The Tuning of Place: Sociable Spaces and Pervasive Digital Media [Hardcover]

Richard Coyne (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 26, 2010 | ISBN-10: 0262013916 | ISBN-13: 978-0262013918 | Edition: 1

How pervasive digital devices--smartphones, iPods, GPS navigation systems, and their networks--help us formulate a sense of place and refine social relationships.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Richard Coyne has found in the idea of 'tuning' a powerful metaphor for the many ways in which we continuously adjust ourselves to our environments and each other. Coyne's analysis is as sensitive and delicate as the processes it tracks. Knowledgeable, but accessible, written with clarity, wit and grace, the book is animated by its appreciation of the intimate ingenuities of the tap, the tip, the fix, the fit, the tweak, the nudge, and all the other miniature acts of alignment and sizing up that keep us in place in a shifting world. Scanning the many devices and systems that have become part of our lives, Richard Coyne has mapped out an entire ecology of everyday digital tactics and interactions."--Steven Connor, Academic Director, London Consortium, School of English and Humanities, Birkbeck College, UK

About the Author

How do pervasive digital devices--smartphones, iPods, GPS navigation systems, and cameras, among others--influence the way we use spaces? In The Tuning of Place, Richard Coyne argues that these ubiquitous devices and the networks that support them become the means of making incremental adjustments within spaces--of tuning place. Pervasive media help us formulate a sense of place, writes Coyne, through their capacity to introduce small changes, in the same way that tuning a musical instrument invokes the subtle process of recalibration. Places are inhabited spaces, populated by people, their concerns, memories, stories, conversations, encounters, and artifacts. The tuning of place--whereby people use their devices in their interactions with one another--is also a tuning of social relations. The range of ubiquity is vast--from the familiar phones and hand-held devices through RFID tags, smart badges, dynamic signage, microprocessors in cars and kitchen appliances, wearable computing, and prosthetics, to devices still in development. Rather than catalog achievements and predictions, Coyne offers a theoretical framework for discussing pervasive media that can inform developers, designers, and users as they contemplate interventions into the environment. Processes of tuning can lead to consideration of themes highly relevant to pervasive computing: intervention, calibration, wedges, habits, rhythm, tags, taps, tactics, thresholds, aggregation, noise, and interference.

Richard Coyne is Professor and Chair of Architectural Computing at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Designing Information Technology in the Postmodern Age: From Method to Metaphor (1995), Technoromanticism: Digital Narrative, Holism, and the Romance of the Real (2001), and Cornucopia Limited: Design and Dissent on the Internet (2005), all published by the MIT Press.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 360 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press; 1 edition (March 26, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262013916
• ISBN-13: 978-0262013918
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #867,370 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Richard Coyne is Professor and Head of the School of Arts, Culture and Environment at the University of Edinburgh. He is an architect researching and teaching in architectural theory, design theory and digital media. He is author of four books with MIT Press: Designing Information Technology in the Postmodern Age (1995), Technoromanticism (1999), Cornucopia Limited (2005), and The Tuning of Place (2010). With Adrian Snodgrass he co-authored Interpretation in Architecture: Design as a Way of Thinking (Routledge, 2006). Richard was brought up in Melbourne, attended the Universities of Melbourne and Sydney, and settled in Edinburgh in the mid 1990s.