Corporate use of ethnography

Technolory Review has a short account of the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference (EPIC> organized by ethnographers at Intel and Microsoft. I'm looking forward to read the proceedings. Among the purposes quoted, there are: "understanding emerging markets, such as developing economies, digital health care, and the digital home (Intel)", "find out how meaning manifests itself in people's live, and ethnography is a good way to get at that (Cheskin)". Though, I am a bit unconfortable of this huge mess:

Internal debates aside, ethnography is gaining credence in the corporate world as a form of market research. Ethnography focuses on a qualitative examination of human behavior. In a corporate setting, ethnographers typically examine how people treat a product, say, a mobile phone, in the context of their lives. Ethnographic researchers at the EPIC could be divided into seven general types: sociologists, human factors and computer interface specialists, computer scientists, anthropologists, psychologists, MBAs, and design specialists.

Why do I blog this? Although I think using corporate ethnography might be a good idea and even though I like multi/interdisciplinary things, I am wondering how all those people (interface specialists, computer scientists, anthropologists, psychologists, MBAs, and design specialist) make sense of the 'ethnography' methods.

Connected: Anne has a good post related to these issues.

Call for project presentations

In the LIFT conference , aside talks and keynote presentation, we are organizing a specific moment devoted for projects presentation. The format will be simple: presenters will have 15minutes to describe the project (there will be 4 projects = 1 hour). After this quick review, there is going to be a break in which we will set dedicated rooms wherepeople are invited to come over and ask questions/discuss about it. This is a tremendous opportunity to get some insightful feedback from people with various background and expertise.

We are looking for 2 projects that would meet this constraints:

• technological and user-oriented (architecture, web, interactive art, ubiquitous computing, open source platforms...).
• original and innovative (nobody wants to listen to presenterrs who reinvented the wheel). So please no 'rate this restaurant on a mobile phone' or 'social software for cheese eaters' will be accepted!
• it should not be marketing gig nor an elevator pitch, we are not VCs, we want a relevant account of how your project might be used (scenario-based approach for instance), what can it shows or what needs it may fulfill.
• at least at the prototype level so that attendees could see what is.

Please send your proposal to lift06 (at) gmail (dot) com before december 15th.

The editorial board will review them and get back to you.

The 'imitation bias' in media design

Today, at the CSCW course, we had a good discussion about the 'imitation bias', a phenomenon studies in Human-Computer Interaction. The imitation bias is the false belief that a medium is more effective if it is more similar to face-to-face interactions. For instance, it's believing that adding video is better than simply having audio communication. Either this lead people to think that WAP is better than SMS for interacting with others using cell-phones. Well, more bandwith makes not always better products.“The richer the better” or “The more face-to-face like the better” have not been confirmed by empirical results. It’s difficult to invent something new and simple. Few points we discussed this morning: Concerning the audio+video versus audio-only, there is a wide bunch of studies which shows that adding video is not always fruitful, for instance:

• Chapanis and colleagues (1972, 1975): The studies revealed that adding visual information did not increase the efficiency of problem-solving, or produce higher quality problem solving
• Anderson, A. H., O'Malley, C., Doherty-Sneddon, G., Langton, S., Newlands, A., Mullin, J., & Fleming, A. M., & Van der Velden, J. (1997): They concluded that VMC with eye contact may encourage participants to “overuse” the visual channel, which may be counterproductive.

In general, those studies (among others),video has no major impact on task performance. Few excerpts from Pierre's course:

Compared to high quality audio-only systems, the presence of video does not have major effects on task performance, unless that work is inherently visual. Besides, video conversations are still more formal than Face-to-Face (F2F) but people prefer them to audio only conversations. Another important thing: there is strong evidence that reducing audio quality to incorporate video is highly disruptive of conversation processes.

Still, video can make meetings more satisfying for the participants by easing the mechanics of conversation, helping them understand nuances in meaning and mostly enabling them to track the remote participants’ presence and attentional state. One of the most obvious finding is that people like to see each other when they interact, especially when they do not know each other well: regardless of any cognitive benefit video may provide, people like having it.

