The Reconstruction of Space & Time through Mobile Communication Practices

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A call for paper that might lead to something I'd be interesting to read/work on:

call for papers for the first Mobile Communication Research Annual. In conjunction with Transaction Publishers and a distinguished editorial board, we are requesting submissions in the area of "The Reconstruction of Space & Time through Mobile Communication Practices."

Rich Ling and Scott Campbell

The volume's theme will be "The Reconstruction of Space and Time through Mobile Communication Practices." The proliferation of wireless and mobile communication technologies gives rise to important changes in how people experience space and time. These changes may be seen in many realms of social life, such as the transformation of public into private space and vice versa, the blurring of lines demarcating work and personal life, and new patterns of coordination and social networks. Recent scholarship has tried to make sense of these changes in space and time. For example, Manuel Castells argues that advances in telecommunications have contributed to new spatio-temporal forms, which he describes as "the space of flows" and "timeless time." According to Castells, these new forms mark a shift in the importance of the meaning of a place to the patterns of the de-sequenced, networked interactions that occur in that place. The purpose of this special issue is to continue and deepen the dialog on how space and time change as a result of the lower threshold for interaction due to mobile communication technologies.

Abstracts of 200 words describing the proposed papers are due by 17 March 2006 with those accepted due in final form by 1 September 2006.

Why do I blog this? I feel like this topic is highly relevant to my research, especially with regards to how knowing where others (people+objects) are can change specific behaviors (communication content, channel of communication used, negotiation and coordination processes...)

Readers asks me where is the url of the CfP. I don't know; I get it from a mailing list (telecom-cities) under the name "Call for Papers: THE MOBILE COMMUNICATION RESEARCH ANNUAL"...

LIFT06: X. Comtesse on the new economy (2006)

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Xavier Comtesse's talk is about how the new economy is following a new trend: it's based on ordinary people who are now what can be called 'consumactors'. It's basically a neologism based on consumer and actors or consommacteur in french; it expresses the fact that consumer are now ‘actor’ of the system, e.g. for Amazon.com in which people’s review give more and more power to the platform. This is definitely a new business model. So, for Xavier, 2 concepts are important:

  • transfactors: people who by using new algorithm are able to transform what has been previously done by machines or organizations. Example. Marc Bürki who started a bank after his engineering degree at EPFL but had never worked in a bank. The same goes for Amazon: Jeff Bezos had never worked in a book shop.
  • consumactors: as said earlier, it's when the users are empowered by the company/platforms and clients have to do part of the job, as with low-cost airline companies such as easyjet:

I would say that , simply, the economy is following the Web 2.0 trend: the most important part of the process is the people: be it consumers or web users. Alain de Vulpian said something like: "from a rigidly regulated mass society to a living networking society"

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Bruce Sterling at LIFT06 + Blogject Workshop

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Well it seems the whole lift06 conference is doing fine. I am very happy of Bruce Sterling's keynote about spimes and the new ecology of things. The reason why I say so is because it really wrap up in a very down-to-earth idea what we - as lab researchers - might are expecting. The spime concept as he expressed can be described by 6 things:

  1. interactive chips, objects can be labelled with unique identity
  2. local and precise positioning systems
  3. powerful search engines
  4. 3d virtual models of objects
  5. rapid prototyping of objects
  6. cradle to cradle recycling

Bruce elaborated on these concepts and how they would foster innovations AND problems. What was great was the way he articulated this to the novel he is currently writing.

And since the community (researchers, designers, foresight people...) is arguing about 'disambiguating (or not disambiguating) the current terminology, what Bruce put together was very relevant, commenting on expressions like 'everyware', "ubicomp", "infocloud" (yes but only if the cloud give birth to the objects...), "storytelling"...

Now, with regard to the blogject workshop we had yesterday (I'll transcript my notes later on, it was really interesting and lots of issues has been raised, thanks people!), Bruce Sterling commented on what we discussed: instead of having objects that produces some content, wouldn't it be - instead - the object that may be produced by the content?? (the infocloud?).

I also appreciated the most important question behind this: "why the hell would we need spimes?", his answer is that it may eventually lead (and hopefully for us) to a sustainable world (and from I discussed with his wife, it could also leads to some minorities emancipation).

