Spreadsheet art

(via), Danielle Aubert's 58 Days Worth of Drawing Exercises in Microsoft Excel is very appealing to me.

Microsoft Excel is a program designed to track and compute information, but here I am using Excel as a drawing tool. These drawings are a part of a series of sixty drawings that I executed (more or less) every day for fifty-eight days. Each drawing is in a new 'worksheet,' which is automatically set up as a grid. These drawings were made by changing cell preferences for background color, fill pattern, and border styles and from time to time inserting 'comment' boxes and letters or words. Other manifestations of these drawings are 58 Days Worth of Drawing Exercises in Microsoft Excel as Rendered for Web and Animated Daily Excel Drawings (2005, ongoing). A year's worth of drawings will be featured as part of a group show at Gallery Project, in Ann Arbor, Michigan (May 10 - June 18, 2006). They will be published as a book over the summer of 2006

Why do I blog this? it definitely reminds me how game designers were doing level design 4-5 years ago. They were basically using excel spreadsheets to create spatial topographies and I found it nice and interesting at that time. This art project then nicely reflects the aesthetical practices of excel. The two I put there are gorgeous.What thismakes you think? Would it be the representation of something? For me it's an instanciation of an imaginary world.

Distorted map

In this hotel I was staying at, there was this nice map in the lobby. Someone told me that the hotel was previously an oil company that has been refurbished into an hotel and this map would be showing some relevant things for the company concerns.

Why do I blog this? I just like this map

About cross media entertainment

I was not aware of this concept of "cross media entertainment" that I saw on the Mind Candy Company. Christy Dena defines it as:

CME is also interchanged with ARG (alternate reality gaming) by ARG practitioners. I see ARGs, however, as a sub-category, a genre within CME (of which there are many).

I employ "cross-media entertainment" in two ways: as a top-level term to encompass all forms of entertainment that are distributed across platforms, in a variety of ways; to encompass all forms of entertainment that have multiple units (eg: locations and producers) but are not necessarily distributed across platforms (multiple websites for instance). In short, CME is multi-platform entertainment!

A cross-media creator is a conductor of an orchestra of media channels & arts types; an imagineer, constructing fictional worlds that cover the planet; a programmer, interpreting conversations between technology and nature; a sorcerer conjuring awesome events even they are surprised by; an audience member that wanted more, and so made a pact with The Creator to change the world.

More definitions of the CME world in this wiki.

Place panel at the netpublics

The other day, preparing the "place" planel at the networked publics conference, Kazys Varnelis sent us (panelists) a list of questions that we would discuss. I just pasted them there with some the answers I thought about during a jetlagged night. It's messy of course:

1. What are three ways in which pervasive networks refashion our relationships to place?

• a new layer of information and communication is present -> I am here and not here, I am aware of what is going on here + what is going on at OTHER locations. This is both interesting from the social point of view (being in contact) but detrimental from the cognitive point of view (partial attention to the environment/people...) -> simultaneous environment -> adam says yes simultaneity but where are the real emotions?
• the definition of a place is also altered. place = a part of space with some social and cultural framing (waiting room, café, library...) -> now it's more than that: different roles at the same time, which might lead to different acceptations (people don't have the same expectations about what is acceptable, doable at at a certain place). +distinction private/public space is blurred too. But at the same time, new types of places emerges: tech hotels, cybercafé and we're not always aware of them: amazon warehouse, servers farms as showed jeffrey huang at lift. new markets = you can adjust the price by checking on the internet (india) + work everywhere
• eventually this may also make some private or semi-private information public: if I can know familiar strangers, or who is interested by what with my PDA... information about oneself can also be accessible everywhere by us BUT also by others: HOW can we escape from that: will there be places I don't want to go because of that?

2. Speculate on how networks that pervade physical space might knit together in differentiated ways our relationships to our social Networks.

it might make people aware of certain things... only if they pay attention to it...

3. What kinds of social interaction rituals are distinguished or made possible by the existence of digital networked publics?

