Lived experience, ambiguity, time
Ambiguity as data, and time as the unit of space.
The literature gives three working answers to the thread's two questions, and four warnings. On ambiguity as data: interaction design treats it as a resource and sorts it by where it sits (in the material, in the frame, in the reader); annotation research treats disagreement between readers as a measure of the range of reasonable interpretations; method theory argues that tidy methods delete the vague realities they study. Phenomenology supplies the ground: perceived wholes are indeterminate, and the indeterminacy belongs to the evidence. On time as the unit of space: time-geography defines what a person can reach by the time available; Lynch and the Italian time-policy tradition make lived and civic time planning objects; Debord's dérive fixes its duration first and lets the spatial field follow; Helsinki work shows that '15 minutes' differs by person and season. Rhythmanalysis has now been run over planning documents together with lived rhythms (Chan 2024), which is close to the proposed first study. The warnings: Bergson would say clock minutes betray lived duration; Law and Lefebvre warn that readings produce what they find; Kwan shows that results depend on the unit drawn; Webb shows the reducing valve is a curated quotation chain. Four unconventional items (Perec, Nold, Fisher, Miéville) supply a Trace protocol, a cautionary case and vocabulary for Fiction.
Sources
- William W. Gaver, Jacob Beaver, Steve Benford (2003). Ambiguity as a resource for design. CHI 2003, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Fort Lauderdalecheckedmust read
Treats ambiguity as something to use rather than remove, and splits it by where it sits: in the artefact (information), in the discourse used to read it (context), in the reader's own stance (relationship). That split could sort Holagram's Readings by where their ambiguity lives, which also says what kind of Test each needs. The tactic of setting incompatible contexts against each other is a ready technique for the Fiction register. It was written for interaction design, where ambiguity is put in on purpose; a later critique (Dyer and Petersen 2021, seen in search results only) argues it arises earlier, before anything is designed, which is closer to Holagram's case.
Read first: Abstract only seen: the three types of ambiguity (information, context, relationship) and the closing tactics.
- Lora Aroyo, Chris Welty (2015). Truth Is a Lie: Crowd Truth and the Seven Myths of Human Annotation. AI Magazine 36(1), DOI 10.1609/aimag.v36i1.2564checkedmust readopen access
The clearest statement that disagreement between readers is a measurement, not an error: collect several readings of the same item and the spread shows the range of reasonable interpretations. The paper's position that truth is closest to agreement is where Holagram parts company, since a Test can show a reading wrong. Crowd methods assume many annotators; three or four hands, some of them models with shared priors, give a much weaker spread.
Read first: Abstract seen: the seven myths of annotation and the proposal of 'crowd truth'.
- Kajsa Ellegård (2018). Thinking Time Geography: Concepts, Methods and Applications. Routledge (Studies in Human Geography)checkedmust readopen access
The current statement of Hägerstrand's time-geography: individual paths through time and space, the constraints on them, and the projects that bring people together, with a notation for drawing them. It is the most developed answer to the question of time as the unit of space, since what a person can reach is set by their time budget, not by distance. The notation is a diagram language, so it may be worth borrowing for the Holagram diagram of linked entries. It records what people do with clock time, not how the time felt, so it needs the Reading register beside it.
Read first: From the description seen: the concepts and notation system first, then the applications on everyday life and planning.
- Guy Debord (translated by Ken Knabb) (1956). Theory of the Dérive. Les Lèvres Nues 9 (November 1956); reprinted Internationale Situationniste 2 (1958)not re-checkedmust readopen access
Sets the span of a drift by time, not distance: about a day from one sleep to the next, shorter or far longer at need, with the spatial field shrinking to a single block or one station to fit. That is time spent used as the working unit of space in a 1956 text, and a precedent for Holagram's fixed fieldwork blocks. Debord also insists the drift is not random, since cities have psychogeographical contours, and pairs surrender with calculation, which maps onto reading-mode switched on and off. A twenty-minute taxi ride elsewhere counts as travel, not as study of an area. It is a call to practise, with no test step.
Read first: The short sections on the duration of a dérive and its spatial field.
