On the 19th of September, players of Call and Return will start to tackle a series of creative missions that will send them out across the city exploring places, materials and the way contemporary culture permeates through them.
The city in question could be Birmingham or Tokyo, Bristol or Kyoto, and as well as negotiating their immediate surrounding, players must also negotiate interactions with other people across different geographies, languages and time zones.
Call and Return is the second in the Emergent Game series: projects that investigate group dynamics, collaborative creativity and the use of digital technologies to adjust how we relate to public spaces.
Missions are not location-specific, so players can be based anywhere: all you need is access to an internet connection, a sense of humour and a soft toy to represent you in the game (we play anonymously).
Instructions on how to sign up can be found here: http://ludogeography.org/projects/callandreturn/
(don’t worry, this is the most complicated bit of the process – it gets easier from here on in!)
To complement activities taking place on-line (once again most of the conversation will take place via twitter.com) there are opportunities to get involved in various events:
Then we pull together the contributions from the workshops and on-line conversations in a weekend of creative missions as part of a festival of pervasive games in Bristol:
It doesn’t matter if you can’t make it in person to any of these events – remote players have an equally important role to contribute. Sign up now to join the conversation and influence the directions the game goes in. For a flavour of what it might evolve into, see the Emergent Game website for what happened last time.
Ludogeography
Call and Return is a project initiated by The Ludogeographic Society. The Ludogeographic Society grew from collaborations central to the development of the first Emergent Game earlier this year: Ana Benlloch, Stuart Tait and myself.
To coincide with Call and Return, we are also launching www.ludogeography.org where we will document the activities of the Society. Likewise for http://twitter.com/ludogeography: if you use Twitter follow @ludogeography for updates on what we are doing, or perhaps just subscribe to the RSS feed.
This was an amazing experience in itself, but to turn it into Learning we are doing it again.
Next month Ana and I will fly out to Japan where we will be contributing to the Dislocate08 festival.
Dislocate is an ongoing project examining the relationship between art, technology and locality. Exploring the impact of new media upon our experience and expression of place, Dislocate08 examines the creative potential of the technologies which surround us to heighten our awareness of our locality, transforming our encounter with our direct environment and the manner in which we attempt to communicate this to elsewhere.
Being in Japan also gives us the opportunity to work with hanare: a sort of artist-led space/meeting space/café space in Kyoto. (You may remember the 4649 project.)
On the 8th of September we’ll be doing a workshop at hanare, and on the 13th of September we’ll be doing a workshop as part of Dislocate. We’ll be using these workshops to shape the Japanese component of a long weekend of Emergent Gaming happening on the 19th, 20th and 21st of September. Why? Because Emergent Game has also been accepted as part of igfest (Interesting Game Festival) in Bristol.
So, coming up is the second iteration of Emergent Game in which we’ll be investigating what happens when you have two groups of players exploring places separated by differences in language, culture, geography and timezone.
As some of the players will be in the UK and some in Japan; some having online access and some not; there will be variations in what is possible: part of the game experience will be how your avatar negotiates this. Perhaps you will make friends with a player in another country and barter things with them by post; perhaps you will be a ‘lone avatari’ with a mission of your own; perhaps you will find new spaces online where participants can interact.
We’re still negotiating the starting points for these activities and, of course, the eventual shape of them will largely be determined by those who get involved. But for now the initial instructions from the first game apply to the one coming up in September.
We’d quite like players based in the UK (or elsewhere) to get involved (online) in the two workshops on the 8th and 13th and we definitely want you guys involved in the weekend of the game itself (19th-21st) which is when we’ll be running the mission challenges. The way we see it working is that you now have a few weeks to find a toy to represent you, set up a Twitter account for it and to start some conversations with other players. Be sure to set the location in the Twitter settings to “emergent game” and to follow the likes of @yohmoh and the other soft toys located in emergent game. The rest will take care of itself.
This headstart will substitute for the workshops we’ll be doing with the players in Japan, so use this time productively…
The Ludogeographic Society
During the course of the first Emergent Game, a new collaborative group was formed between myself and two other artists I worked very closely with to realise the project: the aforementioned Ana Benlloch and also Stuart Tait. The Ludogeographic Society will be an identity we will use for future collaborations that explore similar territory to Emergent Game so this upcoming game will be realised as a project under the name of the Society, rather than under my name alone.
We’ll let you know when The Ludogeographic Society’s website is up and running, but in the meantime announcements will be made here and via the usual channels.
