Travel and Serendipity – Matt Jones

How personal informatics are engineering coincidence, lowering environmental impacts, and forging a new golden age of travel.

“Voyage, travel and change of place impart vigor” – Seneca

Travel is an omnipresent force in culture – something we’ve always done, for trade, education, and also pleasure and adventure.

(Braniff International airlines photographs – totally pop-art)

Travel as exotic, sensual, luxury item.

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness” – Mark Twain

• If travel is broken… let’s unbreak it.
• (lovely container video)
• “The box” – Marc Levinson.

• The world is becoming overwhelmingly urban – a place full of cities.
• shaping things / everyware (I really should get these)

“Serendipity is looking in a haystack for a needle and discovering a farmer’s daughter” – Julius Comroe Jr.

• Serendipity can be engineered – maximise the potential of coincidence occurring – but you need to still have the ability to be able to recognise serendipity.

• Sharing where you’re going to be with who you trust.

“we wanted to design this around trust, and we wanted to design this around intimacy”

• Removing words like “deny” and “remove” from the UI – it’s not about your relationship with these people; it’s about the information you’re sharing.
• People are bringing mental models from other sites to Dopplr and finding that hard. “Quite important stuff; you need to be really confident in it”.

• Light cone!
• Dopplr is about the future, which you can’t automate (yet). You have to declare the future.
• Dopplr is a catalyst, about creating possibilities – lowers reaction energy of meeting your friends.
• Dopplr is about tending towards simple benefits, instead of “features”.
• Dopplr is a feature of larger service, called the Internet. (coral reefs)

Nothing we do is sustainable – inventing agriculture brought that around. Travel is not necessarily sustainable – but can we use technology to help us lower the impact.

Services that let you declare the future allow you to model what you’re doing, and thus create a feedback loop.

Nicolas Nova – highspeed train map – deformed to speed.

• “Settlements” are an object, hence “not far from” is useful. Displaying nearby cities might change your mind about the future.
• Dopplr API will be coming soon.
• “combinatorial-design-and-build.”

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landsacpes but in having new eyes.”

• Tools that model the future let us sustain ourselves better – we can make more informed decisions.
• “Home city” is very valuable for people who don’t travel so much.

Questions

• Why “Dopplr”? – Future coming towards you. Once you hit “now”, we go to a new service – twitter, jaiku, phone, email.
• What’s the business model? – First we’re building the benefit. Then: “how do we sustain the service to sustain the benefit?”

“I didn’t invent physics”

What about the past? “Where have I been, what I spend my time doing”. “Coming soon”.