Video Games Event in Milano

Today was the games@IULM in Milano (could not be there...), an event co-organized by some good people I follow:

The Humanities Lab at IULM University in Milan, Italy, is organizing a digital games conference and exhibition for May 3rd 2006. The event brings together game researchers from Italy, the United States (Stanford University), and Europe (the Computer Games Research Center in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Stanford's Jeffrey Schnapp, Henry Lowood and Fred Turner will take part in the event in mediated form. Their contributions will be delivered via video interviews recorded by SHL visiting scholar and game researcher Matteo Bittanti.

Jeffrey Schnapp examines the role of humanities in the digital age; Henry Lowood discusses the status quo of game studies and game culture, while Fred Turner comments on the politics and ideology of digital games. The video interviews will be freely available for viewing and downloading on the Games@IULM official website from May 3rd 2006

The program is there

Why do I blog this? this event seems to propose interesting and refreshing perspectives in the domain of video-games research.

Meeting at the IFTF

I had lunch today with my friend Alex Pang at the Institute For the Future in Palo Alto. The discussion was around the Internet of Things, spimes and blogjects. Starting by discussing Bruce Sterling's Shaping Things, we were thinking about the fact that as Sterling says there is no smartness in the objects; the smartness better resides in the was those objects and networks help us to make better choices; especially with regards to specific actions or meeting people. Wired and connected objects may indeed help choosing what tools can be used to consume less energy, sharing certain types of objects with others that would be trackable is also of interest (and is actually a topic discusses in one of the story Bruce Sterling wrote in "Visionary in Residence"): a kind of community hammer or driller for instance.

Alex and I also discussed some potential ideas about the blogjects serie of workshop I am organizing along with Julian. Additionaly, Jason tester updated me on their pervasive gaming projects that is a very relevant synthesis about context-aware games. This project interestingly started first by looking at the history of video games from the POV of users and then continued as an overview of the pergames directions.

Alex finally encouraged me to go deeper in the Science Technology and Society world, which is quite a good idea.

Palo Alto in 2006

Two interesting signs. One the left, the company indicates its own subsidiaries, which is often done by luxury companies (like Louis Vuitton indicating the glamorous places where they are like Paris, Tokyo, Cannes...), the streetwear company (LA, Tokyo...) and now the tech ones who not only put the SVs references but also subsidiaries in India. On the right, it's just company plates printed in the rush on A4 papers, web2.0 frenziness?

Why do I blog this? just few thoughts while walking in downtown Palo Alto this morning.

Yesterday's meeting

Yesterday was a quite super active day in the bay area with a serie of meeting at PARC and a dinner with friends in SF. Located in Palo Alto, PARC is a subsidiary of Xerox Corporation, conducts pioneering interdisciplinary research in the physical, computational, and social sciences.

It first started with a meeting with Elizabeth Churchill and Les Nelson to whom I presented my PhD research and get some more insights about they're up to. Some comments from Elizabeth:

It seems that the automatic location-awareness tool in catchbob could be problematic because there is no context around it. Since the users in this experimental condition did not exchange lots of messages (mostly only about their proximity to the object via signal strength indications), there is a lack of a social context that could be helpful to interprete the locational data. As opposed to the players in the "with the location-awareness" who better discussed the strategy and then had a context to help them doing inferences about the others' location (they indicated through map annotations).

She pointed me at this kind of overtrust on technology (the location-awareness tool): since it's an available information, they pay attention to it.

An additional remark concerns the fact that coordination information liek this location-awareness is more than coordination: it's establishing a common ground of the situation, by wrapping up these information into a strategy context.

She encouraged me to ask players some questions about the way they experienced collaboration: did you feel like you were wandering alone? or being part of a team? so that I can evaluated the level of involvement in a social context.

Les asked me whether there could be a kinf of optimal strategy index that would be helpful to measure the spatial behavior.

I then had a meeting with Nicolas Ducheneaut who explained me how he ended up there doing research about multi-user applications (and how PARC works in terms of project management). One of Nicolas' project is the super neat project about World of Warcraft called "Play On". He showed me some of the ongoing things they are doing, mainly the "social dashboard" they patented. They actually isolated important factors in terms of guild management in WoW (such as guild size...), those who are important so that players keep enjoying the game and then developed some services and tools that would be helpful for that matter (for game community managers!): for instance seeing the evolution of certain parameters, the fact that some high-value players left a guild, the desagregation of guilds, the isolation of rotten classes... I told him that I would be very interested in seeing this also feeded back to the players (and not only the guild manager), like in our virtual mirror project at the lab (giving the group an image of itself to modify the way they collaborate). Thus, they're basically focusing on improving the social aspects of the game (so that players keep playing!) through certain kinds of services. Of course, this is of interests to game editors (even though the content and the gameplay are still tremendously an important feature, there should be also an emphasis on those social aspects; and those tools they develop are helfpul).

