Children at the Urban Frontier

Mobile and wireless technologies have the potential to enable children to explore their physical environment while creating, inhabiting, and playing in a virtual landscape, if the technologies being developed acknowledge their presence, both real and virtual. Mobile Bristol has worked with children to explore and map their local physical and virtual spaces.

The emerging spatial capacities of new wearable and mobile computing generate new possibilities of association and new spatialities within the city. Most of the current theorizing around these issues makes little or no mention of children and their current and future relationships to these technologies, even though they have the potential to be used to enhance children’s independent access to outdoor, public, urban spaces. If this is so, then children and the communities they rely on must have a stake in the development of these new urban forms. Children should be acknowledged as participants in urban communities, and be enabled to design, place and use mediascapes in the outdoor space, as freely as adults.

MOBILE BRISTOL
Mobile Bristol has developed a toolkit of software that enables the user to annotate and augment the real, physical space with a digital media landscape. Projects have involved collaboration with a variety of individuals and groups: artists, educationalists, media producers, and schoolchildren. These collaborations not only produce interesting content for the end-user audience, but give grounded insight into potential future uses and attitudes to the technology, and valuable feedback in to the iterative development of the toolkit [1].

Children
“A New Sense of Place?” (NSOP) is a Mobile Bristol project in partnership with researchers from the Community Information Systems Centre at the University of the West of England, and Ordnance Survey Research and Innovation. The title “A New Sense of Place?” refers to the potential of the technology to re-engage children with their local environment.
Children first explored and mapped their local environment in a variety of ways before being introduced to hands-on experience of using the toolkit to develop their own digital landscape of soundscapes over an indoor or outdoor space [2,3,4] They were given free choice in the sounds they chose to populate their virtual landscape, allowing them to play with creating their own ideal sound environment.

Suggested usage
All children who have participated in the NSOP workshops have been able to conceptualise and design their personal digital landscape, and have used their experience of using the tools to make suggestions for future applications that may be grouped into the following three dimensions:

Mobility and safety – relating to going outdoors, locating, marking and tracking, negotiating with parents/guardians and negotiating fear and risk

Social – relating to the above characteristics with the addition of meeting with peers and friendship groups, and sharing experiences such as play, shopping, and listening to music

Information – relating to school, transport, shopping and news

The children were struck by the potential of the technology to allow them to negotiate increased ranges of mobility with parents. In a similar way to their current use of mobile phones to keep in contact, they thought that a ‘benign’ surveillance tool would allow them increased freedom to roam as their location could be monitored remotely. They were also keen on its use among friendship groups as a way of keeping track of each other.
As with the world wide web, there is potential for many types of applications and use. Some of these may generate new forms of commercialised child-play and child-supervision facilities. They may also be used in quite draconian surveillant ways, with some parents and guardians developing new forms of temporal and spatial controls. It is quite possible that both positive and negative applications of these technologies, in terms of childhood, will exist side by side as they do in relation to other childhood-technology interactions.

CONCLUSIONS
The positive aspect is the promise of these new technologies in their quintessentially spatial mobile outdoor-use capabilities. They may offer children a ways of (re)occupying certain spaces in the city by offering a means of negotiating risk and fear, and of permeating adult-ordered geographies of the city with alternative (virtual) children’s geographies. The possibilities of the technology seem vast and unpredictable and will not offer a panacea for the problems of children’s mobility, but will always need to be deployed in conjunction with other initiatives (such as traffic calming) to retrieve urban spaces for childhood.

FUTURE RESEARCH
Questions for ongoing research include:
How will new wearable and ubiquitous technologies interact with childhood?
Could their use as ‘benign’ surveillance tools enhance children’s mobility?
How can such devices be steered towards enabling rather than constricting applications?
What fears will adults have around children’s appropriation of the technology?
What content will be deemed suitable for children to access and create?
Can the technology allow the children to feedback their experience of the city, so that their knowledge can be used to develop the physical space alongside the virtual?

