Strawjet: Natural building material from straw

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Mailtribune reports on this curious invention called Strawjet:

Developed mainly by Ward in his backyard shop and relocated to big shops in Talent last year, Strawjet Inc. produces a machine that gleans waste straw from fields, weaves it into cables, then, using a clay-cement material, binds the cables into building materials, such as blocks and beams. (...) The invention of the Strawjet has special significance, Palombo said, because it's a major departure from existing technology, because it creates strong building materials from abundant waste.

Why do I blog this? when it comes to machines, it's always curious to think about machines that create stuff out of straw.

Cap Mounted Display

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People into baseball cap like me could be interested into cap-mounted display such as the one designed by Lars Johansson and Niklas Andersson. One of their MSc student (Fredrik Nilbrink) designed a prototype:

This project’s purpose was to investigate the truck operators needs and to see how modern digital technology can help to reduce the paper work and increase the productivity and make the operator’s working situation better.

Concept I: Cap Mounted Display A monocular display unit is mounted on an ordinary cap. The unit also contains microphone, earphones, camera and Bluetooth units. The device is voice activated. (...) He [Fredrik]] took apart a pair of Sony Glasstron VGA-glasses to get the monocular Head Up Display we wanted for this project. On top of the cap a web camera was mounted.

Why do I blog this? a cool hack here but I am wondering about its usage in a real-world setting.

Phoxelspace: tangible exploration of voxel data

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Phoxelspace is a project by Dr. Carlo Ratti, Ben Piper, Yao Wang, and Professor Hiroshi Ishii from the Tangible Media Group at MIT.

Phoxel-Space is an interface to enable the exploration of voxel data through the use of physical models and materials. Our goal is to improve the means to intuitively navigate and understand complex 3-dimensional datasets. The system works by allowing the user to define a free form geometry that can be utilized as a cutting surface with which to intersect a voxel dataset. The intersected voxel values are projected back onto the surface of the physical material. The paper describes how the interface approach builds on previous graphical, virtual and tangible interface approaches and how Phoxel-Space can be used as a representational aid in the example application domains of biomedicine, geophysics and fluid dynamics simulation.

Why do I blog this? one of the curious project I ran across while scouting for projects about tangible interactions and information retrieval/data manipulation.

The role of Stanford University as a "transformer"

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From the Valley of Heart's Delight to Silicon Valley: A Study of Stanford University's Role in the Transformation by Tajnai, Carolyn (January 1997) is a technical report that illustrates "the role of Stanford University in the transformation from the Valley of Heart's Delight to the Silicon Valley"

t the dawn of the Twentieth Century, California's Santa Clara County was an agricultural paradise. Because of the benign climate and thousands of acres of fruit orchards, the area became known as the Valley of Heart's Delight. In the early 1890's, Leland and Jane Stanford donated land in the valley to build a university in memory of their son. Thus, Leland Stanford, Jr., University was founded. In the early 1930's, there were almost no jobs for young Stanford engineering graduates. This was about to change. Although there was no organized plan to help develop the economic base of the area around Stanford University, the concern about the lack of job opportunities for their graduates motivated Stanford faculty to begin the chain of events that led to the birth of Silicon Valley. Stanford University's role in the transformation of the Valley of Heart's Delight into Silicon Valley is history, but it is enduring history. Stanford continues to effect the local economy by spawning new and creative ideas, dreams, and ambitions.

Why do I blog this? interesting for some of the things I've read lately about innovation/place/transformation, a bit old though.

Rhetoretical politics in Pierre La Police

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I am a huge fan of french comic writer Pierre la Police. Fabrice Leroy happened to write an essay about it: « C'est tout mal fait, pardon »: The Rhetoric of Politics in Pierre La Police's Comics ("it's all badly done, sorry").

In a recently published article, Livio Belloï and I examined Pierre La Police's parody of media representation, his ironic stance toward mass culture in general, and his reflexive deconstruction of the comics medium, as a network of complex and consistent semiotic structures. At the encoding level, Pierre La Police highlights the systematic distortion and oversimplification of reality usually found in print and television news media, which tend to mythologize (in the Roland Barthes sense) their referent for public consumption. At the decoding level, he relies on his reader's awareness to gauge the ironic transformation of real people and events into nonsensical ones.

