Sidewalk Labs built this free app for people watching

In the 1960s, architect Jan Gehl and behavioral scientist Ingrid Gehl spent hours observing how people operate in public space. They would sit, watch, and track how people used elements of a public square or park, recording how many people sat on benches in the morning versus the afternoon, or frequented the area during different seasons.

This clipboards and clickers method of gathering information about public space is still used by urban planners today. But Sidewalk Labs, the urban design subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet, has launched a new prototype app aimed at streamlining this process. Instead of taking notes on paper and then transferring the data to a computer later, Sidewalk Labs’s app, called CommonSpace, provides a user-friendly interface into which surveyors can enter their data directly.

After signing into the app, you can create a new study–like a stationary activity map that shows what people are doing in a public space, or a people moving count, which tracks how many people walk or bike through an area. The app uses your location and shows you a satellite image of the public area you’re located within. By holding down your finger on the map, the app will register that you’re adding another person, and you can add the demographic details of gender and age range. Depending on what kind of study you’re running, you can also add information about the person’s posture like standing, sitting informally, sitting formally, or lying down, and what the person is doing, like conversing, eating, or scrolling on their phone instead of enjoying being outside (a practice that’s politely described as “electronic engagement”). Over time, you can easily build up a timestamped map of what people are doing in public space.

CommonSpace is not trying to automate humans out of the process–probably because Sidewalk teamed up with the Gehl Institute, a nonprofit focused on data standards in public space, and the Canadian nonprofit Park People. While Sidewalk Labs did explore using cameras and computer vision to make public life studies more efficient, the team ultimately decided against it. CommonSpace doesn’t rely on invasive sensors to track how people are using public space because of privacy implications and the fact that sensors just aren’t as good as humans when it comes to observing complex human behavior. Instead, CommonSpace provides an easier way for humans to record data, which can then be exported for analysis and visualization. As well as entering demographic information and activity information, CommonSpace has a place to enter free-form notes about the person as well. The goal is to take advantage of surveyors’ more granular observations that don’t fit into the other data categories but still might be useful for understanding how people use public space, just like classic public life studies.