The role of theory in ethnographically-informed design research

The use of ethnographical methods in design research here and there out of academic circles brings back the question of the role of "theory", and its articulation with research methodologies and techniques. This is a recurring topic with clients, research colleagues and I've seen it popping on mailing lists such as anthrodesign.

Before jumping to the differentiation between theory and methodologies, it's important to acknowledge that there is no just "one" ethnography. The use of this term, especially in business circles, is not fair. It's as if it is was a general container to provide engineers/strategists/designers with a one-way solution for their problem at hand. An article such as "fieldwork and ethnography: a perspective from CSCW" by Harper et al. (to be found in the EPIC 2005 proceedings) gives an introduction to some of them.

"Part of the trouble has to do with the fact that the word ethnography can be used somewhat capriciously for a whole range of purposes; as a label used by some for practices to be jealously defended; a label used to give renewed vigor, even fashionability for an old trade, fieldwork; and at other times a label used to defend pointless hanging around. What ethnography is, though it clearly has some kind of character, is not at all clear"

The paper basically shows that there are different distinction based on disciplinary assumptions about methods, theories and sensibilities. The authors picked up 4 texts (Cognitive Work Analysis by Vicente, Contextual Inquiry by Beyer and Holzblatt, Designing Collaborative Systems by Crabtree, and Marcus' Ethnography through Thick and Thin) and show how they represent different viewpoints: a ‘cognitive science’ viewpoint; a ‘practical’ approach; an ethnomethodological perspective, and a postmodern alternative. They show how that each of them reflects different orientations and sensibilities and not only refer to which methods to choose and how to look at "data". The paper also suggests to use the term "field work" instead than "ethnography" since the former is better suited to the activity carried out in design research.

Who are the protagonists at stake here? Let's say that we can distinguish 3 components:

• Theories of science analyze the condition of production of knowledge from a philosophical viewpoint. Example: positivist view (authentic knowledge is that based on actual sense experience), more critical approach

. Then, there are finer-scaled theories that act as subset of the general theories of science: Chomsky's Generative Grammar, Sperber's relevance theory of human communication, Suchman's Situated Action theory, Media theory about framing, etc.

• Methodologies describe the general ways about how to carry out research. Based on considerations emerging from theories, methodologies propose a set of methods. Example: qualitative analysis, quantitative analysis
• Methods that are general ways to study a class of phenomena, based on theoretical tools (how about how articulate data and theories) and techniques (recipes to acquire, transform, analyze data).

In the context of design research, the situation is a bit more specific given that it corresponds to (1) a qualitative and, generally, (2) an inductive model of research. It's qualitative as it tries to uncover cases that can be selected according to whether they typify (or not), specific characteristics or contextual locations. It's also generally inductive because general principles (yes, theories) can be developed from specific observations (as opposed to other forms of research which are based on hypothesis-testing). I tried to list the link between empirical research and theories in this context:

• Certain theories can frame the research and give an idea of what one is trying to achieve and look for. Or, as formulated by Harper et al.:"disciplinary ‘sensibilities’ may allow us to produce a set of broad, ‘sensitising’ or ‘illuminating’ concepts, starting points that can serve as reminders that some kinds of thing are often to be found whilst not diverting us from our equally powerful interest in what is uniquely ‘situated’ about what we are studying. In short, provide us with a ‘way of looking’". What it means is that it allows to efficiently synthesize, interpret and sort out insights. In sum, it orients the research.
• The goal of this research is to generate a theory, Beyond describing and exploring the context at hand, it's also to articulate principles or more general notions or rules, and understand a culture based on certain aspects. To some extent, building a theory can be a research goal.

Of course, this is a quick summary and there is more to it. This is all and good but people interested by design research may want to know more about what theories or theoretical spin they might want to employ. Ranging from Ethnomethodology to Interactionism or Grounded Theory and Activity Theory, there is plenty of possibilities here and I won't enter into much details in this blogpost.

What is interesting is perhaps the discussion about which sort of theoretical twist are employed in "design research". In HCI and CSCW, which have a strong ethnographically-informed design approach, it seems that ethnomethodology is very common and french ergonomics is all about Activity Theory (and modified versions). Other approach this without any reference to theories, such as Jan Chipchase's work at Nokia Design which is fairly descriptive and exploratory. Again, as I stated above, there is no "one way" here, the important thing is to find the method the researcher is comfortable with in conjunction with he/she and the design team think is relevant for the time being. On my side, I do think that an approach such as "Grounded Theory" by Strauss and Corbin is pertinent and flexible enough for design research.

Visual marker on the sidewalk

Interesting encounter in a one-day trip to Paris this morning: a visual marker, complemented with a unified resource locator on the pavement of Paris, close to Place de la Bastille. Aimed at mobile phone owners who will surely be led to the url.

What's intriguing here?