I’m spending most of this month working as a mad scientist on a couple of different summer camps for primary school aged children (typically 6-12 year-olds).
Monday’s group was quite small in number but mostly boys and most of them probably around the 10 years old mark. They were pretty rowdy and at one stage we ended up sitting them down in a circle and having a game of wink murder.
It worked OK, but I felt we could up the ante a little so I asked them if they wanted to play werewolf. None of them had played it before so I sold it to them by saying it was “like wink murder; only much better!”. They went for it!
After hastily drawing up some smiley-face cards on torn-up bits of paper I gathered the players all together again and did my best to remember and then explain the rules. Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough in saying that the werewolves should absolutely not broadcast who they were in any way whatsoever because when they were asked to wake up and select a victim on the first night they both promptly (and noisily) stood up! Hey ho, we got through the game some how and I thought that would be that…
…except that for the next day – with about 50% new faces and 50% returning from the day before – someone requested that we played werewolf again.
Again we scrambled for pencils and scrap paper and again we kind of muddled through a game (this time with a text to a friend to check on how the voting process was supposed to go!)
Today things got really interesting.
As soon as I arrived, one of the kids came up to me and requested that we played werewolf again today. Naturally I was more than happy to oblige and since there was still 15 minutes or so before the science activities started I told him he’d better use the time to get some cards ready. [For those of you who aren’t familiar with the game, players are randomly given a card that tells them whether they are a villager, a werewolf, a healer or possibly another specialised character type, depending on the game. More information here.]
Before long, all the other children were gathered around, mass-producing villagers and werewolves. They came up with some beauties – I’ll be randomly peppering the rest of this post with them!
We played 3 or 4 games throughout the day and, other than being delighted that they had been bitten by the bug, it was really good to see the learning curve that came with repetition.
I moderated the start of the first game and, after a re-start when a few people opened their eyes when they shouldn’t have, we were cooking on gas with one werewolf, a healer, a seer and seven villagers. That’s essentially nine people all pointing at someone and screaming “KILL HIM! KILL HIM! KILL HIM!” very, very loudly! My aim for the day was to get people talking more about their reasoning for wanting to lynch a suspect and to be a lot stricter with the voting procedure. We’re not quite there yet, but take it from me; nine people all pointing at someone and screaming “KILL HIM! KILL HIM! KILL HIM!” very, very loudly was a big improvement on the previous days!
Not too far into the game the boy who had asked about playing that morning was killed off and he begged me to let him take over the moderation. I handed over the reins and he preceded to mimic my fairly theatrical commentary. That was amusing to watch!
Things took a twist when the villagers correctly lynched the werewolf. With about 5 villigers still alive and the game already won, our new moderator decided he didn’t want the game to finish! He kept on going through the motions of asking werewolves, healer and seer to wake up and select their chosen ones. Excellent! Our first hack!
I missed a lot of the detail of what happened because I was continually having to take the newly-dead aside and explain to them what was going on. It was interesting to see the range of responses but I think the bewilderment got to a few of them and fairly soon they were announcing it to the remaining players.
In later games we did away with the seer role, and brought in an extra werewolf. We also let the children moderate more – often with 3 boys taking it in turns to ask the various characters to wake up. Nice bit of collaboration there, even if it did still involve a lot of argument!
By about the 3rd game I was starting to notice a bit more evidence of strategy and deduction. Definitely an achievement: our roles were mostly as crowd control rather than as coaches, so this is largely where they arrived at by themselves. We had a healer declare himself as healer in an attempt to prevent himself being lynched, but a good bit of werewolf persuasion meant they eventually got their man (they had tried to kill him for the previous few nights, but he kept healing himself). I wonder when we’ll start seeing some bluffs as defendants cotton onto this as a potential lifesaver?
We did see signs of progress with the reasons given for wanting to lynch suspects. Most of the time their accusations are based on hearing movements start – or snoring stop – during the night. Today we had justifications that included the accused not wearing any shoes and someone else having a red mark/blood on his nose (a remnant of the smell-testing quiz).
As for learning through play: there was a beautiful moment when J (one of the more unruly boys in the group) in trying to get the villagers to calm down and vote properly suddenly twigged what a difficult job we (the ‘teachers’) faced in trying to keep the group under control during the sciencey bits of the day. I swear you could see the thought process move across his face!
