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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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. 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.