Marko Ahtisaari's talk at Reboot

End of the afternoon at Reboot, Mark Ahtisaari (Director of Design Strategy at Nokia) talked about "Mobile 2.0: Social Renaissance", basically describing the second stage of mobile communication. The mobile industry today has a huge scale: it reached 2bn mobile subscribers today.

The next 2bn are very different, in terms of usage patterns + income. He's wondering about how can something grow to become so big so quickly? This is due to 3 features: - an object with a social function (familiar before: making a phone call and later sending txt messages) tied to a service - service providers subsidizing price (by mobile operators) - the shift from a familiar collective object to a personal object (this is less quoted in the marketing literature), one of the 3 things you carry (with some form of payment + keys): mobile essentials

Because of this growth, this object becomes an hybrid object: a magnet to draws to it other functionalities: knowing time (watch), waking up (alarm clock), taking pictures (cameras).

So far, it was about mobile 1.5 = in the last 3 years, the interest of this industry shifted to another rhetoric: about a separate internet of some kind that would appear (wap...). There was a lot of emphasis on media content at the expense of human created content (social cooperative content)

To him, there are 7 challenges that can be opportunities: - reach: Mobile 2.0 = the next to 2bn users, largely coming from the new markets: BRICs (Brasil, Russia, India, China) - sometimes off: user interface + social design questions, there will be a reaction towars the always-onness - hackability: an important aspect of design is to let the user complete objects: Nokia pushed that: changeable covers, physical personnalisation (stickers, strap-on...and not only kids; and not only in western culture: adding LEDs on phone in India), user interface skin: it's someone's thing, you can pimp your ride, you can pimp your phone. It's also possible to script or sketch your cell phone (python). Finally: mobile phone repair chain (even enhancement of mobile phone). - social primitives: the SMS has been used to inform, flirt, joke, flattened... gift giving, signaling (to present intention, what I am listening too, the use of the IM line/mood), photostream, peer production (a la wikipedia or flickr), remixing - openness: if the core is social interaction, all the successfull forms of interactions are based on open standards/protocols (free:dom); what shape communication take when it's completely free? And it's never free, someone always has to pay. FON is a good thing for that matter - simplicity: new ways to configure the user interface ("Making the simple complicated is commonplace, making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity" Charles Mingus): Indian vibration chatting machine (stereo hifi tapes) - justice: how do we sustainably connect the 2bn who are not connected? if the core growth is in the social interaction then the question of fairness of access emerges.

More about it in his notes about this other presentation

A Social Screensaver or a Game?

Matt just sent this: The endless forest is a kind of game, described as a "a social screensaver". It's designed and directed by Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn (belgian game studio Tales of tales):

The Endless Forest is a social screensaver, a virtual place where you can play with your friends. When your computer goes to sleep you appear as a deer in this magical place. There are no goals to achieve or rules to follow. You just steer your deer through the forest and see what happens.

Currently The Endless Forest consists of a forest, a mysterious ruin, a lovely pond and as many deer as there are players at any given time. You can play the game anonymously but we encourage you to name your deer so other players can recognize you. Although not goal-oriented, there are several activities that you can engage in. Nothing very demanding or violent. Just fun things to do in a nice environment. Once every so often, the forest deities will appear, either in person or through their divine powers.

The Endless Forest client as well as the multiplayer service are available free of charge thanks to the support of several cultural institutions

Reading the authors' take is very insightful:

Interactive media, and especially real-time 3D technologies, have so much more to offer than the childish games that form the bulk of the offer today. The Endless Forest is an attempt for us to try and do something with these technologies that does not need to inherit all those things that we don't like in games. (...) It [The Endless Forest] is not designed to offer any challenges that need to be overcome, or points that can be scored. It's is much more freeform than that. It's probably a little bit like a nice painting. You can stare at it for hours a keep discovering new things. And best of all, you can be part of the picture and new things can appear at any time.

Why do I blog this? this is another pertinent move in the expansion of games or the blurring of boundaries and other forms of play.

Reboot 8 in Copenhagen

Some few thoughts about Reboot8 first day.

