I’ve been pondering how we can generate digital peripheral vision of late and this utilitarian miserablist sounding title relates to some recent thinking and playing about how to do it. Parish notice boards and signs attached to lamp posts do all sorts of wonderful things, but one major thing they do is they trigger our peripheral vision; that most basal of responses, the response which helps to protect us and our environment and has done for millions of years. Nowadays our peripheral vision is more useful for dealing with the impending arrival of bulldozers and changes of services we care about and rely on than lions and tigers, but nevertheless it’s useful.  It’s a peripheral vision around meaning and emotion rather than survival.

One thing that digital has done is to assemble information into central stores and repositories that can be queried, the downside is you don’t always know what question to ask of them. To replace the peripheral vision relating to planning notices on lampposts as you walk through your neighbourhood, or the arrival of a new notice disturbing the pattern and patina of existing ones on a noticeboard, we need to ask rather complex questions and sometimes it’s hard or impossible to phrase those as a set of structured queries. Asking of ourselves what we’d be sad if we lost is hard enough without having to try and fill out a form with all of the parameters required to discover it. The remotest of possibilities possibility and the non-immediate timeframe further complicate. Automating is often right out. 

Much of my time of late relates to thinking about two things which are in some ways inexorably linked. One is making digital public services that serve. The other is about what this wealth of sentiment, intent and life scrobbling data can be used for. We have to think of a further future than simply floating a layer of adverts over it. That’s the short termist thinking bubbling to the top and smothering services with a layer of tar; services which could have a long term future as infrastructure if it were not for people leaving as they feel like a commodity. This says it all. 

But what can we do? The peripheral vision bit may come from seeing how you see the world compared to your peers. Comparing the things you’ve scrobbled to the level of interaction from others. Approximating comparative interaction for sentiment and attachment. Once this set of things you care about can be mapped then the relevant sources queried and the information relayed more automatically. As I said in my recent Shropgeek talk we need to stop making lots of things but use technology to bring together meaningful things. To make empathic utilities that know of the things that mean the most to us and tell us more about them. Emotive filters rather the blunt filters and browse options we currently have. 

Here’s a first stab at thinking a bit about the human geography of places we love. It’s my new neighbourhood and the places I’ve been to as I’m learning it and exploring it. The opacity of the circle relates to how often I’ve been there. The radius to the average number of checkins for a venue and the colour to how your visits relate to the average, how much you like/visit it compared to the norm.

I talked a bit about this idea and it’s logical conclusion at Shropgeek; take Foursquare data, find the places which are important and then try and associate planning applications to those places. You always think that the things that affect your quality of life the most are those right by your house, then you find they’re not, often when the system is perturbed and it is too late to affect change.

Next to look at velocity of the perceived emotional connection to see if you can start to find the sort of shapes that relate to the areas that matter to you and then start to generate the noticeboard around it which decay when they’re old a burst to the front when they’re new. Foursquare hackday ahoy.