I sketched a brief description about how we work on colaborative technology analysis at the lab. This drawing is NOT exhaustive at all but is meant to show which dimensions I am focusing on for my PhD: the information flow, the social and cognitive processes that occur in small groups and the interactions with interface elements.
Spring Alpha is a networked game system based on Chad McCail's drawing "Spring".
This narrates the attempts of a small, urban community to create its own "utopian" society. The narrative is used as a metaphor for the real-world issues that the project explores and a focus around which speculative and critical ideas can develop. The software system serves as a "sketch pad" for testing out ideas for alternative forms of social practice at both the "narrative" level, in terms of the game story, and at a "code" level, in terms of working with the actual data and communication structures that support the game. It is an exploration of software and social governance in relation to Free Open Source Software practice. The project combines the development of an open software system along with workshop events that seek to broaden Free Open Source Software development principles into areas outside of programming.
It can be downloaded here.
Why do I blog this? What I find interesting is this:
The basic aim of the game is to change the rules by which the society in that world runs. This is done through hacking and altering the code that simulates that world, creating new types of behaviour and social interaction.
In The Role of the Author in Topical Blogs (Proceedings of CHI 2005. Extended abstracts. Pages: 1256 - 1259), Scott Carter presents a compelling study about blogs and the role of authors in this context. He puts the emphasis on how blogs challenge the notion of authorship.
Seemingly, rather than a model in which the author’s writings are themselves a contribution, the blog author weaves a tapestry of links, quotations, and references amongst generated content. In this paper, I present a study of the role of the author plays in the construction of topical blogs, in particular focusing on how blog authors make decisions about what to post and how they judge the quality of posts. To this end, I analyzed the blogs and blogging habits of eight participants using a quantitative analysis tool that I developed, a diary study, and interviews with each participant. Results suggest that authors of topical blogs often do not create new content but strive to, often follow journalistic conventions,use the content of their blogs as a reference tool for other work practices, and are connected as a community by a set of source documents.The contribution of this work is to provide insight onto the notion of authorship with respect to blogs. I address this by looking at both the practice of blog authorship as well as the ways by which blog authors judge the success of posts.
The results are quite interesting:
- Participants overwhelmingly commented that a good post is one that contributes new information or, to a lesser extent, extensive commentary about some issue on which the participant is an expert
- Some participants included the timeliness of the post with respect to its subject material as being important as well. When asked to specify a particular post that they had written that they judged to be high quality, respondents usually chose posts that had much lower link and quote densities than average for their blog.
- participants said that it was best to link to completely new information or at least source information, bypassing other filters and news sourcesmaking
- Participants reported judging the quality of a post primarily by trackbacks (links from other blogs to their post) or by their own analysis of server traffic. Another metric that most participants used was links from blogs with a much larger perceived audience than their own. Participants did not attribute much value to the size and quality of comments left on the blog.
- participants said that they followed journalistic convention when updating posts — explicitly marking changes and using extra text or color to call attention to the fact that the post had been changed.
- participants described the use of their blog as an archive tool directly linked to their work practice. In these cases, posts often served as way to save information that would later be used in the construction of other documents.
- Participants said that their goal was to make their posts as broadly understandable as possible, but that usually time constraints restricted them from doing so.
- Participants relied on news feeds and e-mail lists to find sources for their posts. All participants also reported perusing topic related blogs and news sites.
Why do I blog this? even though these results are quite common for bloggers, they give a relevant picture of one part of the blogosphere to those who think blogging is limited to personal life accounts.
Prototypes in the Wild: Lessons from Three Ubicomp Systems by Scott Carter and Jennifer Mankoff, in IEEE Pervasive Computing Journal, October-December 2005 (Vol. 4, No. 4) pp. 51-57. This paper is an account of three ubicomp systems evaluation at multiple design stages:
Why do I blog this? For each of these projects, the authors provide a description of how they evaluated them (mostly with paper prototypes first and field experiments with interactive prototypes afterwards). What is strikingly interesting is that their computer science perspective lead them to "a struggle to balance quality of evaluation and ease of prototyping" as they say. This paper is yet another element to attest that testing ubicomp applications in field settings is particularly important. I was also interested by the fact that they studied their prototypes at different stages of design.
Yesterday, the Financial Times had a smart article about what the author called "naive extrapolation", i.e. "fastening on some current trend, projecting it forward, to exaggerated extent and with exaggerated pace".
