I've just come back from a trip across the pond - San Francisco is already well known as a creative metropolis home to big players such as Linden Labs and HP, while it's only an American stone's throw from scillicon valley. However, this story comes from the back-streets, down on the ground, the grass-roots of locative media...

I'm constantly surprised by how many people now have iPhones, but more even more so by how actively people are engaging with the wealth of applications it has to offer. It was our last night in San Fran and 3 lively characters had offered to take us out for dinner in the Marina district, well known as a more up-market, Cliftonian place full of fancy wine bars and sake restaurants. So as we rolled around the hilly streets looking for parking out come the iPhone. In this case the humble human eye triumped over the GPS enabled, hyper-connected hand-held map, spotting a car park relatively easily. When it came to finding our restaurant, out came the device again and off marched our tour guide, nose pressed to the screen, turning this way and that, slowing her pace with every wrong turn. The bizarre thing was that she paid absolutely no attention to her actual real-world surroundings, trusting instead the blue cross-hair in the Googlemaps application to determine her location. She navigated herself by a series of trial and error decisions aimed at making the cross hair move in the direction of the restaurant, as opposed to using a little logic and deduction based on the street names and land marks around her.

In actual fact we were only a block or two away but the iPhone and its driver sent us in circles! The moral for this story is not yet forthcoming but I leave you with the thought that, if we are not careful, we risk dumbing ourselves down to the point of needing constant digital support systems to undertake the simplest of tasks. All the more motivation to design an application that responds to a genuine need or desire, to one of the irrepressable human impulses to play, to learn or to share...

Posted by Ben Templeton