Project 4: Assimilation

Let us now shift attention from the gear to the experience. We have seen that place identity is largely a matter of belonging. We have seen that becoming an insider is a gradual process of assimilation: shifting personal constructs and frames of reference in order to adjust to an evolving understanding of perceived structure in the environment.

As a way of extending contextual design to the experience of place, you are asked to construct a set of scenarios for the adoption of a particular location-aware technology by a particular community. That technology can be our eponymous coupling of embedded-plus-portable elements providing place-based content. Or, if this fits that description, it can be something you have designed already.

As a focus to your inquiry, consider the question of assimilation. What might shape alternative futures for how a community absorbs a new technology? Better yet, how might people apply that technology in order to assimilate themselves into that community, or where they are?

A designer often uses a scenario to illustrate the experience of a proposed object or scene. Yet a scenario should never travel alone. This is because most designs involve prediction, and most predictions are wrong. A set of scenarios buffers a design project so that when the law of unintended consequences shifts reality away from expectations the result is not "wrong" so much as "oh, that one." A well-interpreted set must be small; it cannot be arbitrarily extensible. Each scenario in a set is a different possible future implicit in the present. Together, they reveal a strategist's take on uncertainties. Each scenario differs from the other on the basis of how critical uncertainties channel the driving forces in a situation. (This method will be discussed in class. See also the standard manual on scenario planning: The Art of the Long View, by Peter Schwartz.)

Working in pairs, and in our by now usual formats, prepare a set of four two-minute narratives. Due Tuesday, April 11.