I’ll be honest and say that I have a poor memory when it comes to remembering places I’ve been to during my travels in other countries. My recent travel to Hokkaido, Japan, for example. I can only remember specific points during that journey. Sure enough, I could have brought a journal and wrote down the places I’ve been to and what happened there, but what if I only wanted to know where I’ve been to and have photos or videos to help me remember those places?
This brought us to Moves, an app that acts as a tracker and uses GPS to record your movement. For this sketch, I walked around Melbourne with the app active while simultaneously taking photos and videos. The app doesn’t actually record the places you’ve been to, I actually had to input them myself. I also found that the app doesn’t record the steps taken and times accurately.
An obvious issue is that you need to have an Internet connection for it to work, so that could be a potential problem when you’re overseas and couldn’t connect 24/7. This brought about a question though, what if it could document the journey offline by having the user manually input the data? In other words, they use the app to help them easily document their journey. They’ll have to input the times themselves, and if they wanted to, the method of travel (e.g. walk or van).
The video above is an example if the app could make a video narrative out of it. However, considering that I only took a few photos and videos, I did wonder about the problems this would have if the volume of photos and videos taken was larger. Would it scroll up faster? And if it did, would viewers be able to follow it? If they couldn’t then we’d have to design a different approach. Maybe instead of a video, you could touch/click on the location icon and a library of the photos/videos would pop up. Or maybe all the photos/videos would be in view (like in the video), they would automatically play like a slideshow, and the user can scroll down to see it.