*sigh* PhD Dissertation Submitted *sigh*

It is entitled “Aspects of implicit and explicit human interactions with ubiquitous geographic information“. In this dissertation, I cover some implications of the presence of ubiquitous technologies that afford people new flexibility in conducting their daily activities and simultaneously provide the means to study human activities in time and space. I employ seven of my first-authored papers to describe the following aspects of people interactions with these technologies to access and generate ubiquitous geoinformation:

• Sources and perception of spatial uncertainty (CatchBob!)
• Appropriation of ubiquitous geoinformation (Taxi drivers in Barcelona)
• Implicit human interaction with wireless infrastructure as source of travel detection (Travel survey, no public content yet)
• User-generated ubiquitous geoinformatin as evidence of tourist dynamics (Tracing the visitor’s eye in Florence and Rome)
• Digital footprints as evidences of urban attractiveness (New York City Waterfalls)

At the start of this journey to a PhD, 3.5 years ago, I remember my wish to learn to fit to the mold of academia. Instead, I quite naturally emancipated from that thought, with inspirations from Nicolas or Julian. While keeping true to the purpose of science, I certainly intended to explore beyond the bounding box of one domain and its methods. Reading Järvinen Pertti’s book gave me that necessary holistic view on research methods. The exposure to new approaches and different research cultures and the consideration of real-life issues certainly contributed to the unusual aspect of my thesis. In fact, this thesis is the fruit of this exploration. I am convinced that the interdisciplinary knowledge and skills developed in this journey will enable me to adapt to a constantly changing world. Indeed, my work does not claim in-depth findings acquired through the application of one methodology. Rather, It stresses that varied approaches applied to varied problems strengthen both the methodological approach and the support for the more factual knowledge evidenced. To reach this contribution, I explored the creation of footbridges between domains that do not have the tradition to cross-communicate. I take pride to have developed both factual and designl knowledge from field works in collaboration with cognitive scientists, social scientists, software engineers, network engineers, computer scientists, industrial designers, and architects. The warm response of the members of my thesis jury constituted by experts from the domains of geography, anthropology, data mining, computer science, spatial information science and transportation research is certainly a proof of the attractiveness of my work in a wide context. It also confirms my wish, shared with my PhD advisor, to produce a scientifically honest piece of work that is accessible to people on the edges of academia.

In my next journey, I will further nurture my research qualities, on that edges, at the friction area between the technical, the human and the urban. But this time, I will practice freed from the overheads of academia (more on that later).

Relation to my thesis: Almost the end of the process… let’s prepare the defense! A collateral outcome of this journey, I now master a fourth language, Spanish.

Related to *sigh* DEA Thesis Submitted *sig* and Framing my PhD Dissertation

Mapping the World’s Photos

Related to my past project on Tracing the Visitor’s Eye and World’s Eyes, David Crandall and colleagues at Cornell have created global and city maps and identify popular snapping sites from photos uploaded on Flickr. They ran statistical analyses to identify the most important clusters of “”what the world is paying attention to”. Next they analysed the text tags added to photographs in those clusters, as well as key visual features from each image, to automatically find the world’s most interesting tourist sites. We find that visual and temporal features improve the ability to estimate the location of a photo, compared to using just textual features (slightly similar to IM2GPS: estimating geographic information from a single image). Their paper, Mapping the World’s Photos, recently presented at the WWW 2009 conference explains the process and results in more details.

Representative images for the top landmark in each of the top 20 European cities. All parts of the figure, including the representative images, textual labels, and even the map itself were produced automatically from our corpus of geo-tagged photos. Image courtesy of David Crandall. More on the project’s web page.
Relation to my thesis: Similar to my work, Crandall et al. I have used the spatial distribution of where people take photos to define a relation between the photos that are taken at popular places. I have used similar representations of spatio-temporal traces to illustrate my techniques and finding. However, my motivations has not been to improve photo management and organization applications (see also Mor Namaan’s work). Similar to Currid and Williams’ work on Mapping the Cultural Buzz, I employed georeferenced photos as a proxy to “qualify” the space (e.g. its attractiveness). But rather than mapping and qualifying a timeless space (Currid and Williams talk about “buzz-worthy” without referring to when), I particularly explore the temporal aspect of the data (see The End of Timelessness). For instance, in my work on the NYC Waterfalls, I studies the evolution of the density of georeferenced photos and the flows of photographers to provide evidences of the evolution of the attractiveness of the space (journal paper still in submission).