Bio-hijacking by terrorists

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Could Terrorists Hijack Your Brain? is a good paper by Emily Singer which deals with this potential fact: technological advances in the not-so-distant future may make it a possibility.

Most bioweapons research has focused on traditional biological agents, such as anthrax and smallpox. But that focus is dangerously narrow, the report says; emerging technologies in biotechnology and the life sciences could be hijacked to take control of genes, immune systems, and even brains. (...) the report recommends that technologies with dual-use potential -- those that can be used to either help or harm humanity -- be continually reassessed to take account of rapid advances in biotechnology

Some examples of bioterrorists threats:

Newer technologies such as targeted delivery methods that zero in on the immune or neuroendocrine systems could make it easier to use bioregulators in insidious ways.

Terrorists could also co-opt relatively new technologies, such as synthetic biology, which aims to build organisms that can detect or produce chemicals or perform other functions; and RNA interference, a technique that allows scientists to easily control gene expression.

Why do I blog this? I don't want to play the party pooper here but I was interested in this balance: being careful with technology that may help humanity because they could easily be reversed...

Random Lift Quotes

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Since I am too busy handling things for LIFT06, I just managed to reach my mac for typing few quotes: "Lost for example is designed as a video game although it is a tv series. There is the creation of a virtual space that makes people react and try to figure out and decrypt." Bruno Guissani

"A camel is a horse designed by committee" Jeffrey Huang quoting Alec Issigonis.

"20-30% of the workers in the video game creation industry in France have picked up and moved to Canada in recent years." Pierre Carde

"Easyjet had made more connected europeans than the European Union" Thomas Madsen-Mygdal

"unlike what friedman says, the world is not flat, but rather spiky" Pierre Carde quoting Richard Florida

"Innovation lab is a physical blog on speed" Thomas Sevcik

"...and spimes may lead to teddy-bear supporting machines... a rothweiler kicking the shit out of a teddy bear" Bruce Sterling

"IM and VoIP are supporting continuous communication" Stefana Broadbent

"It's not longer learning anywhere anytime, it's learning SOMEWHERE; we are social animals" Pierre Dillenbourg

"why MS is not advertising in women magazines" Anina

"... those fake art projects [presented by Regine Debatty] reminds me Piaget's work with counter-examples" Stefana Broadbent

"was there greenpeace movement before tv?" David Galipeau

"Games are bloody repetitive and boring" Kelly Richdale

"SMS is to tell you I miss you, Email is to organise our dinner, Voice is to say I’m late, and IM is to continue our conversation" Stefana Broadbent

Pigeons that blog

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Food for thoughts for the workshop about "blogjects" and the internet of things, these pigeons bloggers are curious. I think I saw it already at Regine's place but Julian reminded me of this because it's close to the blogject idea. It's a project by Beatriz Da Costa:

PIGEONBLOG provides an alternative participatory way to environmental air pollution data gathering. It equips Urban Homing Pigeons with GPS enabled electronic air pollution sensing devices, capable of sending location based air pollution data as well as images to an online Mapping/Blogging Environment in real time. (...) PigeonBlog uses a combination of Siemens' XT 56 miniature GPS/GSM unit, an electronic automotive CO and NOx sensing unit and the Atmel AVR microprocessor. Detailed tech and datasheet information is forthcoming on this site.

However, in addition to being used for PigeonBlog, Cina Hazegh is currently working on broadening this platform towards a more general Open Source Hardware cell phone project. (...) Pigeons releases will occur once a day throughout the duration of the festival on the ISEA premises. Release location: ClockTower in San Jose. The first release will take place during the opening ceremony of the festival on tuesday evening. Additional "White Dove" releases are planned at strategic high pollutant areas within the San Jose region. Exact locations are to be determined.

Be careful with Lego Mindstorms

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A friend of mine has been arrested yesterday in a train in Germany. He was basically playing/programming LEGO Mindstorms during his way in the train. The cops said he was suspected to prepare a bomb and then had to answers some questions about the material he was carrying. After few hours, they released him but he had to pay a 50 euros fine and had to leave his mindstorms gear there. Fortunately he could take back his own laptop. Update: my friend got back his mindstorms kit

Cyworld control room

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Doing some research on Korean virtual communities, I ran across this picture of South Korean Cyworld (taken on Wikipedia):

Cyworld (Korean: 싸이월드) is a South Korean web community site operated by SK Communications, a subsidiary of SK Telecom. Literally translated, "Cyworld" means "relationship world."

