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April 18, 2010
 

Living cities

Watching this video (and others like it), you can't help but see similarities to the vascular systems of the living.

 
Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations.

-Jane Jacobs
The Death and Life of Great American Cities 

Filed under  //   GPS   Lisbon   info-viz   visualization  

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January 21, 2010
 

Google Adds Wayfinding Inukshuk Everywhere

800px-inuksugalait_foxe-pi_200

 

I just continue to be impressed with the development and innovation coming out of Google. Using a combination of crowdsourced content contributed via Google Map Maker, and some good old fashioned data power, Google has been able to transform Indian road-based directions to landmark-based. While the whole post on Google's Blog is worth a read, here are the two juicy research nuggets:

We found that using landmarks in directions helps for two simple reasons: they are easier to see than street signs and they are easier to remember than street names. Spotting a pink building on a corner or remembering to turn after a gas station is much easier than trying to recall an unfamiliar street name. Sometimes there are simply too many signs to look at, and the street sign drowns in the visual noise. A good landmark always stands out.

We also discovered that there are three situations in which people resort to landmarks. The first is when people need to orient themselves — for instance, they just exited a subway station and are not sure which way to go. Google Maps would say: "Head southeast for 0.2 miles." A person would say: "Start walking away from the McDonald's." The second situation is when people use a landmark to describe a turn: "Turn right after the Starbucks." The third use, however, is the most interesting. We discovered that often people simply want to confirm that they are still on the right track and haven't missed their turn.

Why this is great? The obvious reason is that this form of getting and giving directions is instinctual. When I read Google's post I was immediately reminded of some complementary wayfinding insights from Jared Spool of UIE from a few years back. When describing wayfinding on websites he brought up the concept of inukshuk.

Per Wikipedia:
Inukshuk vary in shape and size, with deep roots in the Inuit culture. The word inuksuk means "something which acts for or performs the function of a person." The inuksuk may have been used for navigation, as a point of reference, a marker for hunting grounds, or as a food cache. Historically the most common type of inuksuit is a single stone positioned in an upright manner.
The concept of using landmarks, in the Inuit's case man-made towers of rocks, (which makes sense considering not much stands out in an icy plain in the dead of winter) goes way back. We all seem to have this directional system baked in. Humanity, via Google, has simply reached the point where we are now able to turn everyday landmarks into inukshuks on a grand scale. That little fruitstand on the side of 104th Street? It's an inukshuk now. So is the fountain across the street. 

Tagging is the new inukshuk building. Google Maps is simply enabling the ability to see these inukshuks in context. Whereas the Inuit assigned meaning to towers of stones that was only understood by the tacit knowledge of their culture, Google is enabling anyone to assign meaning to anything in such a way that everyone can interpret that meaning in any number of different contexts. Google is helping us read and interpret ambient meaning, in real time, as we go about our day. 

It's just in time wayfinding.

But this is just the start. A quick look at the other tools in Google's arsenal and you can begin to see a more complete picture of what we may be hearing in the not too distant future on our turn-by-turn directions read aloud. Say you're an amateur astronomer, what if Google allows you to sign up for an Google Sky-enabled feed that you can import into your turn-by-turn directions. All of a sudden the crowdsourced inukshuks are there, but so are spatial inukshuks. Your drive to the movie theater just got a lot more interesting:

"You're approaching a Taco Bell. Turn right onto Highway 12 after the Taco Bell. You'll stay on this street for 3 miles. As you finish your turn, you'll see the Atlanta skyline directly ahead of you. Just above the Bank of America Plaza, you'll see the moon rising. It's the first full moon of the year. While you can't see it because of the ambient light, just to the right of the moon, Mars, Jupiter and Venus are aligned with Earth. This is the last time these planets will be aligned with Earth for 14 years..."

History buffs could import historical overlays. "The Walmart you are about to pass by was the site of the first skirmish in the Civil War in Georgia..."

The possibilities are endless.

Understanding where you are, what you're seeing via tagged landmarks opens up a tremendous opportunity to enrich the world around us as we're experiencing it. It's just a fascinating time to be seeing technology being molded to serve humans in richer and more familiar ways than ever before.

Filed under  //   GPS   Google   innovation   inukshuk   wayfinding  

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