Augmenting Guy Debord’s Derive

Talking with Adam Greenfield about his next work, I though back that I already wrote bits and pieces around the topic of how IT renew the urban experience. The report I called "Augmenting Guy Debord’s Dérive: Sustaining the Urban Change with Information Technology" (.pdf) is a bit old (2003), so the examples are a bit outdated. This is just few notes extracted from a paper I wrote with my colleague Mauro Cherubini called “To Live or To Master the city: the citizen dilemma” (Imago Urbis #2). Why do I blog this? Comments are welcome. I am not happy with the whole thing (bad english, naive ideas and almost no critical stance) but I thought that it would be good to put it online.

Mizuko Ito on anthropology and design

The last issue of Ambidextrous has been released. Among the different articles, there is a relevant interview of Dr. Mizuko Ito (the interviewer is Danah Boyd). Some excerpts I like:

DANAH: Fabulous! Can you tell me more about what how you see anthropology being relevant to design?

MIMI: I think there is a role for anthropology along all of the steps of the design process. But of course I would say that. Anthropology can help inspire new designs by providing profiles of users and stories about contexts of use. Anthropologists can play on design teams as designs get developed to sensitive designers to culturally and context specific issues. And finally, anthropologists can evaluate the effectiveness of designs through studies of actual use in context, either prototype, pilot, or after product roll-out.

DANAH: So what advice would you have to young aspiring anthropologists who want to study socio-technical practice and get involved in designing new technologies?

This one is tough. Be prepared for some blank looks from people in your discipline - but a lively audience of practitioners and technology designers who are eager to hear stories from the field. The challenge is to be multilingual and interdisciplinary while also maintaining commitment to ethnographic perspectives and methods.

Why do I blog this? that's sometimes a feeling I have while working with a social science perspective with designers. Though, I am wondering whether going beyond telling stories because I feel there s much more to do.

Wearable gaze detector in the form of headphones

Via, this "Full-time wearable headphone gaze detector" by DoCoMo seems to be curious (ACM subscription required). A paper by Hiroyuki Manabe and Masaaki Fukumoto submitted at CHI2006. It actually describes a full-time wearable gaze detector that does not obscure the user’s view in the form of a headphone.

Full-time wearable devices are daily commodities, in which we wear wrist watches and bear audio players and cellular phones for example. The wearable interface suits these devices due to its features; the user can access the interface immediately, anywhere desired. For full-time wearable devices, the interface should be easy to wear, easy to use and not obstruct daily life. In this article, the “full-time wearable interface” is defined as an interface that the user can wear continuously without obstructing daily life and can use easily and immediately whenever desired.

What is interesting to me is the potential applications:

This system can be used as a simple controller for many daily use devices or applications, such as audio players. It can also be used as a selector that allows the user to choose surrounding objects. When the gaze detector is supplemented with a video camera and a wireless communication device and the surrounding objects have identifying tags like QR codes, the user can get information about the object of interest simply by gazing it.

Why do I blog this? I was just intrigued by this sort of interface, especially from the cognitive standpoint: how would this impact our practices and how can people cope with the cognitive load it would generate.

Codechecking products

Via [telecom-cities], codecheck.ch described by ars electronica as:

The Codecheck project is an effort to create an informed “community” of consumers who are able to critically assess products prior to reaching their purchasing decisions. Whereas certain initiatives pursue this aim primarily by condemning retail offerings that are potential health hazards, Codecheck takes a different approach: it helps consumers decipher the product’s barcode. The way this works is as simple as can be. A potential buyer uses his/her PC to enter the product’s numerical code and sends it via Internet to codecheck.ch; what immediately comes back are comprehensive definitions and information from experts about ingredients like sodium laurent sulfate and E250. The result is the creation of a reference work that is constantly being expanded and updated with contributions from manufacturers, wholesale distributors, specialized labs, consumer organizations and individual consumers. Potential purchasers thus have access to a wide variety of information, opinions and reports, a body of knowledge that constitutes a solid basis on which to form an opinion about a particular product.