• a curious merging of the digital and the physical that depends on the viewer: at first, having a mobile phone or not, you see the digital representation only through the form of an index (the url or the marker). It's only if you use the phone that you can access to the genuine digital layer
• the presence of the marker in the environment, surely an interesting design issue to be contrasted to representation on posters or marker on magazines (smaller surface that you hand out to other performs, while the sidewalk marker is static.
• the horizontality of the surface: you have to look at the sidewalk and point it with your phone.
• the repetition of the url showing different levels and moment of engagement with the content referred to by these inscriptions
• and the practice of spraying visual market on the pavement per se

Paper in contemporary cities

Different forms of paper-handling solutions in Geneva, Zürich and Seoul: (pieces of paper maintainted by a piece of string in Zürich)

(paper bin in Geneva)

(Huge and compressed stacks of paper, once collected, in Geneva)

(Failed attempt to recycle shredded paper, in Geneva)

(Shredded paper in plastic bags, in Seoul)

Why do I blog this? documenting the different forms of recycle papers in our cities is always curious. It basically shows how a certain material moves through different instantiations as well as the recycling norms or practices: the use of strings in Switzerland is very common with or without a big paper bin, the importance of collecting shredded papers (and the inherent accident, as shown in the photo in Geneva) or plastic bags with certain colors. All of this nicely represents both cultural norms, organizational processes and artifacts that people have put in place to maintain this recycling flow. It's important to keep in mind that this is where toilet papers, newspapers and books come from.

Tools to analyze weak signals

Spent last friday in Zürich presenting the Lift screening process and trend analysis with Holm Friebe's class at the Design Hochschule. The morning was about the Lift Conference, more specifically about our process to scout for speakers and ideas, to set a theme and work it out. The message was that the wide range of signals (ideas, memes, "trends", technologies, social phenomena, scientific discoveries, etc.) and inscriptions (books, magazine, blogposts, articles, academic papers) is scanned and filtered through different criteria: preference towards social implications than technologies for the sake of technologies, avoidance of technological determinism (as much as we can), stepping a bit from terms that are too *hip* (such as "web2.0"), etc. In the afternoon, we took some time to discuss different tools to filter the signals and forms of change. The tools are actually quite common and stem from the mix of methods we encountered in our work/readings/studies and meetings with lots of people. Most of the conversation addressed the use of s-curve, coming from diffusion theories of innovation. It shows how adoption is slow at first (depicted by a flat curve at the beginning of the time period) till a tipping point (the steep curve mid-way) and a plateau. This last phase corresponds to the adoption of the technology by adopters (which does not correspond to everyone on earth). To put it shortly, the s-curve is a way to represent the number of people who adopt a technology over a particular time period. As C. Christensen puts it, "it states that in a technology’s early stages, the rate of progress in performance is relatively slow. As the technology becomes better understood, controlled, and diffused, the rate of technological improvement increases . But the theory posits that in its mature stages, the technology will asymptotically approach a natural or physical limit, which requires that ever greater periods of time or inputs of engineering effort be expended to achieve increments of performance improvement"

Of course, we should distinguish the different ways to use s-curves. You have the sociological use where you draw the s-curve with real-data of technology adoption (as described in here). But you also have a more metaphorical use of the curve, which is the one we discussed in the course. Using a s-curve in this context is relevant to structure the discussion about where an innovation (technology, social change, etc.) stands at a certain moment in time, where it came from and where it might be in the future.

A good way to start drawing an s-curve, in the context of such discussion, is to look at different information sources: you can for example map data points depending on the information source represented on the following figure:

As one can see on the two figure above, there are two important points in s-curves:

• The beginning: that I exemplify through these 2 quotes by Paul Saffo and William Gibson. They simply show that s-curves' beginning are already here and the point is to spot them through different data sources (be they readings, field studies or always-on attitude.
• The tipping point: the moment in time when the rate of adoption increases, which depends both on technological improvements and, above all, on "contextual" issues such as " the active participation of all those who have decided to develop it" (see Bruno Latour's work about the "model of interessement"). On a methodological note here, I would say that the use of s-curve in conjunction with Latour's work may be a bit flawed. Will need to think this through later on.

Another way to see an s-curve and to discuss how to apply it to a certain innovation is to adopt a people/user/market viewpoint:

This standpoint can also be summarized by these three phases of idea/meme/technology adoption (based on Scardigli's work):

1. Phase 1: The “time of prophecy and fantasy” (enthusiastic or terrifying) where revolutions are predicted and technique is “inserted socially” (right after invention and R&D). It correlates with a discourse around the hopes and fears linked to these issues which are recurring in history. What happen is that fantasy, scientific knowledge and actions are intertwined and even the weakest signal is turned into an excessive hope or fear. Prophecies become necessities and then self-justificated. Some example: "3D web platforms like Second Life will change the Web forever", "Mobile social software will be a revolution", etc.
2. Phase 2: The “delusion phase” that suggest how the expected technological revolution does not lead to a social revolution. Or, when we realize that there is a gap between forecasts and realizations/effects. At the same time, some people start appropriating, adapting, using the idea/meme/technology differently. This is generally less publicized as the press thinks that the "innovation is a fad" and it's not worth talking about it.
3. Phase 3: “the side-effect phase”: 20 or 40 years after, the real diffusion of the technique is effective and some social and more long term consequences appear but often different from the one expected at first. This is what happened with the video-phone, it never really worked as a independent box at home but people are now using it on their laptop through Skype; and it allows interesting new social dynamics and usages.

