A 'cultural hub' in Dubai

I am not a great fan of Dubai architecture craze; however, there is this interesting new project called 'DUBAI HUB one' designed by GEORGE KATODRYTIS / STUDIONOVA, via Bidoun Magazine (Arts and Culture from the Middle East).

The proposal is for a series of cultural hubs which will act as focal points and public foyers where cultural programs can be plugged-in: art galleries, museums, libraries, performance stages, poetry reading salons, music recital spaces, art auction facilities, etc. The main lobby of the buildings is to be as public and accessible as possible, like a typical Dubai shopping center, with escalators and ramps leading to the upper levels, and to special rooms for additional cultural events. All events and items will be consumable: The aim is to convert the culture of shopping into shopping for culture. The external skin structure and glazing is designed using algorithmic weaving scripts.

Phone masts disguised as trees

Preserved TreeScapes InternationalTM (PTI), a company specialised in replica trees. They now expanded their products to phone mast disguised as trees:

Most recently, PTI has turned its experience and talents toward concealment solutions for the wireless communications provider. The tremendous increase in demand for wireless towers has generated great opposition to the use of conventional, unconcealed structures. Both community and zoning requirements for high quality concealment are on the rise. Today, concealment issues may be the greatest obstacles to obtaining zoning approval. PTI’s botanically correct tree tower products will help speed the approval process. PTI has an ongoing commitment to develop future products and concealment opportunities through design, research and testing.

Why do I blog this? this kind of today's artefacts would definitely appear to be weird for time-travellers coming from the past.

Intriguing Toys, an LBS for kids

Today I went in a toy shop to buy some presents and I stumbled across this very curious Spy Gear by Wild Planet Toy, among I others I noticed: The Spy tracker system: "Set up three secret spy trackers, draw a map on your control panel showing where each one is, and you will know where and when intruders (e.g., little sisters or parents) have entered the secured zone (...) Track movement up to 75 feet away. Includes cool tracking headquarters case with light-up display, audible warning signals and 3 remote motion sensors. Works indoors and out. ". Better than the follow-your-kids-with-a-GPS, it's a "be-tracked-by-your-kids". Note the vocabulary deployed: "you will know where and when intruders (e.g., little sisters or parents) have entered the secured zone " (well of course there is the spy rethoric). Now, things are reverse, there are location-based services for kids!

There are also an eavesdropping device in the form of a pair of glasses or of a little car or as a pod. Besides, the night vision goggles looks cool. My favorite is definitely the Eye-Link Communicators: a headset display and arm-mounted keypad to transmit silent messages to other "agents".

Finally, while venturing around on the web to find these toys, I was amazed by the comments/reviews, see for instance: "The worst part is that the batteries are EXPENSIVE and kids NEVER remember to turn it off because the switch is so small and almost hidden. The batteries ran down after about an hour of play and about an hour of sitting in the room before he remembered to go turn them off", "This is a frustrating toy because it looks cool, and might even be worth the price if it weren't so easy to forget to turn off and had a bigger switch that is clearly marked "on" and "off."", "A Kid's Review: I go this for my birthday. It works poorly, and i can barely hear any better than i can without it"... Of course some are less pertinent but funny: "I am a twenty-year-old professional secret agent, and was delighted to find this ultra-cool-looking piece of equipment at such an affordable price"...

Xmas post: MIT turned into a Mario Level

Just ran across this: a Mario-themed MIT hack that turned part of a building into a Nintendo/Mario level...

Paper accepted to the COOP Conference

Our paper "The Underwhelming Effects of Automatic Location-Awareness on Collaboration in a Pervasive Game" (by Nicolas NOVA, Fabien GIRARDIN, Gaëlle MOLINARI and Pierre DILLENBOURG) has been accpeted to the International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems (May 9-12, 2006, Carry-le-Rouet, Provence, France).

Abstract. In this paper we seek to empirically study the use of location-awareness of others in the context of mobile collaboration. We report on a field experiment carried out using a pervasive game we developed called CatchBob!. Using both quantitative and qualitative data, we show the underwhelming effects of automating location-awareness. Our results indeed shows that automating this process does not necessarily improve the task performance and that it can be detrimental to socio-cognitive processes involved in collaboration such as communication or the modeling of partners’ intents. The paper concludes with some potential impacts for location-based application practitioners.

