Making Places in Virtual Environment: A Model of Digital Sense of Place

To achieve sense of place in the cybernetic spatial domains that can be seamlessly inhabited remotely is the goal of researchers. Such spaces may be used for education, business, socialization, etc. There are many precedents of virtual worlds. However, none of them offers the satisfactory place quality as the physical environment offers. The research about design methodology is still at its beginning stage, unsystematic, far away from being applicable in practice. In contrast to previous efforts, this research bases itself on the argument that cyberspace should be viewed as an environment, a place rather than merely a means of communication because it is place that supports the rich social and cultural activities and grounds the social inhabitation, thus starts from the question what a place is and what a place offers to people, systematically examine place and place-making models from architectural and media perspective, and discuss the possibility of translating them into digital place-making. The discussion will ground the further development of sophisticated design language for virtual environment, and may benefit those who are interested in the design of digital media.

Xiaolei (Lily)Chen got her PhD in Architecture/Digital Design from University of California,Berkeley in 2006. She was also a practicing architect before entering U.C.Berkeley in 2001. Her research interests focus on social and cultural aspects of design, place and place-making, digital design and place-making.