Concerns about what anthropology brings to companies

ComputerWorld has an article about anthropologists working in IT department, which raise quite interesting issues:

Bringing such practices to IT fits in with the overall push to align the tech world with the business realm, Mack and others acknowledge. But even given this alignment trend, Sachs says technologists still have limited ability to garner such insight on their own. "It's a very important thing that technologists are being asked to have a broader view, but they [still] see a problem from their frame of reference and they see a solution from their frame of reference," she explains. (...) even companies that don't hire anthropologists are benefiting from their work, as anthropological tools and approaches used in places such as Intel, IBM and Pitney Bowes bleed out to other companies. "The methods and approaches of anthropology have spread a lot," she says, "and with that, there is a potential for a very large impact."

Why do I blog this? because I am interested in which "other voices" could help design.

Students and location-based services in context

Barkhuus, Louise and Paul Dourish, "Everyday Encounters with Context-Aware Computing in a Campus Environment". In Proceedings of UbiComp 2004, Nottingham, UK, 2004. The paper is an empirical investigation of the use of a ubiquitous computing system blending mobile and location-based technologies to create augmented experiences for university students (i.e. the Active Campus system, developed and deployed at UC San Diego). The focus is on how the technology fits into broader social contexts of student life and the classroom experience. This is not an evaluation of specific technologies, they rather deploy a technological setting to reflect upon some broader patterns of technology use (that would eventually lead to implications for designs), taking an institutional approach (influences of adoption and analyze the emergent practices from an institutional view point). This point is important since it allows to have a broader discussion of the technological impacts.

The conclusion is quite interesting:

Where students, on the surface, seem like the perfect probes for new technology, their inherent social structures and high level of nomadicity creates a tension between their desired use and actual possibility for use. From the perspective of research, many settled practices and infrastructures within the campus environment are inhibiting not only the adoption of new technology but also the foundation for testing new technologies. Only by looking beyond the technologies themselves, towards the broader institutional arrangements within which they are embedded, can we begin to understand the premises for deployment of ubiquitous technology.

And of course, there are some important elements that are connected to my research about the usage of location-awareness of others in collaborative settings.

Separately from the problems of mobility, we can also ask, how and when does location manifest itself as a practical problem for students? Location-based services developed in other settings point to a range of ways in which ubiquitous computing technologies can help people resolve location-based problems - the most common being finding resources, navigating in unfamiliar environments, and locating people.

As we have noted, students’ experience is primarily nomadic, and since their activities and concerns are driven as much by the demands of social interaction as by their studies, we had anticipated that services such as the people finder would be of value, helping them to locate each other as they moved around a campus environment. However, further examination showed that, in fact, location rarely manifests itself for them, practically.

This is also something we discussed here at the lab, and eventually lead to some tough issues regarding a location-based annotation project we had. There was not really a need to design those virtual post-its in the context of the school.

I also find this relevant to my work:

Because of the regularity of their schedules, the students, then, tend to find themselves in the same part of the campus at specific times in the week. Similarly, their friends live equally ordered lives, with locations determined by class schedules, and our respondents seemed as familiar with aspects of their friend’s schedules as with their own. Mutually-understood schedules, then, provide them with the basis for coordination.

A result like this is connected to the framework of coordination I used (Clark's theory of coordination). Among all the coordination "devices" people rely on, conventions or mutually acknowledged agreement like common schedule are a common way to infer other's activity (and hence whereabouts).

Finally, the last part is about the fact that "There being no home base, students have no expectation of being able to find each other in fixed places; instead, class schedules become a primary orienting mechanism around which location is determined and coordination is achieved". It reminds me a paper I saw a month ago at COOP2006 called "On a Mission Without a Home Base: Conceptualizing Nomadicity in Student Group. Work" by C. Bogdan, C. Rossitto, M. Normark, P. Jorge (Adler) and K. Severinson. The paper also addresses that issue.

Portable consoles, network and turbulences

On the 802.11 Turbulence of Nintendo DS and Sony PSP Hand-held Network Games is a paper by Mark Claypool that analyses the traffic characteristics of IEEE 802.11 network games on the Nintendo DS and the Sony PSP. Here is the questions they try to answer:

What is the network turbulence for hand-held network games?

