If a building could talk, what would it say? How would it “feel” about the comings and goings of the people who use it every day? Would it be affected by their moods and desires? What kind of relationship would it have with its occupants if it could communicate with them somehow, and how would they respond? Perhaps most importantly, would such a feeling-and-talking building even be desirable?

In attempting to answer these whimsical questions, the Mobile and Environmental Media Lab (MEML) at the University of Southern California conceived of Million Story Building, an experimental design project exploring how location-specific mobile technology can add playful, imaginative and practical new layers to the relationship between a structure and its inhabitants.

Using the newly-constructed School of Cinematic Arts (SCA) Building as a test bed, the MEML team has designed a location-sensitive iPhone application (see video) that enables students and faculty to engage with their workplace in a variety of exciting new ways, from scanning Quick Response (QR) code glyphs mounted next to posters in the hallways in order to access and tag video clips from a central database, to leaving virtual messages for others to read in an Augmented Reality view of the building’s central courtyard.

Functions such as these, working together with networks of sensors, interactive plasma screens and web-based social media profiles, made it possible for iPhone-carrying building occupants to learn about SCA history, discover events and activities, share stories and updates of their own, enrich the school’s media archive, and participate in an Alternate Reality Game.

Furthermore, and crucially, users could come to expect increasingly customized communications, behaviors and interaction opportunities as a profile concerning their preferences, habits and interests was generated based on their usage of the system. The end result was a prototype for a personalized and self-renewing “ambient story” experience co-constructed by the collaboration between the occupants of a building and the building itself.

Background

At its heart, Million Story Building is an effort to mobilize a range of storytelling and interaction tactics such that the occupants of the SCA building can experience a deeper and richer connection with their workspace and co-workers. Such an effort is not unique in the history of design; indeed, the practice of embedding story and play in physical space is almost as old as civilization itself – one recalls the Catholic Via dolorosa (Stations of the Cross), the Shingon Buddhist pilgrimage of Shikoku or the transit to the Temple of the Sun at Teotihuacan.

More recently, what Jill Walker-Rettberg calls “distributed narratives” have manifested themselves in public and institutional space through sticker art, coordinated graffiti campaigns, flash mobs and other interventions. Million Story Building emerges at the nexus of these practices and the new potentialities unleashed by the recent blossoming of mobile and ubiquitous computational technologies.

More Information

The Million Story Building series archive is an effort to gather together, enframe and contextualize key planning documents from the first phase of the project’s development. By browsing proposals, demo descriptions, annotated meeting notes and other development documents, readers can get a sense of the key concerns from which the project arose and the various components of the prototype application, both implemented and imagined.

Each of these streams are discussed in these minutes. First, regarding the Building App, the issue of motivation once again rears its head due to the Apple-enforced iPhone limitation on background processing (ie, Apple won’t allow it, at least not at the time of writing). The problem, recorded here in ALL CAPS (“NO BACKGROUND PROCESSING”) boils down to this: since we can’t have the Building App persistently running in the background on every user’s phone, we need to somehow encourage users to take the time to fire up the application themselves — that is, to take the active step of “turning on” the system, instead of having it run passively in the background. This is where things like the ARG, the SCA History Project and the Provenence Project all come into play: by enriching the building with opportunities for discovery and interaction that can only be accessed via the Building App, we encourage users to actively participate…in theory, at least.

The second main issue discussed in at this meeting relates to the MovieTagger Project led by Andreas Kratky. For our demo of the system, we wanted users to be able to tag movie clips in the building’s database, and we wanted them to do so by controlling plasma screens with their iPhones. Here, we discuss what, if any, fixed data fields should be used for categorizing/tagging the clips. In the end, we settled on a more or less “freestyle” approach, similar to the folksonomies of popular social media sites like flickr, for the demo.

The last few bullets in these notes refer to some ideas we developed for the future of the Million Story Building project. One of these ideas, the “digital commons” (an augmented reality interface for adding info-bubbles to the main courtyard of the SCA Building), would later appear in our demo, albeit in mockup format.

TFOTS MEETING NOTES
March 06 2009

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Peter ==

quartz thingy will read various xml containers and display content
thingy can also respond to bluetooth presence

to display: IMD stuff, movietagger stuff, SCA stuff, History Project

Jen ==

mockups
Scott: what happens when App goes into background/closed?

Will ==

no no no — NO BACKGROUND PROCESSING
find ways to keep it on — via MOTIVATION/Modal techniques

Jen ==

mockups pt 2
new icons appearing
messages appearing in “your media” AKA “HISTORY”
anomalies appearing in the app

Will ==

data server… logging tables for different users, tracking info — log ins, scans, etc
really basic content database
CODE references via WordPress

Andreas ==

mySQL for the movietagger?

movietagger: what kinds of fields do we want to attach to these movies?
e.g. scene descriptions, dialogue lines versus one or two word tags
tag-based EDL using submitted tags
different kinds of keywords and tags: “interestingness algorithms”
stripping out useless info

buttons on phone — list of vids
what is the reward for this? shoe tagged things appearing on the other screens?

size and style of database questions, etc FREESTYLE

could Emily do some of this?

scott: figure out how much we’re going to have to support this, demo it pre-mobile…

Scott ==

statue as focus for “digital commons” and Archive
could you “send your stories” to Douglas Fairbanks

“letters to douglas fairbanks”

how do we force people to be at the statue when they submit, and what can they get back?

icon that appears only when you’re in front of the statue

what about voice?
tie-in with ARG
sending email

AR Toolkit stuff

BIM meeting monday morning

Hide ==

let’s setup some kind of iPhone app for ARToolkit so we don’t have to walk around with laptops

Jen ==

ambient music tags following around the people in the bldg
different sounds in the elevators?