You-Are-Here Maps: Creating Spatial Awareness through Map-like Representations

Spatial awareness and knowledge about one’s location in an environment is a necessity for successful orientation, wayfinding, and navigation activities. Although familiar environments allow us the luxury of unguided success in reaching our destinations, unfamiliar or partially familiar environments require the use of external spatial information in mostly maplike or verbal form. We are living in times where mobile location-based services become omnipresent, be it stand-alone systems such as TomTom or Garmin, or the more recent generic navigation services now being offered by Google and others. We are also living in times where spatial information is available in a much wider array of formats, currency, and fidelity. Hence, it is time to rethink how to provide spatial information for orientation and wayfinding from the perspective of creating spatial awareness. We see a recent development that researchers and observant journalists are becoming concerned about the negative effects of overdependence on (and even blind trust in) navigation services. Illustratively, an article entitled “Switch your device on and your brain off” compared users of mobile navigation devices to mindless zombies who simply follow instructions (Hillenbrand, 2009). In a similar vein, Brooks (2007) wrote that he quickly attached to his navigation device, and was soon unable to get anywhere without “her.” The scientific community (Péruch & Wilson, 2004; Parush, Ahuvia, & Erev, 2007; Bakdash, Linkenauger, & Proffitt, 2008) has begun studying these issues, and contends that while navigation devices can make it easier to navigate from an origin to a destination, people are less likely to

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