Toward a rhetoric of the place: Creating locative experiences

Modern smartphones, tablets, laptop computers, and increasingly even cameras and wristwatches now come with built-in geolocation sensors. An ever-increasing range of services now ask for the latitude and longitude registered by these devices. Not only services like 4square, that are built around sharing information about places, but all kinds of social media, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, and etc. Pointing to the increasing use of wearable sensors that register all kinds of movement in addition to light, sound, temperature, and even bodily functions, Gunnar Liestøl has described this as the “emergence of sensory media” (Liestøl et al., 2012). It is only to be expected that location-aware devices should be used for artworks, entertainment, and education, and it also has been for two decades (for good overviews of early works, see Løvlie, 2011; Ciavarella & Paternò, 2004). These works are generally done within the user-centered design paradigm, in fields such as human-computer interaction (HCI) design, and user experience (UX) design (see Asaro 2007 and Hartson and Pyla 2012 for extensive overviews of these fields). Such methods yield excellent results for many services, but they stop short of helping designers of experience architecture: As I have argued more fully elsewhere, HCI and UX methods focus on interfaces to systems, systems that hold “content,” but are of little help to those who wish to design content (Fagerjord, 2015). I will argue in this chapter that rhetoric as a frame of mind can aid authors of locative experiences, and I will illustrate that with our experiences with the Musica Romana project, experiences that bring to mind what we call the rhetoric of the place. [...]