The result of naive extrapolation is overestimation of the pace of short-run change and underestimation of the scale and nature of long-run change. None of us is very good at visualising worlds that are fundamentally, rather than incrementally, different from the one we know: and the things that change the world fundamentally are usually things that are not yet widely identified or understood.Prediction is hard, especially when it concerns the future. It is safer, and more common, to predict the present: and such predictions are much better received, so that is what most futurologists do. The lesson for those who must nevertheless prepare for the future is to be uncompromisingly cynical and recognise that those who claim to know what the future holds reveal only their own ignorance. Listen to people who are genuinely expert in specialist fields rather than those who profess to understand how the business world will evolve. But most of all, recognise how little about the world we can ever really know.
I am happy to see that I am not the only one thinking about how IM could be a good interface for information management (search, database query), as I described last year.John Battelle wrote a clever post about it, connecting this to mobile interfaces:
first of all, a mashup of RSS and IM is just a very cool idea. The medium of IM has been underappreciated by nearly everyone in the "media" business for one reason - the leaders of the business didn't use IM. But lord knows the rest of the world sure does.
there are other types of branded content that makes total sense in IM: publications and personal web services. A great publication has an intimate relationship with its audience, it's a trusted source of information, a pal, a buddy. And blogs, as I've argued again and again, can be great publications. And great web services like local search have earned our trust, know who we are, and we know that when we ask them questions, useful answers will come back. No one wants a stupid chat bot that tries to be, say, Santa Claus, that gets old fast. But a chat bot that is useful? That can instantly deliver your favorite content to your mobile phone without forcing it through the crappy sphincter of your mobile operators crippled web interface? Or can answer questions like, say, "pharmacy 91106" with the speed and intimacy of an IM chat session?
Why do i blog this? I like this idea and I am used to ask question to AIM bots about weather forecast, movie schedule... would it work on a mobile phone? I don't really know but I'd love to have this on my Nintendo DS for sure... There is an interesting debate in the comment part of this post. For instance usabiltiy-guru Jakob Nielsen complains that it's just re-inventing the command line. Some others expects "that the rich client UI applications of tomorrow will be delivered when the "browser" is merged with an "IM client"...
"Prolongement d'espace privé" (i.e. Enlarging Private Space) is a short manual by french artist Cédric Bernadotte that aims at showing how using duct tape can help you reclaiming part of s atreet and turn it into a private space:
There are also other manuals to create benches/seats or hamacs out of duct tape in the streets.
I think I did not look this project as it deserves: Generating Art from a Computer Game. It's actually an interview with Alison Mealey by Artifical.dk (a great news resource for information about net art, software art, and other computer based art forms as it defines it).
Alison Mealey has chosen to base her art on the computer game Unreal Tournament. More precisely, she lets a number of virtual players play the game for approximately 30 minutes at a time and uses the data from the games to produce complex drawings. These drawings are also based on photographic portraits.
For instance, Alison Mealey: Unrealart, Jake, 2005.
Why do I blog this? Since I am interested in location-awareness and how people use others' position in space, it's this aspect that interested me in this project:
Interviewer:I'd like to learn a bit more about the relations between the data from the game and the visual output. How are the characteristics of the lines and circles determined from the game data? Alison; Only two types of data are taken from the game. The position of every player (taken every second), and the acknowledgement of a death. As the data from the game is coming in 1 second chunks, Processing takes every seconds chunk and produces a drawing from it, these drawings are built up over time to produce the final images. The circles represent the positions of the players. The X and Y positions taken from the players are drawn as-is, producing a top down 2D view of 'the field of play'/canvas. The Y values from the players alter the size of the circles, if a bot is mid jump they are therefore closer to the camera and the circles will be bigger, if they are crouching the circles will be smaller. The Y values have been greatly exaggerated in some of the more recent works, to produce (in my opinion) more beautiful images. The lines simply connect every second's points to produce separate drawings from every second. The death data is used in some of the images as a big black circle, indicating where a death took place. In some of the other works the death data forces a global colour change.
Of course, it's quite messy but it's an amazing way of visualizing players' paths, it's definitely less precise than what the Whereabouts clock can show BUT it's less intrusive and anonymous...
Game Girl Advance has an insightful post about 5 trends in the world of video games that I fully agree with:
- Sex and games are coming into their own. (...) If the critically and financially successful God of War is a sign of anything, sex will soon become an effective part of storytelling in mainstream games.