The Visualization of photographer movement in Manhattan mapped by Crandall is particularly stiking:

To produce these figures, we plotted the geolocated coordinates of sequences of images taken by the same user, sorted by time, for which consecutive photos were no more than 30 minutes apart. Image courtesy of David Crandall

The Spatiality of Ubiquitous Computing

Martin Dodge announces the Software and Space theme issue for Environment and Planning A with some of the papers available online now. This issues was meant as a useful contemporary review of different developments under what can be labelled, broadly, as ‘the spatiality of ubiquitous computing’ (see the introduction “How Does Software Make Space? Exploring Some Geographical Dimensions of Pervasive Computing and Software Studies“). Through the lenses of Software studies that expands understanding of code beyond its technical aspects, this issue brings geographical work on ubiquitous computing. In other words, it discusses the significance of software as an agent in the making of spaces. For instance, software can make space through the capacity of calculation at a scale and speed far beyond human abilities. Equally significant for geographers is the degree to which software is also spatial; an issue that will become only more important as ubiquitous computing unfolds in the social world. For instance the appearance of “machine readable” spaces:

The growing calculative role of code is of greatest concern with its ability to render all kinds of spaces ‘machine readable’ through identification technologies and fine scale sensors (Dodge and Kitchin, 2005a; Dennis 2008) enabling the generation of ‘data shadows’ and so-called ‘lifelogs’ that record the minutiae of everyday life with great granularity and, potentially, to never forget what has been captured (Allen 2008; Dodge and Kitchin, 2007). These extensive and readable spaces can then be interpreted by code which makes decisions automatically including socially significant ones, in terms of access control and anticipatory governance (cf. Adey 2009; Graham, 2005).

An agent in making Manhattan readable

Close to my observations, the editors Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin and Matt Zook highlight the particularities of software in relation to their failures and fluctuating quality:

As a product software also enjoys some unusual qualities. How software is licensed means that liabilities for its failures are limited. Although most people do not read the terms and conditions they agree to when using licensed software, they are willingly accepting an imperfect product whilst abrogating the supplier from responsibility for damage caused. These imperfections in terms of bugs, glitches and crashes are at once notorious and yet also largely accepted as a routine part of the ‘conveniences’ of computers.

Runtime error in the subway, a routine part of the ‘conveniences’ of computers. Contact your service representative?

Relation to my thesis: After considering the temporal dimension of ubiquitous computing, I use the contributions of my thesis to discuss the aspects of human-space relationships, particularly with the evidences that the integration of ubiquitious geoinformation changes the relations of people with the space. This issue echoes very well with my works that show how software that collect, store, analyze and visualize ubiquitous geoinformation alters the perception of the space, particularly to what the editors describe as “Machine readable spaces” and “Imperfections as the routine part of the convenience of computers”. It complements some of my consideration on the temporal dimension of ubiquitous computing

The End of Timelessness

Writing the conclusion of my dissertation, there is one implication of my research work that I still have not completely gotten my brain around. I will try to layout my thoughts here. I believe that one contribution of my work has been to reveal the new aspects of time with our relation to space through ubiquitous technologies. For instance, I have studied the co-evolution of a community of early adopters with their navigation system, the timely capture of travelers experiences, the potentials of spatio-temporal data shadows such as measuring the evolution of the attractiveness of the space. Each study shows that our relation with geoinformation (and by extension space) has been altered from our interactions with mobile and wireless technologies. The information is accessible and generated ubiquitously, augmenting our roles of sensors and actors of the space. This presence of what Adam Greenfield would refer to, in a more articulate manner, as the Big Now creates an utilitarian fascination to the real-time or the predictability as instantiated in my case study on “Detecting air travel in real time” from a mobile phone implicit interaction wireless networks (in submission). This fascination overshadows the end of our ephemeral relation with space potentially leading to a new version of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and the presence of the hard/soft infrastructure design that does not take it into account.

