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.

The Urbanware Neighborhood API

Urban Mapping, a provider of geospatial data and services released today an API to access its Urbanware Neighborhood database and computation logic for neighborhoods, other informally-defined regions and transit systems. This service include neighborhoods located at a point/location, neighborhoods within a city or bounding box, alternative neighborhood names, relationships with other neighborhoods (nesting, aliases, dominance), multi-lingual support, intersecting postal codes and intersecting municipalities.

Relation to my thesis: Human’s perspective of the space hardly translates to its digital definition stored geographic information systems (see Defining Neighborhoods and User-Centered Approach on Geodata). I am eager to play around with the Urbanware API (the dataset includes Barcelona)

Geosimulation

In the light of my latest spatio-temporal visualization, I stumbled on Paul Torrens’ Geosimulation and his research on modeling time, space, and behavior. He will present his work on Wi-Fi mapping and geography at the upcoming O’Reilly Emerging Technologies (ETech) conference.

Paul describes geosimulation as:

Geosimulation is a catch-all phrase that can be used to represent a new wave of spatial simulation modeling that has come to the fore in very recent years. Besides traditional urban modeling and simulation, the intellectual roots of geosimulation derive from recent developments in computer science and geographic information science. The geosimulation approach draws together a diversity of theories and techniques, offering a unique perspective that traditional simulation has commonly lacked: a view of urban phenomena as a result of the collective dynamics of interacting objects, often represented at the scale of individual households, people, and units of real estate and at time-scales approaching “real time”.

The book Geosimulation. Automata-based modeling of urban phenomena covers the subject

The cloud of Wi-Fi signal that envelops central Salt Lake City, UT, generated by ~1700 access points. Courtesy of Paul Torrens.

Relation to my thesis: Besides the geospatial information visualization, this works relates to my exploration of agent-based modeling. Generating a “geosimulation” was one of the potential approach to validate models of people use of location information. It is also interesting to see that these types of spatio-temporal analysis (urban analytics) projects now reaching the audience of emerging technologies conferences. I strongly expect a “urban computing” (or whatever the catch-all word will be) track at LIFT 2009…

Ocean Break

Contextual Ad

The City Is Here For You To Use: Urban form and experience in the age of ubiquitous computing

This makes my day! Adam announces The City Is Here For You To Use… “power to the people” style. This book will seeks to understand what impact everyware will likely to have on metropolitan form and experience. It will cover questions and themes close to my heart such as:

• How might we use these new technologies to create liveable, humane, sustainable and vibrant places?
• Will we be able to do so while managing the inevitable new orders of frustration and inconvenience they’ll occasion – to say nothing of their unsettling, inherent potential for panoptical surveillance and regulation?

3D Geospatial Visualization of Tourist Density and Flows

While finishing a journal paper on our initial results of Tracing the Visitor’s Eye, I completed the development of my “Urban Dynamics” software to visualize on top of Google Earth the tourist density and flows. There is an explanatory page with examples of Barcelona, Spain and Florence, Italy available in: 3D geospatial visualization of tourist density and flows

Relation to my thesis: I have been developing “Urban Dynamics” as a tool to analyze spatio-temporal data of field studies. It is also a piece of work that proves that 2008 might be the year of Neogeographer as suggested by Andrew Hudson-Smith at CASA.

Receeding Space for Children's Mobility

Thinking about how innovation and urban infrastructure affects people mobility, the Daily Mail’s How children lost the right to roam in four generations provides an example of the declining mobility of children in cities and suburbs. It Includes is a map of the wondering space of children over three generations. Its gone down from about 6 miles in the early 1900s to about 300 meters today.

Courtey of the Daily Mail.
via the Future of Cities

Relation to my thesis: Example of the innovation impacting mobility and the perception of space. Connectivity (quality, opt-in/out) have lead to similar changes (see Rethinking the Role of Space in a Networked World), location-based services might also affect our relation with space.

Instant City by Archigram

Watching some of the presentations made at the Villes 2.0 workshops on the 4 big challenges for a Ville 2.0, I was intrigued by Thierry Marcou‘s mention of Archigram. According to Wikipedia, Archigram is:

Archigram was an avant-garde architectural group formed in the 1960s – based at the Architectural Association, London – that was futurist, anti-heroic and pro-consumerist, drawing inspiration from technology in order to create a new reality that was solely expressed through hypothetical projects.

One of the members, David Greene wrote in the first issue of Archigram magazine:

A new generation of architecture must arise with forms and spaces which seems to reject the precepts of ‘Modern’ yet in fact retains those precepts. We have chosen to by pass the decaying Bauhaus image which is an insult to functionalism. You can roll out steel – any length. You can blow up a balloon – any size. You can mould plastic – any shape. Blokes that built the Forth Bridge – they didn’t worry.”

One of the Archigram project, Instant City, is a mobile technological event that drifts into underdeveloped, drab towns via air (balloons) with provisional structures (performance spaces) in tow. The effect is a deliberate overstimulation to produce mass culture, with an embrace of advertising aesthetics. The whole endeavor is intended to eventually move on leaving behind advanced technology hook-ups.

The french newspaper Le Monde has a very nice audio and visual description of Instant City.

One of the collage revealing Instant City and its scenarios © Ron Herron, Archigram Courtesy Ron Herron Archive

Relation to my thesis: Of course, Instant City is a stunning example of a vision of architecture made of atoms… and bits, it is not hard to imagine the balloons acting has the current Internet clouds of connectivity.

Catching up with the pile of media I was not able to swallow the past couple of months. The Fing work on the city (Ville 2.0) and Hubert Guillaud’s recent articles on traces and “hyperlocalité” are excellent source of inspiration:
- Comment protéger notre vie privée dans un monde où la traçabilité explose ?
- Personnalisation sans identification
- Hyperlocal : nos réseaux dans la rue, nos rues dans l’écran
- Révéler l’hyperlocal
- Vers la ville personnelle

Chronotope

People at the Chronos Group digged up the term “chronotope” from the 90s. According to Wikipedia, chronotope can be literally translated as “time-space”. In the context of urbanism, it highlights the temporal features of the city (see Une interprétation chronotopique by Alain Guez). The increasing availability of digital traces allows new perspectives of chronotopic analysis of urban spaces. The chronotopic visualizations (and tools) developed in WikiCity and Tracing the Visitor’s Eye most definitively go in the direction of revealing the “mobilities” not only in space but also over time (history and real time).