Plans are currently in the works to enhance this system by building in mobility. For example, a shopper in a supermarket could use his/her cell phone’s camera to photograph a product’s barcode and then send this image as an MMS to codecheck.ch, and the relevant information would immediately be transmitted back. By linking up diverse technologies (photography, Internet, telecommunications) in this way, Codecheck represents a step in the direction of well-informed consumers.

Why do I blog this? I am less interested in this as a way to better inform consumers than by the usage it creates: "checking objects". This participates in this kind of interaction people have more and more in places: pointing a device to a certain objects: first it was to take pictures (lots of pictures: moblogging, picture that goes right into flickr from the cell phone), now it's codechecking (not really pointing though...), what's next: touching object to do the codecheck: the "wand" metaphor is more and more relevant.

Spatial technology workshop at UpFing06

(sorry bad english below, I took notes in real time and recomposed them quickly) As I mentionned earlier, I had to manage a workshop about "locative media" and spatial technology today. What was interesting is that attendants had quite different ideas in mind when attending it: some were concerned by business models, other by memories in space, one or two by a curiosity towards google earth, place-based annotations, others by mobility and technology. Maybe the description on the website was a bit too narrow: since it quoted google earth, yellow arrow or flickr, different representation has been triggered in people's mind.

After introducing the whole concept and describing the fact that it is a bit messy and cover lots of practices/technologies/services/usage; there was thre presentations. The first one by Yann Le Fichant who is leading a company called voxinzebox; he explained us the different services they propose for city navigation (first on 2nd generation GSM and now on on pocketPC). He recalled us the importance of self-geolocation in that context (people declaring their own location on a cell phone to get some information about a specific place that would eventually guide them to various landmarks). He also underlined the importance of PND (personal navigation display) like TomTom or garmin that are more and more complex (improved memory, communication protocol) and could lead to new innovative tools. Yann provocatively asked why the sex industry has not yet found any big hits using location-based applications. The discussion also led Google's move in the 3D modeling by buying sketch-up (a modeling tool that would eventually allow people to model their house in 3D and put in on a google map)

Then Cyril Burger talked about his PhD research: an ethngraphy of the usage of mobile phones in the parisian subway. Cyril investigated people's behaviro and trajectory while using audio-communication and SMS. He underlined the fact that the transport facility first did not introduce any norms: so the rules that emerge were based on another norm based on how people drive. Through that code, rules of sociability emerged in terms of movements (for instance stopping in location which are not crowded so that the flow is not cut, the arrival of the metro often lead the user to stop the conversation). In terms of gesture, people stay often inanimated while texting, whereas audicommunication leads to more active/lively behavior (gestures, smiles...).

I also like his remark about the very fact that non-material places needed material places: servers need to be located somewhere. This is connected to what Jeffrey Huang talked about at LIFT06: the fact that networked technologies leads to new sort of places (and subsequently that place still matter).

Then Georges Amar (foresight manager at RATP, a subway company in france) presented the new paradigm of his company. Subway companies previously based their development on hygienist theories: efficiency was correlated with fluidity and less contact as possible (which is nicely exemplified by the non-contact RFID subway passes): the subway was disconnected with the city. Automation lead to layoff and the disappearance of controllers and even drivers, this caused the permeability of the subway (more and more insecurity, people taking it without paying): the city entered the subway. Now their model is rather about having both efficiency AND contact: let's take advantage of the presence of people, the city is in the metro and there are opportunities to have relevant services. The crowd is seen as a resource and not as a constraint. In terms of prospective services, places/stations can be transformed, new type of jobs can be created and tansporters' role change accordingly. The subway could then be seen as a PLACE to meet people, or at least to do something with others. One of the attendant mentionned the idea Starbucks had to be a place for business meetings: would the subway have certain area for business meetings? Another point is the signs that are fixed and directed to every users could be individualized for a certain category of customers (with precise interests or disabilities) or even further: the crowd's traces in space would be a material to use to create new kind of signs to foster better navigation or discovery of places or people.