- Wireless Online Gaming: (...) Online portable gaming has paved the way for MMORPGs and even more impressive strategy games. Furthermore, the DS's touch-screen capabilities make impressive ports of games such as Civilization, StarCraft, and Diablo possible.
- Nintendo has basically said that they know they can't compete with Sony or Microsoft in terms of straightforward gaming. Instead, they want to co-exist. Rather than creating a competing third console with pumped graphics and a two-stick joypad, Nintendo is made a console that will complement a console set-up. [So does Philips with its <a href ambx project - nicolas]. Nintendo's business strategy acknowledges a very new trend in gaming - companies don't always have to outright compete (...) "the system wars," as if one company must plant a flag in the gaming public and declare victory. Nintendo's new strategy suggests a different outlook in which different systems deliver fundamentally different experiences and therefore all warrant a unique purchase.
- Console Indie Development
- Gamers Fight Back against Critics
What I find really interesting is the console indie development thing (Xbox 360, Nintendo Revolution) and the Nintendo strategy that we will follow closely.
To some extent, we are still waiting for the next thing: at some point, video games will jump from the set-top-box (PC, console) to the real world, embedded in various objects. The mobile phone is already something but the existing game are translated from old consoles and they still do not take that much advantage of the phone capabilities such as voice or location-awareness. Alternate reality games is another step towards this direction and I am pretty sure that the so-called "Internet of Things" will allow game designers to create great challenges or pertinent features (like playing the same game on a cell phone, an interactive tv or a computer for instance). I am also looking forward to see how the toy industry will meet the video game companies...
CODII: Combating the Online Dissemination of Illegal Images is a project developed by Microsoft Research. It's aimed at examining how people organise themselves online to disseminate illegal images. The underlying issue is to design tools that help hotlines and moderators identify and remove illegal online content.
This project grows from a working relationship with the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF). The IWF are the charity who run the UK hotline that helps identify illegal online images in order for them to be removed, especial images of child abuse. (...) Our approach is to take an understanding of the area gleaned from working with the IWF, and combine it with a technological and social science understanding of online community systems. This combination helps us to build novel and useful tools.To date we have worked on two tools. The first was an enhancement of the IWF's Bulk Image Viewer. The Bulk Image Viewer is used for rapidly scanning newsgroup images. The second was an Unreferenced Picture Finder used to locate hidden pictures on websites.
The next stage of research is to build a tool for moderators of online community platforms. This tool will unite: novel image visualization techniques, social clustering, and linguistic analysis.
Why do I blgo this? I am intrigued by the 'social cluster' thing. This seems to be the new idea to fight against spam (by checking if the email sender is from you network) and now it's used to check image dissemination.
Ludocraft is an interesting finnish lab (Department of Information Processing Science, University of Oulu):
LudoCraft studies games and applies the theoretical knowledge into game design. The approach combines theoretical, technical and artistic expertise in serving both the academic and the practitioner communities. The mission of LudoCraft is to distribute the knowledge of analytical gamers and game designers for the benefit of wider audience.Ludo - Theories of game and play Craft - Art of game design and development
LudoCraft = The Art of Designing and Creating Games and Play
LudoCraft is a flexible research unit with skills to study, invent and apply theoretical and empirical knowledge of games and game-like virtual environments. LudoCraft specialises in research, design, teaching and consultancy in three main areas: game design, game palying, game analysis
It's lead by researcher Tony Manninen who is doing a great job leading this.
Why do I blog this? I like what Tony Manninen wrote, especially about his analysis of first-person shooters. Check their publications! The approach of conducting research projects about video games to create a body of knowledge so that game designers could improve the way they create game is a topic of interest to me...
I am still struggling to find this paper, I cannot get an online version: Interdisciplinary criticism: analysing the experience of riot! a location-sensitive digital narrative by M. Blythe A, J. Reid A, P. Wright A, E. Geelhoed A, Behaviour & Information Technology, Volume 25, Number 2 / March-April 2006, pp. 127 - 139
Abstract: This paper reports the findings from quantitative and qualitative studies of Riot! – a location-sensitive interactive play for voices. The paper begins by introducing Riot!; it then explores the growing literature on theories of experience and goes on to report the findings from three empirical studies of the event: a questionnaire-based survey of 563 participants; 30 semi-structured interviews with groups and individuals; and in-depth ethnographic case studies of four participants. It was clear from the survey that most people had enjoyed Riot! However, the interview data demonstrated that they had also experienced frustration even where overall enjoyment ratings were high. This is explored in relation to perception of the system and goal definition. The ethnographic case studies identify barriers to engagement in terms of individual identity and orientation. A critical theory-based analysis of Riot! further explicates the user experience in terms of literary devices such as characterisation and the development of narrative expectation.