Anyway, the last point is that we survive to video problems more easily than to audio problems. Audio is often the bug.

Cell phones and toilet-related accidents

Via Antony Townsend's mailing list, this improbable fact:

More and more mobile phones are turning up in the sewage system of the Helsinki Metropolitan area, according to Helsinki Water, which serves over one million households. It's not known if the phones are purposely or accidentally disposed of, but with 4.8m mobile users in Finland, it's reasonable to expect a certain number of toilet-related mobile incidents.

A possible reason is that "Most mobiles apparently come a cropper as a result of tight jeans.".

Girl made, girl approved

An interesting article in Business Week about a design company called 3iYing, new design and marketing firm which does girl-market insights (founded by Heidi Dangelmaier).

Dangelmaier's young team has come up with radical ideas on how to design and sell everything from condoms and lingerie to food. They call these ideas "Girl Made, Girl Approved." The teens started by leafing through dozens of girl magazines and analyzing the advertisements. In the process, they found that most brands are out of touch with the 21st-century girl and her desires. (...) Once the girls identify products they believe are either ill-designed or poorly marketed, they survey their worldwide network of friends via e-mail, or in Internet communities like MySpace.com. They come up with a list of what girls really want and what appeals to them about the product. Then the team redesigns the product and comes up with a marketing campaign that resonates with their age group.

Why do I blog this? what at I think is interesting here is the way it might impact the design of new products; It's connected with the 'co-creation' trend we have today: the integration of conversation with customers into company's business.

Thoughtful critique of so-called ethnography usage in design

A very relevant and thoughtful critique of so-called ethnography usage in 'designing user experience' can be found on Rashmi Sinha's blog (about the DUX conference):Many speakers told us about the "ethnographic research" they conducted. Sometimes they shared some video of their observations - of children playing, or people in their homes, sitting on a chair, or watching TV. And the audience would watch delightedly - look at that, its people! People playing, laughing, sitting, walking... It all seemed very rosy - "we observed some people, maybe for a few hours, maybe we lived with them for a week or two - they still send us postcards - the dears. And at the end of it, we had the Aha moment, when it all fell into place. And the product was born." And everyone lived happily ever after. (...) I doubt that most people are even doing ethnography in the real sense of the word. Call it user/customer research, observation / qualitative interviews / design research. Sometimes when talking to clients, they ask us if we do "ethnography" - I always say, "well kind of", feeling guilty about calling the type of qualitative research that one has time for - ethnography.

Why do I blog this? It's as if ethnography was now a buzzword referring to taking picture or videotaping people doing something and then concluding about the phenomenon. With the exploding number of papers, studies, or conference about the use of ethnographical methods in design/business, there seems to be now some confusion. Besides, I like the author's emphasis on the constraints because I have the same problems in my work:

there are many challenges remaining - how do you make sure that the insights in the observer's head reach other members of the product team (...). How do you synthesize those insights? How do you go from that synthesis to the product concept? And how do you validate those product concepts - make sure they generalize beyond the few people you were able to observe?

Taking users' needs into account and not giving them sth useless

Lars Erik Holmquist's column in ACM's interactions is always very refreshing. This month he's tackling an interesting issue in designing applications for a certain niche: policemen and he is wondering about people who found it useful and effective to give them computers in their cars.

It seems the people who made the police-car system were fixated on the idea of a computer, whereas the policemen just have a job that needs to be done. And it is not at all clear to me that any new computer interface would actually make that job easier. Perhaps the policemen do not need a computer at all; they just need some way of taking notes and passing information along to each other. If so, a small piece of whiteboard could be the best—and certainly cheapest—solution. (...) any policemen have installed their own piece of information technology: a small cut-out piece of whiteboard-like material that goes on the dashboard, in the same place where the computer screen would have been. They use this to scribble important information when they are sent on an assignment, to take notes when talking to a colleague on the radio, to write down orders for pizza, and to pass information along to the next team that is going to have the car. When the information has been used, it is easily wiped off. None of this functionality is available in the in-car computer.

