Sproute is a navigation app that diversifies how you travel by offering a set of characters that get you to your destination in different ways.

For example maybe you want to avoid dark and unlit streets at night, or maybe you could go sightseeing on the way to your destination?

Sproute was the outcome of my 4 month residency with Move Lab: an urban mobility lab based in Berlin. Particular thanks goes to Florian Porada who was the developer on the project and translated my design into a working app. The lab also have a project page for Sproute, and a couple of blog posts which I recommend checking out.

If you live in Denmark, Germany or the UK (and have an iPhone) then you can try Sproute out today!

This initial ensemble of characters were chosen to appeal to different facets of a person’s needs, and also to exemplify the scope of potential future characters: from precise functionality, to open-ended exploration.

Sightseer

The Sightseer will take you via landmarks throughout your environment as you travel to your destination.

Nightlight

The Nightlight is a welcoming blob of light that helps you navigate confidently at night by avoiding unlit streets as much as possible.

Commuter

The Commuter generates 100 routes between two locations of your choice. Every time you travel you are provided with a new route.

You simply select a character before you set out on your trip, and the algorithm that we developed for the character then defines how they travel to their destination. As you travel, you can use the journey overview to get a non map-based understanding of your trip (the information you are shown also varies with each character).

If you live in London, Copenhagen, or Berlin (and have an iPhone) then send me an email at julius.ingemann@gmail.com and I’ll send you a beta invite

With Sproute I wanted to continue evaluating the ideas that I had come up with during my Agency Agency project. Namely that user friendliness doesn’t mean focussing on efficiency and “frictionless” experiences.

Most navigation apps are built on the assumption that the most useful route for you is always the fastest and most efficient. Sproute tries to question this assumption. Instead, asking how many different routes could we get from A to B? And what other routes could we take if we added a couple of minutes to our journey time?

With the goal of evaluating my ideas with a larger audience I set 3 goals for the project:

- Create a critical project that is also approachable and understandable.
- Make a fully functioning prototype.
- People should actually try it, not just read about it.

To get into the headspace of navigation behaviours and in order to catalyse discussions among the lab members, I came up with a range of small experiments. Having an external “thing” (like a map or shared experience) to discuss meant that we could much more easily understand eachother’s specific observations and abstract thoughts.

These experiments helped highlight behaviours that we rarely reflect on, like how little we know about the streets that run parallel to our main commuting route, or how, even when planning a “fast” trip, we still take external factors, like rush hour congestion, into account.

Using the framework from the research paper “What do prototypes prototype?” I planned my own prototypes according to their model of Role, Look and Feel, and Implementation.

A few weeks into the project I presented my progress to 60 employees in the company, and used the opportunity to try out the design directions that had started to bubble to the top. I randomly assigned an activity for each person to do over a 2 week period. Since this was more about the behaviours, I designed a set of cards that told them what to do, rather than losing time trying to program the experiences.

After the 2 weeks I gathered the participants back and lead a short workshop. Amazingly the role playing aspects of some of the more oddball activities, such as asking people to pretend to be stealthy ninjas, had actually led to the most engagement and reflection among participants. This power of characters and role play to get people to behave differently than they usually would was what we tried to harness in Sproute.

Digging through and testing out the “alternate route” functions in the Graphhopper API allowed me to quickly understand how the various parametres affected what routes we could generate. All the street-light and landmark data, as well well as the map graphs themselves came from Open Street Map (OSM). The open source nature of OSM means that unfortunately the app itself is biased towards communities where there is more available data (usually well-populated western countries), but in the future the hope is to encourage Sproute users to contribute back to OSM in areas where the data is incorrect (e.g missing streetlights).

Many of the algorithm ideas, as well as the final implementations and code were made by Florian Porada, who was in charge of programming the functioning Sproute app.

Once the idea of using character based routing was settled on, and we had verified that it would be possible to translate it into code, the next challenge was making this new framework feel approachable.

Paper prototypes led me to the idea of re-contextualising the character selection screens from games like Mario Kart and Street Fighter. Using a familiar and simple interaction also helps transmit the concept behind Sproute to any newcomers.

My hope is that, if nurtured correctly, Sproute could start to evolve from a proof of concept to an open-sourced routing platform. Which is to say, rather a place for sharing specific routes, it would be a place to share the algorithms that create those kinds of routes.

A central repository of routing algorithms would give research groups and hobbyists a-like a centralised place to share their creations. Bundling functionalities in the same platform means that certain gate-way characters can help people build trust in the rest of the system and then eventually branch out into the more eccentric characters. 

The last thing to mention is the role that non-linear navigation could play in a future in which we end up with autonomous vehicles, or even in the milder future where we become even more reliant on our mapping apps. 

Taking a wrong turn or getting lost can be a blessing rather than a curse. It affords us the opportunity to explore our environments and learn new things about familiar places. Understanding efficiency and utility to mean “As Soon As Possible” means we’ll lose those moments of discovery: how can you get lost in a self-driving car? Non-linear routing like what we’ve explored in Sproute could be a way of introducing a little more uncertainty back into the system.

However Sproute’s aim isn’t just to offer a new way of getting around, it is to show the assumptions and interactions that are taken for granted across all of our interactions with technology, not just mobility.