Negotiating Authority in User Experience Design on Gowalla

This week’s project, wherein we collaborated with the MSU Campus Archaeology Fieldschool, was to create a user experience that facilitates an interaction with the heritage of the University’s campus. We were given the choice to work with Foursquare or Gowalla, both mobile check-in services. This project was an interesting experience itself that highlighted how we can leverage existing online services for use in telling cultural heritage stories.

CHOOSING THE SHAPE OF THE EXPERIENCE

For this project, Minh-Tam and I knew that the service we chose would have a strong bearing on what type of user experience we could create. Though both Foursquare and Gowalla are location-based, mobile check-in apps, the aims of each service are different. Each service would place a different set of constraints on our ability to craft an experience and our choice ultimately came down to which one would allow us more curatorial power.

Foursquare emphasizes social domination over physical spaces:

Users are rewarded with badges and titles like “Mayor” for frequent check-ins
Users have very little control over the digital representation of spaces – they may be altered by the community with photos and comments
There is no curatorial function

Gowalla, on the other hand, is about travel, exploration, and sharing:

Users have a “passport” for which they collect stamps, pins, photos, and items for checking into locations
Like Foursquare, users have little control over the digital representation of spaces, but they may upload photos and comments about their visit
There is a Trip function, which allows users to curate an assemblage of locations into a cohesive tour

While each service has a similar set of technical constraints, we decided that Gowalla, with its emphasis on exploration and the ability to curate Trips, would better serve our purposes for this project.

When we met with the Campus Archaeology students, Minh-Tam and I pitched our idea about using Gowalla over Foursquare. Our group agreed that Gowalla would be better suited to this project because it afforded us greater authorial/curatorial control needed to craft a narrative about MSU in its Trip function.

CHOOSING THE STORY TO TELL

Our CA collaborators had a pretty solid idea of the story they were interested in telling and it was one that appealed to me as well, especially after hearing Dr. Lynne Goldstein’s stories about MSU on the archaeological tour we attended last week. For our user experience, we wanted to highlight the University’s relationship with the land. Many students today are only vaguely aware of MSU’s rich heritage in agricultural innovation and we wanted to shine a spotlight on that area of history. Our conversation revolved around botanist William J. Beal and his research with hybrid corn and seed viability, but we quickly realized that MSU’s relationship with land is more all-encompassing than just agriculture – rather, MSU’s very identity has been, and continues to be, shaped by its relationship to the landscape.

And so, after meeting with the CA fieldschool students, Minh-Tam and I set out create a Gowalla trip that focused on how people at MSU have shaped and have been shaped by the land that this university sits upon. Attempting to construct a historical narrative where a time period or person is not the central or organizing element of the story was like putting together a puzzle without knowing what it should look like at the end. We faced challenges in our research with a lack of documentation and resources, but also in our ability to “author” the Trip with Gowalla’s strict character limits. While we saw other groups leverage the constraints of Gowalla’s service choose to enrich their campus heritage user experiences by creating fictitious frameworks and character accounts that would comment on Trip destinations, we did not see this as a useful strategy for the story that we were interested in conveying.

THE FINAL PRODUCT

Our resulting tour, MSU: Cultivating Identity through Landscape, incorporates 5 spots on the North side of campus. We highlight the significance of the “Sacred Space” which now occupies the space between the MSU Union and the Main Library as well as the work of Professor Beal. Admittedly, this tour is quite sparse considering the broad claim we make in the title. I’ve been thinking about other possible sites to include… some that come to mind are:

The Rock on Farm Lane by the Auditorium
The prehistoric sand dune near the Breslin Center
Cowles House and the tree that grows through it
The duck landing outside of Wells Hall on the Red Cedar River

I’d love to continue building out the tour to be more robust! I would be interested to hear other ideas about what it should include. Please leave your ideas in the comments below or send them to me directly via Twitter, @zenparty.

THINKING ABOUT CONSTRAINTS ON AUTHORSHIP/CURATORSHIP AND THE GOAL OF USER EXPERIENCE DESIGN

I’m not entirely sure that mobile apps like Gowalla and Foursquare are that useful for telling cultural heritage story we were trying to tell in the way that we tried to tell it. There is certainly something to be said for leveraging the existing audiences that these services already have, not to mention the simplicity of their user interfaces makes for easy and quick access. On the other hand, such a simple interface is possible only because of the strict character limits and limited number of customizable content areas. As content curators and creators, where do we sacrifice our authorial power for greater access? What’s the value in this? As Ethan might say, what’s the “so what”?

While doing this project, I saw the terms author and curator as the same. I believe now that there is an important distinction to be made between authorial power and curatorial power. The constraints on authorial power are certainly frustrating to work with in Gowalla if you’re the one trying to author something, but I see how they might serve an ethical purpose, relevant to the core values of cultural heritage informatics, and user experience design. In these fields we can destabilize centralized, silencing paradigms of power and give unique experience room to breathe and allow for social interaction to take place. We aim to create digital spaces wherein many voices can be heard and converse with one another. While Minh-Tam and I were limited in how much we could write about each spot on our Gowalla tour, an infinite number of visitors can add their comments and photos, partaking in a conversation about this arrangement of locales. Our job as authors using Gowalla has been less to write experience and more to facilitate experience. In crafting user experience in the domain of cultural heritage, we are curators, facilitators, and – above all – user/stakeholder advocates.

While I think (and hope!) that better tools are out there for crafting these kinds of location-based cultural heritage experiences, Gowalla is most certainly a suitable tool for curating experience and facilitating interaction, despite the constraining limits it places on curatorial functions like Trip building.

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Learn more about Campus Archaeology

Check out all of the CHI tours on Gowalla