Using Pictochat as a Backchannel in conference

Yesterday at the student presentation (Interactive Media Program at the Annenberg), there was a guy who briefly talked about the use of Nintendo DS' pictochat as a backchannel device during conferences. I found it pretty neat. Quoting his friend who gives the account:

The third best thing about the show was apparently the amount of Pictochat action going on in all the major keynotes. Of course, this anonymous metachat style leads to merciless barbs, such as when Valve's Gabe Newell accidentally started talking about 'beef' (as opposed to 'brief') in his Choice Awards intro spot, to a chorus of Pictochatted 'LOL' comments. Next time, GDC, let's see the Pictochatrooms projected on the screen behind the speakers - OMG?

More about what they do at the Zemeckis Media LAb in terms of backchannel in this paper: Justin A. Hall, Scott S. Fisher (2006) Experiments in Backchannel: Collaborative Presentations Using Social Software, Google Jockeys, and Immersive Environments. CHI 2006 workshop about Information Visualization and Interaction Techniques for Collaboration across Multiple Displays.

A pictochat picture taken from the Wikipedia:

Why do I blog this? I find backchannel interesting, especially when using simple and ubiquitous devices such as the Nintendo DS with its simple pictochat interface. It's a very efficient way to create and ad-hoc discussion. With this sort of things (as well as the Opera web browser), the DS is starting to be more and more relevant as a platform to do more things than video-games.

Tongue-based interface

Using the tongue as interface seems to be a new innovation. Researchers at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition worked out an application called "Brain Port" that uses the tongue's ability to detect sonar echoes to control a PC.

"Everything nowadays is so ubiquitous with mobile computing, and we need to find new, hands-free ways of interacting for environments where your hands and eyes are busy," she noted. "I could see something like this being used in cars."

In the human adaptation of this natural strategy, researchers have users stick their tongues into a red plastic strip, filled with microelectrodes, to retrieve information from such instruments as electronic compasses or hand-held sonar devices (...) the project also aims to enable infrared vision via the tongue, resulting in the appropriate tongue-twister of "infrared-tongue vision."

With infrared-tongue vision, divers, soldiers, or pilots could see behind themselves or move in the dark without night-vision goggles, according to project lead scientist Anil Raj.

Why do I blog this? actually I find curious to use the tongue, especially because it raises new questions in terms of affordance, user experience, and involvement in an interaction (what about hygiene?). Let's have video games using this

Being in LA

I'm currently in Los Angeles for few things: participating to the "place" planel of the network publics conference, visiting my friend Julian Bleecker's lab and preparing the follow-up of our blogject project.

Apart from watching empty streets with huge-sidewalks, frank gehry architecture, I spend today visiting the Annenberg Center and Julian's Mobile and Pervasive Lab, also attending to a circus of students presentations at the Zemeckis Media Lab. My running notes are here

Technorati Tags: networkedpublics

Le Frontiere Dell'Interazione

Italian-speaking people might be interested in Le Frontiere Dell'Interazione, an event part of the UXnet network. As the local organizer puts it, this year event is going to be "intelligent" interfaces and artifacts, location aware devices, multimodalities and emotion aware avatars. It will be held on the 16th of june and will last for the whole day. There program features Pabini Gabriel-Petit (UXmatters.com), Fabio Sergio (Interaction Design Institute Ivrea), Sebastiano Bagnara (Politecnico Design), Giorgio De Michelis (Domus Academy) plus remote contributions from Dirk Knemeyer (Involution Studios)

The event will be hosted at the Milano-Bicocca University.

Digital home education

Look at this superb design: the Intelli-Tikes™ Pasta Pack :

“Intelli-Tikes™” interactive technology makes role play with our toy kitchens even more fun! Electronic chips in pretend foods are read by sensors in the stovetop, which respond with over 100 specific food and cooking phrases. Sensors in these toy kitchens can also tell whether more than one food at a time is placed on the stovetop and respond with phrases like “What a creative dish.”

