From speculative meals to design

A one-day trip to Paris in the TGV gave me plenty of time to skim through Speculative visions and imaginary meals: Food and the environment in (post-apocalyptic) science fiction films by Jean P. Retzinger (Cultural Studies Vol. 22, Nos. 3-4, May-July 2008, pp. 369-390). The paper interestingly addresses how science fiction highlight dream and anxieties of the present, as particularly shown by the depiction of food. In an insightful content analysis, the authors describe how food scenes can be seen as witness of "popular perceptions about nature, technology, and humanity" or a "liminal cultural symbol".

Some excerpts I found interesting:

"Familiar foods serve as an anchor in an altered world (evoking both nostalgia and parody), whereas unfamiliar food may become one of the clearest measures of how far we have journeyed from the present. (...) In nearly every instance where food is prepared, shared, and eaten in science fiction films, it aids in what Vivian Sobchack (1988) describes as science fiction’s central theme: a ‘poetic mapping of social relations as they are created and changed by new technological modes of ‘‘being-in-the-world’’ ’ (...) The presence of food at the critical junctures in which the familiar and the strange, the past, present, and future all collide lends materiality to the answers being worked out on screen. (...) Science fiction food scenes help obscure, expose, perpetuate, and challenge the divisions of culture and nature. "

Lots of interesting examples ranging from futuristic food representing a nostalgia for a world that has been lost to unfamiliar meals (with shape or color betraying people's expectations) in "alienated" places. Why do I blog this? Well, although one might find weird that I take a look at food issues, the questions (as well as the methodology) described in this paper is relevant to whatever object you can find in science-fiction production and their resonance in design in general. In this case it's about food, but if you look at other artifacts (be it Marty McFly's shoes in Back to the Future or BG4's flying gear), it's definitely encounters with claims of what the author refers to as "past and present, nostalgia and progress, memory and desire, familiarity and difference (...) and the significance of these many issues and the choices made to satiate our needs and our desires.".

So what is the take-away here? as it seems, sci-fi movies, as exemplified by food scenes, explore moral aspects of production, consumption and object appropriation showing both constant design patterns (nostlgia from the past?) or unfamiliar/alienated depictions (fear from an uncertain present?).

Spontaneous kid play activities with cell-phones

Yet another interesting reference for a project about children and mobile gaming devices (ranging from the Nintendo DS to cell phones): In the hands of children: exploring the use of mobile phone functionality in casual play settings by a swedish team of researchers: Petra Jarkievich, My Frankhammar, and Ylva Fernaeus (taken from the Mobile HCI conference 2008). The paper reports the results of a field study concerning swedish kids (10-12 y.o) and their use of mobile phones in indoor and outdoor settings. The authors mention that they were interested by unsupervised social play and "spontaneous play activities" taking kids as a particular use case of mobile devices target. The locus of their study was therefore peculiar: situations where children were able to play fairly undisrupted for a longer period of time, and in explicit social settings. This is why they chose play centres located in parks. In terms of methodology, it's a mix of observation and kids interview (focus groups) about cell phone usage over the course of 6 weeks.

A quick overview of the results (although reading the whole finding section is very important to get the sense of what happens):

"The first general observation concerns the dual nature of the phones; simultaneously being serious and important communication tools for parents, as among the children being treated and valued primarily as resources to act locally in the group (...) Sharing media content was one of the key activities that we observed and seemed to play a central role in these respects, where individual ownership of the media content was assessed and valued largely based on its social context. (...) Our second general observation has to do with the skills that the children displayed at using the different features of the technology, and how these were constantly appropriated in a variety of ways. Existing physical play activities were sometimes altered and expanded to suit the technical resources, and the discovery of new functionality also inspired entirely new play scenarios. The children thereby also made use of functions in the phones to do things that these functions were clearly not intended for. We also observed several ways to overcome, and even make use of, the technical limitations of the devices. This suggests that children at this age put much value into the freedom of creating their own play scenarios, as a way to make meaningful use of the technologies at hand. (...) Our last more general observation is related to the long-established worry that computing technology may make children less physically stimulated, often favouring passive forms of learning, and how it has tended to force children’s play environments to move indoors."