• permanent connection to the social network leads to the fact that some rituals disappears (I don't say hello to some folks anymore, I am always in contact with them in my buddy list+sms)
• the sharing / exchange / spread of memes, url, cultural content which is INTENTIONAL: I give you this because I infer that you might be interested in it (funny / useful for your job/hobby); "the gift" (marcel mauss): the object that is given bears the identity of the giver. When the recipient receives the gift, they not only receive the object, but the association of that object with the identity of the giver + parties to a relationship of gift exchange are obligated to give gifts, to receive them and to repay them in the appropriate ways.
• distant people are aware of what their social network does/did; when people have offline discussion, people refer to what happened "on the internet"

4. Are RFIDs revolutionary or merely glorified ID tags?

they are promising: - it's still yet another card - especially if everybody can have a reader (cell phones)

the RFID washer: jammer is more promising to me

5. What are some pedestrian instances of how networked publics matter vis-a-vis space and place?

some navigation systems (gps but I don't really believe in that), urban information display (bus, metro, train, interoperability of schedule, reported to the public)

more interesting to me: GAMES: location-based games, mobile games, alternative reality games because it reshapes the way we leave the city (dérive/drift), can help discovering new things about the city

6. What about our need to escape from the net?

more important then ever, a crux issue especially from the cognitive point of view (too much information, cognitive overload, partial attention)

"cold spots" - electronic ghetto: for poors -> mike davis (blog) - for the rich who can manage to escape from the net and who knows that they should do it: they are "netless" literate)

7. What is our relationship to place when we use devices that network us while we are moving (walking or driving) versus those that connect us to a network while we are relatively immobile? That is, has our sense of place become as fluid and mobile as our relation to the network?

the attention is different, cognitely speaking for instance I am lost in a city and very hurried I won't look at my gps phone but ask someone our attention is still limited anyway the device engages us with the place to a certain extent

8. More and more of the devices which network us are screen-based, with some visual display and an input device of keyboard, touch pad or touch screen? What do you think are the key reasons for the intransigence of the screen in our social practices of interaction?

that's a pity and I don't like that, my favorite mobile game device would have no screen we're fed up with screens but currently there are some tech limits, especially in cell phones regarding the massive development of applications that would use lbs, voice or tangible interaction, the industry goes where it's easier: developing on-screen applocations.

but ringtones + the way people personalize their cell phones shows that there is a need to go beyond the screen!

the other problem is that the screen is the standard, the dominant design and it's hard to engage users (I mean ALL users, not just early adopters) in other interactions

9. VRML blew it. Will there be a successor spatiality to HTML?

of course there are stuff like that, especially in the GIS world + also in the open cartography community

there are already few instances: annotating space with metadata; about building semantic models of places; about exchanging geospatial data in RDF, what Jo Walsh does a simple vocabulary for describing physical spaces and the connections between them

there is also PML: Psychogeographical Markup Language: PML is a unified system to capture meaningful psychogeographical [meta]data about spaces which can be used to compose psychogeograms: diagrammatic representations of psychogeographically experienced space.

10. Are MMORPGs just glorified MUDs? Or do they really portend a new spatiality?

there's indeed a big debate about it raph koster talked about that http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/03/31/are-muds-and-mmorpgs-the-same-thing/ graphics are not always more immersive (uncanny valley!) the level of information available is hugely more important in MMORPG

YES NEW spatiality in terms of spatiality, the physical representation can create local affordances (topology) but the main change is that there is an isomorphic representation of the character to the player: it's not textual: then there could be Proxemics issue (Philip Jeffrey's study), you can also follow eye gaze: COPRESENCE AFFORDANCES are very present in MMORPG and different than in MUD (it was more explicit: you had to type: look at XXX)

11. How will space and architecture deform in connection to place? Will cities transform radically as they did during the development of modernity?

the end of cheap oil may be a more radical change but as jeffrey huang said there are new places + electronic ghettos + disconnected ghettos for the rich

13. Is our culture of connectivity also a culture of disconnectivity? How much is the real world losing to the virtual? Is it?

THERE should absolutely be a culture of disconnectivity: 1) the systems are not semafuls, people should be aware of that, to deal with uncertainty, discrepancies (fabien's thesis) 2) people should understand the value of being disconnected

14. What is more important today, the visible or the invisible? What is their relationship?

the articulation of both the advent of virtual space made think that the invisible was important but it's not true

15. What is the future of place?

more variety, more intricacies (a place is not just a café: it's a café+ meeting room + working place...)

and those who will make the changes possible are not the one you expect: JC Decaux, bathroom facilities (geberit)... they are ubiquitous and want to take advantage of that

Videos about the future of network in the US

Today at the Networked Publics Conference and Media Festival, there was a very interesting panel about "infrastructure". It started with 3 great video presentations available here (by wally baer, francois bar, shahram ghandeharizadeh, fernando ordonez, aram sinnreich and todd richmond). Each of them describes three possible network futures.

Why do I blog this? each video offers a pertinent foresight of how network evolved over time and what can be new path that are expected.

Google and pop 3D software

It seems that Google recently bought sketchup, a simple 3D modeling program:

Google SketchUp (free) is an easy-to-learn 3D modeling program that enables you to explore the world in 3D. With just a few simple tools, you can create 3D models of houses, sheds, decks, home additions, woodworking projects - even space ships. And once you've built your models, you can place them in Google Earth, post them to the 3D Warehouse, or print hard copies.