“Intelli-Tikes™” interactive technology makes pasta making more fun! Electronic chips in these pretend foods are read by sensors in an RFID kitchen, which responds with over 50 food and cooking phrases. The 8-piece set includes a pasta pot with lid, spoon, oregano, tomato sauce, pasta, garlic bread and meatballs. Works with the 440Y MagiCook™ Kitchen and the 442F Cook ’n Clean™ Kitchen. Ages 2 years and up.

Why do I blog this? what is this? a role play toy that make kids use to RFID technology so that they cook products with RFID when being adults. It reminds me some technology I saw in a french lab that used RFID tags to know cooking time for chicken brought in RFID-enabled microwave oven.

Sincerely, I've never been a great fan of this sort of digital home applications and from what is published it does not seem to work very well (in terms of market acceptance). Here it's meant to be used by kids. As the Motorola guy mentioned in Adam's book were pushing to: the guy was saying - sort of, I don't have the quote here- that if the market is not accepting digital homes, it may be that "people should be educated".

About interference devices

I recently saw this intriguing news: a man who said he bought a device that allowed him to change stop lights from red to green received a $50 ticket for suspicion of interfering with a traffic signal.:

Niccum was issued a citation March 29 after police said they found him using a strobe-like device to change traffic signals. Police confiscated the device.

"I'm always running late," police quoted Niccum as saying in an incident report.

The device, called an Opticon, is similar to what firefighters use to change lights when they respond to emergencies. It emits an infrared pulse that receivers on the traffic lights pick up. Niccum was cited after city traffic engineers who noticed repeated traffic light disruptions at certain intersections spotted a white Ford pickup passing by whenever the patterns were disrupted.

Why do I blog this? I find this interfering devices curious. Of course, it reminds me the tv b gone that I bought and that I don't really use. What is funny is how it's marketed:

Your TV-B-Gone® universal remote control resembles other TV remote controls, but is different in two important ways. First, it only has a power button that allows you to switch a TV on or off.

You control when you see, rather than what you see. Second, the device is so small that it easily fits in your pocket, so that you have it handy whenever you need it wherever you go: airports, bars, restaurants, laundromats, etc.

It's just for television but it's already something because you can control PUBLIC tv's our tv's in public places. Things go event further with the device that change traffic lights because it clearly disrupts the public life (or at least the conventions the public life is set). Is this a new trend? Having private devices to modify event for private interests.

This also reminds me the RFID washer:

it finds RFID tags and “electronically washes” it, thus protecting your privacy. (…) It disables the tag using patented prioprietary technology (…) it is designed to destroy all tags that you will find on everyday objects – these are known as passive tags. It is not designed to destroy active tags which are used in industrial applicatio“

In this case, there is another "value" assigned to the device: protecting one's privacy.

Fancy fishy RFID tags

(Via), it's as if the design of RFIS tags is more and more trendy; as those from Mannings:

Would the form/shape of the tags play a role in the user acceptance?

Vodafone's Receiver new issue

The last issue of Vodafone's receiver is another refreshing arrival. Some papers are connected to my phd research (use of mobile devices for coordination in small groups).

The most relevant one for my research is certainly the one of Jeff Axup called "Blog the World". Some excerpts that I liked:

the normal life stages which individuals go through are increasingly taking place in a mobile setting that challenges the individual with new activities, customs and lifestyles. An interesting component of this is the increasingly popular activity of backpacking. (...) Examining what technologies could be used to support this highly mobile stage of life may provide insights into how to support their increasingly mobile home life as well.
(...)
Some of these tools include email, mobile phones, SMS, instant messaging and blogs. For the past several years a group of colleagues and I have been looking at the existing technology use and communication habits of backpackers in order to inform the design of new tourism technologies.