After those 3 presentations, we had a discussion about different projects (current or prospective) like earthTV (seeing real-time events with google earth, this has actually been thought in the japanese subway to see where is the crowd to better avoid it), tags in google earth (very often community-based "I use linux" close to MS buidling), locator of personal objects (googling my shoes, finding my personal belongings), indoor technologies (museum), trackers (kids/prisoner tracking).

Overall, the discussion rather revolved around mobility, people and a lot about meetings, and less about technologies and usage. That's important from the rhetorical point of view: we rather dicussed the contexts and the needs (with a peculiar emphasis on the subway experience) as opposed to the technology-push projects we've seen so far: allowing PEOPLE (with a specific context: mobility, limited amount of time, limited cognitive resources because of route finding) to do something (having meetings and exchange with others, discovering information related or not to the route).

One of the conclusions here was also that innovation in spatial technologies is often due to work of peculiar companies such as RATP (subway companies), JCDecaux (urban ads) which are ubiquitous and bound to specific mobile needs. Soome researchers from a french phone operator acknowledged the fact that innovation is very tough for them because everything is either locked or behind walled gardens when it comes to phone (SIM cards, low interoperability, different standards, hard to use voice / location based application, different kind of phones/handhelds...). This resonates with discussions we had at the lab (see here or there).

Technorati Tags: upfing, upfing06

Workshop about spatial technologies at UpFing06

Currently a Université de Printemps de la FING 06, which is a big gig organized by la FING, a french think tank working on innovation and IT. The venue is quite nice, an old catholic mansion:

The reason why I am here is because I have to take care of a workshop here about spatial technologies, in the broad sense (locative media, location-based services, place-based annotations platforms...). The event is in french.

Here are the slides of my presentation (in french, pdf, 3.8Mb). I actually described the following issues: - when we look at the terms we use when we talk about spatial tech, it's very diverse (ranging from geowanking to locative media, geotagging or buddy-finder). Sometimes, it's about practices, sometimes about technologies, sometimes services... - we will focus on a specific subpractice: place annotation - what is interesting is that the usages regarding that practice seem to be diverse but this is does not take a diachronic perspective (the fact that people annotated space a LONG time ago), nor the size of the target group of user (% of tech-savvy persons? % of total population). - some of the most interesting examples will be presented (yellow arrow, flickr notes, stamps...) - and I will describe why this is important in terms of socio-cognitive processes: the fact that space affords specific interaction, shape people's behavior and agency. People leave traces in space and then decode them as cues for acting.

I will put some more notes later about people's intervention, the subgroup activity and the conclusion.

Technorati Tags: location-based games, upfing, upfing06

Finding a location for a pervasive game

Kuan Huang sent me one of his piece, which seems to be quite intriguing. His project entitled "Space Invaders 2006 (done by Computer Science Department and Interactive Telecommunications Program). The project page is informative and explain the whole process (I like when people explain how they are doing what they're doing like "Since it's a thesis project, the most critical thing is that I need to have a working demo to present in the last week of school. So finding a location is the first step.")

In the past one year, some testings and experiements were conducted within NYU campus. For our thesis projects, we decided to put together all the experience and lessons that we learned from previous testings and make an outdoor playable video game in three months.

Space Invaders 2006 is an outdoor video game that takes advantage of real world architecture spaces and transforms them into a game playground. Basically, the video game is projected onto a building. The player has to move left or right to control the motion of the aircraft. Whenever the player jumps, the aircraft shoots out a bullet.

