GeoLapse. A Digital Space-Based and Memory-Related Time-Capsule App Letizia Bollini(), Giulia Busdon, and Annalisa Mazzola Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Piazza Dell’Ateneo Nuovo 1 20126, Milan, Italy
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Abstract. The paper explores the relationship between space and time through the memory based experience of serendipity. GeoLapse – the name of the prototypal mobile app – is based on the idea of allowing users to send messages located in space and – simultaneously or asynchronously – in time aimed to create a sort of digital time-capsule. Keywords: Space-based interaction design · Geo-based experience design · Time-based interaction design · Digital time capsule · Digital heritage · Emotional interface design
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Memory: A Time Driven Experience
If space is the dimension physically experienced by our senses, time is the state of mind that marks our daily life. According to the philosophical point of view of a classical thinker such as Plato and Aristotle the experience of time – past, present and future – is deep connected with memory activities of our brain as opposed to physical life and on it are based consciousness and knowledge. Afterwards, Augustine of Hippo in the development of his reflections on the nature of time adopts a metaphor - the stock - to describe the activity of memory in spatial terms. His approach to intentionality, memory, and language as these phenomena are experienced within consciousness and time anticipated and inspired the insights of modern phenomenology and hermeneutics. Husserl writes: “The analysis of time-consciousness is an age-old crux of descriptive psychology and theory of knowledge. The first thinker to be deeply sensitive to the immense difficulties to be found here was Augustine, who labored almost to despair over this problem.” [1]. Hegel elaborating the concept of memory in connection with the Western culture and history identifies in language the specific medium memory is related on. Nietzsche will definitely put in doubt the relationship between long-memory recalling and oblivion – the right to forget – as an indispensable existential condition. [2] The memory lives therefore in connection with its opposite, forgetfulness, a sort of duality that permeates the human experience in its relationship with the everyday life, in his relationship with others and with the environment which these experiences phenomenally take place. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015 O. Gervasi et al. (Eds.): ICCSA 2015, Part II, LNCS 9156, pp. 675–685, 2015. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-21407-8_48
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On the other hand the memory lives associated with the phases of time and the processing that our psychic world makes – sometimes mistakenly – of it. Déjà vu, lapsus, serendipity are some of the paradoxical phenomena that give rise to distorted experiences of time and that at the same time provide suggestions to play with the time parameter as story-telling drivers. Travel through time is one of the literary, science-fiction, cinematographic theme most fascinating and explored in the artistic culture. If in human history writing, the records, portraiture, the diaries, the correspondence and photography were the tools to keep track of time and to transmit evidence of the past for posterity, in the contemporary world these tools have been superseded by social networks and mobile devices.
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Time Capsule: A Spatial Located Memory
As initially mentioned, the experience of time is closely related to the space in which it occurs. Among the instruments intentionally used to keep track of memory and the past, the time capsules are the most specifically designed for this purpose. “A container used to store for posterity a selection of object thought to be representative of life of a particular time” is the definition given by Jarvis [3]: a sort of broadcast message addressed to unknown receivers to communicate in a one-way-only to the future. A time capsule can be opened only by a given moment on and in the place where it was originally located. If the selection of objects – that means the message to be sent – is one of the objectives of the time capsule its location is the crucial element for its future interaction and discoverability. Once again the location of the memory - the spatial dimension of time - is the driver of the relationship between past, present and future and the key connecting link among generations able to evoke another space and time. Currently, however, social networks have completely reversed and reinvented this relationship: a tweet, a change of status, a post generate a continuous time flow that allows you to find, even after many years, your thoughts and emotions. This virtual storytelling becomes social, but often removes the spatial dimension and relationship with the places of life, depriving the experience of an essential component that is rooted in the place where the events happen where space is a dimension definitely physical, but also symbolic, metaphorical and collective. On the other hand the relationships ground of digital networks creates a new form of conceptual space within which people build new experiential bonds with its own existential streaming and sharing offered to their connections.
