Cognitive Maps and Mobile Technologies

The next speaker at ECREA 2012 is Didem Ozkul, whose interest is in understanding people's sense of place in an era of mobile communication. Mobile technologies liberate their users from place, but also afford a form of attachment and dependence on physical location; we become dependent on global positioning to locate ourselves in physical space.

Space is displayed as locations on smartphone screens, or used as a point of reference for directions; mobile technologies affect our processes of memory and meaning-making. This change can be investigated through concept mapping, which also highlights the difficulties people have in expressing their understandings and experiences of space. Didem approached this by asking Londoners to draw their own maps of the city, based on their personal understandings.

Locative media do not replace such cognitive maps, but they change how we assign meanings to places and how we navigate the city. Our thinking about places changes as such locative technologies become more embedded in everyday life. And, as is clear from this research, our identities and sense of space are constructed socially.

Locative media enable people to visualise their locations in different ways; in cognitive mapping, there is an element of nostalgia as our feelings and understandings about places are affected by our memories which are recalled in the mapping process, and key locations are highlighted in the process. What also emerges from Didem's research is a view of London as a city in transit, populated by people who are never in one place for long, and likely to move away again soon after they are first encountered.

The importance of specific places and spaces emerges only in such retrospective mapping, and enables people to tell their stories; such maps offer a personal representation of memories and nostalgic feelings. Buried and forgotten stories are revealed, and everyday life and the value of locative media is brought into focus.