- T. H. Y. Chan (2024). Rethinking urban street experiments through Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis: from vehicles and vibrancy to virtuosos. Cities 152, article 105175, DOI 10.1016/j.cities.2024.105175checkedmust readopen access
The closest published method to the proposed first study: rhythmanalysis set beside discourse analysis of the documents about a place. It reads 55 records of seven street experiments in Hong Kong and finds that the agendas were often too abstract, oversimplifying street issues and excluding possibilities. That is a ready hypothesis for a Test on a planning document: does its abstraction remove the rhythms of the place it governs? It calls for open dialogue on power and lived experience and offers rhythmanalysis as a first tool for planners. One author, one city, and rhythmanalysis serves as a lens with no step for breaking a reading.
Read first: Abstract seen: rhythmanalysis combined with spatial discourse analysis over 55 records of seven Hong Kong street experiments, 2016 to 2020.
- Kevin Lynch (1972). What Time Is This Place?. MIT Pressnot re-checked
The planner's book on time in the city: the human sense of time is treated as biological and possibly out of step with the clock, and Lynch asks how it shapes what people keep, change or destroy. It gives a route into lived duration as planning evidence and into the city as layers with different tempos, which suits a holarchy whose levels run on different clocks. Lynch writes to make change manageable, so time is treated as something to steward, not as ambiguity to keep.
Read first: From the catalogue contents: the chapters on the presence of the past and 'Boston time'.
- Torsten Hägerstrand (1970). What about people in regional science?. Papers of the Regional Science Association 24corrected
The origin of time-geography. It puts the individual body's path through time and space at the centre and defines what a person can reach by the time available (the space-time prism), under constraints that secondary accounts group as capability, coupling and authority. It gives the most exact sense in which time, not distance, defines space, and it names the gap between individual biography and aggregate patterns, which is the gap Holagram's levels try to span. The prism describes possibility, not meaning, and has no place for ambiguity. Only secondary descriptions were read.
Audit: Pages 6-21. Replace the URL with the DOI.
- Elias Willberg, Christoph Fink, Tuuli Toivonen (2023). The 15-minute city for all? Measuring individual and temporal variations in walking accessibility. Journal of Transport Geography 106, DOI 10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2022.103521checked
A recent test of time as the unit of urban space, from Helsinki. It shows that '15 minutes' is not one distance: it changes with age, winter conditions and opening hours, and the authors measured walking speeds to prove it. For Holagram this is the argument against swapping minutes for metres without comment, since the minute is itself ambiguous across people and seasons, and a reason to record who spent the time and when. It remains a measurement of speed and access, not of experienced time.
Read first: Abstract seen: walking reach is normally judged from the average person's viewpoint and varies across the day and the seasons.
- Mei-Po Kwan (2012). The uncertain geographic context problem. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, DOI 10.1080/00045608.2012.687349checked
Names the problem that findings about areas depend on how the area is drawn and on how long and when people are exposed: spatial and temporal uncertainty about the context that matters. It supports Holagram's premise that spatial facts resist totalising description and gives it a citable phrase. It also warns that results may be artefacts of the unit chosen, so the level of an Entry (body, street, site, institution, territory) should be reported as a variable. The remedy in this field is richer tracking data, which would clash with the care rules.
- John Law (2004). After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. Routledgenot re-checked
Argues that research methods help make the realities they describe, and that many realities are vague and shifting, so methods should be reworked to cope with mess rather than exclude it. That is a warrant for keeping ambiguity in the log, and a warning aimed at Holagram: four registers will help produce the readings they record. A Test run inside the same method does not cure that, which is why the outside reader matters.
- Henri Lefebvre (translated by Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore) (2004). Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. Continuum (Bloomsbury Revelations reissue 2013)not re-checked
Rhythm is repetition that is never identical, joining measurable and qualitative aspects, so a place's rhythms are what 'time spent' measures once the feel is attached. Lefebvre's rhythmanalyst observes from one vantage and has no step for testing the reading.
Read first: The volume also reprints 'Attempt at the Rhythmanalysis of Mediterranean Cities' with Catherine Régulier (listed in the catalogue description).
- Ted Toadvine (2023). Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; first published 2016, substantive revision 28 September 2023checkedopen access
Gives the philosophical ground for the thread's first question. The entry presents indeterminacy and ambiguity in perceived wholes as positive features that an account must keep, and separates the 'bad' ambiguity of perception from the 'good' ambiguity of expression. It also describes time as a field of presence made of retention and anticipation, which is a vocabulary for time spent as lived. Phenomenology offers no procedure for checking one reading against another person's, so it cannot stand in for the Test register.
