[Space and Place] A sprawl dictionnary: sprawl dark semantic

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Dolores Hayden from Yale School of Architecture (and her students) coined lots of interesting terms to name suburban features (quotes taken here):

. "The town's zoning code was so convoluted nobody could read it," she recalled. "After a while I got to see that a lot of it was designed to frustrate discussion rather than enable it." At the same time, she noticed that her graduate students at Yale, who came from different disciplines, including American studies, architecture, planning and anthropology, had difficulty describing the everyday American landscape without resorting to impersonal jargon. "I began to see that one of the most useful things to do might be to develop a common language," she said. (...) "There's a toad!" she exclaimed, referring not to a warty amphibian but to a defunct Toys "R" Us (Toad: Temporary, Obsolete, Abandoned or Derelict site). (...) Her personal favorite is boomburb, a word that "gives the feeling of a place that's growing double-digits when you say it," she said.

There are also: lulu (Locally Unwanted Land Use), the banana (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near) and nope (Not on Planet Earth).

[Research] HCI/CSCW and theories

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Reading a review of Dourish's 'Where The Action Is" by M. Chalmers, I stumbled across this quote: "In our field, theory is like the public library. If asked, most of us would say that we are glad that it is around - but fea of us actually go there". It is actually what I feel, not because I do better than the other! It's rather that it's difficult to find the research rationale in lots of HCI/CSCW papers. The emphasis is often put on designing a new 'thing', sometimes on creating a new technique or method (data analysis for instance) or implementing a new technology (vow wimax! what could we do with it?) and rarely on evaluating technologies. The epistomological concerns seems to be often left out, as if theoretical issues were just bothering issues. I feel concern by this because my background is cognitive psychology (with a strong experiment spin). The confrontation of this experimental way of working with other really compelling methods (like much more qualitative ones: ethnography, anthropology, ...) is definitely interesting. Now that I learnt how to use those other methods (in various research projects like video games or locative media testing/design), I am happy to have opened my scope to other things that 'experiments'. It was also an opportunity to understand when applying which kind of method. Maybe that's why I now feel more concerned by epistemological issues.

[Space and Place] A map larger than the territory

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A Map Larger Than the Territory could be a way to draw your elephant paths :) Here is the path we took in Paris last week-end

"A Map Larger Than the Territory" is a Web application that enables participants to represent their paths across the city using images, texts and sounds. Territory here is not a piece of land enclosed within borders but an interlocking network of lines or ways through. The map materialises and connects individual trajectories.

How does it work? Choose a city and a language. The map shows other people's paths in that city. A button at the right sends you to a blind map where you can add an itinerary of your own. To do so, you must first give it a name, a date and a color. Use the tools provided to locate places on the map and define points on your path. Each time you mark a location, a dialog box opens up for you to identify and describe it. When you have finished marking up your path, you can view the itinerary you have made.

Scenario: Karen O'Rourke Programming: Cesar Restrepo

[Space and Place] New houses/flat

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The french magazine Le Courrier International has an interesting hors-série on the topic of new ways to live in houses/flat. It deals with wooden skyscrapers, mini-house, ecotech, post-communists houses, renewed castle, containers... The container thing and the japanese small houses are definitely my favorites. This concept of a container city in London seems great:

Containers are an extremely flexible method of construction, being both modular in shape, extremely strong structurally and readily available.

Container Cities offer an alternative solution to traditional space provision. They are ideal for office and workspace, live-work and key-worker housing.

[Research] Constant Information Flow through Bluetooth on your Mobile Device

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Jamie Lawrence works on very promising topic:

What if every Bluetooth device was constantly on, constantly broadcasting "information" and constantly receiving it? What information would people share, how will users manage this information flow, how will they experience it, what are the technical problems and opportunities, what are the social problems this technology might solve and what are the social issues it will create? Using the temporal and spatial patterns prevalent in urban society, this local broadcasting may be an effective, decentralised, alternative to location tagging (as in Urban Tapestries). Or, it might not.

[TheWorld] EU contaminated ministers

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The wwf.org revealed that:

ministers from 13 European Union countries are contaminated with dozens of industrial chemicals according to results of blood tests released today. Fourteen Environment and Health Ministers tested by WWF in June 2004 have a total of 55 industrial chemicals in their blood.

