Designing for Location Dependence

foundation : inspiration

Inspiration

what has come before & what can you learn from it

Exploration of prior and/or related works can inspire, warn, highlight & inform the creation of your experience.

These can trigger ideas for interaction methods, suggest techniques & methods for working & suggest technologies for implementation.

The experiences (positive & negative) of the designers of related works will be useful in helping you:

plan & achieve your desired outcomes
working with a particular techology/material/method
engage your audience, initially & throughout the experience
understand the location you will be designing for
generate ideas for your experience.

Below you will see suggestions for how to approach this depending on your 'focus', as well as examples of locative media works that you may want to explore.

Focus : Site

You have a particular site in mind.

What 'style' of site is this? Park, urban centre, shopping mall, historic site.

Search for works that have been designed for & deployed into the style of site you are intending to work with.

Focus : People

You have your target audience.

Search for works that have been designed for same/similar target audience - it may help to generalise here to broaden your search.

Focus : Tech

You would like to use [insert tech here] in your design.

Search for works that have used the same technology - these may or may not be location dependent but could provide insight into the best methods for designing & developing for that technology.

So, what do I look for?

Keywords:

location based game/experience/event, locative media, augmented reality, educational experience, pervasive gaming/computing, interactive environments, geogames, interactive installations, mobile media