Going the Other Way with Happy Maps and more

I have had a crusade going with Map My Run and other map makers for several years, trying to encourage someone to develop new tools to add a little gamification to routing, in my case in the name of exercise.

What I’m wanting seems really simple to me. I want to do lots of walking on roads I haven’t walked on before and as part of that exercise, I want to be able to plan and track the routes I can take on a mapping tool that links with my smartphone. More on this along with some other ideas like the man who used a GPS tracker to spell out a marriage proposal here.

Sounds simple to me, but it seems as though no one else wants it because no one is doing it. At the latest CES there was an interesting app for car routing. Rather than giving you turn by turn directions, it shows uncongested options in green and congested options in red.

Daniele Quercia recently gave a TED presentation (below) on Happy Maps, a concept where rather than choosing the shortest route, you can choose a route based on your mood. A happy route, a quiet route or maybe a route that goes past nice nice buildings or green spaces. It’s not a long video and I think given that you have visited my blog, that you would enjoy it.

He started with the observation that every day he took the same route, which was very busy, then one day he turned off that route and found a nice road that had no traffic on it. At that point I was thinking, “we are on the same page”.

So here’s his presentation. If you check out my other link and you agree with me that it would be a cool feature for Map My Run, or one of their competitors, how about dropping them an email and letting them know I’m not the only one who would like that feature, or leave a comment of support here that I share with them. Maybe someone will get a cool idea and we can all have some fun, getting some exercise and see parts of our cities and the world that we wouldn’t otherwise get to enjoy.

So the last word goes to Daniele.

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