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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This review of IT-based services offered in public transportation focuses on the passenger's perspective. The authors suggest new directions for future services, stressing the need to develop frameworks for assessing service quality and customer satisfaction. This paper describes a study of algorithmic living with Trace, a mobile mapping application that generates walking routes based on digital sketches people create and annotate without a map. In addition to creating walking paths, Trace enables people to send the paths to others. We designed Trace to explore the possibility of emphasizing guided wandering over precise, destination-oriented navigation. Studies of sixteen people's use of Trace over roughly one week reveal how walkers find Trace both delightful and disorienting, highlighting moments of surprise, frustration, and identification with GIS routing algorithms. We conclude by discussing how design interventions offers possibilities for understanding the work of mapping and how it might be done differently in HCI. We report on our design of Curated City, a website that lets people build their own personal guide to the city's neighborhoods by chronicling their favorite experiences. Although users make their own personal guides, they are immersed in a social curatorial experience where they are influenced directly and indirectly by the guides of others. We use a 2-week field trial involving 20 residents of Pittsburgh as a technological probe to explore the initial design decisions, and we further refine the design landscape through subject interviews. Based on this study, we identify a set of design recommendations for building scalable social platforms for curating the experiences of the city.