I call it the end of timelessness. The end of the ephemeral, or what Adam Greenfield would describe as the Long Here, is mainly exposed in my work on Tracing the Visitor’s Eye and related. The observations of the presence of the hard infrastructures that deny the Long Here took place around the NYC Waterfalls study and the novel opportunity to define of indicators of the evolution of attractiveness of the space. Similarly, the ubiquitous technologies of the present, fail to accommodate for the Long Here, the change in the city and the implication on the social practices. Wearing qualitative lenses with a taxi drivers in Barcelona, I could observe co-evolutive ballet with their navigation system and extract the implications of the soft infrastructure on the knowledge of the city.

The embedment of urban informatics into the urban fabrics makes the integration of the Long Here in integral part of the design of hard and soft infrastructures. I would argue that this kind of case studies sets stage to the end of the timelessness considerations of individuals interactions with urban infrastructures. A satellite navigation system does not perform the same service the first six months in the practices of a inexperienced taxi drivers compared to a user with 20 year of knowledge of the city. Moreover, they do not, over time, request the same granularity of geoinformation nor do they assess the quality of the information with the same experience of the technology and knowledge of the city. A different kind of “long here” evolution of the presence and practices of that can be analyzed through their interactions with soft infrastructures to assess the quality of the spatial settings. This longitudinal understanding of the evolution of the interaction can then be applied to the design of the urban informatics. For instance, we made sure that our mobile phone algorithm to detect air travel was not perfect, as our system takes advantage of false detections to keep the survey participants with a certain level of involvement.

The evolution of the people practices, interactions and frictions with the urban space can be compiled very informally as Nicolas and I compiled in Sliding Friction and related. This kind of approach helps highlighting the reality, its complex dynamics, its subtleties, and its situational particularities. My research work suggests the combinations of more formal data collection and analysis approaches. They took the form of quantitative (reality mining), qualitative (ethno-inspired), mixed research methods to a more active, utility-driven mode with design science research.

New use of Bowling Green, the oldest public park in New York City

Now these approaches strongly contrast with the practice of architecture and urban design that almost utterly ignore this notion of time. For instance, from my understanding, there exist limited methods to capture and evaluate the user experience and the use of the built space. That makes me wonder wether since Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn (video of the BBC TV series inspired by the book) any progress has been made to integrate the complexifying intertwinement of hard infrastructures, soft infrastructures and individual/social practices into their design practices. 15 years ago, Frank Duffy explained that “architects have been slow to join the evaluation bandwagon, It’s got somewhat trapped in the academic field, I am afraid“. When considering the hybrid space with real-time elements, asynchronous communications and its logging capabilities of soft infrastrcture, it seems that the human/social elements with their evolution and adaptability find little consideration when in competition with aesthetic.

A bench to relax or work or both? between an ATM and a defibrillator at the cramped part of Logan airport

In consequence, as Steward Brand explains, “More often than not, the pull to conduct evaluations has come from client organizations, not from the architects themselves” also suggesting to collect feedback from facility manager to grasp the dimensions of time and use into building. In contrast, in the digital world, there is a greater tradition of analysing breadcrums to improve the design of web sites. Of course, nowadays, who and where are the facility managers in hybrid spaces?

The lack of consideration of the human in current practices of the designer of the hard infrastructures is particularly striking with the traditional aseptic graphics and medium to communicate them. But the competences to learn from the evolution of the infrastructure do not only require interpretative methods for human and social dynamics, but also for technological/intrastructural counterparts. For instance, 4 years ago, the analysis the players space-time trails in our pervasive game CatchBob! with a custom made “replay tool” necessitated technical knowledge to extract the technological issues of the ubiquitious infrastructures and its evolution. I would not expect this to be otherwise nowadays. This to exemplify that the ability to understand and properly bend the hard infrastructure will naturally come from cross-disciplinary teams that consider time in their practice. For instance, software engineering has been evolving in its practice to check the quality assurance throughout the life of a software (see Software that makes software better). The techniques aim at preventing from the software to break without running it (statistic analysis tools) and also detect when it breaks (dynamic analysis tools).

