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The practice of media architecture has evolved as new technologies and media are changing the relationship between the built environment and the inhabitants. Despite the wide range of topics covered within the media architecture discourse, there has been no investigation to date into ‘interior media architecture’. Interiors form a fundamental part of our urban fabric, from our museums, and libraries, to the cafes, restaurants, and shopping malls we inhabit daily. In an urban setting, our everyday experiences and social practices either occur in or transgress an interior environment, whether you’re meeting a friend for a coffee or commuting to work, it is hard to imagine our everyday lives without some sort of interaction with our urban interiors. In these spaces, media has always existed, playing a critical role in the enhancement of usability, experience, or functionality, such as providing wayfinding through interactive displays. Concurrently the interior has always been a conduit of communication, an object and a subject of media representations and culture creation. However, with the development of web 2.0, new media and increasing usage of mobile technology, the way we interact with, and consume urban interiors have changed. This transformation has been largely enabled by mobile technology and social media. Through social media, the interior as a material object is hybridised, creating new ways of experiencing, perceiving, and engaging that have resulted in emerging typologies and changing interior architectural practice. This digital transformation triggers a need to examine how our urban interiors are designed within new media constructs. This paper examines the relationship between urban interiors and social media, providing a critical discussion on how social media is transforming both the interior and the practice of interior architecture. Through a series of examples, we illustrate how interior architects can critically engage with social media within their practice and principle. We propose an interior media architecture approach to grapple with these emerging interiors and design practices. We contribute to the media architecture discourse by encompassing and considering the urban interior as a unique typological construct and interior media architecture as a line of inquiry.

This research examines discrimination and existing policy, law and practice in Australia’s private rental sector including the impact of informal tenancies and the increasing role of digital technologies.

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Concerns have been raised regarding smart city innovatons leading to, or consolidatng, technocratic urban governance and the tokenizaton of citzens. However, less research has explored how we make sense of ongoing appropriaton of the resources, skills, and expertise of corporate smart cites and what this means for future cites. In this paper, we examine the summoning of political subjectivity through the practices of retrofitting, repurposing, and reinvigoratng. We consider them as “civic infrastructure" to sensitize the infrastructural acts and conventons that are assembled for exploring inclusive and participatory ways of shaping urban futures. These practices, illustrated by examples in Adelaide, Dublin, and Boston, focus on capabilites not only to write code, access data or design prototype, but also to devise diverse sociotechnical arrangements and power relatons to disobey, queston, and dissent from technocratic visions and practices. The paper concludes by suggesting further examinaton of the summoning of political subjectivity from within established institutons to widen dissent and appropriaton of the corporate smart city.

In this paper we look at the integration of the digital and the resurgent interest in crafting artefacts. We do this by focusing on the work, relationships and spaces occupied by Pyladies Dublin - a coding group intended for women to learn and 'craft' code in the programming language of Python. Pyladies offers an interesting and fruitful case study as it intersects gender, relations of making and places of making, nested firmly within the digital world. The relations of making within the Pyladies group provides salient insight into the production of code, gender and space. Pyladies is predominantly attended by women with the focus to encourage women to become more active members and leaders of the Python community. By producing code in a friendly space, the group also actively works towards producing coding subjectivities and hybrid, mobile spatiality, seeking to produce coding and technology culture that is diverse and gender equitable. We base our ethnographic study to suggest ways in which Pyladies Dublin is consistently engaging in crafting code and crafting coding subjectivity and spatiality.

This paper critically reflects on the building of the Dublin Dashboard -- a website that provides citizens, planners, policy makers and companies with an extensive set of data and interactive visualizations about Dublin City, including real-time information -- from the perspective of critical data studies. The analysis draws upon participant observation, ethnography, and an archive of correspondence, to unpack the building of the Dashboard and the emergent politics of data and design. Our findings reveal four main observations. First, a dashboard is a complex socio-technical assemblage of actors and actants that work materially and discursively within a set of social and economic constraints, existing technologies and systems, and power geometries to assemble, produce and maintain the website. Second, the production and maintenance of a dashboard unfolds contextually, contingently and relationally through transduction. Third, the praxis and politics of creating a dashboard has wider recursive effects: just as building the dashboard was shaped by the wider institutional landscape, producing the system inflected that landscape. Fourth, the data, configuration, tools, and modes of presentation of a dashboard produce a particularised set of spatial knowledges about the city. We conclude that rather than frame dashboard development in purely technical terms, it is important to openly recognize their contested and negotiated politics and praxis.

In recent years, the emergence of cultures and practices of music-making associated with new music-making technologies has generated controversy and conflict, being both variously embraced and vilified. Just as some are determined to explore the possibilities that these technologies afford for the re-use and re-circulation of music, others have been determined to regulate such practices through aggressive assertions of ownership over sounds. Central to these controversies is a deeper question concerning the nature of musical sounds and their relationship to the people who produce and work with them. In order to explore this issue, this thesis develops a new conceptual framework for thinking about the biographies of musical sounds. Drawing on concepts from material culture studies and feminist philosophy, the thesis critiques traditional conceptions of musical sounds as the property of a possessive individual, and offers an approach that seeks to better appreciate the complex relationships between sounds and human agents. This framework is applied and further developed across a series of case studies, which take an ethnographic approach to following the eventful biographies of selected pieces of music. These ethnographies trace the ways in which legal, ethical, economic and cultural concerns about the ownership of music are navigated in the practices of people who sample, collect and re-issue music. In tracing how these practitioners work with musical sounds, the research also uncovers the ways in which musical sounds work on those practitioners. In the process, these musical sounds develop a life of their own. Through these ethnographies, the thesis traces the life histories of musical sounds and demonstrates the ways in which those life histories are ‘multibiographical’, drawing together a range of actors and distributing their personhood and agency across space and time. The thesis concludes with a discussion of how an appreciation of multibiographical sound could inform new approaches to the production and regulation of musical sounds in the digital age that are based on connection rather than control. This recognises that music making changes as new technologies influence its production and accommodates the distribution of both sound and human agency through the reuse of sound recordings that digital technologies encourage.