Thomas' introduced the concept of this edition, which is re-naissance (re-birth) = understanding the past and improving on that. It's about easy reality, sustainable change, not just about business but also changing society and changing our own lifestyle; a new perspective, not a buzzword, global connectedness.

Matt Webb gave a presentation about the characteristics of human sense and how they could be used to design new kind of interaction (a renaissance of the senses). He exemplified this by showing it could be included in the next generation browser. (I lost my notes 'coz of a subethaedit crash :( ) Anyway, what was pertinent in his propositions is to think more about the (mostly cognitive) differences between senses that designer do not use. Then, Ulla-Maaaria Mutanen presented her "Crafter Economics" ideas. It will be about a set of rules that seem to emerge among people who make all kind of stuff and publish that on-line. "Craft" can be taken as "arts and crafts" (william morris), "craft quals bad taste", "craft as cool", "craft as alternative to mass production", "craft as help", "craft as play", "craftv as movement", "craftv as culture history". In all these categories, there is different kind of styles: hard, soft, trendy, extreme, corporate... It's all about creative making, and in this presentation, creative makers that publish their work online. She takes the example of "Pertti robotti" (a gift in the form of a robot that can contact the father of a kid when the cell phoen is close to it). She did that and other people crafted their own version and put them on "etsy.com": market exchange, is it really a market? not rellay (because profit did not motivate exchange...). As she said in her talk description,

According to classical economics, 1) profit motivates exchange; 2) exchange is based on money; 3) demand can be purchased (stimulated through marketing). I will argue for a different crafter economics, where objects are exchanged but the goal is not to profit; money does not always exchange hands; and friends can't be bought.

Here, in the crafter economics, learning motivated exchange, comments are currency (and not money), links determine the value of objects, demand shows as recognition (and not as purchases), recognition is based on recommendations (not things are equally recommandable). These are cornestones of the new rules!

ASIN, UPV, ISPN are codes developed for companies by companies (mainly for lgistics); for small producers, they seem useless, cost money and hard to get. Most of art, and craft on the Internet are invisible; this is the reason behind thinglink": an open database in which makers can recommand to other people.

What I liked in Ulla's presentation was how she set the craft activities within a broader frameworker connected to an "alternative" economy. This is very important, especially when it comes to objects and artifacts producing. Maybe it's not so well connected to the blogject issue but my feeling is that the more capacity objects has (agency, capability to recall history...), the better they epitomize the magic of Things.

Mark Hurst also pointed to a very interesting phenomenon in his talk about Bit Literacy: people should learn to learn to say no to some technologies or usage (with gmail: do not keep them all...). This is connected to what we were discussing lately for the next LIFT topics. Random quotes: "here it's renaissance - not capitalised and with question mark" Thomas Mygdal

"if GPS was only a human sense it would directly be appreciated" Matt Webb

"data exist everywhere and we're just revealing it" Matt webb

"craft as alternative to mass production" Ulla-Maaria Mutanen

"Objects without links (interesting stories) are a dead object" Ulla-Maaria Mutanen

"if you want to manage your information stream, you have to learn to say no, to let things off, to delete something" Mark Hurst

Technorati Tags: reboot, reboot8, copenhagen

When robot mimic tongues and tentacles...

What a curious device on "extreme engineering" (Discovery channel): A robot with a flexible, trunk-like arm could one day work like an elephant to grasp unwieldy loads, navigate like a snake through the rubble of a disaster zone, or feel around inside the dark crevasses of other planets.:

Unlike conventional robots with rigid joints -- picture a crane-like appendage with a claw-shaped hand -- the OctArm's nimble design allows it to move freely and adapt to its surroundings.

"These robots are invertebrate robots and are good at getting into tight spaces and wriggling around," said Ian Walker, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, whose team at Clemson University in South Carolina has been working on the project for nearly 10 years. (...) A scientist uses a joystick to the control the OctArm, which resembles an elephant trunk: thick at the base and tapered toward the tip. A computer responds to the joystick's motions by changing the air pressure inside individual tubes.

Why do I blog this? a robot with a trunk sounds a bit odd but it might have curious affordances... biomimicry to its best?