Keywords: location-awareness, socio-cognitive processes, pervasive game, cscw, field experiment.

Designing collaboration in FPS

The Hunt for Collaborative War Gaming - CASE: Battlefield 1942 by Tony Manninen and Tomi Kujanpää, Game Studies, Vol. 5, No.1, October 2005. The paper addresses a phenomenon connected to our research, namely the all the cues that users loose when playing remotely. The lack of face-to-face interaction indeed has important limits in terms of gamers interactions; which leads to new behavior like various forms of non-verbal communication and perceivable actions to reduce communication difficulties. The article hence describes describes and analyses the interaction forms that exist in a contemporary multiplayer 3D game to provide game designers with a model of " perceivable and holistic manifestations of interaction that enable players to fully collaborate and cooperate in networked game settings". It seems that the game studies (Battlefield 1942) offers supports a larger set of interaction forms than previously analysed FPS like Counter Strike.

the issue of collaborative perception, i.e., the possibilities to achieve shared situational awareness among the team members, becomes critical within the context of both virtual spatiality (e.g., large game worlds) and physical isolation (e.g., players communicate only via computer mediation). This means that the limited peripheral perception possibilities offered by contemporary multiplayer games should be supported by efficient communication channels and representational rendition of player actions within the manifested context of that particular individual.

The model they designed can be represented as follows:

The design suggestions originating from the study encourage the use and application of the rich interaction framework and the corresponding model. The results of analysis direct the design and development to support the creation of rich interaction. The primary emphasis is to avoid purely technologically driven design, and to focus instead on the creative process and conceptual understanding of rich interaction. The art assets can be designed in a way that they truly support cooperation and collaboration.

Why do I blog this? I worked on a similar project during my masters; with a peculiar emphasis on studying group awareness in FPS. This issue is very interesting and the results they came up with are worthwhile, especially in terms of collaboration-design. However, I was a bit surprised to see that the author do not refer to all the body of work derived from pragmatic linguistics which already addresses this issue (from a different viewpoint of course). The work of Clark and Brennan for instance could have been useful to analyse what is lost in this kind of context when it comes to communication, grounding (shared understanding of the situation...).

World Economic Forum 2006 about innovation/design

According to Bruce Nussbaum in Business Weekl, the World Economic Forum 2006 in Davos "may as well be called Design in Davos because for the first time there is an entire category of programs, meetings, dinners and late-nite talks called "Innovation, Creativity and Design Strategy". This year the conference may as well be called Design in Davos because for the first time there is an entire category of programs, meetings, dinners and late-nite talks called "Innovation, Creativity and Design Strategy." Is that cool or what? The program says that "Business, government and social innovators are taking on new creative capabilities and innovation strategies in response to a rapidly changing global landscape." OK. For those designers out there still seeking validation for what you do--this is it folks! And for those folks battling it out in the innovation vs. design arena, well, there's meat for discussion here for you as well.

Davos is just discovering innovation and design stuff so the panels are all over the place. There one on Doubt and Decision-Making that talks about CEOs and risk. OK. There's also one about Biomimicry--Nature's Innovation. "What has biomimicry taught us about design in nature?" Interesting? There's a panel on Innovating in Innovation that sounds like Larry Keeley (I don't see him listed as a participant). There's one called Video Game Zombies and New Innovation that I am going to attend for sure.

The panel entitled "Video Game Zombies and New Innovation" seems amazingly intriguing!

Times passes faster when classical music is played (but only for men)

(via) A weird result: MORE CHOICES AND SPEEDIER DELIVERY SIMPLIFY MUSIC AND MESSAGES ON-HOLDBy Milton Allimadi :

The call center industry has shifted to digitally-recorded music and messages on-hold over the past two years for enhanced audio quality and faster shipment over the Internet and Web sites. Acquiring on-hold products is only part of the challenge. Your next step is to select the type of music callers hear. You should be careful to investigate the impact of the music you select. A study led by the University of Cincinnati’s Dr. James Kellaris finds that male callers who listen to classical music while on hold tend to think time flies, while female callers who hear the same music have the impression that time drags on.

ambx: augment game immersion with environmental perceptions

ambx (pronounced am-bee-ex) is a technology to be released by Philips in May 2006 that aims at improving the user immersion in games.

amBX-enabled games will provide gamers with the ability to use light, colour, sound, heat and even airflow in the real world during gameplay.

