Why a sidewalk

My work in voice systems put me inside a particular kind of media infrastructure: the recorded voice people heard when they called a company. That experience made the relationship between people and technology a practical research question. What does an environment make possible for the people using it? What do they learn from being there?

The Digital Sidewalk framework grew from studying those questions in a community where people made things together. Three bodies of work helped me decide what to observe.

Jane Jacobs provided a way to examine the ordinary activity of a shared place: people returning, recognizing one another, watching what is happening, and using the same space for different purposes. I used that perspective to ask questions about online participation. Who becomes familiar? Where do conversations start? What makes it possible to show unfinished work?

Gordon Pask's work on conversation and interaction helped me distinguish information being delivered from understanding being developed. A community can distribute a great deal of information while giving its members few opportunities to question it, try it, or learn from one another.

Mitchell Duneier's Sidewalk provided an ethnographic reference for studying everyday activity closely. For my own research, that meant participating, keeping field notes, collecting artifacts, and listening to members' accounts of the same setting.

Buildspace became the setting for that study. Members worked on individual projects within a shared online program and met at physical events. I could follow learning across those settings rather than treating a platform's activity totals as the whole account.

The sidewalk in the name refers to that shared environment. It gives the Lab a continuing question: what can we learn about a place by observing how people, information, and activity move through it?

Read the framework and study for the method and published research.