Placemaking is the process of creating squares, plazas, parks, streets, and waterfronts that will attract people because they are pleasurable or interesting. This past year I took an intensive workshop in how to do placemaking, how to study how people experience public spaces, and specifically how to improve a market for making it attractive to people so that they will enter the area, spend time there, enjoy themselves, and spend money. The methods and tools of placemaking are very powerful ways to explore the dimensions of information that users experience while doing things in public spaces.

First, we will explore how we as IAs can learn from placemaking in the physical world and apply these techniques and lessons toward building better virtual environments and collaboration spaces that are more pleasurable and interesting. Second, we will investigate markets and public places around the use of mobile technologies and how they add another layer of communication and sense-making on top of physical public places.

I hope that with a better understanding of the context of public places we as IAs can build better information media and mobile applications for use in those public places.