The studies identify a number of usability problems such as inconsistency of interaction and non-reversibility that caused frustration. The critical analysis also identifies problems with the script such as the presentation of linear narrative in a non-linear medium. It accounts for widely differing accounts of the experience with reference to the participant's individual orientations or habitus. The paper demonstrates the value of an interdisciplinary approach for exploring the commonality and particularity of user experience.
Quick notes for readers who are puzzled by this blog:
Oh and finally, yes, 2006 will still be about all this stuff.
Via Internet Actu, the whereabouts clock is a location-based service targeted for the 'future home'. Dan Simmons from the BBC Click Online describes it as:
It shows you where people are, and its inventor Abigail Sellen thinks its best use is in the home. She said: "We noticed in our studies of family life that it was important to know - when you come home from work for example - are my kids still at school, have they left school yet, has my husband left work yet, shall I get the dinner on? This kind of thing. Actually knowing where your family is very important to family life." It would track the mobile phone signals of loved ones, then cross-reference which mobile cell they were in with pre-programmed locations, like the home, school, or workplace.
| Ms Sellen added: "This is not very specific at all about where people are, and that's deliberate. We don't want to invade people's privacy too much, so we deliberately keep things very coarse grained. "If I'm at home I might want to know if my kids have left school, but I don't necessarily want to know exactly where they are." |  |
This project is carried out by Microsoft research.
Why do I blog this? well it's yet another lbs (this time not targetted for mobile devices but as a representation of mobile others at home). Though the scenario are still cliché (the kid tracking thing), it might be interesting to have visualizations generated after extracting mobile phones' data so that it can create an ambient display of who is were. I can fairly imagine different levels of accuracy depending on privacy concerns. However, I am a bit skeptical by such a tool to "Actually knowing where your family is very important to family life". Of course people wants to know where others are but those 'others' sometimes does not want to let people know where they are!
Besides, it's funny to see the way how location-based service is introducted: a reference to Harry Potter's marauder's map. It's starting to be a new meme!
This is obviously the last post of 2005. It's devoted to an interesting installation in Geneva called "L'arbre Atchoum" (The Atchoum Tree, atchoum is, in french, the sound of someone who has a flu). This project, as part of the Arbres & Lumières Festival in Geneva has been developed by Genevieve Favre and Antoine Petroff (electronics and performing). Here is how the artists describes this tree:
The tree on Place René Payot has a cold. Given a voice by astonishing, fabulous musician Daniel Bourquin, the tree neezes, sniffles, whines, complains. It's trying to rest but the approaching pedestrians passing under its branches or near its trunk distrub the tree's nap. Their presence can trigger an outburst of repetitite sneezes or even cause it to lose its temper! This lime tree, spending the winter naked, is inhabitated by scintillating lights which punctuate its moods and accompany the tone of its voice. Fifty discreet LED spotlights dot the tree's branches and light up along with the random voice samples.
Some picture I took yesterday:
A video is available here. If you happen to be in Geneva, go there and watch people being disturbed by the tree's screams ("Have a good meal", "Go dancing!", "Always wearing ties...") :)
The NYT has an interesting list of what they think are 2005 gadgets:
THE FOLDING MEMORY CARD / THE VOICE MAIL VCR / THE FRONT-SIDE TV CONNECTOR / THE BIGGER-THAN-TV MOVIE / TV A LA CARTE / THE OUTER-BUTTON FLIP PHONE / THE FREE DOMAIN NAME / THE MODULAR DVD SCREEN / THE FAMILY-PORTRAIT BURST MODE / THE HYBRID HIGH-DEFINITION TAPE
The list is very intruiging with some nice examples, the most interesting comment was certainly this:
And there you have it: some of the year's best small, sweet improvements in our electronic lives
That's it, we're in a process of small improvements lately. Big things (mass usage of the Internet, web explosion, wireless communication...) happened few years back and now things are improving (web to web2.0...), user-centered applications are developed, etc.
