Yesterday, I presented at the 2008 Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, the preliminary results of my ethnographic study on the use, adoption, and appropriation of satellite navigation systems by taxi drivers in Barcelona (slides). The abstract of the paper “The co-evolution of taxi drivers and their in-car navigation systems” co-authored with Josep Blat goes as follows:

In recent years, the relative market success of in-car navigation systems has symbolized the emergence of location-based services for wayfinding. This market success creates the opportunity to learn from real-world use of current location-aware systems in order to inform the design of future applications. With this aim, we are using an ethnographic approach to study the different ways taxi drivers rely on their navigation system. This work describes how location technologies impact the wayfinding practices and also how practices influence the appropriation of navigation systems. This co-evolution goes from the acquisition and setup of a navigation system to mastering the system shortcomings and limitations. Next, we study the reasons upon which a driver selects among the different modes of a navigation system and the other artifacts and tools (e.g. maps, street directories, landmarks) he or she uses for location awareness and wayfinding. Moreover, we analyze the role of context in this dynamics, i.e., where and when a driver accesses location information from the system, the external supports and the surrounding environment. We present the findings that emerged from 12 interviews augmented by in-car observations within the community of taxi drivers of the city of Barcelona, Spain. This community forms a massive population of early adopters of in-car navigation systems with a strong past practice of relying on mobile technologies and maps to support their work.

My paper “Leveraging Explicitly Disclosed Location Information to Understand Tourist Dynamics: A Case Study”, co-authored with Josep Blat, Filippo Dal Fiore and Carlo Ratti, has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Location Based Services. The abstract goes as follows:

In recent years, the large deployment of mobile devices has led to a massive increase in the volume of records of where people have been and when they were there. The analysis of these spatio-temporal data can supply high-level human behavior information valuable to urban planners, local authorities, and designer of location-based services. In this paper, we describe our approach to collect and analyze the history of physical presence of tourists from the digital footprints they publicly disclose on the web. Our work takes place in the Province of Florence in Italy, where the insights on the visitors’ flows and on the nationalities of the tourists who do not sleep in town has been limited to information from survey-based hotel and museums frequentation. In fact, most local authorities in the world must face this dearth of data on tourist dynamics. In this case study, we used a corpus of geographically referenced photos taken in the province by 4280 photographers over a period of 2 years. Based on the disclosure of the location of the photos, we design geovisualizations to reveal the tourist concentration and spatio-temporal flows. Our initial results provide insights on the density of tourists, the points of interests they visit as well as the most common trajectories they follow.

The reviews validate the direction of my theis. They ask me to explore how the insights insight gained from this project can be transferred to other user groups and compare the outcome with the available tourist services. They propose to continue exploring the issues around the quality of the data (i.e. how to reduce the uncerntainty in a bit detailed manner). Finally, I make a case that the visualization validate my hypothesis, but I could also point out the anomalies or unexpected behavior patterns (journalists somehow requested similar outcomes). And, yeah, not to forget the encouraging comment… “This is an excellent paper, covering a very timely and interesting topic“.

Data flow, from data recording, retrieving, storing to the visualizations.

Townsend, A. M. (2000). Life in the real-time city: mobile telephones and urban metabolism. Journal of Urban Technology, 7(2):85–104.
Back in 2000, Anthony Townsend wrote Life in the real-time city: mobile telephones and urban metabolism, an article that argues that new mobile communication systems are fundamentally rewriting the spatial and temporal constraints of all manners of human communications. As signs of this radical change, accessibility becomes more important than mobility and mobile phones increasingly add an element of uncertainty about physical location to our urban interactions. For instance, as many as one-fifth of cell phones users lie about their location when talking on a mobile phone. “For urban planning, it might mean that the city will change far faster than the ability to understand it from a centralized perspective, let alone formulate plans and policies that will have the desired outcomes”.

