 191-199). There is no doubt that time has always been an important parameter of design but it is now duration that becomes fundamental as it inserts a certain temporal limit for the perception of space. Spectacle is not the same as contemplation since it signifies consumption and thus establishes vectoriality, a beginning, a middle and an end. Once experienced the spectacle can be repeated but this is just that, a repetition. That explains why such strategies are employed in pavilions which have by definition a short life, as visitors are bound to experience this type of spaces just once and are not expected to live in them or have an everyday deal with them. In the theme parks for example, where plot and spectacle are widely used, the duration is taken under serious consideration and is calculated to the detail and at the same time the repetition factor is avoided thanks to the abundance of the offered scenes and also the constant renovation that reassures the visitor that soon he can come back for new, additional themes. A lot can be learned on the duration issue from artistic installations as well, and the way they have treated the time factor as an important matter to take into account, as it implicates a certain understanding of the time perception principles and codes of the public. Spectacle methods have to be taken under advisement in order to achieve the proper duration so that the public is able to comprehend without being bored. The amount of information for the specific duration has to be just right; condensation, exaggeration, intense emotions and peaks, have to be carefully orchestrated and distributed in the duration of the event. Furthermore, artistic installations in public spaces provide an opportunity to approximate the way the public behaves and interacts with the fusion of ordinary and artistic and to reach some conclusions regarding placement tactics in the public space. The placement of an installation in a public space can only be understood as a project that redesigns or at least rereads the public space and offers a brand new version of it, as it alters the way that people comprehend and react to it and ultimately its function. Outdoor public space has not been the scenery of many realised interventions that aim to merge a thematic logic with an artistic aesthetic. However there can be located few paradigms of outdoor thematic-kind of- settings. The Las Vegas paradigm where spectacle is placed in a sort of intermediate place, public but so close to the private that one does not realise when the threshold is crossed and he has entered in the closed private space, is a case where the thematic is used in order to attract tourism and to activate a timeless, spaceless, unstressed and happy attitude that leads to an unconstrained spending. Although Las Vegas is far too unique, due to its singular condition, it shows how open space can host events that attract and seduce the public and change its common way of experiencing it. At a different level and in relation to the creation of a responsive environment, there are lately emerging proposals that are placed in the outdoor public space and through the insertion of interactive digital technologies aim to animate the everyday quotidian realm (Mitchell 1999: 68). Mainly theoretical but realisable projects of this kind are being developed by university’s and company’s labs in order to offer cities an attractive, functional and attentive public space. The different approaches can be seen in just few of these paradigms that are mentioned: Urban Probes project at Intel’s Urban Atmospheres Berkeley, California (Eric Paulos), Digital Street game, Intel’s People and Practices lab in Hillsboro, Ore., (Michele Chang), Wireless Athens Georgia, New Media Institute at the University of Georgia (Scott Shamp), SHAPE (University of Limerick's Interaction Design Centre), or the various projects of the MIT Media Lab including the Zaragoza Digital Mile (William Mitchell). It is obvious that digital interactive technologies are an enabler that reinforces what is persecuted in each specific case, bringing along the special characteristics of the particular technology. A critical issue in all these cases is the design of interactivity in relation with material space, that is to say, the design of the entire system as a whole, where material and digital aspects are mingled and the way this holistic approach reinvigorates the subject’s experience instead of converting it to a spectacle passively followed. Interactivity and design Urban space is thus reinvented and its design, with the inclusion of embedded technologies, has to be approached with a comprehensive and all-inclusive method. Special attention is given to the specific characteristics of digital interaction and how this new type of interaction transforms, on one hand, the design procedures and, on another, the subject/object relation. Interactivity has always been a decisive characteristic for the assessment of the functionality of objects. It is obvious that all objects are interactive but in a different way and grade. Analogical objects have their interactivity lying in their design of form, mechanical objects host their interactivity in their junctions and finally digital objects are interactive through their software (Manzini 1992: 151-152). There is however an important issue to consider in the design of the form of digital objects. Although form has undoubtedly been freed of any restraints and is now in no way submitted to the form follows function axiom, it remains the main mediator between the subject and the object and it has to be able to communicate the possibilities and capabilities of the object. This is clearly a new challenge for the design as it is not the function that has to be exteriorised by the form but rather the understanding of the functions, that is to say, the way the functions are conceptualised and acknowledged through social, cultural and of course personal education and experience. Design