Members cultivate on- and off-line relationships by forming "first-degree" (Korean: 일촌) buddy relationships with each other through a service called "minihompy," which encompasses a photo gallery, message board, guestbook, and personal bulletin board. A user can link his/her minihompy to another user's minihompy to form a buddy relationship. It has been reported that as much as 90 percent of South Koreans in their 20s are registered users of Cyworld, and as of September 2005, daily unique visitors are about 20 million.

Why do I blog this? Web platforms/virtual communities control displays might be amazingly relevant with regard to the kind of information designers could access to. Following in real-time what happen on Google, Web2.0 applications or multi-user games might be impressive.

Judging from the picture, there seems to be lots of quantitative data (various vizualisations) and some qualitative data (harder to summarize them visually). This raises lots of questions like what do they extract? how do they use them? + What's about privacy concerns!

del.icio.us and digital marketing

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A BW article about digital marketing

Del.icio.us could be extremely useful for his business. Wiredset helps entertainment companies develop their digital strategies. By following the tags for a band, Ghuneim could let a record company know the level of buzz after a radio interview or live performance. He could find chatter about budding artists. Essentially, del.icio.us would allow him to listen in on the conversations on the Net that he cared about, minute by minute. He's now obsessed. (...) companies are figuring out ways to take advantage of this phenomenon. As they tag, subscribers end up collectively highlighting changing trends and raging discussions all available at the del.icio.us site. Increasingly, innovative advertisers and other companies are trying to make sense of these discussions. "The conversation we're having with clients is, 'How do you stay on top of tagging? Because you need to, and it can be hugely beneficial,"' says Dan Buczaczer, a vice-president at ad firm Starcom Media Vest Group. (...) Wiredset is on the leading edge. It's developing a service for record labels that pulls together a variety of online data -- sales on Amazon.com, number of blog posts, tags on del.icio.us. The idea? Allow labels to see, in real time, the impact of their marketing. If Sony BMG Music Entertainment releases an MP3 from the band Franz Ferdinand on MySpace, it can track the buzz. Or watch how an MTV video affects Amazon sales. As a test, Wiredset is tracking the tags of a London band, Bloc Party. Wiredset follows the chatter around the band's new album to pinpoint influential online players. "It's good to find and establish relationships we might not know about,"

Why do I blog this? It's interesting to see how a field of digital marketing emerge based on Web2.0 applications (technorati, del.icio.us...). Besides, my favorite part is when they say "It's good to find and establish relationships we might not know about," because it's really what I like to do: finding and understanding connections between different concepts.

A tangible cube as a TV input device

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Towards a Playful User Interface for Home Entertainment Systems by Florian Block is a project that aims at using a tangible cube as an input device for playfully changing between different TV-channels. It's carried out at the Embedded Interaction Research Group in Munich.

The basic idea for a new user interfaces for changing TV channels resulted of informal observations of people watching television. (...) The basic concept is to use a handy cube that allows changing the channels on TV by physical movement in a 3D-space. More specific a virtual version of the cube is shown on the television screen. On each phase of the cube a TV stream is rendered. The motion of the cube on the screen is connected to the rotation the user performs using the real cube. The user now can rotate the real cube in order to see the different sides and the TV channels respectively. If the cube is put down and not moved anymore the TV channel currently facing the user on the virtual cube is enlarged to cover the full screen. As soon as the user picks the cube up again the currently showing channel is resized back to the facing site of the virtual cube. Other channels are shown on the other sides of the cube.

Latour's inscriptions and software development

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Following my thoughts about Latour's inscription (see last week's post), I ran across this good paper about distributed software development and the link with 'inscriptions'. Latour's inscriptions are about "social arrangements, debates, divisions of labor, and patterns of work become inscribed into the artifacts and representations in which science trucks". In the context of software development, they want to study the relationship between technological artifacts and the social structures that shape them.

De Souza, C., Froehlich, J., and Dourish, P. 2005. Seeking the Source: Software Source Code as a Social and Technical Artifact. Proc. ACM Conf. Supporting Group Work GROUP 2005 (Sanibel Island, FL.)

