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Places: People, Events, Loci – the Relation of Semantic Frames in the Construction of Place

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An Erratum to this article was published on 22 April 2008

Abstract

The central point of this paper concerns the way the particular contexts of people, events and loci constitute places through the pragmatics of being and acting in physical space and how this can give designers traction over place design. Although we focus here on meaning associated with the concept of “place”, unlike some thinkers, we also believe that spaces have meaning. Our point is not to engage in a competition between phenomenologies, but to develop a rich description of the contribution to place of the semantic tangle of people, events, and loci as an aide in locating design alternatives. The semantic tangle consists of situated, mutually constituting resources. Patterns of moves and contexts that define and utilize those resources constitute different forms of place construction; in this paper, we focus on three: the linguistic participation of place, ritual, and ephemeral places. Approaches to CSCW may profit (1) from designing technology for multifaceted appropriation, (2) from designing specific places for specific people engaged in specific events in specific locations, or (3) by commutation, that is, a method of meaning making similar to detecting “just noticeable differences” by iteratively and self-consciously substituting related meaningful moves and contexts into the system of meaning.

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Notes

  1. While we deny that Harrison and Dourish treated space and place as static or that they “divided the world up between the objective physical world (space) and the meanings and viewpoints we attach to the world” (Brown and Perry 2001, p. 29), we agree with the larger points that technology must be understood in use and that activity is important.

  2. From a linguistic point of view, what we are describing might be more properly described as a pragmatic tangle rather than a semantic tangle. As in pragmatics, we are emphasizing the creation of meaning in practical action. However, we use semantic tangle so as to emphasize the importance of meaning and not invoke pragmatic philosophy.

  3. In order for Lefebvre’s system to work, he re-invents Hegelian logic for his own interpretive purposes. No longer a strictly oppositional dichotomous thesis/antithesis/synthesis structure, he sees meaning as constructed from a tripartite structure whose process relation is more both/and. This structurally, but not referentially, echoes Charles Sanders Pierce’s formulation of “the semiotic” – more about Pierce in a moment. (Peirce 1991)

  4. Often represented as a multi-dimensional matrix of possible features for a design, it is bounded and often rows and columns related in some categorical structure suggesting topologies of solutions. It is a powerful design tool – sometimes called a “Zwicky or morphological box.

  5. While they work as extensions of embodied space, we have previously noted that maps are problematic for other reasons such as manipulations of power relations. The same basic question obtains, here too, that of who and how the “social construction” is constituted.

  6. In the rhetoric of Re-Place-ing Space, we might call the street the “space” for the parade since it is the undifferentiated field without the specifics of the actual parade.

  7. We will explore how people and events as well as loci are used to represent place and the difficulties this implies for design a bit later in this paper.

  8. “OK – so how is it that Yosemite or some other scenery is a place?” It is through a form of ritual that developed in the Romantic Era, for Europeans at least. Certain aspects of natural landscape were taken to represent connections with inner self, beauty, etc.

  9. Goodwin (2003) uses an archaeological dig as the site of his study of gesture as a semiotic resource, hence our use here.

  10. E.g. in discussing “loci”, for example, we noted the layers of meaning that come from its pre-existing space and place constructions.

  11. Most accounts of media spaces such as PARC and EuroPARC refer often to how specific the design was for the people, locations and circumstances of the user communities and how much that sense fit enabled a sense of ownership, both of which translated to on-going appropriation.

  12. The headsets worn by retail sales people in fast-food restaurants seems to fit this description since it locates the wearer both out at the car where the order is being placed and in the kitchen where they can participate in the routine of ordering and preparing. Some of Steve Benford’s mixed reality games such as Can You See Me Now? also have this property. (Benford et al. 2006)

  13. Dourish’s account of “strategic” suggests that spaces might be produced, rather than places made. Regardless, the more important caution is that strategic moves (that is, product design) often inscribe or even establish power relations.

  14. We might call this “the in-your-face” semantic tangle.

  15. It is this simple observation that began our investigation into the semantics of “place”, leading us to this paper’s investigation of the flow of meaning between locus, people, and events. This was first noted in Bly et al. (Bly et al. 1993)

  16. For example, Card, Newell and Moran (Card et al. 1983)

  17. It is certainly wrong to believe that second paradigm HCI and CSCW has completely ignored meaning as a topic. While always a difficult-to-accommodate idea in the cognitive model, the ecological psychology of JJ Gibson – known mostly for its concept of “affordance” gained currency at about the same time as the publication of Re-Place-ing Space. In some ways it is a sort of proto-embodiment since it requires that affordances be actionable by cognitive actors. It is very useful, but not very explanatory since affordances are “primitives” in the system. These are (relatively) static potentials: chairs want to be sat upon, door handles opened, windows looked through, etc. (It is just this static quality that made it more-or-less acceptable since presumably an affordance was not open to interpretation that would introduce “noise” into the measurement of performance.) Alas, ecological psychology does not account for how these are known or how they are adapted and re-appropriated. What do a chair and the stoop of a house have in common other than they both afford sitting?

  18. Sorry to be so obtuse, but one of the great discoveries that applying the issues found in CSCW to HCI has been that context matters.

  19. HCI discovered embodiment at about the same time that robotics did. While it was previously obvious to robotics researchers that the processing elements and the physical attributes of a robot had to be thought of as a unit, the idea that cognition could be “embodied” in clever robotic form which would in turn obviate developing certain levels of generality in robotic models was a revelation (Brooks 1999).

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Correspondence to Steve Harrison.

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An erratum to this article can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10606-008-9078-3

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Harrison, S., Tatar, D. Places: People, Events, Loci – the Relation of Semantic Frames in the Construction of Place. Comput Supported Coop Work 17, 97–133 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-007-9073-0

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