Reading mobile media as complementary strategy for design

Abstract

The use of mobile devices and the emergence of application culture provide new forms of people-space interaction, promoting connection, learning, and innovation positively for city life. With this, the present research sought to investigate several mobile applications classes through a pedagogical workshop with Architecture and Urban Design students, performing analyzes and readings of media objects by applying the close reading method with the poetics of new media as an analytical lens. The main idea of ​​poetics is to present to human consciousness new layers of meaning and existence, unraveling and revealing worlds from the production of meanings and realities of the city permeated by mobile media. The data were collected through questionnaires, participant observation, and focus groups, treated by content analysis of the collective subject's speech construction and triangulated along with the existing literature (remediation, hyper mediation, immediacy, narrative, interactivity, and agency). Faced with the pedagogical experiment, it was possible to comprehend how students consider and evaluate critical thinking possibilities about the space mediated by mobile media. The insights obtained from the analysis can also become complementary information in the architectural diagnosis, leading to new options in design solutions. It was also observed that the possible interventions could be materialized in several scales, ranging from physical to legal interventions within the city.