Does the network turbulence for different hand-helds (such as the PSP and the DS) differ from each other?

Does the network turbulence for different games (such as Ridge Racer and Super Mario on the same handheld differ from each other?

Does the network turbulence for hand-held games differ from PC games?

Does hand-held game traffic interfere with traditional Internet traffic on the same wireless channel?

Why do I blog this? the paper is quite technical so it's less my focus but the question they ask are interesting from the user experience point of view. This might be close to Fabien's research. How people cope with those turbulences? are there any compensations or strategies (in-game) to handle them?

Catchbob second run of experiment

Today I started the second run of experiment using CatchBob for my PhD research. The purpose this time are threefold. First and foremost, the new experiment are meant to refine the model I described about how people coordinate in mobile settings (using Herbert Clark's framework of coordination, I described which kind of information are used/exchanged during a mobile and collaborative activity, and how those information are mutually acknowledged by the group).

Second, for the Mutual Modeling project which is funding my activities, I will use this run as a testbed to investigate new research methods to better grasp how people model others' intents, knowledge and belief during play. For that matter, I will go further in the use of "self-confrontation" qualitative techniques, meaning that - right after the game ended - I will confront one player to a replay of one of her/his partner and ask him/her to described what the character did. Then I will ask this player what happened. This would eventually allow me to better understand the (reconstructed) mental model of the activity. We have a very simple replay tool that allows to show traces of the activity (such as people's paths and map annotation see picture from an old version below). It's much simpler than the one Paul Tennent is working on, but quite functional to my needs.

Finally, this is also useful for Fabien, since most of the post-game questionnaire concerns how people reacted to technical flaws/discrepancies/uncertainties, whether they manage to compensate using different strategies.

Why do I blog this? well it's a milestone...

Eric Drexler on foresight

There has been a good buzz around the virtual edition of Engines of Creation by Eric Drexler. Even though I am not into nanotech stuff, the book is worth to read for other concerns. An excerpt from chapter 3:

AS WE LOOK FORWARD to see where the technology race leads, we should ask three questions. What is possible, what is achievable, and what is desirable? (...) These three questions - of the possible, the achievable, and the desirable - frame an approach to foresight. First, scientific and engineering knowledge form a map of the limits of the possible. Though still blurred and incomplete, this map outlines the permanent limits within which the future must move. Second, evolutionary principles determine what paths lie open, and set limits to achievement - including lower limits, because advances that promise to improve life or to further military power will be virtually unstoppable. This allows a limited prediction: If the eons-old evolutionary race does not somehow screech to a halt, then competitive pressures will mold our technological future to the contours of the limits of the possible. Finally, within the broad confines of the possible and the achievable, we can try to reach a future we find desirable.

A space-labeling technology

A curious project presented at SIGGRAPH: it's called Instant replay and it's done by folks from Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL).

Real-world, slow-motion instant replay for air hockey. This new space-labeling technology tracks the pucks with a high degree of accuracy and speed (1cm/500Hz) in natural illumination without visible tags.

This system uses infrared optical data projection and hardware tags to provide tracking data for many objects that are moving and rotating very quickly. Because the tags are very inexpensive, many of them can be deployed in harsh conditions.

The core technical innovation of this work is the system's space-labeling technology. The projectors are inexpensive, solid-state, high-speed devices that project invisible (infrared) patterns 10,000 times a second. By sensing 20 patterns (1/500th of a second), passive tags are able to decode their own location. Because the entire space is labeled, the speed of the system remains constant no matter how many tags are tracked. The tags use very inexpensive, off-the-shelf IR-decoding modules and microcontrollers. The projectors are also very inexpensive. In addition to decoding their location, the tags have the ability to detect their orientation and record incident illumination.

Why do I blog this? yet another location detection technology (just keeping track of stuff).

