Slidedeck for workshop with Travel in the Digital Age (TinDA) students at Western Sydney University. For their assignments, students have to pitch and propose a new Smartphone app for travel. This workshop is designed to support them in generating the evidence-base for their app development and avoiding techno-solutionism. The Travel in the Digital Age unit is designed and coordinated by Dr Garth Lean. If you would like more information about the unit, please contact him on g.lean@westernsydney.edu.au

1. Travel – is there an app for that?
Dr Jenna Condie
Senior Lecturer in Digital Society
Western Sydney University
Flickr: Alexkess

2. Session Overview
• Designing apps
• Researching apps
• Techno-solutionism, and how to avoid it
• Case studies
1. Gendered travel and safety technologies
2. Social networking sites for travel
3. Physical disabilities and virtual reality travel

3. All about apps…
• Apps as socio-cultural artefacts (Lupton, 2014)
• ‘There’s an app for that’ culture
Apps are “small bits of software, micro-programs designed to
work quickly and easily on mobile devices, with little effort
required from users to upload them and put them into action”
(Lupton, 2019, p.130).
Lupton, D. 2014. Apps as artefacts: towards a critical perspective on mobile health and medical apps. Societies 4:
606–622.
Lupton, D. (2019). The thing-power of the human-app health assemblage: thinking with vital materialism. Social

4. Apps matter…
“Apps matter because they reflect our cultural values, bring multiple
actors including users, developers and advertisers into an interaction
space and communicate meanings that shape our everyday practices”
(Light, Burgess & Duguay, 2018).
Light, B., Burgess, J., & Duguay, S. (2018). The walkthrough method: An approach to
the study of apps. New media & society, 20(3), 881-900.

5. Designing apps
UX = user experience

6. Designing apps
How will you conceptualise the problem/issue/opportunity?
For your consideration:
• Decentre the human (Forlano, 2016)
• The ‘user’ as dehumanising!
• Commercial vs civic interests or both?
• The politics of travel
• The implications of the technologies you propose
Forlano, L. (2016). Decentering the human in the design of collaborative
cities. Design Issues, 32(3), 42-54.

7. Apps in ecosystems “I don’t really like having
Tinder guys on Facebook.
Instagram is okay but not
Facebook” (Sadia, 19)
“If they [dates] didn’t have
Snapchat, I wouldn’t even
bother” (Aimee, 22)

8. App infrastructures
Flickr: Torbakhopper Mike Lawrence Stock Catalog

9. Who is your
app for?
Flickr: AhmadHammoud (CC BY 2.0)

10. User personas – prominent UX method
Personas developed by urban designer and researcher Marcus Willcocks (UAL: Central Saint
Martins) for use in Playful Cities workshops in Parramatta, New South Wales, Australia

11. Evidence based personas
• User personas enmeshed in your assumptions and perspectives
• Grounding personas in data e.g. interviews, focus groups, social
media data
• 10 steps to personas (Nielsen, 2007, in Williams et al., 2014)
Williams, I. et al., (2014) A collaborative rapid persona-building workshop: creating
design personas with health researchers. International Journal of Sociotechnology
and Knowledge Development (IJSKD), 6(2), 17-35.

12. James (2017) Women, Safety
and Digital Technologies. Final
Report: Building Personas from
TinDA Data Sets, Unpublished
Report: Western Sydney
University.

13. App walkthrough method
(Light, Burgess & Duguay, 2018)
“The walkthrough method is a way of engaging directly with an app’s
interface to examine its technological mechanisms and embedded
cultural references to understand how it guides users and shapes their
experiences” (p.882).
• Deeper interrogation of apps
• Enables app comparison
• More rigorous methodology
Light, B., Burgess, J., & Duguay, S. (2018). The walkthrough method: An approach to
the study of apps. New media & society, 20(3), 881-900.
Flickr: Alexandra Zakharova (CC BY 2.0)

14. The environment of expected use
(Light, Burgess & Duguay 2018)
1. Vision: its purpose, target user base
and scenarios of use
2. Operating model: its business
strategy and revenue sources
3. Governance: how the app provider
seeks to manage and regulate user
activity Flickr: Helge V. Keitel (CC BY 2.0)
Light, B., Burgess, J., & Duguay, S. (2018). The walkthrough method: An approach to
the study of apps. New media & society, 20(3), 881-900.

15. Technical walkthrough (Light, Burgess &
Duguay, 2018)
Registration
and entry
Everyday use
App suspension,
closure and
leaving
Light, B., Burgess, J., & Duguay, S. (2018). The walkthrough method: An approach to
the study of apps. New media & society, 20(3), 881-900.

16. Flickr: Alexandra Zakharova (CC BY 2.0)
What kind of
questions did you
ask about it?
What concepts,
ideas, tools (aka
theory) shaped that
question?
What kind of
analysis did you
carry out?
What data did you
generate? Did it
answer your
questions? What
did you find?
What else do you
need to know and
how can you know
it?
What strategies
and protocols did
you employ to do
your research well?
Who influenced
your thinking? Your
approach?

17. Techno-solutionism
Technological solutions:
• are often turned to for ease, speed, and cost reductions (Condie,
under review)
• should be ‘integrity enhancing’ in the mobilities they afford (Sochor,
2015)
• can often reinforce existing exclusions and inequalities
• can often capitalise on insecurities and vulnerabilities
• have to be commercially viable which is not always in the best
interests of the user
Condie, J. (under review) The turn towards ICTs for women’s safety in public transport: A review and research agenda.
Sochor, J. (2015). Enhancing mobility and perceived safety via ICT: The case of a navigation system for visually
impaired users. In Safety and Security in Transit Environments (pp. 344- 361). Palgrave Macmillan, London.

18. Gendered travel and technology to the rescue
• Cultural understandings of women as vulnerable and travel as
masculine “underpin the technological ‘fix’ of the mobile” (Line, Jain
and Lyons, 2011, p. 23)
• Safety technologies for women travellers reproduce patriarchal and
paternalistic dynamics of gendered violence, risk and safety.
• For example: track and react apps (Condie, under review)
• Crowdsourcing perceptual safety data and creating data-driven mobilities
(e.g. Free to Be app)
• Closing the world down for women, rather than open it up?
Condie, J. (under review) The turn towards ICTs for women’s safety in public transport: A review and research agenda.
Line, T., Jain, J., & Lyons, G. (2011). The role of ICTs in everyday mobile lives. Journal of Transport Geography, 19(6),
1490-1499.

22. Travel apps – design a good one!
Dr Jenna Condie
Senior Lecturer in Digital Society
Western Sydney University
Flickr: Alexkess