Technology as a life-saver? enabler?
Seen in Geneva few months ago

The last issue of The Economist ha a special report on mobile technologies and nomadism. The report features relevant articles but there was one that I don’t really agree with. For example, the one called “location, location, location” definitely overestimate the short term and is in contradiction with currenf facts (see the previous blogpost):

“Most obviously, this means that “the idea of being lost will be unheard of”, he says. More interestingly, it allows people to become “more immersed in the real world around them”.“

The most interesting part is certainly a short video on their website where they asked Jan Chipchase to self-document his nomadic life in Tokyo and Seattle, taking pictures and leaving phone messages.

More notes about this report later.

In-Car GPS Navigation: Engagement with and Disengagement from the Environment by Leshed, Velden, Rieger, Kot, & Sengers is a paper presented at CHI 2008 that deals with the relationship between GPS car navigation and how people interpret their environment or navigate through it. What’s interesting here is that they avoid technological determinism (technology as the external causation of change) and the traditional lament/pessimisn about technologies influence on social change.

Using an ethnographically-informed study with GPS users, the authors show that GPS disengages people from their surrounding environment, but also has the potential to open up novel ways to engage with it“. The issues of environmental engagement and disengagement are the following:

• Pre-navigation/Route Choice: ““Finding” the destination is thus modified from a relative spatial activity to correctly keying in the address“
• Route Following: GPS eliminate the attention to objects in the paths, some people less blindly than others.
• Orientation in Unfamiliar Areas: “ the GPS disconnects the drivers from the external environment, as they no longer need to find out where they are in order to avoid getting lost or for getting oriented when already lost. This issue is intensified when the GPS automatically and quietly recalculates a new route when its directions are not followed unintentionally (e.g. because of a mistake) or intentionally (e.g. because of road constructions and detours): the practice of re-orienting and consciously re-routing oneself is not necessary anymore. However, some informants reported that they do like to know where they are

Orientation in familiar areas: people do not want to have oral instructions, sometimes disagree with paths, use the gps “just for fun” or use it mark place they know.

• When driving: social Interactions around the GPS: with: “interaction with other passengers in the car has altered given in-car GPS units. With vocal directions from the GPS unit, a passenger who serves as a navigator in the car is no longer in need, and so the driver/navigator roles are modified“
• When driving, the GPS is often treated as an “active agent”, socially speaking: naming the device, talking to him.
• When driving, the interaction with the external environment and locals is also altered. For instance, the digital representation is not accurate enough so people have to look outside and see if their POI is here or it can allow to discover new elements (rivers or parks) on the way. And interaction with other people are less needed (to ask a direction).

Based on these results, the author provides some “high-level guidance rather than feature-centered design” ideas:

• “GPS instructions could refer to landmarks in aiding navigation.
• Highlight the ambiguity of GPS data (…) to minimize risks associated with over-trusting an automated device.
• Extend context-aware capabilities: distinctive usage of the GPS in familiar areas
• Support the car as a social place: Instead of secluding the passenger seated near the driver (…) we can engage them in the interaction with the GPS
  unit.”

Why do I blog this? great paper from lots of criteria (theoretical justification, nice exemplification of techno-social recombination, design implications). Moreover, the design implications are close to what we found in another location-based context: in the CatchBob experiment, while studying how WiFi positioning is employed by players (I’m currently writing a paper with Fabien about it). That paper is also interesting at it contradicts what that “location, location, location” article in the last Economist report state (the fact that we will never be lost or be more immersed in the physical world.

Leshed, G., Velden, T., Rieger, O., Kot, B., & Sengers, P. (2008). In-car GPS navigation: Engagement with and disengagement from the environment. Best Paper Award. To appear in Proceedings of CHI 2008, Florence, Italy.

Reading Stamen’s work about cab spots with Eddie Elliott. They actually used the Cabspotting API to produce high-res long-term point maps of San Francisco with cab GPS lcoations. Part of the result description attracted my attention:

“downtown buildings are so high and close together that GPS signals can’t make it down to the ground with very much accuracy, bounce around off the glass and steel, and give “bad” results. Fair enough; downtown’s not so accurate. But what it means in terms of urban area chartings, where cabs tend to stay in very narrow street slots, is that you can use a visualization like this to tell immediately where the high buildings are by the degree of fuzziness in the map, and if you mapped the height of the buildings over this image, they’d probably overlap prety much one-to-one.
(…)
you and I live in a world where normal people can look at complex data visualizations of urban environments, notice anomalies in the display, go to the web to find information about where that place is, and then make pretty good guesses as to why the data is showing up the way it is. It needs smart people with some non-trivial technical knowhow to make these particular views on it possible, sure. But once that’s done, there’s a very quick path available to free information that can be used to reinforce, disprove, or generally poke at the way that the world is, and why it is that way, and it’s fluid and easy and you can start asking real questions very quickly.

I think this is a new thing.“

Why do I blog this? documenting new processes about the implications of urban visualizations when discussing in a bar with Fabien.