I think we’re going to lose a lot of the veteran players over the next few days (to parents, rather than to lupine predators) so I’m interested to see how the enthusiasm for the game waxes or wanes accordingly. Can we keep this up for the remainder of the fortnight?
Lever, crank, bell crank, cam and ratchet was an installation of a series of sculptures I made specifically for the GOODS In group exhibition (Saturday 28th June, a one day event in a disused warehouse space).
It was the first time anything like this had happened in this space and location-wise it was outside the usual destinations and a little bit tricky to spot (amusing considering the size of the place!) so it was good to see so many people track it down and come and have a look over the few hours it was open.
As per usual I ended up producing something that needed active participation from the audience in order to function: Lever, crank, bell crank, cam and ratchet consisted of 5 small cardboard models of each of the named mechanical components connected to each other and to weights via threads that arched across the room.
The sculptures were made so that rather than forming an array of mechanisms that combined to produce some overall useful effect, each one worked in isolation and therefore was limited to a basic repetitive action.
Apart from a few extras to form the axles and pivots (and the occasional rubber band, of course), the units were made from A4 cardboard picked up when I worked as a temp for an examining board. This is the cardboard used to reinforce the envelopes in which adult basic literacy and numeracy exams are returned.
I’ll leave you to form your own connections and meanings…
The way it worked out, there was no signage to accompany the works in the show so it became quite interesting for me to watch and see how people overcame (or otherwise) the usual gallery barriers to interact (or otherwise) with the mechanisms.
Many people wouldn’t operate the levers and handles – even when told they could, and even when they’d been looking at them for some time presumably wondering what would happen if…
As usual, the best way to get people participating was to lead by example and just get on and have a play and then invite them to join you. There were some nice cascades where for a while we’d have 3 or 4 people all operating different parts of the installation.
Also, as with other projects, those that got over that initial participation barrier tended to become ‘power-users’ [to borrow a term from a recent post] and get properly stuck in. I’m definitely talking about Pete here as demonstrated by the final scene in this video:
Saturday was the big ‘closing’ event for Emergent Game (again, we all seem to have trouble thinking of it in terms of being the end) and, as usual, my head’s full of stuff that I’m going to inflict on you as part of the process of sorting through it and pulling out threads. There are lots of photos to be shared and stories to be told, but I expect this will be done in a different place and in a different voice.
Here are some initial thoughts from the point of view of organising the event:
What is?
Partly through needing some distance and partly through commitments to other projects in the interim, there was quite a long gap between the NGA festival-related part of The Game (up until 20th of June) and the Grand Finally.
Though I didn’t have a lot of time for directly organising stuff, it did give me the opportunity to think a lot about more general things like what sort of an experience I wanted it to be. The event had been presented in terms of being a combination of the City Wide Treasure Hunt mission (coming from random descriptions in the festival literature) and the Ludens’ Tea Party mission – both big scorers within The Game and ideal ways to combine cabaret and collaboration.
As it began to take shape in my head though, I increasing lost sight of this and, especially after going to Hide&Seek last weekend, was thinking more in terms of the types of behaviours I wanted to encourage.
That sounds odd. What I mean is…
…that after much thinking I decided that the aim of the day was not to discover the location of some object or to solve a puzzle; it was to give people the opportunity to do things they wouldn’t normally do, within the framework of a larger context that added layers of excitement such as trying to remain anonymous when you knew there were other Ludens criss-crossing the same space at the same time.
Looking back at it now, I’m wondering if it’s enough to regard the larger context as being the day’s event, or whether you have to include all the play that came before it? Would the Grand Finally have been possible/as successful had there not have been the 2 month’s worth of conversation and interaction that built up the characters and narratives involved?
Certainly when I was planning who should do what, a lot of the missions were based on references to things that had developed out of the game. @egorbeaver was given a lot of teaparty themed activities, @cross_triangle’s day was based on glyphs and @LeonHerring got to spend some time at the beach. With other players I knew who they were in real life and so was able to build in references to things outside of Emergent Game.
The other benefit to having been through all the missions and stuff beforehand was that I’d got a sense of what, for me at least, provided the buzz: knowing that you might find yourself at a drop-off point at the same time as another Ludens; having to work with your avatar in public locations; having to either explain to Sapiens what was going on or pretend that nothing out of the ordinary was going on and it’s perfectly normal to be taking photos of this soft toy in this shop thank you very much.
By the time it got to In Deep End-Dance day I knew that I wanted In Deep End-Dance Day +1 to be based around the following:
A Common starting point and a common end point (i.e. the pub!)