Extreme behavior

I am always mesmerized by sort of attitude: 70,000 Beer Cans Found in Ogden Townhouse:

When property manager Ryan Froerer got a call from a realtor last year to check on a townhouse, he knew something was up. Ryan Froerer, Century 21: "As we approached the door, there were beer boxes, all the way up to the ceiling."

Inside, he took just a few snapshots to document the scene. Beer cans by the tens of thousands. Mountains of cans burying the furniture. The water and heat were shut off, apparently on purpose by the tenant, who evidently drank Coors Light beer exclusively for the eight years he lived there.

The cans were recycled for 800 dollars, an estimated 70,000 cans: 24 beers a day for 8 years.

Why do I blog this? it's a quirky but I am impressed by this sort of squalor behavior... Extreme user of cans...

Role played by artifacts in cognition

How social is the social? Rethinking the role of artifacts in cognitive science is a paper by Ana Viseu that I came across while sorting my "to read" txt file. It's basically a good account of the role played by artifacts in cognition. It describes them from the perspectives of 3 different schools of thought:

• Vygotsky's sociocultural theory: the notion of mediation through artifacts.
• Marshall McLuhan's view of artifacts as extensions of Man
• Actor-Network Theory (ANT), in which humans and non-humans are each considered to be actors, their agency depending on their relationships

I particularly like the 2 tables she's using to summarize these issues: the first one is about the nature and role of artifacts and the second is about the character of cognition:

	Vygotsky	McLuhan	Actor-Network Theory
Artifacts	Mediators	Extensions	Actors

	Vygotsky	McLuhan	Actor-Network Theory
Thought	Social--> private (individual development)	Private--> social (historical development)	Relational

I also like the final word:

The solution may lie in the combination of these different perspectives, a multi-disciplinary approach to cognition. But it will also lie, as Lucy Suchman puts it so well, in finding a new language to talk about cognition, for both persons and artifacts. We have to shift from a language that focuses on separation, disembodiment and isolation to one that focuses on relatedness and relationships (Suchman, 1997).

Why do I blog this? these theories of cognition quite fit into my research perspective and are totally different from what is still taught sometimes in cognitive science degrees (in which the paradigm are much more limited to the individual's mind).

meanwhile... 2nd blogject workshop

These last 2 days, I am busy managing the blogject workshop 2 with Julian Bleecker at EPFL. There's a small group of very relevant people there (Julian Bleecker, Fabien Girardin, Mauro Cherubini, Mark Meagher, Frédéric Kaplan, Laurent Sciboz, Timo Arnall, Sascha Pohflepp, Regine Debatty, Fabio Sergio, Fabio Cesa, Marc Hottinger, Cyril Rebetez, Alain Bellet, Manu Bansal, Cyril Rebetez). This one is a bit different from the first one we had during LIFT06, with different people, from different background and more anchored into concrete projects and scenario developments.

Still have to write report from the tons of notes, drawings and audio files we have!

There will be a 3rd workshop on its way... (source), stay tuned

Communications of the ACM on hacking and innovation

The last issue of Communications of the ACM is about "Hacking and Innovation". There are some very interesting papers about that topic; ranging from hacker ethic to hardware hacking and academic freedom.

Hacking and Innovation Gregory Conti, Guest Editor Academic Freedom and the Hacker Ethic Tom Cross Security Through Legality Stephen Bono, Aviel Rubin, Adam Stubblefield, and Matthew Green Research Lessons from Hardware Hacking Joe Grand Software Security Is Software Reliability Felix "FX" Lindner Explorations in Namespace: White-Hat Hacking Across the Domain Name System Dan Kaminsky

Why do I blog this? that's a topic I am interested because it wraps up some thoughts about independent activities (research, design), connected to a new ecology of doers.

When location information undermines navigation

Does Location Come for Free?The Effects of Navigation Aids on Location Learning by Carl Gutwin and Diana Anton; Technical report HCI-TR-06-03.

Navigation aids such as bookmarks, target prediction, or history mechanisms help users find desired objects in visual workspaces. They work by highlighting objects that may be important, and they can improve performance in spaces where the territory is not well known. However, by making navigation easier, they may also hinder acquisition of a mental map of the space, reducing navigation performance when the navigation aid is not available. We carried out a study to determine the effects of three different types of navigation aids on spatial location learning. We found that after training with a navigation aid, there was no reduction in performance when the aid was removed. Even with training interfaces that made the task significantly easier, people learned the locations as well as those who had no aid at all in training. These results suggest that designers can use navigation aids to assist inexperienced users, without compromising the eventual acquisition of a spatial map.

