'Place' and 'Non-Place': a Model for the Strategic Design of Place-Centered Services

This paper describes "The Periscope", a probe tested in the Paris underground to better understand users' relation to space in mobility. Our first result is that testers qualify their relation to the metro both as depersonalized and efficient and deeply personal and social. The second finding is that mobility is not only experienced as a controlled circulation but is also considered as a meaningful "journey" that can be told and shared. To account for this dual perception of physical space and motion we propose to use the anthropological concepts of "non-place" and "place". This theoretical framework offers useful guidelines for the design of what we propose to call "place-centered services" that, first, combine the dynamic synchronization of the journey and users' dual relation to spaces and second categorize the actors that contribute to the information system and services.