It’s Christmas Eve, PST, and the jingle jingle of the final cash register is now only an echo. It seems like an appropriate time to put aside all those business plans which incorporate mobile locative technology. For a moment, let us forget how your cell phone will inevitably soon direct you to the nearest McDonalds, your dearest nearby friend in a one mile vicinity, or the next eligible single you haven’t met yet (but as luck and your PDA screen would have it happens to share your common interests and is sitting at the other end of the bar).
There is certainly a market for the above over-hyped ideas, but what about the more subtle concepts over which venture capitalists are not going ga-ga? I’m referring to the uses of location-aware technology which can make a positive difference in improving our society. Here is one example and I challenge you to think of others. Happy holidays!
The mobile social worker
Envision a new breed of social worker who actively seeks out people in need. This preventative approach would have people visiting different communities prone to issues like racial tension, poverty, or poor health.
Armed with a PDA loaded with a specialized application for the task at hand, the social worker would fill out an electronic form (a questionnaire) on-site. When done with the interview, she would publish it to a server, along with the current GPS coordinate.
GIS software (ArcView, openGIS, etc) would crunch the datapoints and come up with models for addressing a variety of escalating issues.
- Are there many people suffering from a particular ailment? What could be the cause? For example, we might be alerted to illegal toxic waste dumping if we layered maps of cancer rates with maps of manufacturing plants.
- Are many children in this community malnourished? Perhaps nutritious lunch time meals can be sent to their schools.
- Do interviews indicate escalating racial tension? Perhaps we should deploy relevant social workers to promote tolerance with the community before a tragedy.
As these examples demonstrate, an effective strategy might be:
- Define/pose a question.
- Deploy a mobile task force to answer it, using some hardware which can publish information along with a spatial coordinate.
- Use GIS software to crunch the data
- Respond
You may now resume your post-holiday shopping.
Having just read Franz Dill’s posting (Future Now) about YellowArrow, it occurs to me that discoverability is a crucial and subtle locative concept.
Due to its technical limitations, the current breed of SMS mobile social toys needs you to be explicit in order to understand your current spatial context. Sites like dodgeball rely on the user to provide this info (ie. @myDiveBar), before querying a database to find one’s GPS coordinates and close-by friends.
Once GPS becomes pervasive on all cell phones, the previously manual “I am here” becomes a passive sequence of pings to whatever services you subscribe to. But how do you specify what you’re seeking? And how do you describe who knows about you?
Let’s define one’s “discoverability footprint” as a spatial and temporal description of what you can find and who can find you. The latter should satisfy those who have misgivings about the privacy implications for locative technologies.
I imagine an interface in which you could filter:
- topic – ie. jazz club with food
- groups – a la Yahoo Groups to limit your audience. ie. “ny nightlife list”
- direction – ie. only in the direction I am heading (with SMS, one would need to manually enter “North”; with GPS technology, it’s a no brainer). You could make your location or annotations known to people walking away from you (or where you have been)
- pattern – ie. 2 blocks to my right or left….or within 1 square mile northwest, except any areas discouraged by the neighborhood crime web service
- time – ie. after 8pm on a weekday. I envision this as a knob-style widget, where you can turn it like a radio tuner to find the right frequency. A physical knob feels intuitively like the right way to go.
The optimal discoverability interface will be a mix of useful hardware and software. Maybe a bunch of generic phycical knobs, levers and buttons which can be programmed and customized for the locative task at hand.
Jason Tester writes about his experience in creating spatial content in San Francisco. He decomposes these spatial annotations into 2 categories – “I was here” and “You are here”.
The former is likely an emotional, possibly exhibitionistic statement (”I was standing under this window sill when someone exclaimed, ‘garde loo’”). The latter classification smells (sorry!) of intent and is potentially more useful. Jason provides these examples:
- warnings (”bad neighborhood!”)
- lost & found (perhaps with an incentive a la geo-cache)
- temporary notes (”bar was lame; the party has moved!”)
http://blogger.iftf.org/Future/000599.html