Why do I blog this? this is interesting to my research since I also encounters similar results: by providing different location information, there was some undermining results concerning, not navigation, but collaborative partners' navigation memory. And this, with a very different setting since it was pervasive computing.

Extraordinary architecture: futurism from the 70s

Last week I went to La Grande Motte, an impressive city created in France in 1974 to be populated with tourists during the summer.

Why do I blog this? The architecture is very intriguing to me, very stylish and not passé at all; I like the shape, the colors and the global impression (it reminds a bit of UC Irvine's computer science building); a real sci-fi place.

Carpet fighting

An interesting project from the //////////fur//// workshop @ ECAL, 2004 :

CARPET FIGHTING by Patricia Armada / Pierre-Abraham Rochat / Gabriel Walt / Mathias Forbach Compete on the keyboard against a player in the real space in this multiple reality crossing, tic-tac-toe like game. (PC Laptop, EZIO interface board, carpet, electronics)

Why do I blog this? I like the reality crossing idea and the messiness of such technology with wires.

Ito on kids participation in new media culture

Cultural anthropologist Dr. Mizuko Ito recently published a draft about Kids' participation in new media cultures which is very worth reading. She addresses the question of how young people mobilize the media and the imagination in everyday life andand how new media change this dynamic. Some excerpts I found intersting:

Our contemporary understandings of media and the childhood imagination are framed by a set of cultural distinctions between an active/creative or a passive/derivative mode of engaging with imagination and fantasy. (...) Scholars in media studies have challenged the cultural distinctions between active and passive media, arguing that television and popular media do provide opportunities for creative uptake and agency in local contexts of reception. (...) new convergent media such as Pokemon require a reconfigured conceptual apparatus that takes productive and creative activity at the “consumer” level (...) The important question is not whether the everyday practices of children in media culture are “original” or “derivative,” “active” or “passive,” but rather the structure of the social world, the patterns of participation, and the content of the imagination that is produced through the active involvement of kids, media producers, and other social actors. This is a conceptual and attentional shift motivated by the emergent change in modes of cultural production. (...) New technologies tend to be accompanied by a set of heightened expectations, followed by a precipitous fall from grace after failing to deliver on an unrealistic billing. (...) technologies are in fact embodiments, stabilizations, and concretizations of existing social structure and cultural meanings, growing out of an unfolding history as part of a necessarily altered and contested future. The promises and the pitfalls of certain technological forms are realized only through active and ongoing struggle over their creation, uptake, and revision.

She then describes 3 important constructs:

contemporary media needs to be understood not as an entirely new set of media forms but rather as a convergence between more traditional media such as television, books, and film, and digital and networked media and communications. Convergent media involve the ability for consumers to select and engage with content in more mobilized waylateral networks of communication and exchange at the consumer level. (...) These changing media forms are tied to the growing trend toward personalization and remix as genres of media engagement and production. Gaming, interactive media, digital authoring, Internet distribution, and networked communications enable a more customized relationship to collective imaginings as kids mobilize and remix media content to fit their local contexts of meaning. (...) described the kind of social exchange that accompanies the traffic in information about new media mixes like Pokemon and Yugioh as hypersocial, social exchange augmented by the social mobilization of elements of the collective imagination

Why do I blog this? I met Mizuko last month at the Netpublic conference and was very interested in how she's taking another stance regarding kids engagement in new media culture, especially what she was explaining about convergence and hypersociality. I find particulary pertinent the way she rephrase the question of the kids participation into something broader and - in the end - much richer. These constructs are important to me, both as researcher in the field of emerging technologies and also when working with game designers to make them understand the implications of their creations.

