Reading notes about "Get Back in the Box"

I just finished reading"Get Back in the Box : Innovation from the Inside Out"by Douglas Rushkoff.

To me, it was a very clever book, easy to read and the author's point is quite smart. Rushkoff advocates for a new move: instead of thinking in terms of "out of the box experience", manager and innovators should better get back in the box by engaging their core competencies ("core values renewed from the inside out") to really meet people's needs and not trying to flood them with useless crap. This is also supported by turning every interaction users/consumers have with the company into an opportunity/source to innovate (and not by using consensual focus groups).

However, the underlying issue of this topic is certainly of much interest. It's simply the advent of a new Renaissance (rebirth) based on our relationship to others: the new renaissance person, better connected to others is engaged in the playful activity of fulfilling the need of the community instead of trying to win the Maslowian self-actualization.

Of course, this is a really pessimistic way of thinking and I am worried that he brought no critique on the table; Paul Virilio (for instance "City of Panic (Culture Machine)") would have been great to hear in this context

I like Rushkoff's stance about "resistance is futile, restoring order too" and surely that the driving force behind this is the social currency (not as formalized as in Cory Doctorow's book"Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" in which he is talking about whuffies): people engage with each other in order to exchange "stuff", looking for group appartenance or cohesion. That is why the content is not the king: "The Internet was never about computers or the content they carried. It was about elevating people to the role of creators and letting them interact with this new capacity" as he says.

His part about play is also intriguing (he says that we'd better of getting engaged into playful activities, work should be more so that we would be in the "flow state" as in "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi). But this certainly controversial as shown by this discussion between Ulla-Maaria and Anne. I won't enter into the debate here, but for me, injecting more fun in my work is simply being paid for what I would do anyway (if is fits to my values).

Why do I blog this? this is not related with my research but it's rather helpful to understand how innovation is impacted by new social and cultural practices. However, I am not so optimistic as the author.

Besides, it's funny how this "Renaissance" meme is spreading: this will be the tagline of Reboot this year.

COOP2006 Keynote by Michael Buckland

At COOP2006, Michael Buckland gave a very insightful keynote talk about the notion of "documents" and indexicality, regarding their retrieval capabilities. The discussion was around the fact that all documents are artifacts, but are all artifacts documents? He describes how documents pervade society: used in various contexts (educators, scientists, publicists, religion... lawyers and courts), people use documents as more than a just inert artifact. For instance, scientists use documents (articles, offprints) as the archive of achievement and for personal status; or educators use documents (textbooks, instructional materials) to teach, to empower and to diminish teachers. I also like this example: governments use documents to exercise social control: "to travel the passport is more powerful than I am; I could have send my passport here but then I won't be able to come over".

Then he highlighted the phenomenological, semiotic perspective of "documents" by referring to Suzanne Briet (1951): "[a document is] any concrete or symbolic indexical sign preserved or recorded towards the ends of representing, of reconstituting or of proving a physical or intellectual phenomenon". For example, an antelope becomes a document when somebody captures it and brought it at a museum and write an article/shoot a documentary about it, those are secondary documents. He additionally took the example of "a dead bird library": it is meant to be used by students and reseachers: dead birds are documents. It is more convenient and characteristics than a picture or a living bird. It's a document because it is a meaningful sign. You can never say that something could never be a document

There is hence a document - perceived and a document - expressed (code, language) (mode of expression: language, image, sound) (technology). The problem is when we're looking for documents: the indexing and searching problem; the problem is that each specialist express things differently: individuals from different communities need different help. In this context search engine are rather "machine a sélectionner" (selecting machines) than "search engine" so there should be different mapping: - between searcher's words and indexing systems terms - between author's words and indexing terminology - between search query and document metadata

To be efficiently selected, collections of documents need indexing, and here there are some interesting characteristics about that: - indexing is forward looking: indexing is done for a future purpose, so you're imagining the purpose of the group for which you wanted to be useful - indexing is backward looking: "about X" refers to the past discussion / dialog / description what is now named X. - indexing is inscribed in a point of time: time continues so all indexing is necessarily obsolescent. - mention (useing this word) is not meaning (having this sense) - and it's worse because language evolves differently not only in time but in different social groups: cow/sheep becomes beef/mouton in english when you move from the peasant world to the bourgeois world (from english to french).