As decision-making and management of everyday life is increasingly decentralized, the complexity of these systems become greater and therefore less predictable. In parallel, this decentralization creates myriad new interactions and potential interactions between individuals that is dramatically speeding the metabolism of urban systems, increasing capacity and efficiency.The “real-time city” in which system conditions can be monitored and reacted to instantaneously, has arrived. […] Real-time systems are defined by an ability to constantly monitor environmental conditions vital to the operation of the system.

In fact without efforts to develop new knowledge and tools for understanding the implications of these new technologies, city planners run the risk of losing touch with the reality of city streets.. Townsend takes an urbanist’s perspective on the application of new communication technologies within cities by their inhabitants (i.e. how do they reshape basic aspects of urban life). However contrary to traditional urban planning, which often assigns agency to a city as a unit (e.g. the city is busy, the city in unfriendly), there are tools for understanding complex systems like cities as consequences of many interactions of individuals. Yet, these tools must go beyond the classical approaches taken in urban planning “the widespread bit-by-bit reconstruction of cities is going largely unnoticed by planners accustomed to visualizing cities through aerial photographs“. In consequence, individuals must become the unit of analysis instead of the institution, neighborhood, city or region. These types of new insights can be gained from interpretive methods such as ethnography (e.g. Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City) or a psychoanalysts approach. Then the significance of individual-level technological interventions on larger-scale social systems such as cities could be simulated through agent-based modeling.

Also blogged by Nicolas in Increasing pace of interactions in our cities.

Relation to my thesis: This text refers to some pieces of my works. First, similarly to Antoine Picon’s suggestions last week, Townsend stresses the focus on individual interactions (micro events) that make the city. There is also a reference to some sort of glocalization of the city generated by the telephone and mobile phones (decentralizations in urban sprawl and intensification of the center). Second, there is a practical discussion on how taxi driver’s archaic profession was transformed by mobile phones. “The mobile phone permits dynamic reallocation of the taxi system’s resources, resulting in less wasted time searching for fares“. Something that I can argue with my taxi driver study and the importance of satnav not only to improve the efficiency, but also to decrease the stress (improve the quality of life). Third, there is a reference that mobile technologies add uncertainty to our urban interactions (CatchBob!). Finally, this text revives agent-based modeling as a potential output of my thesis.

In April of next year, I will attend in Boston the AAG meeting and participate to a session on “Situating Sat Nav: Questioning the TomTom Effect“. Organized by Chris Perkins and Martin Dodge, it aims to address the social effects, cultural meanings and political economy of in-car satellite navigation. I will be in the middle of a spectacular line-up:

Session One

Amy Propen: The Use of Sat Nav Systems: An Empowering Cultural Practice or Portentous of a Lost Geographical Imagination?
Don Cooke: The TomTom Effect: Industry Point of View
Allan Brimicombe and Chao Li: Sat Nav: Rising theft of a geo-engineered must-have.
Tristan Thielmann: Navigation becomes travel scouting: The augmented space of car navigation systems
Caren Kaplan: Precision Targets: Consumer Subjects, Militarization, and the Politics of Location.

Session Two

Fabien Girardin: The co-evolution of taxi drivers and their in-car navigation systems
Georg Gartner: Restrictions in mental representations of the world as a result of relying upon navigation systems
Jonathan Raper: The mistakes that satnavs make (and what they don’t know)
Alexander Klippel: Can we afford to provide cognitively inadequate wayfinding assistance?
Discussant: David M Mark

The abstract of my paper entitled “The co-evolution of taxi drivers and their in-car navigation systems” goes as follow:

In the recent years, the massive use of in-car navigation systems has symbolized the emergence of location-based services for wayfinding. This market success creates the opportunity to learn from a real-world use of present location-aware systems in order to inform the design of future applications. In that context, we are using an ethnomethodological approach to study the different ways taxi drivers rely on their navigation system. First, this work focuses on describing how location technologies impacted the wayfinding practices and similarly how the practice influences the appropriation of navigation systems. This co-evolution starts from the acquisition and setup of a navigation system to mastering the system shortcomings and limitations. Second, we study the criteria that steer a driver in selecting among the different modes of a navigation system and the other artifacts and tools (e.g. maps, street directories, landmarks) he or she uses for location awareness and wayfinding. Moreover, we are analyzing the role of context in this dynamic. That is where and when a driver accesses location information from the system, the external supports and the surrounding environment. We are currently collecting data from 20 semi-structured interviews each augmented by in-car observations of 1-hour ride. The study concentrates on the taxi drivers of the city of Barcelona, Spain. This community forms a massive population of early adopters of in-car navigation systems with a strong past practice of relying on mobile technologies and maps to support their work.

