Talking about Place: An Experiment in How People Describe Places ∗ Changqing Zhou, Pamela Ludford, Dan Frankowski, Loren Terveen † Abstract. How people describe places is an important issue for the design of location-aware sys- tems. We report here on an experiment that investigated the types of descriptions people naturally produce for places, the extent to which they tailor descriptions for different audiences, and the fac- tors they consider in deciding how to tailor their descriptions. We identified a number of common types of place descriptions and a few common factors(purpose, knows me, knows area, privacy) that influenced what description a person chose. These results show that social applications should make the audience for place descriptions clear, and that systems should allow multiple descriptions for the same place, including making it possible for users to describe their location in different ways to dif- ferent people. 1. Introduction Physical coordinates, like latitudes and longitudes, are a comfortable language for computers - but not for people. People name their places and communicate with each other using contextually meaningful names. Descriptions of a single place may vary widely, ranging from generic (“a grocery store”) to specific (“Cub Foods”) to idiosyncratic (“the place we met last time”). Espinoza et al. [2] have provided some anecdotal descriptions of labels people give places when using GeoNotes. How people describe places is important for place-based system design. Wilenmann and Leuchovius argue that location-based services should describe location in ways relevant to users, such as “I’m home” [10]. In ’Smart Mobs’, Rheingold [6] describes a number of applications that will require individuals to share names of their places with others. Consolvo et al. [1] studied factors that impact people’s decision to disclose their locations. We seek to understand the types of descriptions people naturally produce for places, the extent to which they tailor these descriptions for different audiences, and the factors they consider in deciding how to tailor their descriptions. In this study, we carried out a formative experiment to study the following research question: How do people describe places? Can descriptions produced by one person be understood by another? * Pervasive 2005, May 8-13, 2005, Munich, Germany † Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota, 200 Union ST SE, 4-192, Minneapolis, MN 55414, USA, email: {czhou, ludford, dfrankow, terveen}@cs.umn.edu