I had two main reasons for my visit to the UK; sustainability education; and to talk about our development of models of participatory interactive storytelling. Totally unexpectedly (well perhaps not to me!), these two came together when I had a long talk with Beth Davidson from the Mapping the Necklace project at the DoTT07 Festival.
The Durham Necklace Park is described as an “ephemeral park” – a community effort to re-engage with their landscape, or in other words to build a park without pouring any concrete.
Like our Simpa project, different communities used quite different ways to represent their perspective on the park – a blind community developed an audio map; graphic artists produced a comic book; another group made a combined map of personal places (formalising a community level understanding that gives lie to the technical term for this – naive geographies).
In another twist, and a great example of reuse, these maps are brought to life in large gesture sensitive displays previously used at Wimbledon.
Computing for Sustainability 
November 19th, 2007 → 3:34 pm
[…] been telling Simon about a project in Durham (UK), with similar aims. There, the “Mapping the Necklace” project aimed to increase use of a waterway though public engagement – in effect building a […]