Skype-enabled WiFi phone

At last: news3yen reports on this interesting new gizmo: a Skype-enabled WiFi phone by Accton Technology (from Taiwan)

The new unit enables a talk time of up to four hours with a stand-by-time of up to 20 hours and is likely to be initially priced at over US$150 in the retail market, according to sources. Accton also plans to introduce dual-mode mobile phones that support both GSM and Wi-Fi technology in early 2006.

I am just wondering about how they deal with so many different WiFi network in terms of accessibility + security...

Shoot me if you can: korean location-based game

Via cscout, this cool location-based game from Korea: Shoot Me If You Can (Taeyoon Choi):

Shoot me if you can is an urban game inspired by first person shooting online video game. Replace gun with fun, and shoot the opponent team with a cellular phone equipped with a digital camera. Participants; shooters are given team color and phone number printed on the sticker. Shooters are ought to take a picture of the opponent team. If successful, she/he sends the picture to the opponent team member, via multimedia SMS system. Different rules exist for variations in game. Tactics is important part as well as team work and understanding of the urban environment. This work is a commentary on abundance of digital image in our culture, desire to photograph and violence of surveillance camera. Active public participation in encouraged through website and the game.

Why do I blog this? it sounds like an interesting example of urban computing game!

Girl made, girl approved

An interesting article in Business Week about a design company called 3iYing, new design and marketing firm which does girl-market insights (founded by Heidi Dangelmaier).

Dangelmaier's young team has come up with radical ideas on how to design and sell everything from condoms and lingerie to food. They call these ideas "Girl Made, Girl Approved." The teens started by leafing through dozens of girl magazines and analyzing the advertisements. In the process, they found that most brands are out of touch with the 21st-century girl and her desires. (...) Once the girls identify products they believe are either ill-designed or poorly marketed, they survey their worldwide network of friends via e-mail, or in Internet communities like MySpace.com. They come up with a list of what girls really want and what appeals to them about the product. Then the team redesigns the product and comes up with a marketing campaign that resonates with their age group.

Why do I blog this? what at I think is interesting here is the way it might impact the design of new products; It's connected with the 'co-creation' trend we have today: the integration of conversation with customers into company's business.

Special issue of Journal of CSCW about “Settings for Collaboration: The Role of Place”

A relevant call for paper:

Computer-Supported Cooperative Work Journal Special Issue “Settings for Collaboration: The Role of Place”

Co-edited by Luigina Ciolfi, Geraldine Fitzpatrick and Liam Bannon

Background Existing Recent work in HCI, CSCW and –more recently- interaction design has begun to critically examine the concept of place, its meaning and the implications for design. Early work by Erickson (1993) and Harrison and Dourish (1996) suggested that place, is a more appropriate concept rather than space is the notion that for providing an appropriate suitable framework for understanding people’s interaction with their physical environment. More recently, a consideration of place has been introduced in studies of particular domains such as geographical technologies, collaborative systems and interactive environments. In particular, increasing attention is being paid to the notion of place as a useful conceptual tool when studying people’s interaction with ubiquitous computing environments, whereby computational power augments and enhances existing features of actual physical environments. Place provides a frame for understanding how people relate to complex environments that include technology, physical and material resources and especially other inhabitants.

A debate is emerging regarding different conceptual definitions of place and on their implications if introduced within the HCI, CSCW and interaction design areas, particularly in terms of methodological approaches. The meaning and implications of these different notions needs to be discussed and analysed, and especially when the notion of place is applied to understanding social and collaborative activities in a number of locales, from work environments, to public spaces,. This is even more so as new forms of collaboration are enabled through ubiquitous computing environments.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to): * conceptual frameworks for understanding place * methodological approaches for studying interaction and communication in place * case studies describing the design and evaluation of spatially distributed and mobile technologies * case studies of human experience of place mediated by technologies

SUBMISSIONS Deadline for submissions: 31st January 2006 Notification of Acceptance: 15th April 2006

Please **email** your submission (in MS Word or Acrobat PDF format) to luigina.ciolfi@ul.ie

Why do I b blog this? it's my area of research, then I may submit something.

The weirdest research lab structure

(via), FLIP seems to be the world's weirdest laboratory:

The lab starts off as a regular ship but when it reaches its destination it 'flips' so that most of the ship sinks leaving the end of the ship standing above the water. Once flipped walls become floors and ceilings and whilst some furniture rotates during the flipping process others are built twice so that one of them is always in the correct position

It's meant to be used by scientists who "needed a more quiet, stable place than a research ship to study how sound waves behave under water":

When FLIP is in its vertical position it is both extremely stable and quiet. Since Drs. Fisher and Spiess completed their first tests, many other important data have been gathered using FLIP. The way water circulates, how storm waves are formed, how seismic waves move, how heat is exchanged between the ocean and the atmosphere, and the sound made underwater by marine animals are just a few of the subjects studied using the amazing FLIP.

