Staging Urban Atmospheres in Interaction Design

In this article, we address the concept of atmosphere from a designerly perspective and discuss challenges facing interaction designers who seek to stage atmospheres in urban settings. We outline previous academic works on atmosphere and the emergence of atmosphere as a subject-space encounter, primarily on the basis on Gernot Bohme’s notion of atmosphere. We then present the argument that, in the field of interaction design, it is worthwhile to expand an analytical and operational understanding of atmosphere to encompass technological, social and temporal concerns, as these are central to interaction design discourse. In order to explore this expanded notion of atmosphere in practice, we present and discuss two cases of urban interaction design in which we have employed various interactive means of staging and evoking atmospheres.