This seems to be neat:

More recently we have been experimenting with network graphs showing the behavior of travel blogging communities. A database of 8,073 travel blog entries from within Australia was used to explore the blogging habits of 1,149 bloggers. A primary outcome of the analysis is a graph showing which cities were most blogged about and which travel routes (inferred from blog entries) were most commonly taken. This has resulted in a better understanding of which routes are "on the beaten path" and where backpackers can go for solitude. Other graphs show the social networks that backpackers form while traveling. For example one graph shows how people are connected to blogged activities, such as friends met on a trip to the Great Barrier Reef. Another animated graph shows the growth of a backpacker’s social network as she travels and meets new people. These types of visualizations should be able to assist backpackers in recalling who they have met and how they know each other. It may also allow communities to become more aware of their own behavior, and the consequence of it on the cultures they visit.

And location-awareness of others seems to be important:

So what might the future of backpacking look like? (...) With the increasing population density of backpackers, there is a corresponding rise in potential for peer-to-peer short range networking technologies. This allows pairing of backpackers who are in the same place at the same time

Why do I blog this? I know Jeff's research from his blog + some IM discussion and it's quite pertinent. His work is devoted to "the development and design of mobile devices used by groups and how device design might change group behavior". Which is sligthly different from what i do (I am more focused on how specific features such as location-awareness change group behavior in terms of social and cognitive processes).

New Media/Old Media

The Economist this week has a very insightful report on "new media". They did a great job giving a complete overview of what's new in socio-cultural practices due to the advent of blogs, wiki, IM and so on. There are just two articles available for free and they're not (IMO) the most interesting ones. I was better interested in the one entitled "Compose yoursefl". The article addresses how journalism and old media are reshaped by new technologies. This nicely illustrate a phenomenon that is often misunderstood: new media does not bury old media. Of course, some old media are injured but there is - sort of - a new relationship that is being built; and it's not just Rupert Murdoch buying MySpace. What is funny is to see that, in the first place, old media tries to replicate the open-source/innovation (bottom-up?) phenomenon, as with wikitorial (a term coined by the Los Angeles Times to describe a traditional editorial that can be edited in the fashion of a wiki according to Wikipedia)... and it failed. But then, some more intelligent folks found that what was important was not transferring the idea of letting people publishing things to other others concepts. Then the article gives relevant recipe for old media to position themselves in the world of new media:

The first step, says Mr Jarvis [newspaper consultant], is to tear down any walls around the website. Nowadays, "it's not content until it's linked", he says, and bloggers will not link to articles that require logins and subscriptions to be viewed. (...) The sites that bloggers link to most are the online NYT, CNN, the Washington Post... These are free or mostly free stides and thus, in effect part of "the" conversation. (...) By the same logic, news sites should avoid the still surprisingly common internet sin called "link-rot". This refers to websites that publish an article under one web address but then change the URL when archiving the article. (...) Instead of assuming that readers will start on the front page, editors should expect them to enter at any point, probably having started our from google's search page or a blog or an e-mail from a friend. (...) The next step is to allow - indeed, encourage - reader participation on individual pages. This could start with a simple star-rating system of each article. Deeper engagement would include comment panes at the bottom of stories, or blog discussions between the journalists and invited guests.

Why do I blog this? I am interested by this as an observer of how emerging technologies reshape socio-cultural practices. In this context, it's pertinent to see how old media integrate new concepts from new media, with first a naive direct transfer (turning old school newspaper in a wiki-like edition style) that firstly fails and then it stabilizes with the inclusion of certain features from the new media practices (stable url, open platform, discussion features).

Everyware: book review

I already presented some thoughts about "Everyware : The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing" by Adam Greenfield in this blog but here's a more detailed review. Overall, the book is an extremely complete overview of what is ubiquitous computing / pervasive computing / ambient computing / xxx. The terminology for this new computing paradigm is so diverse that the author coined the term "Everyware". The discussion about the terminology is still lively and I won't enter too much in the debate here because hmm I tend to agree on both sides.