Duct-taped Football!

I've been pointed on this incredible football tape (presented in Saint-Etienne Biennale 2000):

Spanish designer Martí Guixé is known for his anarchic sense of humor, and his Football Tape (2005) is both unruly and witty. Designed to wrap around old newspaper or other scrap material, the Football Tape encircles the wadded core until it resembles a wrinkled soccer ball. This lets a child have double pleasure—mummifying something in tape and making an object to play with. Designed with the traditional honeycomb pattern of the classic soccer ball (football to Europeans), Football Tape comes in a strip that is shiny on one side and sticky with nontoxic adhesive on the other. Appealing to a child’s sense of the potential in objects rather than the rules we attach to them, Football Tape is also a witty gift for grownups.

I am a fan of duct-taped things... Check the author's website!

Bob the blimp

No it's not Sponge Bob, nor CatchBob! but Bob the blimp, a project by Karl Forsberg from the Umeå Institute of Design, :

This product is a robot that can serve as a friend for children and that can help them learn new things by answering their questions. Furthermore, it can act as an assistant in public places, such as hospitals and airports. Thirdly, it can be used remotely, for example, giving museums the possibility to let audiences view their exhibitions via the internet. The robot possesses a superior functionality in terms of mobility and provides new possibilities for other useful fields of application.

On-going Research goals

"On-going goals" at the lab:

  • finish the PhD in one year then I need to refine my model of location-awareness and coordination + a second experiment with the structured tool usage to validate the model
  • current papers to write: one for COOP 2006 about the drawback of automatic location-awareness for collaboration and another one for LoCa about the fact that awareness information needed to be matched to specific task needs in catchbob phases. It's going to be hard to write those two papers at the same time. Besides, the conference will be at the same period!
  • a paper for CSCW 2006 about some side-question in CatchBob (fabien's concern!)??
  • complete review about XXXXXX (confidential becasue private study) + figure out some needs for a study
  • review some research proposals
  • finish writing the literature review about coordination and mutual modeling (Clark's theory, Sperber and Wilson's theory + Malone and Crowston)
  • finish writing the literature review about location awareness and collaboration/socio-cognitive processes impacts
  • ...

Thoughtful critique of so-called ethnography usage in design

A very relevant and thoughtful critique of so-called ethnography usage in 'designing user experience' can be found on Rashmi Sinha's blog (about the DUX conference):Many speakers told us about the "ethnographic research" they conducted. Sometimes they shared some video of their observations - of children playing, or people in their homes, sitting on a chair, or watching TV. And the audience would watch delightedly - look at that, its people! People playing, laughing, sitting, walking... It all seemed very rosy - "we observed some people, maybe for a few hours, maybe we lived with them for a week or two - they still send us postcards - the dears. And at the end of it, we had the Aha moment, when it all fell into place. And the product was born." And everyone lived happily ever after. (...) I doubt that most people are even doing ethnography in the real sense of the word. Call it user/customer research, observation / qualitative interviews / design research. Sometimes when talking to clients, they ask us if we do "ethnography" - I always say, "well kind of", feeling guilty about calling the type of qualitative research that one has time for - ethnography.

Why do I blog this? It's as if ethnography was now a buzzword referring to taking picture or videotaping people doing something and then concluding about the phenomenon. With the exploding number of papers, studies, or conference about the use of ethnographical methods in design/business, there seems to be now some confusion. Besides, I like the author's emphasis on the constraints because I have the same problems in my work:

there are many challenges remaining - how do you make sure that the insights in the observer's head reach other members of the product team (...). How do you synthesize those insights? How do you go from that synthesis to the product concept? And how do you validate those product concepts - make sure they generalize beyond the few people you were able to observe?

Awareness must be matched to appropriate tasks

Coming to the wrong decision quickly:Â why awareness tools must be matched with appropriate tasks by A. Espinosa and J. Cadiz and L. Rico-Gutierrez and R. Kraut and W. Scherlis and G. Lautenbacher, CHI 2000. The paper underlines the importance of matching the features of an awareness tool with a workgroup's tasks and goals.

