Adam Greenfield linked to SeeShell a few weeks ago – a research project that Johanna Brewer is working on to create an annotated Oyster card.
SeeShell is my new project, an augmented Oyster Card (the RFID-enabled Underground ticket) holder which displays, over time, the journeys a rider has taken. When a user passes their Oyster card (which is inside the SeeShell) over the touch-in point at the gate to the station while they are entering or exiting, the SeeShell, using RFID, senses which station the user just passed through and over time a map of the stations they have visited begins to emerge on their Oyster Card holder….. By building SeeShell on top of an already existing system, I hope to show how lived patterns of mobility might be leveraged in new ways and placed back into the hands of their creators.
So, what’s the big deal. Well, a couple of things. One: this is a lovely idea. Two: this is a really important principle.
One of the recurring conversations that I have with clients is around information permission and the dialogue we create with our users. This revolves around asking only for what you need to know, not what you’d like to know until you’ve created a relationship that makes this information trade a ‘win’ for all.
To take a really simple example, when I set up an account with your online service, don’t ask where I live when you don’t need to know. Once I’m in, you might offer the opportunity to customise the information I receive from you based on location. Great: I give you information, you give me information. It’s an equal trade.
One of the thing that amazes and bothers me in equal quantities is the amount of information that Transport for London holds about my life. When I lived in Hackney, I once received an email from TfL to let me know about a planned closure to Brixton station in South London. Odd, you might think, given the 7.5 miles between them. And yet, at that time I was traveling through Brixton, regular as clockwork every Friday night and TfL knew it. It was an amazing use of the information at their disposal, but an uncomfortably uneven relationship. TfL holds an incredibly rich amount of information about my travel patterns – where I go and how I get there. But I can’t use it.
Just imagine the potential of being able to see an overlay of your most common routes, suggestions on better ways to do it (a real bonus in a city as big and busy as London), an ability to find information about places of interest along the way, nevermind the monetising potential of persuading me of the nice coffee shop opportunities along the way (and the ability to pay with my Oyster – a long mooted, but yet to be seen feature).
But more than this, TfL would establish a very different, and deeper type of trust relationship with me as a result – giving me something back for the information I give them with every bleep of a Oyster reader.
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