Improving the reliability of virtual organisations

According to this news, researchers at the University of Southampton are working on models that will supposedly improve the reliability and trustworthiness of virtual organizations.

A virtual organisation is one whose members are geographically apart (usually working via networked computer applications) while appearing to others to be a single, unified organisation with a real physical location. According to Professor Michael Luck of the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), as the market for virtual organisations grows and an increasing number of companies are represented by computerised agents acting on their behalf, there is a greater need to ensure that these agents behave responsibly. (...) In seeking to address some of these challenges, the researchers have developed a system for the dynamic formation and operation of virtual organizations, drawing on scenarios such as that of an individual visiting London for the 2012 Olympic Games who requires a PDA to access various multimedia services.

They are currently in the process of implementing a prototype system which looks at issues such as trust and reputation, standardising communication between agents, and policing within a virtual organization, so that the impact of behaviour such as non-delivery of services by an agent is minimised.

Why do I blog this? what is the next step? having blogjects as company agents?

Traditions in HCI

Kuutti, K. Activity theory as a potential framework for Human-Computer Interaction research. (in Nardi, Bonnie A. ed.), Context and Consciousness: Activity Theory and Human-Computer Interaction. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1996, 17-44. Even though this paper is a bit old, I found interesting the part that discussed the "debate against the use of information processing psychology as the foundation of HCI":

Both the object and methods of the "mainstream" research has been questioned. Critics would like to add to the research object the users and their work tasks in real life. Methodologically the "Cartesian" ideal of cognitive science - continuing the use of experimental apparatus of laboratory-oriented classical psychology borrowed from natural sciences - has been seen unable to penetrate the human side of the interface. So now, in the midst of 1990s we have both the established, cognitive science - based "orthodoxy" and the emerging, although diverse "opposition".

And this gave rise to different traditions:

Thus we have three broad "traditions" in HCI research: the "technical" one, having roots already in the old "knob-and-dial" ergonomics, concentrating human perceptive abilities and motor skills and corresponding features of technical devices, the "conceptual" one that has formed the information processing psychology-based mainstream of HCI research, and the emerging new one searching new frameworks and theories in order to deal with the complexity.

Then the author describes how Activity Theory could enable to widen the spectrum and would be suitable as a pertinent underlying theory in CSCW. Why do I blog this? currently working on the theoretical chapter of my dissertation, I am trying to describe my framework which sits in between cogsci and broader theories (tough!).

Robot painters

(Via Laurent): Leonel Moura is an artist interested in robot painters. For instance, there is this Robotic Action Painter:

RAP is a new generation of painting robots designed for Museum or long exhibition displays. It is completely autonomous and needs very little assistance and maintenance. RAP creates it's own paintings based on an artificial intelligence algorithm, it decides when the work is ready and signs in the right bottom corner with its distinctive signature. The algorithm combines initial randomness, positive feedback and a positive/negative increment of 'color as pheromone' mechanism based on a grid of nine RGB sensors. Also the 'sense of rightness' - to determine when the painting is ready - is achieved not by any linear method, time or sum, but through a kind of pattern recognition system.

But my favorite is certainly the "The Iconoclast Robot" by Leonel Moura (presented at SHIFT 2006):

Why do I blog this? autonomous activity created by robots is interesting to observe, what happens when "machines that decide what to do for themselves"? This kind of principe is used in AI (problem-solving...) and now it's more and more common to let robots draw. Besides, the look of the iconoclast robot is superb.

Interview of BT Futurologist Ian Pearson

ITWales interview of Ian Pearson (BT's "futurologist") raises some interesting issues. Some excerpts about the methods:

How do you and your colleagues make your predictions?

I track future technologies that are coming over the horizon, so as soon as we learn that somebody is doing some research in a particular field, we start putting that together with all the other bits of research that everyone else is doing, and try to figure out what people might try to use that for once it becomes real technology in a decade or so. If one person is doing research on this, and another is doing research on that then companies A, B and C may be able to make products using that kind of basic technology, and if we can anticipate what they might look like then we might figure out how people will use those in society and in business to change their lifestyle.

