We have published several papers and posters regarding undersound. You can download those papers here, or read the contents of the extended abstract belowto get a more detailed sense of what our project is all about.
A. Bassoli, J. Brewer, K. Martin, I. Carreras, and D. Tacconi., "undersound and the Above Ground." Poster Presentation at the 5th International Mobile Music Workshop, MMW, Vienna, Austria, May 2008. [pdf]
A. Bassoli, J. Brewer, K. Martin, P. Dourish and S. Mainwaring, "Underground Aesthetics: Rethinking Urban Computing." Special issue [Urban Computing] of IEEE Pervasive Computing. [original manuscript pdf] [published pdf]
Mobilities not Mobility: undersound. Poster presented at Intel People and Practices Research Open House, Portland, OR, May 2007.
A. Bassoli, J. Brewer, and K. Martin. "undersound: Music and Mobility Under the City." Interactive Poster at the International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, UbiComp, Orange County, CA, September 2006. [pdf of paper] [pdf of poster]
undersound: Music and Mobility Under the City [Extended Abstract]
ABSTRACT
3 million people each day travel through London by means of the Underground, the oldest subway system in the world--people hate it, people love it. Still, the Tube is one of the most widely recognized symbols of the city, and practically one of the most used transport systems. With the project undersound we are exploring the experience of riding the Underground and the mediated perception of the urban space through the design of a highly contextualized interactive system--a music-based application that encourages people to interact with others and with the Underground itself. The aim of the project is to make people reflect on their experience through the use of music, to see people's behaviours and patterns of movement in new ways.
Keywords
situated design, music sharing, mobility, urban computing
INTRODUCTION
For researchers in ubiquitous computing there is a growing concern in understanding how innovative technologies might reflect and enhance current social practices of mobility [e.g. 1, 3] and the personal and collective relationships we begin to build with and within the spaces we move through every day [e.g. 4, 6]. In this paper we present a design sketch for an example of such a technology. Currently a work-in-progress in its conceptual stage, undersound is an application drawing on prior research [2], to support music sharing and distribution within the London Underground. This sub-polis offers a unique view of London and its inhabitants, a place of diverse personal and collective experiences marked by conflicting feelings of togetherness and solitude. undersound seeks to reflect and enhance these experiences, drawing on current social practices of both cocooning [5] and socialization (detailed in the next section) by means of technology--it is intended to be wholly part and of the tube.
MOTIVATION
It is often said that there is little interaction between strangers travelling on the tube, but we would argue that although this might be true of verbal exchanges there is nonetheless a complex form of socialization at work in the Underground. There is, for example, a free, daily newspaper, called Metro, available at every tube station which commuters often use to catch up on the news during their journey to work. On reaching their stop, instead of taking the paper into the office, many people fold the paper neatly and place it onto the narrow ledge between the backs of the seats and the windows in the tube carriage. This subtle act repeatedly performed by countless individuals constitutes an acceptable, almost compulsory, social gesture. It is a channel through which one can express an awareness and an acknowledgement of current and future passengers. Taking a cue from this socially negotiated behaviour of newspaper exchange, we are developing a system which attempts to afford a similar sort of situated interaction through the exchange of digital music. In the design of undersound we are seeking to create an application that offers an experience that is an extension of, and in harmony with, life in the underground. In the same way that Londoners leave and retrieve newspapers as a kind of common good, so too will they with music. Unlike newspapers though, which are of unknown origin, each track in undersound will have a birth-place (see below) giving added meaning. When the end of each line can have almost mythical status for many regular tube travelers one can imagine the curiosity with which people encounter a track from High Barnet or Morden. Passenger's behaviour and journeys too might change as the desire to collect tracks from particularly significant stations - or all 275 of them - emerges.
DESIGN
undersound attempts to address three different aspects of life in the underground: situated understanding of the space, localized interpersonal interactions, and emergent large-scale flows which people constitute and participate in. In order to achieve a unique way by which people can use music to interact with one another and the space around them, undersound uses three distinct, but deeply interrelated, technological pieces; permanent Bluetooth transfer points will be located in each Underground station for uploading and downloading music in the undersound network, Bluetooth-enabled mobile phones will be used for storing, playback and exchange of music and situated visualizations providing a station-specific overview of activity within the undersound network will also be located at each station. We will address each of these in turn.