Going to parts of the city you probably hadn’t been to before
Interactions with Sapiens
Remote interactions with Ludens – i.e. transfers of information and objects
Possibility of accidental direct encounters with Ludens – i.e. crossing of paths
That and 2 things to follow up on after a barrage of phonecalls and texts to possibly friendly Sapiens were pretty much all I had to go on at the start of spending the day in town looking for ways to string it all together…
Interactions with Sapiens
In moments of optimism I had thought it might be nice to have Sapiens tweeting in tasks etc over the course of the event, however the degree of interaction from Sapiens up until this point had been, frankly, disappointing so I gave up on that idea.
In comparison, the support I had from random strangers as I wandered around town and made strange requests was phenomenal.
First stop was the Borders bookshop in the BullRing where a supervisor friend volunteered two front-of-store staff to be in on the Grand Finally. Thanks to them I was able to leave several mission packs in a couple of different locations.
Four of the Ludens and two watchers passed through this space in the first hour or so of the event – I’d like to see the cctv footage!
Likewise, assistance from the staff at the Pen Room really made a huge difference. I’d only had a glimpse of this place a few years ago and wasn’t disappointed on going back for a closer look. I strongly recommend you do the same.
In the 2nd of the two pen room rooms is was immediately apparent that this was somewhere to send not only cross_triangle, but also the stamptmeister Loki. A big thankyou to Malcolm both for his enthusiasm and his assistance in relaying contents of emails.
A meeting in a coffee shop then secured the assistance of Zebra Scraf Woman on the Fluxus boat trip …and also the name of a friend’s mum librarian …which led onto one of the players being shown some of the Central Library’s Shakespeare Collection.
The other big contribution came from the security staff at the Victoria Law Courts at the top of Corporation Street. This is a favourite hidden gem where I usually take visitors to the city. Once you’re past the x-ray machine you’re immediately in another world of 19th Century architecture. Check. It. Out. (information sheet available from the desk inside)
I checked to see if they’d be open to the public on Saturdays and at first it looked like they wouldn’t and that I’d have to come up with another idea. So I asked them if they could think of any alternative locations and that drew a blank. …and then suddenly I’m proudly being shown the portcullis over [under] the main entrance [can anyone confirm this is the only one still in use in the world?] and we’ve worked out a deal that if I send a player along first thing then they’ll probably still be there and everything will be OK. Love it – and what’s more it sounds liek they were conducting their own personal treasure hunts when LeonHerring turned up with Leon’s mission:
As the Grand Finally progressed we also had encounters with various unsuspecting members of the public including (but not restricted to) most of the staff of Borders, someone with a clipboard, the man with the cigar photographed with egorbeaver at a prominent Birmingham landmark, the person ad Hudsons who took temporary custody of the receipt for the mug that had the photo of the man with the cigar photographed with egorbeaver at a prominent Birmingham landmark printed on it and the patrons of the children’s library. Job done.
Timetabling
Some of the players had to get to certain places by certain times before Law Courts shut or boats set sail. The timetable looked like this: (click for larger)
Needless to say most people werelate turning up for the start and a few coffees later quite a few things had to be jiggled. Didn’t seem to matter too much in the end, but lesson learned to leave more allowance for this sort of thing next time around.
Love it or hate it we relied on Twitter really heavily through all stages of Emergent Game. It’s caused us headaches on more than one occasion so I made sure everyone had my phone number before the Grand Finally began. Just as well really, because somewhere between Manchester and Brum egorbeaver discovered egorbeaver was suffering from the same PIN thing that had prevented me from playing Cruel 2 B Kind the weekend before.
So, for the first hour or two I was relaying instructions to egorbeaver by text. Luckily I did then manage to log onto egorbeaver’s account from the Grand Finally HQ in Coffee Lounge and get things working again later!
One thing I hadn’t really anticipated was the extent to which 7 people tweeting would eat up the battery life on our phones. We’ve talked about the benefits of using Twitter for a decentralised method of communication, but my phone gave out about 20 minutes before the end and we came really close to losing a few of the others too.
Next time around we’d have to consider either a) doing things over a shorter time-scale, b) doing things over a much longer timescale (i.e. you can go home and recharge between missions) or c) making more use of direct messages so that players only recieve tweets for them and not so much of the general chit chat. Hmmm, not sure if I’d want that or not…. I’m curious to find out more about egorbeaver’s experience of playing for a few hours with Twitter silence to see what this is like in comparison to having an awareness of what the other players are doing.