It's a question of second guessing what people will do, which requires sitting around and talking about it an awful lot really. What we end up with is a whole stack of possibilities of how people could realistically use technology to improve their lives, or get market advantage, or whatever, and if there are good enough reasons for doing that then we can be fairly certain that people will actually do it. If, on the other hand, it's just a whacky idea, like networking every single thing in your home so that you can close the curtains from the comfort of the office, then not many people are going to want to do it, so it would probably be a flop in the marketplace. So we use common sense to throw away the things that people probably won't want to do, and filter out those things that are quite realistic, and will succeed in the market. (...) In terms of keeping up, I wouldn't say that I do. I stopped keeping up round about 1993 or 1994! Since then things have been moving so fast you can't really keep up, all you can do is hope to not fall too far behind. I don't pretend to keep track of 100% of new technologies now. I keep track of some of the key ones, and there are still some surprises (...) In terms of filtering them, the only tools that you can really use are ordinary everyday common sense and some business intuition.

Why do I blog this? apart from methodological content that struck me, Pearson discusses lots of issues (ranging from androids to computers writing their own software, as well as security and 'biology IT'), some of his thoughts are quite relevant. The most down-to-earth ideas he describes are related to "social computing".

The Economist on SL

An article in The Economist about Second Life, some excerpts I found interesting:

Second Life, as Mr Yellowlees illustrates, is not a game. Admittedly, some residents—there were 747,263 as of late September, and the number is growing by about 20% every month—are there just for fun. They fly over islands, meander through castles and gawk at dragons. But increasing numbers use Second Life for things that are quite serious. They form support groups for cancer survivors. They rehearse responses to earthquakes and terrorist attacks. They build Buddhist retreats and meditate.

Many use it as an enhanced communications medium. (...) Henry Jenkins, a professor of media studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thinks that Second Life deserves credit as “a world of hypotheticals and thought experiments.” From new approaches to corporate branding to education, Second Life is a petri dish for innovations that may help people in real life. Already, therapists are using Second Life to help autistic children, because it is a safe environment to practice giving signals to others and interpreting the ones coming back. Other organisations are using Second Life for long-distance learning. Overall, says Jaron Lanier, the veteran of virtual-reality experiments, Second Life “unquestionably has the potential to improve life outside.”

It's interesting to see how SL creates affordances for new activities in virtual worlds; as if it was holding the promises of 3D virtual reality created 10 years ago. The article also focuses on user-generated content:

Second Life provides its residents with the equivalent of atoms—small elements of virtual matter called “primitives”—so that they can build things from scratch. (...) Because everything about Second Life is intended to make it an engine of creativity, Linden Lab early on decided that residents should own the intellectual property inherent in their creations. Second Life now allows creators to determine whether the stuff they conceive may be copied, modified or transferred. (...) Second Life's total devotion to what is fashionably called “user-generated content” now places it, unlike other MMORPGs, at the centre of a trend called Web 2.0. (...) “It celebrates individuality,” says Jaron Lanier, who pioneered the concept of “virtual reality” in the 1980s and is now “science adviser” at Linden Lab. And it connects people, he says, because “the act of creation is the act of being social.” (...) The Web 2.0 crowd also extols Second Life for its highly original business model.(...) Linden Lab does not sell advertising; instead it is a virtual property company. It makes money when residents lease property—an island, say—by charging an average of $20 per virtual “acre” per month. (...) Bill Joy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and now a prominent venture capitalist. But “I don't see any correlation between that and what it's going to take to be a designer and have a skill set to succeed in the world.” (...) Mr Castronova also cautions against overestimating the depth and breadth of Second Life's economy. Yes, people do create clothes and games and spacecraft in Second Life and then sell them. But most of the big money comes from the virtual equivalent of land speculation, as people lease islands, erect pretty buildings and then rent them to others at a premium.

The future of swiss clock?

Yesterday in the swiss countryside, I ran across that clock:

Any ideas?

