Closing the Gap Between Representation and Experience
The apps we open every day have quietly become the lens through which we see the places around us.
But that software still treats a place as a dot on a map: a coordinate, a star rating, a boundary on
a screen. It flattens what actually makes a place a place, the meaning and memory and shared life that
happen there. My dissertation is about the gap between how our information systems represent
places and how we actually live them, and why closing it matters for people and places alike.
We find restaurants on Yelp, get directions from Google Maps, plan trips on Airbnb, and form
impressions of our cities from Instagram. Over the last three decades these systems have quietly
become the middleware between people and the physical world, our virtual concierges and chauffeurs
and gatekeepers. They shape how we find places, how we choose between them, and how we remember them later.
But they are reductive about it. A place becomes a point in 2D space, an averaged star rating, a
fixed boundary on a map. That flattening doesn't stay on the screen. These representations feed real
decisions about where capital flows, which neighborhoods get investment, what researchers conclude.
When the representation is impoverished, the cost lands on real communities, in stereotypes that get
reinforced and cultural identities that get erased.
“What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value.”
Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place, 1977
And place is not the fixed, backward-looking thing our software assumes. A lot of the gaps come from
an out-of-date idea: that a neighborhood has settled boundaries, or that a corner café has one
identity, the one captured in its online reviews. Geographers like Doreen Massey describe place
differently, as something open and dynamic, each place a distinct mix of wider and more local ties
that is always being remade.
“Instead of thinking of places as areas with boundaries around them, they can be imagined as articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings.”
Doreen Massey, A Global Sense of Place, 1991
My thesis: by closing the gaps between how places are represented and how they are
experienced, we can build social information systems that are more insightful and more meaningful.
That payoff reaches past the people who use these systems to everyone who lives in the places they depict.
The gaps
Four truths about place that software misses
Places are dynamic
Systems treat a place as fixed context. Real places never sit still. Social, political,
cultural, and natural forces keep reshaping them, and a place can differ from season to
season, even from day to night.
Places are multitudinous
A place gets one identity and one rating. But every place contains multitudes. It holds as many
identities as the people and communities who claim it, each with their own perspective.
Places don't need a location
Systems demand a fixed location. Yet some places move (the bar car of a commuter train),
and some have no coordinates at all (an online community).
Places are blended
Software treats the physical and the digital as separate worlds. In practice the boundary
between a place and its digital reflection keeps blurring, and that blur is often a good thing.
The work
Three systems, built and studied in the wild
Rather than argue from theory, I took a research-through-design approach. I designed, built, and
deployed three working systems, each one aimed at a different gap. Together they point toward
location-based software that feels less like a database and more like a place.
Livehoods · ICWSM 2012 · Best Paper Award · Test of Time Award (2022)
Livehoods
How can a map of a city evolve the way the city itself does?
Municipal maps draw neighborhoods as fixed areas that tile the city and rarely change.
Livehoods builds them from the ground up instead. It clusters more than
18 million location check-ins shared on social media to reveal the collective
activity of a city, producing a map that can evolve as neighborhoods do. An interview study
with 27 Pittsburgh residents asked how these data-driven boundaries line up with both lived
experience and the official municipal borders. Their answers became stories about transition,
identity, and the digital divide.
Ratings collapse a place into a single number; reviews bury it in long, subjective prose.
Curated City is a social city guide that represents places as a multitude of personal
experiences instead of one averaged verdict. People create and remix each other's guides, so
the individual and collective views of a city sit side by side. The design surfaces what
experiences have in common without making anyone rule a place simply “good” or “bad.” A two-week
field trial with 20 Pittsburgh residents produced nine design implications for guides built
this way.
How do you give a sense of place to somewhere that isn't one?
Airports, overpasses, rest stops, bus terminals: the anthropologist Marc Augé called these
non-places, the transient, undifferentiated spaces that give a sense of place nothing
to take root in, even as they fill more and more of modern life. Journeys & Notes is an
Android app that turns the time we spend in motion into a shared virtual place, where
travelers connect with one another and reflect on the moment. A large-scale field study
reached 9,435 participants. It showed how social computing can nurture place
where the physical world offers none.
Six dimensions of place, for the people who build with it
I took what I learned building these systems, together with the place literature in geography,
anthropology, and sociology, and distilled it into six qualitative dimensions of place. Each comes
with guiding questions, 18 in all, to help designers treat place as a lived space rather than a coordinate.
Scale
Places range from the small and personal to the vast and all-encompassing.
Transformation
Places are always changing, across years and across a single day.
Interconnectedness
Tangled webs of links between people, objects, infrastructure, and other places.
Openness
Flows of people, culture, ideas, and capital pass into and out of a place, across borders.
Throwntogetherness
The chance that distinct lives and trajectories meet at the same place, or just miss each other.
Politics
Places are governed by power, and that power is never evenly apportioned.
Why it matters now
The stakes only grow from here
As information systems become more and more the lens through which we encounter the world, the cost
of getting place wrong only grows. That is part of why this work has aged the way it has. Livehoods
won Best Paper at ICWSM in 2012, and in 2022 it won the Test of Time
Award, given to research whose influence has lasted.
And the lens is shifting again. People now ask large language models what a neighborhood is like,
where they should go, whether they should move there. They are handing over more than how they find
places; they are handing over how they reason and decide about them. These models
inherit the same flattened representations and speak them back in one confident voice. Whose version
of a place gets encoded, and whose gets lost, becomes a higher-stakes question from here.
The north star of this work is a future where the sense of a place flows freely between the
physical world and its virtual counterparts, and where location-based systems behave more like places.
This dissertation is a set of concrete steps toward that vision, some in working systems and some in
ideas other builders can take further.