Imagine the room of the future, where all electronic devices are amBX-enabled. The treacherous road to Saigon will turn your room jungle green, swimming with dolphins will splash it deep blue, ‘Halo’ jumps will turn your fans on full, lightning storms will strobe your white lighting, and attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion will blast on your heaters.

Incorporating a scripting language, software engine and architecture, amBX has been designed to deliver all-new player experiences through enabled devices such as LED colour-controlled lights, active furniture, fans, heaters, audio and video, which are all placed in the user’s room. amBX goes even further to provide the support framework for peripheral manufacturers to develop these enabled products, empowering both developers and publishers to amBX-enable and enhance their games. In the future, game players may even be able to author and share their own personal amBX experiences online.

The networked home is rapidly becoming a reality for many, through the introduction of low cost wireless technologies such as Wi-Fi and BlueTooth. amBX has embraced this changing future by allowing content authors a language in which to describe and recreate experiences in an Ambient Intelligent Environment. Within a location the devices controlled by the amBX language act as parts of a browser. Together they render the experience and the player’s room, in effect, becomes the browser

Why do I blog this? It's a relevant idea since the game experience is not only a matter of putting a DVD in a box connected to a TV, the context/environmental experience is also worthwile. I don't know whether it's a good way to implement it but it's a good step towards it.

De Certeau on how people modify artifacts

Lucie Giard describes how Michel de Certeau sees people's link with artifact in the following terms:

Certeau’s originality lay in his refusal to endorse the old opposition of high culture versus popular culture, translated into the dichotomy of creative art versus mass production. On the contrary, he moved his attention from the objects (movies, comic books, rock bands records, and the like) to what he called "operations" that people perform with these objects. What was at stake for him was the way people use some readymade objects, the way they organize their private space, their office, or their working-place, the way they "practice" their environment and all public space available to them (shopping malls, town streets, airports and railway stations, movie theatres, and the like). By so doing, Certeau focused his reflection on the ordinary "practices" of every man and woman in his/her everyday life. Thus he substituted the assumption of a large-scale anonymous creativity of ordinary people for the all-too-common presupposition about a passive mass consumption of objects and products. Every man or woman could be regarded as the "producer" of his/her own lifestyle through the true "art" of recycling objects, adapting and transforming readymade products.

Michel de Certeau's social philosophy was based on the notion of détournement and collage, whose techniques allow “weak” people to subvert the social constraints built by “strong” people, even when the weaker apparently comply with their rulers’ injunctions

This approach is so close to what we see today in terms of DIY activities related to technology/life hacking... To get more about De Certeau, read The Practice of Everyday Life.

Encouraging basic social interaction of children with autism skills using robots

Aude Billard, a researcher at our school, worked with others on a neat project that aims at encouraging basic social interaction of children with autism skills using a humanoid robot. One of the experiment she ran is well described in this paper.

our current approach of repeated trails over a long period of time allowed the children time to explore the interaction space of robot-human, as well as human-human interaction. In some cases the children started to use the robot as a mediator, an object of shared attention, for their interaction with their teachers. Furthermore, once they have got accustomed to the robot, in their own time and on their own initiative, they all opened themselves up to include the investigator in their world, interacting with him, and actively seeking to share their experience with him as well as with their carer. We believe that this is an important aspect of the work, since this human contact gives significance and (emotional, intersubjective) meaning to the experiences with the robot.

This work is part of a project called Aurora, which investigates the possible use of robots in therapy and education of children with autism (Aurora 2003), based on findings that people with autism enjoy interacting with computers.

Why do I blog this? designing technology for special needs like this is definitely intriguing and the results they get are interesting both from the interaction designer point of view and the psychologist perspective. In addition, I believe that such interdisciplinary projects are worthwile.