Consequence of unproper blackbox testing… Maybe an error caused by a 64 bit floating point number relating to the outdoor temperature respect to the wind conditions converted to a 16 bit signed integer

Relation to my thesis: Extract some contribution of my PhD thesis (the end of timelessness) to consider their implications on the evaluation of the evolution of the relation between the hard, the soft and the human in hybrid environments. From my experience, a mix of methods are necessary to grasp a world of fast-moving technology. This methods go beyond the current limited approaches of practitioners of the built space, to the exception of Post-occupency evaluations that introduce the dimensions of time and use into building. On the other hand, the practices of practitioners of the soft and digital world are evolving to take time and evolution into consideration. Of course that should lead to an improvement in: reliability, life-cycle behavior, environmental impact and user acceptance.

My research work sets the stage for tools and techniques to reveal evolution or repetitions, with observations and measures of expectation, initial frustration and delight, adjustment, and long-term adaptivity. I examply some elements in my taxi drivers study, the application of metrics as in new york and the collection of evidences “sliding frictions”.

Mapping the Cultural Buzz

A couple of weeks ago at the Association of American Geographers meeting in Las Vegas, Elizabeth Currid (USC) and Sarah Williams (Columbia University) presented their paper The Geography of Buzz: Art, Culture and the Social Milieu (full aper). As described in Mapping the Cultural Buzz: How Cool Is That?, their work takes snapshots from more than 6,000 events from the data mining of 300,000 photos from Getty Images to categorize them according to event type, controlled for overly celebrity-driven occasions and geo-tagged at the street level. They exploited these photos as proxy for ‘buzz-worthy’ social contexts. As a result, they were able to quantify and understand, visually and spatially, how this creative cultural scene really worked. Based on these evidences, they can argue that those not conventionally involved in city development (paparazzi, marketers, media) have unintentionally played a significant role in the establishment of buzz and desirability hubs within a city.

Density of “fashion” events in New York
Relation to my thesis: After Anthony Townsend’s Augmenting Public Space and Authoring Public Art: The Role of Locative Media, the geography of buzz provides another instantiation of the value of digital footprints to describe the city. However, this use of photos as proxy of human time-space activity raises issues in not to confound behaviors with endorsement. It is one of the limitation of my work on the NYC Waterfalls. Nevertheless, Currid and Williams work certainly strengthen the value of my work on Tracing the Visitor’s Eye, with quotes that could come from straight out of this blog:

“We’re going to see more research that’s using these types of finer-grained data sets, what I call data shadows, the traces that we leave behind as we go through the city,” she said. “They’re going to be important in uncovering what makes cities so dynamic.”

They also provide another argument for the discussion of the contributions of my research work in the context of human-space relationship:

“People talk about the end of place and how everything is really digital. In fact, buzz is created in places, and this data tells us how this happens.”

Finally, an excellent reference in their bibliography that coins data shadows:

Zook, Matthew, Martin Dodge, Yuko Aoyama, Anthony Townsend, “New Digital Geographies: Information, Communication, and Place”, In Geography and Technology, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004

Below the Tip of the Urban Data Iceberg

Data mining artist Andrea Vaccari gave a thorough interview to ZDNet on his current investigation at MIT SENSEable City Lab also providing context of the lab’s current endeavors. He starts of by argumenting on the necessity to produce quality visualizations responding to the skeptics that call it “info-porn“. I found myself defending the necessity of the urban demos produced at SENSEable to attract attention, stimulate the dialogue and stretch the imagination. Yet, this is only the tip of the iceberg of the work produced in Cambridge that strongly relies on the experience and data generated during the demos to produce scientific content. The opacity of the research review process and publication venues, does not often allow to get a glimpse of the research outcomes. So Andrea goes at it and gets specific on the type of contributions we can expect form the analysis of city-scale data. He takes example of the project in the context of the New York City Waterfalls we collaborated on to describe how the analysis of urban dynamics can become evidences of the evolution of the attractiveness of the most popular areas of a city. Other of his works aim at identifying unexpected events and assist public authorities and first responders.

Andrea recently presented the lab’s work at Etech (slides) where is seems that the buzz was on the fusion of sensor data with social data traffic that “to improve life“. Beside this honorable goal, I am dubious that this is purely reachable with data mining, machine learning to networks analysis and statistics. But maybe the current conclusion of my dissertation plays a bad influence on me.

