Journeys & Notes: Designing Social Computing for Non-Places
This work addresses the challenge of building social computing systems for non-places, offering incremental design innovations for location-based communities.
The researchers tackled the problem of fostering online communities in transient spaces by designing a mobile app for logging travels and leaving notes, resulting in insights from user studies and a global deployment.
In this work we present a mobile application we designed and engineered to enable people to log their travels near and far, leave notes behind, and build a community around spaces in between destinations. Our design explores new ground for location-based social computing systems, identifying opportunities where these systems can foster the growth of on-line communities rooted at non-places. In our work we develop, explore, and evaluate several innovative features designed around four usage scenarios: daily commuting, long-distance traveling, quantified traveling, and journaling. We present the results of two small-scale user studies, and one large-scale, world-wide deployment, synthesizing the results as potential opportunities and lessons learned in designing social computing for non-places.