Navigation

From the Chicago Breaking Business Report:

Digital mapping company Navteq has introduced a new navigation system
that guides drivers based on the way people naturally give each other
directions, with Chicago as one of the initial cities in the launch.

Its new system, called Natural Guidance, gives instructions based on
points of interest and landmarks. For example, instead of traditional
navigation systems that tell drivers to turn after a certain amount of
distance, Natural Guidance instructs users to “turn right after the
yellow shop.”

I hope you like the look of your yellow shop, because if you paint it green, you’ll be destroying your city’s navigation system.

Give me feet, or meters, any day.

Following up on this widely-discussed post about styles of navigation, today's New York Times has an informal survey of ordinary people's ability to identify north.

Of 20 New Yorkers interviewed — some beneath Union Square, some in
the sun in the park itself — 13 pointed to north accurately and
instantly, 4 pointed in the wrong direction, 2 pointed to the sky …

(Perhaps, when New Yorkers say "I'm going up to Albany," some people are taking that literally.)

They also gave a simple test that seems to me to capture the difference between spatial navigation and narrative navigation, as I used the terms here.

As an extra challenge, we asked a few people to try a “homing task.”
Mr. Vinci was one of the participants. Using chalk, we marked Mr.
Vinci’s position on the ground, then asked him to close his eyes, take
two steps forward, three steps to the right, spin 180 degrees, and then
return to his original location.

All the others who were asked to perform this dance reversed their
steps to return back to their starting point. Scientifically, this is
known as a “route-following” approach; anecdotally, it’s a
less-efficient but fail-safe method.

But Mr. Vinci stepped diagonally back into place, using what’s called
a “path-integration strategy.”

The "route-following" approach, I think, corresponds to narrative navigation: understanding location through the steps required to get there.  Narrative navigators have followed a story to get from A to B, so to get back they can only follow the same story backwards.

Only a spatial navigator would be able to step back diagonally to the starting point.  Whereas a narrative navigator can remember a series of steps, and reverse them, the spatial navigator is remembering an actual map, so he can "see" that there is a shorter path back than the one he had taken.

What does this have to do with transit?  I think transit agencies need to be conscious of these different styles of navigation when they design information and directions.  Only a spatial navigator can tell you if a map works well.  Only a narrative navigator can tell you if directions do.

The last post on spatial vs narrative navigation got quite an interesting comment thread, and interesting response posts by both Angus and Cap’n Transit, all of which I encourage you to read.  Commenter Russ also offered several useful scholarly links, especially to Janet Vertesi’s very readable article exploring how the familiar London Tube map structures people’s images of the city. Continue Reading →