Although the results obtained provide some encouraging evidence about the benefits of awareness tool use, they also make evident how the availability of such tools can be more of a distraction when available but not properly used. (...) while the awareness tool seems to have contributed to a more efficient division of labor, the resulting reduced overlap in documents read by team members seems to result in a loss of common ground, thus foregoing the benefits of shared mental model formation. (...) Also, consistent with the literature on groups, it is evident from our results that awareness tools need to be matched to appropriate tasks [18, 19]. The primary focus of our awareness tool was helping teams to solve a problem quickly. This is precisely what the tool did in our experiment. (...) the features implemented in our awareness tool are adequate for a divergent problem in which there is no apparent right solution, and in which reaching a unified team solution is important. Strategic planning, sports team strategies, surgical teams in the operating room, and economic planning committees are examples of situations in which awareness tools of this type can help.. However, in order to provide support for problems in which a correct solution does exist, different types of awareness information would have to be presented to the user. This highlights the all familiar tradeoff between general awareness tools that provide a little help for many types of tasks, and specific awareness tools that significantly help only one type of task. It also highlights the need to find the optimal amount and type of awareness information to make available without creating unnecessary distractions and information overload.

Quoted references: 18. McGrath, J. Groups: Interaction and Performance, Prentice Hall: Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1984. 19. McGrath, J. and Hollingshead, A. Groups Interacting With Technology, SCalifornia, 1994.

Why do I blog this? this five years old paper is very relevant to my current research about location-awareness tool in mobile collaboration. Even though it deals with virtual environments, it raises very relevant problems related to awareness efficiency that I am also dealing with in Catchbob!.

Walking Cities by Ron Herron

While wandering around on the Web tonight, I ran across this Walking Cities project by Ron Herron (a member of the Archigram avantgarde group). In this concept, the city is a giant, reptilian structures which glided across the globe until its inhabitants found a place where they wanted to settle.

It seems that this concept is now forgotten, there are still temporary architectures but moving habitations (apart from trailers) are not really trendy...

Remote-contolled turtles

After the remote-controlled humans, Ananova has this good headline: A Russian scientist claims to have created remote controlled turtles for spying missions:

Alexei Burikov, head of the biology department at Rostov-on-Don State Pedagogical University, said a human controller could direct the turles through devices fitted to their shells. The device sent vibrations through the shell to the turtle which could be trained to change direction. The scientist added that a tiny camera fixed to the turtle's shell could relay reconnaissance pictures of an area to a command and control centre. (...) "Monitoring could be conducted for both environmental and defence purposes," he said. Turtles could be used to observe other wildlife in a way that no human would ever be able to do, he added.

Find web pages of nearby places based on GPS coordinates

Web-Enhanced GPS by Ramaswamy Hariharan , John Krumm and Eric Horvitz, a paper presented at Location- and Context-Awareness: First International Workshop, LoCA 2005.

Location-based services like reminders, electronic graffiti, and tourist guides normally require a custom, location-sensitive database that must be custom-tailored for the application at hand. This deployment cost reduces the initial appeal of such services. However, there is much location-tagged data already available on the Web which can be easily used to create compelling location-aware applications with almost no deployment cost. Such tagged data can be used directly in applications as well as to provide evidence in models of activity. We describe three applications that take advantage of existing Web data combined with location measurements from a GPS receiver. The first application, Pinpoint Search, finds web pages of nearby places based on GPS coordinates, queries from a Web mapping service, and general Web searches. The second application, XRay, uses the mapping service to find businesses in a building by pointing a GPS-equipped electronic compass at the building. The third application is called Travelogue, and it builds a map and clickable points of interest to help automatically annotate a trip based on GPS coordinates. Finally, we discuss the use of Web-based data as rich sources of evidence for probabilistic models of a users activity, including a means for interpreting the explanation for the loss of Web signals as users enter structures.

Why do I blog this? because there seems to be intriguing usage of GPS here and because I'm curious to see the outcomes of the potential application describes at the end.

Think tank in Lausanne

Thanks to Morten, I've recently been aware of this interesting think tank in Lausanne: Imagination Lab.

The Imagination Lab Foundation is an independent, non-profit research institute founded in 2000 and based in Lausanne, Switzerland. Its raison d'être is to develop and spread actionable ideas about imaginative, reflective and responsible organizational practices. 

We value imagination as a source of meaningful responses to emergent change, and play as an effective way to draw on this human capacity. 

Through in-house and supported research the Foundation seeks to actively contribute to the academic discourse in the field of management and adjacent areas.

Their publication list is interesting, especially the working papers and the next practice.

GPS-based mobile drawing game

Via the locative mailing.list: "N8Spel" a project by Just van den Broecke for the Waag Society. It's actually a GPS-based mobile drawing game for the Amsterdam Museum Night.

Teams would go into the city where they compete on who would (geo)draw the most beautiful “8″ by walking with a GPS and a mobile phone. They could embellish their drawings with photo’s and video’s taken and submitted on the spot. The competitive element was creativity with both the drawing and the media. All submitted media were tagged to the geographic locations where they were taken. The player’s movements, tracks and media could be followed in real-time through a webbrowser

Here is a screenshot of the game

The technical description of the game is described here

Why do I blog this? well with some folks in geneva we were thinking about something like this, using a google map! In this case, I like the idea of "embellish their drawings with photo’s and video’s taken and submitted on the spot" which is an added layer on top of the GPS drawing.

