Arianna Bassoli

Underground Aesthetics: Rethinking Urban Computing

An ethnographic study and a design proposal for a situated music-exchange application suggest how explicitly foregrounding the experiential qualities of urban life can help rethink urban computing design. In this article, through reflection on the ethnographic study results and the undersound design, how an aesthetic account of urban life might be the basis of designs that support not only an individual but also a collective experience of the city is explored.

BluetunA: let your neighbour know what music you like

BluetunA is an application running on Bluetooth-enabled mobile phones that allows users to share information about their favourite music. With BluetunA people can select a list of favourite artists or songs and see who else in proximity share their taste in music, or they can search whom nearby has selected specific artists, and check out what other preferences in terms of music these people have. Moreover, BluetunA users can exchange messages with each other over Bluetooth, connect to the Internet to download their profile and obtain music recommendations from Last. fm website. To enrich this experience, people can interact with each other through their mobile phones while sitting in cafes by accessing the BluetunA hotspots and a wider range of music sharing options.

Tuna: Socialising Music Sharing on the Move

The Sony Walkman was one of the first mobile personal technologies introduced in the market (du Gay et al., 1997). Its success, together with the following development and high penetration of mobile phones, has stressed the importance that ubiquitous technologies play in our everyday life. There are, at this stage, many new opportunities to explore for the design of future mobile devices, especially if we consider the fast improvements in terms of broadband wireless technologies and powerful handheld computers. The main interest of the researchers involved in the project presented below is, in general, to design technologies and applications able to create, support and maintain social interactions among people who happen to be in physical proximity, while performing various everyday activities within an urban environment. Cities are becoming in fact more and more alienating places where people mostly ignore whoever is nearby in their everyday routine (Putnam, 2000). Our aim is to design new personal technologies that could support the creation of a ‘neighbourhood feeling’ and the improvement of the social capital on a local scale. While many definitions have been assigned to the concept of ‘social capital’, it could be here summarized as the sum of relationships, norms and institutions that shape the quality and quantity of a society’s social interactions (World Bank, 1999). This research has started from the analysis of common habits in terms of mobile devices usage, and has investigated potential incentives that would make people use these devices to connect to other people nearby, even strangers. Many studies have tried to explain why the personal music player has become so popular, and to research habits of consumption related to this technology (du Gay et al., 1997; Bull, 2000). From these investigations it emerges that music can constitute a tool to

In-between theory and practice: dialogues in design research

Why Wait? and Betwixt are two of the workshops we have recently run on the theme of in-between-ness. The approach of social computing, where researchers work to understand how the socio-cultural aspects of human life relate to the design of new technologies, was the starting point for our investigation. By observing actual instances of in-between-ness in context we explored how design activities can be used as an opportunity to discuss and take positions on a specific theme, and as a space for narrowing the gap in design research between theoretical and practical thinking.

Social Opportunistic Computing: Design for Autonomic User-Centric Systems

The proliferation of mobile devices equipped with short-range wireless connectivity allows users to produce, access and share digital resources in a wide number of everyday occasions. In this chapter, we consider a content distribution application scenario, aimed at the diffusion of data in autonomic computing environments, and investigate the way the social attitudes of mobile users impact the design of an autonomic opportunistic communication system. We analyze the results of a simulation which combines both a real-world pattern of proximity-based encounters, as measured in an office environment, with a series of userdefined preferences regarding content. Results show how the system design space varies according to these social parameters, and the importance of designing systems which are build taking into account the user and its social habits and preferences.

frēstyl: simplifying the process of promoting and discovering local live music

In this paper, we present a new service for web and iPhone for promoting and discovering live music, frēstyl. We will show how frēstyl addresses and attempts to solve the problem that emerging musicians, local promoters and small/medium venues face when publicizing their events, both on a local and global level, and the problem that music fans face when trying to gather a complete but not overwhelming understanding of local and global live music events.