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Adaptive public spaces

The present social and environmental challenges, the impact of climate change andthe pandemic, revealed the urgency and the opportunity to rethink urban designthrough its renewed spaces and temporalities. The pandemic offered a ‘natural exper-iment’ to explore and develop new perspectives, making public spaces more resilient.Contributing towards a rethink of these spaces, the present paper explores adaptivearchitecture with responsive technologies and their capability of shaping public spacesto constitute a conversation piece with the surrounding environment. This approachcombines and reflects different disciplinary fields: architecture, civic interaction and ur-ban design. The exploration works around a speculative design case – produced aspart of broader research at the Amsterdam University of Applied Science in collabora-tion with the Master in Digital Design.

Staging Atmospheres at the Church: Facilitating a Plurality of Perspectives through Multimodal Augmented Reality

In their attempts to offer visitors meaningful experiences in historical churches, museums are increasingly experimenting with augmented reality. Arguing that an augmented reality experience should be counted as a material event in its own right, I focus on the aesthetic strategies employed in two augmented reality experiences. The first is an augmented virtuality installation that was presented in the Old Church in Amsterdam (Netherlands). The second concerns a HoloLens experience hosted by St. Peter’s Church in Leuven (Belgium). Drawing on the work of Gernot Böhme (2017) and undertaking a sensory auto-ethnography, I demonstrate how bodily sensations in these augmented reality experiences altered my affective involvement with the church spaces. I found that strategies of defamiliarisation and fragmentation affected my disposition, effectively personalising the perceptional relationship between the church as an authoritative institution and myself in the role as the visitor. Building on recent discussions on museums’ function in society, I also discuss the potential of augmented reality experiences to play on a multitude of meanings, and particularly, in staging dispositions that move away from universal truths.

Public play space : turning urban space into public places with games and play.

The Participant Journey Map: Understanding the design of interactive Augmented Play Spaces

Augmented Play Spaces (APS) are (semi-) public environments where playful interaction isfacilitated by enriching the existing environment with interactive technology. APS canpotentially facilitate social interaction and physical activity in (semi-)public environments. Incontrolled settings APS show promising effects. However, people’s willingness to engagewith APSin situ, depends on many factors that do not occur in aforementioned controlledsettings (where participation is obvious). To be able to achieve and demonstrate thepositive effects of APS when implemented in (semi-)public environments, it is important togain more insight in how to motivate people to engage with them and better understandwhen and how those decisions can be influenced by certain (design) factors. TheParticipant Journey Map (PJM) was developed following multiple iterations. First,based on related work, and insights gained from previously developed andimplemented APS, a concept of the PJM was developed. Next, to validate and refinethe PJM, interviews with 6 experts with extensive experience with developing andimplementing APS were conducted. Thefirst part of these interviews focused oninfluential (design) factors for engaging people into APS. In the second part, expertswere asked to provide feedback on thefirst concept of the PJM. Based on the insightsfrom the expert interviews, the PJM was adjusted and refined. The Participant JourneyMap consists of four layers: Phases, States, Transitions and Influential Factors. There aretwo overarchingphases:‘Onboarding’and‘Participation’and 6statesa (potential)participant goes through when engaging with an APS:‘Transit,’‘Awareness,’‘Interest,’‘Intention,’‘Participation,’‘Finishing.’Transitionsindicate movements between states.Influential factorsare the factors that influence these transitions. The PJM supportsdirections for further research and the design and implementation of APS. Itcontributes to previous work by providing a detailed overview of a participant journeyand the factors that influence motivation to engage with APS. Notable additions are thedetailed overview of influential factors, the introduction of the states‘Awareness,’‘Intention’and‘Finishing’and the non-linear approach. This will support taking intoaccount these often overlooked, key moments in future APS research and designprojects. Additionally, suggestions for future research into the design of APS are given.