Mobile Caching

One late afternoon, I went to a public administration office in Helsinki and found out that the office has moved to a new address unfamiliar to me. Realising that I only had a very short time to find the new place before the office closed, I took a few pictures of the moving announcement and the map of the new location using my mobile phone camera. To save time, I immediately left the old office and started to walk around and ask people nearby .


The first several people I asked were familiar with the street, but had no clue about the exact location. I remembered that I have taken the map of the new location using my mobile phone, so I started to show the pictures to the next several people I met on the street using my mobile phone.

A lady immediately recognized the building and gave me a direction. "A good start", I thought. After thanking the lady, I walked toward the direction provided and asked another lady with the map from my mobile phone. Looking at the map, she pointed out that the building was located somewhere across the street block. After thanking her, I rushed to cross the street and went around the block where I found a nice young man walking towards me. I told him about the information from the previous two ladies while showing him the map. He directly pointed out the building I was looking for and suggested me to go inside, because the office is located somewhere in the building. Thankfully, I found the new office before it closed that afternoon.

My camera phone has helped me to store and retrieve in-situ information within seconds. It has also become a means of sharing information. The process of knowledge sharing became smoother with the presence of simple visual information. This visual information presented by mobile phone is similar to the context scenarios in Pair Writing. By sharing a chunk of incomplete information, each passerby has helped me to incrementally build and share a new knowledge about the location in a very short time, which would have not been possible without the help of my mobile phone.