The Journey:
During our first brainstorming session, all members of the team wrote their areas of interest on a large whiteboard, we then linked these areas to one another until we had a large network diagram covering many aspects of interactive media. We then identified areas where our interests converged. One particular ‘node’ was that of ‘democratised’ media, which in our definition, includes software and applications which are freely available for anyone to use, to enable them to create their own digital media content.
In early June, we came up with the idea to do a ‘Locative Media’ project. Although at this stage, we didn’t know it was called that, or that anyone else had done anything like this. We simply all agreed the idea of linking digital information / data / media to physical locations was potentially very exciting. We termed our project ‘Digital media, beyond cyberspace’, with the aim of creating an ‘Internet of the Environment’. Our project manager, Christiana then came up with the name ‘EnviroNet’.
Early concept research revealed there have been various projects involved with linking digital information to physical locations. These include Locative Media projects / platforms such as ‘Urban Tapestries’, ‘Aware’, ‘Headmap’ and ‘Equator’ and Location-Based Services such as ‘Dodgeball’, ‘Jambo Networks’ and ‘Plazes’.
We realised we were going to need to be very specific to differentiate our project from others of this type. We decided to focus on the local area of ‘Elephant & Castle’ possibly to do something related to the re-generation project. We also looked at other existing locative projects, to see how ours could build-upon or differ from them. We found that most weren’t ‘spontaneous’ in the way we initially envisaged ours to be – i.e. that the user is alerted unexpectedly when they pass though a location ‘tagged’ with digital data, rather than having to specifically look things up wherever they are. We also found that most were text-based, so we sought to combine other media if possible (images, then possibly video, audio).
Technical realisation of this type of media was the next area to research. We had to identify the mobile devices (i.e. PDAs, Mobile phones, laptop or tablet PCs, Head-mounted displays etc), the coding & applications (ranging from platforms such as ‘Mobile Bristol’ and ‘Geonotes’ to scripting languages such as XML, GML and RDF) and location-sensing technologies (such as GPS, GPRS, WiFi, Bluetooth) that could potentially be used to create our product. However, accurate and affordable location sensing is something still being developed, and can become highly technical and beyond our practical means.
During our Usability tutorial with Ella, who is very knowledgeable in this area, suggested we focus more on the user-experience, rather than the technical aspects of this problem. She said computer scientists were working on many projects to resolve these technical issues. Ella suggested we could be more effective in differentiating out project from other ‘Locative media’ projects by focussing more explicitly on the users, and by asking questions such as ‘What does it give people that they need?’ and ‘How does using it affect their behaviour?’ She suggested we develop an open-ended model, conducting in-depth user studies to get an array of different uses and generate new ideas for use. Ella also suggested a simulation might be worth doing, as otherwise we may get too diverted into the projects technical implications.
We then thought about many different possibilities for our product, including ‘virtual’ notice boards and locative-mediated bus stops. We were still undecided, when we went to meet Lee from ‘Headshift’. He spoke about their work, and enthused about social software and social ‘tagging’ (‘folksonomies’) which he argued as a means of putting people back in control of the powerful tool of language. He showed us Headshift created site ‘Brixton links’, which uses geoURL to dynamically create a site with RSS-fed content all about the Brixton area. He also talked about the idea of maps with ‘hubs’ of different communities ‘hotspots’ overlaying each other. He suggested creating the application to work on existing mobile devices, to make it more relevant than a complete simulation.
We liked this idea, and were already very interested in the concept of social tagging, Juan specifically wrote about it thesis. We decided we’d like our product, which was already intended to host user-created content, to combine the facility for ‘tagging’ to allow users to categorise their own entries according to their own keywords. Our coder, Markus, set about creating a system where this could be done.
We then had a talk with Russell Merryman, formerly of the BBC’s Interactive TV department, and currently working on Al Jazeera’s Interactive TV. He talked about issues with setting up Locative mobile services such as the cellular ops tight control over the medium, which creates difficulties for developers due to the lack of interoperability between networks / devices. Of creating a simulation, he said faking the real thing in order to prove our concept was an acceptable, and often practised in industry method. By demonstrating the concept without it being tied to one proprietary system would mean there would be more companies the product could potentially developed by. He also stated that the customer ultimately dictates what the providers have to do, so if something is created that people really want to use, the providers have to adapt to it.
Our solution was to build it as a real dynamic Web application, but to simulate the GPS location-sensing functionality. This would prevent it from being diverted by the overly technical - which could potentially detract from our concept focus of user-centred design, and take most of our time and resources. This would also to leave it as a more flexible application, which could be used by anyone willing to link it to the location-sensing technologies. Interface designer Marcela was also planning to design it using XHTML and CSS, to leave it as open as possible, and so it would work on Web browsers on mobile devices, rather than needing a special application installed for it to run. As a team, we had decided it would be an application for mobile phones, rather than less common, more-expensive mobile devices such as PDAs, although it would work with these, or any other Web-enabled mobile device.
We decided to focus our user research on the Latin American community in Elephant & Castle, as we wanted to do something local, which would make it more unique to us, there are many Latin people in the area and we also have Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese speakers on our team. They would be one ‘example’ community to focus on for our research and user orientated product development, although our overall concept was still to create the product to be used by any community. An early user-scenario to demonstrate the concept was that of someone from a particular community arriving in a new area (such as a refugee), and using our product to find out about things of interest and relevance the area.
Click here to view the CONCEPT MAP