My personal professional history during these 15 years has been characterized by affiliations to four organizations, which have each motivated me in their own way to pose the question of "How to design presence in an environment in which technology plays a crucial role?", and have also influenced the way I have approached this question.
Between 1994 and 2004 I worked with two creative labs, The Waag Society in Amsterdam and Performing Arts Labs (PAL) in London, which were concerned with finding new applications for technology that would contribute to the public domain and inspire the arts. note 4 It was not only The Waag and PAL that conducted research of this sort, such work had been carried out in a variety of labs over the previous decades as will be discussed in chapter 2. The Waag and PAL both have their roots in the performing arts and both invited people from different disciplines to collaborate. These two features have informed my research question deeply.