Our work has been motivated by the question of whether aspects of informal software process can be found in the structure of the software artifact itself. Using a software visualization tool, Augur, we have been conducting an analysis of the artifacts of a number of software projects, a “software archeology” to explore the relationships between artifacts and activities as they are negotiated in distributed software development through mining software repositories. (...) Each pane displays a different aspect of the system being examined: changes in one view are immediately reflected in the others. The large central pane shows the line-oriented view of the source code. In the figure, the color of each pixel line indicates how recently it was modified; this allows a developer, at a glance, to see how much activity has taken place recently and where that activity has been located.

The conclusions are as follows:

Distributed software development presents two sources of complexity to its participants – the complexity of the software artifacts under development, and the complexity of the process of developing those artifacts. We have presented a study of software artifacts, conducted using a visualization tool, which demonstrates how these twin sources of complexity are intertwined. Software artifacts are not merely the objects of software development processes, but are also the means by which those processes are enacted and regulated. The structure of the artifact both reflects the processes by which it has been created and can be used to control those processes by centralizing points of access, by regulating the relationships between independent activities, and by making visible the relationships between individuals. It is a means, then, by which the articulation work of the project can be carried out.

Why do I blog this? I am fascinated by this: how technological artifacts and social structures might shape a certain phenomenon such as product development.

Thumb-mounted vibrator for trigger-happy gamers

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In the last issue of Wired, there is a short article about Periborg is very intriguing japanese company which does bizarre accessories for video-games. My favorite is "Ore-Commander" targeted for trigger-happy gamers who need a thumb-mounted vibrator that can help pressing buttons 20 times a second.

Why do I blog this? I like this trend of having more and more devices/accessories on top of existing video games paltforms. It leads to a certain variety compared to the low number of consoles.

Location-Based Marketing Issues

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Russell Buckley sunday post is of great interest for people who are wondering whether location-based marketing might work. For him, the most important question (presented after an insightful chain of arguments) is:

So, in fact, the really important question when studying LBM, the-answer-to-life-death-and-the-universe question of the subject, is: what kind of marketing messages should you say you’re going to send that will attract opt-in in the first place, that recipients will welcome and that they’ll respond to? In other words, what kind of messages will work? Knowing what the user wants is key to both opt-in in the first place and subsequently, optimising the channel’s effectiveness.

Stay tuned for the part 2 of his post!

Why do I blog this? if we extend our landscape to location-based messages (or place-based annotations or...), what would be the corresponding issue interaction designers would have to adress?

NYT on location-based services

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The NYT features a smart article about location-based services (By ETHAN TODRAS-WHITEHILL). Well-known projects like Dodgeball, Yellow Arrow, Social Light, Rabble, Street Hive or Rave Wireles are presented. Mostly, those systems allow proximity-based interaction (ping registered participants when participants/friends are in the vicinity) or location-based annotations/blogging (i.e virtual post-its)... allowing the so-called "geospatial Web, the Internet overlaid on the real world". Food for thought certainly for the current vocabulary disambiguation!

The article raises the issue of location-awareness, be it passive or active as they call it:

What the industry calls passive location awareness on the part of cellphones is critical to growth in mobile social software. It simply means that a phone knows where it is because it is equipped with technology like a Global Positioning System. Most current location-based services do not automatically keep track of where you are; you need to tell them by sending a text message. Passive awareness in your cellphone, by contrast, lets sites like Socialight or Dodgeball keep track of where you are all the time and send you relevant information posted by others.

But getting passive awareness on your phone is not easy. (...) cellphone users are suspicious of passive location awareness because they do not want to get unsolicited location-based text messages, or geospam, from advertisers as they pass stores.

Besides, the conclusion is very interesting:

As for other mobile social programs, a press officer for Verizon Wireless suggested that in the future the company might let its customers use such services through an off-network, "trusted content provider" model.

And geospam? It may actually materialize, and even the developers of mobile software are not thrilled by the idea.

"The billboards are already there," said Mr. Allen of Yellow Arrow. "I don't need a message in my pocket to tell me McDonald's is around the corner."

So true...

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Curious Handheld Games

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Wow, I'd like this device could have a GPS inside so that I can fish on a city plazzas: "The latest introduction to the best-selling "Bass Fishin" series" (made by Radica).