He also worked on an relevant project about "social tv" that might be interesting for private research projects.

Regarding my PhD research, he made some insightfuls comments and connections with others' work:

It started to make him think at Aoki, P. M.; Woodruff, A. Making space for stories: ambiguity in the design of personal communication systems. ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2005); 2005 April 2-7; Portland, OR. NY: ACM; 2005; 181-190.

Then he pointed me on another paper: Dabbish L. & Kraut R. (2004) Controlling interruptions: Awareness displays and social motivation for coordination, in: Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW'04), New York: ACM Press, 182-191

I'll explore these papers in the near future.

For him, the information about others' whereabouts in space can ruduce the richness of the mental map people build of space by just focusing on a certain kind of information (conveyed by the location-awareness tool) and not the others (cf Kevin Lynch, image of the city, p45): players who had the "follower" role maybe had a poor representation, whereas the "explorer" had a richer image of space. I am wondering whether I can apprehend this sort of things with the data I have (given that participants knew the campus). Maybe some studies about ethology or animal behavior in space could be valuable for that mattter.

The final round at PARC was with Victoria Bellotti, to whom I also described my PhD research. Here are some comments she made:

Did the explorers were more successful in terms of performance? did they make more spatial modeling mistakes?

She was concerned by the location accuracy + lag and thought that 15meters would be a problem for this sort of task (not to mention the variability of this accuracy in different places due to the hotspots repartition). In her opinion, people were perhaps relying too much on the location-awareness tool: if the accuracy is 15 meters and if there is a 3 seconds lag, users might be misleaded. I would answer that for our task, and givent the EPFL campus, the 15meters accuracy is not that much of a problem, since it's approximately the size of roomsm and it discriminated different zones with different boundaries (and no line of sight).

She thinks that indeed, more communication can lead to more grounding of the situation, which would be why the richness of communication in the no awareness tool condition had positive on the mutual modeling index.

Also, I have to be careful when referring to the condition "without AT" because it's not really without but without explicit AT because they can dialogue but indeed it's not a awareness tool strictly speaking.

Of course, she pointed me at the dangers of this sort of field experiment study, arguing that results are bound to the system and the context I tested (which I am definitely aware of). Results are then bound to the system configuration: location accuracy, area size, number of users... The nature of the task is also important too, it puts demands and constraints arbitrarily on the context, And she's then wondering how far these results could be generalized.

I am deeply aware of all these comments (right from the beginning of the project actually, when choosing a more quantitative methodology but mixed with qualitative data). And my point is simple: my study is rather here to counterbalance the frenziness and overemphasis of location-awareness technologies. IMO It's rather here to ponder the engineerical madness around those applications that are oooh so neat like the intelligent fridge (!).

Thanks all for these inputs, they're invaluable for the evolution of the PhD project.

I finally had lunch in SF with my finnish friends Jyri Engeström and Ulla-Maaria Mutanen who nicely introduced me to Elizabeth Goodman and Mike Kuniavsky. The discussion was there around various topic but mainly about bottom-up innovation and independent structures a la Squid Labs and others. Europe is especially in the need of this kind of places/structure with crazy folks doing project. Ulla-Maaria was referring to crafting stuff but to me, even peopel doing user experience or more abstract research matter to. These structures (or non-structures) are act as the Research and Development of tomorrow's services, product and memes.

Liz also talked about how the relationship between engineers and interaction designers/user experience specialists should be more a conversation about users' context than just getting a set of requirements.

I was interested by Mike's perspective on user experience of pervasive computing , which is what is going to address in his next book.

wi5d search engine

wi5d (Wireless 5th Dimensional Networking) seems to be an intriging company. It had been created in 2005 and it's focused on the development of a context-aware approach to surfing the Web as they say.

By challenging the myth that the web frees the user from space and time considerations, we hold that the most valuable search engine will not aim to organize cyberspacecc, but rather will aim to better connect individuals with the potential energy of their own spatial/temporal context.

