To create the i-Doc interface I worked with Michael Skelly, a friend and web coder. Although i-Doc producing software does exist (for example “Klynt” is one popular software) I wanted to build my own i-Doc from scratch rather than use the templates available. This was because what is important to me about the i-Doc, as a method, was partly the process of designing its interface and making the decisions about its spatiotemporal architecture including; how the pages would be arranged, how clips would link together, its temporality, its aesthetics and its abilities to host different media including moving and still images. None of the software available offered enough flexibility on these elements as they are designed to provide an infrastructure that can be adjusted to varying degrees but always includes some, and usually many, fixed elements. Building the i-Doc from scratch involved me thinking up features of the i-Doc’s spatiotemporal architecture that I thought would communicate pop-up’s imaginaries and working with Skelly to see how these could be manifested.
There were multiple important decisions to be made about the interface. I had to decide how many pages the i-Doc would involve and what would be on each one. In the ‘play the pop-up city’ page, which is the i-Doc’s main view, a calendar marks the passing of time as a user watches clips and I had to decide how fast time would pass and how long a user would be allowed to stay in the play view (if not infinitely), thus determining how many of the clips they could potentially watch. I also had to decide what links to offer at the end of what clips, including which clips would link to one another and which outside pop-up city pages would be available from which clips. There were also decisions to be made about the aesthetics of the i-Doc, its colour schemes, the icons used for clips and the font for the text.
The way that coding works made this kind of collaboration possible. For many of the i-Doc’s features, Skelly was able to show me several options pretty much instantly by making small changes to the code, changing, for example, the colour scheme or the positioning of an interface feature and then changing it back if we decided the alteration wasn’t successful. I held three meetings with Skelly over the course of the
i-Doc’s production and the rest of the decisions and production we discussed via email.
Collaborating was beneficial as it required me to consider how pop-up’s imaginaries can be communicated to others. Whereas I tended to get tied up with how to design the interface in line with my theoretical convictions, Skelly was interested in what the i-Doc would be like to use. This forced me to focus on how pop-up is felt and would be communicable in contemporary culture rather than on the academic articulations of its imaginaries that I, by that point, was so embedded in. For example, I had reservations about using a map for the basis of the interface in case it gave an impression of the city as a static space, a container within which pop-up occurs, rather than a dynamically produced assemblage. But, in talking with Skelly, I realised that without a map users would find it hard to know how to navigate the interface. Furthermore, on reflection I realised that the map, although potentially problematic for Geographers as a totalizing representation of space might actually help to communicate pop-up’s imaginaries of dynamism and flexibility to others. Whereas for me, the idea of a dynamic pop-up city juxtaposed against an otherwise ‘fixed’ urban space-time was ontologically erroneous, I realised that this would not necessarily be a problem in communicating pop-up’s imaginaries to others. Clearly the strength of pop-up’s spatiotemporal imaginaries in popular culture derives from the fact that pop-up is seen as unusual in its flexible and nomadic use of space; its imaginaries wouldn’t have the power they do if they didn’t sit against more traditional imaginaries of space as static that, while outdated in Geography, are clearly still to some extent operative within society more broadly (otherwise pop-up wouldn’t be seen as novel and exciting).
This raised an interesting question for me as to who I was making the i-Doc for. While I was thinking of the i-Doc as a methodology, I was also concerned with how it would communicate pop-up’s spatiotemporal imaginaries to a hypothetical audience. On reflection, I felt that the hypothetical audience were in fact part of the i-Doc’s value
engage with what pop-up’s spatiotemporal imaginaries are and how they can be made tangible, and in doing so to identify the components and contexts they emerge from and operate in. Thinking about the user was also helpful in sorting through the difference between pop-up’s imaginaries as felt in contemporary culture and my own academic understanding of the phenomenon.
Building on the propositions worked through in the first and second parts of this chapter, I now discuss three key ways that the i-Doc interface engages with space- time in pop-up culture. Firstly, I show how its design helps to evoke pop-up’s
spatiotemporal imaginaries and secondly I show how it helps to foster a critical perspective on those imaginaries; drawing attention to their instrumentality in the city. Thirdly, I explore how the i-Doc engages with tensions between agency and inaction. I also discuss the challenges I encountered in designing the i-Doc interface.