Monomedia (Matthew Chalmers)

"This interweaving of physical and digital media, using activity to associate and design text, building, video, museum display, web page, room location, audio track and so on has been called monomedia. This stands in deliberate contrast to the rather wan term ‘multimedia’ that too often involves synchronised use of just two media, audio and video. (Thanks to Willem Velthoven and monomedia.org for this.)

Activity stems from previous understanding, but also feeds back into understanding by creating or reinforcing associations between individual objects, individual spaces and individual people. A person’s movement through data, through the city and through society adds to his or her understanding of information, places and people. One aim of this project is to support this interpretive process, improving information and information systems by representing and adapting with real use, making manifest more of the information and understanding that turn city spaces into ‘places’, and offering people useful and interesting ways to interact with each other."

"City was about interweaving the digital information about a city with its traditional structures such as its street configuration and signage, and treating activity in streets, maps, VRs ad hypertext as peers. It is tied in with the monomedia idea, which is about treating each tool or medium we use as gaining its meaning or utility from the patterns of activity involving it -- patterns of use of all media, mixed together to one larger medium i.e. human activity and interpretation. This work led to JCSCW, JASIS and DIS papers, and the Social Navigation book chapter described below... and to the City project's system design, to some extent." (on the Website)

"The City project focuses on a treatment of the city that deliberately blurs the boundaries between physical and digital media. We are combining mobile computers, hypermedia and virtual environments in one system, and allowing each person to interact with others even if they are using quite different media or combinations of media. We have found it useful to consider the many media, technologies and spaces as one design medium, because each person’s experience depends on them all. People’s activity continually combines and cuts across different media, interweaving those media and building up the patterns of association and use that make meaning. How people act and work is determined by the full combination of media that they can use and have used, and hence a narrow focus on technological media as the paramount determinant of activity underrates the influence of other media."