In this talk I examine how place might be a useful concept for addressing the challenges of scaling collaborative and co-located activities beyond personal computing at the desktop. Whereas people move, places are stable and specific in geography, physical form and cultural meaning. This stability extends to the particular local constellation of embedded sensors, computers, displays and infrastructure. This makes, as several others have noted, place an interesting, yet underdeveloped concept in computing. It is not a matter of connecting multiple personal devices and improve their context — they are just guests anyways. It is a matter of making place a first class digital entity, approaching places as an object of design and explore how place might implicated dominant technology patterns and (hopefully) provide insights for computational alternatives.

In the talk I will give a short introduction to some of the theoretical and practical considerations influencing my PhD work on place-specific computing. I will present recent cases and, if time, a short demonstration of how the above might be translated into participatory IT infrastructure.