Relation to my thesis: Andrea describes very well the lab its approach and projects I had the chance to share back in my SENSEable days. The open question that he leaves at the end of his interview are up my alley. Currently writing the conclusion of my dissertation, I take advantage to draw the implications of my work and discuss “human side of urban data” and what it means in context of urbanism; discarding a pure data-driven urbanism and sketching something I would call human-based urbanism, an approach mixing quantitative and qualitative data analysis.

Exploring Fact City: Trust and Acceptance

An intriguing paper in the nytime “Wikipedia: Exploring Fact City” builds an analogy between Wikipedia and a city. Like a city, Wikipedia is a tale of spontaneous organization and achievement because it mimics the basic civility, trust, acceptance of a city. The author Noam Cohen elaborates in trust with references to Jane Jacobs observations of sidewalks and rules that govern them:

It is this sidewalk-like transparency and collective responsibility that makes Wikipedia as accurate as it is. The greater the foot traffic, the safer the neighborhood.

The concept of acceptance is developed with reference to Lewis Mumford’s “The City in History,”

Even before the city is a place of fixed residence, it begins as a meeting place to which people periodically return: the magnet comes before the container, and this ability to attract nonresidents to it for intercourse and spiritual stimulus no less than trade remains one of the essential criteria of the city, a witness to its essential dynamism, as opposed to the more fixed and indrawn form of the village, hostile to the outsider.”

Why do I blog this?: Working on a project that propose the treatment of a city digital infrastructure with the same approach of its physical infrastructure (i.e. enable rather than structure urban life). Some thoughts in this article can support my argumentation. Digital infrastructure could relay on these approaches of trust and acceptance to enable rather than authoritatively structure/frame/contain the intercourse and spiritual stimulus that make living in a city possible.

Citizens to Improve Bicing

In relation to the visualization to raise the awareness on the dynamics of bicing from openly available data, Aleix Ruiz de Villa has developed an algorithm to improve the distribution of the bikes. The solution, inspired by the classic traveling salesman problem, simulates the movement of the trucks that redistribute the bikes to work on the best routes to perform the job in less time. Besides the theoretical problem, the major issues hides behind the complexity of the city. So far Aleix has worked on the historic behavior of bike stations, simplifying the problem to 100 stations.The specifications and logistics of bike-sharing systems is coming to a science, and so far the citizens have been leading it. Alex decided to work on it observing the trucks going around the city and thinking there might be a more efficient solution.

The “traveling salesman” of the XXI century

Reformulating the co-evolution of taxi drivers and their in-car navigation systems

To complete my PhD dissertation that will be based on a series of papers, I am writing a journal version of my study presented at last year’s AAG: The co-evolution of taxi drivers and their in-car navigation systems. Besides improving the details that describe the research method, I need to rephrase the elements of co-evolution I aimed at capturing, re-categorize the findings and work on a discussion section that compares the findings with related works and link them to implications consideration for design. A revamp I dissect below.

Motivations
The extensive distribution of satellite navigation systems represents the first massive adoption of location-aware system by the public. However, the market success also translates into documented poor integration of the technology into the practice of driving (e.g. distractions that create accidents, frustrations due to the uneven quality of the geoinformation). From this observation, we hypothesize that users of satellite navigation systems overcome these types of problems by both adapting to their systems and adapting their systems to their needs. First we wanted to report on evidences of this co-evolution (theorized in Orlikowski, 1992a; O’Day, Bobrow, Shirley, 1996, Ackerman, 2000) and then describe the detected implications (e.g. (de-)skilling factors on the knowledge of the city and social relationships, modification of the wayfinding practice, new relations to the environment). An ethnographical approach provides an appropriate analytic angle to examine user practices in context and situated activities (need stronger arguments here!). We argue that our observations and interpretations can be valuable to designers of next generation location-aware systems particularly to understand how a) users create over time unanticipated use to better fit their need, if the system is capable of only partial satisfaction; b) a location-aware system effects the interaction of the user with their environment (social, physical, informational); c) the implication of the adoption of location-aware system on potential for future design. An example in Hutchins cognition in the wild is the slow evolution of navigational tools. For example, the Mercator projection for maps simplifies navigation calculations, and its creation was an act of tool adoption and co-evolution.

