A Full-day Walkshop at DIS 24, Copenhagen, Denmark, July 1st 2024
Experience Copenhagen like you never did before: step out of the conference venue and immerse yourself, mind and body, in the blended space of the city.
In this walkshop, the facilitators take you through Copenhagen to experience what blended spaces are, could be, and should be. You walk, you observe, you feel, you take notes, and discuss what blends are, where they are, and how you could design for them. The world of today is not physical nor digital: it is a blend, with its affordances, its own rules, its own sense of place and continuity that extends beyond what is immediately contiguous. The walkshop is a highly immersive experience: you stretch your legs, you use all your senses, and then you pour your observations into sketches and drawings and maps, and we discuss.
If this sounds like a plan to you, please send a half-page statement of interest explaining who you are, what you do, why you are interested in the walkshop, and whatever you think we should know at walkshops@blendedexperiences.com by June 8th 2024.
The walkshop consists of a series of walking and exploratory activities outside of the conference venue and in
the urban fabric of Copenhagen (morning), and of a mapping, discussion, and reflections session at the
conference venue (afternoon). It will run from 09:00 in the morning to 17:00 in the afternoon, with a 2hrs
lunch break that will also be used to allow the facilitators and participants to make their way back to the venue
(if lunch is provided on site) or to a café/restaurant and then back to the venue, and still have enough down
time to rest and chat before engaging in the afternoon session.
Facilitators will meet and welcome participants at a designated meeting point at the venue before heading out.
The organizers welcome participants, introduce the day’s activities, and scope the workshop.
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Participants and facilitators reconvene and discuss
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Lunch and return to the conference venue
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Raise energy levels
Moderated show-and-tell, discussion, reflections
Consolidation, future plans, closing
The facilitators welcome participants at the designated walkshop meeting point, provide the basic instructions for the day and the necessary materials for the activities to be carried out outside in the morning. Then facilitators and participants head out into Copenhagen for the walking part of the walkshop, which consists of two primary activities divided by a "rest and reflect" break.
Activity 1 (A1, 9:30-10:30) sees participants walk from the venue to a specified point of interest nearby (chosen by the facilitators) while practicing observing and describing urban space as a layered information environment comprising visible and invisible parts, both physical and digital. A simple task such as finding a certain type of building, landmark or shop along the way is added to add a degree of detail to the activity.
Activity 2 (A2, 11:00-12:00) sees participants choose a theme from a list created by the facilitators and based on the location (green spaces, idle spaces, commerce, transport, urban nodes) and then walk their way back to the venue along preestablished routes observing, discussing, and documenting their experience of encountering the theme using notes, sketches, photos, and other materials.
For these two activities, the participants are divided in three groups: Team Blue (TB), Team Yellow (TY), and Team Green (TG). Within these teams, individuals can decide whether they intend to cooperate or proceed individually, depending on team size: larger teams may drive focus away from observation towards interpersonal interactions, and make the experience less than ideal.
TB engages with A1 with the explicit instructions to only use information and clues that can be obtained or accessed in digital space, via mobile phones, tablets, wearables, real-time displays in the street, and so on. TB then engages with A2 with the explicit mandate to only use information and clues obtained or accessed in physical space, via signage, behavior, urban elements, and the like.
TY does the opposite: they engage with A1 only via information and clues in physical space, and with A2 only via information and clues in digital space.
TG is explicitly asked to use information and clues from both physical and digital space.
All participants are required to take notes and track or map their activities in any way they like, provided that TB and TY do not use digital devices while running the “physical only” activity (for example, no photos taken with mobile phones ), and no analog methods when running “digital only” (for example, no pen and paper notes). TB and TY receive physical cards to visibly and clearly remind them of which modality they are engaging with at any moment.
The facilitators move between teams in order to provide support where and when needed and connect the theory of blended space and the OTC framing to ongoing activities. “Remote helpers” part of the facilitation team intervene via online digital tools (either teleconferencing, texting, or DMing) to help, hinder, or add complexity to the activities.
In the afternoon session, participants turn their notes and observations into maps with the help of the facilitators. Starting from their own choreographies (their walks), participants diagram the ontology and topology of their experiences in A1 and A2 and then turn maps into reflections and reflections into explicit, if preliminary, conclusions. Specific attention is paid to identifying pace layers and to comparing and contrasting outcomes from the digital-only and physical-only sessions in A1 and A2 with those framed as happening in blended space, in terms of structure, participating elements and their relationships, and overall experience.
The walkshop wraps up with a final room discussion of the various deliverables created so far, of what insights were gained in the process, and possible developments to follow. Participants share stand-out moments or reflections from their walks, group activities, and map-making.
An invitation is extended to those interested, to contribute to different post-walkshop developments: one concerned with turning the insights from the walkshop, integrated with those from previous walkshops, into a series of teaching guidelines detailing goals, methods, challenges, and best practices to be used with students and practitioners to conceptualize and design digital / physical and blended spaces from an OTC perspective, to be published on the walkshop’s own website. The other with variously engaging with the more academic conversation on future smart blended places, carried out at the REBEL design hub at the School of Information Technology at Halmstad University.
