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David Gartner
Jane was unusually quiet. Normally, at this point she would be chirruping suggestions and admonitions, being helpful and accommodating. Silence was definitely odd. I glanced at her to make sure she was alright. Yes, she seemed to be okay.
Given that I was driving, I turned my eyes back to the road, concerned I would oversteer and career down the steep bank. I looked at the potholed, narrow road ahead and the lush vista below. Another minute of silence passed. Just as I was about to stop the car in the middle of the road and address her directly, Jane spoke. “Turn around! Turn around!”
Was it me, or did she sound somewhat concerned? Anxious perhaps? Looking at the width of the road I was on, it was clearly not possible to turn around right there. The road was one and a half times the width of the Jeep I was driving.
I looked down at Jane, aka my Tom Tom XL1 navigational device, whence her voice came. She was now sounding more urgent. I saw the source of her distress. The navigational map on my Tom Tom was a white, blank screen.
We were nowhere. With some disturbingly precise notations for a nowhere location: No route planned! (Note the exclamation mark—emphatic.) 0mph.
1:22pm. 206 SW.
I am an urban rat. I have never been anywhere with so much…nothingness. I am used to apartment buildings, skyscraper skylines, streets lined with shops, buses trundling by, and cars U-turning in the street for that elusive parking place. I was thoroughly discomfited by the featureless white landscape depicted by my Tom Tom.
I hesitantly looked up from the display and peered out the windshield, a little afraid of what I would see.
Funnily enough, there looked to be plenty around me; I was not in a sea of white, a landscape tabula rasa. No, there were trees, vines, and a blue sky, with a road (well traveled) ahead and a side road (not so well traveled) about 400 yards down the hill.
To give some context, I was in Waipi’o Valley, “The Valley of the Kings,” on Hawaii’s Big Island, driving down to the valley floor and heading to the beach. Waipi’o Valley is beautiful and lush, with stunning waterfalls. Its untouched splendor gives the appearance of remoteness, but it is an inhabited area with plenty of tourists—surveying the area by car, horseback, and using “shanks’ ponies” (that is, walking). As I gazed at the valley below, I saw a group of six elderly hikers. Seconds later another Jeep, just like the one I
was driving, was approaching from behind.
My point is, I was not in an uninhabited, featureless nowhere. Despite the Tom Tom’s insistence, I had indeed “planned” a trip. I could conclude only that the Tom Tom, and therefore Jane, was not altogether happy with my plan to head to the beach.
Reflecting on this incident has led me to decide there are some problems with the TomTom, despite my general agreement with Jan Borcher’s discussion in interactions that this device hits his sweet spot as a nicely designed, truly useful interactive appliance. One issue is that it is biased to the road well traveled. Two, it needs connectivity; it gets all confused when it hasn’t been connected for a while. The third is that though Jane makes the Tom Tom suitably multimodal for the very real design issue of effective and appropriate information delivery while our eyes remain where they should be—on the road—she also doesn’t know when to shut up. So, I have been pondering three things: first, cartography and nothingness; second, reflective services; and third, anthropomorphic/conversational interfaces.
More and more people are using maps from Web pages and portable Internet-linked or
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