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GeoLapse: A Digital Space-Based Time Capsule
Geolaps is a mobile application– a prototype – designed as a sort of digital time capsule able to reconnect the temporal and spatial in the user experience both typical memory. GeoLapse users don’t know when or where a message is, because the application is based on the fact that an addressee could receive a Glap only when is in the right place at the right moment, decided and only known by the sender.
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A Glap is the base unit of GeoLapse and it is the message itself. The name came from a contraction of GeoLapse itself. GeoLapse is born as a Serendipity Time Capsule which allow each user to discover sudden and unknown attraction points in their everyday spaces in order to awake old or new emotions linked to the space itself. The name GeoLapse has been created melting two significant words: ‘geo’ and ‘lapse’. The word ‘geo’ originates itself from the greek work γεο- and γεω- (from γῆ as “Earth”) and it is historically used with the meaning of “related land as the terrestrial globe.” The second one, ‘lapse’, is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “a period of time between the two things that happen.” In addition exist a cinematic technique called “time-lapse” used for documenting visible or not natural events whose evolution in time are little perceptible by the human eye. Naming in this way GeoLapse would suggest the importance of the space around us and across the passage of time. Users are totally involved into the space and time dimensions during the use of GeoLapse Themes like time, space and memory are close to the system. They are experienced by both senders and addressees in the interaction with GeoLapse: the first ones composing the Glap-s live a moment of reflection about past, present and future like those who created real Time Capsules, the others as they open the Glap-s live an experience in the real world in order to strengthen or create a bond with the places of their lives. As Time Capsules capture proper objects of the time of production to allocate them to the distant future and communicate with it, in the same way GeoLapse wants that individuals reflect on their lives carrying messages to be deployed in the real so each recipients can experience a particular moment. In this way we can create a bridge between generations, people, emotions and spaces in order to communicate our present thoughts and culture without temporal limits. The key point of GeoLapse is surprising people by chance. In this way the bond with the spaces and people who lived in came out suddenly and let users think about their lives and relation in. A sudden emotion is awaken by both the reading of the Glap and the being in a specific place. In this way GeoLapse wants to be a mobile application which helps to reconnect people to each other and to the real world creating an interaction between real and digital. 3.1
Immaterial Needs: Designing Emotion
When the moment of analyzing user needs has come, it was immediately clear that GeoLapse responds needs that are immaterial and emotional. They are not practical or functional in the conventional way but surely they are still needs. Being able to reconnect people, memories and space as GeoLapse does, is a new concept in the mobile experience world. GeoLapse has been designed with the purpose to offer a new emotional experience to users that are overwhelmed by everyday life routine such as work, school, family and all the variety of duties that occur in their lives. GeoLapse wants to make people smile while they are in a rush taking a train, and it does by delivering messages in time and space that are unexpected. In this time, when relationships are often taken for granted, an application like GeoLapse wants to re-give people emotions they maybe forgot just to make them feel loved and happier one day or another
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Possible Future Scenarios: A Co-design Approach
Designing the GeoLapse experience, the team imagined four different future scenarios in which the application could help people reconnect themselves with memories and special places. The scenarios design phase was based on the concept that each user, in different time of his life, could fit himself in more than one scenario: they reflect emotional situation more than concrete ones.
To my beloved ones The user can send Glap-s to his beloved ones, aiming to surprise them by awakening old memories or telling untold secrets, using GeoLapse with a more romantic
To my legacy GeoLapse users who are consciuous of their future premature death can send Glap-s to their families and friends aminig re
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Once the scenarios have been drafted, it has been necessary to define which kind of elements people considered fundamental in order to compose a Glap. To make it stimulating for both the team and the users, we decided to pursue a CoDesign approach: by sorting a workshop out, this technique let users take active part in the designing phase of the application contents without working on temporary prototypes but making them. The Co-Design experience has been used to discover the core and undeniable elements to awake and recreate memory in order to make it as intense as possible. These elements will then be employed to compose Glap-s to let GeoLapse users live an experience related to people, emotions and space. The experience has been fulfilled by involving a total of 20 subjects divided into two workshop sessions. The workshop has been structured into four sections: 1. Introducing the project explaining the main GeoLapse functions and the interaction dynamics to let subjects better understand the Co-Design experience 2. A first set of questions aimed to define the background experience of the subjects regarding their knowledge of the main messaging applications 3. The core of the workshop involved the using of a set of seven cards for each individual. Each card represented one of the typical elements for the preservation of the memory (Picture, Text, Video, Audio record, Object, Book, Perfume) plus and empty card which could be filled with an extra content according to the subjects. Each subject had to order the set of cards from the most important to the less, following their sensation. The result of this section were 20 different sequences that has been put together in a general one using a score system: the first two position obtained 2 points, the last one lost 1 point and the central positions gained each 1 point. 4. A second set of question asked the subjects to imagine the use of GeoLapse in their everyday life.