Of course, back to the evolution of technologies, you can also take a "sales" viewpoint: if you look at the rates of acquisition/sales instead of the adoption. For each product, you then this sort of succession of curves that represents cycles of adoption (video game consoles in this case):

Finally, we also discussed the importance to consider the large diversity of human behavior, which was depicted by this well-known Bell curve that I've taken from a book by Don Norman (who actually took it from G. Moore's book "Crossing the chasm").

What we can draw from this curve is that:

• There is diversity, not juste "one normal human"
• People who are at the beginning of s-curves are the early adopters.
• You can be an early adopter for a certain topic (iphones) and a conservative person for others.
• Besides, this curve also relates to the previous representations in the sense that the s-curve can be seen as being made up a series of 'bell curves' of different sections of a population adopting different versions of a certain product

Why do I blog this? trying to formalize a bit the tools we used the other day is interesting as it forces to describe why and how they're relevant. It's important to point out, though, that these tools are definitely not a perfect algorithm/process to give you the answer about “how a signal would evolve into a fad or a success". Instead, they should be seen as a a way to structure the discussion of signals and topics we collect. Which is why I smiled when, few streets ahead in Zürich, I stumbled across the name of this company:

Thanks Holm for the opportunity!

Pervasive games book

It seems that the book "Pervasive Games: Theory and Design - Experiences on the Boundary between Life and Play " by Markus Montola, Jaakko Stenros and Annika Waer (editors) is finally out, published by Morgan Kauffman:

"Quickly emerging from the fast-paced growth of mobile communications and wireless technologies, pervasive games provide a worldwide network of potential play spaces. Now games can be designed to be played in public spaces like streets, conferences, museums and other non-traditional game venues – and game designers need to understand the world as a medium—both its challenges and its advantages.

This book shows how to change the face of play—who plays, when and where they play and what that play means to all involved. The authors explore aspects of pervasive games that concern game designers: what makes these games compelling, what makes them possible today, how they are made and by whom. For theorists, it provides a solidtheoretical, philosophical and aesthetic grounding of their designs.

Pervasive Games covers everything from theory and design to history and marketing. Designers will find 13 detailed game descriptions, a wealth of design theory, examples from dozens of games and a thorough discussion of past inspirations—directly from the game designers themselves."

Why do I blog this? just saw this on, need to get it and peruse this interesting compendium of case-studies (Killer, Insectopia, Botfighters, Uncle Roy, etc.). People interested can also listen to the podcast by the editors.

Space, from above

"By looking at the satellite image we extract ourselves from our particular point of view, yet without, bouncing up to the bird's eye view; we have no access to the divine view, the view from nowhere. We go from our bounded view to a sliding view that will carry us from a labyrinth of transformations to the general frame in which our daily action is set – and that will never be more than a few square centimetres big. The frame has the same dimension, in a sense, as the object it frames. The big is no bigger than the small"

"Paris ville invisible" by Bruno Latour and Emilie Hermant (1998).

Why do I blog this? writing a piece with Julian about urban computing leads me to revisit this nice book by Latour.

Johanna Brewer about ethnography and design

Back to EPFL today for a lecture by Johanna Brewer about "What can ethnography do for technology?". She basically presented how ethnography, as a methodological strategy, is relevant for design in the context of her PhD projects. Johanna did her PhD with Paul Dourish at UCI Irvine and she recently launched a new start-up called frestyl (in the mobile/web music business).

After a brief introduction of *what is ethnography*, she showed how Human-Computer Interaction, initially based in Computer Science, evolved to include cognitive psycho concepts with a quantitative understanding of how humans interact with technology. Researchers recognized that this approach, though fruitful for certain purposes, could be complemented by others, such as ethnography. Which is *Ethnography met HCI*: as technology has become ubiquitous, multi-purpose, embedded, social, there was trend to move beyond lab-based studies of individuals and instead understand social use of technology. The point was then to leverage ethnographic techniques to seek inspiration for new designs. This quick summary was interesting but I think it partly ignores the use of ethnographically-inspired method in the broader context of design (that happened in parallel).

Johanna then summarized what *ethnography can do for HCI*:

1. broadening the notions of requirements gathering
2. understanding social context of service increases chances of adoption (rather than just the use of technology)
3. creating new engaging experiences (things that move beyond practices people are already doing, push the envelope, push the boundaries)
4. inspired by real-world social interaction

In human-computer interaction, the way ethnography is employed is different than its earlier roots in anthropology: field study is shorter (week-long rather than year-long but the rationale is that one day is better than no days at all!), there is a deep/narrow focus on particular setting (what's like to ride the public transport in lausanne?), study of target users, with an eye towards technology design, not just understanding culture for the sake of it. Which led her to delineate two scopes: "open-ended, exploratory, revolutionary" versus "target, tailored, techno-centric" (look at a particular setting, or at particular features to be changed).

A big part of the presentation was then a description of the different techniques, which she categorized in two clusters:

• Traditional methods: participant observation (and the importance of taking personal field notes), photography, video, interviews
• Innovative methods: defamiliarization (looking at your culture with fresh eyes), people shadowing (following a person (often with consent), documenting their actions, in-situ discussions, ask "stupid" things: Why did you push that button here?), object shadowing (following things instead of people, like newspaper dropped on the tube in London), disrupting and intervention (shaking up a social situation and observing the result), cultural and technological probes (low-fi/hi-fi design interventions: exploring people's reactions, probe a situation, once you have designed something)

After a brief description of the analysis part (documentation is analyzed through coding: looking for common themes in data), she presented the existence of various outcomes: a plan for follow-up ethnographic study (as it allowed to ask more questions), general guidelines for futures technologies, concept design, implementation of prototype, fully realized product. And all of this can take a large range of format: written document, video, photographic essay, design response/prototype to demonstrate ethnographic work.