This connects to Ludig Wittgenstein who showed the value of dialects and contexts: - language games: meaning is constituted through activity / language usage (different contexts) - language regions: language games differ in different language zones (different dialects) This is related to the fact that meaning is dynamic: language is disambiguated within contexts and specialized dialects.

Why do I blog this? even though this might seem very abstract and high-level at first glance, this kind of account is very important while working on collaborative applications because it shows how context and communities play an important role in the creation of a common body of knowledge (regarding information retrieval of course) and therefore to perform collaborative activities (like having a proper document collection in a community of practices or within a company for example). This of course connects to our Mutual Modeling project at the lab.

Interactive tables studies at COOP2006

One of the paper who struck me as interesting (and related to our lab's research) today at COOP2006 way this "Evaluating Interactive Workspaces as CSCW" by Maria Croné (Stockholm University, KTH). It was basically about 3 users studies. It involved small groups of students (3-6 persons, synchronous and co-located), who did their own tasks (collaborative course project, design of multimedia application, brainstorming sessions...) The needs for this kind of collaborative activity are simple: shared surface (visible to all) + private surface (paper or laptop) problems: moving content from shared to private, moving content between laptops.

An interactive workspace is defined as a combination of one or more large displays (shared surface), tools for moving data (dragging file icons on this "teamspace" windows, list of people to send the document) and tools for coordinating interactions between the different surfaces (move the computer cursors on the different surfaces, not allow simultaneaous typing) They conducted three studies (iLounge study 1, iLoungs study 2, Teamspace) that differs over the combination of large displays (screen) and smaller ones (laptops)

The research questions they addressed:

• how and for what activities are the different work surfaces uses?
• how is the interaction with different work surfaces coordinated?
• how is the information trnasferred between work surfaces
• What tools do groups use for their collaborative work? do they need a shared work surface and how do they achieved that? howe do they transfer information between laptops and between laptops and other work surfaces?

Some results: - good to have shared work surfaces that all group mmebers could interact with - need for individual input devices (so that you don't have a situation in which one student does all the typing) - need for private work surfaces - a more frequenty shifting between collaborative and individual work surfaces when your provide more private surfaces

Plus I like this piece:

The collaborative work of the groups consisted of a more frequent shifting between the different displays, which lead to an increased need for sending data between the different displays. This is also in line with the thoughts of Fisher and Dourish, that most everyday work is carried out using single-user applications for collaborative work, and that the best support would be to offer coordination tools instead of providing CSCW applications.

The main conclusion here was that the most efficient design is to provide a good combination of laptop computers and large interactive shared displays because of the flexibility it proposed.

Why do I blog this? this connects to research conducted at the lab about interactive tables usage, as well as the project we did in my Teaching Assistant duty. This study tend to go further from what we did about how the user experience of augmented furnitures.

Crossmedia Game Epidemic Menace

Report about the Crossmedia Game Epidemic Menace by Jan Ohlenburg, Irma Lindt , and Uta Pankoke-Babatz is one of the PerGames 2006 paper. It describes an interesting pervasive game called "the Crossmedia Game Epidemic Menace", developed within the EU-funded IPerG project. It has already been presented at CHI2006 (see here) but the report goes into other details in terms of evaluations of the project. They used field observations done by four observers who constantly followed the players.

The evaluation was mainly based on detailed field observations. Four observers were constantly following the players, writing down their observations with respect to player-environment, player-devices, player-to-player and player-gamemaster interaction. Observers indicated time and location for each notice. Observations were combined with player feedback discussions and questionnaires. During the play test we got results with respects to the game story and game concept, the social play, the suitability of devices, and the technical aspects and game orchestration experiences. In the following we will briefly outline some of the results.

