Exploring hiking data at home & on the trail

Team

Timeframe

2022 ↝ Ongoing

Keywords

Alternative Outcomes
Digital Archives
Domestic Technology
Field Study
Interaction Design
Research Product
Metadata
Research Through Design
Slow Technology

Outcome

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3 Capra Research Products
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Novel Interaction Design
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Papers at CHI 2024 and DIS 2024
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Long-Term, Multi-Year Field Study
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Short Film

The Core Idea

As the practice of hiking becomes increasingly captured through personal data, it is timely to consider what kinds of data encounters might support forms of noticing and connecting to nature as well as one’s self and life history over time. To investigate this space we designed of Capra — a system that brings together the capture, storage, and exploration of personal hiking data with an emphasis on longer-term, occasional yet indefinite use.

Research Product

The Collector

The Collector is a wearable camera that captures time lapse photos from 3 different angles and encodes them with: time, dominant color, and altitude data.

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The Capra Collector, after a hike, ready to be connected to the Explorer.

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Two of the Capra Research Products.

The Transfer

After a hike (or multiple hikes), the Collector is inserted into the Explorer, initiating the transfer and storage of recent hiking data. During this transfer, the Explorer projects a slowly changing sequence of images that use hiking metadata to highlight connections between moments in the new data and the existing archive of hikes.

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The Capra Collector slides into the Capra Explorer, masking its controls during the transfer.

The Explorer

The Explorer is a projector and tangible archive of all hikes captured with the Collector. It enables re-visiting time lapses of your hikes through 3 filters: time, color, and altitude. We found these three forms of metadata could lead to a range of potential experiences. For example, exploring the quality of light throughout the day across hikes, contemplating ecological differences at varying altitudes, or non-chronologically orienting through hikes via a color spectrum.

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The Explorer projects timelapse photos onto the living-room wall.

We encourage you to view our video for a dynamic explanation of Capra.

Design Research Process Overview

Our multi-disciplinary design team adopted a designer-researcher approach where we progressively designed, built, refined, and critically reflected on Capra over several years.

Related Publications ↘

@ ACM CHI 2024

Capra: Making Use of Multiple Perspectives for Capturing, Noticing and Revisiting Hiking Experiences Over Time

William Odom,
Jordan White,
Sam Barnett,
Nico Brand,
Henry Lin,
Min Yoo,
Tal Amram

@ ACM DIS 2024

Negotiating Conceptual and Practical Frictions in Making the Capra Short Film: Extending a Research through Design Artifact with Video

Acknowledgments

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This research took place on the unceded ancestral territories of the xwmə𝜃kwəy`əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), səl`ilw`ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), q`íc`əy` (Katzie), kwikwəo`əm (Kwikwetlem), Stó:lō Coast Salish, K’ómoks, Tla’amin, Qayqayt, Kwantlen, Semiahmoo and Tsawwassen Nations. These locations are rooted within Indigenous lands and nations. We informed our- selves through the native-land web application (native-land.ca) to acknowledge and critically consider the land that we walked on as a part of this project. Acknowledging traditional territories, nations, and lands can be an initial step toward challenging the underlying colonization bound up in standard Western maps, and lead to further exploration and understanding of the history and complex effects of colonialism.
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This research is supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI).