TANKO: A Service Design for Place Exploration

Abstract

The need of people to understanding environments remains no change since thousand years ago yet it is still hard to be satisfied due to the differences of human cognitive maps However though cognitive maps vary by individuals there must have something in common To discover the varieties of cognitive maps of individuals the understanding of spatial information and the distinction between space and place are needed Through reviewing literatures of spatial information spatial knowledge cognitive maps and the definition of spaces and places the fundamental understanding of how people learn about an environment could be gained Based on existing knowledge a series of surveys and experiments are conducted To find out what actually be used to form spatial cognitive maps and to know how those spatial “elements” be structured differently we applied a pilot study a web survey and two focus groups From the survey and experiments we found a way of structuring information of a place which mainly contains three kinds of elements: objects relations and attributes and through which spatial information can be easily shared among individuals According to previous researches a prototype of spatial information system was built for the campus: TANKO The design concepts of TANKO are (1) TANKO provides chances for everyone to share his environmental understandings with others (2) TANKO lets users know a space and make the space become a meaningful place (3) Through providing new arrivals rich contents of spatial information TANKO helps them to better integrate into local life (4) TANKO provides chances for local residents to explore familiar places from different perspectives and therefore to increase the pleasure of living (5) TANKO assists people with bad sense of directions to explore the environments And (6) the spatial information in TANKO is composed of three kinds of elements: Objects Relations and Attributes The details of service design including system information architecture four personas including three spatial information requestors and one contributors four user journeys and scenarios illustrations based on built personas and three devices as touch points are all explained Besides by using a system map a whole picture of how TANKO works behind the screen is also presented After service design the interaction and user interface design of three kinds of technology devices PC mobile devices and kiosks are presented to explain how the system interacts with users We describe in detail about user actions by also providing screenshots of prototyping In addition to evaluate the prototype design of TANKO two more cases are also given Lastly while going through the whole design process we made a conclusion and believe that the diversity of how people recognize and define things in a space makes spatial information complex yet interesting And it is worthy of taking advantage of the difference to make the spatial information provision more humane

Date of Award	2014 Oct 14
Original language	English
Supervisor	Sheng-Fen Chien (Supervisor)