Are you ready for the Internet of Things?

Lots of things going on in the Internet of Things world lately. See for example, as pointed out by Marc the other day, Casagras, which stands for Coordination And Support Action for Global RFID-related Activities and Standardisation, has just issued its final report on RFID and the inclusive model for the Internet of Things.

On a different front, we teamed up with Council, tinker.it to set a one-day event about this important topic. It's called "Are you ready for the Internet of Things? and will happen at iMal in Brussels on December 4. This conference will celebrate the launch of Council orchestrated by Rob van Kranenburg.

The program is impressive with a great bunch of pioneers, entrepreneurs, designers, analysts, researchers and developers. The event will feature different activities ranging from keynote speech to workshops and role-playing games:

"0930 : Opening by Rob van Kranenburg and Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino

0945 0955 : Talk by Nicolas Nova

0955 - 1005 The future of storytelling through scenarios, with Gill Wildman

1005 - 1015 The future of IOT, with GS1

1015 - 1115 : Inspiration

RFID Guardian with Melanie Rieback Pachube and Connected Environments, with Usman Haque Nearness, with Timo Arnall Mime, with Lorna Goulden Noisetube, with Matthias Stevens Privacy Coach with Jaap Henk Hoepman Legal Issues in the Internet of Things, with Nicola Fabiano What I learned from the Violet experience with Rafi Haladjian: The problem with the Internet of Things, are the Things. “Or, how do you get to have open and intelligent artifacts and devices all around the place, without having to manufacture them, transporting them, distributing them (hardly very innovative). How do you creat proliferation, the Internet way, with atoms.”

1115 - 1230 Workshops (with input, questions and views by Gérald Santucci (Head of Unit, Networked Enterprise and Radio Frequency Identification, INFSO D4)

WS 1: Accelerating the roadmap to an Internet of Things @ Home, Philips Design WS 2: IoT in education: creating an MBA WS 3: Interactive Role Playing workshop, Summ()n WS 4: Homesense, Tinker.it WS 5: HC Systems and Self-care, IDC Limerick WS 6: Tools for mediation in IOT 1230 - 1400 Lunch

1400 - 1430 Inspiration

Gaming, with Karim Amrani Urban Eyes, with Marcus Kirsch Awareness Technology, with Alan Munro TownToolKit, with Christian Nold A distributed physical network of humans through the city unveilling invisible and always mobile connections, with Natacha Roussel Social Implications of IoT, with Jim Kosem 1430 - 1630 Workshops continuation

1630 - 1730 Workshop leaders present the results. Short Q & A. 1730 - 1930 Dinner

2000-2200 Public evening program. Opening by Yves Bernard. With lectures, keynotes, interviews, short presentations of workshop results by workshopleaders. Speakers include Liam Bannon, Karim Amrani, Karmen Franinovic, Slava Kozlov on "New mindsets and personal/psychological skills we need to develop for the IoT", Jo Caudron..."

Feel free to register here.

Paul Valéry on "the conquest of ubiquity"

(The famous "Gaz à tous les étages" sign)

Spent some time re-reading this fantastic piece by Paul Valéry called La conquête de l'Ubiquité ("The Conquest of Ubiquity"). Written in 1928, this short text has been quoted by Walter Benjamin in The Work of Art In the Mechanical Age of Reproduction.

Three excerpts that struck me as fascinating (considering that it has been written in 1928):

"At first, no doubt, only the reproduction and transmission of works of art will be affected. It will be possible to send anywhere or to re-create anywhere a system of sensations, or more precisely a system of stimuli, provoked by some object or event in any given place. Works of art will acquire a kind of ubiquity. We shall only have to summon them and there they will be…They will not merely exist in themselves but will exist wherever someone with a certain apparatus happens to be. (...) Just as water, gas and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign. (...) Just as we are accustomed, if not enslaved, to the various forms of energy that pour into our homes, we shall find it perfectly natural to receive the ultrarapid variations or oscillations that our sense organs gather in and integrate to form all we know. I do not know whether a philosopher has ever dreamed of a company engaged in the home delivery of Sensory Reality""