Blue Rotterdam by Florentijn Hofman

(via) An impressive arty project by Florentijn Hofman: Beukelsblue:

The borough of Delfshaven, Rotterdam, asked me [Florentijn] o come up with a plan for a block of derelict buildings, which will eventually be demolished. The agreement with the neighbourhood is that the block will remain blue as long as there isn’t a new plan for the area. This was once one of the most unseen blocks of houses in Rotterdam, and by applying a layer of only 2 micron of blue paint onto it, it became Rotterdam’s most photographed one. By redecorating this block, which was built in the first years of the 20th century, people start looking again at what was and is there, and maybe think about what they will get in return.
It also puts in perspective blocks of houses as such, architectural 'fashions' and demographic processes like city migrations, by making those blocks look like toy houses or archetypal buildings on an architect's maquette.

Why do I blog this? From an urban study point of view, I guess that it's interesting because it shed some light on a specific area. Plus, pictures are awesome! Also check his other project: DHL in which he transformed my second van into a courier van, by copying the fleet marking of DHL Logistics & Mail.

IBM new analysis tool: blog analysis

ZDNET reports this interesting fact: IBM said it is developing an application to analyse how discussions on blogs and other Web sites are affecting a given corporation's image. It's called "Public Image Monitoring Solution" and it's based on IBM's text analytics and search software, WebSphere Information Integration OmniFind Edition. This would certainly be of interest for some e-marketing companies down there (among others).

The Web-based program could cull results on the topic of fuel efficiency from various sources and generate reports by categorizing the information. If many consumers or news stories are making negative comments about a product, for example, a marketing person would know and could react,

Why do I blog this? this seems to be a tool that would be of interest for other purposes than just marketing. I don't know whether this service will be affordable...

A day in Zürich

I spent the day in Zürich for different things. I briefly attended Tweakfest 2005, an art/culture conference about creative potential of Zürich (a.k.a downtown Switzerland). It's interesting to see that after Richard Florida's take, lots of cities are jumping into the 'creative' bubble (i.e. being aware that there are 'creative' jobs and making connections between them + being creative-friendly). Anyway, some good notes on blog.invisible.ch that I just ran across. At the ETH, I also had a meeting with Morten Fjeld (Associate Professor at IDC, Chalmer University in Götenborg, Sweden) who presented me his new lab: t2i (TableTop Interaction Lab). He came out with this interesting manifesto, showing me videos of their work up there:

The use of the tabletop as an input/output device is an exciting and emerging domain of computer systems. This is a cross disciplinary domain. An example set of combining areas are as follows: projector based display systems, augmented reality, user interface technologies, multi-modal interactions, CSCW, and information visualization. The t2i Lab at Chalmers TH sets out to explore such areas as applications for tabletop displays, gesture-based interfaces, tangible interfaces, haptic rendering, information visualization, and horizontal display hardware; all for tabletop displays. The t2i Lab brings together a select group of talented students and researchers with a common interest and commitment to the construction and exploration of tabletop interaction.

Morten gave me some pointers, ideas about CatchBob! and some folks I might contact around Lausanne. One of the topic we discusses is the use of Petri Nets used for cognitive modeling (that could be an option for modeling coordination in catchbob, the only problem is to find 'states' in my case).

Then I visited the cool folks of Kaywa (a bleeding-edge blog company in Switzerland), the point was to meet them, briefly exchanging some bits and pieces about our respective work + talking about specific issues I won't mention here.

A Tree Gaming Controller Unit

Via Gamasutra Esoteric Beat Clumn: This "lumberjacked" game controller is amazing!!!

Lumber jacked! is a computer game that is played with trees. Using the 'Tree Gaming Controller Unit' the human player takes the role of a lumberjack while your tree friend can play the part of the super tree.

You are armed with an axe but it is your choice if you use it . Your tree has control over the super tree which can move around the plantation avoiding you and your axe and giving birth to new saplings.

Simply attach the T.G.C.U. to your tree of choice and start to chop or if you are a tree lover just have a wander around your plantation,. enjoy the weather and let your tree live and produce generations of trees.

The most interesting part of it is the tree controlelr unit:

This piece of equipment makes it possible to play Lumberjacked! against a tree. The ivy leaves, pictured below, are attached to the ends of branches. Each leaf hides a vibration sensor which picks up movement in the tree and translates that movement to the game through an adapted game controller concealed within the pot.

Why do I blog this? I really like this sense of 'intangible interaction', vibration-controlled. Is this 'calm technology'? ;)