Repetition in new media art

Regine has been interviewed by fine art Trendbeheer. One of the topic they discussed is very relevant to me:

Trendbeheer: Art is all about hypes and media art more then that: there are so much sponsored/government subsidised events these days - at least in Holland - that there are more conferences then artists. There is a danger of disillusion for a new audience.

Regine: I see a proliferation of new media art festivals all around europe. And there’s a lot of repetition, not always in favour of the best works.

On the one hand it’s great for new media artists, on the other hand the audience is not growing as quickly as the number of festivals.

Why do I blog this? I fully agree with this statement about repetition: it seems that as in engineering, media artists are sometimes not aware of other projects related to theirs (hence they reinvent the wheel on a regular basis). This is no an attack targetting artists but rather a phenomenon that I noticed both with engineering students and media artists which IMO is rather about the way they work than their intrinsical behavior. And of course, as a person working in the academic world, I have a strong bias towards an overamphasis on checking earlier work of others.

"Extreme Users"

Lars Erik Holmquist defines what he means by "extreme users" in his paper: User-driven innovation in the future applications lab:

users that have very particular and perhaps peculiar requirements. We believe such specialized groups are more likely to put our technology in a new light, thus giving rise to interesting ideas. We can think of them as “extreme users”, an analogue to the concept of “extreme characters”, which are persona that are created to generate ideas in interaction design. As with extreme characters, the purpose is to inspire novel ideas that can be generalized for a larger audience. In several instances we have seen how the insights gained from working with specialized users has pushed the original technology and concepts much further than would otherwise have been the case.

Why do I blog this? I like to think in terms of extreme users and extreme "usage".

Locomotion interface: Powered Shoes

I recently ran across this (I don't know where, maybe at WMMNA): Powered Shoes, a project carried out by Hiroo Iwata. It's basically a "wearable locomotion interface that enables omni-directional walking while maintaining the user's position"

A locomotion interface using roller skates actuated by two motors with flexible shafts. The device enables users to walk in arbitrary directions in virtual environments while maintaining their positions.

Enhanced Life It has often been suggested that the best locomotion mechanism for virtual worlds would be walking, and it is well known that the sense of distance or orientation while walking is much better than while riding in a vehicle. However, the proprioceptive feedback of walking is not provided in most virtual environments. Powered Shoes is a revolutionary advance for entertainment and simulation applications, because it provides this proprioceptive feedback.

Why do I blog this? It reminds me of something discussed with julian about a walking-based interface. Lots of interesting mixed reality application could be used using this sort of device: not in the proper "mixed" system that actually exists (including virtual world features in the real world through glasses) but rather by allowing tangible interactions to control stuff that would happen in the virtual worlds.

The importance of the "body" (the why of tangible computing?)

I am sure this paper is interested for Adam Greenfield's next book ("The city is here for you to use"):How Bodies Matter: Five Themes for Interaction Design by Scott R. Klemmer, Bjoern Hartmann, and Leila Takayama For DIS2006:

It discusses how "our physical bodies play a central role in shaping human experience in the world, understanding of the world, and interactions in the world", drawing on various theories of embodiment in the field of psychology, sociology and philosophy.

What is interesting is that articles presents some relevant arguments and examples that shows the importance of the body. It put the emphasis on the embodiment for (among others), I picked up those I was interested in:

• Learning through doin: physical interaction in the world facilitates cognitive development (Piaget, Montessori)
• Gesture is important in terms of cognition and fully linguistic communication for adults (to conceptually plan speech production and to communicate thoughts that are not easily verbalized)
• Epistermic actions: manipulating artifacts to better understand the task’s context
• Thinking through prototyping
• Tangibility of representations: The representation of a task can radically affect our reasoning abilities and performance.
• The tacit knowledge that many physical situations afford play an important role in expert behavior.
• hands, as they are simultaneously a means for complex expression and sensation: they allow for complicated movement
• kinesthetic memory is important to know how to interact with objects (ride a bicycle, how to swim)
• Reflective reasoning is too slow to stay in the loop
• Learning is situated in space
• Visibility Facilitates Coordination
• Physical Action is characterized by Risk: bodies can suffer harm if one chooses the wrong course of action
• Personal responsibility: Making the consequences of decisions more directly visible to people alters the outcome of the decision-making process.

Why do I blog this? This echoes with the literature review I did about how space/place affords socio-cognitive interactions. Embodiment is certainly one of the most interesting component of this relationship.

I also think one of the most important dimension is the inherent risk of physical actions, nobody gets physically hurt in virtual worlds but what happened while playing augmented reality quake?

Of course this is meant to support the "why" question of tangible computing?

Veejaying: a new form of dubbing

The Christian Science Monitor has a piece about this curious socio-cultural practice in Uganda: veejaying: the act of translating in real-time foreign movies for the audience:

"Veejaying" is now a central form of local entertainment. But the art involves much more than translation. Part sports announcer, part street preacher, part comedian, a veejay must fill in cultural gaps and keep the audience engaged, which - for many veejays - often means taking considerable creative license.

The video jockey is an offshoot of the distinctly home-grown phenomenon of the video hall. Makeshift shacks commonly made of plywood and tin sheeting, they function as the main form of cinema for the Ugandan masses, most of whom cannot afford theater tickets or rentals of pirated DVDs. (...) The festival features a "Veejay slam," in which some of the country's best-known video jockeys display different styles and compete for the best audience response.

Why do I blog this? it's curious to see that this practice goes further than just translating, and it eventually lead to new forms of entertainment in the forms of slam competitions or DVD editions.