Why do I blog this? in this fascinating short essay, Valéry forecasted in a very acute way the evolution of art and media delivery. Furthermore, he addressed the notion of dematerialized contents and linked it to the "network" meme: although he does not mention this term, the comparison with utilities (gas, electricity and water) is strikingly interesting. Besides, the last bit about "a company engaged in the home delivery of Sensory Reality" seems to be a premonitory basis for the discourse about Virtual Reality in the 1990s and Augmented Reality nowadays.

Infrastructure issues for Vélib

The NYT has an interesting article about the infrastructure problem with regards to the Velib in Paris. Some excerpts I found relevant below (I've taken the picture above once in Paris, a nice Velib utterly destroyed in a cardboard box):

"With 80 percent of the initial 20,600 bicycles stolen or damaged, the program’s organizers have had to hire several hundred people just to fix them. And along with the dent in the city-subsidized budget has been a blow to the Parisian psyche. (...) “We miscalculated the damage and the theft,” said Albert Asséraf, director of strategy, research and marketing at JCDecaux, the outdoor-advertising company that is a major financer and organizer of the project. “But we had no reference point in the world for this kind of initiative.” (...) At least 8,000 bikes have been stolen and 8,000 damaged so badly that they had to be replaced — nearly 80 percent of the initial stock (...) JCDecaux must repair some 1,500 bicycles a day. The company maintains 10 repair shops and a workshop on a boat that moves up and down the Seine. (...) “For a regular user like me, it generates a lot of frustration,” she said. “It’s a reflection of the violence of our society and it’s outrageous: the Vélib’ is a public good but there is no civic feeling related to it."

Why do I blog this? such an interesting example of how a technical objects rely on its socio-economical milieu to evolve. The figures here are tough but that illustrates the difficult life of innovations. I wonder about other cities where JC Decaux implemented this scheme.

"you are here"

One of the most curious "you are here" sign, which simply that "you are here", next to the map. Seen at the Telecom Conference in Geneva few weeks ago.

Ben Cerveny at Urban Labs

My (messy) notes from Ben Cerveny's talk at Urban Labs which was organized by Citilab (Cornella, near Barcelona)

The talk was entitled "The city as a platform: computational systems for urban society" and the basic take-away was the proposition to see the city as an Operating System.

Ben is interested in how to make urban phenomena legible and feed them back into people's experience. Which is why he works with Stamen that he describes as a data viz agency. In other words, representations that make visible these invisible complexities to give people a tool to visualize them.

He recently started Vurb (a pun on "verb" and "urban") as a follow-up to his previous venture, the "Playground Foundation" in Amsterdam. In this previous project, he was interested in how to build an infrastructure in a city to allow a new sort of play... that take advantage of behavior patterns, computational resources, create new meaning of play and may have a transformational effect... turned today into VURB... which is interested in going beyond play.

He reminded us that the city is already shaped by information as shown by a picture of the first newspaper in amsterdam "amsterdamsche courant". BUT what is new: citizens are now information makers and the city is an aggregation of an enormous quantity of data (from plumbing infrastructures to digital photographies and GPS) that reflects the individual expressions of all the residents... and can be perceived now in its entirety.

What does this produce? while 20th century cities were consumables, 21th century cities will be collaboratively produced, no longer to-down but completely emergent... a bit like this evocative picture of the "New Babylon" by Constant Nieuwenhuys:

All of this lead to this idea of an operating systems for the built environment The various layers of the urban stack are differentially accessible to citizen input:

• sensor networks: not so much
• dynamic infrastructural services
• collaborative modeling: everybody is expressing their aspiration for the city, this is captured in a software model that represents a parallel state: the "cloud city", a set of information that is dynamic, active and aggregated... almost the spirit of the city... the idea that all of the human information and the history of the city lives in a dataset that can be used in different circumstances

We can then have a real-time model of urban scale space: it reflects a politics of a situation, a model does not reflect the entire reality. What type of model do we want to represent the city? Ben claims that we don't want one, we want a thousands! like web-services... there are going ways to bring models on space. The other side of the model is who is in the model, who takes advantage of the model: social networks are the inhabitants, which leads to massively multi-participant models... like an offline game.