Players liked the two play-modes: stationary play in the team room and mobile play outdoors on the campus. We observed that collaboration across media and play modes worked well. Surprisingly, the speed of movement was rather high in both play modes. The speed of movement was suitable as a means to indicate high player immersion. Players easily understood the meaning and use of devices. However, it turned out that players preferred to play in pairs of two in both play modes, and that device specific roles emerged. The players liked communication and collaboration within their team and competition with the opposite team.

Why do I blog this? I like the usage of different gaming devices (running for example on mobile phones, stationary displays, mobile Augmented Reality) to engage people in a playful experience. A different set of research question arise when you have this sort of game design: how would giving different tool lead to specific roles attributions? How would this impact individual actions? group interactions? communication and actions asymmetry among teams? As you see, I am really interested in the collaborative user experience afforded by the gameplay and the artefacts. This sort of platform is then very relevant to CSCW research as we do in our projects. This kind of approach is described by Chalmers and Juhlin in "New uses for mobile pervasive games - Lessons learned for CSCW systems to support collaboration in vast work sites ".

perimeters, boundaries and borders

An interesting call for submission from artists, designers, architects, tinkerers and makers at www.fastuk.org.uk and www.folly.co.uk. They are looking for 9 existing works and in addition will be commissioning 6 new works

perimeters, boundaries and borders’ is an exhibition of contemporary art and design practice. It is especially concerned with object and spatially oriented disciplines, the use of digital technologies and the convergence of sculpture, product design and architecture. This exhibition will bring emerging and existing contemporary practitioners and technologies into the public arena and help to make cutting-edge developments in art and technology more accessible. ‘perimeters, boundaries and borders’ will be held from 29 September - 21 October 2006 at venues across Lancaster city centre in the North West of England. The main exhibition space will be the new CityLab development in Dalton Square. The aim of this exhibition is to present the very latest examples of work that blur the conventional boundaries of arts and design practice through the use of technology. The exhibition will include works which explore these creative perimeters, boundaries and borders including: computer-designed or manufactured objects and environments, visual and audio installations, pervasive and locative interactive artworks, computer games and 3D net based works. More at www.fastuk.org.uk and www.folly.co.uk

Dates: Exhibition: September 29th-October 21st, Monday to Saturday only, 12-6pm Symposium: September 28th, 10am to 4pm Private View: September 28th, 6-9pm

Why do I blog this? Now that we're into space/place discussion, boundaries, perimeters and borders are certainly relevant because it allows to ask new questions regarding the relations between art and technology.

Red Herring special issue on Europe

Red Herring has a special issue about Europe and Innovation that is very valuable. One of the take there is about the fact that more and more entrepreneurs and VCx are taking Europe as a serious place to innovate and invest. Some of the advantages:

“The talent is here and the ability to innovate and develop innovative companies is not exclusive to the U.S.,” Ms. Gibbons said.

Broadband and Internet technologies have allowed Europe to seek outside help from developing countries to create software and services, said Peter Ohnemus, CEO of software maker ASSET4.

“I believe if you combine the European market with India [and China], it works as a great combination,” Mr. Ohnemus said. (...) Europe’s strength lies in companies that will converge the worlds of PCs and mobile, as broadband and mobile penetration is one of the highest in the world.

Innovation is then shared between new products (as Skype and MySQL) and "me too" strategy" of copying American products. The list of companies is a quite interesting way of gathering insights about innovative european companies like NetVibes, Echovox, Total Immersion, FON.

Why do I blog this? I am interested in innovation in Europe; having an "ecology" of innovative organizations and structure is important.

Notes from Paul Dourish presentation at CHI

I ran across this very insightful notes about Paul Dourish paper presentation at CHI2006 (the one that critiques the "implications for design" in ethnographical studies in HCI). I blogged the paper few months ago and was looking forward reading what people could say about it.Here is what interest me a lot:

Relationship between technology and practice: the common view is that ethnography will uncover problems that design can fix. This assumes that the world is problematic and can be fixed by (technological) design. A better approach would to have a broader view of practice, including how technology is put to use (and adopted, adapted, repurposed, and appropriated), how people create new circumstances and consequences of technology use, and how technologies take on social meaning. To formulate practice as "deficient" or "needing to be fixed" presupposes a lot, and also puts design outside of the domain of the ethnographer (...) the absence of implications for design shouldn't disqualify an ethnography -- they're a poor metric for evaluating ethnographic work.

