Research meeting

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Today at the lab, we had a meeting with Jean-Baptiste Haué. The project we might carry out with him is about how people maintain a representaiton of their partners' intents while collaborating. His work is very interesting, mostly ethnographically oriented (french ergonomics/HCI researcher are mostly into this area); he collaborated with EDF and Nissan plus some neat lab in the US. I am looking forward discovering more how he analysed his data (some fruitful tools were shown during the presentation). One of his publications I've put on my reading list: McCall, J.C.; Achler, O.; Trivedi, M.M.; Haue, J.-B.; Fastrez, P.; Forster, D.; Hollan, J.D.; Boer, E. (2004) "A Collaborative Approach for Human -Centered Driver Assistance Systems",, IEEE Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems

More and more creative customer

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The Economist has an appealing column about the rise of creative customers: "how and why smart companies are harnessing the creativity of their customers". Some excerpts I find informative:

How does innovation happen? The familiar story involves boffins in academic institutes and R&D labs. But lately, corporate practice has begun to challenge this old-fashioned notion. Open-source software development is already well-known. Less so is the fact that Bell, an American bicycle-helmet maker, has collected hundreds of ideas for new products from its customers, and is putting several of them into production. Or that Electronic Arts (EA), a maker of computer games, ships programming tools to its customers, posts their modifications online and works their creations into new games. And so on. Not only is the customer king: now he is market-research head, R&D chief and product-development manager, too.(...) This is not all new. (...) But the rise of online communities, together with the development of powerful and easy-to-use design tools, seems to be boosting the phenomenon, as well as bringing it to the attention of a wider audience, says Eric Von Hippel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is about to publish a book, “Democratising Innovation” (MIT Press). (...) DIY innovation [vow I like this concept] (...) Traditionally, firms have innovated by sending out market researchers to discover “unmet needs” among their customers. These researchers report back. The firm decides which ideas to develop and hands them over to project-development teams. Studies suggest that about three-quarters of such projects fail. Harnessing customer innovation requires different methods, says Mr Von Hippel. Instead of taking the temperature of a representative sample of customers, firms must identify the few special customers who innovate.

Well, marketing and user centered studies are more and more mixed all together and customers/users' needs are more and more took into account! There is really a strong momentum here...

ebrain = ebay for researcher

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eBrain is an ebay-like website that instead of seelling goods aims at trading jobless over-qualified frecn researchers. French PhD and Postdoc now get more and more trouble finding jobs in their homeland and then stay in the US/Canada or some friendlier places to do R&D business (well that is why I am in Switzerland). Anyway, some want to go back home but there are no jobs for them, either in universities (where new positions are often taken by friends) and private companies (they prefer hiring engineers).

Phd meeting

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Just unsorted thoughts and todo stuff:

  • Players without the location of their partners communicate more about their position (same information as the awareness tool) as well as about other information not conveyed by the tool (direction and strategy). Then how can we measure the effects of this additional communication?
  • In order to investigate the mode (text, graph), the position (site/onsite) and the intent (announcement/question/order), I should not work on the total number of messages but on the frequency (for instance Number of order / Total)
  • Code the map drawn by the player with symbolic names (Coupole, Couloir CM-A, Couloir CM-B...)

Kids, media and multitasking

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(via), a Kaiser Family Foundation survey focused on kids behavior towrds new media: Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year-olds. The report is here (.pdf).

A national Kaiser Family Foundation survey found children and teens are spending an increasing amount of time using “new media” like computers, the Internet and video games, without cutting back on the time they spend with “old” media like TV, print and music. Instead, because of the amount of time they spend using more than one medium at a time (for example, going online while watching TV), they’re managing to pack increasing amounts of media content into the same amount of time each day.

The study, Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year-olds, examined media use among a nationally representative sample of more than 2,000 3rd through 12th graders who completed detailed questionnaires, including nearly 700 self-selected participants who also maintained seven-day media diaries.