Ben drew a parallel between urban planning and game design... the "secret school of learning interaction design" (as it teaches to design for users who do not read manuals, teaches how to make people learn new things progressively... or WoW status aggregation is twitter avant la lettre)

Another thing that I found interesting in his talk was this comment about Barcelona:

"I'm interested in looking at barcelona on the Google maps... look at how the barrio gotico is messy and then you see the grid... look at the boundaries... they look as if you could move a slider to accelerate the transition between the messy old city and the grid"

City center

I've always been curious about the location where people (citizens or visitors) place the center of a city. You can define it as an area but also at specific points.

You have different ways to explore this question:

• Asking people what is the point they would refer to as the center of a city. This kind of enquiry is common in environmental psychology and may help to uncover how individuals have specific representations (psychologists would call them mental models). Depending on the sampling (visitors/tourists, job type...) the answer may be different: should it be the CBD? the geometrical center? Should it be the Schelling Point?
• Observing how city centers are represented in technological artifacts such as maps or guidebooks. For example, looking for cities in digital mapping systems such as Google Maps and observe where they put the red dots that correspond to the city. In this case, it will reflects a specific norm chosen by the Googleplex engineers. I'd be curious to know the underlying rationale behind this positioning.
• ...

Why do I blog this? thinking about urban notions and their representations. I find intriguing to define what is a city center and how human beings think about this concept.

A synchronicity: Design Fictions for Asynchronous Urban Computing

New dispatch: "A synchronicity: Design Fictions for Asynchronous Urban Computing" by Julian Bleecker and myself has just been released. It's a discussion between the two us from the Situated Technologies Pamphlets series, published by the Architectural League. This series aims at exploring the implications of ubiquitous computing for architecture and urbanism: How are our experience of the city and the choices we make in it affected by mobile communications, pervasive media, ambient informatics and other “situated” technologies? How will the ability to design increasingly responsive environments alter the way architects conceive of space? What do architects need to know about urban computing and what do technologists need to know about cities?

Introduced by the editor as:

"In the last five years, the urban computing field has featured an impressive emphasis on the so-called “real-time, database-enabled city” with its synchronized Internet of Things. In Situated Technologies Pamphlets 5, Julian Bleecker and Nicolas Nova argue to invert this common perspective and speculate on the existence of an “asynchronous city.” Through a discussion of objects that blog, they forecast situated technologies based on weak signals that show the importance of time on human practices. They imagine the emergence of truly social technologies that through thoughtful provocation can invert and disrupt common perspective."

We'd like to thank Omar Khan, Trebor Scholz and Mark Shepard for this great opportunity!

Lift @ Citilab in Barcelona

Last saturday at Citilab in Cornella, near Barcelona, Fabien and myself organized a "lift @ home" event. A one-day long workshop, this event was called "Hands on Barcelona's Informational Membrane. It was part of a series of seminar about the new practices as well as the visions and issues around the hybridization of the digital and the physical in cities. We focused on the informational membrane hovering over Barcelona and try to sketch near-future scenarios with datasets and infrastructures existing in city. The goal was to understand a contemporary urban software infrastructures and explore the implications (trade-offs, opportunities and concerns) in the data they generate. The effort was put on Barcelona’s specific issues (e.g. mobility, infrastructure, tourism, gentrification, ecology …) and their related datasets.

