This app proposal was a part of a project I completed in a Locative Media seminar class taught by Professor Clancy Wilmott at UC Berkeley in Fall 2020.
I conceptualized a counterfunctional mobile mapping application called Grounds, which serves as a locative device for psychogeographic dérives and grounded reflection on the relation of self and the city.
Modern consumer-facing navigation and mapping technologies like Google Maps and its competitors are typically destination-driven and designed for efficient user experiences to get from one place to another. Mobile mapping technologies are “built on ontologies based on the categorization of places as POIs (Points of Interest),” which contributes to the “(economic) government of population mobility flows”. Furthermore, according to Barreneche and evidenced by the recommendation engines inscribed in locative media like Foursquare, the discovery of new places and locations is dictated by “attention-seeking algorithms, or ‘The Economy of Interestingness’”. Contemporary algorithms for engaging with parts of the city are rooted in “academic geography's reduction of the city to ‘the undifferentiated state of the visible-readable realm’” to use Sadler’s reference to Lefebvre. In contrast, the situationist perspective on discovering, exploring, and experiencing the city is exemplified by the “psychogeographic drift” — the "playful-constructive behavior" of roaming through the city spontaneously while staying alert to "the attractions of the terrain and the encounters [one] find[s] there”.
With Grounds, I engage with the question of how we might intervene in the landscape of modern mapping technologies with ways to embody the essence of the psychogeographic drift by counteracting and opposing the mainstream patterns of goal-driven, efficient experiences. How might we build a locative medium that encourages a user to immerse themselves in an urban cityscape without stripping away their organic spontaneity or exerting control over the paths of their drift? How might we spotlight and center the relationship between the self and the space of a city in such a tool, without collapsing the layers of space (social, geographical, political, etc.) into a two-dimensional mobile map?
To explore avenues for designing a map that counteracts the traditional narrative of mobile mapping, I draw on Pierce & Paulos’s concept of a “counterfunctional thing” — “a thing that exhibits features that counter some of its own ‘essential functionality’ while nonetheless retaining familiarity as ‘essentially that thing’”. Pierce & Paulos argue that designing digital limitations, or building functional oppositions into our digital tools, enables us to “explore technologies that enable playfulness, surprise, ambiguity, pause and reflection — often by disabling functionality that might otherwise be expected or desired”.
Additionally, I consider Debord’s characterization of “the primarily urban character of the drift” via Marx's phrase, “Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive". Through Grounds, I foreground the central nature of the reflection of the self in relation to what is around oneself.
The Grounds mobile application displays your position on a blank screen with no base map or additional geographic information, with one catch: the map only shows up when you’re not looking at your phone screen.
This extreme functional opposition can be implemented by facial detection and eye movement tracking using the phone’s “selfie” camera. When a user engages in visual contact with the Grounds mobile application, the map will disappear and be replaced with a prompt asking the user to respond to the question of where they are located at that time. The user may respond with any multimedia data, like a photograph, video, audio, or text, that they must produce in collaboration with their physical vicinity.
This mobile mapping application’s response to visual engagement functionally opposes the traditional essence of a “map,” which typically attracts visual attention and responds visually to user inputs. The user may certainly catch a brief glimpse of the map every once in a while, due to the latency of a mobile system’s detection, but the counterfunctional design of the mobile application will prevent extended visual engagement with the mobile map, especially when the user feels like they need it.
A user might wish to glance at a mobile map at several points during a psychogeographic walk in a new vicinity, to figure out where they are currently located and where to go next. Instead of providing a mobile mapping solution with suggestions based on “interestingness”, the Grounds mobile application redirects the user to articulate their own poetry to fill the “great empty space” that they travel in.