The chemicals found in the Ministers include those used in fire-resistant sofas, non-stick pans, grease proof-pizza boxes, flexible PVC, fragrances and pesticides. Some were banned decades ago though many are still in use today.

Karl Wagner, Director of WWF’s DetoX Campaign. "It is hard to believe that legislators have been willing to allow this uncontrolled experiment to continue for so many years."

You can download the ministers blood test pictures (well...) as well as different factsheets.

[MyResearch] Epistemologie

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Epistémologie: étude de la démarche générale de la science et des conditions de production des faits scientifiques. Le terme recouvre une série de disciplines, comme la philosophie des sciences, l'histoire, la sociologie et la psychologie de la connaissance scientifique. On distingue une épistémologie normative (Popper), qui veut déterminer les critères définissant de ce que doit être une science, et une épistémologie descriptive, qui a pour vocation de décrire les sciences telles qu'elles s'élaborent réellement.

[MyResearch] Ph.D chitchat with P. Salembier

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Last friday, I met Pascal Salembier to have a brief chitchat about my phd project. I am pretty used to ask for some feedback from various persons (like Stefano about coordination theories or Thomas about psychology/methods/games). This time, my interest was put on epistemological concerns. Since we came up with this game idea to study how locative media modifies collaboration, I add few epistemological problems that I wanted to discuss: - cognitive ergonomics methodology - the use of game in HCI/CSCW/psychology - the outcome of the project: empirical knowledge versus applied guidelines: i would like to have both. - data analysis: I can use a program like actogram. And do I really need the video? maybe not because of the path I want to take. - the link between: paradigm/theoretical framework/research 'object'/methodologies

1. Cognitive ergonomics methodology

The canonical approach is: - first, ethnological method used to find properties, mechanisms implied in ecological situations. - second, when patterns are found, it's more a matter of having more precise questions, with an experimentl setting, with variables (like different type of interfaces, various display...) to get some insights and test them.

Conducting experiments without the first part could be detrimental, it's indeed possible that the test shows nothing...

Another way is like in the 'lutin' project: having an environment in which you can test stuff, do comparisons, see if things emerge... without any hardcore hypotheses. The point is not to have too much constraints, just few 'heuristical' hypotheses.

Outcome for my project: I am rather in the second approach in which I can use the game as a testbed to see how different groups use the tool and see if some patterns emerges. I still need few heuristics to analyse the wide load of data (soft hypotheses).

2. Use of games in HCI/CSCW

My concerns was: it seems fruitful to use games to study various phenomena in HCI (because participants are more motivated...) but is it OK epistemologically? The problem is that the task itself is not real, it is rather artificial (non ecological?).

It seems that it is not much of a problem since: - a game, especially a mobile computing one, involves participants in a real context (the physical world) with an ecological validity. A game in public space indeed create a certain kind of complexity.s - the domaine (task domain) is easier for both the participants and the experimenters (compared to air traffic control for instance). Besides, it is better to make students (my current would-be participants) doing a game than a really complex task they will never carry out. - participants would have a better implication than in a complex task

Ask Laurence Nigay, she seemed to have reviewed projects that used games in HCI.

Outcome for my project: it seems OK to use a mobile game.

3. Misc

The thesis needs an epistemological approach with: - a theoretical framework, there are various levels: from the more global one (distributed cognition, activity theory...) to much more precise thing (like the grounding theory from clark...). - well defined theoretical objects: what do I study? - well defined methods: how can I study these objects? - articulation between the objects and the methods: I need descriptive categories that don't come out from the blue. There must be a connection between them and the framework.

I should refine the research question so that I can set soft hypotheses to analyse the data and have a proper theoretical framework. A list of constraints would be great to find the task I want to use (like: I want collaboration, a task more complex than just a spatial one...)

[LocativeMedia] A location based fishing game

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Swordfish:

Swordfish™ is North America's first location-based fishing game designed for Java enabled mobile phones that are GPS equipped.  The game system is comprised of three main components:  the client software that resides on the phone, KnowledgeWhere's Location Application Platform (LAP), and the mobile providers' location-based system (LBS). Swordfish client software provides the gaming interface to the end-user.  It is written in J2ME but can easily be converted to BREW.