Talking about Place: An Experiment in How People Describe Places ¤

How people describe places is an important issue for the desi gn of location-aware sys- tems. We report here on an experiment that investigated the t ypes of descriptions people naturally produce for places, the extent to which they tailor descripti ons for different audiences, and the fac- tors they consider in deciding how to tailor their descripti ons. We identified a number of common types of place descriptions and a few common factors(purpos e, knows me, knows area, privacy) that influenced what description a person chose. These results sho w that social applications should make the audience for place descriptions clear, and that systemsshould allow multiple descriptions for the same place, including making it possible for users to descri be their location in different ways to dif- ferent people.