Tag Archives: Real places

Free access: Phenomenology of Real and Virtual Places

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Routledge is running a monograph sale through June 11th. Readers can now access The Phenomenology of Real and Virtual Places free-of-charge for seven days. At the end of the trial period, they’ll have the opportunity to purchase the eBook for £10/$15.

Here are the links to the offer.

The Phenomenology of Real and Virtual Places

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New edited book out 8 November:

Champion, E. (Ed.). (2018). The Phenomenology of Real and Virtual Places. The Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy series. Routledge. 08 November 2018 (ebook 26 October 2018 9781315106267). ISBN 9781138094079

Feel free to ask Routledge for a review form and book copy..

This collection of essays explores the history, implications, and usefulness of phenomenology for the study of real and virtual places. While the influence of phenomenology on architecture and urban design has been widely acknowledged, its effect on the design of virtual places and environments has yet to be exposed to critical reflection. These essays from philosophers, cultural geographers, designers, architects, and archaeologists advance the connection between phenomenology and the study of place. The book features historical interpretations on this topic, as well as context-specific and place-centric applications that will appeal to a wide range of scholars across disciplinary boundaries. The ultimate aim of this book is to provide more helpful and precise definitions of phenomenology that shed light on its growth as a philosophical framework and on its development in other disciplines concerned with the experience of place.

Foreword byJeff Malpas
Introduction by Erik Champion
1. The Inconspicuous Familiarity of Landscape by Ted Relph2. Landscape Archaeology in Skyrim VR by Andrew Reinhard

3. The Efficacy of Phenomenology for Investigating Place with Locative Media by Leighton Evans

4. Postphenomenology and “Places” by Don Ihde

5. Virtual Place and Virtualized Place by Bruce Janz

6. Transactions in virtual places: Sharing and excess in blockchain worlds by Richard Coyne

7. The Kyoto School Philosophy on Place: Nishida and Ueda by John W.M. Krummel

8. Phenomenology of Place and Space in our Epoch: Thinking along Heideggerian Pathways by Nader El-Bizri

9. Norberg-Schulz: Culture, Presence and a Sense of Virtual Place by Erik Champion

10. Heidegger’s Building Dwelling Thinking in terms of Minecraft by Tobias Holischka

11. Cézanne, Merleau-Ponty, and Questions for Augmented Reality by Patricia Locke

12. The Place of Others: Merleau-Ponty and the Interpersonal Origins of Adult Experience by Susan Bredlau

13. “The Place was not a Place”: A Critical Phenomenology of Forced Displacement Neil Vallelly

14. Virtual Dark Tourism in The Town of Light by Florence Smith Nicholls

notes about places

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I’m writing a book,  DESIGNING THE ‘PLACE’ OF VIRTUAL SPACE, Indiana University Press, Spatial Humanities series.

Current planned book chapters

  • Place Theory Applied To Virtual Environments
  • Dead, Dying, Failed Worlds
  • How Mind Remembers Space, How Places Are Meaningful And Evocative
  • Place Affordances Of Virtual Environments Learnt From Affordances In Real Places
  • Place Interaction And Mechanics
  • Learning From Place
  • Place-Making Devices, Place-Finding Devices
  • Evaluation
  • Conclusion

My notes include the following:

  1. Place theory seldom clarifies different types of place features and different types of place genres, for example, fantasy places. There are places imaginative because they don’t clearly and explicitly relate to current place objects or interactive place relations, or imaginative because they don’t follow common sense, lived experience, or known physics. I don’t however know of a classification of them suitable to the design of virtual worlds.
  2. Such places are captivating but vague, what are the general affordances that mark them out as distinctive places but allow a variety of events and actions to take place?
  3. The place affordances of mobile places (tents, boats, stones, trailers) are seldom described but of great design interest to me. Where do I find this literature?
  4. Places are typically
    1. gathering (a center focusing or center-pulling away)
    2. the placing or gathering components are imaginatively or allegorically linked
    3. ecosystems
    4. related to other places
    5. allow a placing between the dynamic and the static (is there a better word than threshold?) This allows them to support creativity or allow time to imagine creativity..
    6. Depict a marking by or resistance to time (no, not exactly Kenneth Frampton’s architecture as heroic environmental resistance or critical regionalism theory). A place is a diary of us, a tapestry of meetings, of planned and spontaneous encounters.
  5. Place evaluation: places are very difficult to evaluate, to capture or to imitate. It is very difficult to observe a place without being there (and hence the appeal of phenomenology). For they are more network than tree, not linear and not directly observable.
  6. The levels of observable interaction are granular but of differing scale and not actually tailored directly to the scale and capabilities of a human observer, something we often forget when we design a virtual place, where everything is meant to be observed from and be seen to make sense from a human-height eye level. The layers and eddies of reality are infinitely complex. That does not mean that everything needs to be simulated or generated about that place.