Read first: Sections 3 (Phenomenology of Perception) and 4 (Expression, Language, and Art).
- Henri Bergson (translated by F. L. Pogson) (1889 (English translation 1913)). Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Allen & Unwin / Macmillan; Project Gutenberg eBook 56852not re-checkedopen access
Distinguishes lived duration from time laid out as units on a clock, arguing that dividing time into measures brings space into it. That is the sharpest objection to 'time instead of distance': if the unit is clock minutes, it is distance in disguise, and only a felt measure would count as duration. It is also where the filtering view of perception behind Huxley's reducing valve begins (Matter and Memory, recalled, not checked). Duration cannot be gathered from a stranger, so it pushes Holagram toward first-person Readings and toward ambiguity that cannot be removed.
- Adrian Webb (2023). Nested hermeneutics: Mind at Large as a curated trope of psychedelic experience. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 48(5), DOI 10.1080/03080188.2023.2249208checked
D. Broad (Philosophy 24(91), 1949), summarising Bergson, with two omissions and one alteration that shift the emphasis away from Bergson's account of memory and perception. For Holagram the valve is then a curated metaphor with a traceable edit history, not a finding about perception. Use it as a labelled figure in Readings and keep a source in the Trace. The critique concerns provenance; it does not show that perception does not filter.
- Richard Sennett, Pablo Sendra (2020). Designing Disorder: Experiments and Disruptions in the City. Versonot re-checked
Sets open forms, which change with use and tolerate ambiguity and contradiction, against closed forms that investors can quantify. The link to Holagram is that closed forms are what data pipelines prefer, so taking ambiguity as data is also a position on urban form. The authors answer with design experiments, whereas Holagram stops at a diagram and a log, so this is a stance to answer, not a method to copy.
- Michel de Certeau (translated by Steven Rendall) (2011). The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press, 3rd editionchecked
Maps closely onto the first study's pairing of one planning document and one walkable place. Part III sets spatial practice against the planner's view, and chapter XII treats readers as poachers who make their own meanings from texts, so a planning document's meaning is never fully fixed by its authors. That supports the Reading register's licence for strong readings and also says who reads (hands matter). One counterpoint, from memory of the walking chapter and unchecked: the walker is set against the view from above, and Holagram's diagram of linked entries is a view from above.
Read first: Part III, Spatial Practices ('Walking in the City', 'Spatial Stories'), and chapter XII, 'Reading as Poaching'.
- Georges Perec (translated by Marc Lowenthal) (2010). An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris. Wakefield Press (translation of Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu parisien)not re-checked
A working Trace protocol in under an hour's reading: three days in October 1974, one square, a list of what passes (pedestrians, buses, pigeons, signs, a wedding, a funeral) without interpretation. It shows what a fixed block yields and how dull it is, and the dullness is part of the result. It also shows that a list is still selection by one observer, which the outside reader and the Adversary should be able to challenge. A model for the Trace register and for the short condensed case.
- Christian Nold (ed.) (2009). Emotional Cartography: Technologies of the Self. Free edited book; Royal College of Art research repository and biomapping.netnot re-checkedopen access
Walkers carry a skin-response sensor and GPS, and the arousal peaks are later captioned with the participants. It is an attempt to turn lived experience into a map layer, and it shows both problems at once: the sensor records arousal and nothing about meaning, so the captions carry all the reading, and the map still looks objective. For Holagram it marks the line between Trace and Reading, and gives a reason to keep bodily data out of the Trace. The essays in the book discuss the politics of biometric self-visualisation.
- Mark Fisher (2017). The Weird and the Eerie. Repeater Booksnot re-checked
Defines the eerie as a failure of absence (something where nothing should be) or a failure of presence (nothing where something should be), and ties it to agency; the feeling fades once the mystery is explained. This is vocabulary for what Alter writes in the Fiction register where it is unclear who or what is acting, and a caution: a Test that settles a reading may also dissolve the experience the reading was about. It is criticism of film and fiction, not field evidence.