Situated Understanding of the Space
To populate the undersound network with new music people will use their Bluetooth-enabled mobile phones to "check-in" tracks (which, given current issues surrounding music copyright, we envision to be creative commons licensed music recorded by local bands) at any station's designated transfer point. A track may only be checked-in to the undersound network once, and the station where the track is first checked-in will be considered its point of origin. When a person who is running undersound on their mobile phone enters Bluetooth range of a transfer point, a message will pop up on the phone asking them if they would like to grab that station's "top" track. They will have a one-click option to answer yes, or to choose browse
Localized Interpersonal Interactions
While riding in the carriages of the tube, undersound users in Bluetooth-range of each other will be able to browse one another's available tracks as well. Because we will be gathering metadata on the stations where the track has been (via uploading/downloading at the transfer points) and thus its spread within the network, the time it has been in the system, the number of times it has been played, the number of people who have played it, and so on, it will be possible to display all of this to the users as they look through each other's music. People can browse through other's tracks anonymously, but when person decides to download a song from someone else an alert will be triggered on their phone letting them know that someone is grabbing one of their tracks. In this way, you cannot take a track from another passenger without them knowing-- there is a social cost. It is possible for the other person to ignore the act altogether, but in keeping with much of the tacit interaction which tube riders engage in, we hope that this will provide an acceptable social opportunity to connect with another person. This might only take the form of reciprocally glancing through their tracks, but it could incite someone to look around the carriage and try to locate the downloader or to stay on past their stop rather than breaking off an exchange. This sharing of music would not violate current social practices and would ideally afford new ones.
Emergent Large-Scale Flows
Each of the local interactions contributes to a broader trend--every time I listen to a track, drop one off at transfer point or download music from someone else, I have an effect on the overall state of the system. Not only is this reflected in the rankings of the tracks that I see as I browse through the lists of available music from transfer points and people's mobile phone, but it will also be incorporated into public displays which are installed in each of the stations. These displays will serve to convey the most recent state of the undersound network--the journeys and lifetimes of the tracks. Each station's display will uniquely reflect information pertinent to that station so that users are presented with a quick visual overview of what the station has to offer. Because people are moving quickly, we intend these displays to function as an aid for deciding what tracks I might most want to download as I pass through this station. Additionally the display will function as a visual representation of the sum of all the individual actions that shape the undersound network. I can then see that my personal choices have a global effect and perhaps I will change my behaviour given that knowledge.
CONCLUSION
Although undersound is in its early stages of development we believe a design which leverages the exchange of new emerging music to support the rise of grassroots, underground, social and cultural phenomena has rich potential. It combines situated and ubiquitous technologies in a way that reflects current social practices as songs are highly linked to the location where they become accessible but their journey throughout the space depends on people's movements and behaviour over time. We are currently working with the EU funded project Bionets to develop the network infrastructure and we will be conducting more directed studies of an ethnographic nature in the coming months to aid in further refinement of the interaction design.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under award 0133749, BT, the EPSRC, and the EU funded project Bionets.
REFERENCES
1. Auge, M. 1995. Non-places: An Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso.
2. Bassoli, A., Moore, J. and Agamanolis, S. 2005. tunA: Socialising music sharing on the move. In O'Hara, K. and Brown, B. (eds). Consuming Music Together. Springer, 151-172.
3. Churchill, E. and Wakeford, N. 2002. Framing mobile collaborations and mobile technologies. In Brown, B. and Green, N. (eds). Wireless World. Springer,154-179.
4. Lane, G. URBAN TAPESTRIES: Wireless Networking, Public Authoring and Social Knowledge. In Proceedings of 1AD 2003, Bristol, UK.
5. Mainwaring, S., Anderson, K. and Chang, M. Living for the Global City: Mobile Kits, Urban Interfaces, and Ubicomp. In Proc. of UbiComp 2005, Tokyo, Japan.
6. Persson, P., Blom, J. and Jung, Y. DigiDress: A Field Trial of an Expressive Social Proximity Application. In Proc. of UbiComp 2005, Tokyo, Japan, 195-212.