Field trial of Tiramisu: crowd-sourcing bus arrival times to spur co-design

  • Authors:
  • John Zimmerman;Anthony Tomasic;Charles Garrod;Daisy Yoo;Chaya Hiruncharoenvate;Rafae Aziz;Nikhil Ravi Thiruvengadam;Yun Huang;Aaron Steinfeld

  • Affiliations:
  • Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA;Swarthmore, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, USA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA;University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA;Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, USA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Crowd-sourcing social computing systems represent a new material for HCI designers. However, these systems are difficult to work with and to prototype, because they require a critical mass of participants to investigate social behavior. Service design is an emerging research area that focuses on how customers co-produce the services that they use, and thus it appears to be a great domain to apply this new material. To investigate this relationship, we developed Tiramisu, a transit information system where commuters share GPS traces and submit problem reports. Tiramisu processes incoming traces and generates real-time arrival time predictions for buses. We conducted a field trial with 28 participants. In this paper we report on the results and reflect on the use of field trials to evaluate crowd-sourcing prototypes and on how crowd sourcing can generate co-production between citizens and public services.