Jason Wilson
This entry records what is known from the subject's own description and from his contributions to this site. It is deliberately short: little further public material is available, and the page should be expanded by someone with first-hand knowledge rather than filled out by inference.
Biography
Geovangelist, designer and hacker, deeply interested in urban games, platforms, location-aware brain cells, mobile tech, audio perfume and our sense of self. Living in Palo Alto, California.
Contribution to This Site
Wilson coined the term sonic metadata — the practice of encoding actions or events in sound so that data can be compressed into soundscapes. His illustrative case was proximal notification, in which the distance between two people is expressed as a sound that changes with that distance, rather than as a number that has to be read.
The idea sits alongside the established research literature on auditory icons, earcons and sonification, but arrives at it from the direction of ambient and location-aware design rather than from human–computer interaction research, and the proximity example is a genuinely useful one: it treats sound as a channel for a continuously varying quantity rather than as an alert.
Geovangelism
The self-description "geovangelist" belongs to a specific moment in the late 2000s and early 2010s, when location-aware mobile technology was arriving faster than any account of what it was for, and a small community of designers, developers and organizers were advocating for it in public — through location-based games, check-in services, mapping projects, geo-hackathons and conferences. The term names an advocate for geographic and location-aware technology, and the enthusiasm it carries is part of its historical interest: it is a word from the period before locational privacy became the dominant frame. Reading it alongside geocloaking gives a fair picture of how quickly that shift happened.