The author advocates for a user-centered approach to design proper applications that would fit policemen's needs. I really like the comparison between the two systems (on the left: a commercial police-car computer—expensive and rarely used and on the right: The policemen's own IT solution—a small piece of plastic for taking temporary notes.)

Studying Technology Use in Hybrid in Hybrid and Undisciplined Place

There is currently an compelling event in Tokyo: FIELDWORK UNTETHERED: STUDYING TECHNOLOGY USE IN HYBRID AND UNDISCIPLINED PLACES (I put the emphasis on a sentence I like):

This two-day workshop will explore and document methdological frameworks and innovation in the study of portable ICTs outside of the home and workplace. A select international group of experts in the social study of mobile and portable information and communication technologies will be convened for two days of presentations, discussion and fieldwork experimentation. Researchers will be equipped with GPS enabled 3G videophones and a moblogging system in order to document their trial. Results will be published in the form of a collection of methodological essays, (...) In social research of mobility and portable technologies, we are transitioning from an experimental stage to a stage where we can develop robust methodological frameworks and standards.

Organizers are usual suspects in the field, very relevant people with regards to the topic of the workshop: Ken Anderson (Intel Research), Jan Chipchase (Nokia), Mizuko (Mimi) Ito (Keio University and University of Southern California), Steve Love (Brunel University), Daisuke Okabe (Keio University), Mark Perry (Brunel University.

Why do I blog this? the methodologies discussed there will be of interest for our work about studying the usage of location-based technologies in urban/field settings. I am looking forward to read the results. Jan Chipcase gives some hints about the workshop on this blogpost.

Fragmentation of attention in mobile interaction

An interesting paper I perused recently: The fragmentation of attention in mobile interaction, and what to do with it by Antti Oulasvirta, interactions, Volume 12 , Issue 6  November + December 2005, pp. 16 - 18. Some excerpts:

Our goal has been first to understand how serious this "multitasking craziness" , or fragmentation of attention as we see it, is, and also to explore some possibilities to counter this unwanted phenomenon. (...) we conducted a field experiment to investigate the seriousness and extent of fragmentation. (...) In mobile situations, continuous attention to the mobile device fragmented to bursts of just four to eight seconds (...), and attention to the mobile device had to be interrupted several attention shifts, by glancing the environment up to eight times during a page loading

What's interesting is this:

Interestingly, we observed several strategies that users adopted to compensate for this unwanted situation. In general, the simple strategies can be described as strategic withdrawals of resources from less important tasks (e.g., slowing down walking, or postponing and refusing tasks). More sophisticated strategies were enabled by users' preknowledge of the particular situation. For example, when a metro leaves from the station, travelers "preprogram" themselves to what is to be expected; in this case to the announcement of the destination station. After this calibration, only brief sampling is required to observe that the task is proceeding normally.

Then they came up with potential solutions:

Some design tactics to fight mobile multitasking craziness.(...) At the very least, our results should convince designers to put effort to: • shorten interaction units (down to less than five seconds). • automatize or eliminate tasks. • Offload tasks to unused resources, support execution of tasks in different modalities. • Provide modality-targeted feedback for long system response times. • Support brief monitoring of changes. • Support temporal control and orchestration. • Provide unsanctioned delaying of responses. • Provide cues for anticipation of upcoming events and schedules. • Support user's understanding of tasks' upcoming demands.

Why do I blog this? the paper is a clever summary of how a field experiment in the domain of mobile computing usage can be useful to set guidelines for mobile application designers.

Paper prototyping and video game design

Tyler Sigman describes a good account about how using paper prototypes in video game design:

This article is meant to be a small collection of learned experiences from the paper prototyping process; it's a mix of tips, advice, and also a modicum of philosophy regarding the benefits of paper prototyping to assist with digital game design. The first part is about why paper prototyping is useful; the middle bit is about how to construct said prototypes; the end is a crash course overview of playtesting concerns.

understand that paper prototyping can save your project TIME and MONEY. (...) The reason paper prototyping can save time and money is because you are able to start examining the gameplay of your game well in advance of large-scale coding and art asset production. You can do a creative and functional “check-up” to see if you are on the right track. I (...) You can also find dreaded “problems.” Any problems in design cascade to the rest of the team. (...) One of the most straightforward reasons to make a prototype is to test out the overall game mechanics. You put the wheels on your game and give it a spin, so to speak. (...) Similar to #2. In addition to “kicking the tires” of your game, you can also start putting the wax on--balancing. (...) a paper prototype can help test for good flow—after all, you are still playing the game even if it is in a different format.

