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The road inspector is out on his daily inspection tour. He spots a damaged road sign, but the traffic situation does not allow him stop immediately. Instead he uses PlaceMemo to save the geographical position and record a voice-memo, so that he won’t forget about it like he always used to do. Later the same week, before heading out on the same stretch of road, he listens through the memos. The map gives him a rough idea of where the reported malfunction is situated, and by reviewing the message he knows what equipment to bring. Back on the road he concentrates on identifying new faults. When approaching the location of the broken road sign, he can hear the memo played |
in its entirety just before he reaches the broken sign. He gently decreases the speed of the truck and comes to a halt without jeopardizing other drivers, and then gets out to mend the sign.The PlaceMemo prototype is being developed to facilitate infrastructure management tasks, like identifying, reporting and taking care of malfunctions along the roads. The vast working area of road inspectors makes it hard to remember all the identified defects and organise the work to fix them. This system enables the inspectors to associate memos to geographical locations along the roads. Our design supports the simultaneous handling of reporting and receiving reminders while driving. |
Additionally, the memos could easily be shared among colleagues, for instance to enable job rotation. We are interested in the development of innovative mobile services, and in acquiring knowledge on how to take advantage of different contextual factors. The design choices were based on the requirements discovered in an ethnographic field study, and the service is based on handheld mobile devices equipped with GPS-receivers. PlaceMemo is interesting from a commercial perspective, since there are many occupational groups working with infrastructure management in vast settings. We have started initial work towards commercialisation of the concept. |