Syllabus

From Designing Around Place

Contents

Class 1: (September 2) Hello My Name Is...

Let's find out who you are, what you're interested in and what you hope to get out of this class. We'll walk through the syllabus, class structure and goals for the semester and discuss the world of location-based services, tools and technologies. Topics: History of LBS, building blocks and tools, breakdown of LBS categories, examples of projects and products and startups and services that define the space.

Assignments:

  1. Introduce yourself on the Classlist page! Tell us about who you are, your background and some of the things you've worked on while at ITP.
  2. Three mini readings from Everyware! We selected these as an introduction to location-based services and user-centered design and to kick start some thinking process for your own projects.
  3. Weekly Research Assignment #1! Two paragraphs or so a personal experience you have with some kind of locative service. Add them here.
  4. Dust off your tech skills! By next week you should have a web page up and running that can collect data from users and talk to a database. Try to make something that asks people where they are, like this. Add a link to your homework on the Homework page.
  5. Two email lists for you to sign up for! Sign up for the Geowanking list (all locative, all the time!) and the class listserv (coming soon!).

Resources

Class 2: (September 9) Placing Yourself #1 (Let the users do the work!)

Let’s turn some user-generated content into location coordinates! This week we’ll get our hands dirty with geocoders, data service providers, mapping APIs, and the different ways of using web and mobile tools to gather location data from users. We’ll also walk through the basics of product development (wireframing, user experience design) to help us turn the ideas in our heads into projects and products we can release into the wild.

Assignments

1. Read Clay Shirky's essay on situated software. Great piece on building what you know, rapid-prototyping style right here, at ITP.

2. Weekly Research Assignment #2! Two paragraphs on what you consider to be a great use of one of the mapping API's we've covered in class - you can look towards the Google Maps Mashup site for inspiration. Bonus points for writing about something that changed the way you experienced some aspect of the city. Add it here.

3. Dig into the mapping APIs! Let's take the example from last week and add what we learned about geocoding and placing dots on a map. Modify last week's code to (a) try to geocode whatever the user inputs into the "place" field, (b) store this info in the database and then (c) add a map that plots some/all the geocoods you have in your database. Make sure to post your work on work on the Homework page.

4. Go to Conflux! This Thurs -> Sunday a "psychogeography" festival is being held downtown. Try to go to some of the lectures or at the very least stop by HQ (536 LaGuardia Place btw W.3rd and Bleecker) on Fri/Sat/Sun and check out some of the projects (it has a very ITP-show type of vibe). Schedule of events here!

5. In case you haven't already, sign up for the Geowanking listserv (all locative, all the time!).

Resources

Class 3: (September 16) Placing Yourself #2 (Let technology do the work!)

If week two was all how to let users’ telling us of their location, this week will focus on the tools that can do the dirty work for us. We’ll look at the different types of location tracking technologies we can use to collect geocoordinates (GPS, A-GPS, cell ID, triangulation, IP lookup), the data formats we can use to publish this data (KML, XML, GeoRSS, GeoURL, microformats and machine tags) and the services that are best suited for data visualizations (mapping APIs, Google Earth). Special guest Andrew Turner from Mapufacture will help lead the charge.

Assignments

  1. Revise your examples from the previous two weeks using one of the access methods presented in class (Textmarks / Loki). Get automatic location from web site visitors or get users to text in their locations / places. Bonus points for going beyond the "putting markers on the map" theme. As always, post your latest works of art on the Homework page.
  2. Think about an application/project that you're interested in making. Write up a short (1-3 paragraphs) description of this concept. If it's similar to existing applications, include references to those applications in the description - e.g. "It's like a location-based HotOrNot for street food". If you'd like you can include diagrams, images or anything else that you feel will help you get your point across.
  3. Watch Matt Jones' talk from Interesting2007 for some ideas/inspiration.

Resources

Class 4: (September 23) One Map, Many Dots

Let’s look at what happens when we start working with the geocoordinates of multiple objects – people, places and/or things. We’ll work with proximity detection (“What’s within 10 blocks?”) and distance calculations (“How far from Point A to Point B?”). We’ll also start deconstructing and reverse engineering some of the more well-known examples in the space to get an understanding of how things work behind the scenes.

Resources

Resources

Class 5: (September 30) Designing User Experience

We’ll start off Week 5 with an intro to User Experience Design (UX) from Jennifer Bove (VP, UX @ HUGE). From there we’ll look at UX issues specific to location-aware apps: How do we ask users for their location? How do we control privacy and social awkwardness? We’ll look towards some of the mobile-social and social-discovery apps (both web and mobile) in an attempt to discover what works and what doesn’t.

Class 6: (October 7) Informatics & Data Visualizations

Now that we’re collecting location data from multiple users, how do we turn our simple geocoords dataset into something more meaningful? With the help of Greg Skibiski from Sense Networks, we’ll look at ways of visualizing aggregated geodata and using this data to make predictions on user behavior. We’ll also take a look at the role that location data can play in Personal Data Informatics – think: Nike+, Nokia’s Sports Tracker, Feltron’s Annual Reports, Daytum.com.

Fall Break / No Class: (October 14)

Class 7: (October 21) Wildcard Week

Let’s leave this week open – most likely there will be topics you’ll be itching to cover before the midterm and we’ll use this spot to fill in those gaps, bring in a guest speaker or debug your midterms projects.

Resources

Class 8: (October 28) Midterm Presentations

Show us what you’ve been working on!

MidtermPresentations

Class 9: (November 4 Fri November 7, 3:30-6pm) Beg / Borrow / Steal - Working with External Data Sources

Plenty of services simply take information that is readily available online and use locative tools to cut, filter or push data in ways that make it geographically relevant. Think: Google Maps mashups, Outside.in, etc. This week we’ll take at the tools needed to track down this data (scraping HTML, parsing XML, working with APIs) and present it back to your users.

Resources

Class 10: (November 11) "This Was Supposed to be the Future!" (with a nod to Mike's tee-shirt)

Since the dot-com heydays, the locative future has always been 18 months away. We’re getting closer with the latest crop of location-aware devices - iPhone, Nokias and Blackberries. This week we’ll talk a look at this history of location-aware apps, the obstacles that have hindered the space in the past and where we can expect to be 18 months from now. Raise your hand if you have an iPhone and we may just dig into the iPhone SDK.

Class 11: (November 18) Sharing Location Across Platforms Introduction to Android Development

An overview to the wonderful world of Android from Peter Nofelt and Mark Wyszomierski, the l33t developers of Mobile Dead.

Class 12: (November 25) Everything but the Kitchen Sink

Locative apps don’t have to be limited to our laptops and mobile phones. Let’s spend this week looking at the future of personal navigational devices (PND): in-car nav systems (Garmin, Navi, Dash), handheld GPS units (Garmin, Trackstick, geocaching, geodrawing) - and the tools people are developing to change the way people travel, train, hike, run, bike, ski and everything in between. And don't forget the networked gaming devices - our Nintendo DSs & PSPs. Remember, where there's wi-fi, there's a way of finding location.

Class 13: (December 2) Wildcard Week

This will be another wildcard week in terms of class discussion. Extra time will be dedicated to debugging final projects.

Class 14: (December 9) Final Presentations

You’ve worked all semester to get here - show us what you’ve been working on!

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