This also connects to the discussion I had last week with Liz Goodman from Intel: valuing conversations between ethnographers and designers.

One of the proposed use of ethnography is indeed to understand how people themselves produce design ideas (a la De Certeau). This is nicely exemplified by the research done by the Nokia design people in this paper: Chipchase, J., Persson, P., Aarras, M., Piippo, P., & Yamamoto, T. (2005). Mobile Essentials: Field Study and Concepting. Presented at DUX 2005, Fort Mason, San Francisco, CA, November 3-5, 2005. Retrieved May 1, 2006.

Genevieve Bell from Intel also tackles this issue in her work; her take is that ethnography is more than finding users' requirements, it could help understanding the cultural assumptions that underlies people's activities (at work, at home...) to refine the design space.

Why do I blog this? I like this stance, the fact that ethnographical studies does not have to be systematically coupled with design, and also that situations, issues or problems that would found, should or can not be necessarily solve with technology. I definitely don't like to see technology as the systematic world's problems solutions.

Related: more about this issue is addressed by technotaste.

Rant against 3D

At the Metaverse conference ("Pathways to the 3D Web"), it seems that there were some good discussions about errors of the past concerning the overemphasis on 3D as the solution for moving beyond the current interfaces. Here is what Randy (from the Habitat weblog) says about this:

3-D isn't an interface paradigm. 3-D isn't a world model. 3-D isn't the missing ingredient. 3-D isn't an inherently better representation for every purpose. 3-D is an attribute, like the color blue. Any time you read or hear about how great 3-D is and how it's going to change everything about computers and services, substitute the word blue for 3-D.

Don't get me wrong; there are great applications for 3D. That's not the point. The point is that idealistic assumptions and techno-optimism are no substitute for understanding what people actually want and do when they interact with each other, whether via computers or in the physical world.

Let's not repeat the path VRML took - that'd be a double waste and I won't do it. Let's figure out the problem first, and then look to see if a global-shared-3d-standard-UI-identity-object-system is the solution. So far, I haven't found a single one.

Why do I blog this? I am concerned by people's interaction in space/place (be it physical or virtual) and my feeling is that there is always on overemphasis on 3D. Yesterday it was on the web: having boring 3D libraries to pick up books instead than having a amazon-based interface. Today, it's on cell phones, people design 3D application on tiny cell phones screen; I don't really see the point in that. There is clearly an overemphasis about reproducing spatial topographies in 3D, which is not systematically pertinent for interactions. The point is not to have the same structure but more to have a common "place": a virtual location that affords specific interactions.

And of course, this should not undermine the value of 3D, MMORPG clearly shows that they are pertinent and meaningful.

Paper presentation

Today at COOP2006, I presented a paper that concerns a project we did at the lab in partnership with NOKIA. The paper's called "The RoadForum: Sharing informal knowledge in a distributed team through a mobile audio environment" (Pierre Dillenbourg and Nicolas Nova). The goal of the study was to develop and evaluate a new approach to the use of mobile technology in training, focusing on sharing informal knowledge among colleagues. The project included the development of an application referred to as the RoadForum, a server-side software accessible to phone users through normal audio communication. The paper provides an informal evaluation of this system.

Ethnographical studies at MS

Kelly Goto recently interviewed one of MS ethnographer. While the beginning of the interview is quite classical ("My goal is to understand people's lives and behaviors, then infuse this understanding throughout the development process to help build products that more directly meet people's needs and mold to their lives"), the end is very insightful (because it's less abstract mostly):

Ethnographic work helps show where unarticulated opportunities exist. We closely observe people and look where their current systems break down; in other words we see gaps that are waiting to be filled. If they're turned into a solution, that's where you see innovation. Innovation is not always cool, new and flashy. It's sometimes solving simple problems in new ways, like the 'big button' that Xerox Parc put on copier machines.