LBS, flexibility of information, semantics and transparency

Matching User's Semantics with Data Semantics in Location-Based Services by Shijun Yu, Lina Al-Jadir, Stefano Spaccapietra, Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Semantics in mobile Environments (SME 2005), Ayia Napa, 9 May 2005.

One of the major issues for flexible information services is how to be able to correctly understand what is being requested by users, and how to find information that is relevant to the request. This paper focuses on such semantic issues, aiming at outlining the general problem as well as the specificity attached to location-based services, one of the major trends in mobile information systems. (...) From a semantic viewpoint, the major characteristic of, and challenge for, LBS is the fact that they serve as mediator between a possibly unknown user and possibly a priori unknown data sources. Moreover, the mediation has to be run on-the-fly, i.e., it cannot be prepared in advance as the partners in the mediation are not necessarily known. To overcome the difficulty, contributions from most advanced techniques are welcome. They include: ontology assistance (to understand what it is all about), peer-to-peer information search (to increase chances of finding relevant information), incomplete information handling (to cope with missing data), and approximation techniques (to determine what could be a reasonable answer when a perfect matching is not possible). (...) In this paper we showed how using semantics can help in finding information that is relevant to the mobile user, and thus improve the quality of location-based services. The context, user profile, user history, and data profile are dynamic semantic components that should be used in the matching process in order to give a tailored and useful information to the user.

Why do I blog this? even thought the LBS scenarios proposed in this paper are quite common, it deals with very pertinent issues with regard to what the users need, which information might be relevant for them and in what context. Besides, I like the idea adressed in the conclusion (I'm not a great fan of the example but...):

Nowadays, a user can use his mobile phone in Paris or London, without having to know that s(he) is using the telecommunication services of this or that local operator. Location-based services should offer the same flexibility. A tourist, whether s(he) is in Paris or London, should have tourist assistance by local LBS providers, and get relevant information according to his/her profile.

Of course, the idea of 'profile' might be expanded but I think the service 'transparency' to the users is important.

Location awareness and World of Warcraft

While walking is swiss snowy mountains, Mirweis pointed me on this World of Warcraft add-on called The Gatherer:

Gatherer is a WoW addon for herbalists, miners and treasure hunters. It's main purpose is to track the closest plants, deposits and treasure locations on you minimap. The addon does not track like a tracking ability does, rather it "remembers" where you have found various items in the past. It does this whenever you gather (perform herbalism, mining or opening) on an item, and records the specific map location in it's history. From then on, whenever the item comes into range of being one of the closest 1-25 (configurable) items to your present location, it will pop up on you minimap. (...) The usage of Gatherer is fairly straightforward. You simply use the game as normal, and the tracked items will appear in you minimap as soon as you gather them. On the minimap you see green circles to indicate if you're close by to a node (if there is data for the node - created from a previous harvest). On the zone maps you will start to see icons indicating an overall picture of the resource layout of a zone.

One of the use ask another requirement... a spatial annotation feature: "May I humbly request: the ability to toggle World Map notes on and off (ideally with a button provided on the world map itself)", others wants location awareness of others: "I would be really cool if it could track more stuff like NPC's. I often use much time on trying to remember where the Quest NPC is when I need to claim my reward.".

Why do I blog this? I am interested in location awareness and video games... This kind of thing is utterly crazy and might be interested for my research. There are tons of questions that could be relevant like why and how people keep track of things/people; how this help them achieving their goals (collaborating, working on a specific task...), ...

Confluence of street art and knitting

Via AEIOU I ran across an impressive article about a new and hilarious trend: the confluence of two rising cultural tides: crafting/knitting and street art in Houston Press:

"We're taking graffiti and making it warm, fuzzy and more acceptable," says AKrylik. "I like the duality there. Also, I really think there can be a lot more to the new, alternative knitting craze than meeting at the local coffee shop every Sunday afternoon to make scarves together -- not that I don't like to do that, too." (...) Poly stands guard while AKrylik puts a pink, red and gray swatch on the bike rack at Poison Girl; it's done faster than you can say "Christo." (...) These gangsta mamas have big plans: cozies for car bumpers, hats for fire hydrants, carpets for sidewalks and, if only they can get enough people, curtains for bridges and covers for water towers.

