The Kitchen
The Pervasive Media Studio is a creative technologies collaboration between Watershed, University of West of England and University of Bristol, bringing together designers, artists, programmers and researchers to produce new forms of media experience.

The Pervasive Media Cookbook is mix of practice, ideas and inspiration, that can be read ‘cover to cover’ or opened at any page. It introduces the emerging field of pervasive media in which context aware devices deliver ‘the right media in the right place at the right time.’

Written in non-specialist language, the cookbook is based around twelve case studies, our ‘recipes’, from tasty projects cooked up in the research kitchens of the Pervasive Media Studio Bristol U.K. The case studies are complemented by ‘essentials’; short essays covering themes in pervasive media to get students and young designers thinking, as well as a list of basic ingredients that can be used as a base for your own recipes.

There are lots of different ways to create Pervasive Media experiences, and our cookbook aims to get that across. We want to inspire users to find their own way to make projects that make the wireless world a tastier place to live! The recipes we’ve chosen represent the range of possible flavours that we’ve been cooking up at the cutting edge of existing pervasive media practice.

This work is not fictional, it is based on a two-year research project run by UWE’s Digital Cultures Research Centre in partnership with Bristol’s Pervasive Media Studio, which has produced and supported a wealth of ground-breaking examples of these new forms of media experience.

The Pervasive Media Studio is a city-centre research lab that brings designers, artists, programmers and researchers together to experiment with these new forms;

  • The Studio offers residencies and support for researchers, companies and artists with new ideas;
  • It provides an open innovation environment that puts the emphasis on sharing and collaboration;
  • It has hosted hundreds of experiments in its first four years.

Pervasive Media

Pervasive media is a research field at the junction of media production, pervasive computing and design. Sensors, databases and live data streams are being built into the fabric of urban space, offering new relationships between citizens and our environment: cultural products can work in new ways where stories and images are made available on the move; digital content can be tagged to physical place for advertising, education and entertainment; social networking and gaming can make the ‘virtual’ city a stage for play and performance. The explosion of the ‘apps’ market has made these new forms economically viable.

The Cookbook aims to make this potential available in practical form to the designers and producers of the future who will be bringing the Pervasive Media world into being.