Relation to my thesis: I can’t imagine a better set of people to receive feedback on my taxi driver study.

I am in Hong-Kong for the 4th International Symposium on LBS and TeleCartography where I introduced two different works in the Mobile Users Analysis track. First I presented my paper “Understanding of Tourist Dynamics from Explicitly Disclosed Location Information” that describes the early results of the Tracing the Visitor’s Eye project based with data collected in the Province of Florence. I intended to communicate the complementary perspective new types of digital footprints can bring to mobility, urban and travel studies. The content of other presentations in the session (mainly Ahas Rein’s Mobile Positioning: New Perspective in GIS and Geographical Studies. Ahas chairs an upcoming workshop on social positioning method) that are based GSM network data, helped situate the originality of my approach based on act of communications “I was here” instead of passive, implicit mobility data. It means also no issues of scalability, infrastructure and negotiations with operators. I suggested the idea the explicitly disclosed location data can help inform the design of LBS (e.g. help define area of attention of people, the area of influence of objects, and the granularity of information). Finally, of course, I mentioned the feedback loop generated by people’s past interactions with the urban environment and infrastructure that become recommendations and impact the perception of the space.

Understanding of Tourist Dynamics from Explicitly Disclosed Location Information (slides in PDF)

Later, I presented (on behalf of the WikiCity team) the main concepts and design of the MIT SENSEable City Lab current project WikiCity. Without getting into the technical details, I stressed the importance of developing a real-time mapping of city dynamics for people to become actuators and prime actors of the cityspace. The scenarios of WikiCity is based on the fusion of 3 elements agents (individuals, companies, local authorities…), the environment (architecture, infrastructure, climate…) and technology features (opportunities and limitation positioning and sensing technologies. A main challenge is to provide a common format for interchange of realtime location-based data and to communicate the information to multi-modal interfaces (close to the person such as mobile/fixed devices, embedded in the infrastructure, vehicles (public transport, individual cars).

WikiCity: How can a city perform as an open-source real-time system (slides in PDF)

A book in the making, Urban Informatics: Community Integration and Implementation will include contributions from (among many others) Anthony Townsend, Carlo Ratti, Adam Greenfield, Paul Dourish, Genevieve Bell, Vassilis Kostakos, Christian Nold, Eric Paulos. Some of the contributions come from the presentations given at the Digital Cities 5 workshop at the 3rd International Conference on Communities and Technologies 2007. It is edited by Marcus Foth.

Foth, M. (Ed.) (2008, forthcoming). Urban Informatics: Community Integration and Implementation. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference, IGI Global. Contracted 28 Jan 2007.

The first issue of the Journal of Location-Based Services is now online. It includes a very complete editorial lead article with A critical evaluation of location based services and their potential written by Jonathan Raper. There are several more issues of the journal queueing up to get into print, but the editors are still looking urgently for new LBS articles.

The call for paper, states a wide scope of interest:

Published research will span the field from location-based computing and next-generation interfaces through telecom location architectures to business models and the social implications of this technology. The diversity of content echoes the extended nature of the chain of players required to make location-based services a reality. Hence the journal’s aim is to bridge the research undertaken in industry and academia and promote communication amongst all in this diverse and rapidly growing sector

Relation to my thesis: a very fine place to publish.

Last week at Ubicomp, I briefly met Jo Vermeulen who pointed me to an article on written some 12 years ago by Agusting A. Araya examining and criticizing the proposals advanced by the ubicomp literature: Araya, A. A. (1995). Questioning ubiquitous computing. In ACM Conference on Computer Science, pages 230–237.