And the following "implication for design" is also intriguing:

"some of the most meaningful and interesting technical functions were those that allowed users to invent and develop their own activities. We see no reason to suspect that this would not be a much appreciated feature also among adult users, at least in certain settings"

Why do I blog this? accumulating material about kids and mobile devices for a client project about mobile gaming. I am preparing a field study about that topic and try to get both methodological/results from other researchers. Reading the findings also worth it as it shows mobile phone usage is articulated with kids games such as 'cops and robbers'.

Urban jigsaw

Mismatch poetry in Geneva.

WASD, ESDF, IJKL et al

WASD according to the Wikipedia:

"WASD is a set of four keys on a QWERTY or QWERTZ computer keyboard which mimics the inverted-T configuration of the arrow keys. These keys are often used to control the player character's movement in computer games. W/S control forward and backward and A/D control strafing left and right. Primarily, WASD is used to account for the fact that the arrow keys are not ergonomic to use in conjunction with a right-handed mouse.

Some gamers prefer the WASD keys to the arrow keys for other various reasons, including the fact that more keys (and therefore, game commands) are easily accessible with the left hand when placed near WASD. Left-handed mouse users may prefer using the numpad or IJKL with their right hands instead for similar reasons.

After being popularized by first-person shooters, WASD became more common in other computer game genres as well. Many of the games that have adopted this layout use a first-person or over-the-shoulder third-person perspective."

There are other alernatives such as WQSE, ESDF (sometimes preferred because it provides access to movement independent keys for the little finger), IJKL (common in browser games because employing the arrow keys woud make the window to scroll and thus hinder gameplay), and of course the unix-based HJKL. Why do I blog this? documenting different styles of interaction, it's intriguing to see how the arrow key configuration evolves and mutates.

"Designed by an engineer"

The city of Lausanne is very proud to have the first swiss subway system (opening very soon). After two years of constructions, some new urban elements are appearing and it's funny to see the pride of the persons who took care of that. See for example this stunning sticker that is pervasive around the new subway entrance:

It basically says "Conceived/designed by an engineer", I wonder about the background decisions that led to this sticker campaign and find it utterly fascinating. Also what will be people's reaction? Does that make you more confident before taking that elevator?

Of course, I am always thinking how OTHER stickers (such as "Designed by a crocodile wrangler" or "Built by a chicken sexer") would do.

Internet of Things+PicNic

If you by any chance you go to PicNic next week in Amserdam, be sure to check this nice special event called "Internet of Things: Toys for hackers or real business opportunities" put together by Vlad Trifa:

"The purpose of this session is to raise awareness that a new ecology of tiny interconnected objects - the Internet of Things - is quickly and silently pervading even the most intimate corners of our lives. Still, many companies are reluctant to invest in this field, as these devices are perceived as unreliable toys that are not mature enough to be turned into real products. As a counterpart of the Mediamatic Hacker’s Camp - where the focus is on brainstorming and fast prototyping of new gadgets and ideas - this special event will focus on what happens when such an idea gets turned into a commercial product. To encourage research in this field, six world-class experts in this field accompanied with a bunch of interactive demos will present how they have transformed some toys for hackers into readily available products used both in research and industrial applications."

With good people such as David Orban, Mike Kuniavsky, Rafi Haladjian and others.

"Making" WiFi

(presence of wifi in Geneva, revealed on a tree)

My interest in the invisibility of the digital (on par with its pervasiveness in the physical) led me to Katrina Jungnickel's research project called Making Wifi. Her work basically explores the role and importance of visual representations and practices in the making of a new digital technology: Wireless Fidelity (WiFi):

"Drawing on an ethnography (participant observation and interviews) of the largest not-for-profit volunteer community WiFi network in Australia, she examines how members design, make, tinker, break, fix and share a wireless network that spans across the city of Adelaide. To do this she foregrounds the visual representations members make in everyday situated practice and examine what types of work they do. She shows how members regularly encounter trees, thieves, animals, neighbours, legal restrictions, technical complications, a myriad of materials and the weather in the daily practice of making WiFi. However, rather than filtering out and tidying up mundane mess, members build it into their visual practices. They make WiFi because of uncertainty and ambiguity, not in spite of it."