She then showed various examples taken from her work. I enjoyed the part about how she chose the sample group for her interviews.

(undersound is one of the project that emerged from Johanna and her colleagues' ethnographic research)

She used what she called "theoretical sampling": chose a theoretically interesting sample of people (rather than statistically representative) who are interested by the experience of the context she was exploring (the tube). I was also intrigued by how she looked for inspiration for design, not guidelines, something that I was not surprised of given that this was the reason why I invited her PhD advisor to Lift last year. Her point was that ethnography can give an impetus that what you design is culturally relevant as it roots your design in cultural underpinnings "when you go to a place and talk to people, you design sth that is relevant for them (and it also makes them appreciate what you do)".

Why do I blog this an interesting overview that is certainly useful as I am preparing a course about these issues for next year's class at the design school in Geneva.

Original design thinking approach for researching RFID

Designing with RFID by Einar Sneve Martinussen and Timo Arnall (presented at Tangible & Embedded Interaction 2009) is an highly interesting read if you're into alternative visions to the internet of things. Based on what the authors call "a practice-driven design approach", through sketching, making and form-explorations, they explore the possibilities for richer design of RFID products in everyday contexts.

However, I was even more interested by the design methodologies proposed in the paper. The way the articulate different techniques, such as sketching, modeling, form exploration or evaluation, is original and curious. What is relevant to me is the clear definition of a purpose ("to gain a rich working knowledge of the kinds of design qualities that RFID objects may embody") and the way they proposed different investigation phases:

"product review (...) To understand the ways that RFID tags have been designed into consumer products, we conducted an extensive product review that documents many RFID products from around the world. This has been a process of reflection on existing industrial and consumer products. (...) design experiment that focuses on form and expression rather than specific applications or technical infrastructures. (...) Through a sketching process we developed an understanding of the relationships between physical forms and tags. Form-explorations were then used to visualise findings, to generate further models and to examine surface qualities. (...) The experiments were carried out and evaluated by a group of designers with diverse design skills: including model making, software programming, electronics hardware and digital 3D design. Subsequent iterations were informed by design evaluation and through teaching (...) Sketching is used as an analytic tool, to evaluate, not just for idea generation. (...) digital 3D modeling (...) act as a way of lifting the findings out of rough sketching and experimenting stage and towards a generalisation of the research. They effectively communicate the physical aspects of the design findings and help us to evaluate and refine a vocabulary of forms. (...) In industrial design the approaches to physical objects has included aesthetic taxonomies of form18 that codify various elements and properties of primitives such as geometry, orientation, symmetry, spatial matrices, forces and relationships between forms as well as intention and expression. Through introducing RFID as an element into this approach, we begin to design an inspirational or generative set of forms for RFID- enabled objects. (...) [it] helped to understand the fundamental properties that determine how RFID object could be used and designed."

Why do I blog this? It's been a long time that this pdf sits on my desktop. Knowing Timo and Einar's work I was intrigued by both the topic AND the methodological approach. The two aspects of it are important but it was even more important to see how they exemplify an interesting approach to design research. Besides, such a description is rarely seen.

Surely some good material for my courses, and an opportunity to rethink about how to articulate user research can be included in such a process.

About why people hate Clippy

Taking some time reading about technological failures, I found this interesting reference by Luke Swartz called Why People Hate the Paperclip: Labels, Appearance, Behavior, and Social Responses to User Interface Agents. This dissertation deals with Office assistants on computers that seem to be a big pain for lots of people. The documents provides an interesting contextual history of such user interface agents and it tackles the user experience angle based on theoretical, qualitative, and quantitative studies, the author.

Some of the results:

"Among the findings were that labels—whether internal cognitive labels or explicit system-provided labels—of user interface agents can influence users’ perceptions of those agents. Similarly, specific agent appearance (for example, whether the agent is depicted as a character or not) and behavior (for example, if it obeys standards of social etiquette, or if it tells jokes) can affect users’ responses, especially in interaction with labels."

But my favorite part is certainly the one about mental models of Clippy:

"Two interesting points present themselves here: First, beginners—the people who are supposed to be helped the most by the Office Assistant—are at least somewhat confused about what it is supposed to do. Especially given that beginners won’t naturally turn to the computer for help (as they seek out people instead, it may be especially important to introduce such users to what the Assistant does and how to use it effectively.

Second, that even relatively experienced users attribute a number of actions (such as automatic formatting) to the Office Assistant suggests that users are so used to the direct-manipulation application-as-tool metaphor, that any amount of independent action will be ascribed to the agent. For these users, the agent has taken on agency for the program itself!"

Why do I blog this? collecting material about technological failures and their user experience, this research piece is interesting both in terms of content and methodologies. Besides, I was intrigued by the discussion about mental models and how people understand how things work (or don't work). There are some interesting parallels between this and the catchbob results. Especially in how we differentiated several clusters of users depending on how they understood flaws and problems.

