During the 1980s and 1990s, a considerable number of technology and application trends were concerned with location transparency and virtual spaces, overcoming the limitations of the physical space. The first years of the succeeding decade has seen a different trend in technology: the development and popular uptake of mobile media and wireless networks technologies. Real space combined with mobile, wireless, location-aware technology becomes a primary platform for mobile media applications. Because of the difference in the use of space between mobile technologies and their static...

Let s suppose that you are part of a design task force sent to a very different context from the one you're familiar with. Let s also suppose that you have less than two months to gather useful information on the local cultural and social ground as part of filling a gap created by the imminent deployment of new technology in this context. What would you do? This book describes the technique adopted by a team of the Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute (M-ITI) in just such a situation. Giovanni Innella, in collaboration with Franco Papeschi, and Valentina Nisi have reached the North of...