memory place identity

I wanted to share some questions that came out of Ed Casey's visit, and that I hope might stimulate some discussion at our next meeting.

This is both a critical question for us in trying to design experimental scenarios, AND a major substantive question for us in studying the phenomenon of place as (we are hypothesizing) structured by "rooms" and "doorways" (broadly and provisionally construed). (I suspect that this circularity, in which our experimental design depends on answers to the very questions that the experiment is designed to answer, will be characteristic of the kinds of questions we are asking and the kinds of experiments we are designing. This is either an insoluble problem or the kernel of our method.)

Ed's visit prompted us to think about this question in terms of edges, borders, boundaries and limits. What delimits a room? Are the limits of a room thick or thin, sharp or fuzzy, fixed or plastic? What delimits one room from another, and how does one room open onto another?

Hallways: when is a room not a room, but an extended passageway between rooms, an in-between space? Is a hallway like a long doorway, or a doorway like a short hallway?

I'd also like to think about pathways: from one room to another, within a room, and as structured by the objects and other people within a room. (I'm tempted here to start thinking about a kind of field theory of human movement, the fluid dynamics of groups and crowds, but I'm not sure if this is the direction we want to go in.)

Is the place-world structured by nested rooms or room-like regions/zones? E.g. The rooms of my apartment within my apartment within my building within my intersection within my neighborhood, etc.

From the experimental design perspective, notice that the minimal conditions of roominess can be thought of not just in terms of a physical environment, but in terms of how participants are asked to interact with that environment. For example, a set of lines on the floor might be enough to generate room effects PROVIDED that participants are asked not to step outside of these lines. (In other words, a room is not a "thing", but a meaningful situation. There are lots of ways to change the meaning of a situation, and manipulating the physical environment is only one of them.)

The smaller the requirements are for generating rooms, the easier it will be to generate new room configurations, and even manipulate them on the fly, perhaps even in response to the movements of the participants. (I keep coming back to this sort of thing in my own thinking, to environments that respond dynamically to participants, as a way of generating unanticipated phenomena and situations. In other words, I want to design experimental scenarios that can surprise me, that aren't fixed in advance, rather than placing people in a fixed scenario and then waiting to see how they respond.)

See you on the 3rd.

Noah