And especially this:

Q: What are some of the most memorable insights you've gathered from your research? Every study has unique and exciting insights. But perhaps the most surprising was working with truckers. It was part of a larger study exploring 'blind spots', or areas about which we had little information, and in particular it was part of a wireless hotspot and transit spaces study. We were floored by how much truck drivers are on the cutting edge of communication technologies and strategies to stay connected wherever they are. We heard over and over that 'when you live your life on the road, connecting with the people you love is essential to maintaining relationships.' Traditional stereotypes of truck drivers were blown away as we explored the detailed ecosystems these folks built to stay connected! These were not technology people - but they are driven to use technology in innovative and advanced ways to meet a critical need they have. Ethnography helps uncover these unexpected but invaluable uses of technology.

It reminds me this NPR podcast in which one of person interviewed was a truck driver who discussed the benefits and drawbacks of GPS positioning for his work.

I also like what she said about the fact that lab studies of mobile phone experience are quite useless because it removes the context. Plus, this is so true: "doing the research is only a quarter of the work": communicating results and working with others is another great part.

Why do I blog this? even though these are only glimpses of information, it's relevant to know some of MS usage of ethnographical studies.

Designing relevant mobile interactions

In the last issue of ACM interactions, Lars Erik Holmquist's column is about designing mobile applications. He starts from a not-so-commonsensical take (at least for app developers):

the accepted wisdom from decades of research on interfaces for stationary computers simply does not hold for mobile devices. You will even hear HCI researchers and UI designers complaining that mobile devices are too small and "limited" to permit anything interesting. But the real difference has nothing to do with size. Instead it comes down to the fact that what we do with mobile computers and the situations in which we use them are fundamentally different from what we do with the desktop. (...) Mobile devices follow us through the day, which means that they are used in many shifting roles

Then he presents what he's doing at his lab:

The goal was to investigate mobile services that, rather than just being smaller versions of desktop applications, take advantage of the fact that they are inherently mobile.

Many of the mobile services that were created in the project were based on local interaction. For instance, MobiTip from the Interaction Lab lets you share "tips" with other users in the vicinity through a Bluetooth connection. (...) Another example of local interaction is the Future Application Lab's Push!Music. What would happen if the songs on your iPod had a mind of their own? In Push!Music, all MP3 files are "media agents" that observe the music-listening behavior of the user and other people in the vicinity. (...) The eMoto project by the Involve group extends the possibilities of mobile messaging by adding an emotional component. By shaking, squeezing, and otherwise mistreating the phone's stylus after you have written a message, you generate a colorful background pattern that expresses the emotion you want to put across.

And this actually nicely exemplifies his claim about mobile design:

Those who still worry about the "limited" interaction possibilities of mobile devices should note that all the applications mentioned above could be used on a standard mobile phone today (with small modifications). Yet at the same time they drastically expand the interaction parameters of mobile devices by taking advantage of local interaction, observations of the user's behavior, physical input, and so on.

Why do I blog this? I like this emphasis on taking advantage of external elements in the interactions (spatial proximity, tangible inputs...) and not relying on a limited input/output device.

IHT on location-based marketing

Yesterday in the IHT, there was an interesting article about mobile phone/billboard interactions.

JCDecaux, the outdoor-advertising company behind the project, is that consumers consent to receive alerts about digital advertising as they move through the city. "We are switching from a one-time active response to the user's blanket acceptance of many digital messages," he said. "We will, of course, need to be careful in making certain that users get only advertisements that interest them." When participating users are near an active advertisement - it could be part of a billboard or a bus shelter poster - their phones will automatically receive a notice that a digital file can be downloaded. The information could range from a ring tone or short video to a discount voucher. "With this project, we are really starting to create the personalized digital city," Asseraf said. "We eventually will see a rich dialogue running between mobile phones and what are now uncommunicative objects." (...) A cautious and permission-based approach is vital when using technologies that touch consumers so directly,

The permission feature is indeed a crux issue.