We had a group of 30 participants coming from very diverse backgrounds: designers, engineers, people from the city of Barcelona, ethnographers, architects, etc. both from the area and abroad. We started from a presentation&discussion about the general problems of Barcelona and the available data. Then small groups have been formed to work on how to use the existing infrastructures and data to create potential solutions in terms of services. The assignments led people to go beyond traditional techno-determinism to envision social and organizational framing.

We're working on a short write-up document for this workshop. Something that would summarize the findings and pave the way for upcoming seminars.

Digital traces and tourism

Yesterday in Sierre, I gave a talk about the use and implications of digital traces for tourism services. Slides are on Slideshare. [slideshare id=2312286&doc=etourismforum2009nova-091021135319-phpapp02]

The point of the talk was the following: we're seeing the advent of location-based services and augmented reality applications. But those are only the "interface" aspect of a broader phenomena: the aggregation and use of digital data to create new sorts of services. Indeed digital objects used by people such as mobile phones and cameras leave a large amount of traces: the phone can be geolocated through cell-phone antennas or GPS and digital cameras take pictures that people can upload on web sharing platforms such as Flickr. All of this enable new application that allow to count tourists or provide them with new sorts of services. Based on existing experiments, the presentation addressed how the tourism industry can benefit from these digital traces to obtain new representations of tourists activities and to build up new services based on them.

Thanks Roland Schegg for the invitation.

Ubiquitous obama representations

Following Julian, different forms of Obama representations that I refer to as "Obamania" in my Flickr stream. The "Obama" pizza in Paris:

Street graffiti in Saint Etienne and Geneva:

An ad poster in Paris:

Why do I blog this? these iconic representations are quite interesting in terms of diversity and the meaning it certainly evokes to people. A sort of meme that finds it way onto the urban fabric. Nothing really new here but it's always curious to spot this.

GPS failed pattern: wrong door

I think it would be good to start a catalogue of weird "failed GPS paths" patterns. The one above could be called "right way, wrong door". The other day I Geneva, while going to a seminar, my iPhone GPS gave me this curious set of information that I liked a lot. I was looking for a building I've never been into and used the GPS device to help me.

The "path solution" it gave me is the one above, strip naked in terms of urban elements (for some reasons, it's only a grid as if I was playing "Space harrier"). I simply had to go back on the avenue and find the entrance on the other side of the building. It left me wondering about the way navigation database are aware of building entrance, surely a parameter that add a layer of complexity.

Upcoming speeches and workshops

Some events where I'll be speaking at or be involved in as an organizer. Perhaps an opportunity to meet up some readers, I generally do not publicize this but some of you asked me to keep them posted.

Next wednesday (October 21st), I'll be the keynote speaker at the Swiss E-Tourism Forum in Sierre (Switzerland). My talk will be entitled "the near future of tourism services based on digital traces" (yes, I've been asked to give the talk in English, this is Switzerland) and this is the outline:

"Digital objects used by tourists such as mobile phones and cameras leaves a large amount of traces. The phone can indeed be geolocated through cell-phone antennas or GPS and digital cameras take pictures that people can upload on web sharing platforms such as Flickr. All of this enables new application that allow counting tourists or providing them with new sorts of services. Based on existing experiments, the presentation will describe how the tourism industry can benefit from these digital traces to obtain new representations of tourists activities and to build up new services based on them."

Then I'll go to Barcelona and join Fabien for the Lift @ Citilab workshop called "Hands on Barcelona's Informational Membrane" where a great bunch of people will tackle the increasing presence of the informational membrane hovering over Barcelona, exploring the implications (trade-offs, opportunities and concerns) and understanding how it affects the way citizens feel and live their city.

Three weeks ahead, on November 9th, I will organize a lift @ lift offices seminar (quite a name uh) at our offices about the "new digital landscape". We still have room for people and the event will be in french.