What I appreciate in this book is the author's stance: taking the user experience hat allows Greenfield to go was beyond a simple catalogue of neat applications. This is not the propos here. More importantly, I really like the conclusion: "it's one of the many things in my life that I cannot conceive of being improved by an overlay of ubiquitous information technology. (...) I know enough about how informatics system are built and brought to market to be very skeptical about its chances of bringing wholesale improvements to the quality of my life (...) I have a hard time buying into the notion that such ubiquitous computing interventions in the world can be had without significant cost". Of course, it's Adam's (and also mine) work to study the user experience and HCI concerns so this conclusion (and the fact that I like it) are quite logical, but there is certainly more reason to acknowledge them. Unfortunately, there is currently little studies about pervasive computing usage. That is also what Adam says: advocating for more user experience concerns and studies using social sciences in ubicomp, I cannot say more that this is exactly what we are trying to do with CatchBob!: trying to explore and understand how certain features of pervasive computing (it's scientific research, we cannot tackle all the topics at the same time) may affect social and cognitive processes. My work is directed towards understanding how location-awareness impacts group collaboration by exploring how knowing others' whereabouts affects small group communication, construction of a shared understanding of the team, strategy negotiation, coordination as well as inferring other's intents. Fabien is using Catchbob to study the problem of users' uncertainty.

The thesis 18 is also interesting ("in many circumstances, we can't really conceive of the human being engaging everyware as a "user""). That's indeed a problem we're facing when discussing about blogjects with Julian.

I already discussed the thesis 43 (“Everyware produces a wide-belt of circumstances where human agency, judgement and will are progressively supplanted by compliance with external, frequently algorithmically-applied standards and norms“.) but the thesis 35 is also of relative importance with regards to my work: "Everyware surfaces and makes explicit information that has always been latent in our lives, and this will frequently be incommensurate with social or psychological comfort". In my work about how people benefit (or not) from having automatical information about other's location in space, this the case: sometimes the information is not needed and brings people on wrong inferences or miscoordination. Automatically sending parterns' location led people to less focus on other parameters.

Back to the book, what is good is to have a global perspective here; the section about what is driving the emergence of everyware is important for that matter: pervasice computing is latent and arriving due to some reasons ranging from techno-push companies to its existence in our imagination (inherently driven by a certain kind of culture).

Moreover, I am still wondering about the tinkering potential of everyware. Adam says in p163 that "everyware is not going to be something simply vended to a passive audience by the likes of Intel and Samsung: what tools such as Ning tells us is that there will be millions of homebrew designers/makers developing their own modules...". There are mixed signals about this. On one hand, there are lots of tinkerers that use Ning, hack roomba robots or Nabatag but my fear is that those pervasive computing platforms are not open enough. IMO the most interesting, lively and open platform is the Web (and the Internet to a lesser extent), and I don't know whether a similar phenomenon would happen to pervasive computing (even though the web/forums/blogs/IM... allows better visibility and then the forming of community of practices).

I also liked the criticisms towards certain projects like the neverending variation around the "web-on-the-wall" or the intelligent fridge that - even when I saw them in action - I always found dead boring, tech-driven and not situated in user's practices. Besides, concepts like "the messy inexacitude of the everyday" are neat. The concluding guidelines are important and it's obviously a commitment to user experience specialists and researchers to do something.

Now for the critics, I would say that it could have been included in a wider overview using the NBIC framework (Nanotechnology Biotechhnology Information technology and Cognitive sciences) but it might had been detrimental to the reader's comprehension. So it's not too much of a problem.

However, I feel like the book lacks of graphics. It's not that I wanted picture to see what's behind everyware technology (I know that and I don't care, and I guess it's been on purpose so that the neophyte reader more focus on what is at stake than how it may look like) but for some theses and arguments, it would have been could to have graphics. Not scientific things but only few picture to clarify some points or to make arguments and theses more visual.

Finally, I miss the art dimension: if user experience and HCI are still lagging behind technology and engineering to address the usage of ubicomp, this is definitely not the case of art: interactive art gracefully tackles lots of issues in the world of pervasive computing. Of course, it's not scientific research, nor concrete arguments towards the comprehension of massive usage of pervasive computing but it brings lots of important concerns that Adam's address (on topic ranging from new user interface capabilities to the social impacts of those applications).

Also, speaking about convergence I'd be interested in thinking about how robots would fit into this everyware picture. I tend to think that not-anthropomorphical/pet robots are more interesting as ubicomp objects, and I am wondering about the convergence between robots and pervasive tech, which is IMO very latent.

