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.
Previous work has explored the design of technologies to connect people with one another while riding public transportation. For instance, researchers developed Trainroulette, an app to promote situated in-train social interaction between passengers'' @cite_35 . The researchers found that people were interested in knowing who shares the rides with them, but wanted to do it semi-anonymously (exposing only certain aspects of their identity). Similarly, Belloni and colleagues @cite_6 explored the use of mobile technologies in transitional spaces.'' Their work focused on the design of a location-based friend finder that displays any of the user's friends that are in the same subway train. The researchers found that users wanted the ability to invisibly'' log in to the system. This need for identity opaqueness inspired the design of our app's identity system.
@cite_35 @cite_6
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This project explores the social possibilities of mobile technology in transitional spaces such as public transport. Based on a cultural probes study of Stockholm subway commuters, we designed a location-based friend finder that displays only people in the same train as the user. We aim at reaching a critical mass of users and therefore decided to make the system compatible with as many phones as possible, thus it was designed as a simple web application. An initial informal study pointed out consequences of certain design decisions on the user experience and highlighted social tensions created by presence awareness. 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. 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. Planners and social psychologists have suggested that the recognizability of the urban environment is linked to people's socio-economic well-being. We build a web game that puts the recognizability of London's streets to the test. It follows as closely as possible one experiment done by Stanley Milgram in 1972. The game picks up random locations from Google Street View and tests users to see if they can judge the location in terms of closest subway station, borough, or region. Each participant dedicates only few minutes to the task (as opposed to 90 minutes in Milgram's). We collect data from 2,255 participants (one order of magnitude a larger sample) and build a recognizability map of London based on their responses. We find that some boroughs have little cognitive representation; that recognizability of an area is explained partly by its exposure to Flickr and Foursquare users and mostly by its exposure to subway passengers; and that areas with low recognizability do not fare any worse on the economic indicators of income, education, and employment, but they do significantly suffer from social problems of housing deprivation, poor living conditions, and crime. These results could not have been produced without analyzing life off- and online: that is, without considering the interactions between urban places in the physical world and their virtual presence on platforms such as Flickr and Foursquare. This line of work is at the crossroad of two emerging themes in computing research - a crossroad where "web science" meets the "smart city" agenda.