The walkshop aims to develop and improve the ability of the participants to “read” the design of structures in the built environment as happening in blended space, to experience the novel affordances of good and bad blends, map their information structures using the OTC framing, turn them to meaning and intention, and suggest designerly ways to make day-to-day experiences in the 21st century more humane by rebalancing the relationship between the fast pace of technology flowing through the environment and the slower, deeper levers coming from spatiality and embodiment.
The primary intended outcome is in terms of knowledge production, and specifically in relation to understanding how the commingling of physical and digital space creates a novel space, with its own sense of presence, its own affordances, and its very special challenges.
Participants will actively first engage with and then reflect on how the structures of embodiment and spatiality shape our experiences and act as important, non-interface level grounding elements that have a huge bearing on the design and use of digital technologies.
We invite students, researchers, and practitioners interested in how digital and physical are commingling in urban space and in the challenges and opportunities presented by mixed reality, blended spaces, blended experiences, IoT, urban planning, and experience design.
Come and experience Copenhagen like you never did before: step out of the conference venue and immerse yourself, mind and body, in the blended space of the city. In this walkshop, the facilitators take you through Copenhagen to experience what blended spaces are, could be, and should be. You walk, you observe, you feel, you take notes, and discuss what blends are, where they are, and how you could design for them. The world of today is not physical nor digital: it is a blend, with its affordances, its own rules, its own sense of place and continuity that extends beyond what is immediately contiguous.
The walkshop is intended as an introduction to addressing the conceptualization and design of digital / physical experiences from a structural, rather than interface-level, perspective It is also a highly immersive experience: you stretch your legs, you use all your senses, and then you pour your observations into sketches and drawings and maps, and we discuss.
If this sounds like a plan to you, please send a half-page statement of interest explaining who you are, what you do, why you are interested in the walkshop, and whatever you think we should know at walkshops@blendedexperiences.com by June 8th 2024.
Andrea Resmini is associate professor of experience design and information architecture in the Department of Intelligent Systems and Digital Design at Halmstad University and a researcher in design games at the University of Skövde. An architect turned information architect turned educator, Andrea is a two-time past president of the Information Architecture Institute, a founding member of Architecta, the Italian Society for Information Architecture, the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Information Architecture, and the author of Pervasive Information Architecture (2011), Reframing Information Architecture (2014), and Advances in Information Architecture (2021).
Dan Klyn teaches information architecture at the University of Michigan School of Information, is a co-founder of World Information Architecture Day, a past President of the Information Architecture Institute, and is a founding member of the teaching faculty at Building Beauty. Dan’s writings have appeared in the Journal of Information Architecture, the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, and in Reframing Information Architecture (2014) and Advances In Information Architecture ( 2021).
Bertil Lindenfalk is a researcher and lecturer at the School of Health and Welfare at Jönköping University. He is a designer by trade and an educator by practice. His research focuses on how designers can be aided in their practice while navigating complex situations and settings, often connected to healthcare contexts. As an educator, Bertil has always had a strong belief in experiential learning and often uses games and other exercises to encourage reflection. His main work focuses on the formalization of the relationship and natural movement between system space and design space during design processes while designers tackle wicked problems, often as collaborative endeavors.
Miriam Tedeschi is a researcher at the Faculty of Law, University of Turku, Finland, and a fellow at the Westminster Law & Theory Lab, London. A docent in human geography, Miriam works combines empirical methods, primarily ethnographic and autoethnographic approaches, with non-representational and posthuman theories. Miriam has explored spatio-legal phenomena within the broader fields of human, urban, and legal geography: segregated or criminalized spaces; migratory spaces; natural spaces; blended spaces. She currently serves as the Principal Investigator for the Academy of Finland research project JuDiCe – Justice in Digital Space.
Josephine Wong is a co-founder and principal at Hong Kong firm Apogee, a co-founder of Make Meaningful Work, and a co-founder of UX Hong Kong. Jo grew up with a Chinese-Burmese father and Chinese-Indonesian mother. She collaborates with global teams conducting research in Cantonese, Mandarin and English. Jo is passionate about the environment, political and economic systems and how we can live healthier and happier lives without adversely impacting less fortunate people. She is the author of Make Meaningful Work (with Daniel Szuc).Daniel Szuc is a co-founder and principal at Hong Kong firm Apogee, a co-founder of Make Meaningful Work, as well as a co-founder of the UX Hong Kong conference. He has been involved in the UX field for over 25 years, and has been based in Hong Kong for over 20 years. Dan has lectured about user-centered design globally, and he is the author of three books: Global UX (with Whitney Quesenbery), the Usability Kit (with Gerry Gaffney), and Make Meaningful Work with Josephine Wong.
We have walkshopped in cities on both sides of the Atlantic, including Chicago, Dublin, Genoa, Zurich, New Orleans, Lisbon, Grand Rapids, and Venice. You can read more about some of these over at TUG’s Architecture Walks.
Last updated: May 2 2024 :: Image: City alley, un-perfekt, under the Pixabay license
BLENDED EXPERIENCES :: Last updated May 17 2024