Chris Heathcote talk at reboot8

Last week, I missed Chris Heathcote presentation at Reboot (because of an early flight). However, since he put the slides on-line (see his blogpost) and given that people conspicuously took notes about it, I managed to get his stance. His talk (called "mobile 2.0 -a mobile Internet manifesto") was about the mobile internet. Chris criticized the barrier people think about when it comes to that: small display size, limited device speed/computing capability, tough text entry and insufficient network speed. Chris states that these limitations were not barriers. Bruno blogged about the real ones:

The real barriers are: transporting data wirelessly costs a lot of money ("flat pricing may partially solve this problem"), battery life is limited (color screen, playing music etc use serious power), the "2 hours problem" ("in the Western world we are always less than 2 hours away from a computer, so we put off doing stuff because we can wait 2 hours for it"), and smart networks ("we want high speed, always on, and don't want anyone interfering with our data").

I also like some of Chris stance about it (extract from Bruno's note, thanks!):

I don't get my best ideas sitting in front of my computer, I get them when I'm out and about. If I have a mobile connection, I can action them immediately. That's where mobile is really useful.

Mobile is social. Many people have tried to push the mobile stuff using the "when I'm waiting for a bus" scenario (mobile applications and content as interstitials in daily life), but mobile is social, and what's interesting is to take the Internet and make it social."

Why do I blog this? I like those points Chris highlighted and which are not so often raised while reading the tremendous body of stuff concerning the so-called mobile internet.

Projects discussed at the 2nd blogject workshop

My (raw) notes about the 3 projects discussed during the second blogject workshop held in Lausanne: 1) Ubicamera (Julian Bleecker, Sascha Pofhlepp, Mark Meagher, Frédéric Kaplan): Starting point: how blogjects would be used to circulate culture. I my camera knows that I am in Amsterdam and also that I was there 6 months ago, it would link up on Flickr and establish a network of different sources. Or, if I go to an event and takes picture, the camera will check other Flickr pictures automatically

"The Flickr camera" is driven by a fascination towards media sharing as a cultural practice. This group thought about how to turn this into the next level of interaction: the social practice of Flickr into a blogject

There are 3 primary Flickr characteristics embedded in a camera: - the interface (fluidity) - association: sharing pictures amongst friends and strangers - browsing practices: go there and look at the 10 different photo of your contacts and then check pictures of a group whom your friends belongs to ("big brown things").

Scenario: Sascha walk down the road, he sees a Totem, take a picture; a public/private indicator shows up as well as the opportunity to select certain tags: certain are preloaded and other tags are there just becasue the camera has foudn them.

Social camera situation: meet other blogject camera. As you maneuver through your day, you come across similar camera and communicate: embodiment of the Flickr association to find similar pictures and people. You can also specify the tags you're interested in and the camera would download the pictures of others you meet serendipituously (these people won't even know).

Also, the camera is GPS-enabled: location can be another key to find information /people/pictures: it's then an exchange of tags based on location. The camera can also tell the others which tag is proper.

As for the browsing practice, the question is "how do we use the camera as a display device?" Not just for browsing but also navigating in a way that is as compelling as Flickr. There could be different interfaces: photo can be shifted accordingly with time/space/personality/trajectory. The photostream is then the stream of life of the owner; when 2 cameras take the same picture, there would be an intersection of 2 lives: this should also be displayed.

The camera has also a life of its own: no buttons, the photo can't be deleted. What happen if you buy such camera on a flea market? You buy a camera but also the pictures taken by the previous owner.

Timo was interested in this sort of interface as well as the tagging practices it would generate

2) Nabaztags and blogjects (Fabien Girardin, Alain Bellet, Regine Debatty, Cyril Rebetez) Starting point: Using Violet's Nabaztag (the wifi rabbit) as an output device or a blogject aggregator. Using it as a way to make sense of history of interactions. It could also be a nice channel. A part of the "blogjectsphere"

"Not a rabbit that helps loosing weight" but a spokespet. The main features would be: - reminder/teaser/awareness - trigger for actions or to drop an action you are doing based on the data collected by the blogject - a spokesperson for voiceless objects in the form of a rabbit: it would recycle and analyze data from the environment (other objects), managing an ecosystem of data. The ecosystem of objects is made of objects which have simple sensors: - letters with your bills you have to pay (RFID tags): a reminder that you have 5 bills to pay - trash: the rabbit will know the status of your trash as can act as a reminder or warner ("don't put that can in the bin, it's only for paper") - water the plant: the rabbit recives the answer of the plant sensors and reminds you that you should water it - playful or unpleasant reminder - the action generated by one sensore can trigger another blogject - the rabbit can talk to your friends' rabbits and your pedometer in your shoe can activate your friends' rabbit: "hey your friend went running": awareness of others so that you might eventually choose to join. - the collar of your dog can communicate with the rabbit: a translator of the barking dog or as a warner that you have to go out with him.