On November 26-27th, I’ll be in Paris (along with Julian, Adam, Jean-Louis, Frédéric and Daniel) for the the new industrial world forum 2009 at the Pompidou museum. I've been parachuted in a session about "new industrial objects", which sounds pretty good. The point of my speech would be to analyze a bunch of networked objects and highlight what how the Internet of Things features certain preconceptions about users. It's a research project I've been working over the summer.

Back to Paris on December 2nd for a workshop at Bell-Labs/Alcatel-Lucent.

December 4th will be devoted to the big workshop day we (lift) co-organize with Council (Rob van Kranenburg) and tinker.it. I'll be posting more information about this later on.

Paris again in January 2010 for a lecture about locative media at the EHESS for a seminar about transdiciplinarity organized by Antonio Casilli.

And finally (phew), I'll be at Interaction10 in Savannah to give a talk called "From Observing Failures to Provoking Them".

The evolution of the "amateur" figure

Raw notes from a presentation by André Gunthert at the Geneva University of Art and Design the other say:

Amateur photography appeared around 1880, after the transition between silver to silver-chloride... which led to photojournalism and scientific photography such as the work of Albert Londe. Curiously, Londe always referred to his work as an "amateur", although he was the medical photographer at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris (and perhaps one of the most famous chronophotographer with Étienne-Jules Marey. Gunthert's claim is that the reason why a photo expert such as Londe referred to him as an amateur was because he lived in a transitional time between the Daguerreotype and the new popular activity of photography. Claiming to be an amateur was a peculiar stance, an avant-garde choice that aimed at showing others that "he was on the other side, a promoter of the new technique".

The end of the 19th century saw the emergence of the new figure of the amateur, through Kodak's release of their camera ("You press the button, we do the rest"). To be an amateur at the time would be described today as being a "user" and it's because of the arrival of this stance that amateurs has been opposed to professionals.

However, it's only around 2005-2005 that amateurs became a threat to professionals. Gunthert traces this back to the London subway bombings. This event in July of 2005 can be seen as a turning point in global news coverage; especially because the news (BBC) asked survivors/witness to send them images (taken with cameraphones)... simply because they could not go there.

In parallel, Gunthert describes how the Web started to build its own mythology around the amateur ("We the Media" by Dan Gilmor, citizen journalism, the web2.0 slogan by Tim O'Reilly, etc.)... and eventually services such as YouTube in 2005 were explicitly built (and valued) for their capability to be based on "user-generated content".

To him, the best example of this trend is Be Kind Rewind, a sort of testimony to the notion of Amateur culture. Gunthert describes this movie as the nicest way to depict user-generated content because it shows HOW IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE. A sort of YouTube were viewers will act as participant and create their own videos. This kind of expectations of course lead to laws and measures taken by governments in certain countries to help the the cultural industry... because lots of people believed in this myth.

But this vision did not materialize. He described them as self-fulfilling prophecies proposed by web gurus and showed that most of the content on platforms such as YouTube are not creations. There is indeed a great shift from television to platforms like YouTube but it's mostly an archive of past productions (with tons of copyright infringements). It's not only an archive but there are also ads and new forms of communication proposed by companies (see the Evian roller babies campaign).

He concluded by stating that most of the interest by researchers/media has been drawn so far to the production part of usage and that he is more interested in how people use these platforms. YouTube is now the second the web search engine and people access it to look for answers (e.g. how to fold a tent). To Gunthert, we are in 2009 in a situation close to the one people in the 20th century encountered with sound recording devices. At the time, inventors and industrial companies has high expectations about these machines, they were supposed to help produce content and store memories of people. But it did not happen and it was mostly employed to listen to music. Nevertheless this does not mean that people were passive and there are lots of interesting and active practices with regards to sound recording devices.

Why do I blog this? my notes here are a bit messy and incomplete. I tried to translate this roughly into English but I was quite interested by his approach. Of course, some other things could be added about the DIY culture and perhaps my transcription is a bit shaky but I found it intriguing to deconstruct the notion of amateurs and usage.

