The Blue Dot: A User's Guide (the exhibit)
Role: Project Lead / Designer / Researcher
After researching location-centric interactions for a year, I designed and built an interactive exhibit that slows down the moment when you pull out your phone, open Google Maps, and see your blue dot. The exhibit unpacks the question: How has Google Maps designed how its users experience the world?
The Blue Dot: A User's Guide invites users to reconstruct their experience with Google Maps by spatially inhabiting the mobile app’s navigation interfaces. By giving dimension to what is hidden, flattened, or abstracted in the app by design, The Blue Dot challenges the objectivity and ubiquity of Google’s worldview.
Each “step” in the exhibit unpacks how you as a user are interacting with different technologies and systems: GPS, the sensors in your phone, and Google Maps interfaces as you take your blue dot from Point A to Point B.
Each “step” in the exhibit unpacks how you as a user are interacting with different technologies and systems: GPS, the sensors in your phone, and Google Maps interfaces as you take your blue dot from Point A to Point B.
Below is a video demoing how users interacted with the exhibition, and a description of each "step" in the exhibit.
Step 01: HOW TO GET A CLEAR VIEW OF THE SKY
If your current location is an unknown point, and the GPS receiver in your phone can “see” three or more satellites (known points), then the distances between you and the satellites are used to calculate your latitude and longitude on the surface of the Earth.
Step 02: HOW TO BECOME ORIENTED
If the GPS receiver in your phone can determine the coordinates of your current location, then Google Maps needs the natural sensors of your body in space, and the other artificial sensors in your phone to tell what direction you are facing, and whether you are moving or still.
Step 03: HOW TO GET ON THE MAP (FIND YOUR WAY)
Mapping data from 13,000 ft above to data on the ground is not easy for a mere human like you. Without the visual infrastructure of a map, your blue dot is nowhere and your coordinates are just numbers.
Step 04: HOW TO READ THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH
04A: Move beyond the default map layer, to the satellite imagery layer, and the two-dimensional world starts to look more familiar—Google Maps makes the surface of the Earth as navigable, searchable, and infinitely zoomable as the World Wide Web.
04B: If you type in an address and open the portal to Street View, you drop from a view overhead, to a view on the ground—from human-scale to nine-feet-high, from navigation to observation.
