Unlocking the power of place

Written byRachel Hinman. 4 comments

Rachel Hinman

Rachel Hinman is a designer and recognized thought leader in the mobile user experience field. She is the creative force behind the 90 Mobiles in 90 Days Project and her perspectives on mobile user experience have been featured in Interactions Magazine, BusinessWeek, Wired, Wireless Informatics Magazine and the Adaptive Path blog.

The web is great at things, and not bad at people. But place has been its Achilles heel. However there's movement afoot and human expressions of place on the web are becoming possible.

Where are you from?

It’s curi­ous how eas­ily this ques­tion rolls off the tongue in the con­text of a con­ver­sa­tion with a stranger. It’s a sim­ple, socially accept­able ques­tion that we often ask with­out a sec­ond thought. Sure, it’s an easy ploy to fill the void in a con­ver­sa­tion or move it along. How­ever, why that par­tic­u­lar question?

Why are we humans so curi­ous about where peo­ple are from? And why does the knowl­edge of where some­one is ‘from’ feels like a gift of famil­iar­ity? Sud­denly, we under­stand some­thing very impor­tant about them and who they are in the world.

The power of place

I believe hid­den in the heart of that ques­tion is the unde­ni­able power of place. More than a postal address, a GPS coor­di­nate, or a spot on a map, any geog­ra­phy is embed­ded with a rich col­lec­tion of his­to­ries, cul­tures, val­ues, pol­i­tics, lan­guages, shared expec­ta­tions and dreams. We social crea­tures inher­ently under­stand how place can shape and influ­ence our lives. We use that implicit and unspo­ken under­stand­ing in pro­found yet intan­gi­ble ways to forge and deepen our rela­tion­ships with each other. ‘I’m from Detroit’ pro­vides a world of infor­ma­tion that’s dis­tinctly dif­fer­ent than ‘I’m from Mum­bai.’ Eerily, though, this fuzzy infor­ma­tion about place lies largely dor­mant and hid­den in most mod­ern tech­nol­ogy expe­ri­ences today.

Maps as the go-​​to solution

Maps seem to be the panacea solu­tion to com­mu­ni­cate place. It’s the clip art solu­tion for a break­ing news arti­cle on the BBC News web site or the Face­book appli­ca­tion we use to brag about all the places we’ve trav­eled in the world. Maps are like a Mon­drian paint­ing — a log­i­cal abstrac­tion that strips away the messi­ness of a place. A map is a highly rec­og­niz­able but hope­lessly unex­pres­sive birds eye view.

Maps prove use­ful, though. They help us nav­i­gate the known ele­ments of an ever-​​changing world. Despite the sub­tle visual dialects, there’s a coded visual lan­guage to maps we all know and under­stand. Maps depict the tan­gi­ble stuff – roads and high­ways, cities, land­marks, trails and moun­tain ranges; maps express the well-​​worn paths we can use to get somewhere.

Maps are only one piece of the place puzzle

While I like maps, I think they’re only one piece of the place puz­zle. There’s another side to place – an impor­tant piece of the puz­zle that’s yet to be explored. Places are much more than a point on a map. Like mem­ory, place is asso­cia­tive. We all carry a per­sonal atlas in our minds of places we’ve lived, places we’ve vis­ited, places we’d like to go, or places we’ve heard of – and these are land­scapes that have no maps or paths – these places are per­sonal, his­tor­i­cal, metaphor­i­cal, and emo­tional. This is the heart of place, where it starts to have real mean­ing and become reflec­tive of our true rela­tion­ship to geog­ra­phy and sense of place. Shouldn’t the tech­nol­ogy expe­ri­ences we cre­ate reflect this?

The web is great at things, not places

We can think of the world as made up of three basic noun-​​types: peo­ple, places and things. As web devel­op­ers and design­ers, we’ve spent the major­ity of our focus on cre­at­ing sites and sys­tems that help under­stand the things. Search, the most pop­u­lar and one might even argue the uni­ver­sal inter­face for the web, uses words or lan­guage to find things – books on Ama­zon, a song on LastFm, a movie on Bit­Tor­rent, a pair of Hush Pup­pies on eBay. Things own the web. We’ve also devised clever ways to unlock the power of things on the web with fea­tures like peer reviews, asso­ci­ated prod­uct rec­om­men­da­tions and price comparisons.

The web is unde­ni­ably great at things, and some might argue it’s pretty good at peo­ple, too. While most lack the grace, sub­tlety and dimen­sions of human rela­tion­ships, social net­works have pro­vided glimpses into how to begin to grap­ple with the com­plex­ity of peo­ple on the web.