The most interesting part is certainly the 'Make stuff' section:

If you've got a game collection, pop open the boxes and look for tokens, dice, markers, and other pieces that might serve a need. (...) A great source for spare parts is your local thrift store. There are usually many board games to be had for only a buck or two each. (...) A last note about scrounging: don't stop at games. There are a surprising number of household items that can serve as game components. Stores like Pier 1 and the like usually have a good selection of potential game parts, too - decorative items like glass beads, polished rocks... whatever. (...) When it comes down to it, you often can't avoid some actual layout and assembly time because you will need very specific items for your game. The most common - “the big hitters” - are cards, tokens/counters, and gameboards.

Why do I blog this? first because I like prototypes stuff, alpha or beta-version and the mix of games/cards/board is appealing to me. Second because I find that it's a good idea to test game designe ideas.

Schism between ethnography and usability

While communiting between Geneva and Lausanne, this morning I read Avoiding the next schism: ethnography and usability by David Siegel and Susan Dray (Interaction 12(2), pp.58-61, 2005). It's about the growing schism in organizations between proponents of usability and supporters of ethnography.

So here is the point:

there is potential for ethnography and usability to develop a contentious relationship, including comments denigrating the other camp. For example, ethnographers can be accused of providing input that is too abstract and general to be useful. They can be viewed as overly reliant on anecdotal information and too lacking in rigor. Ethnographers can see usability people as too tied to evaluating specific features without questioning whether the feature should exist in the first place.

Both of these sets of charges can be turned into negative stereotypes. thnographers are supposedly "fuzzy in their thinking," and "don't understand design or technology." Conversely, usability people are "so focused on technology features that they are hardly better than technocentric designers and developers," and "are incapable of stepping back and seeing the big picture."

After a summary of schism dynamics (schism can arise from the tendency of related subdisciplines to accentuate their differences as they stake out their turf, claim legitimacy, and emphasize their unique contributions + both groups are subject to pervasive forces in the larger organization that threaten to dilute their concept of quality + there are fundamental paradigm differences between ethnography and usability that are almost bound to produce clashes), the authors put the emphasis on the differences between both (contrasting focuses, and these drive different approaches to data collection, different styles of reasoning, and different types of output). The final part is maybe the most interesting section:

there are differences in what these approaches produce as an input to the design process, and how and when the information is introduced. Ethnography provides insights that are most useful in product planning and high-level conceptual design. Usability provides input into narrowing and refining design choices, and ideally, it should also play a role in generating design options. One consequence of this is that the two groups may have different audiences. Ethnographers may be talking more to product planners early in the process and usability people to designers later in the process, when the basic design is a fait accompli. Even though ethnography and usability are partners in UCD, they may not collaborate as much as they should.

A schism such as this can be damaging to both usability and ethnography, because of their complementarity. In fact, the two sides can potentially undermine each other. (...) We need to avoid a methodological purist stance, and instead collaborate. For example, we should combine our approaches in naturalistic field research, or even in longitudinal field research. Furthermore, both usability and ethnography professionals need to understand the product planning and design process so that they can be active participants in tradeoff decisions with other disciplines that contribute to the ultimate product design

Why do I blog this? Using both (or I would say being OK with both 'paradigm' or? no it's not correct and aaaaaargh how can we put ethnography and usability at the same level? well, let's drop this issue for the moment), I am not so keen on the idea of opposing them but it appears to be the cruel reality in companies :( Actually, even though it's very simple and 'common sense' I like their conclusion. Of course these people need to collaborate; besides the combination of methologies is a relevant idea that I try to implement in my studies here (easy to say but... ;) ).

