Rather than relying on a convenience sample (e.g., a specific class, institution, family, or network of friends and colleagues), participants in this small-scale experimental research study were semi-randomly selected. Participants, who subsequently took on the role of collaborators, were randomly assigned to the treatment group: an invitation to visually and verbally reflect on the concept of ambience. The semi-random selection process involved a rapid review of public profiles to extract publicly available email addresses. Particular attention was paid to gender and geographical origin in an effort to construct a diverse participant database. The final sample included 32 contributions from individuals representing 20 countries and 24 distinct urban areas. Among the collaborators, the largest proportion, 34.38%, consisted of independent, professional photographers. The countries with the highest response rates were the United Kingdom (15.6%) and the United States (15.6%), a result likely influenced by the English language of the invitation. Regarding the submitted media, the most frequently employed format was photography (56.3%), followed by illustrations (18.8%) and digital renderings (15.6%). This distribution closely aligns with the professional backgrounds of the collaborators.

Making issue n°1, I intuitively arranged the content to tell a narrative of scale and proxemics based on the visual contributions - and not the text submissions.

I grouped 1) all human centered images, 2) all room and architectural centered images, 3) all meta-images and 4) all ‘big space‘ centered images.

Based on this concept a simple and subtle story of ambience is told throughout the magazine. It starts with a black and white, close-up of a girl, the move through various spaces and ends with a black and white rendering of a whole planet. The story evidences ambience as intimacy and boundless, awe-inspiring space. The story takes inspiration from “The powers of ten” directed by Charles Eames, Ray Eames and narrated by Philip Morrison in 1977. In this short film the camera zooms out from a picnic in Chicago to 100 million light years away from Earth, then down to a single particle, simply investigating the scales of the physical universe. (cf. Eames Office LLC., 1977 in Aeon, 2016).

Different repeating motives - like arces, images of images, people with crossed legs - has been detected in the image contributions. During the analysis I  highlighted 4 of the most significant motives and commented on a few cultural patterns. These observations helped me drive the progress of the project and inspire new interventions.

Mark Weiser, former CTO at Xerox PARC, who coined the term ubiquitous computing in 1988, is introducing the concept of calm technology describing general characteristics and different examples of ambient objects in the text Designing Calm Technology (1995). Weiser operates with the terms periphery and center to describe what Hazlewood et al. (2008) is naming tertiary and primary. Weiser’s main idea is very well captured in the quote: "A calm technology will move easily from the periphery of our attention, to the center, and back. This is fundamentally encalming, for two reasons."

 

Weiser touches upon the basic principles of human attention but at a time when the discourse around the attention economy was non-existing or at least nowhere near the same as today. A point in time where the masterness of focus and self-awareness wasn’t valued to the same extend as mastering problem-solving and knowledge. In this way the article predicts and suggests a solution to an issue that is only just becoming an issue. This is especially evident in the following quote: “[…] too much design focuses on the object itself and its surface features without regard for context. We must learn to design for the periphery so that we can most fully command technology without being dominated by it.” (Weiser, 1995: 2).