I am playing the party pooper here, the book is a great achievement and a must-read for ubicomp novices. I have comments or connection for every pages so I will stop here. Let's talk about it directly on thursday Adam.

Google Map Games

Game on Google Maps offers a very good overview of the existing games that take advantage of google map. It ranges from very simple concept (finding a landmark) to more elaborate. With also ideas for possible implementations (Warcraft-like games or Risk or a revival of Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?).

An interesting existing project is Brewster Jennings Protects America: The global spy hunt game.:

Remember playing "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego" as a kid? Well now the new game Brewster Jennings Protects America brings this classic adventure into the 21st century by merging the game play with Google maps technology*. In the web-based Brewster Jennings Protects America game you race around the globe as a government agent trying to stop a deadly terror attack from taking place....

The story so far: You are an undercover CIA agent claiming to work for the fictitious "Brewster Jennings & Associates" company. You were just awoken at three in the morning by a phone call from The Chief telling you to report to your office immediately. From what he told you it looks like a terrorist is set to attack today and you are the country's last and only hope.

The "control your airplane" is almost an old-school shoot'em up with a google map.

My favorite is maybe Tripods in which you have to battle invading Google Maps tripod markers that are invading Manhattan!

Why do I blog this? with open platforms such as google map, there might be an opportunity to have creative location-based games/applications (with of course still some user interface issues).

MySpace and Space to hang out

Catching up with tons of papers, feeds, emails and crap after one week away, I was struck by a talk by Danah Boyd about MySpace called "Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace". Apart from the identity production topic as well as the social analysis of this platform, I was particularly interested in this:

So what exactly are teens _doing_ on MySpace? Simple: they're hanging out. (...) For many teens, hanging out has moved online. Teens chat on IM for hours, mostly keeping each other company and sharing entertaining cultural tidbits from the web and thoughts of the day. The same is true on MySpace, only in a much more public way. MySpace is both the location of hanging out and the cultural glue itself. MySpace and IM have become critical tools for teens to maintain "full-time always-on intimate communities" [4] where they keep their friends close even when they're physically separated. Such ongoing intimacy and shared cultural context allows youth to solidify their social groups. (...) It is not the technology that encourages youth to spend time online - it's the lack of mobility and access to youth space where they can hang out uninterrupted. (...) structured activities in controlled spaces are on the rise. After school activities, sports, and jobs are typical across all socio-economic classes and many teens are in controlled spaces from dawn till dusk. They are running ragged without any time to simply chill amongst friends.

By going virtual, digital technologies allow youth to (re)create private and public youth space while physically in controlled spaces. IM serves as a private space while MySpace provide a public component. Online, youth can build the environments that support youth socialization.

Yes, what lots of researchers and designers tries to do in the late 90s with VR about creating virtual space topology so that people could "hang out" on-line has been achieved through blogs, social software and platform such as MySpace.

Why do I blog this? what I found important in this analysis is that the author is taking space as the cornerstone of the activity. This is an important topic: how space affords social (and also cognitive) practices. And of course, compared to parents concerns, it's less visible than thinking that myspace is a dangerous place to meet peodphiles. This situation expresses a very relevant spatial phenomenon.

Dark side of computing

As we were discussing with fabien, the dark side of computing may lead to new fossils in the future. See this atrocious dump in Lagos, Nigeria.

(Picture © Basel Action Network 2006)

It's from the Basel Action Network, a very important NGO "focused on confronting the excesses of unbridled free trade in the form of “Toxic Trade” (trade in toxic wastes, toxic products and toxic technologies) and its devastating impact on global environmental justice".

Why do I blog this? I tend to blog and reblog this kind of picture to be reminded of what is the other face of technology, the one we do not know, we do not perceive (apart from old tv set thrown in the sidewalk that we sometime see in cities). It seems that emerging tech (pervasive computing) take the same path.

