Walking & talking: Probing the urban lived experience

With ubiquitous mobile computing devices spreading throughout the urban environment of everyday life, there is a growing need to better understand person-place relationships and how technology can play a role in this urban experience. To this end, we propose a mobile methodology called Walking & Talking, an observed walking tour with participants through the city, which makes it easy and motivating for them to discuss their personal relationships with a place. The paper will describe a case study where the method was successfully applied to elicit rich, contextualized and intimate data, making it a useful research tool for the fields of urban interaction design and mobile & location aware technology.