A Temporal Sense of Place: The Politics of Attention and Information Architecture

Abstract

The paper introduces perspectives on power/knowledge and technicity to politicize the design and architecture of digital, cross-channel or hybrid places. It applies these concepts to update and revitalize Doreen Massey’s concept of place, to argue that digital places appropriate the attention of inhabitants to create a temporal sense of place. This is extrapolated from two contrasting case studies of digital place: a social networking service and a content platform, to demonstrate how various forms of economic, cultural and social value can be generated. This re-conceptualization of place is critically applied to the information architecture theory of place-making to argue that information architects are active participants in the politics of attention within digital environments. It responds to the discipline’s awareness of its inherent political agency and offers two suggestions for information architects to design as change agents: (1) create place that necessitates affordances of temporal agency; (2) generate a holistic range of values in place