The other thing I like about public tweets is that they are then available as an archive of what happened in the way that direct messages are not.
Documentation and commentary
Puppet Mastering the Grand Finally was an intensely hectic experience. I didn’t get a chance to pause for the whole 3 and a half hours and only got the chance to go for a wee when Loki’s brain went bork and Loki joined me for a few minutes before going to collect the mug.
I’m definitely thinking in terms of this being a two-person job next time around. There certainly wasn’t any time available for live blogging or LudensShow tweeting for the benefit of any Sapiens.
I’m really glad that Alex and Vanessa agreed to join us as Ludens Stalkers and help document the event. I’ve now got some great images of various players at different points of the game and it seems like most of them were unaware they were being followed!
Although we heard a few tales in the pub afterwards, I’m really hoping the Ludens will take the time to write up their experiences so we can start to piece together what happened and, more importantly, what it was like to be in it.
The meet up
So, the guessing game is over! Now we know who they are! (Well, some of them, anyway.)
A bunch of Ludens in a pub eating beevapoo… who could have known that would have made me feel so happy! :)
One of the things several people commented on as the Ludens started to appear was how so many of them were women. Normally I’d pay as much attention to gender labels as I do to those for Art and Science (i.e. I try not to), but it does seem this is something significant. It would be interesting to find out who all the other players are to see if this trend is carried out across the whole Ludens population.
It’s interesting to look back now with hindsight and look at the different assumptions I made about whether Ludens were male or female. In my mind’s eye egorbeaver was male until I got the furball in that box and somehow the handwriting was female too. Oh, and the singing voice!
Ditto for cross_triangle: female handwriting on the labels that accompanied the treasure. What the hell does female handwriting look like?!?! How do I have an opinion about what female handwriting looks like?!!?
It occurred to me this morning that what we had in the pub was a bunch of web-literate people talking about digital stuff …who mostly happened to be women – and it all felt very, very different to the one blogmeet I’ve been to.
Anyhow, it feels like it would be a heinous crime to reveal anyone’s identity, so I’m going to leave it there.
Lessons learned and a big thank you to all those to whom I owe thanks.
Although it’ll be a good chance to find out more about The Game we’re intending that it should also stand alone and be of value to anyone who’s interested in the Big Game approach to collaborative creativity and exploring what’s around you.
So, armed with a pocket-full of technology and a soft-toy avatar, we invite you to join us in seeking out some interesting parts of Digbeth. Tonight, drop in from 4.30pm until at least about 7pm. It’s free – just bring yourself, your mobile phone/digital camera and a sense of humour.
Judging by the Google map for the mission they’re finding it hard going. So far they’ve logged a few libraries and a couple of free WiFi connections.
The issue of free WiFi in Birmingham (or the lack thereof) has come up a bit recently, and the idea of mapping free WiFi nodes is not new – although it’s often hard to distinguish between genuinely free resources and those you have to pay to use.
We’re appealing here for anyone who knows of a free WiFi connection or, (even better for the purposes of Emergent Game) anywhere members of the public can use an internet-connected computer for free, to let us know in the comments on this page. Then we can hunt it down, add it to the map and use it later as part of The Game. Of course, you could even add it yourself, if you felt so inclined…
The recon2 map is here and it’s public access for anyone to view. Like the resources it maps, it’s free. Use it.
paul conneally + nikki pugh + you + them
Saturday 29th March, 2-5pm
meet at VIVID at 2pm
As Digbeth continues its metamorphosis and assimilation into Eastside (Birmingham’s transforming, revitalising and regenerating regeneration project[1]) art institutions and project spaces present there are slowly increasing in number and yet, for the most part, they are safely kept behind locked gates, barred windows and access-controlled doors.
For Invigilator: Digbeth, a team of volunteers will take the role of gallery invigilator/visitor assistant outside where, rather than sitting in gallery spaces, they will be watchful over the streets and the day-to-day life unfolding there.
This is the fifth in the Invigilator series[2] where a single set of directions has been transposed onto different locations to determine the exact place for watching over; we can choose our significant starting points, but then a pre-determined sequence of lefts, rights and straight-ons takes us on a not-quite-random walk to an unplanned invigilation site.