Day of the figurine, pervasive game

I just discovered this Day of the Figurine thing, which is a new pervasive game project carried out by lots of relevant actors (Blast Theory, Frauhnofer Institute, the Mixed Reality Lab, Sony Net Service). It seems to be a part of the european iPerg project. Here is how it's describe in the IPerG News Letter, August 2005

To participate in Day of the Figurines, the player must first visit a physical place. Here, they find a large scale model of an imaginary town at table height. The model is 1:100 and extends for several metres in all directions. The image is a mix of computer graphics and photographic collage.

The town has identifiable buildings such as the YMCA, the Big Chef, Video Zone, the XXX Cinema and the Battle of Trafalgar Square. There are other features such as a Cemetery, a Gasometer, a canal, a Level Crossing and an Underpass.

To play the game the visitor selects from a display of one hundred plastic figurines. They give the figurine a name, answer a few questions about him or her and then watch as she or he is placed at a random location into the model town. As they leave the space the player is given a small map of the town and a set of rules for the game.

An hour or so later the player will receive their first text message from the game, asking where their figurine would like to go. By replying to the message with the name of a place in the town the player's figurine is set on the path towards that destination. Each hour a turn is executed and the invigilator moves each figure a small distance towards their destination. There are 10 turns a day for 24 days.

Intermittently each player receives text messages to alert them to nearby figurines in the model city, to their figurine's arrival at a destination or to other events in the town. Each destination has a short description. For example, if you arrive at the The One Club you receive the SMS: "Home of the 2 Fs. The lock ins are legendary, the fire escape stairs have seen it all." The goal of the game is "to help others". Texting messages to other players may provide opportunities to do this.

I like the low-tech aspects of the thing:

The project is deliberately targeting low-end phones: it is playable on any phone that is able to receive SMS. Instead the technological focus is on orchestration and management tools. During the long-term test period, 8 players have been given phones that log Cell ID and upload this information to a server. We aim to use this data to assess when players are engaged, when they are most likely to play and how the game fits into their daily activity pattern. We will also carry out phone interviews with selected players at key moments, to study the interaction between game play and daily life.

New design journal

(via) It seems that Stanford University is releasing a new journal about design issues, it's called Ambidextrous and it seems really promising. It's actually the design journal of the nascent Stanford d.school.

It is a magazine for the wider design community, which includes engineers and ethnographers, psychologists and philosophers. Rather than focusing on promoting product, Ambidextrous exposes the people and processes involved in design.

Ambidextrous is a forum for the cross-disciplinary, cross-market community of people with an academic, professional and personal interest in design. The magazine is geared toward high subscriber participation and interaction. It is expressly designed to be informal, irreverent, and fun to read. (...) We created Ambidextrous to draw a community around what designers *do* rather than what they make. We wanted a place for you to converse about your favorite tools, your struggles with craft, your evolving process and your most exciting ideas.

Why do I blog this? even though I am not really into design, I think they'll tackle relevant issues that are related to my HCI interests.

Mobile product testing

This paper by Linda Gallant, (Bentley College) "Ethnography of Communication & Mobile Product Testing" is going to be published in the Personal and Ubiquitous Computing journal.

Abstract: The ethnography of communication approach is employed to enhance the mobile user-centered design process. Mobile product testing has employed the same research methodologies used for stationary technology. The main data collection method for user-centered design and proof-of-concept in mobile computing has followed the traditional ethnography method of field observation. The crux of this paper is to apply a user experience research approach to mobile computing that does not primarily rely on physical location. In mobile technology, physical space is not primary or stable: but, human communication is always present. The ethnography of communication places talk as the primary and essential unit of measurement thereby making the stationary physical location secondary. This allows design teams to enter a user "speech community" anywhere, even in a usability lab setting, through talk. Users articulate their "local" speech community meaning systems and become "co-designers" in the user centered design process. Users' understandings of a product use in their local environments become part of the design process. The meaning a technology presents in people's everyday lives becomes an add-on section of a usability testing session. After each participant has completed a usability testing task, he or she is asked direct questions about the tasks and possible uses for the product. During these conversations, test participants can create performance scenarios (i.e., interaction scenarios) for an artifact. The users' concept scenarios produce understandings, meanings, and practices that are utilized by product design teams. This paper develops this technique by examining how salespeople (i.e., a speech community) interpret and construct the potential usage of mobile workplace communication with particular communication features on wireless Internet-enabled personal digital assistant. Participants operate a mobile version of a customer relationship management software for sales. Using a live wireless connection to the company database, participants can update customer files, send and receive email, and search the World Wide Web. The findings show that proof-of concept testing mobile versions of desk-top software can be done in conjunction with the usability testing of software for stationary technology. Research outputs include user concept scenarios that guide product design.

