See you on the subway

Abstract

This project explores the social possibilities of mobile technology in transitional spaces such as public transport. Based on a cultural probes study of Stockholm subway commuters, we designed a location-based friend finder that displays only people in the same train as the user. We aim at reaching a critical mass of users and therefore decided to make the system compatible with as many phones as possible, thus it was designed as a simple web application. An initial informal study pointed out consequences of certain design decisions on the user experience and highlighted social tensions created by presence awareness.