What's behind a "personalized digital city"? What are the consequences? having people immersed in different levels of information? what about spam? What are the assumptions? that we already have a different perception of space and place, territoriality and the cues that make us think it's different? or is it just a way to better reach potential customers?

They seem to care about that:

The potential shortcomings would be apparent in any large public space that might have many digitally enabled posters close to one another. "You can imagine a nightmare scenario where someone's mobile phone fills up with half a dozen advertising messages each day as they walk across Waterloo Station," Edwards said. "The most powerful way to use this technology will be offering people something of value that they really want."

The article also addresses two applications:

they also were developing airport signs, called UbiBoards, that will show information in the language spoken by a majority of the people nearby. "If mobile phones near a sign say that the majority of people are Chinese, the sign will show information in Chinese," Banâtre said, adding that such a system would require registrations much like the ad system. "Those who do not speak Chinese will receive the same information in their phone via SMS message in their own language." Another application, called UbiQ, is being developed to allow people in a location like a bank, cinema or fast- food restaurant to give information by cellphone about what they want before getting to the front of the line. "Think about it and you realize how much time is spent giving the same start-up information for a transaction," Banâtre said, citing the time it takes for a teller to enter banking details. "The intention with UbiQ is to speed up the exchange of information through mobile phones."

Why do I blog this? after few years of emergence in the LBS world, location-based marketing seems to be one of the most developed application (after navigation tools) but there is still no consensus about best practices as well as a positive user experience: the added value is often balanced by the risk of information overload (physical spam). This does not mean that location-based marketing is not useful but it's tough to invent something really valuable.

Stuffed-doll that reads emails

Regine pointed me on Ubi.ach, by Min Lee, Gilad Lotan, Chunxi Jiang. Close to the Nabaztag, it's a "ubiquitous, personalizable stuffed- doll that is able to read out your emails wirelessly and transmit voice messages" as the designers put it.

In search of using calm technology in our project, we have come up with a friendly-looking stuffed-rabbit that speaks out your gmail, according to your preset preferences on the web. This way, you do not have to solely rely on your personal computer to retrieve your emails. The user has the freedom to preset the importance of his emails, and categorize them as well as be alerted when a new email is received. They can also have personal messages recorded, allowing for the voice to be transmitted. Essentially, we have chosen to use RF (Radio Frequency) as a method to transmit and receive data between the doll and the internet, and a set of walkie talkies to output the emails using Text-to-speech technology, while also allowing for the use of personal speech. Radio Frequency can travel up to 125ft and the walkie talkies transmit and receive up to a distance of 5 miles.

An email is sent to ubiach@gmail.com, with either the word "alert" in the subject, the bunny will read the subject of that email. And a user can also record personal messages for the bunny to speak.

The ubi.ach is a hacked mechanical rabbit that dances around. Inside, there is a board with a microcontroller, radio frequency, LEDs and switches. There is also a walkie talkie that speaks out the emails. On the computer side is the receiver with a toy that is attached to the computer with a similiar board inside.

The project is better described here, the video is funny to watch.

Why do I blog this? a very simple object (one feature = reading email) but it's interesting to see that there are more and more design work around this issue of embedding interactions in a tangible device. The next step is to use this device also an input interaction device; a dimension which is somehow lacking even for the Nabaztag

From Artifical Intelligence to Cognitive Computing

There is now a language shift from the previsouly so-called "Artifical Intelligence" to "Cognitive Computing" as attested by the news in Red Herring (an interview of Dharmendra Modha, chair of the Almaden Institute at IBM’s San Jose and IBM’s leader for cognitive computing).

Q: Why use the term “cognitive computing” rather than the better-known “artificial intelligence”?

A: The rough idea is to use the brain as a metaphor for the computer. The mind is a collection of cognitive processes—perception, language, memory, and eventually intelligence and consciousness. The mind arises from the brain. The brain is a machine—it’s biological hardware.

