WIRED 2015 is our annual two-day celebration of the innovators, inventors, artists and entrepreneurs who are reinventing our world. For more from the event, head over to our WIRED 2015 hub.
Buying a house in London is expensive. So imagine if you bought a house on Euston Road only to find that the neighbourhood is really smelly. But worry no longer, because Good City Life's Smelly Maps is live. "If you were to live on Euston road then you will see it’s all about traffic," Daniele Quercia, who specialises in maps that overlay human emotions and senses onto the environment, told WIRED 2015.
The Smelly Maps lets you sort London's streets by emissions, nature, food and animal smells. We tested the map and decided we might keep our offices at Tobacco Dock year round -- 67.8 percent of the smell surrounding the WIRED offices is due to emissions, while 75 percent of Tobacco Dock smells like food. "Smell is important because you as humans are able to smell more than 1 trillion different kinds of smells," Quercia claimed. "Your nose is actually a big data machine."
At the moment, most urban planning departments only take 15 to 20 bad smells into account. But Smelly Maps used 258 smell triggers, collected by Katie McLean -- a "smell walks" PHD candidate -- who provided the data for Quercia and his map-making team.
Before smells, Quercia created a "happiness" map. For this, he collected data through multiple choice image testing -- asking people which picture they thought looked happier, quieter and more beautiful. "We built Facemash for cities," he said. The results showed red brick Victorian houses, gardens and small streets "make Londoners happy." Cars and isolated buildings were the worst.
With this data, Quercia designed walking routes that -- while they may have taken a little longer -- were dedicated to guiding people down the happiest, quietest or most beautiful route.
Quercia hopes his maps will make people think differently about cities. He implored the designers and innovators at the WIRED2015 conference to "think about things that are difficult to measure, but are simple and meaningful. Because the ultimate goal is to give a good life to the people."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