Why do I blog this? it's an interesting and relevant methodology (design oriented rather than evaluation oriented).

The bathroom effect: a trigger for social awareness

An interesting concept: the bathroom effect (via):

(...) Pixar’s CEO, Steve Jobs. “He thought it was really important that there only be one bathroom in the building, for all 700 people who work here,” Greenberg says.(...) Here’s the “bathroom effect” theory, as Greenberg explains it: “If you have bathrooms that are scattered throughout the building, you use the bathroom nearest to where you’re sitting. If there was one bathroom, all kinds of people would come together and talk with one another all the time […]. It would enhance communication […]. The atrium also [aside from eight restrooms] boasts [a café], break rooms with an unusual number of toasters, the mailroom, conference rooms, pool and foosball tables, and an open area for the occasional concert or lecture. (Pixar University, the department where Greenberg works, arranges talks and classes for employees to broaden their expertise.)

Why do I blog this? because it's a relevant example of the use of third places, a trigger for social awareness in companies, as coffee/vending machines.

Multi-agent modeling of pop/youth subcultures dynamic

Modelling the Dynamics of Youth Subcultures by Petter Holme and Andreas Grönlund (2005), Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation vol. 8, no. 3:

What are the dynamics behind youth subcultures such as punk, hippie, or hip-hop cultures? How does the global dynamics of these subcultures relate to the individual's search for a personal identity? We propose a simple dynamical model to address these questions and find that only a few assumptions of the individual's behaviour are necessary to regenerate known features of youth culture. (...) Our model is based on five major assumptions:

• The dynamics of the underlying social network is negligible
• An adolescent belongs to one subculture at a time.
• If the fraction of friends that have adopted a certain subculture is big enough then an adolescent will adopt that subculture too
• The attractiveness of a subculture decreases with its age.
• There is a certain resistance to changings subcultures.

Yes this is subculture modelisation ;) The following graph depicts the propagation of subcultures:

Illustration of the model on a small example graph. The colour and number in the circles indicates the current subculture of the vertex. The bar next to the circle shows the vertex' score-function values for the three subcultures (0, 1, and 2) the current time t. The starting time of a subculture t(i) is, in this particular example, identical to i. (b) shows the time-step after (a) in with the threshold value T = 0.5. In this case no other subculture is introduced, no vertex will change subculture as time tends to infinity. (c) is the corresponding plot with T = 0.3. In this case the system will, as time progress, reach a state where every vertex adopts subculture 2.

Why do I blog this? Even though the underyling assumptions could be discussed, I find fancy this sort of stuff, people then have a model for how subcultures spread in a population of adolescents. It would be interesting to compare this dynamic model to propagation of mainstream cultures, to see if there are different phenomenon (I expect that the assumptions might be different of course). Besides, would it be possible to expand the model with other parameters (more related to the 'quality' of the subculture or social aspects like the possibility that at a certain period of time there could be a repulsion towards a specific subculture)?

Tabletop workspace territories

Territoriality in collaborative tabletop workspaces by Stacey D. Scott, M. Sheelagh T. Carpendale and Kori M. Inkpen, Proceeding of the 2004 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work.