Cognitive computing is less about engineering the mind than it is the reverse engineering of the brain. We’d like to get close to the algorithm that the human brain [itself has]. If a program is not biologically feasible, it’s not consistent with the brain.

The emphasis is then less in the "artifical" but in the information treatment processes (cognitive) that should be re-designed through reverse engineering. What is also very intriguing is this:

Q: Can even the simplest artificial “mind” have practical applications?

A: That’s my goal, to take the simplest form and put it into a system so a customer can use it. We hope to appeal to what business can do with it.

OK, it's IBM, it's a company research lab, and even though there are still very high-level, there is this mention to "the customer can use it", which is very curious in terms of what (of course I have ideas about it but it's not explicated in this interview) and with regards to the "consuming process" (let's consume this cognitive computing device).

Why do I blog this? it's interesting to see language shift in the domain of technology, it's always meaningful.

JPod by Douglas Coupland

I'm looking forward to read JPod by Douglas Coupland.

From Publishers Weekly: Coupland returns, knowingly, to mine the dot-com territory of Microserfs (1996)—this time for slapstick. Young Ethan Jarlewski works long hours as a video-game developer in Vancouver, surfing the Internet for gore sites and having random conversations with co-workers on JPod, the cubicle hive where he works, where everyone's last name begins with J. Before Ethan can please the bosses and the marketing department (they want a turtle, based on a reality TV host, inserted into the game Ethan's been working on for months) or win the heart of co-worker Kaitlin, Ethan must help his mom bury a biker she's electrocuted in the family basement which houses her marijuana farm; give his dad, an actor desperately longing for a speaking part, yet another pep talk; feed the 20 illegal Chinese immigrants his brother has temporarily stored in Ethan's apartment; and pass downtime by trying to find a wrong digit in the first 100,000 places (printed on pages 383–406) of pi. Coupland's cultural name-dropping is predictable (Ikea, the Drudge Report, etc.), as is the device of bringing in a fictional Douglas Coupland to save Ethan's day more than once. But like an ace computer coder loaded up on junk food at 4 a.m., Coupland derives his satirical, spirited humor's energy from the silly, strung-together plot and thin characters. Call it Microserfs 2.0.

Why do I blog this? because I like Douglas Coupland's novels and that one seem to be quite curious. I expect it to epitomize the beginning of the XXIst century's habits/trends in terms of work/cultural practices.

Metaverse Roadmap: pathways to the 3D web

The Metaverse Roadmap is a ten-year forecast and visioning survey of 3D Web technologies, applications, markets, and potential social impacts.

What happens when video games meet Web 2.0? When virtual worlds meet geospatial maps of the planet? When simulations get real and life and business go virtual? When your avatar becomes your blog, your desktop, and your online agent? What happens is the metaverse. (...) Areas of exploration include the convergence of Web applications with networked computer games and virtual worlds, the use of 3D creation and animation tools in virtual environments, digital mapping, artificial life, and the underlying trends in hardware, software, connectivity, business innovation and social adoption that will drive the transformation of the World Wide Web in the coming decade.

The MVR is organized by the Acceleration Studies Foundation, a nonprofit research group, and supported by a growing team of industry and institutional partners, all pioneers in this important space.

So check out:

Creation of the Roadmap begins with an invitational Metaverse Roadmap Summit May 5-6 2006 at SRI International where a diverse group of industry leaders, technologists, analysts, and creatives will outline key visions, scenarios, forecasts, plans, opportunities, uncertainties, and challenges ahead. Below are a few distinguished attendees. Click 'view all participants' for the full list

The first steps of the roadmap 2016 is presented here

Why do I blog this? This is helpful for my foresight research about video-games.

A place like a Muscle

I am really enjoying this Muscle NSA project carried out at the Hyperbody Research Group at Delft University. This is a programmable building that can reconfigure itself.

For the exhibition Non-Standard Architecture ONL and HRG realized a working prototype of the Trans-ports project, called the MUSCLE. (...) Programmable buildings change shape by contracting and relaxing industrial muscles. The MUSCLE programmable building is a pressurized soft volume wrapped in a mesh of tensile muscles, which change length, height and width by varying the pressure pumped into the muscle.