Map incompleteness

Map incompleteness is something that I am very intrigued about. As shown in the example above taken in Paris, the city itself is well represented but as soon as you leave the "périphérique" (the highway-like infrastructure that surrounds the french capital), it's a blank grey void as if no one leaves beyond this limit. It's a phenomenon you also encounter with weather maps as you can see below: weather forecast generally stops at the border (clouds don't go through the customs, do they?). You can see the swiss map as if it was a stand-alone territory (lots of countries do it anyway).

Why do I blog this? Map incompleteness is understandable in terms of information design: the use of "white space" can be relevant to "balance composition and induction properly". Designing maps and signage is a matter of simplification so that people could easily grasp the situation at hand. However, in both situations above I am often bothered by the simplification; not that I need to go across the border and would be happy to know the temperature, rather because it discretized phenomena that should be represented as continuous.

Testing the Nintendo DSi

Recently acquired a Nintendo DSi. Although I have a DS for sometime, I wanted to see how the user experience could be reshuffled through the new features provided by Nintendo.

The first interesting change is that you can download games from DSi ware virtual shop. Simply put, there's no game sold with the console! You plug in the interwebs, see what you can buy with 1000 points and download it onto the internal drive of the DSi. It takes a short amount of time that you spend watching a bunch of Nintendo characters who race to fill box with blue liquid (which means that the game download is complete). Fortunately, this time, the web browser (Opera) is free. What this means is that part of the software is dematerialized (no cartridges).

Another important addition consists in the two cameras that allow you to take photos with eleven different lenses and exchange photos with other Nintendo DSi systems. The basic piece of software enables the user to manipulate content in very basic ways (stretch a photo, add moustaches...) and create new game mechanics (as in the Wario Ware game you can buy with your 5000 points). Of course the quality is so-so but I am more intrigued by how basic games could be implemented on top of that, than using the DSi to replace my camera.

Perhaps the most striking change lies in the small improvements and variety of usage allowed by the new features: web integration/access is very interesting and it turns the console into a platform to do other things than gaming. I actually used it last week in our Lift weekly meeting to access Google docs. The whole user experience is improved through very simple UI transformations. It's interesting to observe how dealing with memory issues on the DSi has changed: you have virtual "slots" where you can download applications from DSi ware and the addition of an SD card slot is also a good move to enable the use of external content.

On the minus side though, the loss of the GBA cartridge slot (then no weird add-on!) and the "yet another new power adapter" is again an issue. Moreover, it's not possible (so far) to read MP3 because they wanted to support the AAC music format; I know it allows you to alter the pitch and speed but I don't have anything in this format (yet).

Why do I blog this? as a user experience research intrigued by mobile technologies, the DSi is an highly curious piece with good things ahead. For two reasons:

1. it's not longer a device uniquely devoted to gameplay: users can be engaged in web-based interactions, play with pictures and sounds and I am pretty sure there will be improvements and tools to build sth around them.
2. it also disrupts the mobile gaming experience: playing with cameras or material from SD cards is perhaps more common after seeing games on cell-phones but it's still a good step for the video game console designers. For instance, Wario Ware micro-games with the camera are very curious (although a tad difficul depending on the light conditions). Furthermore, It seems to me that the social component will also be a hot topic using different contextes (colocated versus distant play).

The Sci-Fi angle in Love&Rockets

One of my favorite graphic novel series lately is "Love&Rockets" by Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez. More specifically, it's Jaime's Hoppers 13 which gets me all hopped up. It basically tells the story of a group of chicano girlz in their teenage years (Margarita Luisa "Maggie" Chascarrillo and Esperanza "Hopey" Leticia Glass as well as tremendous quantity of secondary characters) in the SoCal punk-rock scene.

An interesting aspect consist in the mix of science-fiction elements at the beginning of the series, especially in Maggie the Mechanic, surely on of my favorite comic-book. The SoCal world is mixed with sci-fi fantasies that some folks referred to as "window dressing"... which I disagree with. Although this futuristic twist is sort of left out of the pictures afterwards in the comic series, I found it highly intriguing.

"Maggie the Mechanic" is about Chascarillo's adventures as a world-travelling "prosolar mechanic" (working on space-rockets) with Rand Race (a famous prosolar mechanic who becomes Maggie's love interest). The plot revolveds around Maggie and Race who get a job in Rio Frio (an island in the Pacific) where the weird Dr. Beaky wants them to fix robots on the isle of Chepan, so he can say he's employing Race to his rival H.R. Costigan (more about it here if you're lazy). Let's have a look at sci-fi ingredients in there.

The first thing that struck me as fascinating was the general aesthetic: parts of a broken spaceship crashed in the jungle, a bunch of old robots that need to be fixed, dinosaur-encounters after fixing a spaceship. There is a sense of fascinating "retro-futurism" in there through a mix of "almost-space-opera" and mexican wrestlers. Written in 1984, technology is definitely not digital as it's mostly all about mechanical engineering. The idioms are curious too, starting with this "pro-solar mechanic" job title or the presence of "hover-bikes" and "mini-tram". Even the french translation that I had a glance at kept these good memes. The beautiful drawings of Hernandez, as well as the writings make the whole atmosphere very special. For example, the tone (see the panel above) is both humorous and casual while describing fantastic situations.