The part about multitasking is important:

26 percent of kids in 2004 said they "multitasked" when using any form of media, up from 16 percent five years earlier. That could mean a child downloading music over the Internet while talking on the phone, or chatting online while watching a favorite TV show.)...) ...

Nokia\'s next move: audio games

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Gamasutra summary of a GDC (Game Design Conference) topic: GDC Mobile: Novel Ways to Use Audio in Games. Some excerpts:

Audio often gets the short end of the stick during the mobile game development cycle, but researchers at Nokia are looking at ways to start from music and audio to create compelling mobile game content. Jukka Holm, of the Music Technologies Group at the Multimedia Technologies Laboratory at Finland's Nokia Research Center, presented examples of how game designers could use music as the starting point for video game content creation. (...) usic-controlled games. Now that modern handsets have the power to spare, they can analyze music and audio data. (...) The last part of Holm's presentation presented the idea of Shared Sound Worlds. Rather than treat each player as part of a single sound stage or as two distinct sound stages, components are shared between the individual handsets in a single world of sound data. In an example showing a volleyball game involving four people with individual handsets, the volume on each handset reflects the individual's player from the ball while the pitch reflects the altitude of the ball. For the player who is closest to the ball, he must "hit" the ball back up when it is within a range of pitch. (...) Holm said after the talk, and developers will soon have the tools to bring these more novel ideas into the marketplace, but it's clear that some intriguing research is going into the hitherto largely unexplored ideas for mobile audio.

3 games to check : Bug Man, CDEFGABC, AudioAsteroids. Why do I blog this? I always thought turning to audio is a good move to create innovative game design on mobile devices. The added value might be in using all the features of the device and audio is a powerful component to support various process: awareness of others, game control, game feedback...

Relationship management databases dilemna

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There is an interesting take on Zdnet about social protocols: "The XHTML Friends Network (XFN) microformat could eliminate the need for proprietary social networking services such as LinkedIn, Orkut, and Plaxo, if XFN was widely adopted among users and blog and Web presence authoring tools". It is definitely true that using all those social software tools require entering information in a wide laod of format (proprietary of course). Systems like XFN as they say might be useful (why don't they mention FOAF?) The ACM News Service offers a good summary of this discussion:

Currently, the proliferation of such social networking services (there are roughly 18 services) requires significant effort to continuously update personal profiles on each of those services. An ideal situation would entail individuals maintaining their own personal contact information on their Web site, blog, or contact management software, allowing all their friends to refer to that resource, and XFN allows for this type of nonproprietary social linking by adding relationship context to hyperlinks. The XFN profile describes possible relationship descriptors, such as brother, colleague, or even "crush." Blogrolls offer a good example of how XFN would help create loosely coupled social networks, but currently few blog authoring tools support XFN, such as by allowing people to use the rel hyperlink attribute that indicates XFN relationships. The hCard contact record standard uses XML to display contact information in a standard way, and could be used in conjunction with XFN and XFN-crawling software to automatically create directories of friends and friends' friends. This scenario would be helped by the incorporation of hCard and XFN technologies in Web presence tools--perhaps even Outlook--and blog authoring tools such as blogroll generators. Furthermore, the XFN concept could be extended to the business realm, perhaps in the form of XBN or XB2BN microformats

Personnally I juste use foaf and sometimes xfn but I would prefer to have just my adres book connected to a foaf file connected to my blog (to generate the blogroll) and other social systems. The difference might be that in most of the social soft, there must be an agreement by the two persons to create a connection; whereas in FOAF you can put whoever you want...

