Space-time knowledge in social networks: a collaborative travel app workshop

Social networks that are rooted in physical locations, such as village or school communities, evolve distinctive space-time patterns of physical movement. These space-time patterns include shared, recursive pathways where the routines of the population coincide and result in distinctive rhythmic patterns of place. While individuals are aware their pathways coincide with others, until recently it was hard to visualise the presence of others in a social network in any meaningful way. Mobile social networking provides a new substrate to understand the travel patterns of communities.

This workshop will loan smartphones to participants and embed them in a temporary social network to experiment with a collaborative travel app. The Sixth Sense Transport app, designed for a campsite community, gives people a sense of being in time by enabling users to follow the collective physical traces of other users in the past, present and, based on space-time memories, into the future. This enables users to make sense of network movements so they can reflect on their place in the social network across space and time. Workshop participants will be set travel tasks based on the collection of objects around RGS conference venues. This replicates a shopping trip activity and demonstrates how an awareness of others within a social network might create opportunities for collaboration and reduce the need for car trips. Following the activity we will re-convene to discuss how this and the findings of other papers presented in the session may be evolving new perspectives for transport geography.