CityFlocks: Designing Social Navigation for Urban Mobile Information Systems

Bilandzic, Mark and Foth, Marcus and De Luca, Alexander (2008) CityFlocks: Designing Social Navigation for Urban Mobile Information Systems. In van der Schijff, Johann and Marsden, Gary and Kotze, Paula, Eds. Proceedings ACM Designing Interactive Systems (DIS), Cape Town, South Africa.

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Abstract

CityFlocks is a mobile system enabling visitors and new residents in a city to tap into the knowledge and experiences of local residents, so as to gather information about their new environment. Its design specifically aims to lower existing barriers of access and facilitate social navigation in urban places. This paper presents a design case study of a mobile system prototype that offers an easy way for information seeking new residents or visitors to access tacit knowledge from local people about their new community. In various user tests we evaluate two general user interaction alternatives – direct and indirect social navigation – and analyse under what conditions which interaction method works better for people using a mobile device to socially navigate urban environments. The outcomes are relevant for the user interaction design of future mobile information systems that leverage off of a social navigation approach.

Item Type:	Conference Paper
Status:	In Press
Keywords:	Social navigation; Interaction design; Information systems; Mobile services; Geotagging; Locative media; Mobile web 2.0; Expertise finding; Urban informatics; Knowledge networks
Subjects:	400000 Journalism, Librarianship and Curatorial Studies > 400100 Journalism, Communication and Media > 400104 Communication and Media Studies 280000 Information, Computing and Communication Sciences > 280100 Information Systems > 280109 Decision Support and Group Support Systems 370000 Studies in Human Society > 370100 Sociology > 370104 Urban Sociology and Community Studies 280000 Information, Computing and Communication Sciences > 280100 Information Systems > 280104 Computer-Human Interaction 370000 Studies in Human Society > 370400 Human Geography > 370401 Urban and Regional Studies
ID Code:	10871
Deposited By:	Foth, Marcus
Deposited On:	22 November 2007
Alternative Locations:	http://www.sigchi.org/dis2008/, http://portal.acm.org/dl.cfm
Copyright Owner:	Copyright 2008 ACM
Copyright Statement:	Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. DIS ’08, February 25 – 27, 2008, Cape Town, South Africa. Copyright 2008 ACM 1-58113-000-0/00/0004…$5.00.