What is interesting is the interaction they designed engaging people in a playful activity:

Visitors of the Architectures Non Standard exhibition play a collective game to explore the different states of the MUSCLE.

The public interacts with the MUSCLE by entering the interactivated sensorial space surrounding the prototype. This invisible component of the installation is implemented as a sensor field created by a collection of sensors. The sensors create a set of distinct shapes in space that, although invisible to the human eye, can be monitored and can yield information to the building body. The body senses the activities of the people and interacts with the players in a multimodal way. The public discovers within minutes how the MUSCLE behaves on their actions, and soon after they start finding a goal in the play. The outcome of this interaction however is unpredictable, since the MUSCLE is programmed to have a will of its own. It is pro-active rather then responsive and obedient. The programmable body is played by its users.

There is also a slight connection with the blogject concept:

For the behavioral system this means that the produced sensorial data is analyzed in real-time and acts as the parameters for pre-programmed algorithms and user-driven interferences in the defined scripts. These author-defined behavioral operations are instantly computed, resulting in a diversity of e-motive behaviors that are experienced as changes in the physical shape of the active structure and the generation of an active immersive soundscape. The MUSCLE really is an interactive input-output device, a playstation augmenting itself through time.

Why do I blog this? what I like in this project is that it mixes different aspects of the HCI world: games, games software, architecture, usage of sensors. In the end, the outcome is pretty original and the visitors' experience seem to be intriguing. I also like how it modifies the relationship of the visitors to a dynamic place.

Special issue of Psychnology about Mobile Media

The Psychnology journal (an online research journal) is going to have a special issue on Mobile media and communication – reconfiguring human experience and social practices? (edited by Ilkka Arminen):

Mobile media have already become an essential aspect of everyday life. They alter existing communication patterns, enable new kinds of contacts between people, and yet remain embedded in prevailing social relations and practices. Mobile communication has said to have created “timeless time” and freedom from place. This new social and communicative development has been characterized revolutionary. Still, the usages of mobile technologies are solidly anchored on local circumstances and prevailing forms of life. Also not all mobile technologies have proven successful. The adoption of mobile media has been in many respects much slower than anticipated. Is there a contradiction between revolutionary technological potential of mobile media and embodied, habitual human experiences? This special issue addresses the potentially tense relationship between the development of mobile technologies and mundane experience.

Possible topics include:

Reinvention of mobile media.

Limits of mobile technologies.

Mobile technologies and local realities.

Mobile technologies and new forms of social interaction.

Mobile technologies and social networks.

Submissions are accepted of any length, discipline and format provided their scientific relevance and accuracy. They should be sent in electronic form to both: articles(at)psychnology.org, and Ilkka.Arminen(at)uta.fi no later than October, 30 2006. Inclusion of color pictures, videos and sound files is welcome.

Why do I blog this? again this is indirectly connected to my research about how new technologies reshape social/cultural/cognitive practices.

A bag of wires

Seen in Stanford University yesterday:

Is this what happen when a university goes wireless?

Workshop about space/place

In the context of the Participatory Design Conference, there is a workshop about place, space, and design (.pdf).

While we are "Expanding Boundaries in Design", perhaps we should think for a moment on the significance of boundaries, which are essentially the separation of "this place" from everything "not this place". And what constitutes "this place"?

The intent of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners who have studied place and space and are engaged in exploring the ways in which place and space affect design and the use of technology and the ways in which technology changes the places where it is used.

The day of the workshop will be divided between exercises and discussions. It will begin with a brief round of introductions, followed by an exercise on location. This is intended to explore differences in awareness of location and the differential meanings carried by the respective erminologies of place and space. The next segment will be the presentation and discussion of participants' reports on their own studies of place and space, either sent in advance or brought to the workshop. The morning will conclude with a game on place, space, and design.

Why do I blog this? This is related to my PhD research, especially the relationship between space/place and socio-cognitive interactions with regards to pervasive computing applications.