The Tuning of Place: Sociable Spaces and Pervasive Digital Media

In his fourth book, Richard Coyne continues the exploration of the social shaping and impact of digital technologies. The Tuning of Place provides a wide-ranging, articulate, and probing investigation of how pervasive digital devices (e.g., smartphones, cameras, GPS systems) influence the way we interact with each other and continuously adjust ourselves to our environment. Inspired by Murray Schafer’s seminal book The Tuning of the World, Coyne further develops the metaphor of tuning to describe the relationships between people and places they inhabit. According to Schafer, people shape their environment, willfully or unwittingly, through sound. Coyne introduces digital devices as intermediary between people and places. In this view, tuning is a series of incremental adjustments using digital devices. The Tuning of Place is impressively well documented, drawing on numerous disciplines rarely connected with digital media, including music, architecture, urbanism, psychology, ecology, and philosophy. Coyne synthesized a wide range of philosophical, technical, design, and humanistic considerations to summarize scientific and cultural knowledge of the subtleties of the sense of place in the digital era. The book is divided into three sections: “Temperament,” “Everyday,” and “Commonplace.” Each section is then organized into chapters around the metaphors of intervention, calibration, wedges, habits, rhythm, tags, taps, tactics, thresholds, aggregation, noise, and interference. The first section, “Temperament,” introduces the metaphor of tuning and shows how it can illuminate the design process in its relation to actual use and context of reference (instead of grand plans and intended use). According to Coyne, “The tuning is the design” (p. 69). The role of the designer is to introduce fine differences in standard designs or templates to propose a first solution for a specific area of application, and later refine it. Tuning consists of a series of adaptations and adjustments to different circumstances such as local conditions, target users, or market differentiation. Coyne further expands on public participation in design illustrated with Web 2.0 development examples of incremental refinements based on user comments and reviews. The second section, “Everyday,” provides an ecological framework to examine how digital devices impinge on the habits of our everyday life, with an emphasis on the temporal cycles and repetitions in our daily routine. Ubiquitous digital media support access, communication, and social practices for the negotiation of schedules and coordination of activities. Coyne illustrates the importance of social context, practices, and cultures with examples of various means of adjusting meeting times or coordinating instructions between users operating from different places and time frames. Tuning is conceived as a dynamic process to bring two or more models into alignment and compare and adjust them. Digital devices are then “mechanisms people use to synchronize their relationships and interactions” (p. xiii). The third section, “Commonplace,” includes various discussions on the tactical nature of our use and appropriation of digital devices,