A conceptual framework for location-based and mobile social applications

Jones, Q., Grandhi, S., Terveen, L., and Whittaker, S., (2004) "People-To-People-to-Geographical-Places: The P3 Framework for Location-Based Community Systems". Journal of Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 13 (4), pp. 249-282. The article describes an interesting conceptual framework of mobile social and location-based applications (already blogged somewhere here but I wanted to keep track of the whole model). Some excerpts:

Our proposal of P3-Systems – people-to-people-to-geographic-place – characterizes the class of systems as essentially community systems (people-to-people) that are tightly organized around and utilize the notion of geographic place. (...) The first dimension distinguishes People-Centered techniques from Place-Centered techniques.People-Centered techniques use location information to support interpersonal awareness, enable informal communication, and identify previously unknown affinities between users. Place-Centered techniques link virtual spaces to physical locations, using social information to aid place-based navigation and decision making. Both People-Centered and Place-Centered techniques can be subdivided, each along a different dimension. Some People-Centered techniques use absolute user locations, while others use relative location or proximity between users. The difference here is between applications that tell users where their buddies are and those that only tell users which buddies are close by. (...) The final dimension is an extension of the standard CSCW distinction between synchronous and asynchronous interaction.

Why do I blog this? because it slightly fits with the review of location-awareness applications I did when writing the chapter about that in my dissertation. I find relevant the dimensions described here: people/place, synchronous/asynchronous, absolute/relative location. However, I would add fourth dimension: active/inactive: with some systems the users are automatically aware of others' whereabouts and with other application they have to be more active (sending their position or asking to get the others').

Data mining and MMOG game design

In this Better Game Design through Data Mining feature, David Kennerly nicely describes how data mining can improve MMOG game design. He starts by describing the "why"

Why Mine Data? Because players lie. Player feedback alone provides a poor diagnosis of game design. The picture a player's verbal feedback paints is not even an approximate guide. It is a distorted portrait of psychological and social forces. Players do not accurately report their own behavior in surveys or customer feedback. (...) As political creatures, players, and developers, also revise their reports (...) Data mining also builds better theories. It gives the game designer insight into how players use and abuse the game. It broadens perspective, proves or disproves hypotheses, and substitutes facts in place of opinions

And then look at the possible statistics than can be used, taking as an example "performance" and how it can be derived from diverse indexes (experience point by time). The article also explores test and analyses of hypotheses that can give interesting insights to game designers. Finally, the author presents in which context this can be used, showing examples to balance the economy, catch cheaters, cut production costs or increase customer renewal.

Why do I blog this? I always have been interested in this sort of log mining of games as a complement for qualitative data (like interviews and observation; I am not a great fan of surveys). What is proposed here is simply speaking close to log analysis in human-computer interaction research. This methodology is additionally similar to what Play-On researchers are doing.

This idea also connects with what USC Justin Hall proposed with the concept of "passively mutliplayer games" (see also here).

Space and Place 10 years after

Dourish, P. 2006. Re-Space-ing Place: Place and Space Ten Years On. Proc. ACM Conf. Computer-Supported Cooperative Work CSCW 2006 (Banff, Alberta). This paper is a follow-up of the "Re-Place-ing Space: The Roles of Place and Space in Collaborative Systems" by Steve Harrison and Paul Dourish that has been published 10 years ago. The first paper advocated for a distinction between “place” and “space” that might serve as a basis for the understanding settings of collaborative work:

One common reading of the relationship between space and place as articulated by Harrison and Dourish has been to see space as a natural fact – a collection of properties that define the essential reality of settings of action – and place as a social product, a set of understanding that come about only after spaces have been encountered by individuals and groups.