is, on one hand obliged to respond to this emancipation from the form follows function that had become a simple and universal rule, easy to follow -and to break as well-, and on the other hand, has to become able to initiate a new kind of communication, through the use of all sort of already existing coding systems and the creation of new applicable conventions. Designing open public spaces where responsive, intelligent environments are implemented, is a task that requires new methods of conceptualising and comprehending space and furthermore demands a change on the mode that activities and sceneries are situated, codified and communicated. Special attention has to be drawn to the design of the interface used as well as to the competency of the settings to communicate their contents to the visitor. Three elements have to be considered, the existing open urban space, where there are normally limitations on performing vast operations, the implemented transparent interactive technologies, which is the element that can be designed and can work as a mediator between the other two, and the subject-visitor. On another hand, the relation of the subject to this new kind of environments is characterised not only by their capacity to offer strong emotions and spectacletype marvels but also of their ability to provoke a higher grade of participation. The constantly increasing interactivity of the digital objects clearly affects the mode subjects relate to them. The customary roles are altered, objects become less and less passive and consequently subjects, who interact with them, do not need to be as active as they were in the past and are now more passive. As in a dialogue, the equilibrium changes when a silent interlocutor becomes an eloquent orator and obliges his, up to the moment, fluent and monopolizing conversationalist to hush. This is a very important issue to consider when designing augmented and responsive urban environments as it is essential that they do not convert the subject to a passive and inactive receptor. Digital media have already been accused of mutilating the subject’s initiatives by being far too user friendly in a way that they anesthetize and inactivate the subject’s enterprises. Of course if humans have managed to progress thanks to their ability to socialise and interact in groups, it is obvious that they could do the same with digital media without sacrificing their ability to be active but instead having it instigated. In order to have objects that behave as subjects without having subjects transformed in objects we have to rethink the design of digital media and especially of those implemented in public spaces. A crucial aspect of the design is succeeding to provoke an energetic and lively attitude opposed to the common, spectacle-originated, passive and docile reception of the subject. As always, design depends on society, and public space can only be a mirror of the society’s particular interests and viewpoints. In order to design using interactive installations embedded to open public spaces, one has to have special knowledge and preparation. In this actual moment when computers are ready to enter and disappear in our everyday, physical world the inevitable issue of interaction design and eligibility for it, is placed. Far from being a technological problem it seems to be rather a logical problem as interaction design feels at the moment like no man’s and everyman’s land. Architects, computer engineers, graphic designers among other disciplines, are involved but not in a conclusive way, nor in a regulated one. Interaction design, understood mainly as the art –applied art- of facilitating interactions between humans through products and services and only secondly as the interaction of humans with these products that have some sort of “awareness”, is about behaviour and not about appearance (Saffer 2006: 4). Public space is recognized, by those intending to work upon it by inserting additional interfaces, as an amazing and powerful physical and social interface between different people (Eriksson 2007: 32). Of course design of public spaces can encourage or discourage interaction, exactly as certain objects can be used in order to achieve, through triangulation (Erickson 1993: 400), a catalyzing effect on people’s interaction. But in any case physical space is experienced in an immediate way, whereas to digital space, the existence of interfaces is, up to the moment, necessary in order to be able to engage with it, as we can not –yetconnect to digital devices without the use of some intermediary, that is, some interface. Although interface design is so closely tied to interaction design that they are frequently confused, interface design is only a part of interaction design. That is to say, interface design is only the experienced representation of interactive design, and not the interaction design itself (Saffer 2006: 122). Interface Design is about feeling stuff, a similar to what Decoration is to the buildings, when Interaction Design is architecture. It is however extremely difficult to evaluate Interaction Design and even to suggest who is responsible for it in a multidisciplinary team as it is the responsibility of all and of no one explicitly. Its importance is crucial as it is now a powerful agent not only for the digital realm but for the physical realm as well and for the way public space operates or becomes inoperative. Interaction design has become an overall, totalising management of space, which can no longer be understood in terms of separated realms and calls upon unifying, all-embracing, catholic strategies for it to be able to answer to the contemporary needs of its users. Public space invested with digital technologies can turn out to be, depending on the quality of interaction design, an inoperative space, where subjects interact solely with products or procedures, or a dynamic, enriched milieu that offers a multileveled, intense experience and creates the necessary ground for