The article then explores syntactic and semantics constructions (discursive shortcut, lexical malapropisms , slang, adjectival misuse) that are at stakes in the comics. Reading La Police's stuff, I am always amazed by some of the structures like: " "Des chômeurs empêchent Lionel Jospin de prendre son bain, ils ont essayé de lui casser le magnétoscope mais l'armée il les a empêché" ("Jobless people prevent Lionel Jospin [france prime minister at that time to take a bath, they tried to break his VCR but the army he prevent them from doing that", with a mistake on purpose).

These morphosyntactic distortions ironically imply that the news tends to reduce political reality to an infantilized oversimplification, and that news consumers in return process information at a most simplistic, and sometimes ridiculously transformative level (as recent electoral campaigns proved to many observers).

About infantilization, Thomas Lélu is also doing good. Why do I blog this? I am very often intrigued by oversimplication and infantilization in media production, Pierre la Police nicely makes fun of this in today's world.

Ambient displays in the Googleplex

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After a quick search on Flickr, I ran across some of the ambient displays used at the Google Headquarters to show real-time queries (queries content + geographical location):

Pictures courtesy of yoz. Why do I blog this? As a I said in the previous post, we're interested in information retrieval/visualization and ambient displays, so I am just scouting. It's clear that they should have something more elaborate somewhere else, any thoughts about that?

Embeding information retrieval into tangible interactions.

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Tangible Interface for Collaborative Information Retrievalby Alan F. Blackwell, Mark Stringer, Eleanor F. Toye and Jennifer A. Rode

Most information retrieval (IR) interfaces are designed for a single user working with a dedicated interface. We present a system in which the IR interface has been fully integrated into a collaborative context of discussion or debate relating to the query topic. By using a tangible user interface, we support multiple users interacting simultaneously to refine the query. Integration with more powerful back-end query processing is still in progress, but we have already been able to evaluate the prototype interface in a real context of use, and confirmed that it can improve relevance rankings compared to single-user dedicated search engines such as Google.

Why do I blog this? because (at the lab) we're discussing projects about interactive tables to embed queries/information retrieval into tangible interactions. This project is however more based on query construction in a collaborative setting.

Blogject Presentation at Reboot 8

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At noon, Julian (aka "bleecks") and I gave our talk at Reboot 8. The title was "Networked objects and the new renaissance of things" in which we elaborated on the blogject concept (describing its main characteristics such as geospatial traces, history and agency) and of course highlighted what is stake and why this would be important. Here is the teaser:

The Internet of Things is the underpinnings for a new kind of digital, networked ecology in which objects become collaborators in helping us shape our individual social practices towards the goal of creating a more livable, habitable and sustainable world. "Blogjects" — or objects that blog — captures the potential of networked Things to inform us, create visualizations, represent to us aspects of our world that were previously illegible or only accessible by specialist. In the era of Blogjects, knowing how even our routine social practices reflect upon our tenancy can have radical potential for impactful, worldly change. Nowadays, the duality between social beings and instrumental inert objects is suspicious. In this epoch, a renaissance in which imbroglios of networks, sensors and social beings are knit together, everyone and everything must cooperate to mitigate against world-wide catastrophic system failure.

Slides can be found here (pdf, 4.5Mb), but it's mostly pictures and no text.

So, maybe there needs to be more room is to explain why this blogject concept is important (and why we're running this workshop serie about that). Here are few reasons we discussed (these are notes discussed by Julian and I in the plane):

We're now moving from Web 2.0 to the so-called Internet of Things (some would talk about the "web of things"). And if Web 2.0 was a place where social beings can aspire to 1st class citizenry, what happens in digitally networked world in which objects can also participate in the creation of meaning? Should they be passive, pure instrumentalities, as objects have been sense Descartes? Or should we consider ways to integrate them to help us make meaning, and meaning beyond just that dictated by conventional, rational business efficiency practices? We should definitely care about networked objects because of the possibilities for a potentially richer mechanism for knitting together human & non-human social networks in impactful, world-changing ways.

In addition, this related to a multidisciplinary trend: Objects and context matter for human activities: cognition (Situated Cognition, Distributed Cognition, Vygotsky), Sociology (Latour's ANT: objects are actors), ubiquitous computing (desktop > "smart" objects): it's about human and social agency, computation also lays in Artifacts.

Moreover, information brought by blogjects can be meant to raise awareness about some phenomenon we should be concerned of: what happen when a society get an accurate mirror of its own activities and production (Anne would wonder about why do we always have to raise awareness about bad or missing phenomenon). It also brings more transparency in human practices which may eventually leads to a "renaissance" of public concerns about human activities?