Science consultants in sci-fi shows

ON Sci-Fi wire, there is this curious description of how science consultants have been called to work in Star Trek/Battlestar Galactica:

"former Star Trek writer and creator of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica Ron Moore revealed the secret formula to writing for Trek. He described how the writers would just insert "tech" into the scripts whenever they needed to resolve a story or plot line, then they'd have consultants fill in the appropriate words (aka technobabble) later.

"It became the solution to so many plot lines and so many stories," Moore said. "It was so mechanical that we had science consultants who would just come up with the words for us and we'd just write 'tech' in the script

La Forge: "Capain, the tech is overteching."

Picard: "Well, route the auxiliary tech to the tech, Mr. La Forge."

La Forge: "No, Captain. Captain, I've tried to tech the tech, and it won't work."

Picard: "Well, then we're doomed.""

Why do I blog this? Reference for later. This is a model for creating design fictions but I wonder about how to go beyond this. Using this kind of process may lead to a certain vision of the future that is very normative. Charles Stross describes on his blog how he works and it's more interesting to me:

"I use a somewhat more complex process to develop SF. I start by trying to draw a cognitive map of a culture, and then establish a handful of characters who are products of (and producers of) that culture. The culture in question differs from our own: there will be knowledge or techniques or tools that we don't have, and these have social effects and the social effects have second order effects — much as integrated circuits are useful and allow the mobile phone industry to exist and to add cheap camera chips to phones: and cheap camera chips in phones lead to happy slapping or sexting and other forms of behaviour that, thirty years ago, would have sounded science fictional. And then I have to work with characters who arise naturally from this culture and take this stuff for granted, and try and think myself inside their heads. Then I start looking for a source of conflict, and work out what cognitive or technological tools my protagonists will likely turn to to deal with it. (...) The biggest weakness of the entire genre is this: the protagonists don't tell us anything interesting about the human condition under science fictional circumstances. The scriptwriters and producers have thrown away the key tool that makes SF interesting and useful in the first place, by relegating "tech" to a token afterthought rather than an integral part of plot and characterization."

Information convergence

A korean letter box, a great example of a how a certain object acts as a focal point for information flows: letters go in the box and announcements/ads are stuck on the object itself.

Design research typology

In Research Through Design and Transdisciplinarity, Alain Findeli and his colleagues (Swiss Design Network conference 2008) interestingly propose a tentative framework for Design Research.

Their typology of design research practices goes like this:

• "Research for design is highly relevant for design practice, since its purpose is to make sure that the various parameters on which the output of the design process depends (technological, ergonomic, economic, aesthetic, psychological, etc.) are adequately handled, i. e. that the design project is properly and responsibly informed.
• Research about design is normally performed by various disciplines, other than design, according to scientific standards. (...) The problem we encounter with this kind of research is its relative lack of relevance for design. By “design” is here meant design practice, design education or design research. Why is that so? Well, because the research is carried out about design (i.e. about its objects, its processes, its actors and stakeholders, its meaning and significance for society, business, culture, etc.) by scientists (like anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, cognitive psychologists, management scientists, semioticists and many others) whose main goal is to contribute to the advancement of their own discipline, not particularly of design.
• Research through Design: a kind of re- search about design [more] relevant for design, or as a kind of research for design that produces original knowledge with as rigorous [and demanding] standards as research about design. (...) we call this approach project-grounded research "

Why do I blog this? framing my course about field research for design leads me to this sort of theoretical categories.

Teaching in Geneva

This fall, I will be teaching at the Geneva University of Art and Design in the Media Design Masters program. Hence, a "teaching" category on this blog. Today was the introductory course about methodology, which I chose to illustrate through the example of game design and user research (slides are here but it's a french-only version, sorry I'll do the others in English though).