Sewing Circuits is a project by some folks I met in Japan: Leah Buechley Nwanua Elumeze and Sue Hendrix (from University of Colorado), a construction kit and acompanying activities that will allow kids to learn about circuits through sewing.
Each kit contained a patch of fabric, a fabric switch, two LEDs, a needle, conductive thread, and a battery attached to snaps. The girls designed images that incorporated the lights and switch, drew their designs with fabric markers and then sewed the lights and switch to their patches, creating a simple series circuit
In order to make your own electronic sewing kit, go check this page.
In Ten myths of multimodal interaction (Communications of the ACM, Vol. 42 , No. 11, pp. 74 - 81, 1999), Sharon Oviatt describes common myths about multimodal interaction (i.e. interacting with a computer using more different input/outputs, like mouse/voice/keyboards or more recent technologies). The myths she is describing are quite relevant to lots of HCI research:
- Myth #1: If you build a multimodal system, users will interact multimodally.
- Myth#2: Speech and pointing is the dominant multimodal integration pattern.
- Myth #3: Multimodal input involves simultaneous signals.
- Myth #4: Speech is the primary input mode in any multimodal system that includes it.
- Myth #5: Multimodal language does not differ linguistically from unimodal language.
- Myth #6: Multimodal integration involves redundancy of content between modes.
- Myth #7: Individual error-prone recognition technologies combine multimodally to produce even greater unreliability.
- Myth #8: All users’ multimodal commands are integrated in a uniform way
- Myth #9: Different input modes are capable of transmitting comparable content.during periods of blank staring.
- Myth #10: Enhanced efficiency is the main advantage of multimodal systems
The article is full of interesting examples that explains how each of these myths can be deconsctructed.
One year ago I blogged about microwave oven hacks and yesterday I ran across this intriguing usage of microwave technology: NATO pilots during the war in Kosovo has been fooled by microwave ovens they bombed, believing it was Serbian tanks. Some more information here:
According to a British officer who spent six months in the region and offered his own assessment of bombing damage, the Serbs lured the NATO planes using household microwave ovens to simulate the emissions of armored transport systems. (...) A NATO officer who gave an anonymous interview to the British Herald stated that only three tanks were found. "The Serbs use a lot of tricks to elude NATO bombs. The use of microwave ovens from houses in Kosovo to thumb their noses at the alliance was only one of their ruses." (...) it demanded nothing of them, since they used 100-dollar decoy devices (microwave ovens) which were available in every household. And the guided bombs cost around 30,000 dollars.
Yet another example of a lowtech jamming trick... Any this is a good example of how people hack existing technologies for other purposes.
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Update: Spot on this topic, I just saw this on Boing Boing: a book about "extreme tinkering and radical self expression through technology" (which is obviously one of the topic I am fascinated of). It's entitled "Adventures from the Technology Underground : Catapults, Pulsejets, Rail Guns, Flamethrowers, Tesla Coils, Air Cannons, and the Garage Warriors Who Love Them (Hardcover)" by William Gurstelle who also blogs here. |
Outsourcing research and development seems to be a new trend, as attested by this article in Der Spiegel. It's about small businesses and major corporations which use the Internet to advertise monetary awards for inventions. They call this concept "innocentive", the name is a fusion of the words innovation and incentive.
The business principle behind the company's idea exchange is quite simple. A company has a problem it wants to solve, but its own R&D department is unable to develop a solution on its own. So the company describes the problem it wants solved -- using a few sentences, formulas or graphics -- posts it on Innocentive's Web site and names a sum it's willing to pay for the invention. (...) Some 80,000 inventors have already tried their hand at solving the various problems posted on Innocentive. The rules are straightforward: Whoever produces the best solution gets the money, while everyone else gets nothing. The Web site charges the companies a fee to post their questions. In return, they remain anonymous, in order to protect company secrets.
Still, there are some drawbacks:
"Some full-time researchers, apparently worried about losing their own jobs, are intentionally flooding online innovation marketplaces with unsolvable problems, in order to frustrate their competitors on the Internet." Furthermore, the rigid contract policies are also the source of disgruntlement. Says freelance researcher Hügin: "It's difficult to get accustomed to the idea of giving up all intellectual property rights to an anonymous company, as is often the case."
Why do I blog this? I think freelance research is starting to be a new mode (judging on companies new way of managing innovation/R&D). Innocentive seems to be an interesting model (very web2.0).
| Update: what is impressive is this banner (on the innoventive project page), about how to find your lab gear... |  |