They have plenty of intriguing devices like thumb warriors or friendchips:

  • Girls send secret electronic notes using a chip and reader unit.
  • Instant text message friends.
  • Create 'em, Pass 'em, and Collect 'em.
  • Password protected for added security.
  • Comes with two reader units and four chips.

Psychophysiological techniques to measure user experience with entertainment technologies

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Using psychophysiological techniques to measure user experience with entertainment technologies by Mandryk R, Inkpen K, Calvert T, Behaviour and Information Technology, Vol. 25, No. 2. (April 2006), pp. 141-158. This seems to be the new trend in 'user experience' analysis: using psychophysiological techniques to attest/validate specific applications/environments. Here is roughly, the point of the paper:

Current subjective methods of evaluating entertainment technology aren’t sufficiently robust. This paper describes two experiments designed to test the efficacy of physiological measures as evaluators of user experience with entertainment technologies. We found evidence that there is a different physiological response in the body when playing against a computer versus playing against a friend. These physiological results are mirrored in the subjective reports provided by the participants.

The authors base their claim on the fact that current methods are either costly (coding gesture, body language... then there are some inter-rater reliability) or too subjective ( user preference) and then advocates for taking psychophysiological techniques into account: Galvanic skin response, Cardiovascular measures, Respiratory measures, Electromyography, Emotions identifications.

Some of the results:

The methodological problems that we initially experienced in collecting and analyzing physiological data revealed a number of caveats for conducting this type of research. For example, great care must be taken to avoid stimuli that affect emotional responses, other than the stimuli being investigated. Although we took many precautions in Experiment One, such as the caffeine intake, sex, and age of the participants, there were still effects that we did not predict, such as the responses generated.

Super Mario Bros Maps

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At last! I found the complete maps of Super Mario Bros.

Also, read chaotic n-space network for a good analysis of SMB level design:

SMB was rather revolutionary in terms of level design. Earlier games had usually only had a few game screens which did not change. Games like Adventure, which had distinct levels with multiple screens, were the exception. SMB, however, was a scrolling platformer with 32 different levels, some of which were even mazes. Gamers had no choice but to memorize some levels. The last level is a good example of this: There is a specific sequence of pipes one must go down in order to get to the end of the level; take the wrong one, and Mario is returned to the beginning of the level to start all over again. This memorization was probably SMB's biggest contribution to the gaming world. While almost all games require some level of memorization, and Super Mario Bros. was not really the first of its kind, SMB took it to a new level and a new prominence, setting a precedent for most of the popular console games to follow. This came to be both a blessing and a curse. While it introduced a new genre, it also introduced a new fad, as large portion of following games would be sidescrolling platformers. Just as first-person three-dimensional shooters dominate now, and Space Invaders or Asteroids style shooters dominated the early years of gaming, these games came to dominate gaming in the late eighties and early nineties so much that one becomes almost sick of them. And as level design and graphics began to dominate new games, gameplay tended to suffer: Each game was just like the last one, but with a facelift.

Why do I blog this? I am an absolute fan of SMB.

Web surfers decide the worth of a site in a mere 50 milliseconds.

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Attention web designers: You have 50 milliseconds to make a good first impression! by Gitte Lindgaard, Gary Fernandes, Cathy Dude, J. Browñ, in Behaviour & Information Technology, Volume 25, Number 2 / March-April 2006, pages: 115 - 126. The paper shows how web surfers decide the worth of a site in a mere 50 milliseconds.

Three studies were conducted to ascertain how quickly people form an opinion about web page visual appeal. In the first study, participants twice rated the visual appeal of web homepages presented for 500 ms each. The second study replicated the first, but participants also rated each web page on seven specific design dimensions. Visual appeal was found to be closely related to most of these. Study 3 again replicated the 500 ms condition as well as adding a 50 ms condition using the same stimuli to determine whether the first impression may be interpreted as a ‘mere exposure effect’ (Zajonc 1980). Throughout, visual appeal ratings were highly correlated from one phase to the next as were the correlations between the 50 ms and 500 ms conditions. Thus, visual appeal can be assessed within 50 ms, suggesting that web designers have about 50 ms to make a good first impression.

Why do I blog this? this is an important fact to be taken into account for interaction designers... as users' attention span is decreasing, their decision are taken very quickly... so much for Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking" (Malcolm Gladwell).