The proliferation of GPS units in our life has greatly changed how people find their ways in the real world. Overreliance on step-by-step route directions from these automated navigation systems may result in less consciously building spatial knowledge of the environment and make people less engaged with the real environment. Consequently, when GPS devices are out of access, malfunction, or simply give wrong directions, people may not be well prepared to react to unexpected environmental conditions or find alternative action plans. Such mental unreadiness may cause safety problems in emergency situations.

To address this problem, I apply works in sensemaking from information science in the context of physical navigation and propose a spatial sensemaking framework. A detailed analysis decomposes navigation based on the key components of this framework showing that learning a new environment can be understood as a sensemaking process, which provides direction to the new designs of mobile navigation applications.

Related Publications

Wu, A., Zhang, X., Cai, G. (2010). An Interactive Sensemaking Framework for Mobile Visual Analytics. Proc. of VINCI '10, 133-141. PDF

Wu, A., Zhang, X. (2010). A Framework of Spatial Sensemaking for Human Navigation. In S. C. Hirtle, A. Klippel & F. Schmid (Eds.), You-Are-Here 2: 2nd Workshop on Spatial Awareness and Geographic Knowledge Acquisition with Small Mobile Devices at the International Conference Spatial Cognition 2010, 29-41. PDF

Wu, A., Zhang, X., Convertino, G., Carroll, J. M. (2009). Supporting Synchronous Sensemaking in Geo-Collaboration. Sensemaking workshop at ACM CHI'09. PDF

Wu, A., Zhang, X., Zhang, W. (2008). GPS---Secure Against Getting Lost, or More Danger? Proc. of International Conference of Cyberworlds 2008, 501-505. PDF

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