My life, my interests, my research
The Godesic Lab at EPFL has developed a location positioning system called INS Inertial Navigation System which connects a GPS to a compass and a gyroscope. Using this system is possible to track very finely the movements of a person in a urban context.
http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/incite/
This paper the connection between technological gadgets and mobility from a psychological point of view. The authors ask themselves what is mobility, without going into details while answering the question. Some of the key points they discuss are:
- People threat themselves as projects to be self-consciously made.
- Mobile technologies can be used to make improvements to the self.
Mr. Michael Robinson
Director
Address
Via La Manta 22, Torino 10137, ITALY
Tel +39 011 003 3346
Mobile +39 335 789 6326
Fax +39 011 003 8112
Company
Centro Stile Fiat
In the MapTribe project I started from the assumption that every person has a mental representation of the city, that this representation may quite different from other people’s conceptions and that the same representation may be quite different from reality. (Milgram)
I believe to have defined the need that justify my project in the fact that people don’t live the place they inhabit with full understanding of its features or possibilities.
I believe technology can help people in forming their mental map of the city and in initiating a civic perception on the development and usage of the places they inhabit.
A possible research question may be phrased as: “People undergo their environment or they dominate it?”, “Do people have a clear idea of the place they inhabit?”, “Do people have an opinion on how they want their place to be?”, “Do they extend this idea to the public spaces?”
The author describes here WayMaker, a tool for forming two–dimensional diagrams of spaces remembered or imagined. The basic assumptions of this work are stimulated by Kevin Lynch’s work on the image of the city (\cite{Lynch60}). Essentially the author assumes that a finite number of elements can be used to describe a mental representation of the space; that elements preserve a topological relation also if they are placed in a malleable environment; that a possible way to support the understanding of the space is to support the construction of the knowledge about the place, helping the user to learn how to take reference points, separating different parts of the space, customising the space. The premises of this work are that: (1) conceptual elements of the city can be used as building blocks; (2) participants are part of the design of the virtual environment; (3) that learning happens through the design.
Normally we read maps with the expectation that we will find in the world what we see on the map. What if we designed maps with the expectation that we will create in a world what we place on the map? That is the premise of WayMaker, a design tool based on Kevin Lynch’s elements of the “city image.” Districts are broad regions, such as neighborhoods; edges are boundaries between one region and the next; paths are the channels along which people move; nodes are foci to and from which people travel; and landmarks are punctuation points used for general orientation. WayMaker users duplicate, stretch, and position representations of the elements to form a map. The software calculates and displays street-level views along the pathways.
This blog focuses on the community engagement and creation, focusing on three keywords:
Engagement,
Collaboration,
Technology.
R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is a GNU project which is similar to the S language and environment which was developed at Bell Laboratories (formerly AT&T, now Lucent Technologies) by John Chambers and colleagues.
R provides a wide variety of statistical (linear and nonlinear modelling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering, …) and graphical techniques, and is highly extensible.
My personal interest in R is that it can be easily interfaced with GRASS providing Imaging statistical analysis.
– Mobile GIS is a growing technology.
More and more choices are becoming available for field spatial data collection. –
LBS – Location Based Services
Location Based Services is a growing technology field that focuses on providing
GIS and spatial information via mobile and field units.
ArcPad
ESRI’s handheld mapping software runs in the Windows CE environment using ArcView
shapefiles.
FieldWorker
Variety of products supporting field GIS functions. Uses Oracle 8i Lite as the
database engine.
GPSPilot.com
This application allows you to add mapping and GPS capabilities to your Palm Pilot.
Fugawi
FUGAWI,used in combination
with almost any popular handheld GPS receiver and a download cable turns your
PC, laptop, Pocket PC or Palm PDA into a navigation and mapping system.
HGIS
StarPal is the creator of HGIS, a handheld GIS solution that can run on Windows
CE, 2000, 98, 95, and NT Notebook, Handheld, and Pocket computers with export
options to .mif and .shp files.