Invigilator: Digbeth will consist of several invigilations taking place simultaneously throughout the Digbeth area. The significant starting points will be the galleries, studios and project spaces that would normally host the invigilators. The same galleries, studios and project spaces responsible for Digbeth’s renaissance…
Digbeth is also significant as the starting point for the Invigilator series as a whole since the directions used to arrive at the invigilation sites were derived from those used to get from home to a part-time job invigilating at VIVID.
All are welcome to join us for Invigilator: Digbeth. We will meet at VIVID at 2pm, borrow some of their red t-shirts and then walk to our respective invigilation sites (about 4 people per team) where we will be watchful for about 30 minutes before returning to VIVID for refreshments and feedback. No special equipment required: just bring yourselves, suitably warm clothing and a willingness to interact with the city.
I generally have a couple of website clients on the go alongside my main commissions as an artist [caution: superficial divisions – not always useful!]. I don’t do the web design full-time so, in addition to being a supplementary source of income, these commissions are really important to me as a way of keeping my skills as up-to-date as possible.
After several months working alongside Joe and Kelly in Rednal, we’ve now launched the website for their new holiday home Fern Cottage. Well, when I say new, I mean about 250 years old…
Fern Cottage was built circa 1750 and, as well as being one of those places that’s tucked away in it’s own quiet niche so you can forget that you’re just on the edge of Birmingham, it’s also famous for being one of the childhood homes of J.R.R. Tolkien. Yes, thatJ.R.R Tolkien .
I’m happy to say that, in true Grand Designs stylee this project met with several delays linked in with the renovation of the cottage, but the results were worth waiting for. I just wish we were a bit further on into Spring so the turf and garden had had a chance to get going a bit.
So, what was I up to whilst Joe and Kelly were sanding the wooden beams in the ceilings and debating over the light fittings? Where was I bringing in a bit of learning curve to the web design?
Paperwork
This was the first challenge. As the projects I’m getting involved in get progressively larger in scale it was time to get the contracts and other paperwork up to standard too. I’d already learned my lessons (the hard way) with regards to fighting project creep and making sure there’s a design brief that sets out exactly what’s to be done for the price quoted, but it was time to make sure things like copyright and liability were explicitly covered too. Fortunately AIGA (founded as the American Institute of Graphic Arts, now a professional association for design in general) have already done most of the hard work with their Standard Form of Agreement. Perhaps a bit O.T.T. for most of the jobs I do for artist portfolio sites, but we felt it was necessary here. And of course, now I’ve developed my own templates from this, these can easily be adapted for future projects. Phew!
All this was backed up with Slim Timer so I could compare how long I estimated things would take with how long they actually did.
Blueprint
I’ve been implementing my own frameworks for coding sites for several years now (particularly with regards to browser resets and typography), but with the Fern Cottage project I decided to give the Blueprint CSS framework a try.
This felt sort of alien at first, however it was very easy to implement and yes, it did speed things up a lot – particularly with the usual fun and games getting compatibility across browsers.
After a bit of wrangling I decided to leave the Blueprint classes in the code for all to see. Does it feel like cheating? Maybe just a little, but I’m sure I’ll get over it!
Libraries
I’ve been playing with javascript libraries more and more recently, but have been very strict when it comes to using them within live sites. It’s very easy to start using transitions and effects just for their own sake. Since I’m coming at this web design stuff from a process and architecture point of view rather than as a graphic designer (probably evident in the rather flat style I seem to be developing!) I’m generally cautious about following the crowd with whatever the in thing currently is.
The Fern Cottage rooms and facilities slideshow however was a perfect situation to use glider to add a bit of interactivity and compress what would otherwise be a fairly mind-numbing list.
Setting up the tea and cake shot for the dining room section was quite fun too!
Getting social with Flickr
After a few photo shoots it became obvious that we had loads more photos that we wanted to share than we had space to put them on the website. Flickr came to the rescue and although it wasn’t appropriate to embed slideshows within the Fern Cottage site, Flickr was a nice way of extending stayatferncottage.co.uk out into the wider world. The We’ve stayed at Fern Cottage group is an important part of this and I’m hoping it will be both an appealing way for people to get involved (complementing the guestbook) and also an easy way for Joe and Kelly to document the cottage as it grows into itself.
Joe and Kelly would also be really interested in hearing from anyone who has any photos of Fern Cottage from the past so please get in touch with them if you have any Fern Cottage photos, or perhaps just add them to the Flickr group.
My main area of enquiry is centred around interactions between people and place: often using tools and strategies from areas such as pervasive games and physical computing to set up frameworks for exploration.
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