Abstract:

In this talk, I will highlight a few recurring ideas in my research career. I’ve conducted research in many areas, but today I will pull together a story about the intersection of media, place, people – and hands. Starting in the mid--?1980’s my colleague Bob Stults and I assembled video, audio and information technologies into what we called a “media space”¹. “Media spaces” use the constellation of affordances to bring together disparate places and times. I will very briefly show a few projects – the Xerox PARC media space,  video draw,  the drawstream station,  domestic media space, and eXperiments in the Future of Reading – from the distant and more recent past that illustrate and explore different situations and themes, including what makes a space as compared to a place,  how hands operate in social communication, and how the configuration of multiple technologies affords socially negotiated privacy,  access and the redirection of attention.

Bio:

The first phase of Steve Harrison’s career was as an architect. He is licensed in California,  and spent 12 years at Skidmore,  Owings and Merrill. His second career was as a research scientist at Xerox PARC from 1985 to 2002. In 2003, he became an academic: he is currently Associate Professor of Practice at Virginia Tech in the Department of Computer Science and the School of Visual Arts, and a studio head in the Institute for Creativity Arts and Technology. Steve designs interfaces and buildings; he has won awards for some of those designs; he studies the practices of design; he has created tools for design collaboration; and he writes about all those things;  “Re?Place?Ing Space”  (Harrison and Dourish,  1996) is an oft-cited paper on the behavioral framing of real and virtual space. He has edited and substantially contributed to two books about media space– Media Space: 25+ Years of Mediated Life and Connecting Families:The Impact of New Communication Technologies on Domestic Life.He is very pleased to be spending his sabbatical at Aarhus.

https://www.cs.vt.edu/user/harrison

http://people.cs.vt.edu/~srh/

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Having seen the big construction project by the harbor, the term “mediaspace” seems to mean something related, but different here.