My 8*4-hours course will be about field research for interaction designers. After an introductory course about the field research rationale (research questions, theoretical frameworks, sampling issues, etc.) each course will cover a different technique (participant observation, visual ethnography, interview, probes, "user of the future", evaluation). For each session, students would have to apply a certain technique to a design problem of theirs, related to the design studio by Etienne and Douglas-Edric.

Currently pondering about which platform to support the course (weblog, CMS, etc.). Any recommendations about it? I personally want to find a basic solution to spread slides/articles and something which enable conversations with students. The current solution I have in mind may be a wordpress blog but I am wondering about other approaches.

Content-Reader evolution

Flea market findings again. Saturday way rainy but i found my way to the market and stumbled across these various elements.

A quite enjoyable picture that roughly depicts a part of the musical devices evolution. This topic emerged from a discussion with Laurence, one of the design student I supervise for a masters thesis. As opposed to the tape and CD cases - where the device's shape was constrained by the shape of the tapes and CD - the MP3 player required some thinking about its overall shape.

The content is reduced to something smaller than the CD and the tape (I wouldn't go as far as stating that it's immaterial because the MP3s files are located on some sort of electronic component IN the device). However, it raise the issue of the general shape regardless of the content.

Nintendo "technical lineage"

Following the evolution of technical objects over time generally reveals interesting matter. Philosophers such as Gilbert Simondon theorized a bit this issue and proposed that technical evolution shows phases of continuous progress (based on adaptation) alternating with other phases that he called "saturation" during which major improvement emerge as a reconfiguration of the structure (invention).

Applying this to recent artifacts such as game console is quite interesting (yes game console are recent compared to the kind of technical objects philosophers take as examples). The Nintendo DS as a resurgence of the "game and watch" industrial design is a curious instance of such principles. The dual screen, as well as the clam-shell platform (plus the A and B buttons) can be seen as the major characteristics of this resurgence. However, the D-pad is clearly an invention that appeared after the game and watch interface. There would - of course - be a lot more to analyze here.

Why do I blog this? digging more and more into the philosophy of technical objects in conjunction with frequent visits to the flea market leads to fruitful thinking/discussions about design.

Earth Sandwich

Making an "Earth sandwich" is a curious practice found in Generation A by Douglas Coupland which was originally proposed by Ze Frank:

"I’d taken a slice of boring white bread from its bakery bag and had slapped it onto a small patch of yellow sandy dirt. I was standing up to photograph the slice of bread using my mobile phone. Why would you have been doing this? I hear you wonder. Excellent question. I was making an “Earth sandwich.” What is an Earth sandwich? Fair enough. It’s when you use online maps to locate the exact opposite place on the planet from you, and then hook up with someone close to that place. Then, after you mathematically figure out exact opposite GPS coordinates to within a thumbnail’s radius, you put a slice of bread on that spot, then connect via cellphone and simultaneously snap photos: two slices of bread with a planet between them. It’s an Internet thing. You make the sandwich, you post it, and maybe someone somewhere will see it, and once they’ve seen it, you’ve created art. Bingo.

Why do I blog this? this sort of ludic practice automatically found its way to my list of locative-technologies-repurposed-for-other-aims. Perhaps some sort of new and extreme ritual from the 21st Century (definitely the kind of ideas that Coupland document/describe/invent). Let's wait for the iPhone app, I am pretty sure someone out there would be willing to develop it.

Such idea sounds weird but I am convinced there would be some curious possibilities in interaction design, a sort of long-distance location-awareness if you want. Much of the focus in human-computer interaction research and product development revolves around the notion that location-awareness makes sense at the urban level (or national). The granularity is generally low, A gets a message that B is nearby (neighborhood/in town) and acts accordingly.

However, the Earth sandwich practice/meme is interesting from the long-distance viewpoint. Are there situations (casual or professional) where it's pertinent to know where others are? Should the granularity be different than current mobile social software? I guess so although I don't really know a precise use case. Maybe diaspora and families spread across the globe may be curious about it.