Fig. 1. Co-design workshop results and highlights
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Geolapse App: An Experimental Simulation
After the basic dynamics have been designed, it has been created a storyboard that shows the essential interactions acted in GeoLapse.
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It will be shown both sides of the usage of GeoLapse: the application seen as sender and recipient. For the sender-side it will be displayed how a user can compose a Glap by putting together the different kinds of elements and how the will insert the data for the future delivery of the Glap. It will then be shown how the recipient-side get the notifications and how the Glap could be seen as the recipient gets it. As it will be argued in the next section of this paper, the storyboard also helped the team to go through with the testing phases about the notification system. 3.4
Engaging the User: Alerting Messaging
Considering the fact that not all the users believe in fate or chance so not all the individuals like the idea of "not knowing if there is a message to be read" or where it is located. In addition it is difficult to be in the right place at the right moment to read the message and when we create a mobile application we have to deal with already existing systems. So since a GeoLapse user don't know when or where a message is it was necessarily to introduce a notification system which inform people only about the presence of particular Glap-s for them in the real world.
Fig. 2. Glap message composition user interface https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFH-ozWwKG4&feature=youtu.be
The starting point of the GeoLapse notification system design was an analysis of the standard alerting message system. In a cross device view all the last generation smartphone allow the users to customize the visualization of their alert messages: it can be controlled by the OS (Operation System) or by the Application itself. In this way ours devices let us setting the main view of alert messages. It can be shown as 1. Pop-Up message, which allows a block of text to appear in the middle of the screen and carries the information required. It is the most informative kind of visualization.
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2. Badge message, which show a number on the application icon and doesn't show any further information but only inform about the fact that a trigger occurs. It is the less informative kind of visualization. 3. Status Bar message, which show a preview of the alert message in the superior part of the device’s screen. It is the middle informative kind of visualization. In any case every notification view let the user know which is the application who carries the trigger or the event for which an addressee is informed. The sender of the alert message is always recognizable but especially the users can respond directly to these events and can understand which is the information that they need to know. Furthermore, to understand the real users' behavior about their alerting messages it was opened an online questionnaire to understand how they react on the notification on their devices. Trying to figure out how and what users have active on their devices we realized that on 50 responses the trend has been to open the message in most cases which let us understand that the individual differences are the most relevant aspects on this theme. In order to create more engagement between the users and GeoLapse and to get more involvement and curiosity the Geolapse alerting system misses these key elements. First of all in fact the sender does not reveal the actual content of the Glap nor his identity. In this way the receivers have to find the Glap-s in the real world to discover who is writing and which is the real content of the message. The whole purpose is to make the addressee curious about discovering the identity of the sender, the location and the content itself.
Fig. 3. Notification interface of a Glap
There have been designed three different kind of alerting message: space related, time related and space-time related. All of them have the same content: • A 200-character-long text message considered the real hint • An optional multimedia element (Picture, Video, Audio Record, External Link), considered the memory acrtivator • A default text referring to the kind of notification message.