Playful situations at home

"Playfully situated messaging in the home: appropriation of messaging resources in entertainment" by Mark Perry (Brunel University, UK), Dorothy Rachovides (Brunel University, UK), Alex Taylor (Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK) and Laurel Swan (Brunel University, UK) is a paper from the "Entertainment media at home - looking at the social aspects" workshop at CHI 2006. The authors promotes an an embodied, everyday gaming paradigm in which people artfully employ the everyday resources in the world around them to entertain themselves and others. This is exemplified by a field study of how people are engaged in playful activity through (asynchronous) messaging at home.

The activities that we have seen are very much about household members creatively making use of the resources around them to entertain themselves, and (they hope) the others around them. Here lies a serious point for technology designers: systems that open themselves up for, perhaps unanticipated, use (cf. Robinson, 1993) give their users a powerful tool for artfully integrating them into other practices, a good deal of which in the home are playful and entertainment-related. By allowing users to generate, co- opt, display and annotate a variety of media we can give them the resources to do many forms of communication, one of which is the ability to support play. And whilst play does embody social rules, it is the very socially constructed nature of these rules, and not their technological embodiment, that makes them powerful, and allows them to be applied in a variety of ways. We would therefore not encourage strong rule sets that form ‘methods’ of play, but would rather allow these to be generated on an ad hoc basis, and to draw from the existing social practices around messaging that household members already use in their everyday lives.

Why do I blog this? What I like here is the idea that gaming is not just interacting with a gaming system (console, PC...) but something broader that would involved everyday artifacts.

TV test pattern / test card

A test card is (according to Wikipedia):

A test card, also known as a test pattern in North America, is a television test signal, typically broadcast at times when the transmitter is active, but no program is being broadcast (often at startup and closedown). Originally, all test cards were actually physical cards at which a television camera was pointed, and such cards are still often used for calibration, alignment, and matching of cameras and camcorders. Test patterns used for calibrating or troubleshooting the downstream signal path are nowadays generated by test signal generators, which do not depend on the correct configuration of (and presence of) a camera. (...) Most include a set of calibrated color bars which will produce a characteristic pattern of "dot landings" on a vectorscope, allowing chroma and tint to be precisely adjusted between generations of videotape or network feeds

Some examples:

Why do I blog this? first because I like their odd design; second because it's an artifact that belongs to the past. What's the equivalent of the test pattern for the Web?

Architecture Foresight

Archrecord has a good read about building foresight: Imagining the future: How will we make buildings in 2030? by Sara Hart.

magine thirty years from now. Will urban areas in 2030 look like Ridley Scott’s Los Angeles in the sci-fi movie Blade Runner—a prelude to Armageddon where the affluent reside in the tops of 400-story skyscrapers, and the less fortunate scratch out an unsavory existence in the seamy, polluted, and lawless regions on the surface? Or will Americans live the utopian dream in self-sufficient, fossil-fuel free communities. (...) At this moment, however, the future is already taking form. On one hand, materials scientists are locked in laboratories inventing new, smart, and sustainable materials and composites, which are touted elsewhere in this issue as the beginning of a revolution in design and construction. At the same time, building materials that dominated the 20th century still dominate in the new millennium. (...)Still, in an era of engineering virtuosity and genuine collaboration and teamwork, who will own the architecture?

The article describes the material of the future with specific case studies about new developments that concerns concrete, steel and glass. Why do I blog this? the blade-runner like city is still the nightmare of urban planners but it does not seem to be where we are heading; I find this discussion interesting in terms of foresight research and my interest towards urban computing makes me think about these issues too.

Galileo, assisted GPS and potential users

IHT describes the few points about Galileo, its 5 levels of services of Galileo (the European quasi-GPS) and other interesting things with regards to locative technologies:

Galileo would have five levels of service, the most basic of which would be free, like GPS. The others would be commercial and offer higher levels of accuracy, security, strength or a combination of those qualities. The second tier of service would be designed for basic commercial applications like truck-fleet management, while the third would be accurate enough for more sophisticated services like assisting aircraft to land or guiding ships loaded with dangerous materials through coastal waters, he said. The fourth level would offer higher security in the form of encryption and anti-jamming measures and would be used by government authorities like the police, ambulance drivers, fire brigades and the armed forces, de- Ledinghen said. The final tier would be used for search and rescue and would offer a unique two-way service, providing the sender of a distress signal an acknowledgment of its receipt.

