Public Computing Group

Active Devices: an EPSRC-funded public engagement research project.

The project

This project builds on work in providing tools to simplify the process of authoring located media, i.e. to allow members of the public to locate sounds, images and the like in particular places, leaving them there for others to acquire.

We have called our project a public engagement research project because it is specifically our goal to learn about unconsidered new directions from our public collaborators just as much as it is to educate them in areas we understand well.

The aims

State of the art mobile computing is starting to move beyond basic located media towards embodied computing, robotics, mobile vision and visualisation. Through a series of workshops and commmunity sessions, we are seeding an initial pool of public expertise in existing located media systems to sufficiently ground public debate and support design input towards these newer developments.

Our objectives for this project are:

• To enable public understanding of the development process of located media.
• To train target user groups across the public domain in the basics of authoring located media.
• To generate a cross-domain forum for the discussion of future directions in personal devices for located media.
• To engender public design on the future of personal devices.

The team

Over the course of the project we have been working with the following groups:

• Nailsea School, a college with specialist status in media and technology.
• The Southville Centre, an older residents day-care community centre.
• A range of natural history experts across the disciplines of entomology and ornithology.

The university researchers involved have been:

• Dr. Mike Fraser
• Dr. Kirsten Cater
• Paul Duff

The technology

We have been using software based on the original Mobile Bristol toolkit. This toolkit has now evolved into Create-A-Scape.

Downloading Create-A-Scape is free and support for the tool is provided through the mscapers.com website.

We have also been prototyping an advanced robot device for pointing at features of interest in mediascapes. You can read about it in the papers below.

The text

We have published or drafted a number of papers on our work in this project. These are collected here for ease of access.

• Fraser, M., Cater, K. and Duff, P., Using Actuated Devices in Location-Aware Systems, to appear in Proc. Tangible and Embedded Interaction (TEI 2008), Bonn, Germany, February 2008, ACM Press. [PDF]


• Cater, K., Report on Southville community public engagement for EPSRC PPE project EP/D504708, December 2007. [PDF]


• Cater, K., Smart, N. and Fraser, M., Designing a School Using Mediascapes, in cs4fn Magazine Issue 6: Computer Science Everywhere, ISSN 1754-3657, 2007. [HTML]


• Fraser, M., Cater, K. and Duff, P., Sharing Located Experiences through Physically Mobile Devices, in Proc. Shareable Interfaces Workshop, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK, 19-20 June 2007. [PDF]

We have also recevied some press coverage during our work with Nailsea school. Here is our original press release and coverage in the Weston Mercury.