What is interesting is that Dourish re-visits this previous paper with a different light: the increasing importance of mobile and ubiquitous technologies reshuffles the questions related to space and place in a considerable way (much more than with previous virtual space). At the same time, virtual environment are still around (think of MMORPG). The paper is very dense and full of important insights, I grasped here only few items related to my research:

While the 1996 paper pointed to the importance of understanding place socially, similar arguments can be applied to space. Indeed, where the conventional reading of place and space in CSCW has suggested that “place” arises only out of (and therefore both consequently and subsequently to “space”), I would suggest instead that place comes first. Our experience of the world is not an experience of mathematically derived uniformity and connectedness; what we experience are places, heterogeneous locales with local meaning, different extents, and individual properties. Space is something we can encounter only afterwards (...) What this suggests, then, is that we need to understand, first, something of the relationship between spatiality and practice, and, second, how multiple spatialities might intersect. This is particularly the case when we think not about “virtual” settings but rather about the ways in which wireless and other technologies might cause people to re-encounter everyday space. Introducing technology into these settings does not simply create new opportunities for sociality (the creation of places); rather, it transforms the opportunities for understanding the structure of those settings (developing spatialities)

Why do I blog this? in this paper, Dourish puts more emphasis on "space" rather than "place" (what he actually did in the 1996 paper). What I find interesting here is the way he is arguing against simplistic interpretations that has been done on the first paper. The idea of multiple spatialities is also very important to me given the kind of intersections we're more and more experiencing. And I am wondering about developing spatialities that would emerge first from new technologies (like adding a wifi layer at cityscale, no mentions to seams and flaws) and second by the intersection of those layers (gsm, wifi, past traces of earlier tech...).

Hakim Bey's spoken dub

Excerpts from "Final Enclosure": spoken words (on dub music) of Hakim Bey and french dub band Brain Damage (extract from the Spoken Dub Manifesto album):

There’s nowhere to go! This is the final enclosure!

You know science fiction novels about societies of the future which are completely contentless in some way, in which the social has really, really been abolished. All the science fictional images of transcendence are all bullshit as far as we can see. You know, the aliens have been a big disappointment, time travel doesn’t seem to work, there’s nobody leaving on other planets, it’s not even anything useful to steal there. I mean it’s just a big … you know … it’s the end!

Extremely playful game space

Via, this incredibly nice and real Donkey-Kong environment. Anyway, I can't find the name of who did this.

Why do I blog this? The guy metaphorically overlayed the digital character but effect is compelling. Le Parkour at its best? Is it the equivalent of Survival Research Labs for Alternate Reality Games? like dangerous environment for playing?

A graphic language for touch-based interactions

Straight from the Mobile HCI workshop about " Mobile Interaction with the Real World " (see the proceedings), this paper: "A graphic language for touch-based interactions" by Timo Arnall. It actually investigates the visual link between informationand physical things, using cell phone to interact digitally with augmented artifacts and spaces.

Timo's point is not take the counter-approach of existing practices (RFID, NFC...) which "hides" the range of possible interactions with augmented objects. He then proposes an iconography for interaction with objects, based on existing signs.

Sketching revealed five initial directions: circles, wireless, card-based, mobile-based and arrows. The icons range from being generic (abstracted circles or arrows to indicate function) to specific (mobile phones or cards touching tags).

Arrows might be suitable for specific functions or actions in combinations with other illustrative material. Icons with mobile phones or cards might be helpful in situations where basic usability for a wide range of users is required. Although the ‘wireless’ icons are often found in many current card readers, they do not successfully indicate the touch-based interactions inherent in the technology, and may be confused with WiFi or Bluetooth.

The circular icons work at the highest level, and might be most suitable for generic labelling. A simple circle was chosen for further investigation. This circle is surrounded by an ‘aura’ described by a dashed line. This communicates the near-field nature of the technology but also describes a physical object that contains something beyond its physical form. The dashed line distinguishes touch-based interactions from generic wireless interactions.

Why do I blog this? It's been a while that I wanted to post about it and I took this workshop paper as an opportunity to describe what Timo does. I find this work very interesting in the sense that revealing possible interactions to the user is an important point, especially regarding touch (it's not self-revealing for lots of human activities).

Now, thinking about gaming applications, I like what Timo mentions "could be applied to situations as diverse as a gaming sticker offering powerups", there is a lot to think about here: not only for collecting objects/improving capabilities in cities but also dropping game artifacts that could trigger specific behavior to other players (not from your team).