interaction and communication among subjects. Design can thus restore to the public space its quality of place, frequently lost, as relations are sacrificed at the progressively expanding non-places, characterised by the absence of relations (Auge 1993: 83). Interaction Design becomes therefore a central issue that has to be addressed overcoming the problems that arise from its interdisciplinary character and its intangible and evanescent nature. Working with interactive technologies embedded to public space leads to the realisation that this is the inevitable question that has to be answered and although answers appear to be neither obvious nor easy, there are certain actions that can be taken in order to facilitate our position towards the augmented open public space. Project description The preceding theoretical survey of public space in relation to the implementation of media and specifically interactive media and digital technologies serves as analysis for the presentation of a project that intents to reanimate public space with the use of interactive digital technologies, focusing on the history and collective memory and aiming at the construction of a highaesthetic environment that attracts, implicates and activates the visitors without disrupting everyday life for the habitants. The proposal builds a web of prefabricated multi-sensorial installations that are intertwined to the material environment and are triggered by the presence or the mobility of the visitors. The events are not only audiovisual appearances but can also include the involvement of smells, the activation of certain movement in material objects, the creation of airstreams, the incorporation of animated scenes that can be viewed through a window or a door that slightly opens, etc. In all of these cases it is extremely important that the technology apparatus is not visible to the unsuspicious visitor in order not to betray the convention essential to every case of make-believe. It is however obvious that the visitor as well has to be willing to participate and to accept the convention, as it is he that bears the interacting device, a sort of activator that sets in motion the interactive technologies. The visitors are given an activator which allows the system to keep a register of where they are and where they have been and what they have experienced. At the same time they are given a map of the selected area which indicates some selected itineraries that they can follow, but has no information concerning the location of the points where the interactive technologies are placed. Experience has proved that the fact that the visitor has to wear an activator, which he will acquire by payment, far from being a problem can be an additional advantage, as it guarantees his willingness to play along and it provides a sort of preparation, a ritual entrance to the story-telling atmosphere, which allows him to transit smoothly from the everyday world to a dreamlike condition. The visitor can either have a single activator or a group activator which permits the system to treat the group as such and thus adjust correspondingly its response to their presence. The form and the function of the activator, as well as the one of the map, remain to be investigated and designed in a way that they are coherent with the principles of interaction design followed throughout the whole project. The story told with the use of interactive technologies is superimposed to the actual environment and refers to it but may offer also a possible translocation which can be temporal or qualitative, that is to say, the story can be about another époque or about a legend or a fusion of historical and fictional events. The narration is not a linear, one-way narration but is rather a construction of articulated events which can appear in different order, depending on the way that the visitor moves around the predefined area of the proposal. The story rather than told is insinuated in an implicit, hinted manner. The visitor is a spectator or in some cases a participant in scenes that seem to construct a scenario which is a multidimensional, articulated structure. It is important that the system can follow up his shifting through the selected area and have a register of what he has experienced in order to be able to select which one from the possible scenes for each site is adequate for this particular visitor given where he has been up to the moment and also allow the system to avoid repetitions that can ruin the convention. Different visitors at the same point will not activate the appearance of the same scene more then once but the system will be able to offer in some cases consecutive scenes. It is obvious that thematization strategies are in order, as the objective is not so much to recreate an accurate real event, but rather to create a certain atmosphere, an enchanted milieu, which captivates and at the same time excites its visitors. This whole project is built upon principles and procedures which derive from spectacle structures. It is therefore necessary to achieve a collaboration of different experts in fields related to the spectacle production. However, as one of the aspirations of this proposal is to instigate and attract high-quality tourism, the aesthetics of the constructed scenes, as fragments and as a whole, is of extreme importance. It is consequently imperative to accomplish a high level artistic result through the collaboration with artists and especially with installation artists. Special attention is given to the fusion of digital and analogical elements that make possible an enhanced somatic perception of the constructed scenes. The architectural aspects of the existing public space are taken under consideration and are reinterpreted through the insertion of events which seek the proper place to be hosted. Control of lighting, sound, airstreams, points of view, is crucial for the design of the suitable atmosphere. Technologists and architects have to collaborate