Navigating the World With Technology

Call for Interest

Mobile information technology, including smartphones and smartwatches, has become ubiquitous. Mobile geographic information displays (mGIDs) readily available on such smart devices have revolutionized the way we move through our environments. While GNSS-assisted mGIDs help people every day to reach their destinations safely and efficiently, they have also been shown to impact navigators’ innate self-localization and orientation abilities and skills, resulting in us depending on such tools, and the large corporations providing them, for finding our way around. This has various consequences on the individual, societal, and environmental levels. Current mobile maps present a seemingly one-fits-all display design solution used by many users and use contexts. In doing so, they are missing the opportunity digitalization offers to be adaptive to individual needs and abilities of users and their task and use contexts.

In this workshop, we will thus focus on two central research questions:

• How can we adapt mGIDs to individual users and their various tasks and use contexts?
• What are the consequences of various design decisions on an individual, societal, and environmental level, how do these interact, and what are ways to counter any negative effects of mobile navigation technologies?

We invite participants to express their interest in the workshop by either using our contact form (https://geohci.wordpress.com/contact/) on our website and telling us briefly about their motivation for joining the workshop or by submitting a position paper of up to 5 pages (ACM single-column format) showcasing their interest or experience in the topic, ongoing or preliminary research, concepts, ideas, or any other form of contribution. Position papers in PDF format are due by 04.06.2023 at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=navigatingtheworldwi0. Position papers are not a requirement for participating in the workshop.
Admission will be granted based on available spots in the workshop and the relevance of your motivation. At least one author must attend the workshop online or offline. In-person attendance is encouraged but will not affect the acceptance decision. All participants must register for the workshop and at least one day of the conference. The workshop will take place on September 26, 2023. For more detailed information, visit the workshop’s website: https://geohci.wordpress.com/.