Survival Research Labs and their motivations

The last issue of Stanford's Ambidextrous magazine features an interesting article about Survival Research Labs (heavy pdf):

Survival Research Labs (SRL) has built its reputation on providing “the most dangerous shows on earth”—it is an art collective that specializes in staging performances, starring enormous robots that beat the crap out of each other. You may think you’ve seen robot wars on television, but there’s a crucial difference: These exhibitions are explicitly designed not only to entertain hundreds of paying viewers, but also to threaten their lives.

Then the writer (Angie Heile) reports some interesting thoughts about their motivations:

“Our shows aren’t for humans, they’re for machines.” But this only hints at the real answer: SRL’s shows aren’t done for the audience—they’re for the creators. (...) Observers often wonder why so much engineering genius doesn’t get applied to something more beneficial—after all, people who can make a self-propelled fire-breathing monster from scrap could probably use their spare time to design life-saving-appropriate technologies for the developing world—rather than just blow things up. But SRL’s creators seem to feel that using their skills to play with fire is a more exciting challenge.

Why do I blog this? SRL has always been interesting to me and I am intrigued by this argument about the "why so much engineering genius doesn’t get applied to something more beneficial". Actually the author could have elaborated a bit more about the importance of stuff like SRL; even though it's exciting for the creators, there is a lot more to think about that: what they do convey relevant messages with regards to tech usage, the future of its use and dissemination and how it plays out in extreme contexts.

DA/VE (insect eye visor)

I like the DA/VE (insect eye visor) by Nikita Pashenkov

da/ve was my first electronics project at the media lab. The starting idea was an image of an insect eye made out of disrete leds. The addition of fiberoptic elements transformed the display surface into a rudimentary visual matrix, which was recorded by camera and analyzed in computer software. At some point in 2001 da/ve was accessible on the internet via a network-enabled microprocessor module

Why do I blog this? I like the appearance of the device (and the internet-enabled controller).

Game and Culture about WoW

The last issue of academic journal Game and Culture is focused on World of Warcraft. Lots of good papers here, for instance:

Nicolas Ducheneaut, Nick Yee, Eric Nickell, and Robert J. Moore Building an MMO With Mass Appeal: A Look at Gameplay in World of Warcraft Abstract: World of Warcraft (WoW) is one of the most popular massively multiplayer games (MMOs) to date, with more than 6 million subscribers worldwide. This article uses data collected over 8 months with automated "bots" to explore how WoW functions as a game. The focus is on metrics reflecting a player’s gaming experience: how long they play, the classes and races they prefer, and so on. The authors then discuss why and how players remain committed to this game, how WoW’s design partitions players into groups with varying backgrounds and aspirations, and finally how players "consume" the game’s content, with a particular focus on the endgame at Level 60 and the impact of player-versus-player-combat. The data illustrate how WoW refined a formula inherited from preceding MMOs. In several places, it also raises questions about WoW’s future growth and more generally about the ability of MMOs to evolve beyond their familiar template.

Dmitri Williams, Nicolas Ducheneaut, Li Xiong, Yuanyuan Zhang, Nick Yee, and Eric Nickell From Tree House to Barracks: The Social Life of Guilds in World of Warcraft Abstract: A representative sample of players of a popular massively multiplayer online game (World of Warcraft) was interviewed to map out the social dynamics of guilds. An initial survey and network mapping of players and guilds helped form a baseline. Next, the resulting interview transcripts were reviewed to explore player behaviors, attitudes, and opinions; the meanings they make; the social capital they derive; and the networks they form and to develop a typology of players and guilds. In keeping with current Internet research findings, players were found to use the game to extend real-life relationships, meet new people, form relationships of varying strength, and also use others merely as a backdrop. The key moderator of these outcomes appears to be the game's mechanic, which encourages some kinds of interactions while discouraging others. The findings are discussed with respect to the growing role of code in shaping social interactions.

Torill Elvira Mortensen WoW is the New MUD: Social Gaming from Text to Video Abstract: With the immense popularity of massively multiplayer games such as World of Warcraft (WoW), other media as well as game research have discovered gaming as a topic of discussion and study. These discussions, however, tend to ignore the history of both games and of game studies. This article addresses the connections between one of the old and, today, obscure forms of using computers for multiplayer gaming—the text-based Multi-User Dungeon (MUD)—and the current, highly visible and massively used graphic interface game World of Warcraft. These connections range from player style through game-play options to social interaction and player-controlled social modifiers within both types of games. The comparison is based on play, observation, and interviews with players in MUDs and in WoW.

