A place is primarily related to stored experience – collectively, it is really what tradition is all about. Each place has its traditions, its history, its identity and its inhabitants. A place without a story, is fictional, a place that has stayed in the story is retrospective. An authentic place is both. What people feel should be anchored both backwards and forwards, i.e. the time factor should be seen as a process and as an experience of development rather than one of innovation, something ‘new’. We not only live ‘at a time’ but as part of a time process. Each location must take their history, their identity, in possession and not become a non-place – which are planned and steeped in the same shape, smooth, stiffened up, where people who live there become alone and alike, just as everyone else.

In order to get people to care about places, it is about creating meaning, both in the ambient environment and in the functional enviroment. People want to live and inhabit, not just the latter. Even the seemingly simplest, most everyday places in people’s lives are rich in values that give life meaning.

All technology are social in its manifestation, technology are helping us to be more human. Information and relations are constantly mirrored in the social networks. And your digital self continue to live even though you are not there at the moment – meaning: you can be social all the time, regardless of time and space. This is what ”old” media logic has difficult to relate to. Today they still use rigid metrics that fail to measure a total integrated behavior.

Inculture has used the app in different projects in combination with traditional ethnographic fieldwork and think this tool gives intimate, in-the-moment happenings captured effortlessly by informants involved in the project. On thursday we meet IKEA in Waterloo to give them the opportunity to try!