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The differences between this three kind of alerting messages are the activating dynamic and the central element on which the contents are presented. The space related one, is based on a map and its activation depends on the proximity to the message. The closeness of activation is decided by the sender choosing on a range (from 50 meters to 1 kilometers) suggested by the application itself. The time related typology bases itself on a timeline showing the life span of the Glap and it is activated at the moment that the sender set up. This kind of message has no commitment with the closeness to the place. The last one is a mixed version of the previous two. For this reason has a map and it is activated as the addressee is next to the message, but it has also a timeline showing the lifetime of the Glap. The same formulation of three different types of notification will be considered useful for understanding every type of person and to provide an alternative: they can be placed along a continuum ranging from total randomness (notification spatial) in absolute accuracy (notification spatial and temporal) being warned of the presence of a Glap.
Fig. 4. Glap message notification user interface
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Evaluating the Serendipity Experience
After the design phase we wanted to test and evaluate the experience that comes from the interaction with a system based on serendipity. The characteristic of asynchrony between time, place and the user is crucial to the alerting system of GeoLapse: in fact, the initial hypothesis was that users could see these missing as a negative element and unmotivated. Testing the usability of the alerting messages we wanted to understand how the information stored in was helpful and how it works as a memory activator. Testing the experience which comes from the interaction with them we wanted to investigate especially the actual satisfaction and the emotions originate from GeoLapse.
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We obtained a total sample of 21 respondents aged between 17 and 53 years. The sample was randomly divided into 3 groups, each consisting of 7 individuals in order to minimize errors resulting from the administration procedure, to assess whether there were differences in the perception of the types of alerting message and which could actually work better considering the purpose of the application . The first group was asked to test the notification space and compare it with the space and time related kind of alert message. The second group instead has been asked to test the time related one and in the same way of the first group to compare it with the space and time related alert message. The third and last group of subjects finally has to test all three types of notification messages. Before starting the testing phases the application has been described and the aim was illustrated to the participants for let them better understand how GeoLapse really works.
Fig. 5. User testing phase results and Highlights
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The testing phase was divided into 6 step. In the Step 1 an alert message in a Pop-up visualization was shown and were asked the following questions to evaluate an initial reaction: "What do you think? What are you going to do? What do you expect to find once you'll open it? The Step 2 was about the real usability task. It concerned the exploration of the content of the alert message. Its purpose was to let the users to discover the content in the notification and for us to understand how them interact with this digital elements (the operation sequence consist in Open the notification, Scroll the content, Save the media and Set a reminder). During the Step 3 a Score Usability System was introduced to the subject to understand their experience with the alerting system in a usability view. It is a questionnaire based on 5-point Likert scale which investigate in a quick and dirty way about the reception of the interface and their ability. The Step 4 and 5 represent the comparative phases. Each group repeats the 2nd and 3rd phase using a different kind of alert message (Group 3 has done this phase for each alert message - total of 3 times). The Step 6 represent the last and most important phase the one about the semistructured interview with questions on issues that require a response qualitative. During the interview we were able to reach the opinion about the perception of the system: • How it was usefull or different from the already existent one • How the users consider the alert messages: personal, real or digital element • Which kind of alert message prefer and the reasons why
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Conclusions
Although the application has its own complexity both for conceptual aspects and interaction dynamics, the most critical and significant issues for its future development are related to privacy and alerting system. The lack of synchronicity between the events and the people in the time/space where the Glap is activated is an important concept to be explored both in terms of user experience that technology implementations. Unlike other mobile apps like Foursquare® where the message is received contextual to the place and conditions of copresence, dynamics GeoLaps is more similar to the functions of the search service of your device implemented in iOS 7. In the standard condition the user is not aware of its proximity with a significant point/message, but the device that identifies it for him even in conditions in which the app is not directly turned on, or at list in notification mode. To meet this condition the user is always the track in its geolocation and trips from its own device with significant implications for what concerns the personal privacy. On a technical level, however, the implementation issue moves from the app itself at the level of the operating system in connection with the native services of the device (GPS etc.) to be able to constantly follow the user and allow them to interact with Glaps that have been scattered in the physical/virtual space addressed to him by another user, in another space/time. Acknowledgments. Although the paper is a result of the joint work of all authors, Letizia Bollini is in particular author of parts 1, 2, 3 and 4, Giulia Busdon is author of paragraphs from 3.1 to 3.3 included and Annalisa Mazzola is author of paragraphs 3.4 to 3.5.
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