More specifically, she is interested in DIY as well as the role of mess as a conduit to new forms of expression and innovation:

"One thing I’m currently exploring is the paradox implicit in DIY WiFi. If WiFi is an invisible, fragile, temperamental and complicated technology that predicates meticulous precision, advanced technical skills and abstract diagrammatic schema then what constitutes DIY or "homebrew" high tech? How do members negotiate the intersection of wireless technology and tinkering? What is the role of hands-on knowledge in making, understanding and innovating and how, if at all, does a hands-on engagement influence their relationship to the technology and the network as a whole?"

More on her research blog Why do I blog this? it seems a relevant exploration of intriguing DIY practices as well as situated practice regarding technological development, always good to read/investigate to understand the complexity of technology and how it is hybridized with other elements (be they legal restrictions or the presence of animal). Would be nice to read the whole phd or papers. Personally, it's in this sort of research that I like reading thick description of how design and usage, the kind of material I like skimming as case studies of "messy" innovation.

The complexity of GPS accuracy

Writing a chapter about geolocation history, I am digging the issue of GPS accuracy as it is often a "pain points" in the user (driver) experience. The Road Measurement Data Acquisition System has an interesting paper about it, by Chuck Gilbert.

Gilbert shows how complex the problem of GPS accuracy is and how misleading the advertisements are as they do not convey an intelligible vision of that topic. In general, the admitted accuracy (if there was such thing as admitted accuracy) is between 15 and 100 meters). But what does that range corresponds to? Is it achieve under optimal conditions? under difficult or extreme circumstances? The accuracy values is therefore represented statistically with different means but there is never enough room in an ad to depict this complexity; Gilbert finally recommends not not to use advertisements as an evaluation of GPS accuracy.

The factors that should be listed are the following:

"Required occupation time Type of data recorded (phase or pseudorange) Type of processing (phase or pseudorange) Environmental conditions Maximum allowable PDOP Minimum allowable signal strength Maximum allowable distance between base and rover receivers Horizontal accuracy versus vertical accuracy"

Why do I blog this? although I often focus on the environmental limitations (e.g. narrow streets), the situation is far more complex and it's interesting to pinpoint the different factors that can make a GPS device be inaccurate. How can design take this into account?

The E on touch interface

Although I don't share the optimism described by this article about touch interface (in the insightful Technology Quarterly in The Economist), there are some good elements discussed there. I recommend reading it in conjunction with Bill Buxton's perspectives about that very topic.

The article in the E gives an overview of touch interface (table, mobiles, etc.) showing how they have been around for quite a while as well as interesting quick descriptions of the available technologies. As with other technologies, I am less interested in the interface per se than how it evolved over time. See for example this description of the limiting factors:

"If touch screens have been around for so long, why did they not take off sooner? The answer is that they did take off, at least in some markets, such as point-of-sale equipment, public kiosks, and so on. In these situations, touch screens have many advantages over other input methods. That they do not allow rapid typing does not matter; it is more important that they are hard-wearing, weatherproof and simple to use. (...) But breaking into the consumer market was a different matter entirely. Some personal digital assistants, or PDAs, such as the Palm Pilot, had touch screens. But they had little appeal beyond a dedicated band of early adopters, and the PDA market has since been overshadowed by the rise of advanced mobile phones that offer similar functions, combined with communications. Furthermore, early PDAs did not make elegant use of the touch-screen interface, says Dr Buxton. “When there was a touch interaction, it wasn’t beautiful,” he says. (...) That is why the iPhone matters: its use of the touch screen is seamless, intuitive and visually appealing. (...) Another factor that has held back touch screens is a lack of support for the technology in operating systems. This is a particular problem for multi-touch interfaces. "

Furthermore, the article also deals with a topic I am researching (mostly with the Nintendo Wii and DS): the one of gestural language for tangible interfaces:

"Microsoft is also developing gestures, and Apple has already introduced several of its own (...) The danger is that a plethora of different standards will emerge, and that particular gestures will mean different things to different devices. Ultimately, however, some common rules will probably emerge, as happened with mouse-based interfaces.

The double click does not translate terribly well to touch screens, however. This has led some researchers to look for alternatives."

Why do I blog this? some interesting elements here about the evolution of technologies, especially showing how slow such interface (almost 20-25 years old) takes time to find its niche.

