A preliminary exploration of augmented social landscapes

The ubiquity of sensing devices, including location-aware, sensor-enabled mobile phones, creates an opportunity to design a novel digital layer of a city, which senses and shapes the experiences of urban inhabitants. This paper explores a possibility of ubiquitous sensing devices to generate alternative social landscapes of a city, and facilitate universal communication. Sensors have critical dual roles in this process: (1) analyzing existing social relations, and (2) providing resources for establishing new relations. Several examples are discussed in relation to the latter role of sensors in shaping social landscapes, suggesting the possibility to create various representations that could support novel communication and collaboration practices.