closely in order to achieve the best possible intermingle of digital-immaterial and analogical-material features. Interaction design issues are undertaken from an interdisciplinary team that focuses on promoting the visitors involvement. The transparency or better yet, the invisibility of the implanted technologies is equally important as the successful association of the material and the immaterial. The material features allow the overexposed to audiovisual media visitor to enter in a magical dimension and to live the events presented in a corporal, bodily way, particularly pleasant and surprisingly fulfilling as they implicate a multi-sensorial reception. The visitor is not a spectator but a protagonist, he feels immersed in an enriched somatic experience that affects him as a totality. Apart from the construction of the events-scenes a special attention is given to the consideration of the details which aim to organize the material space as a totality with the smallest effort and minimum intervention. Details, specifically designed little things that are offered as a bonus to visitors and general public, are planted here and there. Their main purpose is to attract the attention of the visitors to particular positions where there is possibly a larger gap between settings, or distract the visitors from contradictory elements that form part of the material urban environment and cannot be eliminated or even create an interaction among visitors. It is of course necessary to design these details in such a way that they can be a part of the thematic and real environment at the same time. Even when confronted with existing and historical public spaces, there are certain elements that can be reconfigured in order to promote the interaction, through the use of catalysing physical objects. Interaction design cannot be limited to the digital realm but has to work parallel at multiple levels and at all realms where the visitors have access to. Security issues are not a great problem as all technology apparatus have to be planned so that they will not be apparent. However there have to be a control of the area and the personnel that will take part in some of the scenes will also be able to assist in aspects of security. Cameras and other surveillance apparatus will have to be authorized in order to be used in the public space. Possible locations The proposal is based on the fusion between outdoor, material, public space and digital, interactive technologies. Consequently the locations have to be open, public spaces and the plot weaved around them will have to focus upon a specific story from the past, a historic event or a traditional legend, a kind of narrative that is exclusively associated to the specific site. There are no limitations regarding the accuracy of the story told; as theme parks have shown the public is quite receptive to time-condensations and space-translocations; in the case of the theme parks different continents and millenniums can be put together without creating any annoyance to the spectacle educated public. However, the theme park paradigm only serves as a reference and not as a model to be followed, as the proposal aims to animate the public space and not to annul it by superimposing a completely irrelevant and incoherent plot. The narrative in cases of historic sites of great importance would have to follow in a rather more meticulous way the historic facts but leaving a certain freedom in the relation of fictitious scenarios which are correctly placed in the space and time. Historic sites and city centres appear, subsequently, to be the most appropriate sites for this proposal as they are practically always charged with stories and legends that can nourish the construction of a plot. Conclusions Digital interactive technologies can be used as a powerful instrument of activation of public space through the inclusion of a narrative and the possibility to experience simultaneously different historical moments in time or even parallel realities. Designing physical space and interactive, high quality aesthetic installations is an inseparable, unifying process that has to be understood as a single, multidisciplinary project. The project proposed considers urban spaces and historical sites as locations that can host a web of prefabricated multi-sensorial installations, intertwined to the material environment and triggered by the presence or the mobility of the visitors. Physical urban space is not to be converted to a thematic park and visitors are not supposed to be mere spectators, but rather to be instigated to discover and combine digital and physical realities. No-linear narrations, invisible infrastructures, complex events can lead to the creation of a dreamlike atmosphere. The collaboration of artists, technologist and architects is necessary in order to allow the overexposed to audiovisual media visitor to enter in a magical dimension and to live the events presented in a corporal, bodily way, particularly pleasant and surprisingly fulfilling as they implicate a multisensorial reception. Illustrations shown are from an adaptation of the proposed project for a concrete case. The site chosen is the city of Ioannina in the Northwestern part of Greece. This city has an important recent history, full of legends and traditions, and a significant landscape, with a big lake, an inhabited island inside the lake, and a big castle in the continental part of the city, which are the areas chosen for the project. References Boyer, C. (1996) Cibercities: Visual Perception in the Age of Electronic Communication, N.Y.: Princeton Architectural Press Cooper, A. Reimann, R. Cronin, D. (2007) About Face 3: The essentials of Interaction Design, Indianapolis: John Wiley and Sons Publishing Debord, G. (1996) La declaración de Amsterdam, 1958, in L. Andreotti & X. Costa (Eds.) Teoría de la deriva y otros textos situacionistas sobre la ciudad, Barcelona: MACBA Ed. Erickson, T. 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