A new form of tinkering cultural content.

Ubiquitous versus Pervasive Computing

Visualizing the usage of these two terms with the new Google Trends tool:

I don't know to what extent the tool is reliable but the search volume is decreasing over time and there are some variations where ubiquitous is more searched than pervasive and vice versa.

Why do I blog this? just wanted to try Google Trends comparing two keywords which I am familiar with.

Distorted maps, check the royalties/fee one!

Worldmapper offers some exquisite "anamorphosis" (maps where territories are re-sized on each map according to the subject of interest). What is great is that their data are also available. Some of the distorted map are utterly crazy, look at this one: Royalties And License Fees Exports:

Territory size shows the proportion of worldwide net exports of royalties and license fees (in US$) that come from there. Net exports are exports minus imports. When imports are larger than exports the territory is not shown.

Only 18 (out of 200) territories are net exporters of license fees and royalties. This means that a few people living in less than a tenth of the territories in the world between them receive the US$30 billion of net export earnings for these services.

The International Monetary Fund explained that royalties and license fees include "international payments and receipts for the authorised use of intangible, non-produced, non-financial assets and proprietary rights ... and with the use, through licensing agreements, of produced originals or prototypes ...". Thus these export earnings are payments for past ideas.

“Ideas shape our world. They are the raw materials on which our future prosperity and heritage depend.” Kamil Idris, 2006

Sensecam, Collaborative Reflection and Passive Image Capture

This afternoon at COOP2006, I enjoyed a short paper by "Supporting Collaborative Reflection with Passive Image Capture" by Rowanne Flec and Geraldine Fitzpatrick. Her PhD research is about how the a technology such as Microsoft's Sensecam can support reflective thoughts in different situations (teacher's practices, everyday reflections... learning from experience).

The SenseCam is a digital camera that has a light sensor and a temperature sensor (allows to trigger images to be taken)... a passive images capture tool. Then you can get a storyboard of the pictures taken.

She ran an expriment in which students when to an arcade to play games with the SenseCam. They played the game and then went back to their HCI class in which they had to discuss some HCI questions. Some groups had the images, some others not (two experimental conditions). She looked at the "goodness" of answers and the number of issues raised in discussion.

Results: - discussion-led use of images: to ground the conversation (referential communication), as an objective record, to talk about something missed by partner or "just in case" - image-led discussion: trigger memory, confirm/disconfirm memory, reveal something missed at time ("it's quite useful for getting a look at what you're actually because we did not use those buttons in the game".

Why do I blog this? I am actually interested both by the study and the tool. I would be super happy to have this sort of tool for my research project about location-based applications and about video games. It would be a nice way to get some traces of the activity that I'd be able to use to get back to the users and discuss them. Here is how it's described by MS:

SenseCam is a badge-sized wearable camera that captures up to 2000 VGA images per day into 128Mbyte FLASH memory. In addition, sensor data such as movement, light level and temperature is recorded every second.

Sensors trigger a new recording. For example, each time the person walks into a new room, this light change transition is detected and the room image is captured with an ultra wide angle or fish-eye lens. (...) The sensor data (motion, light, temperature, and near infrared images) is recorded for later correlation with other user data, for example in the MyLifeBits system. (...)MyLifeBits will allow the large number of images generated daily to be easily searched and accessed. Future SenseCams will also capture audio and possibly heart rate or other physiological data.

Paper presentation at COOP2006

Today, I presented my PhD research at COOP2006. It as called "The Underwhelming Effects of Location-Awareness of Others on Collaboration in a Pervasive Game" (Nicolas NOVA, Fabien GIRARDIN, Gaëlle MOLINARI and Pierre DILLENBOURG).

Abstract. In this paper we seek to empirically study the use of location-awareness of others in the context of mobile collaboration. We report on a field experiment carried out using a pervasive game we developed called CatchBob!. Using both quantitative and qualitative data, we show the underwhelming effects of automating location-awareness. Our results indeed shows that automating this process does not necessarily improve the task performance and that it can be detrimental to socio-cognitive processes involved in collaboration such as communication or the modeling of partners’ intents. The paper concludes with some potential impacts for location-based application practitioners.

Keywords: location-awareness, socio-cognitive processes, pervasive game, cscw, field experiment.

This paper can be downloaded here. Some interesting comments had been made about new possible conditions to be tested (having one player who has the location-awareness tool and not the two others; having a crossed repartition of the subjects for example). Of course, I still have some people who are unhappy by the fact that I controlled my sample, having only people who know each others and who know the campus but that's life... I understand that they don't like experimental research but hey... Some have pointed out the fact that the study shows how communication is important and how it's very different from broadcasting information. There was also a good discussion about the neverending debate concerning "awareness": is it knowledge? information? is it about being conscious of a phenomenon or just being aware of it (even though the word "awareness" is based on the english word, sometimes it's not taken as such by some scholars). Finally, I was encouraged to keep looking at the qualitative data, in terms of coordination information, which is actually what I am heading towards in the next month.

The "cluster effect"

According to the Wikipedia:

The cluster effect is the effect of buyers and sellers of a particular good or service congregating in a certain place and hence inducing other buyers and sellers to relocate there as well.

For example in the mid- to late 1990s, several successful computer technology related companies emerged in Silicon Valley in California. This led anyone who wished to create a startup company to do so in Silicon Valley. The surge in the number of Silicon Valley startups led to a number of venture capital firms relocating to or expanding their Valley offices. This in turn encouraged more entrepreneurs to locate their startups there.

Why do I blog this? I was not familiar with this name referring to this concept of emergent/self-organization.

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.