Consider this: If we were able to teleport, no one would ever stumble upon anything. You'd look up Chinese food on Yelp, pick the top-ranked place, and after a brief dematerialized interlude, you'd be there fumbling with your soup dumplings. Everything you might have encountered had you walked to that destination--all the bookstores, the coffee shops, the Instagram-worthy street scenes and the potential paramours sharing the sidewalks--would go undiscovered. That can be a little bit what it's like to use Google Maps on your smartphone these days.
>Google Maps knows nothing of serendipity. Crowsflight encourages it.
Why? Because Google Maps transfers its own satellite-guided efficiency to us, its users. It tells us precisely what route we need to take to get where we're going as fast as possible, and we keep our noses pressed to our screens to make sure we heed it. It gives us the path of least resistance, literally, from point A to point B, which is fine most of the time, because most of the time that's what we ask of it. But that's not the only way of getting from point A to point B. You don't amble or stroll or explore with Google Maps. Google Maps knows nothing of serendipity. Crowsflight, an alternative navigation app, encourages it.
CW&T, the two-person, Brooklyn-based design studio that developed the iPhone app, bills it as "a GPS compass that simply points." And that's basically it: You search for a place, like you would with Google Maps, but instead of spitting out a turn-by-turn list of directions, Crowsflight gives you a thick yellow band showing which way to head. No street names, no traffic reports--just a direction to follow.
Che-Wei Wang and Taylor Levy, the designers who make up CW&T, scraped together the first version of Crowsflight in 2009, when they were on their way to visit Wang's parents in Tokyo. "Every morning we would preload a bunch of places we might want to end up, then we'd set out wandering by foot or bike," they explain. "Crowsflight completely transformed the way we moved around the city. It left us free to follow our instincts, get distracted and explore new places."
>We need apps that drive us back into the real world.
It's certainly not the only maps app you'd want on your phone. Sometimes, you just don't have time to wander. But it's an important reminder that we might not always want our lives as superhumanly optimized as technology allows them to be. Yes, of course, Google Maps is a modern marvel, saving us thousands of hours in aggregate, time that we can spend playing with our kids and learning new skills and volunteering at soup kitchens. And apps of its uber-efficient ilk--super-calendars, powerful inbox managers, and fantastically complex to-do lists of every imaginable design--help us cope with the breakneck pace of modern digital life.
But we also need apps that drive us back into the real world--apps that give us new ways to embrace its messy weirdness. Instead of apps that merely help us manage and catalog our lives, we need ones that help us expand them; apps that promote randomness and spontaneity and play. Rando, an photo-sharing app that beams snapshots to other users at random, is just one compelling example. In other words, an app that actually pushes you to go out and discover the city you live in is vastly more powerful than one that lets you put "discover the city" on a list of things to do.
