Visualizing Geo + Time
As some of you may know, I work for a company who has a fetish for time (and should stay that way *wink). Life is a collection of memories, and a collection that validates our existence. A life. and for that matter death, without memories, would be like a book who has sat idle on a bookshelf for eternity.
There are moments in your day in which something triggers an important memory from the past. It usually catches you by surprise. The “events” that trigger these flashbacks range from a variety of different things. These flashes become even more interesting when the experience, you thought was unique, is also shared by others.
Whenever I hear a baseball announcer on the radio, I am immediately transformed to a very specific date and time in my life. I am immediately taken to my family room, with the now old fashion ‘wood burning fire place’ , burning from the latest old oak tree chopped down from my backyard. The sort of fireplace that takes at least a 10 minute effort to get started and always leaves the scent of burning wood throughout the house. Not some invisible gas you swear you can smell, or some log you have to unwrap. There is coffee being drunk, and another pot brewing in the 1980s model of the Coffee-Mate. (in other words, the same one you use today) The drip is distinct. High pitched and high velocity in the beginning and then finishing with an extremely loud and rude gurgling with steam condensing all over the wood cabinetry screaming to let you know that it has completed.
The doors were always open with the screen door closed to prevent any of the Oak leaves from actually blowing into the house. It was always that damned high step door in the family room that my mom would continually bicker about getting a three season porch for. To this day, thank god, there is still no three seasoned porch. Just one awkward door, and I am still wondering what the function of that door was, besides to let in the cold, October, Minnesota air in. In the background would be that same damn baseball announcer, I swear by it, announcing the Packers/Vikings football game. Even to this day, be it hockey, baseball, football, basketball, it’s same guy. He follows me everywhere I go year after year.
I couldn’t tell you one play or score from the thousands of games I witnessed in this settings. I do remember my dad ironing his dress shirts for class the next morning as a the coffee table laid scattered with lessons plans, transparencies, and a sloppy pile of uncorrected essays. I remember when I was in high school and I would try to imagine the setting time and place that my teacher would be correcting my papers. I remember coming up with some of the wildest settings, visualizing them finally reaching my paper.
Most of our memories are triggered by some cue in our day to day life. Very few people record moments of their life, so they are left with the things in their environment that pulls up a fleeting memory sinking way down in the subconscious. The moments that are recorded, usually because of some perceived notion that we are expecting an experience that will offer to lessen our displeasure in the future, are often less “moving” then the unrecorded. For me, the most important memories have no physical representation, but are triggered on their own from music, symbols, people, and periods, like before falling asleep. I don’t think it’s accurate to say that all recorded memories are less valuable then recorded ones, it’s just that to be diligent in the process of recording is downright costly to your well being.
I think that’s part of the reason why I frantically tried to save all of my schoolwork over the past years. Something to preserve the memory that never required me to do more work then I already did. I think why this fetish grew on me was from my last day of elementary school. Over the 5 years that I attended Castle Elementary in Oakdale MN, each year the teacher would pull writings, art, a whole hodgepodge of our work and were saving it in a file only to give back to us on our way out to middle school as 5th graders. To this day I remember looking at things in that folder and being shocked. Sure, the difference between writings and the funny artwork was interesting, but in all honesty I don’t think it was the materials themselves that were the most memorable of this moment. It was the collection of things that started sending us back to our past, our lunch breaks, spelling tests, Oregon trail, and first crushes. It may not sound like what 5th graders do, but I guarantee you, as every 5th grader peered through their folder they were thinking, “Crap, middle school.” Followed by a whole bunch of butterflies. Those folders did something to us, they brought us back, and then brought us BACK, and forced us to reflect about -now-. This is the overwhelming thing about memories. As much as they have to do with the past, they have everything to do with the present.
When Google maps first came out I was glued to the screen for hours. As everyone does, you immediately find your house. When you find it, you don’t sit there and say “There is a building. There is a road.” Seeing your house from the sky triggers something. And then you move to the backyard searching for the outline of your hockey rink. And then you move to the front yard where you played catch, and the street where you first rode your bike. Then you quickly navigate to your friends house and retrace the path you took to sneak out to friends’ houses. And then you find the Burger King, Wendys, and Taco bell you all met at when there was nothing else to do. Then you find your friends’ house where you met your first girlfriend, and drank your first drink. There is the school and there is the hockey rink where you got up at 4am before school to practice, and the parking lot where you parked your first car. You start zooming out and you become older. Minneapolis, St Paul, the Mall of America. Freedom. You stick close to the roads and cities you know, slowly moving out trying to recognize familiar vacations spots or friends’ cabins. It doesn’t even matter if you don’t know where something actually is on the map. You just move “north” on the map and all of a sudden you are at your friends cabin on the pontoon boat fishing for walleye. There is is Colorado, where you watched DMB at Red Rocks and Arizona where your first college roommate was from. There is southern California where you took that amazing spring break trip, with the amazing people in your life and wish from that day forward that you could go back. It’s just a dot, a black little dot that reads “Los Angeles”, it’s no where near where you actually vacationed, but it doesn’t matter.
