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Science-fiction prototyping is often used to explore the social implications of science and technology and to provide inspiration for innovation. The future that is being imagined however often exhibits a form of techno-optimism. This paper critiques that optimism by describing the #Patchworks project in which science fiction prototypes were used to explore the social implications of who does the imagining. Through our vignette we explore how the promissory nature of science fiction prototyping folds back into the present to change current understandings of real life situations. We suggest that the power to imagine and invent futures is often not extended to vulnerable communities, nor does it take into account the differing authority and agency depending on who is telling and who feels able to tell stories. The collision between these different stories and backgrounds in #Patchworks, the co-design project informing this paper, has produced contradictions and negotiations between the speculative practice of ‘tinkering’ used by DIY hackers that act as ‘openings’, an academic focus on innovation and the ‘anchoring’ inherent in the need to produce practical prototypes that solve urgent problems. more...

“We look on Comob and think ‘where on earth is he now?!’.” Liz, Comob Net User. Global Positioning System (GPS) technologies have become an integral and often invisible part of mobile technologies. We use maps on mobile phones to navigate from A to B on a daily basis without a second thought. The capacities of GPS are, however, greater than ‘just’ navigation, and this chapter explores a speculative art project Comob, which has become a widely available mobile phone app. The Comob Net app simply shows the locations of multiple members of a group, and joins together their locations with a line. It was originally built for use in participatory workshop situations, and was used experimentally in live art, performative walks and at a number conferences in Europe and North America between 2009 and 2013. During these events we observed how it was used, and recorded discussions and conversations about collaborative and collective use of GPS. In analyzing these responses we identified an emerging sense of what we call ‘comobility’, of being mobile with others at a distance. For ease of use in early workshops we submitted the app to Apple’s App Store. Subsequently we realized that people world-wide were downloading the app and using it. For some this was just as a one-off experiment, others used Comob over several days with a group of friends, over a year with a family, or in some cases on a daily basis over many years. This chapter describes comobility and explores how one family used the app to enhance their sense of connectedness whilst at a distance, mediating absences and presences in a highly mobile familial group. While the term comobility is new, it builds upon already established social phenomena, from the ‘wish you were here’ on postcards (Kurti, 2004), the sharing of mobility in travel blogging (German-Molz, 2012) and the portable personhood of intimately mobile lives (Elliot & Urry, 2010) to a sense of mediated proximity, identified in analysis of the Japanese locative game Mogi in which players collect geographically located tokens through their mobile phones, and are able to see and communicate with other players nearby (Licoppe & Inada, 2010a). In games like Mogi or artist’s projects like Can You See Me Now? (Blast Theory, 2001; Benford et al., 2003), participants can observe that another user is getting closer and thus negotiate meetings and movements en-route (Licoppe, 2009; Licoppe & Inada, 2010b). It is this awareness of the movement of people at a distance through visualized GPS data that we refer to as comobility. This chapter introduces the term and provides a review of literature and practices that engage with the concept. The chapter also uses an interview with Liz, a member of the public who uses the iPhone app Comob Net, to offer a highly personal perspective upon living through comobility. more...

In 2000 the restriction of high quality global positioning system (GPS) data ended, making everyday use of GPS possible and affordable, for route planning, navigation and even to draw pictures on the Earth's surface. Since that date artists have been exploring the use of GPS as an expressive and social medium. This paper focuses upon the capacity for locative media to support the social discussion of place. Beginning with the work of established artists and researchers who use GPS, the authors highlight a tendency in the works to engage with individuals in the field, but to discuss social aspects at a distance. In attempting to allow social reflection upon a place in ‘real-time’, the authors have developed a novel technical and conceptual twist on the use of GPS data that allows them to sustain live spatial/social dialogues. more...

This research presents initial work that brings together artists, designers, technologists and the community of content creators to describe the events of World War I through the voices of families and soldiers. These stories, that would have been otherwise lost, are restored and narrated in modern day, and finally distributed through new locative audio experiences. Homing is a locative-based audio navigation experience designed to encourage visitors to explore these stories by visiting the Harris Museum Roll of Honour and War Memorial. The project brings to life the museum and the Cenotaph to unite and bridge the physical gap between two artefacts to tell and disrupt a broader story. more...