(Re)Interpreting natural quiet in Silence of the Lands: Metadesign and social creativity

Our effort in promoting the museum as a place of cultural negotiation builds on perspectives of social creativity and metadesign with the goal of sustaining the system of knowledge and social relations responsible for the interpretation, communication, and renewal of the cultural object as a living entity.

Social creativity emphasizes that the heart of human activity is not only the individual but also the interaction among individuals and between individuals and their environments. Cultivating an understanding of the cultural object must bring together not only the physical artifact that represents it, but also the multiple perspectives that shed light upon how it was and is perceived and understood by others.

To incorporate these perspectives, we need a different understanding of design that builds upon dynamic and open realities. Our metadesign approach allows participants to be active and creative contributors (or co-creators) through situated, distributed, and repeated processes of action and reflection.

In Silence of the Lands, local communities are involved in producing and describing the audio objects and soundscapes that will compose the museum collection. The use of multiple tools and interaction spaces, separated physically but seamlessly integrated virtually, sustains the engaging possibility of collecting and reinterpreting both individual and collective data over a sustained period of time, according to the different properties of the space with which a participant is interacting and through which data is traveling.

Participation platform

The architecture of Silence of the Lands builds on multiple dimensions of distribution—temporal, spatial, conceptual, and technological—as a means of not only achieving the integration of individual and social creativity, but also broadening the participation platform for such integration, so to bring action and reflection on a large scale.

By providing different entry points, promoting the different properties of each interaction space, and supporting different interaction roles over a sustained period of time, this architecture aims to: (a) empower the creative interaction between current and future interpretations of the cultural object engendered by social discourse and collaborative design, (b) enable participation and collaboration that fits more naturally with existing social practices and the way in which people act and interact with their local environment, and (c) support processes of informal learning and social awareness.

Data flow as sense-making

This result is obtained by combining direct experience, cognitive mapping, and face-to-face interaction; that is, by combining: (a) data catching (individual sound collection and georeferencing); (b) data description (individual soundscape management); and (c) data interpretation (social negotation and collaboration to the virtual soundscape). This integration represents the convergence of the two dimensions of "place experience" (the concrete experience of the natural environment) and "place imagination" (the imaginary experience of the same environment as recreated by memory and desire). In this way, data creation and data transfer connect the actual experience of the acoustic environment to the various interpretations of that environment, and ultimately overlap with the process of sense-making that is associated to the generation of such interpretations.

Entry points and engagement trajectories

The convergence of different interaction spaces and media is key to encouraging people to get actively involved. The sociotechnical architecture of Silence of the Lands provides multiple entry points (the wild, the web, the public space) and engagement trajectories (from the wild to the web, from the web to the wild or the public space, and so on) for people to become participants. This enables participation and collaboration to fit more naturally with existing social practices and the way in which people act and interact with their local environment.

Geospatial annotation and visual mapping

By taking advantage of locative media, participants produce a geospatial annotation of their own experience while recording ambient sounds. In Silence of the Lands, the combination of audio objects and visual mapping is critical to highlight elements and structures of the social conversation. It provides an instantaneous and dynamic visualization method that lets information be explored both at the level of the individual and the community. The goal is to develop a non-linear method of interpretation, in which the surface of the image is placed in opposition to the linearity of verbal discourse, as the representation of the individual is opposed to that of the group.

Triggering collaborative events in the public space

Placed in the public space, the tangible social interface of Silence of the Lands enables participants to negotiate their interpretations of natural quiet and collaborate to the creation of the ideal soundscape in which the community would like to live. To encourage this process, the interface presents two modes: (a) explorative and (b) collaborative. The explorative mode is meant to engage participants in the pleasure of an immersive and free exploration of the soundscape produced by the overlapping of the soundscapes individually created by members of the community. The collaborative mode is meant to provoke participants’ reaction and collaboration. A set of triggers will act as a switch to this second mode and bring participants into playful situations that can be resolved only by discussing and negotiating their own interpretations.

Seeding and regulating community participation

By exploiting both the tangible and intangible resources of the community (in that individual concerns, values and attitudes play a fundamental role in the exploration, collection, and preservation of actual ambient sounds), Silence of the Lands inspires spontaneous participation from local communities and strengthens their cultural identity and sense of belonging to an identifiable territory.

However, the affordances of the technical architecture are not sufficient to engage the local community. The design of the system as a seed subject to evolution over time, its interweaving with existing practices and activities inside the local community, the identification of social and emotional support mechanisms, and finally the identification of relevant partnerships and social networks in the community fabric are all crucial elements to encourage participation and regulate it over a long period of time.

See our publications.