In this work we present a mobile application we designed and engineered to enable people to log their travels near and far, leave notes behind, and build a community around spaces in between destinations. Our design explores new ground for location-based social computing systems, identifying opportunities where these systems can foster the growth of on-line communities rooted at non-places. In our work we develop, explore, and evaluate several innovative features designed around four usage scenarios: daily commuting, long-distance traveling, quantified traveling, and journaling. We present the results of two small-scale user studies, and one large-scale, world-wide deployment, synthesizing the results as potential opportunities and lessons learned in designing social computing for non-places.
Other work has looked at designing applications to increase social engagement with the physical world. designed an application that let people convert free form doodles to sharable walking routes on maps @cite_31 . designed an online community of people documenting their experiences at places through sharable city guides @cite_29 . Overall, a meta-analysis of pervasive technology and public transport @cite_5 proposed the development of applications that not facilitate only more efficient journeys, but also more enjoyable ones that people look forward to. This is what we set out to do.
@cite_5 @cite_31 @cite_29
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In the age of mobile communications and social media, users are connected to interact with other people, and often obliged to be socially active as technology drives to connect us. In this paper, we harness the technology for the opposite use: helping people to avoid company instead of encouraging interaction. We have developed the concept of an asocial hiking application (app), in which users can generate routes that avoid meeting other people. We developed the concept based on user feedback data derived from an online survey (n=157) and two focus groups, and created a tool that generates solitary hiking routes based on OpenStreetMap data and additional information from the web. In addition, to make the application react to dynamic changes in the environment, we developed a mobile application prototype that scans Wi-Fi signals to detect other hikers nearby and warn of their approach. The prototype was tested and evaluated with 8 hikers in-the-wild. In addition to the concept design and the functional prototype, we present findings on people's, especially hikers, need for solitude, and introduce user feedback from each stage of the prototype design process as well as design recommendations for an asocial navigation application. The recent wave of sensor-rich, Internet-enabled, smart mobile devices such as the Apple iPhone has opened the door for a novel paradigm for monitoring the urban landscape known as participatory sensing. Using this paradigm, ordinary citizens can collect multi-modal data streams from the surrounding environment using their mobile devices and share the same using existing communication infrastructure (e.g., 3G service or WiFi access points). The data contributed from multiple participants can be combined to build a spatiotemporal view of the phenomenon of interest and also to extract important community statistics. Given the ubiquity of mobile phones and the high density of people in metropolitan areas, participatory sensing can achieve an unprecedented level of coverage in both space and time for observing events of interest in urban spaces. Several exciting participatory sensing applications have emerged in recent years. For example, GPS traces uploaded by drivers and passengers can be used to generate realtime traffic statistics. Similarly, street-level audio samples collected by pedestrians can be aggregated to create a citywide noise map. In this talk, we will provide a comprehensive overview of this new and exciting paradigm and outline the major research challenges. Travelling by public transport is usually regarded as boring and uninteresting. Refraining from talking to the stranger next to you may be due to limitations that are self-imposed and further corroborated by social expectations and cultural norms that govern behaviour in public space. Our design research into passenger interactions on board of urban commuter trains has informed the development of the TrainRoulette prototype -- a mobile app for situated, real-time chats between train passengers. We study the impact of our design intervention on shaping perceptions of the train journey experience. Moreover, we are interested in the implications of such ICT-mediated interactions within train journeys for stimulating social offline interactions and new forms of passenger engagement. Several pervasive and mobile computing systems would benefit from being notified about special events happening in the city. In this paper we present a methodology to discover events from human mobility patterns as recorded by cell network usage. Experiments conducted over an extensive dataset from the main Italian telecom operator show that the proposed approach is effective and can be applied to a number of different scenarios. These results can have a strong impact on pervasive applications including online map services, automatic gazetteers, urban planning, and disaster response.