- David Seamon (2023). Phenomenological Perspectives on Place, Lifeworlds and Lived Emplacement: The Selected Writings of David Seamon. Routledge (his Life Takes Place: Phenomenology, Lifeworlds, and Place Making, Routledge, 2018, is the companion book)not re-checked
The 2023 collection is the safer starting point for place ballets. Seamon's phenomenology is checked by shared description, not by trying to break a reading, so it supplies material for Reading and Fiction but not for the Test.
- Yi-Fu Tuan (1977). Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. University of Minnesota Pressnot re-checked
Treats space as what allows movement and place as a pause in it, so a place is made by time spent. That is a first-principles argument for time spent as the measure of place, and a way to sort Entries into those that record movement and those that record pause. Humanistic essay; no method for checking.
- Sandra Bonfiglioli, Marco Mareggi (eds.) (1997). Il tempo e la città fra natura e storia. Atlante di progetti sui tempi della città. Istituto nazionale di urbanistica (Urbanistica Quaderni)not found
Italian route. An atlas of projects from the movement that made the times of the city a planning matter in Italy: opening hours, school times, mobility and services coordinated through time plans (piani dei tempi) in cities such as Cremona, Bolzano and Bergamo (from search summaries, not opened). It is an Italian-language institutional precedent for time as the unit of urban space, and a way into practitioners who already hold time-use data. These policies treat time as schedules and services, not as lived duration.
Audit: Keep as a lead; confirm in the SBN/OPAC catalogue before citing.
- Barbara E. A. Piga, Daniel Siret, Jean-Paul Thibaud (eds.) (2021). Experiential Walks for Urban Design: Revealing, Representing, and Activating the Sensory Environment. Springerchecked
A recent collection of walking methods for recording and representing the sensory environment (multi-sensory and in-motion walks), which gives practical protocols for the walkable place in the first study, including how to represent what was perceived. Thibaud's ambiances research tradition sits behind it, and a 2026 Routledge volume from the same school (Thibaud, Tixier and Zerbib, Ambiances: A Sensitivity to Ordinary Situations) was verified but not selected. The methods aim to activate design, not to test readings.
- Ben Anderson (2009). Affective atmospheres. Emotion, Space and Society 2(2), DOI 10.1016/j.emospa.2009.08.005not re-checked
Treats atmosphere as holding opposites in tension (presence and absence, singular and general) and as a quality that comes out of the assembling of bodies yet exceeds it. That fits a site-level reading that is neither one person's feeling nor an aggregate, and it treats ambiguity as part of what an atmosphere is. Atmosphere talk can be impressionistic and unfalsifiable, so each atmosphere Reading should be paired with a time-stamped Trace and a Test that names what would count against it.
- China Miéville (n.d.). The City & the Citychecked
A novel of two cities on the same ground whose citizens are trained to unsee each other. It is the reducing valve made civic, enforced and policed, and a ready model for an institution-level Fiction entry. Fiction only; it is evidence of nothing.
Ideas to take
Name where each Reading's ambiguity sits. Add a field to the Entry saying whether the ambiguity is in the Trace (the material is unclear), in the frame (the discourse used to read it is contested) or in the reader (the stance is unsettled), and let that choose the Test.
Changes: Gives ambiguity a place in the Entry instead of leaving it as noise in the Reading, and links each Test to the kind of ambiguity it must address.
Risk: Gaver and colleagues sorted ambiguity in designed artefacts. In a found place the three kinds blur, and the field could turn into a form to fill in.
Log disagreement as a result. Have at least three hands (the outside reader, Alter, the Adversary) read the same Trace independently, and record the spread of readings in the log without reconciling it.
Changes: Makes the spread an output of the study, and a measure of how ambiguous a Trace is, instead of a problem to resolve by agreement.
Risk: Crowd-truth methods rely on many annotators. Three or four hands, some of them models sharing priors, produce a thin and possibly falsely uniform spread, and the idea that truth is agreement conflicts with a Test that can break a reading.
Define the site by a time window, not a perimeter. Fieldwork blocks of fixed length set the spatial field, as in Debord's dérive, and Entries record who spent the time and when, with time-geography paths drawn in Ellegård's notation.
Changes: Answers the question about time as the unit of space: the unit becomes time spent, with the observer and the hour attached, and the paths double as a diagram language.
Risk: Bergson's objection: clock minutes are space in disguise. Willberg's result: minutes differ by person and season. Add a short felt-time note to each block and state that the unit does not travel between observers.