Phases of co-evolution
We analyzed this co-evolution for three different phases

1. Acquisition: why and how this new technology gets integrated into other artifacts and how, over time, it impacts the use of these artifacts;
2. Expectation gap: how the reasons to acquire are matched in practices and where are the expectation gaps;
3. Evolution of the appropriation: despite the gaps, how does the practices evolves in relation a) to the awareness and reactions to the limitations and imperfections of the system; b) to driver’s knowledge of the environment; c) to the access to geoinformation both from the system and other artifacts.

Approach, method and participants
So the market success of makes relevant phenomenon to study how people integrate pervasive geoinformation into their practices in the context of their work. What was even more appealing was to perform a systematic study of one type of early adopters, the taxi drivers in Barcelona (available in a large number of the 10,400 licensed cars), who have massively adopted the technology the last few years. This context is precisely relevant to the research on location-based systems because it provides evidences, outsides of the laboratories of their impact and implications, we believe necessary to feed the design process. The study of in-car navigation systems are typically interested in usability issues with an experimental angle. Rather than focusing on the device, we are interested on the practice with mobile and location-aware devices (see Understanding mobility contexts), on the losses and opportunities, and considering a full-circle perspective (Chrisman, 2005)

In our ethnographically-inspired study, we collected empirical evidences from 12 taxi drivers (11 males, 1 female) with a working experience from 2 to 20 years. In a first phase, we conducted semi-structered interviews at the Barcelona airport parking lot dedicated to taxis. This site provided a good setting to get in touch with taxi drivers, because they often must wait there for more than 30 minutes. During this period, they fill the time discussing, playing (e.g. chess, scrabble, golf), cleaning their care, taking a refreshment and eating. The navigation system had been purchased and used by the informants for a least 6 months. Interviews alone did not suffice, as the informants necessarily selective in what they describe or think is important to discuss. Therefore, they complement additional situational insights from observation of driver work settings (e.g. artifacts used) and behavior (e.g. engagement with geoinformation) while driving. Acting is customers, we requested rides from and to a railway station, a major hotel and an address on one of the many very narrow streets of the Gracia neighborhood. Each informant participated in one session, lasting approximately in from 45 minutes to 1 hour, divided in half with situational insights then complementary semi-structured interviews in the other half.

Despite the small sample of taxi drivers, we were able to collect rich data consisting of photos of work settings (to record the eco-system of artifacts), videos of taxi rides (to capture key moments of access to geoinformation) and written field notes from the semi-structured interviews (analyzed and compacted after each session). In our analysis consisted in a careful reading of the different materials and highlighting parts that were related to the phases of the co-evolution we wanted to focus on. We organized the relevant parts into common themes, and coded the documents using the emerging themes. The sessions were conducted in Spanish and we provide the closest translation for this paper. We summarize the findings extracted from these themes in the following section.

After a red light, in proximity to destination, a taxi driver is about to close his “Guia” after checking the location of a street number. The navigation system is in passive mode.

Findings

Addition to an existing ecosystem of artifacts
The navigation system completes an arrangement of artifacts proving layers of geoinformation to support the job. With our observations, we were able to categorize detected the real-time information sources with the sat-nav system, dispatched radio, electronic booking system, mobile phone and radio. Another category of artifacts provide more static information of the city; the newspapers to keep the knowledge of events and activities in the city up to day, scribbled list of “unofficial” points of interests requested by customers such as the strip clubs, and above all the street directory and map of Barcelona “Guia Urbana de Barcelona” generally kept at reach on the passenger seat, above the dashboard or the interior storage compartment. (Need a table to describe the artifact, its purpose, context of use and the evolution of this ecosystem.

Serenity over efficiency
In the past, taxi drivers face moments of uncertainty when a customers take them to a village or unfamiliar areas of Barcelona, such as the multiple suburban business areas that emerged from the ground in the recent years. Nowadays, there is a consensus that a satellite navigations system is an unbeatable tool when it come to reaching a specific destination in a village and leaving it and it is a strong reason for purchase. But it is not really to be more productive and hence earn more, rather than feeling more serene in appropriately doing their job. A tool not to make more money, nor to improve the efficacy, but to tranquilize, ”I can go everywhere and relax” said informant X and “the fear of getting lost with a customer I felt in my stomach now disappeared” (informant Y). Other drivers mentioned that it does not only tranquilize them but also their customers ”they know I cannot cheat them with it”, “it reassures them that I go to the proper destination”. This feeling of relying on a “companion” for critical situations reveals particularly when informants referrer to it as a “he” (and their car as a “she”). That does not prevent them in keeping it most of the time in the glove compartment and retrieving it only the times it is necessary.

