I’m thrilled to be attending the World Congress of Sociology here in Melbourne this week. Being in a bevy of sociologists (I wonder what the collective noun actually is? Swarm?) is unusual and heady. I am usually working and collaborating within interdisciplinary teams and am rarely in the thick of sociological heartlands.

For this conference, I’m presenting on some exploratory work that combines my research into playful creative cities with mixed-reality environments and digital pleasures. It is part of what looks set to be a very interesting session on “The Sense of Data and the Data of Sense: Bodies, Technologies, Spaces“.

I’m thrilled to be collaborating on this work with some excellent colleagues, including Naomi Smith (digital pleasures and desire lines in the city), Jacinthe Flores (creative cities and immersive spaces) and Luke Heemsbergen (mixed-reality environments). The backbone of this work was developed during my recent creative cities research residency, with the many conversations that took place during it as inspiring as the setting itself in Olot, Spain.

You can read a the work in progress paper here: Senses of/in the city: A speculative and conceptual exploration of sensory spaces of play in the digital city

The article abstract below will give you a taster for what to expect.

The digital city is a space of sensory play that contains the visceral embodiment of digital pleasures (Smith et al 2019), extended or mixed-reality environments (Heemsbergen 2021) and aesthetic encounters (Maddox et al 2022). We observe the shift from only the platform economy to the mediated experience of a city, and articulate the ways in which that can be achieved (via the big platforms and otherwise) in social digital-physical connections. An embodied sense of the social in these spaces can be derived through unpacking conceptual work on social effervescence (Olaveson 2001), sensory playfulness, and digitally-mediated intimacies. We characterise these social moments of interaction, engagement and participation through intensities and immediacies of experience that involve intention and symbolic focus. Focusing on the sensory, playful, and digitally intimate cities space can also be understood as a way of inscribing desire lines in urban environments that can often be hostile to pleasurable and non-commercial forms of engagement (Smith and Walters 2018). Our approach creates a vector between the urban geography of a city, its digital architectures and a playful and pleasure-ful built environment that speaks. We argue that these vibrant moments of encounter in the digital city can drive creativity, place-making and a sense of belonging that manifest in localised ways.