Technology on the Trail

Readings:

This week’s paper is by Maaret Posti and her colleagues examines social issues related to hiking, presenting a design-focused approach to understanding the tensions and desires to be asocial while hiking.

• Maaret Posti, Johannes Schöning, and Jonna Häkkilä. 2014. Unexpected journeys with the HOBBIT: the design and evaluation of an asocial hiking app. In Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Designing interactive systems (DIS ’14), 637-646.

Agenda:

• Brief revisit of reading group and introductions of anyone new
  • Attendance: 6 people (1 professor, 3 graduate students, 2 undergraduate student)
• Discussion of next week (the week before Thanksgiving break) and beyond
• Summarize papers
• Discuss papers

Discussion:

Gracie opened up with a comment about how it was a shame we couldn’t download an app to try out, but such is the way with research projects.  A bit more planning ahead and we could email the authors, alas.

Several times, the group came back to the issue of which trails had enough of a network to make an app like this feasible. In our experience, a lot of trails nearby have one and only one route, meaning it would be impossible to avoid someone without hiding in the bushes (which the paper explicitly said users didn’t prefer doing). Where the app was tested, there was enough of a network of trails that pieces could be mixed and matched at intersections of routes in order to avoid people or otherwise accomplish a “lonely” walk. However, it’s not like such networked trails don’t exist in the US (Gracie has hiked one in Indiana’s Turkey Run State Park) – it just seems less common to us locally.

Some of us felt there wasn’t demand for an app to avoid people on the trail. Some people are comfortable just walking by and not acknowledging others on the trail when hiking “alone,” but others note that people with considerations like social anxiety could benefit from avoiding people entirely. However, we did all relate to some degree with the notion of avoiding contact with a specific person (maybe your professor that you see across the quad, or an old classmate who you see in line at a shop) by actively avoiding them. We talked about little tricks like walking behind a different person or acting distracted.

We also talked at length about privacy and security issues, which we felt the original paper didn’t do justice to. This app could very easily tell someone with malicious intentions that they’re alone on a remote trail with just one other person. We connected this to a talk here at VT recently by our new faculty Gang Wang who discusses similar security issues with a driving app that revealed exact locations of others in traffic (which his group proved made it possible to stalk specific people). In general, very few people want everyone else around them to know their exact location.

Instead of an app with specific nearby people marked, we talked about the utility of a tool for estimating projected loneliness of a trail at a specific time. You’re at the mercy of chance if you wait until you’re already hiking to see if others are hiking the same paths. Projected popularity could be based on things like social media traffic relating to an area, but there’s confounding factors of a boring area not getting much social media attention.

In terms of the app itself, we talked a bit about the user preferences discussed in the paper. We thought it interesting that most preferred the version with an actual map integral to the view – something with utility beyond just the lonely hike use case. Needing the visual cue to detect others nearby made us talk about how a user might handle checking the device, being distracted by checking it, or choosing only to engage the app at intersections. We envisioned use over a longer period of time than just 84 minute hike. This would enable an understanding of hikers use it over time and how usage changes.