Pictures by Keith Plocek showing AKrylik and PolyCotN work:

Why do I blog this? even though this seems to be pretty funny and nice, I am convinced than this take part a broader innovative trend: connected to 'do it yourself' motivation, this kind of bricolage is meant to give some personalization feelings. It reminds me Ulla-Maaria's manifesto:

1. People get satisfaction for being able to create/craft things because they can see themselves in the objects they make. This is not possible in purchased products. 2. The things that people have made themselves have magic powers. They have hidden meanings that other people can’t see.

So what we have here in the street is a mix of handcrafted-pleasure and space-based annotations as gently pictured by Timo. In this case, it's less a matter of capturing spatial memories... well now it made me think of what Anne blogged about today... :)

MEART portrait series

MEART and the portrait series conducted by art-group Fish and Ships.

A web cam captures portraits of viewers within the gallery space. These images are then converted into a stimulation map and used to stimulate the neurons (this is the beginning of a drawing process). A multi channel electrophysiological recording from a neuronal culture (“MEARTS brain”) is performed in Potter's lab. The resulting data sets are processed in two locations – Atlanta & the location of the arm. The processed outcome is used to control and move the drawing arm. The progress of the drawing is monitored and compared with the original portrait. The difference between the original portrait and the progressing drawing is then sent back to the lab as another stimulation map to complete the feedback loop and this whole process continues until a threshold of marks on paper is passed. This is the end of a drawing

Leapfrogging: rapid system adoption without intermediary steps

I like this concept very much: Leapfrogging and Worldchanging has a good definition of it::

"Leapfrogging" is the notion that areas which have poorly-developed technology or economic bases can move themselves forward rapidly through the adoption of modern systems without going through intermediary steps. (...) Rather than following the already-developed nations in the same course of "progress," leapfrogging means that developing regions can experiment with emerging tools, models and ideas for building their societies. Leapfrogging can happen accidentally (such as when the only systems around for adoption are better than legacy systems elsewhere), situationally (such as the adoption of decentralized communication for a sprawling, rural countryside), or intentionally (such as policies promoting the installation of WiFi and free computers in poor urban areas).

The best-known example of leapfrogging is the adoption of mobile phones in the developing world. It's easier and faster to put in cellular towers in rural and remote areas than to put in land lines, and as a result, cellular use is exploding.

Use plants to do photography

Via Wilfried Houjebek's delicious, an intriguing project he calls "geranium as camera"

many natural things are sensitive to light. Long ago people noticed the effect of light on green plants, or how it made coloured fabrics fade. It is the effect of light on plants that makes Roman Photography possible. (...) if you drop a small amount of a solution of iodine on it [chlorophyll], the starch turns black. So that's it really. All you have to do is get a plant to produce lots of starch in the right place, then stain the starch with iodine. Don't let a few details prevent you starting straight away.

The webpage proposes a curious way to make a picture with plants, try to follow it.

Research discussion at the lab

This afternoon, at the lab, we had a discussion about methodologies. The goal was not to agree on a common methology for all our projects, but rather to have a discussion of what we can use and in which context. One of the issue that lead to this was the fact that we know what we're not using (pure experimental research paradigm for instance) but it's harder to define what we should use. Especially given that our research projects have different purposes ranging from studying people's behavior when collaborating too designing applications or services that meet specfific needs. Jean-Baptiste presented what is called "Design-Based research" in educational science because he thought this might be of interest in terms of mixing qualitative and quantitative methods in an 'interventionist' way. Hence we had a discussion about it and commonly agreed that some project can use it (design-oriented projects) and some cannot (when we study behavior rather than designing artefacts). Pierre was still wondering about referring to this theory in our research.