Urban pranks

(a plastic ninja seen in Rome)

Being a great fan of random acts (and André Gide's acte gratuit), it's always to read what the mainstream press has to say about it. So when the WSJ features something about this, there are sometimes some good excerpts, such as:

"The latest pranksters are "urban alchemists," akin to so-called guerrilla gardeners who cram plantings into sidewalk cracks, or people who create "found art" made from random items plucked from the streets, according to Jonathan Wynn, a sociologist at Smith College in Northampton, Mass.

"These are people in cities who take the public spaces and everyday life and make something kind of magical about it," he says."

Why do I blog this beyond the fun part of prank, they're definitely interesting as signal which reveal the need for meaning making in contemporary cities/societies.

Umbrella hack

An intriguing use of umbrella, seen both in Seoul (above) and Geneva (below). Protect your place with what you have up your sleeve!

Why do I blog this? fascination towards mundane creativity, or how people use what they have to repair stuff, and here it's beyond carboard or duct tape.

Explore and produce provocative designs for automated journeys

If you're (still) around Seoul, which I am not, there is this awesomely intriguing "action-packed" workshop next week called Automated Journeys (as part of the Ubicomp 2008 conference):

"Computing technology now pervades those moments of our day when we move through our cities. Mobile phones, music players, vending machines, contact-less payment systems and RFID-enabled turnstiles are de rigueur on our daily journeys. This workshop aims to examine these augmented journeys, to reflect on the public, semi-public and private technologies available to us in them, and to speculate on what innovations might be to come. Taking as our starting point cities such as Seoul, we aim to take seriously the developments in mobile technology as well as the advancements in autonomous machinery and how these mesh with our urban journeys.

Through collaborative fieldwork, group discussion and a hands-on design brainstorming session, the workshop's empirical focus will be directed towards producing 4 envisagements that either speculate and/or critically reflect on technological futures."

Why do I blog this? interest in automatic city + active workshop with participants engagement + already attended another workshop organized by this team. Seoul's a perfect place to investigate such a topic (on par with Rotterdam).

Touch - no touch

Both seen in Korea (first in Jeju, second in Seoul). Unclear affordances for touch/don't touch

Designing interactions, designing conversations

Morning read in the train: Uncertain futures: A Conversation with Professor Anthony Dunne by David Womack. Yet another insightful short article on the Adobe Design Center think tank website. Womack starts off by describing how Dunne+Raby's work is meant to reclaim the original meaning of interaction design: generate particular types of conversations, usually about technology or an aspect of the future. Some excerpts I found relevant:

"With classic design, the idea is generally to solve the problem or cure the ailment. If you’re getting wet, you make a shelter. Placebo projects we see more as a way of negotiating a relationship to something. It’s not solving a problem. You’re setting up a situation that facilitates a discussion. (...) it stops students thinking in terms of, “Here’s a problem, now I’m going to solve it.” We want to think about people in a complex way that isn’t neat or containable.

For example, if nanotechnology is on its way in its various manifestations, which of these manifestations seem acceptable and which seem scary? And why? Design can be a medium for exploration and a place for experimenting and engaging people in dialogue. We think design can provide a very concrete and down to earth language for exploring the implications of technology.

I would never describe designers as problem solvers. I might describe them as meaning makers."

Why do I blog this? preparing a presentation for a design conference, I am cobbling some notes about utilitarian versus critical design. What I find of particular interest here with what Dunne is claiming is the importance of this approach. As he wrote with Fiona Raby in Design Noir, "Beneath the glossy surface of official design lurks a dark and strange world driven by real human needs". A quote I really enjoy and often use even in less critical-design-prone domain (e.g. with business exec wondering about the "added value" of the weird stuff I throw up when interacting with them). Why is it pertinent IMO? because it's about asking questions, uncovering new meanings and desires and not about doing new product development by adding the word "intelligent" as a creative way to design the future.

Anticipatory or representational visions of ubiquitous computing

Catching up with accumulated RSS feeds, I read with great pleasure the slides from Sam Kinsley's presentation at the RGS-IBG annual international conference.

