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Phone zombie

Phone zombie illustration: pedestrians turned zombies staring into their phones run into danger and bump into each other while crossing a road

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A phone zombie is a regular pedestrian turned zombie walker because they’re busy staring at their phone.

Sometimes it’s hard not to be a phone zombie—whether it’s a notification about where you’re about to meet, a message about something you just finished at work, texting to say you’re on your way home, a sudden thought to look something up, reading a weekly newsletter, or maybe it’s just switching the podcast. On a long, quiet street on my commute, I’ve also read a book while walking. There are so many reasons why it’s easy to turn into a phone zombie walking unthinkingly down the street.

Once, while waiting for a crossing light to change and checking train times on my phone, I noticed the people around me starting to cross. Taking my cue, I began to walk too, only realising a few steps later, with a car bearing down on me, that the light hadn’t changed to signal it was ok to cross. I’ve also seen people walk into cyclists, a near miss with a bus driving close to the curb, and someone tripping and falling. Take care, and don’t let it be you!

Also known as smartphone zombies, smombie for short, or zombie pedestrians.

You can get a printed gift of phone zombies , but as zombies aren't that nice to look at, I also made a friendlier version of phone zombies

Also see: continuous partial attention, when drinking tea and phubbing

Published 3 Dec 2023

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Keep exploring

Desire path: the difference between design and use illustrated by a person crossing a corner of grass

Hump-Back Stations illustration: an above and below ground cross-section of an urban environment is shown, displaying the rise and fall of an underground transit tunnel as it approaches and departs a station platform - allowing gravity to play its part in slowing the train down, uphill as it comes into a station and accelerating it away, downhill on departure.

Hump-back stations

Phubbing illustration: Someone sat in a cafe being phubbed by their friends on their phones while a parent and child walks by, gently heartbroken by being upstaged by a phone

Desire paths: created by desire and use. Sometimes I find myself walking on the traces of one as a statement that ‘there ought to be a path here’ - voting with my feet. There’s the classic, perhaps apocryphal, story of the architect who didn’t build any paths on a campus until people had worn them in, showing where the paths should be. The phenomena has found use in technology with the phrase 'pave the cowpaths’. More detail from Dan Lockton: One emergent behaviour-related concept arising from architecture and planning which has also found application in human-computer interaction is the idea of desire lines, desire paths or cowpaths. The usual current use of the term (often attributed, although apparently in error, to Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1964)) is to describe paths worn by pedestrians across spaces such as parks, between buildings or to avoid obstacles—“the foot-worn paths that sometimes appear in a landscape over time” (Mathes, 2004) and which become self-reinforcing as subsequent generations of pedestrians follow what becomes an obvious path. Throgmorton & Eckstein (2000) also discuss Chicago transportation engineers’ use of ‘desire lines’ to describe maps of straight-line origin-to-destination journeys across the city, in the process revealing assumptions about the public’s ‘desire’ to undertake these journeys. In either sense, desire lines (along with use-marks (Burns, 2007)) could perhaps, using economic terminology, be seen as a form of revealed user preference (Beshears et al, 2008) or at least revealed choice, with a substantial normative quality. Architecture, urbanism, design and behaviour: a brief review, Dan Lockton, Sep 2011 Or see this very concrete example from UC Berkeley at peterme.com.…Desire paths: created by desire and use. Sometimes I find myself walking on the traces of one as a statement that ‘there ought to be a path here’ - voting with my feet. There’s the classic, perhaps apocryphal, story of the architect who didn’t build any paths on a campus until people had worn them in, showing where the paths should be. The phenomena has found use in technology with the phrase 'pave the cowpaths’. More detail from Dan Lockton: One emergent behaviour-related concept arising from architecture and planning which has also found application in human-computer interaction is the idea of desire lines, desire paths or cowpaths. The usual current use of the term (often attributed, although apparently in error, to Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1964)) is to describe paths worn by pedestrians across spaces such as parks, between buildings or to avoid obstacles—“the foot-worn paths that sometimes appear in a landscape over time” (Mathes, 2004) and which become self-reinforcing as subsequent generations of pedestrians follow what becomes an obvious path. Throgmorton & Eckstein (2000) also discuss Chicago transportation engineers’ use of ‘desire lines’ to describe maps of straight-line origin-to-destination journeys across the city, in the process revealing assumptions about the public’s ‘desire’ to undertake these journeys. In either sense, desire lines (along with use-marks (Burns, 2007)) could perhaps, using economic terminology, be seen as a form of revealed user preference (Beshears et al, 2008) or at least revealed choice, with a substantial normative quality. Architecture, urbanism, design and behaviour: a brief review, Dan Lockton, Sep 2011 Or see this very concrete example from UC Berkeley at peterme.com.

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