Then Pierre (lab director) summarized the main characteristics of what our lab should put the emphasis on:

• intervention or design-based approach.
• variation: studying variation, to compare things (but not necessarily having controlled group, it's rather a matter of comparing different interfaces than comparing a group with an artefact to a group without it).
• investigating the PROCESSES rather than the outcomes. By processes meant the interaction with the artefacts/application/service but also the group processes when they collaborate using it. The outcome or the performance is often less intersting than the processes that occured.
• we collect data (be it quantitative or qualitative) to analyze what happened.
• granularity of our research: emphasis on small tests/experiment/investigation (which - in addition - are not pre-experiment to fix bugs or tune settings)
• generalization: how to augment the external validity of our results? by having larger scale investigations or doing them across contexts (task/people/settings)? or do we neeed generalizations.

The discussion was quite messy but it was really relevant for us to talk about this. Of course, it's still in process. Sometimes, in the discussion, I was not so comfortable by all of this (we need to set boundaries between research goals and the corresponding methodologies); but anyway, that's what happened when people with different perspectives talk with each other. Actually, even though we want to mix methods, it's clear that the main paradigm at CRAFT is positivist and bound to quantitative methods. Then, it's more a matter of discussing how to integrate other methods (qualitative) in a proper way.

Garment-Augmented Technology: Cell phones and Shoulder Pad

A Shoulder Pad Insert Vibrotactile Display by Aaron Toney, Lucy Dunne, Bruce H. Thomas, Susan P. Ashdown describes a project that aims at integrate a vibrotatcitle display and support electronics into a standard clothing insert, the shoulder pad.

The shoulder pad in particular was chosen as a highly useful garment insert because of its common integration into the standard business suit, one of the most culturally pervasive garments in western society. (...) The objective for this project was to develop a tactile display contained within a standard shoulder pad that could present a stimulus to the user. More specifically, the display needed to be capable of presenting several distinct stimuli in multiple locations at once, and it needed to maintain the the functions of a shoulder pad: shape, stability, and flexibility.

The pad is meant to display to mimic social conventions such as tapping on the shoulder area for alerts or guidance. One of the authors, Bruce Thomas, reports that:

"As one example, we are working on a set of pager motors integrated into a shoulder pad for a business suit," Thomas said. One idea is to have silent vibration patterns -- similar to custom ring tones -- coded to incoming phone numbers. "This way, when you are in a meeting you have a better idea of who is trying to contact you and you are not always pulling your phone out to see who is calling,"

...

Social bookmarking in companies: IBM example

Queue, the ACM journal has a special issue about social software. Among the different articles, the one entitled "Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise" by David Millen, Jonathan Feinber and Bernard Kerr caught my eyes. The tagline is very appealing: "Can your organization benefit from social bookmarking tools?". Some snippets:

The apparent success of Internet-based social bookmarking applications begs the question of whether large enterprises or organizations would also benefit from social bookmarking systems. To investigate this question, at IBM we are designing and developing an enterprise-scale social bookmarking system called dogear. (...) The first significant design decision was whether to base user identity in the application on real names or pseudonyms. We decided to require real-world identity for the following reasons. First, one of the expected benefits of the system is to allow users to make inferences about the interests and expertise of others based on informal browsing of bookmark collections.

This point is very pertinent and tightly related to a phenomenon called Transactive Memory (a theory proposed by Wegner (1987). This theory examines the process by which individuals determine who knows what and who knows who knows what).

The "dogear" application is then described:

Dogear also exploits collaborative filtering techniques to screen new bookmarks for those that are predictably of interest to an individual (or a group of individuals). Common interests can be inferred based on a number of observable user actions, including use of similar tags and/or tag combinations, similarity of bookmark (URL) collections, common RSS subscriptions, and click streams that indicate interest in specific kinds of bookmarks. Text analysis of bookmark titles, descriptions, and comments will also be used to determine bookmark relatedness.

The article continues describing the research prototype they designed to investigate the usefulness of a social bookmarking application for a large enterprise. Among the results they investigated, there is this: they used social network analytical methods to "begin to understand" the information affinities among dogear users.11 The picture below shows a sociogram showing which individuals have clicked through to another person’s bookmark reference:

Why do I blog this? even though this is more " we did this to begin to understand", it's refreshing to see that some companies are investigating how social bookmarking (as a geek-based/out-of-companies innovation) could be used in companies. This is just the beginning but a social network study of this can be very informative, in terms of information management and transfer.