Researchers seeking alternatives to traditional desktop computers have begun exploring the potential collaborative benefits of digital tabletop displays. However, there are still many open issues related to the design of collaborative tabletop interfaces, such as whether these systems should automatically orient workspace items or enforce ownership of workspace content. Understanding the natural interaction practices that people use during tabletop collaboration with traditional media (e.g., pen and paper) can help to address these issues. Interfaces that are modeled on these practices will have the additional advantage of supporting the interaction skills people have developed over years of collaborating at traditional tables. To gain a deeper understanding of these interaction practices we conducted two observational studies of traditional tabletop collaboration in both casual and formal settings. Our results reveal that collaborators use three types of tabletop territories to help coordinate their interactions within the shared tabletop workspace: personal, group, and storage territories. Findings from a spatial analysis of collaborators' tabletop interactions reveal important properties of these tabletop territories. In order to provide a comprehensive picture of the role of tabletop territoriality in collaboration, we conclude with a synthesis of our findings and previous research findings and with several relevant design implications.

Why do I blog this? what I like is the whole process of studying the activity and figuring out guidelines about design implications. The analysis of the tabletop territories is interesting, using this sort of cues (as dewcribed in the picture below):

their tabletop activity was transcribed from the video data. Transcripts included all tabletop actions, the initiator of each action, the location of each action, the location of each participant, and any conversation related to the tabletop actions. To facilitate our analysis, the tabletop workspace was divided into 16 directional zones, and 4 radial zones , then we coded the transcripts for:

• the directional zone of each tabletop action,
• the radial zone of each tabletop action, and
• the direction zone of each participant at the table.

Urinal innovation

A weird innovation: for people like me who always wondered why there is a fly in European urinals, here is the answer, thanks to Seth Goldin:

pparently, the folks who run one of the big airports in Europe became famous because of a clever idea they installed in the airport men's room (click on picture for details... this is a family friendly blog).

Apparently, the tiny silk screened image dramatically increases the quality of aim and thus the cleanliness of the bathroom.

Great innovation to increase the urinal shooting abilities, did some people ran ethnographical studies to come up with this?!!!

Video tracking system to study animal behavior

Ethovision

EthoVision is the video tracking system for automatic recording of activity, movement and social interaction of animals in just about any enclosure. Providing a wide range of features for video tracking and data analysis, EthoVision allows for automation of almost any behavioral test. Examples include: 96-well plate, Morris water maze, Porsolt swim test, Radial maze, Social interaction test

Have a glance at the case study for which they used this tool: "Using EthoVision Color-Pro to quantify spontaneous swimming behavior in small groups of fish", "Using EthoVision to study social interactions in rodents", "A colorful EthoVision masquarade or how to trace pig manoeuvring automatically". Why do I blog this? even thought the methods described here are more focused on animal behavior, there might be interesting/relevent idea for video game replay tools.

Game/Level Design Analysis

My colleague Pascal Luban founder of the Game Design Studio just released a new description of his companies methods.

The Game Design Studio is a consulting firm whose mission is to support its clients in the video game industry in designing their games.

Our objective is to support our clients in creating their own design, not to do the game design for them. To accomplish this, we bring a complete range of services that are tailored to bring the very specific know-how required at any moment during the design phase of a game: definition of the concept, game design doctoring or coaching, work on gameplay mechanisms, script writing, level design, etc.

Why do I blog this? what is interesting here (with regards to my interests) is the tool Pascal developed to analyse games. For instance, the methods he set up for level design analysis is very relevant. I like the visualizations he worked out, for instance to depicts how players del with difficulty throughout the levels (picture on the left) or how to adapting the pace of the level to the game genre (picture on the right): He used it to analyse existing games like Crash Bandicoot, the following example Pascal shows is the difficulty analysis for the second level of Crash Bandicoot 2: According to him, judging on this graph, "a trend clearly appears. The game is moderately difficult for the first half then offers two major challenges followed by a cool down period. This is probably not the result of luck but rather a well-thought level design strategy.". I think this sort of tools are very relevant; however I envision lots of ways to move forward, especially through user testing and data-analysis, which is somehow something I am working on (with our work about mobile games here at the lab for instance).