The latest Gensler Design Forecast has made me think about how I experience place and whether the overlay of digital connectivity has changed it. Here are my field notes.
Given the ubiquity of digital connectivity, I would expect place itself to change tangibly, along with how we perceive and use it. Spatial changes appear to lag changes in our use and perception, however. This conforms to tech guru John Seely Brown’s contention that it takes a generation for a major technology innovation’s impact to be fully felt.
So what is place in 2017? To me, it’s still any setting that registers in human terms. The scale and edge conditions of a given place are inexact—we intuit its context from prior experience and whatever we’ve brought with us to help reveal it. Not long ago, this meant maps and guidebooks. Or we gave up and hailed a cab. Now we have Maps, Yelp and Lyft on our phones. We can orient ourselves faster, but has place changed?