This is a website dedicated to materials from my PhD research project on mapping connection and intimacy across geographical distance. Publications, blog posts and web experiments are available here. Check back to see what's new!

What's it about? Increasingly, digital networked technologies are becoming places where relationships of all stripes are created, maintained, and deepened. Friends meet through video games, long-distance families and partners maintain intimacy through messaging apps, and strangers living in the same neighbourhood collaborate through location-based games. My research looks at how such places form in digital platforms through a shared need for closeness at a distance, how those platforms shape the kinds of places that emerge within them, and perhaps how we can better design them for the creation of these virtual "places between places."

Mapping Transplaces - an interactive map

Now more than ever before, technologies like the internet, cellular networks, snail mail, and air travel are bridging bonds between friends, families, and partners living far apart. Mapping Transplaces visualises diverse stories about the community spaces, homes, and dwellings that transcend national borders, oceans, and time zones, mapping a world of connections across divides.

GeoGuestbook

What would you say to someone far away? Leave messages to distant loved ones on this map. You can share your message with the generated link. (Use approximate locations for privacy reasons.)

Web place provocations

• Experiment 1: Animal Forum - what do animals think of Kipling's Just So Stories? Take a look here...and perhaps add your own commentary. (Websocket + database integration test)
• Experiment 2: Tiles - fill an empty room with wacky tiles together with friends (or strangers)! (Websocket + database, image upload test)
• Experiment 3: Corkboards - Make a real-time collaborative board of polaroids and notes! (Websocket + database, presence indicator test)
• Experiment 4: Multiplayer Room Designer - (WIP) Create a 3D room together. Currently with customisable photos, windows, and a few furniture options. (Websocket + database + three.js)

Publications

Full paper (Academic Mindtrek 2022)

Abstract

There is growing academic interest in how people use ubiquitous computing devices—particularly smartphones—for cultivating liveable, enjoyable places, replete with layers of living meaning, memory, heritage and social connections. This is a trajectory embraced by two related paradigms of urban studies: slow cities and playable cities. In this paper we investigate how locative mobile games—alternately known as location-based games and pervasive games—can be vehicles of placemaking through play, enhancing the careful processes that form places out of layered networks of affection, habit, and social bonds in the playable city. We highlight carefulness as a latent theme not previously given a close treatment in locative game scholarship, applying it as a lens in our study of locative mobile games. Drawing on autoethnography, we investigate three locative mobile games—Niantic's Ingress and Pikmin Bloom, and Meyran Games’ Plant the World—conducting a qualitative analysis of the findings using Dena's elements-behaviour-experiences (EBE) framework. We distil our findings into four design implications for developing locative mobile games that support pla(y)cemaking with care: physical anchorage, slow mechanics, ownership, and co-construction.

Invited talk (Multiplay Space and Place in Virtual Worlds Conference 2022)

Short paper (OzCHI 2023)

Abstract

As more people take to networked technologies as primary sites of relationship deepening, it becomes increasingly important to examine how we design these technologies for connection over a distance. This article presents a pilot study looking at how players build homes together in video game environments. Drawing on phenomenological studies of architecture and geography, we observe and analyse how remote players cooperate to build a virtual place of dwelling in the game Terraria. Via observational and focus group data, we consider how players negotiate their priorities and social relationships throughout the process of creating a shared place of habitation. From this data, we extend Tyler Quiring’s three themes of virtual placemaking into five virtual placemaking priorities—Making more precise; Establishing a centre; Cultivating fields of care; Communality, and; Building as dialogue—to describe how cooperative space configuration activities function to anchor both player-player and player-place relationships. Our findings shed light on how video games can uniquely support placemaking as a means of achieving meaningful co-presence over a distance, offering valuable insights for future design and research into virtual worlds.

Early insights - blog post

Project blog

A blog (well, two mirrored blogs, actually) to which I post regular updates on my research work.
WordPress | Tumblr mirror

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