This would then impact industrial design and marketing: production reshaped by a tremendous new amount of information related to the usage of the objects produced: fed back into marketing+production. There's going to be tough issues to think about (privacy, control on data). The question is then "How an object that has the capactiy to report on itself modifies communication/relationships between companies and individuals?" since blogjects could be seen as communication channels between customers and companies. How do you/we design to accomodate two often times antagonistic practices? How would people design objects that customers can keep trusting about: if something can blog about you, your are concerned by who is reading that? who has access to that RSS feed and what goes into it? Therefore, ethical concerns are very important to take into account.

(more to come)

Why do I blog this? It was a very good exercice for us to do that, right after the second workshop; and lots of relevant people were there to comment on that. We tried to show there's an increasing concern about Things and stuff and possible connections for instance with Ulla-Maaria Mutanen's Thinglink or Bruce Sterling's spimes.

Reboot 8 Friday morning

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Jesse James Garrett (from Adaptive Path) talked about user-generated information architecture ("Beyond Tagging"). The problem designers have today is that they can't always know the words people will use or the groups people will prefer. Card-sorting techniques is a primitive low-tech way to do the job. In the last few year, new approaches were used: instead of buidling architectures, build systems for users to build their own architecture (explicit activity): tags (user-defined keyword metadata), navigation devices (expose other people's keywords). BUT there are problems: insider language, "everybody use this tag" is a poor substitute for controlled vocabulary, is the most popular tag, by definition, best? Besides, the tag relies on people good well and sometimes the system is undermine with tag spam (tag things with irrelevant but popular tags), tag bombing (mistag content to make a statement about it.

So how can this could be improved? Amazon defies the conventional wisdom about information architecture (theh fact that users create mental maps of sites as they navigate (formulaitng their own classification system)). Amazon process an enormous amount of data: it knows everything you do with their website and they're able to generate architecture for you, to connect you affectively with their content.

The next step is to make this algorithm transparent to the users; to do that we need better data: about content that we are serving and about the users. The second one require another approach than usability testing ("usability testing are canes for the blind"): we need to treat EVERY visit into a usability test and every user in a test subject (to track effectiveness of their algorithm). And more sophisticated analysis of stats are needed to lead to more meaningful results than just most accessed directories. Unfortunately, the presenter did not go further explaining how this could be achieved, and the discussion stayed at the information architecture level (I know that's the topic of the talk but I would be interested into deeper things such as practices investigation or queries analysis over time).

Then, Bruno Guissani started by saying that he is tired that old media will be killed by new media or that journalists are not reliable. To him, the discussion should be more about where both will converge. This is something I fully agree with (old media does not disappear but have a peculiar relationship with new media such as blogs).

He presented the example of the swiss magazine "L'Hebdo" which, during the french "banlieue" riots in 2005, instead of sending journalists there and quickly getting back home; they sent almost every journalist on a weekly rotation (sth like 10 days per person) and they reported news/interview/insights on a blog. They rented a small studio on the groundfloor in the "banlieue". This impacted the way journalists worked (reconnecting journalism and field investigation) and also how others newspaper looked at this experience (and in the end tell their stories ina better way). But it also impacted the city itself, and now people from the city voluntereed to take care of the blog: it's the first media in this city now (there were no newspaper there previously). The whole thing is financed through a book that compiled the stories coming from the blog.

Boundary objects

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According to Birger Hjørland's definition:

Boundary object is a concept originally introduced by Susan L. Star and James R. Griesemer (1989) to refer to objects that serve an interface between different communities of practice. Boundary objects are an entity shared by several different communities but viewed or used differently by each of them.

Star, S., L. & Griesemer, J. R. (1989). Institutional Ecology, 'Translations' and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39. Social Studies of Science, 19, 387-420.

Why do I blog this? this is an important concept, and I am often trapped in conversations in which I have to struggle between disciplines and communities. For instance, talking about "locative" with my former linguistics teacher is very different than talking about locative media with LBS designers.

Update: Fabio has a good blogpost about this very concept. He has a good take about it:

I am more convinced than ever that disciplinal purity will unlikely ever be a defining characteristic of our practice, but that this has to be seen under a positive light, as an opportunity to shape theoretical frameworks around fluid, relational models, rather than striving for monolithic, all-encompassing paradigms.

Marko Ahtisaari's talk at Reboot

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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?

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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

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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

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When robot mimic tongues and tentacles...

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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

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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

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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

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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.

DSCN2251 stuff

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

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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

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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.