Designing the Way We Move: From Navigating the Users to Users of Navigation Devices

Abstract

This article discusses the relationship between information generated by GPS navigation applications and the appropriation and significance of urban spaces by these applications’ users in large urban areas such as the city of São Paulo, Brazil. Although applications such as Waze make life easier for drivers in cities with dense road networks and daily commutes riddled with heavy traffic jams, they also promote a change in the perception and significance of cities’ physical spaces. Hanssen [9] recalls that “what Benjamin teaches us is how sensation gets repeatedly transformed in ways that necessarily tighten the circuit binding human perception with its technical supplementation” [9, p. 63]. In this text, ubiquitous technology is interpreted as what may promote not only a transformation in human perception of territory but also a change of what Milton Santos named as used territory [16].