Their system is called MapNexxus (they have this weird habit of puting their text as image files):

As it's explained on the website, the company was purchased by an "anonymous buyer" during the beta development phase...

Why do I blog this? Since I am interested in spatial technologies, I am wondering about how user would employ this sort of search engine. How would they relate on location-based information.

Future of the Internet

Last month, there was a futuristic piece about the Internet on Red Herring, which had interesting points with regards to the relationships between virtual world/objects and the physicality of those.

the barriers between our bodies and the Internet will blur as will those between the real world and virtual reality.

Automakers, for instance, might conceivably post their parts catalogs in the virtual world of Second Life, a pixilated 3D online blend of MySpace, eBay, and renaissance fair crossed with a Star Trek convention. Second Life participants—who own the rights to whatever intellectual property they create online—will make money both by using the catalog to design their own cars in cyberspace and by selling their online designs back to the manufacturers, says Danish economist and tech entrepreneur Nikolaj Nyholm. (...) “Devices will no longer be spokes on the Internet—they will be the nodes themselves,” says Ray Kurzweil.

I am wondering how this would work with networked seams, perplexed users facing the non-interoperability of networks; how would this prediction work: "People will be able to talk to the Internet when searching for information or interacting with various devices—and it will respond". As a user experience researcher, I am wondering whether everybody has in mind how people are currently using the Internet, how one look for information with search engine. I know this is long-term research but there is a huge gap between this and how people use current networks. Of course today's kids will be able to handle that but what about the aging population?

The machine-to-machine communication is also expected to increase:

As so-called sensor networks evolve, there will be vastly more machines than people online. As it is, there are almost 10 billion embedded micro-controllers shipped every year. “This is the next networking frontier—following inexorably down from desktops, laptops, and palmtops, including cell phones,” says Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3Com. This is what will make up much of the machine-to-machine traffic, he says.

The article also addresses other concerns like the telco competition, the internet infrastructure and mostly innovation in emerging technologies.

Discussion with taxi driver in Irvine

Me: I want to go to UC Irvine (we were at the Amtrak Station) Taxi driver: mmmh, do you have the address?

Me: mmmh no

Taxi driver: I cannot go there, I am new here and I need an address to put in my GPS

Me: I don't have the address but I have the directions descriptions on this paper

Taxi driver: mmmh but it's not on my GPS, I cannot go there

(we finally got there, he called a friend on the phone...)

Research meeting with Paul Dourish

Had a good meeting for lunch today with Paul Dourish at UC Irvine, chatting about my PhD research and on-going projects here and there. It seems that he's back on writing about space and place, which is very relevant to what I do. Some raw notes from what he said about my research:

• he acknowledged my concerns about articulating both quantitative and qualitative data (but seems to me very inerested in my qualitative analyses)
• do we really need to model other's positions (in the game + ...): that's actually something we discuss with the dispositional versus situational Mutual Modeling.
• He's interested in the following question: to what extent the technology provides a medium for people to develop a meaning of others' actions. In my context, this is related with how people interpret others' paths.
• Would it be possible to dig my qualitative data to go deeper into Mutual Modeling of location, MM towards the goal and MM of strategy? For him, there should be more emphasis on qualitative data, like ethnographical analyses to understand how people discuss, understand and use other's paths/locations
• the visualization thing made him think about chalmers' students work (maybe I should more articulate this with what I want to do with the viz?)
• He asked why choosing the path distance as a performance index: it's meant to foster more strategy discussion among players (+ prevent them from running and possibly break the tablet pcs)

He also encouraged me to submit a poster to ubicomp, I may write something about the asynchronous awareness tool, let's see.

Visualize the invisible (dataflowviz)

Just found this on information aesthetics: Free Network Visible Network, a project by the Mixed Reality Lab.

Free Network Visible Network is a project that combines different tools and processes to visualize, floating in the space, the interchanged information between users of a network. The people are able to experience in a new exciting way about how colorful virtual objects, representing the digital data, are flying around. These virtual objects will change their shape, size and color in relation with the different characteristics of the information that is circulating in the network.

Why do I blog this? this is something very important to me: the possibility to visualize the dataflows, showing the overlay of information in various environments. This would nicely depicts what we were discussing yesterday at the conference: how a certain place now has different meaning: given that in one place you can be there physically and virtually meeting people on IM, MMORPG or something else, the inherent simultaneity of this situation can be visualized through this sort of project.