Peripheral awareness examples

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My advisor asked me for some references about epripheral awareness applications... here are some:

Some ambient media projects: - Water Lamp: http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~ahutchin/AmbientMedia.htm - informative art project: http://www.viktoria.se/fal/projects/infoart/ - activity wallpaper: http://www.viktoria.se/fal/projects/infoart/actiwall.html - bloomberg's wall http://www.a-matter.com/eng/projects/Bloomberg-pr072-01-r.asp

I maintain a list of interactive wall projects with some peripheral awareness examples here:

classical example on a computer: - social proxy: http://www.pliant.org/personal/Tom_Erickson/st_TOCHI.html - visual who: http://smg.media.mit.edu/people/Judith/VisualWho/VisualWho.html

it's rough I know, no time to blog lately :(

Some lab about interaction design I check on a regular basis

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Most admired companies and innovation

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Nice paper in Fortune about what it takes for admired companies to innovate. Hay Group polled executives at 160 companies on the subject of innovation and fortune gives us some results:

Most companies know innovation when they see it: Sony launched the age of portable music with its Walkman; FedEx transformed the package-delivery industry with its hub system; Procter & Gamble created fluoride toothpaste, among other household products that are now indispensable to modern life.(...) That mindset includes knowing which innovations to focus on and how much time to devote to each. (...) And it requires having the right people in the right places—both motivated employees and managers who can encourage them.(...) Companies admired for innovation are also more likely to invest in research and development. (...) nnovation leaders are also more likely to have clear procedures for determining the level of investment; more likely to be patient in allowing new ideas to develop; and more likely to allow ideas to fail without penalty. But when it comes to appreciation and remuneration, both the innovation leaders and the peer group have a way to go. (...) Innovation isn't something confined to a company's R&D unit. It's a mindset that permeates an organization. Successful innovation requires more than brilliant scientists. It takes leaders, entrepreneurial spirit, great ideas, good management, and the right organizational structures.

They might forget the right network, connections...

CatchBob usage statistics

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I did some rough statistics lately about how catchbob users' manage to communicate through the freehand drawing interface. I code all those messages using a simple coding scheme that focus on the content (position, direction, signal strength, strategy, offtask and acknowledgement), the mode (textual or graphical), the position on te map (site specific or not) and the intent (announcement, question or order). The presence of the location awareness tool have a positive effect on the total number of messages, the position/direction/strategical messages. There is also more announcement and questions messages in the condition with the awareness tool.

Annotated google map

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Engadget has a good take on how to make your own annotated multimedia Google map.

One of the great things about Google maps is it has its roots in XML. To translate for the non-web developers out there, it basically means Google maps are user hackable. This how-to will show you how to make your own annotated Google map from your own GPS data. Plus, you’ll be able to tie in images and video to create an interactive multimedia map. We’ll walk you through the steps we took to generate an annotated map of a walk we took recently through our hometown, now that it’s actually starting to get warm enough to want to walk about!

A must read for location-annotations freaks!

Haptic interface: an haptic box

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This haptic box by Simone Gumtau looks nice and minimalistic. The point is to determine semiotic link between physical sensation, emotion and verbal expression through building an haptic box where different surfaces and textures can be felt without visual modality The content of this box is amazing.

Haptic interface: vibrobod

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Neat stuff here, the Vibrobod (.pdf) is a pretty darn device (developed by Kelly Dobson, Danah Doyd, Wendy Ju, Judith Donath andHiroshi Ishi):

VibroBod allows two users to communicate feeling; hand gestures and vocalizations made by one user convey emotional content to the other user. VibroBods rest on the laps of individuals having personal conversations via phone, chat or instant messaging, to amplify moods or tones that may otherwise be lost. The design intent was to facilitate awareness, empathy, and emotional influence across mediated channels. (...) In informal critiques with fifteen students and faculty, we found that the VibroBod indeed provoked strong reactions. At first, people were hesitant to place their fingers in the holes and were alarmed by the vibrations. As users learned how their actions were affecting the VibroBods’ behavior, they became very involved and attentive in experiential discovery and in trying to evoke particular vibration patterns that seemed like accurate representations of how they were feeling.