The article also mentions the current assisted GPS:

Several services around the world offer enhanced, or assisted, navigation services based on the open GPS service. Such services enhance GPS with additional geostationary satellites and ground stations that monitor the GPS signals and correct them. (...) while normal GPS is hindered by buildings, trees or anything else that blocks out the sky, "assisted" GPS works much better in urban canyons and can even operate indoors. (...) Alcatel and Orange, the mobile operator owned by France Télécom, conducted a trial from October to February in which 200 users were given Hewlett-Packard devices that combined the functions of an advanced mobile phone and an assisted-GPS receiver. The gadgets allowed users to roam around towns on foot, with accurate maps beamed to them via the mobile network. Alice Holzman, marketing director at Orange France, said the customers were impressed with the speed and accuracy of the devices. She said the increased accuracy of assisted GPS made it feasible for mobile phone operators to offer services to track valuables or for applications like emergency services and medical assistance. More "fun" services like friend finding and mobile gaming will use the technology when costs come down, she added.

Why do I blog this? since I am interested by the user experience of location-based applications, I'd like to know more than " customers were impressed with the speed and accuracy of the devices", what does that mean in terms of people's behavior: is it " Phew wow my assisted GPS is so accurate!" or a "ok I have to make a right and a left to finally find my car"? That's really an important topic, when it comes to how people feel technologies' discrepancies, accuracy (or non accuracy) and responsiveness.

Blogject workshop part 2

Next week, at EPFL (may 29-30), CRAFT will host the second blogject workshop. The first one was hosted by LIFT06. Organized by Nicolas Nova and Julian Bleecker. By talking about "blogjects" (objects that could potentially disseminate a record of their interactions with people, context and other objects on the web), we envision a new participation of "things" in the physical and social space. In this context, the so-called "Internet of Things" may give rise to a new ecology of things, and consequently to a different set of social practices and relations to space.

The previous workshop addressed that issue by considering how this would generate new possibilities for integrating networked artifacts such as "blogjects" in both the physical world and the Internet. The description and discussion of various scenarios allowed the definition of usage opportunities.

The first workshop was devoted to finding interesting research avenues and questions related to this "blogject" thing. People from various background and perspectives participated in the discussion, which eventually lead to this big report (pdf, 19Mb!). This time, the participants will have a different background (rather technical) and the aim of the 2-days is to have a more "hands-on" follow-up so that we design prototypes of networked artifact of the future (be it a blogject, a pervasive device, a slogging place, a locative thing, a pre-spime or an everyware).

100 most influential works in cognitive science

For those who want to keep in touch with cognitive sciences, let's have a look at the one hundred most influential works in cognitive science; here is just the top10:

• Syntactic Structures Chomsky, N. (1957)
• Vision: a computational investigation into the human representation and processing of visual information Marr, D. (1982)
• Computing machinery and intelligence Turing, A. M. (1950) Mind, 59, 433-460.
• The organization of behavior; a neuropsychological theory Hebb, D.O. (1949)
• Parallel distributed processing: Explorations in the microstructure of cognition Rumelhart, D. E., McClelland, J. L. (1986)
• Human problem solving Newell, A., & Simon, H. A. (1972)
• he modularity of mind: An essay on faculty psychology Fodor, J. (1983)
• Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology Bartlett, F. C. (1932)
• The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information Miller, G. A. (1956) Psychological Review, 63, 81-97
• Perception and Communication Broadbent, D. (1958)

Why do I blog this such ranking is weird but interesting, I was wondering whether there could be more diachronic representations, both for research work and paradigm: a Kuhn-esque ranking would be curious.

Pervasive gaming workshop papers

The paper from the Pervasive gaming workshop during the Pervasive2006 Conference has been released.

The PerGames series of international workshops addresses the design and technical issues of bringing computer entertainment back to the real world with pervasive games. The previous PerGames events were held in Vienna (2004) and Munich (2005) and attracted researchers and practitioners from all over the world

So there are papers about AR gaming, smart RFID cards, the use of seams, cross-media gaming, the user experience of flow, the use of haptic feedback...

Why do I blog this? lots of stuff to parse about the future of gaming, using new paradigms such as tangible interactions, AR or haptic feedback (or new tech like RFID...).