Mediaspace – Meaningspace – Meetingspace

As technology becomes ever more pervasive in our lives, one of the fundamental questions confronting us is how to resolve the increasing complexity that too often accompanies it — complexity which threatens to prevent us from reaping the potential benefits that it offers. In addressing this question, much of the literature has focused on improving the design and usability of the interface to the technologies. In this chapter we investigate another approach, one in which some of the complexity in using the devices is eliminated by exploiting some of the key properties of architectural and social space. Our work is based on the observation that there is meaning in space and in distance. Hence, we can relieve users of the complexity of having to explicitly specify such meaning, as — through appropriate design — it can be implicit, given its spatial context.