And the second aspect that I found important was that how science-fiction characteristics are only depicted as background elements, with a strong plot around it. They just fade in the background and are then taken for granted. You can find broken robots, odd animals such as dinosaurs or awkward spaceship but you never really see where they can bring you to. It's just part of the ambience and it's fine. The emphasis in the graphic novel is clearly on relationships, not on weird and crazy technological items. As Jaime's brother claimed:

"What's very interesting about the science fiction stuff is that the question we get asked the most, at least out loud, is "Where is the rocket? That's the real Love and Rockets." Oddly, that's the smaller segment of the audience--they're just more vocal. The real audience is the one who followed Maggie and Hopey's adventures as real girls, so to speak, and the Palomar stories. That is the real Love and Rockets reader. But for some reason we have the most outspoken ones saying, "When are you going to do the rockets? It's called Love and Rockets!" That's fine, we love doing rocket stuff, but the real Love and Rockets is what we are famous for."

Why do I blog this? saturday afternoon musing about interesting cultural items sitting on my desk. Tried to rationalize a bit why I found this piece intriguing. What I find important here, and perhaps as a take-away in my work, is that science-fiction bricks and components should not be fetishized, instead they can act as "hooks" to create a certain atmosphere. Perhaps this atmosphere allows to create an interesting imaginary realm where new ideas about more abstract maters can take place. The parallel I draw here concerns the role of sci-fi items in design and foresight: the items are not the most important part, it's the implications and what people do around/with them that counts.

2.0

A reminder that the "2.0" meme has not always referred to "user participation/sharing" (on the World Wide Web in the Web 2.0 trope or in other fields such as in "enterprise 2.0", "city 2.0" or "human 2.0"). And don't get me started on that term...

EPFL IC research day about invisible computing

[Local news] The School of Computer and Communication Sciences at EPFL (my alma mater) has a research day on June 4 about Invisible Computing: Novel Interfaces to Digital Environments organized by two ex-bosses (Pierre Dillenbourg and Jeffrey Huang). There's going to be three interesting talks about this topic:

"Programmable Reality by Ivan Poupyrev (Sony CSL, interaction Lab, Tokyo): What would happen when we will be able to computationally control physical matter?

The Myth of Touch by Chia Shen (Harvard University): Are multi-touch tabletop interfaces as intuitive as they seem in YouTube demonstrations? Do we perceive better by touching? How do users really perform on a touch surface?

Labours of Love in the Digital Home of the Future by Richard harper (Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK): What will homes of the future be? Will they offer all sorts of automation that will let the occupants be lazy and indolent? Will this make for contentment? We think that automation will have a place in the home of the future, but our concern is not with proving the individual with machines that take over their every labour: we think contentment at home will also be delivered through allowing people to invest in labours of love. These can take many forms and can be supported in various new ways."

Why do I blog this? I am especially interested in the last speaker as I follow his work about ethnography and design, as well as his interest in automation. On a different note, it's intriguing to see this faculty finally having an event about human-computer interaction.

Pieces of personal informatics left on our office door

At the Lift offices, we now print (yes, on paper) different pieces of personal informatics such as our Dopplr sheets of trips. As we are often in and out our physical offices, collocated colleagues and friends who swing by can access this a sort location-awareness board that is both accessible on the web (if connected to us through Dopplr) and on our office door. Information about our perambulations when traveling to different locations for field trips, vacations, conference visits, client meetings and stuff are then made accessible through two modalities: being connected through the interwebs AND coming physically to our offices (in addition, it also necessitates to know where our offices are located, which is not obvious).

What's next? perhaps a colleague will start adding post-it notes or drawing graffitis on the paper sheets, that would be an interesting.

Why do I blog this? Quite rough and paper-based, this example makes me think about the ways one can rethink non-computer based practices by adding rationale coming from software/web services design. The unbook is another example of such idea as it corresponds to the idea of re-injecting ideas from the digital sphere (e.g. the release early/often trope, the community-based model). As a matter of fact, translating ideas from the digital to the physical is perhaps not always interesting as it may embeds logics and underlying hypotheses that can be irrelevant (I wouldn't be that interested in translating productivity software/widget out of my laptop) but there could be curious and original design endeavor.

Of course the example above is flawed given that the Dopplr webpage is not really meant to be printed on paper and stuck on a wall; it's definitely a trick but uh it can be a good start. And it leads me to think about what would be a good asynchronous and paper-based location-aware device? shareable with friends? with a certain level of errors about my future whereabouts?

Motherboard as tapestry

Tapestry made out of old motherboards, encountered in Lisbon, Portugal. Ubicomp/urban computing to the letter.

Confusion in user research

In "Ships in the Night (Part I): Design Without Research?" (ACM interactions, May/june 2009), Steve Portigal addresses the role of user research in design. He points this interesting example of people/companies who mistook how to to carry out research, see this quote from a book he mentioned:

"[T]hey put a design in front of customers and say, “What do you think?” And the customers say, “Well I don’t know; I don’t know if I like this; it’s new; it’s scaring me; it’s too big; it’s too round; it’s too square.” That’s the kind of response you get. People who use this kind of research come back and say to the designers “People think this is too square-you’ve got to make it more round.” Most customers have a hard time articulating their design preferences. You can do far better by watching, listening, and observing."