Fabio Sergio was struck by the desire of human beings to have objects that would be like us and he pointed us on the fact that it is antithetic with the fact that animal can act badly. The question is then "do we really want things to have a personality because we would need to manage them?" Do we want to have this sort of relationship with objects?

Sascha raised the question of the underlying cultural aspects: from "mute servants" to agents. But Cyril reminded us that psychology showed that we project meaning and intents anyway.

3) Mobile phones and blogjects (Timo Arnall, Fabio Cesa, Fabio Sergio, Marc Hottinger, Nicolas Nova) Starting point: The mobile phone is a generic device (phone, take pictures, post it on Flickr...): can it be turned into a blogject? or a blogject controller? If we become surrounded by blogjects, how do we manage that situation? The mobile phone as a tool/wand/interface What are the potential social issues

Computer-supported work at Accenture

WSJ last week had a good piece about computer-supported work over distance at Accenture.

"Anyone who says managing this way is easy is lying," says Adrian Lajtha, head of Accenture's financial-services group. (...) With many of them on the road much of the time, partners decided they should live where they wanted and meet regularly. (...) Technology helps keep a virtual company on track. Every day, Accenture employees log on to the company's internal Web site to record where they are working. (...) shares documents and financial data with other executives through Accenture's internal Web site. And when he wants to see, as well as hear, other executives, he conducts a videoconference. (...) To compensate for restricted face time, he talks daily by phone with many of his direct reports. Every other Friday, he confers by phone with the heads of Accenture's five operating groups to review projects and decide where consultants are most needed. (...) A "magic hour" for global phone conferences is 1 p.m. London time, says Mr. Lajtha, who lives in London but travels 85% of the time. That's midnight in Australia, 9 p.m. in Beijing, and 5 a.m. in California. "It isn't too grim" for anyone, he notes. (...) He sometimes alters his own schedule to be in better sync with his managers around the world. An "early bird" who likes to begin his workday by 7 a.m. (...) some problems require "being there in person," he says. When he learned that a project team in the U.S. felt bogged down, he made an unexpected visit to their work site and held a three-hour meeting. (...) "When times are tough, you have to go into communication overload so people have faith they can come through," he says. For virtual executives, that means more travel and more odd-hour conferences.

So what can we learn: - use of mix old (telephone) and not so old (web portal, cell phone) technologies - time is always an issue, fortunately, they have the "magic hour" - face 2 face meetings still matter, especially if there's a big problem

Besides, one of the curious reason they have this "virtual company" model is "Accenture's partners couldn't agree on a headquarters location for the new company". Why do I blog this? What is explained is very well known to the CSCW community but it's interesting to read what business people say about it, what are their concerns.

Skyscrapers, technology and new sort of places

The Economist about skyscrapers: The skyscraper boom: Better than flying, it's a good overview of the most important question related to that in architecture+economics (innovation in terms of material, models, construction), as well as how technologies allowed it. Of course, to me, they discuss intriguing question related to new sort of places that emerge from this kind of buildings:

engineers also have to work out how to get people to the top floors. (...) Most tall towers now have at least two banks of lifts: one for the lower floors and one for the upper ones. In the tallest towers in Asia (home to eight of the world's ten highest giants) this still means waiting too long. So engineers run two or more lifts in each lift shaft, and build “sky lobbies” where passengers cross between lifts if they want to go the whole way down or up. (...) These arrangements, whereby cappuccino-carrying office workers or hotel porters are directed to a particular lift according to where they want to go, are collectively known as “hall call”. KONE, a Finnish lift company, is working on a lift system that sends text messages to people's mobile phones as they enter a building, informing them to take lift five, say, if they want to go to their desk or lift seven if they want the café on the 60th floor.

Why do I blog this? It reminds me an eTech presentation about "software for skyscrapers". Apart from that, this is related to my interest towards how technology can lead to news sort of places.

Strawjet: Natural building material from straw

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

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

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"

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.