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Dr. Katharine S. Willis

Email contact: willis [at] locatingmedia.uni-siegen.de

Title of Research Project:

Information Places: Investigating, Defining and Developing Settings for Locative Media in the City

An overview of my research:

In our everyday life we are used to using physical settings as backgrounds for social encounters; we might agree to ‘Meet on the corner’ or ‘See you at the café’. But information available and delivered on mobile devices enables a different relationship with our spatial world. Instead we may agree to catch up once the other person comes into Bluetooth range, or to meet on a Myspace page. These interactions still have a relationship with location; we still have to physically be somewhere even if it remote from the person we are communicating with, but it is more complex and layered. The situated nature of the interaction creates opportunities for behaviours that transcend existing concepts of space. This research proposes both to develop a theoretical approach and to undertake a series of empirical studies, which attempt to understand the particular role that the physical and social setting has on how and why people acquire and act on digital spatial information. A key outcome is to develop a series of project-based proposals for implementing the findings of the research, which will seek to support localized practices. These will integrate the technologies of locative media, with a particular focus on GPS and Bluetooth, to explore the conditions in real world settings with everyday participants. In conclusion the research will draw on the outcomes of the studies to establish how we might better embed and integrate information in place so that it enables a more relational and shared experience in the interaction between people and technologies. 


News:
I am organising the track Performing Places at EASST 2010 – “Practicing Science and Technology, Performing the Social” at University of Trento, Italy from 2nd – 4th September 2010. 

I will be presenting my paper titled: Maintaining presence-at-a-distance with locative media at the Hyperkult 2010 conference on 8th July in Germany.

The book Shared Encounters which looks at the nature of shared experience in public space was published in January 2010. It is published by Springer

My contribution titled Hidden Treasure , Sharing Local Information was published in the ‘Locative Media’ themed Special Issue of Aether the Journal of Media Geography in March 2010.

I have had a paper entitled: WiMo: Location-based Emotion Tagging, which is co-authored by Ruturaj Mody, accepted for MUM2009 , Cambridge. A copy can be downloaded here

I am working together with Keith Cheverst as guest editor on a Special Issue of IJHCS entitled: Locative Media and Communities. A copy of the CFP can be downloaded here

On August 10th  2009 I successfully defended my doctoral thesis entitled: Wayfinding Situations. If you would like a copy please email me.

The book 'Shared Encounters' which developed out of the CHI07 workshop of the same name is due out in November 2009.

I will be presenting as part of the panel 'Raum als Interface' at the Gfm in Wien in October 2009.

I am co-organising a workshop at MobileHCI09 entitled 'Community Practices and locative media' on 15th September 2009. http://www.uni-siegen.de/locatingmedia/workshop.html?lang=de

I attended the Intelligent Environments Conference 2009 in Barcelona on 21 July 2009.
 

Selected Publications:

Willis, K., Chorianopoulos, K., Struppek, M., Roussos, G (2010). Shared Encounters. Springer, UK.
Link

Willis,K (2010). Hidden Treasure: Sharing Local Information. Aether Journal of Media Theory. Volume 5a, March 2010

Willis, K (2009). Wayfinding Situations. Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, Bauhaus University of Weimar, Germany. A synopsis of the thesis can be downloaded here

Eckhardt, F., Geelhaar, J., Colini, L., Chorianopoulos, K., Willis, K., Hennig, R. (2009). MEDIACITY, Frank & Timme, Berlin
Link

Willis, K., Hoelscher, C., Wilbertz, G. (2009 accepted for publication). Understanding Mobile Spatial Interaction in Urban Environments. In Minker, W., Weber, M., Kameas, A., Hagras, H., Callaghan, V. (Eds). Augmented Intelligent Environments, Springer.
download

Willis, K., Hoelscher, C., Wilbertz, G. , Li, C. (2009 accepted for publication). Spatial Knowledge Acquisition with Mobile Spatial Information: Implications for Navigation Applications. Special Issue of Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, Elsevier Press.
download

Willis, K, Geelhaar, J. (2008). Information Places: Interfaces Between Physical and Digital Space in Foth, M (Ed). Urban Informatics. ICS Global.
download

Willis, K (2008). Spaces, Settings and Connections in Aurigi, A., De Cindio, F. (Eds) Augmented Urban Spaces: Articulating the Physical and Electronic City. UK: Ashgate Press.
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Willis, K., Chorianopoulos, K., Struppek, M., Roussos, G (2007). Shared Encounters. In Proceedings of CHI2007, April 28 – May 3, 2007, San Jose, USA.
download

Willis, K. (2007). Situated Interactions: Spatial Setting and Mobile and Wireless technologies. Encyclopaedia of Mobile and Wireless Communications. Taylor and Page, US.
download

Struppek, M., Willis, K. (2007). Botfighter: A Game that Surrounds You, in Space Time Play, Birkhaeuser, Basel.

Willis, K. (2007) Sensing Place: Mobile and Wireless Technologies and Urban Space in Frers, L., Meier, L (Eds) (2007). Encountering Urban Places - Visual and Material Performances in the City, Ashgate Publishing.
download

Giles, T., Marienek, M., Willis, K., Geelhaar, J. (2007). Hide and Seek. in Poster Proceedings of Fifteenth ACM International Conference on Multimedia, (ACM MM 07), September 2007, Augsburg, Germany.
download

Willis, K., Holescher, C., Wilbertz, G. (2007). Understanding Mobile Spatial Interaction in Urban Environments. In Proceedings of 3rd IET International Conference on Intelligent Environments (IE07) (pp 61-68).

Li, C. and Willis, K. 2006. Modeling context aware interaction for wayfinding using mobile devices. In Proceedings of the 8th Conference on Human-Computer interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (Helsinki, Finland, September 12 - 15, 2006). MobileHCI '06, vol. 159. ACM Press, New York, NY, 97-100.
download

Chorianopoulos, K., Willis, K, Colini, L., Teran, M., (2006). Dousing for Dummies: methods for raising public awareness of invisible communication networks. In Adjunct Proceedings of British HCI conference 2006.
download


Background:

I am a researcher, artist and architect whose interests lie in exploring the ways through which we interact with our spatial environment. This work investigates navigation, wayfinding and identity and the transformative possibilities of mobile and wireless technologies. A key aim of the work is to propose approaches to understanding how we can create legible environments when urban public space is experienced through new media. Until April 2008 I was a EU Marie Curie research fellow on the MEDIACITY project, Bauhaus University of Weimar and prior to this I was a DAAD researcher in the SFB/TR8 Spatial Cognition program at the University of Bremen. I have also spent many years working on interactive site-specific art projects and installations in UK and internationally. My background and training is in architecture (Bachelor at University of Manchester and Masters at Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL) and I am a qualified Architect registered in UK and Germany.