Read the planning document for its time assumptions, then walk the place at those times. List the rhythms, hours and pauses the document takes for granted, and make the Test whether they hold on site.
Changes: Gives the first study (one document, one place) a concrete bridge, taken from Chan's pairing of document analysis and rhythmanalysis and de Certeau's readers and walkers.
Risk: Chan's finding about abstract agendas is one case in Hong Kong and may not hold for the chosen document. Italian time plans show that planners already treat time as schedules, which narrows what 'time' means.
Write the Trace protocol after Perec and keep sensors out of it. A Trace block is a fixed time at one spot with a plain list of what passes; photographs and counts are allowed; captions, feelings and any bodily data belong in Reading.
Changes: Sharpens the Trace/Reading line and supplies a concrete fieldwork block that matches the care rule of fixed blocks.
Risk: A list is still one observer's selection, and a dull block may tempt the observer into reading early; the outside reader needs to review lists as well as readings.
Treat the reducing valve as a labelled metaphor, and use Miéville and Fisher to write about it. Any Reading that invokes the valve cites Webb's finding that the passage is a curated quotation chain, and Fiction entries use unseeing (Miéville) and the eerie as agency (Fisher).
Changes:
Risk: Dropping the valve as evidence loses some of the style's pull. Webb's critique concerns provenance, not whether perception filters, so it should not be over-read.
Pair every atmosphere Reading with a time-stamped Trace and a falsifying Test. Atmosphere (Anderson) is kept as a site-level quantity, but each claim names a different hour or a different reader that would show it wrong, using walking methods for the second look.
Changes: Lets atmosphere stay central without becoming unfalsifiable, and fits it into the held, broke or unchecked result line.
Risk: Atmospheres are often described as unrepeatable, so a second visit may be an unfair test; Nold's sensor data shows the opposite temptation to over-trust an instrument.
Use the Italian and Finnish time-policy and accessibility literature to translate the style for planners. Present 'time spent' next to 15-minute-city and time-plan terms when the log is written up in conventional form.
Changes: Gives the conventional write-up produced from the log a vocabulary planners already use, with Helsinki and Italian precedents.
Risk: Both strands treat time as schedule and service access, so using their terms may pull the concept back toward measurement and away from lived duration.
Counter-arguments
- Law (experience-10): methods make the realities they record. Four registers written in order by hands who share a method will produce readings that fit the method, and a Test inside the same method does not cure that. Only the outside reader and Test results from a different level or hour carry weight.
- Bergson (experience-13) and Merleau-Ponty (experience-12): lived duration and perceptual ambiguity resist measurement. Turning time spent into a unit risks the spatialising of time Bergson attacked, and ambiguity gathered as data may stop being the ambiguity that was lived.
- A register that permits strong, even paranoid, readings invites exactly that.
- Kwan (experience-09) and Willberg et al. (experience-08): results depend on the unit drawn and on who walks and when. Holagram's levels and its time unit could produce artefacts, and a minute from one observer is not a minute from another.
- Aroyo and Welty (experience-02): their view that truth is closest to agreement is at odds with Tests that can break a reading, and their methods need many annotators, not three or four hands.
- Nold (experience-18): instruments that capture lived experience look objective but record arousal, not meaning, and collect bodily data that the care rules should not allow. Treating ambiguity as data can slide into data-fication of people.
- Fisher (experience-19): the eerie depends on not knowing, and explanation dissolves it. A Test that resolves a reading may destroy the experience it concerned.
Gaps
- Treat this as a gap in the search, not a proven absence; both queries are worth rerunning.
- No Finnish or Estonian item on ambiguity or lived experience in planning was found; Willberg et al. (Helsinki) is the only Finnish-linked item. Pallasmaa (Finnish; The Eyes of the Skin, Wiley edition) is verified in an Open Library record but not selected.
- Named but not verified, so left out: Ingold, The temporality of the landscape (World Archaeology, 1993); Kusenbach on the go-along interview (Ethnography, 2003); Moreno et al. All recalled; treat as leads.
- Several publisher pages returned 403 or a login (MIT Press, Springer, SAGE, Polimi, PhilArchive), so some records rest on catalogue and search-result evidence only. No full texts were downloaded.