On Digital Ground

Digital ground is shorthand for a complex proposition: Interaction design must serve the basic human need for getting into place. Like architecture, and increasingly as a part of architecture, interaction design affects how each of us inhabits the physical world. (p. 172)

McCullough’s key concept of digital ground draws together his messages about the importance of intent, context, and place in the design of technological experiences. It forms the structure for his defense of architecture’s place alongside the newer field of interaction design.

If, as McCullough suggests, typical technological futures lack the appropriate attention to environmental context and human intent, then the concept of place is his proposed solution. Digital ground is a plea for designers to create more opportunities to feel a sense of place. 

Places are a way of taking part in the world, for with a resonance unequaled by many other aspects of existence, they are both socially constructed and personally perceived. (p. 171)

How does place counter the feeling of disempowerment in technological futures? McCullough hints at two answers in his statement above.

First, place is “socially constructed” or ecological. One reason we value a sense of place is because it usually indicates a meaningful set of overlapping patterns of life shared between us and others (think of a healthy neighborhood). Places contain and make possible the social capital of community: trust, support networks, common interests and experiences, history, shared rules and transactions, etc. We should design technology that supports and intertwines with these everyday life ecologies, rather than one that enforces its own order, especially now that technology increasingly is embedded in our physical infrastructures.

McCullough identifies four types of service ecologies for interaction design: device ecologies (relationships among hardware and devices), information ecologies (relationships among knowledge models, software models, and mental models), interaction ecologies (relationships among services and interfaces), and architectural ecologies (relationships among the built environment). What are the ways in which these ecologies can be built to support community and place?

Second, place is “personally perceived” or embodied. A sense of place is built through our embodied interactions with the world and we value this feeling of connection. McCullough makes this point through a brief, but useful, survey of thoughts on the difference between space and place:

Perhaps the simplest distinction between space and place was given by Yi-Fu Tuan: ‘Space is movement; place is rest.’ Here are some other interpretations. Space is the anxiety of global indifference; place is the comfort of local malleability (another argument by Tuan). Space is alienation; place is identification (according to architectural phenomenologist Norberg-Schulz). Space is an ordering of understanding; place is an ordering of experience (urban planner Edward Relph, whose interpretations of place and placelessness were among the best of the especially profuse work on this topic in the 1970s). Space is a social production; place is a personal reading (Henri Lefebrve, who reopened the study of emergent social spaces). Spaces are the basic divisions of our surroundings; place is our history and adaptation of them (landscape historian J. B. Jackson, who legitimized vernacular landscape studies). Space is the scene of being; place is a site where human modes of being are well provided for (Heidegger). (p. 176)

Notice the words used here to describe place: experience, identity, history, personal, local. A sense of place throws focus on individual intent and agency. We should design technology that empowers people to exercise this complex agency, rather than one that deskills its user to simplify a process