Sybille Lammes

Digital mapping interfaces: From immutable mobiles to mutable images:

In this article, I discuss how digital mapping interfaces ask users to engage with images on screens in far more performative and active ways and how this changes the immutable status of the map image. Digital mapping interfaces invite us to touch, talk and move with them, actions that have a reciprocal effect on the look of the image of the map. Images change constantly through absorbing our mobile and physical actions. I approach digital mapping interfaces as mediators: They do not so much collect information as create spatial transformations for the user of the interface, thus instigating new moves on his or her part that are fed once again into the interface. I argue that it is therefore short-sighted to view digital mapping interfaces as mere points of passage. They are better understood as mediators that create spatial meanings by translating between and inviting movements of users, vehicles, programs and so on.

‘I am he. I am he. Siri rules’: Work and play with the Apple Watch:

In this article, we will use autoethnographic accounts of our use of the Apple Watch to analyse a new type of ludic labour that has emerged in recent years, in which leisure activities are redefined in terms of work and quantifiable data. Wearable devices like the Apple Watch encourage us to share data about ourselves and our activities, dividing our attention in everyday contexts as ‘quasi-objects’ that need our input to hybridise work and play, offering opportunities to merge leisure and labour, and also the possibility for resistant practices in the interstices between function and failure. We combine perspectives from Science and Technology studies, media studies and play studies, including the ‘quantified self’ and the ‘Internet of Things’, to argue that while the Apple Watch moves us closer to merging with the machine, its inability to provide what it promises offers a way out – a more positive understanding of intimate, wearable computing technology.

Encountering Place: Mapping and Location-Based Games in Interdisciplinary Education

ABSTRACT In this paper we propose the use of ‘Encountering’ a location-based game (LBG) based on the Wherigo platform to facilitate interdisciplinary student learning about places on field courses. Deploying a mobile, digital map-based platform addresses significant challenges – such as the sacrifice of context specificity and methodological applicability and depth. It also runs the danger of ‘gamifying’ the fieldwork, blinding the participant to their own agency and emergent encounters. Interactive and layered digital map interfaces have affordances that can potentially overcome such challenges. We claim that one such affordance is the ability to play through the map. In other words, maps – and digital maps in particular – offer the possibility of decoupling results-orientated actions from free-form serendipitous engagement with the field. Our argument is two-fold. First, that LBG toolsets such as Wherigo can provide a ‘common ground’ for students engaging in place-based interdisciplinary research, by providing a material, cartographic basis for playful investigation. Second, that they can facilitate the production of ‘spaces of epistemological failure’, allowing students to challenge taken-for-granted conceptual and methodological axioms within and across disciplines.

Destabilizing Playgrounds: Cartographical Interfaces, Mutability, Risk and Play

In this chapter I will examine the triadic relation between play, digital mapping and power. I look at how playing with cartographical interfaces is a central and never neutral activity to digital mapping that invites users to change cartographic landscapes in playful and subversive ways, and thus containing potential to changing the very nature of maps and the spatial relations they invite us to produce. Since the emergence of digital maps, cartography has changed drastically. Digital maps allow for a greater degree of two-way interaction between map and user than analogue maps. Users are not just reading maps but can constantly influence the shape and look of the map itself. Used on our mobile phones, on our computers or as satnavs in our cars, maps have become more personal—transforming while we navigate with and through them. Digital maps have thus altered our conception of maps as ‘objectified’ representations of space that has been a touchstone for centuries (Anderson 1991; de Certeau 1984; Crampton 2001; Harley et al. 1988). Instead, I will argue in this chapter, maps have become more open to playful, subjective and subversive practices. Play is understood here as a range of activities that go beyond ordinary life by taking on a playful attitude (Cermak-Sassenrath 2013) and as activities of pleasure (Fiske 1993) although not necessarily fun (cf. Malaby 2007). I will probe is where exactly this room to play resides in the particular case of digital mapping and to what extent this gives users agency. Certainly, the image of the map has become mutable and seems to be open to play, but that does not necessarily mean that the power lies solely in the hands of the player/user. How does power work in such ever-transforming neo-cartographies and what affordances does the user/player have to change power-relations?

Mapping the quixotic volatility of smellscapes

This chapter discusses how Kate McLean uses mapping as part of her artistic-based research into smellscapes. McLean investigates how smell can be mapped when traversing environments in smellwalks through cities and using gathered olfactory data. Her work is mainly concerned with the ephemerality of smells and how to visually capture this volatility in and on smell maps. These maps are produced as an assemblage of digital technologies and manual techniques such as drawing and painting. Lammes and Perkins discuss with her how olfactory mapping foregrounds many different temporalities and how it brings us new temporal – as well as spatial - stories.