Calvium are a creative technology company
who specialise in digital placemaking, mobile
experiences and user experience. The Hidden
Florence project was about working between
Calvium and Fabrizio to deliver an app for
tourists to be able to engage with the streets
of Florence. I've always loved walking around
cities and showing people what's there, what's
there to be seen. This is how I got fascinated
in GPS, because what GPS allows you to do
is to attach the stories of the past, the
stuff of history, it allows you to attach
them to the objects, the buildings, to the
fabric of the city. It's an ideal way of talking
about the things that interest me; about street
corners, about the way that people assemble
in shops, the way that coats of arms talk
to us from the past about the people that
lived in the buildings that we're standing
in front of. One of the really distinctive
features of that project from a technology
point of view was to be able to embed the
original Bonsignori map within the mobile
app, so that not only could you connect to
some of the buildings that are there right
in front of you, but you're actually interacting
on a digital platform with something that
was made in the 11th or 12th Century, which
I found mind-boggling, really, that you could
have that renaissance of something that was
created and crafted that long ago, but re-inspired
and re-delivered through this mobile platform.
One of the things that made this project quite
exciting is that we're all increasingly aware
of how we navigate the city using maps. Google
maps is now something that everybody is conversant
with. Rather than use a modern map, what we
were able to do with Calvium was to peg the
16th Century map made by Stefano Bonsignori
- the most accurate map of renaissance Florence
- to a modern streetmap. What the user is
able to do is walk around the city, in a 16th
Century streetview experience where the environment
they're walking through is represented as
a woodcut. They can see their own avatar,
their own self, walking in this 16th Century map.
One of the lessons learnt was: when you
work with fast-moving technology, there's
an assumption that everything is already done
and it's already obsolete. Actually what I've
learnt is that this has lasted the test of
time, and so blending that mix of 'yes it
feels like everything is moving', but actually
there are some real things that just take
time for their value and will always be established.
That was a really valuable lesson.
