The metaphor of the city
Assignment 8 | 4.11
The city represents one model for how active participation within an environment can foster a greater sense of community. For some residents, the city might seem to be something outside their control, a cold and unresponsive place in which they conduct their daily business without forming any special bonds to their surroundings. But for many others, the city provides a wealth of locations, objects, and of course other people; and activities involving these elements can increase a resident's sense of belonging to the world at large. Jacobs and Appleyard advocate that residents should "feel that some part of the environment belongs to them, individually and collectively". Online environments can provide a wide range of activities to heighten user involvement. Specifically, the customization and extension of virtual spaces can give users powerful control over their environment beyond what is possible in the real world. The hope is that such power will engage users by providing "an environment that encourages people to express themselves, to become involved." (Jacobs and Appleyard) Environments that allow creative user modification illustrate Kitto's description of the polis as "an active, formative thing", where the notion of the city is almost indistinguishable with its members' participation and engagement.
The city can be seen as a collection of distinct, disparate units. Jacobs and Appleyard describe how the modern city has "spread out and separated to form extensive monocultures and specialized destinations", where the sense of community exists primarily within homogenous, protected enclaves. Many current online communities also maintain a similar setup. GeoCities, for example, has numerous different neighborhoods, each organized by a theme such as movies or sports. To explore the "city" of GeoCities is to choose up front a particular neighborhood; there is no support for navigating between locations in different neighborhoods. There is also no way for a user to register his or her home page as belonging to multiple neighborhoods, which avoids complexity and maintains strict neighborhood borders. It might be interesting to think of interfaces that can make GeoCities feel less fractured - and to help the GeoCities residents feel more kinship with people in other neighborhoods. One could imagine a GeoCities-wide mechanism that allows users to easily link to home pages from other neighborhoods. The tool would let users to create and express thematic associations and relationships beyond their own neighborhood. GeoCities could suggest to a user other home pages that might be of interest, an attempt to encourage the user to "travel" to other neighborhoods. GeoCities could provide a visualization tool that shows activity levels (hits and updates) in other neighborhoods, indicating hubbubs of potential interest.
It is natural for people to develop and maintain context knowledge about the layout and functions of various elements within an environment. Jacobs and Appleyard call this aspect the city's "authenticity": "People should be able to understand their city... its basic layout, public functions, and institutions... An authentic city is one where the origins of things and places are clear... an urban environment should reveal its significant meanings." In a 3D online world, it can be challenging to provide overall layout information as well as highlight particular landmarks of significance. Environments I've seen suffered from missing overview map, restrictive viewing angle, or lack of resolution, all of which make it difficult to note and remember overall layout and particular landmarks. Given that all of the virtual space is generated, an online world might allow the user to mark particular landmarks using icons, color, or graffiti-like signs. Such markings could be used for future reference, and other users could choose to view them. A system could play with scale and magnification so that the entire environment shifts according to the particular user and his or her present POV. An extreme example is presented in Saul Steinberg's famous illustration for New Yorker, A View of the World from Ninth Avenue (1976):
By applying fisheye views, Steinberg presents detailed subjective information about the viewer's current surroundings - namely, Manhattan - and the rest of the world fades away in distance as well as detail. A 3D environment might offer a similar feature: the user could set a level of detail which would determine how detailed objects might appear, if at all. Only those objects deemed important by the user or the system may appear within the view. It would then be interesting to allow users to share their views of the world with others, an equivalent to sharing the mental maps of Paris as studied by Milgram. Or the system could aggregate all the users' mental maps and provide a summary, highlighting the most popular gathering spots or the most frequently used paths. The system could visualize for users how his or her community perceives and uses the shared space in terms of significant landmarks or frequently used navigation routes.
Required readings:
This week's readings include several very short pieces from the collection The City Reader, edited by LeGory and Gates:
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James Jung-Hoon Seo | 4.9.2000