Why do I blog this This device reminds me the gum-like interface of eXistenZ's pod, which I like.

references about sketching interfaces

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  • freehand drawing interfaces explored in 60s (light pens ) but failed, the mouse won
  • now tablets+ pda offer drawing tools: renewed interest towrds freehand drawing interfaces
  • especially used in design, architecture,a bit for military operations
  • support creative design but not so many work in coordination or field activities

    • general thoughts about sketching: V. Goel, Sketches of Thought, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1995. Robbins, E. (1994). Why Architects Draw. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Tversky, B. (2002). What do Sketches say about Thinking? AAAI Spring Symposium

    historical dimension: I. Sutherland. Sketchpad - a Graphical Man-Machine Interface [Ph.D. Dissertation]. M.I.T., 1963.

    sketching and groupware: Greenberg, S., Hayne, S., & Rada, R. (1995). Groupware for Real-Time Drawing. London: McGraw Hill.

    systems used in a design context: 1996 Gross, M. D. "The Electronic Cocktail Napkin - computer support for working with diagrams," Design Studies. 17(1), 53-70.

    1996 Gross, M.D. and E. Do. "Ambiguous Intentions: A paper-like interface for creative design", Proceedings ACM Conference on User Interface Software Technology (UIST) '96 Seattle, WA. 183-192 Landay, J. A., & Myers, B. A. (1995). "Interactive Sketching for the Early Stages of Interface Design, CHI '95 - Human Factors in Computing Systems", (pp. 43-50). Denver, Colorado: ACM Press.

    system used by the US army Forbus, K., Usher, J., and Chapman, V. (2003). Sketching for military courses of action diagrams. In York, A. P. N., editor, Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces, pages 61–68, Miami, Florida.

Relevance of using map annotations

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Forbus, K., Usher, J., and Chapman, V. (2003). Sketching for military courses of action diagrams. In York, A. P. N., editor, Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces, pages 61–68, Miami, Florida.

"A serious barrier to the digitalization of the US military is that commanders find traditional mouse/menu, CAD-style interfaces unnatural. Military commanders develop and communicate battle plans by sketching courses of action (COAs)."

"One task where sketching is used extensively is when military planners are formulating battle plans, called Courses of Action (COAs)"

"A COA consists of a sketch and a textual statement. The sketch conveys a number of crucial properties of the situation and the plan. First, it includes a depiction of what terrain features are considered important. (Sometimes COAs are drawn on acetate overlays on maps, sometimes the basic terrain description itself is simply sketched.) The results of analyzing terrain, such as possible paths for movement (mobility corridors, avenues of approach) and good locations for different kinds of operations are identified. The disposition of troops and equipment, both for friendly (Blue) forces and what is known about the enemy (Red) forces is shown by means of unit symbols, a vocabulary of graphical symbols defined as part of US military doctrine. This graphical vocabulary also includes symbols for tasks, such as destroy, defend, attack, and so on. The COA sketch indicates a commander's plan in terms of the tasks that their units are assigned to do."

"Today's speech systems have serious problems in noisy environments, especially when operators are under stress. "

Why do I blog this? I am gathering some usage of map annotation tools like the one we're using in CatchBob. It seems that military use of such systems are relevant. The system they present is for desktop computers. I am looking for ubicomp military applications (working od pda or tablet pcs).

MIT admirers in Europe plan rival

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According to the Financial Times, there should be a European Institute of Technology based on the MIT model:

European commentators frequently mention MIT as the best model of an institution that carries out world-class research and teaching in science and technology, while maintaining strong links with industry and spinning out lots of innovative small companies.

The latest - and most powerful - endorsement came last month from José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president, who called for the creation of a European Institute of Technology modelled on MIT, as part of the EU's new jobs and growth strategy.

Well... it's always the same story... trying to copy the big neighbor (Route 128 + Silicon Valley)...

Much more interesting is the proposal from the European Commission (via)

to double European research funding in the next financial perspective (2007-2013) and highlights that this significant boost at European level needs to be accompanied by increased research spending at national level. In addition, more emphasis should be put on radical innovation and risk-taking. More industry participation, especially SMEs, and streamlined and simplified administration are also strongly encouraged.