Visual Patterns and Communication for Robots

The Future Applications Lab in Gotenborg, Sweden is involved in a very interesting project (from my point of view) called ECagents (meaning Embodied and Communicating Agents).

The project will investigate basic properties of different communication systems, from simple communication systems in animals to human language and technology-supported human communication, to clarify the nature of existing communications systems and to provide ideas for designing new technologies based on collections of embodied and communicating devices.

The project is a huge EU thing but what the FAL is focusing on is about investigating how such mobile ommunicating agents would become a natural part of our everyday environment. In the masters thesis proposals, there is a description of what they're up to:

We have previosuly developed a number of ideas for possible application in the form of personas.

This thesis proposal is inspired by the persona Nadim. It is about developing a language for visual patterns using e.g. genetic programming, cellular automata, boids, diffusion-reaction, naming game or any other combination to visualize patterns on a small e-Puck robot. The robots should be able to develop as well as communicate such patterns through the language so that new and interesting patterns emerge from their perception of their environment and interaction with each other. The goal for the thesis is to either make a real demonstrator on the suggested platform (requires some previous knowledge about software implementation on embedded systems) or to make a simulated demonstrator based on the prerequisites.

Why do I blog this? I am less interested in the implementation and technical aspects but rather by the situatedness (or non) of communication between robots/artifacts of the future and human users. What happen during the interaction? what are the inference made by individuals about objects and vice-versa? How to improve this by creating new affordances?

Kafka Index

Last week, during an offline week in greece, I ran across this very curious new concept: the Kafka Index, created in France. It is basically and index that measures the complexity of a project/law and its impact. Referring to Franz Kafka's great novel "The Trial" in which a man tries to struggle against an atrocious bureaucracy, this index will be public (yeah, let's see what institutions are kafka-esque) and would be in the form of 1-100 scale "measuring how many hurdles, from forms to letters or phone calls, are needed to win state permits or aid for a project" (via). For those who can read french, here is the account from the Assemblée Nationale:

un indice - provisoirement baptisé « indice Kafka » - va par ailleurs être créé pour mesurer la qualité des projets de loi. À la place des études d'impact, qui ne fonctionnent pas, chaque projet de loi sera accompagné de deux notes : la première traduira la complexité de la loi et la seconde appréciera son impact, notamment en termes de coûts. Les grilles d'analyse élaborées ont été appliquées à des lois passées et donnent des résultats très intéressants. Cet indice étant public, chaque ministre sera incité à travailler davantage pour améliorer les dispositions de ses projets de loi ;

And it's only a provisional name!

Why do I blog this? Although it sounds amusing, I am curious about how people put meaning behind this kind of measure. I would prefer having visualization of the process liek the temporal description with the people in charge... hmmm activity theory?

Sterling on Independent Research

Bruce Sterling's "Visionary in Residence : Stories" include an intriguing novel called Ivory Tower, which has already been published in Nature in April 2005 for a special issue about "What does the next half-century have in store?".

It addresses a topic I am very interested in: independent research. Some quotes:

We were ten thousands physicists entirely self-educated by Internet (...) In the new world of open access, ultrawide broadband, and gigantic storage bank, physics is just sort of sitting there (...) we demanded state support to publish for our research efforts (just like real scientists do), but alas, the bureaucrats wouldn't give us the time of the day.

So to find time for our kind of science, we had to dump a few shibboleths. For instance, we never bother to "publish" - we just post our findings on weblogs, and if that gets a lot of links, hey, we're the Most Frequently Cited. Tenure? Who needs that? Never heard of it! Doctorates, degrees, defending a thesis? Don't know, don't need 'em, can't even be bothered. (...) You're one in a million, pal - but in a world of ten billion people, there's ten thousand of us. We immediately started swapping everything we knew on collaborative weblogs. (...) we established our Autodidacts' Academy... we also had unlimited processing power, bandwidth, search engines, social software and open-source everything.

