Leveraging Urban Digital Footprints with Social Navigation and Seamful Design

Late last year, a position paper I submitted to the Urban Mixed Reality workshop at CHI’08 was only accepted as a poster presentation. In this paper, we propose that digital footprints present an opportunity to the residents and tourists the ability to look down on the city and view the activities and their consequences. When this information is fed back to the community, it can inform the decision-making and change the behaviors through social navigation. However, the design of a social navigation service should take into consideration the lack of accuracy in space and time of digital footprints. Apparently, the unique reviewer who rejected the paper understood that we propose the use of digital footprints to support people in navigating (orientation/path/aims) in the city.

So I thought that instead of flying overseas to present a poster, it might be more relevant to leave this position paper online with its reviews, open for discussion and thoughts to the reader of this blog. Considering the encouraging comments of the second reviewer, I will most probably recycle it for future publications.

Leveraging urban digital footprints with social navigation and seamful design
Girardin, F., Nova, N., Dal Fiore, F., Ratti, C., Blat, J.

Abstract. The widespread deployment of mobile and wireless technologies increases the amount of recorded interactions between humans and the urban environment. The accumulation of these digital footprints provides new opportunities to reveal human behaviors in space. Beyond their utility to improve the quantity and quality of mobility data already available to urban planners and local authorities, this information can be returned to residents and visitors to enhance their perception of the space and inform their discussions and decision making. In this paper, we argue that digital footprints, when properly revealed, can act as social navigation cues to support the exploration of the city.

[Full paper - 104KB]

Reviewer 1 (reject):
The paper discussed ideas on how to make patterns of mobility and flow based on digital footprints available to tourists and residents. The discussion is based on two concepts – ‘social navigation’ and ‘seamful design’. I miss a reflection on previous studies on supporting people’s orientations/paths/aims when moving in a city through giving them visual information. This is a quite complex endeavor and it is not sufficient to provide a ‘vision’ without thorough grounding. For example, I don’t underdstand the usefulness of ‘seams’ (uncertainty of data, lack of timeliness, etc.) for people. You may want to read Bill Gaver’s paper on ‘Ambiguity as a resource for design’.

Reviewer 2 (accept):
The paper argues for the use of digital footprints as social navigation cues for the exploration of the city. Digital footprints are space and time referenced data that are produced by the increased amount of recorded interactions between humans and the urban environment. The paper presents an approach meant to leverage this kind of mobility data to support awareness of the overall dynamics of an urban space and affect the discussion and decision-making of residents and visitors in that space. Challenges inherent to the rendering of spatio-temporal data in mobile and urban environments are addressed by adopting a “seamful design” approach revealing the imperfection of the sensed data.

The contribution of the paper to an overall framework for the social use of mobility data is timely and likely to raise discussion. Suggestions for improvement: the authors may want to better explain the idea of “cultural views of mobility” and provide more examples on the kind of data that could be used and how their visualization would inform people’s behaviour in the urban space.