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
To NSOP collaborators, especially Owain Jones and Morris Williams.
This was originally written as a position paper for a workshop on Ubicomp at the Urban Frontier, organised by Eric Paulos and Ken Anderson at Ubicomp 2004.

REFERENCES
1. Hull, R., Clayton, B., & Melamed, T. Rapid Authoring of Mediascapes Ubicomp 2004
2. Williams, M., Jones, O. & Fleuriot, C. Wearable Computing And The Geographies Of Urban Childhood - Working With Children To Explore The Potential Of New Technology Small Users, Big Ideas: Interaction Design and Childhood 2003
3. Jones, O., Fleuriot., C. & Williams, M. A New Sense of Place? Mobile Technologies and the Geographies of Urban Childhood, Environment, Experience and Learning session, New Directions in Children’s Geographies, The Association of American Geographers Annual Conference 2003
4. Fleuriot, C., Williams, M., Reid, J., Hull, R., Facer, K. and Jones, O. Mobile Bristol: A New Sense Of Place Ubicomp 2002 Adjunct Proc. Ljungstrand, P. and Holmquist, L.E. eds, Viktoria Institute 2002

A New Sense of Place - project details

Collaborators
Mobile Bristol in collaboration with Morris Williams (UWE-CISC), Lucy Wood (Ordnance Survey Research and Innovation), Owain Jones (Bristol University) Year 6 Ashton Gate Primary School.

“A New Sense of Place” used the Mobile Bristol software as a tool for the children to become creative producers, so that they were constructing soundscapes rather than experiencing information designed or provided for them.

The children produced a variety of content for their mediascapes, ranging from spoken word, sound effects they downloaded or created, their own recorded singing of chart hits, to cd tracks.

The authors were year 5 children (age 9-10), and they decided that the “end users” or audience of their mediascapes would be friends and family.

Process
The workshops took place over the course of 10 weeks, and the class of 36 children was split into two halves, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. The series of workshops was designed as a three-phase process:
• the first phase did not raise the issue of technology with the children but asked them to explore and engage with the space they were designing for (Old Chapel Park)
• the second phase began with the introduction of the technology and was followed by the children creating their own soundscapes
• the third phase then asked the children about the potential value of the technology and its implications for their mobility and spatial practice

Phase 1. Engaging with the physical space: looking at the physical space that they would be designing for.
Before the children experienced mediascapes or were introduced to the technology, they were introduced to a variety of mapping exercises to try to understand their existing relationship with the space that had been chosen as the physical site for the mediascape. The sorts of questions that the researchers were attempting to understand were:
• How do children describe a physical space?
• Which areas, objects and concepts e.g. relationships, locations, & orientations are important to them?
• How do children use that environment?
• What do they do there, with whom, what memories do they have, what feelings do they associate with the space?
The creative exercises included various forms of personal “memory maps” of Old Chapel Park; exploring the space and its associated feelings and memories. The children drew maps and drawings of past events and suggested future ideas to change the space. They also drew representations of their ‘landmarks’ on their routes to school and other important journeys eg the connection between their home and a friend’s, or the way to their grandparents.
An activity that took place in the outdoor space was a blindfold walk, in which one child led another wearing a blindfold around the space to enhance non-visual senses, the idea being to get them to think about the space in terms of the sounds they could hear, the tactility of the ground underfoot, and their emotional response to all this.
Each activity was designed with an objective and a plan and an adult facilitator. Each child had a personal A4 logbook for activities, such as drawing their version of the space and their memories of it. The logbooks were left in the school and they were allowed access to them if they wanted to. In addition A4 and A3 paper with just the outlines of Old Chapel Park were provided for the children to draw on for some activities.

