Designing games with a purpose
Communications of the ACM - Designing games with a purpose
Proceedings of the 18th international conference on World wide web
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services
What makes Paris look like Paris?
ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) - SIGGRAPH 2012 Conference Proceedings
Drawing the city: differing perceptions of the urban environment
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
The hidden image of the city: sensing community well-being from urban mobility
Pervasive'12 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Pervasive Computing
Finger on the pulse: identifying deprivation using transit flow analysis
Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work
Urban: crowdsourcing for the good of London
Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web companion
Aesthetic capital: what makes london look beautiful, quiet, and happy?
Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing
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Planners and social psychologists have suggested that the recognizability of the urban environment is linked to people's socio-economic well-being. We build a web game that puts the recognizability of London's streets to the test. It follows as closely as possible one experiment done by Stanley Milgram in 1972. The game picks up random locations from Google Street View and tests users to see if they can judge the location in terms of closest subway station, borough, or region. Each participant dedicates only few minutes to the task (as opposed to 90 minutes in Milgram's). We collect data from 2,255 participants (one order of magnitude a larger sample) and build a recognizability map of London based on their responses. We find that some boroughs have little cognitive representation; that recognizability of an area is explained partly by its exposure to Flickr and Foursquare users and mostly by its exposure to subway passengers; and that areas with low recognizability do not fare any worse on the economic indicators of income, education, and employment, but they do significantly suffer from social problems of housing deprivation, poor living conditions, and crime. These results could not have been produced without analyzing life off- and online: that is, without considering the interactions between urban places in the physical world and their virtual presence on platforms such as Flickr and Foursquare. This line of work is at the crossroad of two emerging themes in computing research - a crossroad where "web science" meets the "smart city" agenda.