This papers sketches a framework for understanding modern technology (now commonly mistaken as being the mere application of modern science) to criticize the technological thinking forming the assumptions that determine the development of ubiquitous computing. It highlights the chain problems and technological fixes we are involved in (e.g. issues of privacy of information dealt with innovative technologies such as cryptography) to reach desirable goal of invisibly enhancing the world that already exists. Now assuming that the technological advances could be achieved, I keep two critiques that are still relevant to the current state of ubicomp research:

Driven by technology, rather than needs
Ubiquitous computing is conceived as being primarily - perhaps exclusively - driven by technology and its sources of inspiration are other technologies that have successfully penetrated everyday life. It is seen as the best possibility for “achieving the real potential of information technology”. Thus, ubicomp has little to do with human needs and much more with the unfolding of technology per se.

Acceptance taken for granted
The primary of the unfolding of technology over the satisfaction of humans needs, and the self-sufficiency of this unfolding are taken as absolute givens. Therefore, it does not really require a justification.

Relation to my thesis: This paper proved to be a rather timely reading (in continuation to train of thought started earlier this year at LIFT). From what I have seen in Innsbruck, these topics are still barely taken into consideration (to the mere exceptions to the talks of Barry Brown and Yvonne Rogers). Arayas’ quote “As the poser of technologies grows, it will become increasingly necessary to probe into the assumptions being made during their inception and into the possible consequences” is still very much contemporary.

A couple of workshops I will send a position paper to:

Situating Sat Nav: Questioning the TomTom Effect, as part of the 2008 Association of American Geographers Annual Conference. 15-19 April 2008, Boston, USA.

Comprehensive in-car satellite navigation (Sat Nav) systems have rapidly become affordable and ‘must-have’ mass-market accessories, advertised on television and the focus of ‘scare’ stories in the tabloid press. With their driver’s-eye position, dynamic maps and an authoritative voice telling you where and when to turn, these archetypal geographical gizmos depend on the ‘magic’ locational power of a cluster of unseen satellites and the global reach of corporations marketing the latest consumer fad. Sat Nav offers technologically sophisticated spatial data models of the world, but the technology quickly sinks into taken-for-granted everyday driving practices, such that its social and political significance is hard to assess. The gadgets themselves take space on the dashboard and windscreens, but also make new senses of space for the driver, well beyond the car. What exactly is the nature of this TomTom effect?

I plan to discuss my work with taxi drivers within the context of my thesis. Deadline: September 30th

Urban Mixed Realities: Technologies, Theories and Frontiers, as part of CHI 2008. April 6th 2008, Florence, Italy

Mixed reality environments encompass a range of domains from pervasive games through to systems to support cultural heritage, and currently represent a growing area of research. However the growth in such systems has resulted in a need to further explore their situated and social nature, and how these aspects impact upon their use of such systems and alter the environment around them. Although there has already been a substantial amount of research into telepresence and sense of place much of this has focused on more traditional technologies such as purely virtual environments or mobile tour guides. In contrast urban mixed reality environments require a substantial change of research emphasis and in doing so must take into account the following shifts
* From virtual to mixed reality environments which mesh or augment places and times
* From psycho-physiological and “constructive perception” to understanding social action, interaction and meaning making
* From a focus on individual behavior to interaction in groups who are co-located and distributed
* From immaterial environments to those which combine real and virtual elements
* From a passive sense of place and presence, one where creation of place, meaning and engaging of all senses plays a critical role

I plan to discuss the work I plan to perform next year as a member of the SENSEable City Lab in the Wireless City project in Florence (e.g. (tourist) interaction issues within urban environments, social navigation, seamful design, evaluation methodology, urban spatio-temporal data analysis). Deadline: 17th October 2007

Jonathan Raper uploaded an extensive bibliography of research in Location-Based Services (MobilityNewv2.txt) that mirrors the one in the Editorial Lead article of the upcoming first issue of the Journal of Location-Based Services.

Relation to my thesis: A complement to my current bibliography (in BibTeX).