The playground:

Why do I blog this? yet another example of using the real world as the interface. Of course, the analysis is a bit too rough (testing... surveys...) but it's interesting to read about how they thought about that. I am curious about this location thing, what is a good location for pervasive game, what constraints designers can think about? what about the spatial topology? Look at what Ken highlighted as constraints:

here are some technical issues that I can't solve in a short time: - I am not allowed to climb high to mount a camera onto one of the light stands in the park. - I need an at least 30 meters long power strip to get power supply from a building across the street. - There are some drug dealers hanging around the park after 9PM. It is kind of scary if I carry a laptop, a projector, a video camera at that time. - Too much ambient lights in that space which is bad for large-scale projection.

Wiki science, zillionics and AI

Few quotes from Kevin Kelly's thoughts in Edge (it's called SPECULATIONS ON THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE); it's mostly about "the evolution of the scientific method" as the author precise. Some of the examples are interesting and curious (I don't agree with the novelty of all, like pattern recognition... hmm we already have that?)

AI Proofs – Artificial intelligence will derive and check the logic of an experiment. Artificial expert (...) systems will at first evaluate the scientific logic of a paper to ensure the architecture of the argument is valid. It will also ensure it publishes the required types of data. This "proof review" will augment the peer-review of editors and reviewers.

Wiki-Science – The average number of authors per paper continues to rise. With massive collaborations, the numbers will boom. Experiments involving thousands of investigators collaborating on a "paper" will commonplace. The paper is ongoing, and never finished. It becomes a trail of edits and experiments posted in real time — an ever evolving "document." Contributions are not assigned. Tools for tracking credit and contributions will be vital. Responsibilities for errors will be hard to pin down. Wiki-science will often be the first word on a new area. Some researchers will specialize in refining ideas first proposed by wiki-science.

Zillionics – Ubiquitous always-on sensors in bodies and environment will transform medical, environmental, and space sciences. Unrelenting rivers of sensory data will flow day and night from zillions of sources. This trend will require further innovations in statistics, math, visualizations, and computer science. More is different.

Return of the Subjective – Science came into its own when it managed to refuse the subjective and embrace the objective. The repeatability of an experiment by another, perhaps less enthusiastic, observer was instrumental in keeping science rational. But as science plunges into the outer limits of scale – at the largest and smallest ends – and confronts the weirdness of the fundamental principles of matter/energy/information such as that inherent in quantum effects, it may not be able to ignore the role of observer. Existence seems to be a paradox of self-causality, and any science exploring the origins of existence will eventually have to embrace the subjective, without become irrational. The tools for managing paradox are still undeveloped.

Why do I blog this? Kelly's vision is of course is the one an observer of current technological change; sometimes it's a bit odd with regards to scientific practices but he certainly has some good ideas, and this meta-observation described here is valuable. I agree with some of the highlights he have; nothing really new in what I picked up here but it's relevant to my practice and I share the same feelings.

Turning vacuuming robots into pets

Via THE PRESENCE-L LISTSERV, it seems that Roomba vacuum robots are more and more complexe: myRoomBud allows to personalize iRobot Roomba Vacuuming Robot.

Since 2005, myRoomBud™ has been selling RoomBud™ costume covers to the owners of the 2 million Roomba robots and turning their vacuuming robots into pets. Now, the RoomBuds have been given (multiple) personalities. RoomBud Personalities enhance the Roomba pet experience by "teaching" your Roomba to act like the pet or character trapped deep inside it. Roobit the Frog hops around, Roor the Tiger growls then pounces, and RoomBette La French Maid wiggles its behind at you before vacuuming your room.

Why do I blog this? even tough this is a simple step, it's interesting to see how small organisations participate in this exploration of new affordance of things.

Stuff on the street

Things on the street around my place in Geneva are more and more curious, look at that one I saw yesterday:

Might be a mixer or something that is able to rotate. Why do I blog this? even though this is garbage I am always intrigued by this sort of thing dropped here and often think about what was the passé (past) of this object and what would be it potential future (chances are high that it will be tossed but you never know).

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.