Kinsley interestingly addresses the vision of ubiquitous computing and how it is employed in the domain of corporate R&D. He takes the example of HP's Cooltown project and what "stories" were set to define the project and the vision. Of course there were some issues with the large quantity of material produced in the Cooltown project. Some excerpts I enjoyed from Kinsley's notes:

"After CEO prominence came, some HP managers went to this producer to create a ‘vision’ video for CoolTown. From a corporate ‘vision’ perspective: the video was a very compact articulation of a lot of things CoolTown as a research project was trying to say about the type of world being created by these types of technologies. From the technology research scientist standpoint - there were things about the video they liked, but many things that made them cringe and say 'we didn't say it would work like that'. As some of the researchers saw it, the producer wasn't very ‘tech savvy’.

The video became an interesting double-edged sword. It had a particular effect on how CoolTown was received. It wasn't accurate to technological development the ensued but represented a ‘vision’. The researchers felt that the overly emotive and simplistic corporate vision elided some of the interesting and important things they were trying to achieve to make the world better. (...) whilst visions are not necessarily realised, nor likely to be, they are productive of particular types of relation between researchers, business managers, clients and various places and things. (...) Vision texts and videos are, in most cases, certainly not glimpses of a future. Rather, they are representational constructs born of anticipatory impetus. "

Why do I blog this? I often find interesting when this sort of gap is revealed as it shows the importance of culture and imaginary expectations in technological developments. The notion of "visions" less teleogical but representational is also important here as it shows that reality is more complex than presented in the pop press/PR communication.

The internet "letter"

Is the Internet best represented by the "e", the "a" or the "i"? Quick review of internet signage in Seoul/Incheon. What letter suits best for what culture? If "A" is pretty common, the others are also employed.

What it takes to have all have these swimming pools

The sort of machinery you have underneath hostels here in Jeju island, to make swimming pool working. The incredible size of infrastructure, always hidden from the "users" (no to mention the waste generated by this kind of device).

Take-aways from LIFT Asia

Some notes Laurent and myself prepared for the wrap up, insisting on the following take-home issues, the image that takes shape after the conference is done:

1. experience of space: physical space change, the way we perceive and interact in space is modified. Christian Lindholm talked about wifi places as oasis, Adam Greenfield talked about the new way we will experience places, etc.
2. currency & business models redefined as shown by Davird Birch's talk, Joonmo Kwon described new business models such as co-promotion or the fact that game money are controlled by game designers (they even control the inflation rate)
3. service convergence as described by Joonmo Kwon and Takeshi Natsuno
4. cities as interfaces: Jury Hahn, Jeffrey Huang, Soo-In Yang or Adam Greenfield gave us different propositions
5. technological relativism: some countries are more advanced than others, the speed of change is increasing (as shown by Jan Chipchase), it's never black or white, the notion of "uses" is also different.
6. real world is a limit: the limit is often simple: the physical reality: battery life (and that there could be solutions as exemplified by Raphael Grignani), machines that crash, etc.

Kansa-amida!

Robot session @ LIFT Asia

Saturday morning at LIFT Asia 2008, quick notes. Frederic Kaplan began his talk by stating that the number of object we have at home is huge (nearly 3500), all of them have different "value profile". he showed curves that capture the evolution of the experienced value of an object). See the curve below. A roomba for example follows a curve such as a corkscrew (c) whereas an Aibo, an entertainment robot, follows more a "notebook" curve: where value augment over time through the relationship with the owner(s).

Frederic stated how we know how to deal with the mid to end part of the curve but not the beginning, namely how to create the first part of the robot-owner relationship, which is a crux question in general for robots/communicating objects designers. There are many reasons for that: in the west, it's not easy in the occidental culture, to "raise" and talk a robot; most people try but stop, and show it only when friends come visit. So the robot is a pretty expensive gadget.

After moving from Sony to the CRAFT laboratory, Frederic started moving form robot to interactive furnitures and became interested in how objects can be "robotized" and the fact that perhaps robots should not always look like robots. Since 1984, computers have not changed much (shapes, icons have been modified but still it's always the same story). We changed the way we used computers (listen to music, watch photos, get the news, that was not what computers were intended for) but they did not change, so they thought it would be an idea to build a robotic computer as in the former Apple commercial. They therefore designed the Wizkid, an "expressive computer" which recognizes people, gestures proposing a new sort of interactivity with people. To some extent, he showed how you can have expressivity without any anthropomorphic robot (unlike the demo we had of the Speecys robot).