Phase 2 Engaging with the technology
• How do the children engage with the technology to create “soundscapes”?
• What sort of soundscapes will the children create and for whom?
• What is the relationship between the soundscape and its physical location?
Soundscape design workshops were spread out over a period of four weeks to allow reflection between and the chance to plan, build and develop ideas. This was important, as shown by changes they made to their soundscapes and the preparations made by the children e.g. thinking about sounds they wanted to use and bringing in the relevant CDs. They were keen to listen to (and use if possible) each other’s sets of sounds, and compare work and the choices they had made. They were able to view and hear each other’s soundscapes when moving around Old Chapel Park and deemed some to be good enough to recommend to others. They enjoyed the opportunity to record themselves singing or talking.


Phase 3 Engaging with the wider environment
• What potential use of the technology do children perceive?
An essential part of the process of thinking about this was what we refer to as the “Big Map” exercise, a non-technical session half way through the workshops asking the children what they would do if they could broaden the area of the pervasive technology that they had been using. Each pair of children was given an A0 size colour Ordnance Survey, scale 1:1250 OS MasterMap® of their area, centred on the area around their school and Old Chapel Park. They were asked to annotate their maps with post-it notes during the following activities:
• identify their own landmarks and important places they go to on or off map, annotate them as to whether it was a place that they liked or disliked
• identify and locate sounds they hear in the environment that they associate with a particular place
• think about where they would like to add virtual sounds to the physical landscape if they could use the mobile technology anywhere outside Old Chapel Park

In terms of the children’s role as informants for the future potential of the technologies, applications to support mobility and safety received favourable comments from the children. They were not a feature of the soundscapes in Old Chapel Park, perhaps because mobility is not an issue in a confined ‘safe’ enclosed space, especially one that is only used by them during the course of school-related activities and therefore is always under the supervision of at least one adult in a position of authority. Safety issues did feature in the Big Map session, where the children suggested a variety of warnings and instructions to be part of the virtual landscape. Some locations were singled out as being unpleasant in some way, or dangerous, suggesting that soundscapes could be useful for expressing children’s concerns or for ‘hazard tagging’ applications. Identifying hazard tags is an interesting way of generating discussion about local community issues.

Software used to create/capture/edit content
The children used handhelds and PC to create the mediascapes. The Mobile Bristol software used was an early version that played audio only. The children were able to mark their location on the ipaq screen when outside, in the place where they wanted to hear sounds. They could then edit their marked regions using a table based interface when back in the IT suite.
They were able to change the region’s location (x,y coordinates) colour, shape (circle or square), size (diameter in metres) and attach a url that pointed to a sound file.

Sound files
There were three ways of creating sound files to use in the mediascapes
• The children could bring cds and then we converted files to MP3 for them.

• To create their own content we used pc microphones and recorded direct onto pc. The background noise in the classroom was an issue.

• We also used two ancient tape recorders and then transferred to the PCs. The sound edit software used was a free download - Audacity. The children did manage to do some editing themselves using Audacity. The main difficulty was finding their recordings on the tape, especially when it was a shared recorder. We tried getting them to note the tape counter position before recording so we could rewind the tape to the place where they had recorded their sounds. It would have been easier if they had had separate machines and/or tapes.

When editing sound files we got them to note the minutes and seconds where they wanted the cuts to be made – I think that was because we couldn’t load audacity on to all the machines. They did work alongside the adult helping them to edit.

Another issue was that the sounds were stored on a shared file system so they could ‘borrow’ each others sounds, so we set up separate file spaces per pair to stop unwanted borrowing.

If you would like to know more about these and other workshops with children please email nsop@mobilebristol.com

children, play and locative media

A one-day seminar on children’s use of mobile and locative media in their outdoor environment

Organised by MobileBristol & Community Information Systems Centre UWE
on Monday 18th July 2005
at Hewlett Packard Research Labs,Bristol
Cost £20 includes lunch and refreshments. Places are limited to 40 people
Purpose of the day: To bring together those working or interested in projects working with children and locative media, to share experiences and discuss future directions & issues. This seminar will include presentations on existing projects (A New Sense of Place? & Mudlarking) as well as opportunities for discussion and networking.