Serendipitous Landscapes: Personal Memory and Google Maps

Abstract

When Google’s camera cars photograph a street, they sometimes catch things they were never sent to collect: pots on a balcony, a graduation sign in a front yard, a parent’s old car in a driveway. For someone who once lived there, stumbling on these fragments in Street View’s historical imagery can feel like an unplanned reunion with an earlier self. This thesis explores that encounter: what it is like to find one’s past preserved, more or less by accident, inside a system designed for navigation. It asks how design might help people respond to what they find.I pursued these questions through a sequence of studies and design experiments, each shaped by what the one before it found. In a pilot study, eight participants navigated Street View’s historical imagery to curate timelines of the places they had lived. Their encounters showed how people meet their own pasts inside geographic data systems. Three findings shaped everything that followed: (1) imperfect imagery works as a scaffold for memory reconstruction rather than a substitute for it; (2) memory is triggered less by the pixels than by the familiarity of the viewing angle; and (3) an auditing mindset, focused on evaluating the system, crowds out intimacy with the material. I designed two experiments that used generative AI to fill the archive’s gaps; neither landed as hoped, and their failures pointed to something my later work is built on: participants gravitated toward real material, and generated imagery tended to read as tampering rather than restoration. An autoethnographic counter-gaze experiment, a performance in which I waited with a mirror to catch the Street View car in the act of recording, probed the asymmetry between one person and a planetary recording system. The experiment left its questions open, but it inspired the turn the work took next: away from contesting the record, toward the gap between the record and the life it missed. That gap organized my final design work: three tools, each opening a different distance between what the system captured and what it meant. Rename It works the gap between what the system names and what you call it; Claim It, between what it sorts and what you feel; Counter It, between what it records and what actually happened. A second group of ten participants ran all three tools alone and then talked through what they had made. Asking who a new name was for turned reflection on a place into reflection on a relationship, including, for one participant, the relationship with her own fifteen-year-old self; given the same imprecise brush, each person invented their own logic for dividing space; and the system’s omissions (blurred faces, missing years) often became openings for restoration rather than sources of frustration. From this work the thesis offers the concept of the serendipitous landscape: the experience of wandering back into a digital space and unexpectedly meeting a past self. The concept reframes personal data less as something to manage or protect and more as terrain one can inhabit; it suggests that infrastructure can be read against its intended purpose, as a memory medium it was never designed to be; and it holds that content about a person’s past must carry a visible author, which is what separates a mark someone makes from material a system generates on their behalf. Imprecision, slowness, and a degree of friction are not usability failures but conditions under which feeling has room to arrive.