And here is what Steve says:

"I’m a big fan of “what do you think?” questions because they let the participant respond on their own terms first. But to be effective, there’s much more to consider: What do people tell you first; how do they tell you; what reasons do they give; how can you triangulate that response against other things you’ve learned about them; and how can you help them get to a point where they’re engaged enough in this new idea to give a meaningful response? And of course, we don’t have to take these answers literally and make our design more square or more round; we can see that those responses are trailheads to follow for a deeper understanding of how this new thing is or isn’t making sense to them."

Why do I blog this? This is an interesting problem I often encountered when chatting with people/companies who express some concern/skepticism about user research. The conversation sometimes lead to a similar discussion about "we have done it, we asked people what they wanted and it did not work". There seems to be a confusion between user-centered design and asking people what they want/need.

Design as part of R&D?

[A perhaps very high level and political post... emerging from recent thoughts about how to frame my work in the R&D public policy in Europe] Can design be perceived as a component of Research & Development? Or is it mostly about "production" and commercialization of products? What are the design phases that can be part of R&D?

All these questions take an increasing importance in my work lately. Working with European companies, I often face them for a very simple reason: in countries such as France, Research and Development benefits from a series of financial incentives (such as tax credit). Since it's not possible for States to directly help companies (although sometimes they try to do so), they have to figure out how to support their national firms in compliance with what the European Commission can accept and stated as regulations. This is why offering financial devices such as tax credits on R&D expenses/investment can be a good way to help. The underlying agenda is that backing companies to fund research project may facilitate the emergence of innovation (I won't comment on this as this is another hot potato in political/economical theories).

Once you've said that you want to facilitate R&D, you have to deal with an important question: what activities can be considered as R&D? The answer generally lies in arid documents that define what constitutes R&D or not. Although different countries have different ways to formulate it, the common definition stems from something called the "Frascati manual":

"Research and experimental development (R&D) comprise creative work undertaken on a systematic basis in order to increase the stock of knowledge, including knowledge of man, culture and society, and the use of this stock of knowledge to devise new applications. The term R&D covers three activities: Basic research is experimental or theoretical work undertaken primarily to acquire new knowledge of the underlying foundation of phenomena and observable facts, without any particular application or use in view. Applied research is also original investigation undertaken in order to acquire new knowledge. It is, however, directed primarily towards a specific practical aim or objective. Experimental development is systematic work, drawing on existing knowledge gained from research and/or practical experience, which is directed to producing new materials, products or devices, to installing new processes, systems and services, or to improving substantially those already produced or installed. (...) The basic criterion for distinguishing R&D from related activities is the presence in R&D of an appreciable element of novelty and the resolution of scientific and/or technological uncertainty, i.e. when the solution to a problem is not readily apparent to someone familiar with the basic stock of common knowledge and techniques for the area concerned."

The definition is quite broad and the document gives lots of examples of what is considered as being part of R&D but my experience in France was that you had to follow certain criteria that are largely based on technology: what is the technological problem? how did you solve it? what prototypes have you put in place to solve it?, have you secured the IP through patents?, etc. In the end, this puts the emphasis on technological research, and it's hard (but possible to stretch it a little bit for creative industries (web, video game for instance). What it means is simply that if you have a bunch of existing techniques (say... open source components and IP) and you try to innovate by tying them together to create something new and original, you will have trouble showing that it is "R&D" as defined by these criteria (so you're sorta forced to create a new technology).

Therefore, it's interesting to look more closely at the document and see what they have to say about "design and R&D". See how it is summarized in this other EC document:

"The Frascati Manual includes some industrial design activities in this definition of R&D. Specifically, the Manual states that prototyping and industrial design required during R&D should be included in R&D for statistical purposes. Design for production processes and the less technical design activities are however not considered as R&D. Forms other than industrial design, such as service design, are also not included. (...) From a designer’s point of view, design includes some research (for example to identify user needs, preferences and behaviours). This means that there are overlaps between the concepts of R&D and design, but that there is no common view as to which is the overarching concept of which the other is part."

Still digesting the implications of this, I am highly interested in the recent announcement Mark reported about the EC public consultation on design as a driver of user-centred innovation. Why do I blog this? all of this means sounds boring and formal but these discussions and definitions have a great importance in innovation in Europe. Based on what is considered (or not) as R&D, some work can be funded (or not). And it has lots of implication about my daily work (when I carry out research studies for european clients OR when I work on a project about how such definition impacts web companies R&D).

Windows, shutter and privacy

Windows and their relative transparency are an architectural element that I tend to always observe when traveling. Indeed, the presence of shutter and curtain is an interesting material indicator of how people deal with privacy. Some cultures are more likely to leave things open/transparent (as in the first picture above from Utrecht in the Netherlands) than others (the second one has been taken in Zürich, Switzerland). However, the absence of shutters or curtains is not an invitation for passers-by to look at what's happening inside the house. It's a different social norm. Besides, shutter are not just meant to be used for privacy reasons, it's also a good way to regulate indoor temperature (keeping the heat in the winter or a fresh atmosphere in the summer)

During my trip to Portugal last week, a different sort of shutter attracted my attention. Called "meia persianas", it's an interesting middle-ground between the absence and the presence of shutter.

