Abstract:

My presentation will discuss a course I recently created at the College of New Jersey, entitled "Technology and the Experience of Place." I will trace my inspiration for the course from my experience teaching American students in Alcalá de Henares, Spain, where I developed a research interest in psychogeography and was encouraged by my host institution to explore the possibility of "virtual" study abroad. I will discuss my goals for the new course. Broadly, the course is on user experience design, perfectly at home in my department of Interactive Multimedia. In this case, however, we focus on the particular experience of being in a place, allowing us to consider more philosophical notions not typical to design and technology courses, such as phenomenology, situationism and existentialist "dasein." I will describe the course's implementation, roughly divided into a research phase and a development phase. Through expeditions, mobile surveys, and reflective journals the students carefully analyze the experience of being in a variety of places -- familiar and unfamiliar, natural and human-made, virtual -- then deconstruct that larger experience down into smaller sub-experiences, perhaps focused on individual senses or the the place's social energy. Additionally, the students interview other students who are currently studying abroad to better understand the experience of being in a foreign place, and what it means to share this experience with compatriots, new friends and host families. Armed with insights from this research phase, the students then question how our available technology might recreate, evoke or enhance some of the positive experiences -- such as the thrill of discovery or speaking a different language -- or perhaps alleviate some of the negative experiences, such as culture shock or home-sickness. I will present some of the projects that students developed in response to that central question, including an augmented reality mobile application for creating liminal objects and a multisensory mood generator. I will close by considering the outcomes of this first-run of the course, including its value within the students' larger program of study, and its impact on my own future research in the area.