The phases of wayfinding
The wayfinding practice takes place in 2 main phases. For the “to go” phase in which the driver takes the proper direction and the “to arrive” phase in which the precise drop off location (the number of the street, a monument, a corner) necessitate different geoinformation at a different granularity. [...] For a ride to a rather unknown destination, drivers seem to accesses the geoinformation as in a “funnel”. First, there is a tendency to quickly retrieve in the paper-based street directory the area of the destination point. If the paper map does not provide enough information such as reference points to precisely arrive at the area, the drivers we observed engage with the navigation system. No detailed information are requested at that moment of the ride. It is only when approaching the destination area, that the exact address in the navigation system is entered. Informant X explained that he engages with the system at that moment to avoid the often misleading information on the path to take. Indeed, a taxi driver applies several paths depending on the time of the day and circumstances (e.g. traffic, weather conditions, preference of passenger).

An altered learning process
In the past, the driver would open the “Guia” and browse the index of streets and points of interest to get access to a map of the area comprised by the destination. The book was one way to learn the city by doing. Another big part of the knowledge drivers acquire come from the customers themselves, as they communicate the tricks and secrets that official books and commercial systems do not disclose. As the experience drivers contain most of the knowledge of the city in memory they rarely return to the Guia. In fact, they prefer using their sat-nav and open the Guia only as fail-over (e.g. when the system does not contain a street number or lacks of information). Even after 20 years of experience, one drivers still perceived reading the Guia as a demanding task. Compare to that, “hitting the screen of his Tom-Tom is a pure pleasure“. Experienced drivers only rely in the system (sometimes keeping it in the glove compartment – or only use it to keep track of their speed) when driving to unfamiliar destinations, which after 20 years only happens rarely. The system is not source of learning but rather a punctual saver.

The integration of the satellite navigation system altered the learning process of the city from three main disruptions: the necessity to assess the quality of the geoinformation, the imputation of some social interactions and the ability to temporarily disengage with the environment:

- Assessing the quality of geoinformation
Taxi drivers with a short job experience express mixed feelings about their experience with their sat-nav ”It is like my mobile phone, sometimes it does not work well”, “it is a potential problem” in terms of quality of services and precision of the information. Their demand of accurate information quickly reached the limits of the systems and the inaccuracy of the system directly impacted the quality of their service. Because they had to deeply rely on it in the beginning, they have learned when not to rely on it. For instance, informant X could name me the places where he experienced the navigation information to be absolutely irrelevant (e.g. get access major squares). But that does not make them learn the city. In consequence, they embrace the use of the “Guia” which is “more accurate and complete” for their job, particularly when it comes to providing a detailed index of streets, points of interest and city-related information.

- New engagement with the environment
As drivers cannot completely rely on their navigation system, they have to form their knowledge of the city to improve quality of their service and relax. One mean translated into leaving their navigation system system on passive mode to learn the street names or identify the present of fixed speed measurements radars as they appear on the screen. Keeping the system on passive mode, also enables the driver to disengage with the environment for a while knowing that the screen will give a proper position. In the past, drivers would count the number of streets to cross before making a turn.

- Social amputation
A major part of about learning about the city comes from the interaction with the customers. It is still a tradition for a taxi driver to ask “how do you want to go there?” and rely on the direction given by the customers to avoid any complains and learn the tricks to navigate. The presence of a navigation system changes this social configuration and reduces the opportunities for this learning process to take place. This technological presence not only affects the social interactions not only inside the car, but also with remote friends and colleagues. Informant X was relieved that he did not have to use his radio to ask colleagues about particular location information and directions (even though many taxi drivers are social animals). Similarly, taxi drivers have now less a tendency to ask for directions to locals (e.g. in remote villages) or other knowledgeable people of the city (e.g. truck drivers at red lights in industrial areas).
Discussion

