The Creative Exchange

Paul Coulton

Lancaster University is in partnership with Newcastle University and the Royal College of Art within the AHRC Knowledge Exchange Hub, The Creative Exchange. Our aim is to bring together creative industry companies and Arts and Humanities academics to explore the potential of something we are calling ‘digital public space’, where anyone, anywhere, anytime, can access, explore and create with digital content. This collaboration is in the form of innovative research projects that explore various themes associated with digital public space. The theme I lead is called ‘Making the Digital Physical’ and its primary aim is to transform the digital space trapped inside screens and devices into physical experiences in the real world, in particular moving beyond the primarily visual experiences of at screens towards ones that can engage all our senses so that the digital public space can also be felt, heard, tasted, smelt, or even worn. Drawing inspiration from research in areas such as: tangible and natural interfaces; perceptive and ambient media; augmented reality/virtuality; hacking and 3D printing, the projects create innovative prototypes that explore plausible futures in which we can turn digital spaces into lived experiences. While all the projects in this theme share this experiential quality, they do so in very different ways, thus reflecting the particular partners within a project. Therefore to illustrate just some of the potential of this research area, I will highlight some of the projects undertaken thus far in the following paragraphs.

Numbers that Matter

The Numbers that Matter project aim was to explore what would happen if people could create smart devices that reported very specific data to the wearer – numbers that mattered to them the most. What if they could invent a watch that told you that your neighbours were lonely and needed some company? What if we could create a badge that indicated the air quality in the spaces you use, or a glove that reacted to the weather? How would it affect us? Would these products change our behaviour as individuals? Or more interestingly, could they help us become more aware citizens?

PAC-L AN

The design of many so-called ‘location based games’ means the attention of the player is directed to the mobile phone screen for navigation through the physical space, thus limiting player immersion to the single dimension of the virtual game. This research uses a mixed reality game to examine how physical immersion could also by designed into the physical space in such a way that the combined digital/ physical space becomes self navigable. PAC-LAN is a real world recreation of the arcade classic Pac-Man, in which the players physically take on the role of the game avatars, either Pac-Man or one of the four ghosts, to collect real physical objects in a real world location. The players use Android phones with on-board Near Field Communication readers (essentially the same technology used for travel cards such as Oyster in London.) To interact, NFC game pills (created from Frisbees) attach to the physical environment (e.g. lamp posts) and tags on opposing players to enact the game.

Physical Playlist

The shared mix-tape had an emotional and physical connection that digital shared content often lacks. Writeable CDs came too late or too close to the rise of the mp3 to become a shareable treasured object. This project aims to explore the relationship between the physicality of a shareable personalised object that has digital content embedded within it. Whilst the mix-tape offered elements of personalisation, the objects created for the Physical Playlist can take almost any form, and, being digital, they can also be enabled so that they can only be played on a specific day, at a specific time, or perhaps only when the weather is warm and sunny, thus allowing the creator to produce a very unique, personalised experience.

Cold Sun

Cold Sun is a game that illustrates how scientific and real world data can be integrated into game mechanics, in this case as live weather data, time, location, and climate change forecasts, in order to enhance the rhetoric within the game design by engaging the player at a more personal level. The result is a hybrid, dual-mode adventure game where players must survive over a set period of time in a strange, future landscape, affected by real-time weather, in order to traverse the extreme climates of a dream world by night. In particular it seeks to ‘humanise’ the scientific data by presenting it as a personal experience, allowing players to rehearse plausible futures based directly on and in relation to this real world (weather and climate) data.

All these projects are addressing the merging of physical and digital to create what we often describe as phygital experiences. The reason behind describing them as phygital rather than the ‘Internet of Things’ is two-fold Firstly, ‘IoT’ emphasises the infrastructure. I see it as part of the evolution of the web from a space we visit to places we can live in. The distinction between place and space has a long tradition in geography, which suggests that place is perceived as security and space is freedom: we are attached to the first and long for the latter. We have enjoyed the freedoms of the spaces of the web but as we increasingly incorporate our personal data and objects, then it will need to provide us with a sense of place. The second aspect is a way of emphasising that these are systems and products that have not simply had some digital functionality embedded within them, but relate to a class of connected devices whose functionality and operation exist simultaneously in both virtual and physical places and will inevitably form part of what we are calling the Digital Public Space.