Dave Alongi (dalongi2)
CS 598kgk
What Time is this Place
By: Kevin Lynch
This paper talked a lot about how a sense of change can be added to an environment to make it
more meaningful and appealing. One of the types of change that the author talked about was
temporal change- combining past, present and future into an environment. One example of this
that I really liked was Japanese connoisseurs displaying wintery pictures during the spring and
pictures of spring during the winter. This combines two different times, spring and winter, into one
scene. It also would help to make the scene more enjoyable because they can reminisce on the
previous season and be happy that it is over at the same time.
People also seem to be fascinated in having a place that is stuck in a period of time, past or present.
In the William Whyte video, he points out that Disney World makes a living partially by allowing
people to feel like they are walking through a small town main street. People are fascinated by
feeling like they are in the past or future, but knowing that at any time they can leave and return to
the present.
In social computing and social spaces, the computers are often used to bridge and connect different
places in space. However, this suggests that people may also be fascinated by connecting different
periods of time. This is more challenging, though, because we can’t just connect to the future, and
connecting to a noticeably different past (different styles, seasons, etc.) would require a relatively
long delay. However, it could be somewhat interesting to look into a “mirror”, a hole-in-time to
play off the famous hole-in-space, and see someone else standing where you are during a different
time of year. Another reason that this would be harder to apply, though, is that the people could
not interact with each other. Temporal change would be interesting, but difficult, to apply to social
computing.
