Mapping is a fundamentally human trait. As a metaphor for how we construct our sense of identity in relation to others it is becoming a more and more overt activity in everyday life. More and more technologies are being designed with inbuilt tracking and positioning sensors, such as GPS transceivers.
Whilst these technologies bring new abilities within the reach of ordinary people – for such benign activities as collaborative cartography and geocaching - they do pose more problematic considerations when issues of surveillance and personal privacy arise. It is not just surveillance by big government, nor even by corporations greedy to learn more about consumer habits the better to target them with offers. It is also the potential for everyday surveillance of each other by each other – from that of parents watching over their children, to friends and lovers checking up on each other.
As we find new ways to focus our mapping technologies onto the everyday we need to consider the social and cultural, the political and economic implications – how are we to strike the appropriate balances between public and private, between place and space, between our desires to mark and delineate public space and our need to preserve private boundaries?
Posted by Giles Lane at February 13, 2004 05:36 PMAs with a great deal of things that exist in our lives already, diaries, mobile phones, work spaces, home boundaries, etc, Urban Tapestries is yet another method exposed to the public/private discussion, people deal with it depending on who they are. Some people are much happier to expose their ideas, thoughts and perspectives on a range of information more than other people.
Posted by: Rachel at February 19, 2004 09:38 AMI think most people find maps less natural than directions and variations on routes. 2-D maps take more conceptual effort to use than either.
An eminent geographer (Prof Mike Clark, Southampton University) once alerted me to the difference between giving someone directions, and giving them a map. You can make an analogy with teaching someone to fish, or feeding them for a day. But in my experience, people are happier to take the fish.
On the subject of privacy, the net has already spawned one answer, in the form of personal avatars. Mobile phone companies won't like it.
Posted by: Ant at February 22, 2004 04:25 PMThere's two questions here, which I think need to be separated:
1) what kind of world will we have to deal with as corporate-based applications come to the fore? and
2) what design considerations should we keep in mind as we are building applications of our own?
As for the first, I think we will gradually see our freedoms whittled away, and will grudgingly grow to accept it as per the hoary cliche about the frog and the boiling water. When random drug testing was first introduced for job interviews in the States, everyone was all a-twitter, and several people I knew went to great lengths to smuggle drug-free urine into the tests.
Now people either don't apply for those jobs or don't take drugs.
But this doesn't mean that we have to happily include drug-testing (or its mobile data equivalent) into our new projects. We can ask people nicely if they'll opt in, and clearly delineate exactly what they'll be explosing if they do. Properly-designed, I see no problem whatsoever in developing new technologies to let people communicate with each other. The success of IM and SMS shows that most people see the benefits as far outweighing the costs, and I expect that calculus to continue for well-designed applications.
Incidentally, a grand total of zero people spontaneously mentioned privacy or security concerns during the Urban Tapestries trial in December! Outside of big-media fear-mongering, it simply isn't an issue in a well-designed application.
Posted by: Nick West at March 8, 2004 03:05 PM