There is something special about location. It hasn’t been used as a traditional recording medium until now. I also believe that it has a long way to go until people really recognize its importance to their own personal history. In my job I am constantly obsessing over how to better understand information including topics, and not to get all cliche on you, (although it’s far too late for that) but yourself. But why is understanding all of this information so important? Well, maybe it isn’t, but it’s not just about ALL of the information, it’s about taking all of that information and showing “what it all means”, the real underlying point of the whole story. At first, it sounds that no one would/should care but inflated egos. For me, It’s really not about uploading photos to Flickr, updating my status on Facebook or Twitter, blogging, where I was, on and on and on. The magic happens when you put these pieces together pinned downed by the only thing that keeps them together. Time.
Just how browsing a map triggers specific memories, putting these bits and pieces together in the context of time, causes neurons to fire like crazy. Here is the most interesting aspect. When you take a collection of these…lets say events, maybe it’s a visual representation of where you were, pictures you took, things you said, and people you were with… crazy things start to happen. No longer is it about the picture or the person you were with. The individual items fade away into the background, similar to how the ugly patterns in Magic Eye books would fall backwards as the 3d object was lifted from the pages. Nothing ‘on’ the page is in focus anymore, and nothing else ‘on’ the page matters. It all of a sudden becomes about one of the conversations you had with your friend. Or maybe you remember all the leafs that were on the ground that crunched as you were walking. You all of a sudden feel the anger or the happiness and remember exactly what caused it. Then you remember the cracks in the ground, and you start getting wrapped up in them. Why were they there, why were they so wide, how many people walked over them. You get angry, frustrated, and confused.
Something happens is all I know. It’s just a bunch of chemicals being released, who cares? I don’t know. Maybe that is all it is, just a bunch of chemicals being released. Just some mechanical neural response to stimulation. Regardless of what it is, I want to believe it is important. I want to believe that the retrieval of some of the things that have been left behind by the brain, for your own protection and sanity, have risen to benefit your future self in some sort of way. Just how seeing the school work from one year to the next helped me cope and prepare for the present and beyond. It also doesn’t have to be overblown windbag of emotions. The same sort of self “learning” can occur when discovering anything. Showing a combination of the right events over time that has the ability to zoom in and out to the correct “scope” of the story. It is like recursion for the brain. You can pull way out, understand the bigger picture, and immediately start telescoping into the details, down to the second to get the richest story possible. It’s like a Hanoi tower problem. You sit there looking at the disks, and you get it, but you have no idea how to solve it. This analogy is a bit of a stretch…but bare with me. Lets say I am looking at the Hanoi towers in front of me, lets say graduation day. I see a picture that I took on graduation day. Great, I get it right? Now you know you need to move all the disks over one peg and there are a lot of complicated rules along the way. I know graduation was an important day for my present and future and there are a lot of complicated rules along the way. I look at the graduation picture and move in. I see status updates two hours before walking. I zoom in. Now I saw my location and more pictures. I may be satisfied and break out of further detail by then backing up, but backing up with new information to help tell the story of the one graduation photo I started at in the beginning. I could have potentially dropped down to the second layer, and I’m talking specificity here, as in seconds of the day. If you don’t understand the story/problem you make the problem/story as small/detailed as you need to start to understand.
So whats my point? I think there is much more work to be done when it comes to adding consumer value to location + technology. With the recent addition of GPS to the iPhone I think this is becoming more and more apparent. I have spent month after month, gadget after gadget, trying and testing every stupid Windows mobile app I could possibly put on my phone and haven’t been happy with any of them. No one ‘gets’ it yet. Location, as it is used today, is only a utility, and a poor one at that. Google has finally created social features, but it is limited and siloed from the rest of the world. There are in fact some people who have recognized the potential of location such as Y! Fire Eagle. Although most consumers and critics don’t really understand the point of this “distribution platform,” it’s importance will depend on the network effect which is now becoming a realization with self aware applications.
Something missing altogether is the ability to understand location over time. Sure, you can trace you path with polygons on a map, but this is a lie! Your location is not some continuous path at some constant rate. It actually has nothing to do with time and it is completely misleading. Why is this important? Lets say you take a road trip to Yosemite with your friends. You’re on the freeway and Freddy has to take a number two really bad and there is no bathroom in site for miles. You pull over along side the road so he can do his business while everyone else is laughing hysterically. Then out of no where a police car puts on his lights to investigate what the hell is going on. Finally, thirty minutes later you are back on the road. Now when you look at the path overlay on a map like it is traditionally displayed, you miss an entire axis of information. The whole pooping story gets erased all together, what a shame! How do you visually display in an intelligent way on a 2d map the axis of time. I think some
Tufte’s need to put their heads together to solve this problem in an elegant manner. Besides extremely ugly and inefficient method of annotating timestamps in popups with kml, I haven’t seen it done well anywhere. One interesting way, although still not ideal, was Dipity’s Tickr mashup. By separating the time/location axis into separate window panes one could understand the location story much better through the movement of time. As you flip through time, the associated location lights up, and as you keep moving froward in time you can begin to piece together your location in its complete context. There is no way to consume the information statically which brings us back to where we started. If anyone has some good examples of this being done, please share!
The location revolution is coming.
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