Some use cases: - in the living room, the Wizkid can act as a central interface to the media players: showing a CD make the robot playing it; it can also take pictures autonomously and create a visual summary of the event that can be sent to guests afterwards. It's like an automatic logging system that remembers and use that information. - in the kitchen: the wizkid can help you cook and shop. When the owner prepare a recipe, the wizkid will help following it step by step, tracking face and gestures (ans also doing some suggestions). It would be possible to show an item and the wizkid add it to the shopping list. - games are also an interesting field: you can play augmented reality games with the wizkid: you look at yourself in the screen and see yourself in imaginary worlds.

As a conclusion, Frederic said that most people things that robots will look like objects but he claims that everyday objects can become robot and the next generation of computer interfaces will be robotic. People used to go to the machine to interact but now interactivity comes to you. Computers used to live in their own world, now they live in yours.

Then Bruno Bonnell in his "from robota to homo robotus: revisiting Asimov's laws of robotic" took up the floor and gave an insightful presentation about robot designers should revisit the definition of "robots" (and therefore Asimov' laws). To him, there is a vocabulary problem when it comes to robots.

In Czech, "robot" means "work" and it pervaded our representation of what is a robot, that is to say, a mechanic slave. Hence the laws of robotics for Asimov. These laws work well for military or industrial robots but what about leisure robots such as the Aibo, the roomba, iRobiq? We had the same problem with the word "computer". it's only since World War II that the word "computer” (from Latin computare, "to reckon," "sum up") been applied to machines. The Oxford English Dictionary still describes a computer as "a person employed to make calculations in an observatory, in surveying, etc.". We moved that into machines and computers took over the successive activities: Systematic tasks, support creation tools, became and artistic Medium and finally an amplifier of imagination. And it's the same with animals: it used to be food, then working forces, companions and finally friends. In addition, we don't talk just about "animals": there are ponies, dogs, etc. with a classification: animals, mammals, equids, horses. It would be possible to classify computers according to the same classification: order/family/genre/specy.

So, what about robots? are the very different robots all the same? Couldn't we classify them in a classification: a family of static robot, a family of moving robot, etc. So now, it's no more "robot, robot, robot" but "Robots,Mover,Humanoide,IrobiQ". What is important here is that all these robots in the classifications are recognized as having different features and characteristics. We start recognizing that they are all not the same species. By classifying (giving a name), you generate some different applications and can improve the quality of the product that you are designing. Putting names on things helps creating them. It allows to go beyond the limits of the robot vision: and it allows to reconcile the vision of having of both an anthropomorphic robot (like Speecys' robot we saw first) and a different one (like Frederic's Wizkid) since they are from two different "species".

After this classification, we can go into the evolution, how to branch out the future of robots. there could be the following path: mechanical slave, the alternative to human actions, the substitute of human care, the companions and finally the amplifier of human body and mind. Is it scifi or Reality ? Today or Tomorrow ? Is it possible technically? We don't know but what is important is to start today and look ahead?

An interesting path to do so is to move away from practical robots and investigate useless robots, as well as not being afraid of technical limitations (think about the guys who designed Pong at Atari). To the question "what does the robot do?", the answer is simple: to create an emotional bond with humans (that would be recipe for a robot success). The important characteristics are therefore: fun, thrilling, etc. Which is very close to video games do: they creatine a emotional bond with the players because they are faithful to a reality, they are reliable, available, adaptable, and above all TRUSTFUL. In the same fashion, robots should be trustful. The bottom line is thus that we should forget the Asimov laws and invent the Tao of robotic where the "gameplay" is the key to accept them as part of our reality.

Also, the funny part of the session was the first talk where Tomoaki Kasuga's demonstration of his robot, which "charm point" is the hip (or something else as attested by the picture below), especially when dancing on stage. What Tomoaki showed is that expressivity (through dance, movement, the quality of the pieces) is very important for human-computer interaction.

What is beauty?

Great quote discussed by Christian Lindholm in his LIFT Asia talk:"Beauty: the adjustement of all parts proportionally so that one cannot add or subtract or change without impairing the harmony of the whole" Leon Battista Alberti, 1435