- De-skilling?
Previous studies on navigation systems have highlighted that introduction of navigation system has shown evidences of de-skilling effect on orientation and navigation (Leshed et al., 2008, Elaluf-Calderwood and Sørensen, 2008, Aporta and Higgs, 2008). For instance “The more the driver relies on the system to locate jobs, the less he or she relies on their in-depth knowledge of where they need to position themselves to maximise income” ( Elaluf-Calderwood and Sørensen, 2008). This is also supported by the perception of the experienced generation of taxi drivers we got to observe and interview. Informant X explained that “the newcomers who use a navigation system do not gain knowledge of the city, because they follow the recommendations and stop to think“. Our analysis of of the less knowledgeable taxi drivers showed somehow has not revealed negative affects on their acquisition of knowledge that support their skills to perform well their job. We notices that they are eager to learn the city and the imperfection of their systems forced them to learn using traditional sources such as the “Guia”. These drivers have a tendency to keep their system passive mode, not only to detach with the orientation process but also to learn the environment in familiar areas such as keeping track of the street names and their sequences.

This need by less experience drivers to access multiple sources of information from an ecosystem of artifacts slightly breaks the myth that sat-nav system changes a “skilled” job unto a unskilled one; in other words anyone with a GPS could do their job. A prove as that the system gets to be used less and less over time, sometimes finishing in the glove compartments or even the trunk. However, the presence of the technology altered the social practices that were at the source of learning the “unofficial” city from the knowledgeable customers. In that sense taxi drivers may slowly change social practice to adapt, but we have no evidences of that. What is clear is that the navigation system does not provide these kind of information.

- Information quality, system limitations and co-evolution
The fluctuating quality of the geoinformation as sources of co-evolution of the taxi drivers and their in-car navigation system. An ecosystem of artifacts are set to complement the limitations of information. Indeed, taxi drivers learned not to completely rely on their sat-nav because they do not have the knowledge to assess the quality of the information. Therefore, besides learning to interpret the system and its inaccuracies, they have a tendency to open their “Guia”. Informant X admitted that when a conflict emerges between his sat-nav and his intuition he starts to “improvise” and depending on the circumstances he would either switch it off or ignore it for a while, a pure example of Suchman’s situated action theory (locations and opportunity determine the action): “Idiosyncrasy, improvisation and knowledge are all useful tools when choices between planned and situation acts are complex” (Suchman, 1987)”
- Considerations for design

* Moving beyond technological determinism

* People may use systems in ways unanticipated by the designers (more evidences for the discourse of Ackerman). For instance, one taxi drivers used the speed displayed in the navigation system rather than fixing his broken speedometer.
* System designers should assume that people will try to tailor their use of in-car navigation systems; a system that complements rather than replace an ecosystem of artifacts, sources of the knowledge of the city. It does not replace, because a large part of the knowledge has no informational model or digital sources.
* Support and not reduce social interaction with customers as opportunities to learn: often a taxi ride is an opportunity to engage in social interactions. A navigation system is primarily designed for a specific interaction with the driver without engaging with other people in the car, secluding the customer.

* Highlight the quality of the geoinfomation to help users to match their knowledge to assess the quality of geoinformation. This is particularly importance with the emergence of real-time traffic information. So the design should reveal the quality and timeless of the information (seamful design)

Relation to my thesis: Using this blog to reformulate a paper for journal submission (that should be my last journal paper) in re-aligning the thoughts free from the academic paper writing overheads

Real-Time Geo-awareness – Sensor Data Integration for Environmental Monitoring in the City

A paper by senseable’s colleague Bernd Resch has received the Best Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Advanced Geographic Information Systems & Web Services for his paper:

Resch, B., Mittlboeck, M., Girardin, F., and Britter, R. (2009). Real-time geo-awareness – sensor data integration for environmental monitoring in the city. In IEEE International Conference on Advanced Geographic Information Systems Web Services. Cancun, Mexico.

Bernd has been pursuing the urban sensor data interoperability holly grail, building methods to integrate heterogeneous data sources that both lack of interoperable interfaces and have deficient coordination due to monolithic and closed data infrastructures. He has been developing the kind “Sensor Data Integration” system based on open sensing infrastructure making extensive use of open (geospatial) standards.

Congrats Bernd!

Relation to my thesis: I humbly contributed to a section on the potential implications of such a system on raising people environmental awareness.