Why do I blog this? This is not the current situation but the tools Sterling describes (which we already have) reshape the research practices. Researchers begin to use blogs, tagging (conotea), wiki; benefits from bandwidth + large processing power. The weblog ranking system is very close to the peer-review process (less formal, more emergent and messy). What we currently lack is the critical mass. I am not sure whether the blog or another platform might be a relevant format for publishing research but there is something interesting here.

BESIDES, some people are working in that direction. Olivier reports that this paper (which form is really far from the old-school scientific paper format because of its open-source-ness maybe) features for instance a reference to a blogpost. Is blogging good for the career? also asks Alex Pang

Constraints-Based Architecture

Design is bound by constraints as we can see on this picture (seen in Greece where I've been last week):

The tree was there and then "they" built the wall (and the street consequently)

Tangible Flags: collaborative field trip for kids

A case study of Tangible Flags: A collaborative technology to enhance field trips by Gene Chipman, Allison Druin, Dianne Beer, Jerry Alan Fails, Mona Leigh Guha, Sante Simms, Paper that will be presented at IDC 2006. The paper describes the participatory design of a "Tangible Flags technology" to support children (grade K-4) in collaborative artifact creation during field trips:

We worked with two teams of children in developing Tangible Flags; a group of 6 children, age 6-10, who joined us in our lab after school twice a week and a class of kindergarteners at the Center for Young Children, University of Maryland’s on campus research pre-school. We made observations of the kindergarten classroom’s actual field trips, and both teams participated in mock field trips. We experimented with marking the environment using flags consisting of a pipe cleaner attached to a popsicle stick. We named these Tangible Flags because the children planted them like flags and used them as a mock tangible interface for accessing digital artifacts. Our goal was to see the impact of the Tangible Flags concept on children’s collaborative effort and ability to re-locate or elaborate on their findings. These initial flags were not computationally enhanced, so adult researchers helped the children correlate Tangible Flags with various media, such as notes taken or pictures drawn by the children, or audio and video recordings created by the children.

Why do I blog this? this is a relevant example of how the physical connection to digital information through tangible interactions. The activity study is very insightful with regards to children appropriation of the technology.

Street Interconnectivity

Google Cartography: Street Art in Your Neighborhood is a curious google hack by Richard Jones:

Google Cartography uses Google via the Google Search API [] to build a visual representation of the interconnectivity of streets in an area.

This application takes a starting street and finds streets that intersect with it. Traversing the streets in a breadth-first manner, the application discovers more and more intersections, eventually producing a graph that shows the interconnectivity of streets flowing from the starting street.

Figures and show maps generated for two of the world's great cities, New York and Melbourne, respectively.

Why do I blog this? because I am fascinated by interconnectivity.

Meaningful whereabouts/locative information while googleing your shoes

Reading Everyware and thinking about Bruce Sterling's talk at LIFT06 and ETECH, I was mumbling about the idea of googling objects to know where they are. What Bruce was saying:

“I have an Internet-of-Things with a search engine of things. So I no longer hunt anxiously for my missing shoes in the morning. I just Google them. As long as machines can crunch the complexities, their interfaces make my relationship to objects feel much simpler and more immediate. I am at ease in materiality in a way that people never were before.”

What I am interested in is how such a system tells the PROPER "locative assertion" (that is to say the name of the referred place). In the example above, my shoes can be "under my bed", "on the third shelves under a pile of old rubbishes in my parent's garage" and sometimes the scale is a lot bigger if you want the system to tell you that you threw your car keys in the pacific ocean.

From my perspective the challenge is to give "the users" a relevant indication of the whereabouts: sometimes it's the name of a room, sometimes it's geographical coordinates...

Of course, there is an interesting roundup/special case, especially when it comes to objects as described in "“Where Are the Christmas Decorations?”: A Memory Assistant for Storage Locations" by Lewis Creary, Michael VanHilst from HP Labs. The paper describes a storage location memory assistant that saves and retrieves information about the locations of stored objects in and around the user's house. Something that would do:

User: Where are the Christmas decorations? PDA: They're in the leftmost medium-sized white box under the wood table in the garage.

But of course, you would have to tell the system where the object is, which is not that convenient, especially when you LOOSE TRACK of things.