From what I was told, this sort of shutter acts as a low-cost air conditioning system (since the house's walls are very thick and retain the heat/cool) AND a good way to protect one's window by letting it open while being sure that no-one can come through the window. Furthermore, it also allows to see without being seen.

Another aspect of this portuguese architecture is also the presence of ropes to dry things above the window. But this is definitely not enabled by the semi-closure. It's just a side-use of the window that I found relevant to document.

So, what is the take-away here? simply that there are different ways architecture embeds privacy issues, practices and norms: from the transparent glass to the sealed window and the half-half solution of the portuguese "meia persianas". This last solution is perhaps the most relevant when it comes to current debates about social software/location-based services privacy issues.

What happens when you criticize a holy grail

(Picture taken from Azuma's "Tracking Requirements for Augmented Reality", 1993)

The other day, Julian wrote an insightful critique of Augmented Reality, as a one of those glorious holy grails I referred to in my Lift09 presentation. Julian argued about how he wasn't convinced by the current iterations of this endpoint that has been presented in the past already, and why the meme is coming back nowadays.

While I share similar concerns about this very technology, I was more specifically intrigued by some of the comments, which dismiss Julian's claims and re-iterate that AR is *teh next big thing*. Let's have a look at the range of opinions:

1. AR (or whatever technology) is inevitable and this is generally demonstrated by bringing a usual suspect to the table: Moore's law. Such a reference is what sociologist Bruno Latour calls an allie: a piece of theory/knowledge used to back up position. What other french sociologist (like Lucien Sfez) have shown is that the allies in the discourse about progress and technology are often recurring. In this sense, Moore's law can be described as a "usual suspect" in the discourse about the inevitability of technology. To put it shortly, it's generally very useful to bring this law out from the blue as you can prove almost everything wrt to increase and improvement. The law states that the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has increased exponentially (doubling approximately every two years). However, if you read it correctly, the law is about a "number of transistors" (then extended to cost per transistor, power consumption, cost per transistor, network capacity, disk storage and even "pixel per dollars"). What I mean here is that there is some sort of technological determinism implied by this law (not to mention its role in acting as a self-fulfilling prophecy!). See more in Ceruzzi's "Moore's Law and Technological Determinism: Reflections on the History of Technology".
2. The next argument is generally that "technology" has changed. This is a fair one and it's indeed true that the technological underpinning are different now than 15 years ago ("1995 tech and 2009 tech are a wee bit different). However, it does not necessarily mean that the use of AR proposed 15 years ago will work in today's context. It's not because we have a "mobile internet" that we will end up with a "3D Twitter where people walk around with “what I’m doing” status updates hovering above their heads, or mood labels" as one of the comment express (hmm). Perhaps I would have reacted differently if the statement was "society has changed / we're more used to used mobile technology for XXX".
3. Some people think that willing to avoid "tour-guide" AR scenarios on the basis that it's a loss of poetry in our way to live in our environment corresponds to being an old fart ("This reaction is about as annoying and as useless as people who, when confronted with ebook readers, say “but I like the smell of books and/or turning page"). This techno-geek reaction is quite funny and inadequate as it dismiss the wide range of desires and wants express by people. It's as if techno-enthusiasts could not understand the inter-individual variability and gave an opinion based on their sole interest. Doing lots of workshop about the future of mobile and locative technologies, I am often stunned by how much some people only rely on their own experiences and needs to think about the possibilities.
4. Others say that you can be critical because it's "the idea has been around for ages" but under different forms signage like trail blazing). Nevertheless a sign on a rock is different than what is currently proposed on AR devices.

This is highly intriguing as it echoes a lot with the reactions I sometimes received in my talks about failures. There are also other opinions, not expressed in the comments posed after Julian's blogpost.For instance see the the "it's already here argument" that I encounter very often when I talk about the failure of social location-based applications (such as buddy-finder and place-based annotation systems). Lots of folks seem to by confused by the adoption of a service and it's mere existence. It's not because you have Latitude on your phone that social location-based services are "already here". Furthermore, I do admit that the we're moving slightly on the adoption curve thanks to mobile internet and better devices/applications (especially on the iphone) but it's still a super-small portion of human beings on Earth.

Perhaps the best conclusion for this post is to look at Adam's comment on Julian's post about AR:

"They get defensive, they hide behind rhetoric or jargon, they appeal to authority or the aura of inevitability, they call you names - you see it right here in these comments. This is what happens when technological literacy is allowed to reside solely in the class of people who benefit from the widespread adoption of technology, and why I believe we should work to extend such literacy as far outward into the far larger pool of “(l)users” as is practicable."

That said, a bit of reflexivity here wouldn't hurt. The arguments used here:

• also emerges from allies, although they're different: sociology and science-technology-society research.
• see technological success with a different lens, ore metric: the adoption of the device by a large number of people out of the techno-enthusiats sphere, who will then appropriate it in different ways (hence creating new usage). I can fairly admit that some people can have other measure of success.