MapXtend
MapInfo® MapXtend™, Java™ Technology Edition is a developer tool for creating
location-based applications running on wireless Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs).
Palm OS GIS Software
Links
to finding GIS and mapping software for your Palm and Visio PDAs.
MapFrame
Developers of mobile mapping/GIS-Based software with the suite of FieldSmart products.
PocketGIS
Field GIS
data capture software which can display and edit map geometry and attributes.
PocketGIS runs on Microsoft Windows CE for the Handheld PC, Windows CE Handheld
PC Professional Edition, and Windows CE for the Palm-size PC.
Web-Mapper
Find information about mobile GIS applications, downloads and devices. Browse
and download GIS applications for your PDA.
This site is dedicated to making Remote Sensing algorithms, code, and technology available to all interested parties. Resources are provided to facilitate communication and development of open source tools. It is hoped that this effort will attract participation from companies, students, professors, and agencies that are involved in remote sensing efforts. Through the combination of our collective efforts all parties will benefit through the development of new capabilities, tools, and advances in this field.
(0)MapTribe is a tool for collaboratively building and sharing a personal representation of the city.
Everyone has a mental map of the city, which contains reference points and objects intrinsically connected with the social life of the person. The city is a social fact, therefore the mental map of the city is a social fact, and as such it emerge from the social interactions we have.
MapTribe is a software running on SmartPhones (J2ME enabled mobiles), which is able to display the map part of the city where you are in. In addition, it adds to this representation the position of a group of friends you can define plus objects you or them create to visualise your mental map.
MapTribe give you a way to trace your positions, leave landmarks, define areas, limits, or paths, enabling you to represent the way you see the city and to compare your vision with those of your peers. From the following negotiation an understanding arises, which we plan to support and explore further.
Milgram, S. Environmental Psychology: People and Their Physical Settings, 2nd ed. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, USA, 1976, ch. Psychological Maps of Paris, pp. 104–124.
In this paper, Milgram describe a psychological study he conducted with habitants of Paris, to study their mental representation of their city. (1) The first principle he explain is that reality and image are imperfectly linked. The main problem he encountered is how to render this image observable.
Many of the concepts people have about cities are nonverbal, spatial ideas. They are not easily translated into words.
(2) The second principle is that one can readily fuse private and public aspects of life through the network of streets and landmarks.
(3) The third principle is that some properties of the mentalised places may be changed (e.g, they deviate from their true spatial coordinates but they do preserve a topological sequence.
Several cognitive processes take place on the mental map: selectivity; emphasis; distortion; projections of lifestyle. Neither the city nor the map are just agglomeration of objects: they are structures. It is a feature of the structure that displacement of one element is not an isolated event. Rather has consequences for the other elements with which is linked.
In addition to these points, a city is a social fact. Therefore the perception of the city is a social fact, and as such it need to be studied in its collective and in its individual aspects.
Milgram analysed a certain number of mental maps and noticed the emergence of common elements. The boundaries and the rivers (Lynch’s LIMIT), the landmarks of Paris, the links (Lynch’s PATHS).
Milgram’s analysis extended on using several different techniques such as “the last walk”, “the meeting point”, “the free associations”. Using these systems he produced several different visual image of the city that unveiled interesting phenomena, such as that whereas the psychological center of Chigago or any big american city is constantly changing position, the psychological center of Paris is always the same rooted on the cultural simbols of France.
There are already several research project going in the direction of City interactions, grouping and portable devices. The best contribution are represented by the Geograffiti project and the activity of Antony Townsend. In addition, the JavaGPS gorup is building the same stuff we are planning to do. In this sense, a new dimension into the field may only be added looking for the specific field I targeted, which is the understanding of the cities.
What can really make the difference is to design a service which make usage of this particular cognitive context to add something to human communication.
del.icio.us Next trips
.jpg "This wall...")
.jpg "colonnata_romana")
Recent Comments