Territories of experience. Urban, social, digital spaces: a user-centered perspective

The paper explores the relationship between spatial, social and digital spaces in a user-centered approach according to the Lynch’s perspective on the mental construction that people living in the same urban space share an image of it. The digital territories, as the social network of the web 2.0, seem to set up similar connections and –at the same time different– as the traditional social dynamics do with the physical territory. How is the digital interaction able to reproduce significant experiences of meaning for the different user personas or –more precisely– for the social groups that in the territory live and communicate? The paper –based on an experimental research– tries to investigate and to propose metaphor or design concepts of interfaces based both on cognitive representation that people have of the urban space daily experienced according to the physical organization and on the connections that the social groups establish between themselves in the real and in the digital space in which they interact.