Crowd Compass: An Interaction Design Exploration of a Non-place

Abstract: The thesis project is an exploration of interaction design possibilities within thespaces of public transport in urban India and the challenges for design in these large,disorderly contexts. These public transit spaces offer a microcosmic view of thecurrent urban environment of India, where new paradigms of technology adoptionare emerging, and provide significant scope for interaction design to learn from andcontribute to in diverse ways.As the theme of public transport and its encompassing spaces are traditionallyapproached from urban planning and engineering perspectives, this thesis aims toexplore the urbanism of transit places from the framework of place-specificcomputing, which is a perspective on mobile and ubiquitous computing, and adesign methodology that is grounded in and emanating from the social and culturalpractices of a particular place. To understand and evaluate the environment, theproject makes use of elements of participatory design, brainstorming techniques likeplacestorming, and experience prototyping methodologies, a way for users to interactdirectly with the prototype, and thus at each stage of the design process explores therole of prototyping to generate reflective discussion.The thesis proposes Crowd Compass, an information service based on crowd density,that is available freely anywhere but only of value in a certain context to support aspecific decision, and expires instantly. The thesis also presents a new paradigm fordesign in large scale, disorderly contexts: crowd density, a parameter of contextualinformation for transit; and the concepts of a semi-controlled space for earlyprototyping, analytic and generative maps for effective analysis, and the significanceof design from “the inside”.