 My name is Paul Dourish, I'm a professor of Informatics at the University of California at Irvine and most of my work lies at the boundary of the technological and the social so I do a lot of work with sociology and anthropology of digital media. I think Laurent's metaphor of liminality is really powerful. I think we're probably going to be hearing a lot about that for the rest of the day. I think it's important though to try and this is sort of as I was arguing to try to place that back in a sort of social and historical context. So the notion of liminality comes from Van Gennef's work on the ritual process and the way that people are sort of moved from one important sort of cultural status to another through different kinds of rituals that they don't have marked. That one set of adulthood and things like that. And that's linked into a spatial motion that extends beyond spatial and I think that's a really powerful and useful idea for trying to think about the role of publicness in a sort of cyberspace world. I don't see a major sea change associated with cyberspace and with information technology because those things have been subject to continual change throughout history. We can see changes associated with the development of different kinds of technologies of urban spaces, urban technologies, spatial technologies and now with information technologies but I don't think it's a major transition point. I think it's much more gradual evolution that we continually sort of respond to what we need to. One of the questions that's important that we haven't talked about so far is the granularity with which different kinds of spaces could be represented and that we start and then shape how it is we think about those spaces. Think about the power or everything that's happened around zip codes and how much the zone improvement program, which was designed simply to make it easier to deliver mail, has reorganized everything about how it is that urban space is understood. Everything's in terms of zip codes, that's where marketing information happens it's there for how demographic profiling happens it's there for how state services are deployed within urban spaces by both commercial and state actors and so I think granularity is going to be really important. Clearly one of the things that we're experiencing right now is the growth of mobile and location based technologies so I think all the interesting questions for the next five years are going to be around how it is that we can re-understand the relationship between public and private space through the information technologies that we have. One of the things we're interested in is how people re-encounter space through GPS. Not just because I was actually using the GPS on my phone to find my way to the hall this morning but how you get to navigate spaces in radically new ways. A couple of years ago I spent a couple of months over the summer at Intel's facility in Portland, Oregon and drove there without having ever consulted a map before I went. This is the longest, the first time I'd taken a trip of a thousand miles without actually checking a map before I moved and it then sort of results in this weird thing where I would like no move through space and suddenly go, oh my god this is lovely I'm driving through a national forest and I never expected this to happen you didn't know what was around the corner and so the availability of technology to allow us to move through space in ways that change our sort of anticipation of those spaces and change again granularity with which we understand those spaces has offers up all sorts of different kinds of design possibilities and so that's a lot of our work has been focused on how the technologies then act as lenses through which you encounter spaces as being available for you for different kinds of actions whether I can get on to the network, whether my phone is going to operate where I can get data services and where I can't, where power is and where always when we create new infrastructures and deploy them in space we reorganize that space by raising the new kinds of possibilities to use the space in different kinds of ways and GPS is just another of those.