For instance, here is the University of Southern California (USC) Tower:

Then it's of course possible to search, store/share those models here.

Why do I blog this? with Second Life, there seems to be a good trend towards this modeling thing. Clickable Culture has a good point about Second Life as a production tool: using the World Wide Web as a 3D design platform. I found intriguing the way virtual space and the real world can be intertwined by such practices.

Thoughts around korea food

Interesting chat yesterday at the korean restaurant in Koreatown with Julian Bleecker, Adam Greenfield and Raphael Grignani. Raphael's working at Nokia Design (previously with the ever watchful Jan Chipchase), he briefly explained us what they basically do with their ethnographic studies (finding behavioral patterns and then trying to make them match with the company's technology roadmap). I am particularly fascinated by the second part of the process (after the conduction of field studies, be it ethnographic or more experimental as in my phd research); that's a topic I am trying to work on for my research and foresight work: what can be transfered? how? what would be a good design process (in the case the research outcome are design-oriented)? how this would help strategy people (in the case the research outcome are strategy-oriented)? Don't know whether they can communicate about it but I guess there's a lot to think about here. The discussion also addressed the often emptiness of conferences presentation, which I sometime tend to share event as an academic.

LIFT06 survey results

We recently got the results from the evaluation survey of LIFT06. As one of the organizer I am quite happy with what people said. The response rate is significant (173 attendees out of a total of 285 (not counting speakers and organisers) completed the survey. This is a very respectable 60% response rate which conforms to an acceptable sample size for a population with a finite size). The survey and its analysis has been conducted by Glenn O’Neil from the independent company called Benchpoint:

LIFT06 was assessed as a success by most attendees – 93% plan to attend LIFT07. According to the attendees, LIFT06 was successful in providing information and influencing their attitudes about emerging technology. One third of attendees saw the main benefit of attending LIFT06 as networking and are looking towards more facilitated networking at LIFT07. The quality of the presentations varied considerably for many attendees and a different selection process may be appropriate for LIFT07. In terms of the conference format, attendees suggested more interactive sessions and workshops around the conference. LIFT06 was successful in connecting people and provoking ongoing discussions amongst attendees and beyond the conference.

Why do I blog this? this push us to do something even more interesting next year. Our challenge would be to keep the ambiance and improve the interactions between people. This is the main thing we have to work on as shown on this pie chart (the rating of the social events is notable for the number of attendees that did not participate in a social event.)

As for the variety of feeling towards some presenters, it's very funny, some people were really impressed by some speakers and other persons did not get anything from the same one; my feeling is that it's good: it shows that we manage to bring people from different interests.

Different streets configurations

Last week, I was on a small island in Greece and this week in Los Angeles, two different ways of dealing with spatial issues:

Though empty on the pictures, both of them are taken by cars (which have different size anyway).

From spatial practices to a context-aware system

Augmenting the City: The Design of a Context-Aware Mobile Web Site by Jesper Kjeldskov, Jeni Paay in Gain: Journal of Business and Design. The authors present “Just-for-Us” - a context- aware web site for mobile devices augmenting the social experience of the city.

Informing design, field studies of social groups’ situated social interactions were carried out in a new civic space in Melbourne, Australia followed by paper prototyping and implementation of a functional mobile web site. The produced solution augments the city through web-based access to a digital layer of information about people, places and activities adapted to users’ physical and social context and their history of social interactions in the city. The system was evaluated in lab and field, validating the fundamental idea but also identifying a number of shortcomings.

Why do I blog this? I am less interested in the outcome (the website) than in the process that leads to the design of such system. The gathering of information about people and the way they think in terms of space and place is quite relevant here.

One of the key findings from the field studies was that the physical space of Federation Square is divided into four districts each with distinct features and landmarks. Like many other places, the space has significant focal structures but it is difficult to find out what is going on behind the facades. (...) Another central finding from the field studies was that people typically coordinate meeting up with their friends in a highly ad-hoc manner. Typically, this involves a lot of communication negotiating who, why, where and when to meet. (...) Another finding from the empirical studies, which had impact on the design of Just-for-Us, was that places and spaces are dynamic and that setting matters immensely for the quality of socializing – especially in relation to its physicality, the presence and activities of other people and convenience in terms of proximity. (...) A fourth finding from the field studies of socialising at Federation Square, which had impact on the design of Just-for-Us, was that people make sense of a place through the social affordances provided by other people; where they are and what they are doing there.

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.