So let's start a review about this kind of projects:

Related projects:

• SOUP: the Shapes Of [Un]warped Packages by Alejo Duque and his colleague Lorenz Schori
• Tunneable Cities project by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby
• Invisible topographies by Usman Haque
• The Orb by Restate Media

Any others dataflowviz?

3D Level design history

There is a good serie of columns on Gamasutra lately about level design by Sam Shahrani. It focused on FPS and 3D level design. What is good is that it gives a comprehensive overview of the different techniques used so far. Some very relevant excerpts about how level designers takes advantage of constraints to create spatial affordances that would support the game scenario and gameplay:

Level designers, or map designers, are the individuals responsible for constructing the game spaces in which the player competes. (...) The level design for Battlezone was relatively straightforward, in as much as it consisted of creating a game space (the “large valley surrounded by mountains”) in which the player could drive around and destroy targets for points. Essentially, the level design was that of a digital Roman arena, wherein the player could do battle, and it was a design that worked well for the limitations of the graphics engine, and provided enjoyable and novel gameplay for the arcade and home computer markets. (...) Not all attempts at 3D games involved the use of polygon-based 3D environments like those used in Battlezone; several games attempted to leverage other technology to provide an impression of a three-dimensional world. Notable efforts include Lucasfilm Games, now LucasArts, 1986 title Rescue on Fractalus!, a first-person title that used fractal generation technology to render the game world. (...) [Then in 3D FPS like Wolfenstein 3D]The emphasis on speed, however, again led to limitations on how detailed the world was. Interactivity in Wolf3D was relatively limited, with the player having only two ways to interact with the world; shooting things to kill them and opening doors by pressing the spacebar, a universal “use” key. Wolf3D upped the ante, though, by adding in “push walls”. These walls appeared like any of the normal solid walls in the game, but if a user hit the spacebar in front of them, the wall would slowly slide back, revealing a hidden room (Kushner, 108). Hidden rooms and secret levels would play a major part in future id games, and First-Person Shooters in general. The push walls were another innovation by Tom Hall, who served as the director of Wolfenstein 3D (Kushner, 108-112), and served to reward the player for thoroughly exploring the game world. It was an interesting gameplay mechanic, and one that grew out of a tradition in the video game industry for including secrets, or “Easter eggs” for players to find (Kent 188-189). While many would consider these “Easter eggs” to be afterthoughts, they present an important opportunity for level designers to maximize player investment and interest in the game world. (...) Doom fundamentally altered the First-Person Shooter genre (...) The Doom engine supported a number of new features that finally made realistic and interactive environments possible. Instead of merely featuring doors that could be opened, Doom featured the ability to alter the game world by using in-game switches and “triggers” to activate events. These events could range from a set of stairs rising out of the ground to unsealing a room full of ravenous near-invisible monsters to bridges emerging out of toxic slime. Additionally, Doom added in lifts, which could raise players to different levels inside the game world or, if used slightly differently, could act as pistons and crush players against a ceiling. Further, the Doom engine’s support of variable height floors and ceilings also meant that in addition to being able to move on all three axes, more complex architecture could also be created. Tables, altars, platforms, low hallways, ascending and descending stairs, spacious caverns and other objects could all be created using geometry. The ability to trigger events that could release monsters or alter geometry led level designers to create a number of surprisingly complex traps for players to uncover as they played through the game, from rapidly rising floors to bridges that would sink into toxic sludge if players moved too slowly. (...) In addition to architectural advances, Doom also added the ability to alter the light levels in a level. (...) The level designs for Doom were accomplished using much more advanced tools than previous id titles. Romero wrote an engine-specific level editing program called DoomEd (...) Doom also illustrates that levels do not have to be based on easily recognizable locations in order for players to enjoy them, nor do they have to conform to preconceptions of what an environment should look like.

An important concept is also this idea "Doom defined the first person genre, but more importantly it made the idea of users modifying a commercial title acceptable to developers.": the level design is the cornerstone of bottom-up innovation in the game world: through modding, end-user manage to create their own version what would be the world they want to play in.

Why do I blog this? What's explained here is of tremendous importance for the comprehension of spatial practices in virtual worlds. The author of this piece is Sam Shahrani, an M.A. candidate at Indiana University in the Master’s in Immersive Mediated Environments program through the Department of Telecommunications. He's making an incredible job explaining level design from the game developers' perspective. I am looking forward reading his dissertation.

It's certainly the most interesting piece about spatiality in video games I've read in the last few months.

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.