Daniele Quercia: Happy maps

169,600 views ・ 2015-01-06

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

00:13
I have a confession to make.
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As a scientist and engineer, I've focused on efficiency for many years.
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But efficiency can be a cult,
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and today I'd like to tell you about a journey
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that moved me out of the cult and back to a far richer reality.
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A few years ago, after finishing my Ph.D. in London, I moved to Boston.
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I lived in Boston and worked in Cambridge.
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I bought a racing bicycle that summer,
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and I bicycled every day to work.
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To find my way, I used my phone.
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It sent me over Mass. Ave., Massachusetts Avenue,
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the shortest route from Boston to Cambridge.
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But after a month
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that I was cycling every day on the car-packed Mass. Ave.,
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I took a different route one day.
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I'm not entirely sure why I took a different route that day, a detour.
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I just remember a feeling of surprise;
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surprise at finding a street with no cars,
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as opposed to the nearby Mass. Ave. full of cars;
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surprise at finding a street draped by leaves and surrounded by trees.
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But after the feeling of surprise, I felt shame.
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How could I have been so blind?
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For an entire month,
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I was so trapped in my mobile app
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that a journey to work became one thing only:
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the shortest path.
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In this single journey, there was no thought
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of enjoying the road,
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no pleasure in connecting with nature,
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no possibility of looking people in the eyes.
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And why?
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Because I was saving a minute out of my commute.
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Now let me ask you: Am I alone here?
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How many of you have never used a mapping app for finding directions?
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Most of you, if not all, have.
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And don't get me wrong -- mapping apps are the greatest game-changer
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for encouraging people to explore the city.
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You take your phone out and you know immediately where to go.
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However, the app also assumes
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there are only a handful of directions to the destination.
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It has the power to make those handful of directions
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the definitive direction to that destination.
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After that experience, I changed.
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I changed my research from traditional data-mining
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to understanding how people experience the city.
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I used computer science tools
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to replicate social science experiments at scale, at web scale.
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I became captivated by the beauty and genius
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of traditional social science experiments
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done by Jane Jacobs, Stanley Milgram, Kevin Lynch.
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The result of that research has been the creation of new maps,
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maps where you don't only find the shortest path, the blue one,
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but also the most enjoyable path,
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the red one.
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How was that possible?
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Einstein once said,
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"Logic will get you from A to B.
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Imagination will take you everywhere."
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So with a bit of imagination,
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we needed to understand
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which parts of the city people find beautiful.
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At the University of Cambridge, with colleagues,
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we thought about this simple experiment.
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If I were to show you these two urban scenes,
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and I were to ask you which one is more beautiful,
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which one would you say?
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Don't be shy.
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Who says A? Who says B?
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Brilliant.
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Based on that idea,
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we built a crowdsourcing platform,
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a web game.
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Players are shown pairs of urban scenes,
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and they're asked to choose which one is more beautiful, quiet and happy.
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Based on thousands of user votes,
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then we are able to see where consensus emerges.
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We are able to see which are the urban scenes
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that make people happy.
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After that work, I joined Yahoo Labs,
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and I teamed up with Luca and Rossano,
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and together, we aggregated those winning locations in London
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to build a new map of the city,
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a cartography weighted for human emotions.
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On this cartography, you're not only able to see and connect
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from point A to point B the shortest segments,
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but you're also able to see the happy segment,
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the beautiful path, the quiet path.
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In tests, participants found the happy, the beautiful, the quiet path
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far more enjoyable than the shortest one,
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and that just by adding a few minutes to travel time.
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Participants also love to attach memories to places.
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Shared memories -- that's where the old BBC building was;
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and personal memories -- that's where I gave my first kiss.
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They also recalled how some paths smelled and sounded.
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So what if we had a mapping tool
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that would return the most enjoyable routes
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based not only on aesthetics
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but also based on smell, sound, and memories?
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That's where our research is going right now.
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More generally, my research,
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what it tries to do is avoid the danger of the single path,
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to avoid robbing people of fully experiencing the city in which they live.
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Walk the path through the park, not through the car park,
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and you have an entirely different path.
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Walk the path full of people you love
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and not full of cars,
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and you have an entirely different path.
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It's that simple.
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I would like to end with this thought:
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do you remember "The Truman Show?"
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It's a media satire in which a real person
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doesn't know he's living in a fabricated world.
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Perhaps we live in a world fabricated for efficiency.
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Look at some of your daily habits,
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and as Truman did in the movie, escape the fabricated world.
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Why?
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Well, if you think that adventure is dangerous, try routine. It's deadly.
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Thank you.
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07:15
(Applause)
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