Pareidolia and design

Some definitions on the concept of pareidolia (a cousin of apophenia):

"Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (usually an image) being mistakenly perceived as recognizable" (Explore Dictionary of Psychology)

"Pareidolia is a type of illusion or misperception involving a vague or obscure stimulus being perceived as something clear and distinct" (Skeptic's Dictionary)

The most recurrent example of pareidolia is certainly the jesus' face on grilled cheese, shrouds, ultrasound scan of a baby in the womb or even trees in LA.

Why do I blog this? I guess I am mesmerized by this concept, and its underlying cognitive basis: how human beings see pattern in objects (at some point it can be worse: Mistaking a House for a Face: Neural Correlates of Misperception in Healthy Humans.

Personally, I prefer when it's in technology that people are thinking about human's face (examples from here):

Does such a design make people more confortable using the artifact? What's the role of pareidolia in design?

Arrows indicating to press on missing buttons

Spotted in "Fashion Island", Newport beach (with Riad and Emmanuel):

...Arrows indicating to press on missing buttons... a really compelling metaphor of the place... self-revealing when you think of the area's atmosphere!

Palimpsest blogject

It's been a while that Wil is playing with the blogject idea and I haven't found time to explain what he is doing. He recently worked out this interesting prototype:

This blog/blogject is a Janus head, 2 faced web0.0 monster sharing a memory-system styled on a palimpsest. When the limited memory it has is filled to maximum capacity it needs to reorganise it to make space otherwise it can't store any more new blog entries. In doing this it has to try not to forget the old ones, but this is not always done with much success as memories confabulated over time become increasingly unrecognisable. This making space is done by the blogject and its functioning is modelled on how our brains interleave our memories: by dreaming. The resulting dreams are what the blogject publishes online. (...) The purpose or meaning of this writing is not in the writing itself but in the interpretation of it by the ones submitting writing to its memory. This property too it shares with dreams.

Why do I blog this? pushing further the notion of blogjects, focusing on input/outputs, this project is quite compelling and I like the adjacency to automatic writing and the cut-up.

More about it here: BLOG/BLOGJECT; A Blog that Dreams

About presence in VR

Being There Together and the Future of Connected Presence by Ralph Schroeder, Presence, Vol. 15, No. 4, Pages 438-454, 2006. The paper is about presence in virtual environment, a very broad topic. But I am less interested in presence per se than in some of the elements that contribute to this experience; namely mutual awareness:

This paper proposes a model for the different modalities of connected presence whereby research on shared virtual environments can be integrated with research on other new media - and vice versa. (...) People are either immersed in the physical world or in the virtual world, stepping in and out of these constantly, and sometimes participating in several such worlds, limited only by the fact that sensory attention needs to be focused on a limited set of people and features of the environment, which makes multiple simultaneous channels (communicative multitasking) difficult. Increasing communication means that we are continuously connected to others who are aware of our presence and copresence to a greater or lesser extent. If we think of the multiple devices for connected presence that we use constantly throughout the day, it is possible to see that we need to manage our accessibility, mutual awareness and focus of attention continuously with different affordances (or constraints and possibilities) in different technologies for mediated interaction.

Why do I blog this? because it's quite related with the first project of my phd thesis.

Seminar at Nokia Design

I was today participating in a Nokia Design meeting, presenting some stuff at their "IN&Out speaker series" in Topanga (California). My presentation (pdf slides, 6.2Mb) was about tangible interfaces and some potential misconceptions drawn from user experience research, concepts I found pertinent and stuff I've read. It's absolutely not academic research but more "food for thoughts" for designers, like what I do for video game companies. This material is meant to trigger some insights and discussion about design problems/solutions and ideas. The cover picture is taken from Cronenberg's movie eXistenZ.

It was also a good opportunity to meet Jan Chipchase and talk more about what is doing + methods he uses.