Place is the web’s Achilles’ heel – at least on a com­puter – sim­ply because infor­ma­tion is locked in the desk­top or lap­top con­text. Restau­rant reviews are tough to access unless you know the exact name or address, bus timeta­bles are read min­utes or hours before you actu­ally catch the bus.

Mobile is great for unlock­ing the power of place

Mobile is a dif­fer­ent story. Mobile is a tech­nol­ogy expe­ri­ence that’s well-​​suited to unlock­ing the power of place because we carry our mobile devices every­where. Even the revered map expe­ri­ence is infi­nitely more use­ful on a mobile device than a com­puter. Mobile appli­ca­tions like Google maps on an iPhone lever­age our spa­tial rela­tion­ship to place, pro­vid­ing us with highly rel­e­vant and timely data.

There’s move­ment afoot, and peo­ple are begin­ning to make human expres­sions of place possible.

Tech­nol­ogy is allow­ing land­marks to speak to us like a per­son, such as the Tower Bridge in Lon­don, com­mu­ni­cat­ing to fol­low­ers via Twitter.

Location-​​aware mobile appli­ca­tions like Twin­kle enable con­ver­sa­tions to hap­pen between peo­ple using the com­mon ground of place as the start­ing point.

Appli­ca­tions like Urban Spoon add a dose of serendip­ity to din­ing by using loca­tion as a start­ing point for a host of restau­rant options.

Finally, RFID is mak­ing it pos­si­ble to con­nect things to place in inter­est­ing and mean­ing­ful ways. Count­less mobile appli­ca­tions make it pos­si­ble for users to find the best price on items based sim­ply on a bar code or RFID tag and their cur­rent location.

What has always excited me most about design­ing for mobile devices is the new oppor­tu­ni­ties for peo­ple to inter­act with infor­ma­tion. Unlike a lot of ubiq­ui­tous com­put­ing sce­nar­ios, mobile phones are tan­gi­ble, prac­ti­cal plat­forms to exper­i­ment, pro­to­type, and frankly, play around with new pos­si­bil­i­ties for infor­ma­tion access. I’m excited to see how this map­ping, ori­en­teer­ing, and the gen­eral sense of ‘I am here-​​ness’ unfolds over time – how design­ers and devel­op­ers will bring the human ele­ments of place to dig­i­tal expe­ri­ences. There seems to be no plat­form more aptly suited to unlock the power of place than mobile.

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Comments on this article

  1. Written byRahul Sen on the 30th of November

    Thanks for a won­der­ful arti­cle, Rachel!

    As a for­mer archi­tect, I’ve always been fas­ci­nated by dif­fer­ences between ‘spaces’ and ‘places’. Places to me are like dog-​​eared books. They tell us — we’ve been used, inhab­ited, owned and per­haps shared. We defined spaces as some­thing that had dimen­sions, mate­r­ial and other ‘cool’ ingre­di­ents. Expe­ri­enc­ing space required con­di­tion­ing and not every­one ‘belonged’ there. This is what the web has been in the past — ster­ile, sta­tic and impersonal.

    You’ve hit the nail right on the head with your take on the pos­si­bil­i­ties for more mobile places in years to come. I hope these places wont rely on the super­fi­cial metaphors of chat-​​rooms that annoy, poke and prod you. The new places have the abil­ity to learn about us, and this is what is fun­da­men­tally dif­fer­ent about the con­ven­tional notion of archi­tec­tural space.

    I hope that we’ll see a lot more of ‘I’m here-​​ness’ in expe­ri­ences. I’m also fas­ci­nated about how these places that we inhabit, accu­mu­late con­tent, con­text and mem­ory about our­selves and the rela­tion­ships we made while we were there.

  2. Written byhttp://posterous-home-improvement.posterous.com/ on the 9th of February

    I con­sider this amaz­ing post , “Scroll Mag­a­zine | Unlock­ing the power of place by Rachel Hin­man”,
    rel­a­tively enjoy­able not to men­tion it ended up being a superb read.
    Thanks for the post-​​Walker

  3. Written byhttp://bestinteriortip.ucoz.com on the 14th of February

    “Scroll Mag­a­zine | Unlock­ing the power of place by Rachel Hin­man” cer­tainly got me addicted on your web­page!
    Iwill prob­a­bly be back again even more nor­mally.
    Thanks a lot –Scott

  4. Written byhttp://technologydesignsinc.tumblr.com/ on the 21st of February

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    I actuallycouldn’t agree along with u more! At last looks like Ifound a blog page wor­thy of check­ing out. I appre­ci­ate it, Sophie

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