Amble Time / “A shortcoming of standard maps is their inability to convey a sense of temporal scale. Can I stroll to the park for lunch, or would it take me all day? Amble Time adds an element of time to a PDA-based tourist map. By using a GPS system and your average walking speed, it creates a bubble that indicates everywhere you could walk in an hour.” This could be a lot of fun.

Don’t bother clicking, the url is kaput. One quick Google finds Amble Time alive and well:

A steadily shrinking area of a city map shows where you can walk as time ticks by. The bubble shows everywhere you could go within timing constraints that you provide. Researchers used this “travel-sensitive alarm clock” to explore ways that location-based information and ad-hoc networking could support participation in interactive stories.

There’s even a nice PDF available, Time, Voice, and Joyce, that discusses the project Amble Time was built to support:

We present a design for recapitulating walks through Dublin’s City Centre by characters in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Our computationally supported walkers will avail themselves of a “map with a sense of time” and a system that translates their hand lettering gestures as attributes of colourful typographic forms.

Now I definitely have to see it working again. Amble Time has iPhone written all over it.

In a nutshell, this little script grabs up to 15 items recently tagged “readinglist” from my del.icio.us account, applies some simple formatting and then builds a 3×5 PDF suitable for your Hipster PDA. It’s stream of consciousness coding with lots of hardcoded stuff, but it works just fine for me. Bugs exist, e.g. it’ll get confused if you use certain characters in your item titles. I had a few extra minutes so now you can also build arbitrary lists, like this or this. The hardcoded formatting can either work for or against you.

Of course, there’s no support for this. If you can find something useful out of it, great. Otherwise, sorry.

“In keeping with the theme of the course, the students unveiled their final recommendations by staging an immersive experience. They filled a large, round room with process sketches, prototypes, and thematic props (such as tents). After walking their audience through the final recommendations, they invited everyone outside to enjoy a makeshift campfire and toasted marshmallows.”

There are a number of PDFs available, from strategic planning, to brainstorming, to signage and much more. Final recommendations and process documentation also available (PDF, 12MB).

I have to highlight the PDF from Marc Rettig and Aradhana Goel—it’s great! I want to project each page on a wall and immerse myself; these little PDF pages don’t do the subject justice. One of the best examples of the physical “experience” experience design demands around.