Spotted this morning on a french railway station in remote small town:
Why do I blog this? 1) looks like Bitman 2) it's gorgeous, the cables are intriguing, going form the ground to this intriguing flashing character (meant to prevent you that a train is arriving)
A good read in the IHT today: Wireless: Can mobile phones give you 'presence?' by Thomas Crampton is an article about mobile presence and location awareness. Though this topic received a fair amount of work in HCI research (my PhD diss is about that very topic), it is now more and more common to see it installed in the paysage (landscape). There are more and more systems that provides those features (both on desktop and mobile devices), and Jaiku (one of the system described in this article) is a relevant example for that matter. The article describe Jaiku, Plazes, Whereify... Some excerpts I found interesting about the design choices:
"Mobile phones have already become the hub for communicating by voice, pictures, video and Internet," said Mikko Pilkama, the director of multimedia services at Nokia. "Making phones aware of the context for all these activities is the next logical step." (...) Engestrom said that in setting up Jaiku, it became clear that the sharing of such data also raised privacy concerns. "We make sure that you as the user decide whom you share information with," Engestrom said, adding that individual users own all information stored on Jaiku's servers and can have it deleted at any time. Users also have the option of shutting off the system for privacy. (...) In addition to location-based advertisements, there could be charges for premium features like storing information over longer periods of time, or for sending SMS alerts.
But, of course, things are not simple (as reader of this blog might know):
"I worry that people attribute too deep a meaning to raw information," said Danah Boyd who researches social media at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. (...) An added risk for the location-announcing services is that people might find themselves unable to break away from following friends or old lovers, Boyd added.
"The problem is that people really, really love stalking," Boyd said. "When you have just ended a relationship, it is not necessarily healthy to follow the exact location of your ex- lover minute-by-minute on your phone."
Why do I blog this? nothing really new under the sun here but it seems that Le Web3 (a conference held in Paris last week about technology usage) gave an opportunity to gather relevant people such as Jyri Engestrom and Danah Boyd to discuss their thoughts about LBS with an IHT journalist.
Wandering around in the street of Paris last thursday, I ran across this terrific street plate:
Why do I blog this? I found interesting the usage of the street plate as a way to create new affordances such as a direction map. Judging from the picture, there is already a street plate in the background but that one is more relevant. Of course this is the 1st arrondissement of the french capital, hence you won't find this in every parts of the town...
In The Economist this week, there is an article about “Responsive” buildings" capable of changing shape andresponding to their users' needs, namely how architecture can be thought as "living systems rather than static buildings". Some excerpts I found interesting: What woudl that look like?
Houses, for example, might shrink in the winter to reduce surface area and volume, thus cutting heating costs. They could cover themselves to escape the heat of the summer sun or shake snow off the roof in winter. Skyscrapers could alter their aerodynamic profiles, swaying slightly to distribute increased loads during hurricanes. Office buildings could reconfigure themselves to improve ventilation.
And to do so, what is needed?
Such “responsive architecture” would depend on two sorts of technology: control systems capable of deciding what to do, and structural components able to change the building's shape as required. (...) One approach being pursued by researchers is to imitate nature. Many natural constructions, including spiders' webs and cell membranes, are “tensegrity systems”—robust structures made up of many interconnected elements which can be manipulated to change shape without losing their structural integrity.
Why do I blog this? one of the most striking features of such description is that the "dynamic" paradigm" (that I would define as linked to the responsiveness of an artifact to the environmental conditions) now pervades static objects, long life to biology-based inspiration!
Two interesting projects from the ITP (thanks regine!): On one hand, MoPres: Sense and contribute to the ghosty presences around you by Jane Oh, Alex Bisceglie (see also their website):
MoPres brings out the risidual presence of the people who occupied your current location. It is a geotagging project with the humanized 'context' of the locations. The raw data is from bio-metric sensers rather than the conscious, forceful, and mostly inaccurate logging which will provide a more creative and sophisticated flexibility of interpretation on the experiences of people
User Scenario: People wear the vest with embedded sensor package [heart rate and body temperature sensors], and the data is logged through the cell phone with geo tagging [gps and/or cell-tower id]. Once the mobile application reads the pattern of the data in relation to locations, it triggers the output devices embedded in the vest [heater and the pulse motor] with relevant residual patterns so that people can experience others' past experiences at the given spot.
On the other hand: the personal range finder: A device used to navigate physical space without the aid of your eyes by Justin Downs:
The personal range finder is an assistive device that translates physical space into a tactile input on your arm. The goal of this project was to make an affordable mobile machine that is rugged, runs off a common power supply (9volt battery) and easy to use. The range finder utilizes sonar to create a map of the surrounding physical space. This map is then translated to a scaled pressure gradient which is applied to your forearm. In this way you are able to “see” the surrounding 8 feet of space allowing for informed movement without the use of your eyes.
Why do I blog this? the first project is very interesting in the sense that it follows the trend "making explicit invisible/implicit phenomenon" in a nice way. Plus, I also like the lowtech look of the hooded :) The second one is different for another reason: the translation from physical space to a tactile input is a pertinent way to create a sort of intangible interaction through gestures: seeing by gesturing.
The NYT has a good piece about cell phones practices:
In an age of information oversharing, the mobile-phone number is one of the few pieces of personal information that people still choose to guard. Unwanted incoming calls are intrusive and time-consuming and can suck precious daytime cell-plan minutes. And the decision to give out a cell number can haunt you for years, as people now hold on to the numbers longer than their land-line numbers. (...) Some people have found a way to avoid compromising the sanctity of their cellphone without committing the modern sin of being unreachable. Instead of giving out her cell number, Ms. McClain has recently been dispersing what has become known as a “social phone number.” This is a free number that is as disposable as a Hotmail address. A handful of Web sites are creating these mask numbers, which can be obtained in nearly every area code (...) Mr. Wisk (creator of the social phone number provider PrivatePhone.com) said a person’s cell number has become the most personal, “the last one you’d give out.”“Now for so many people,” he said, “it’s the only number, and it corresponds to an object you have on you at all times. It can be a disruptive technology. Having a number that goes straight to voice mail is less intrusive.”
Why do I blog this? I tend to agree with the idea that cell phones # are like and ID and some people do not want to give them up. It's interesting that more and more service will be built around this phenomenon (counter the disclosure of information done in the past).
iFind is... "MIT's new location-based application for friendspotting", as they describe it (a project coordinated by François Proulx):
iFIND, a project developed at the MIT SENSEable City Lab, aims to improve social networking through some kind of digitally augmented serendipity. Using iFIND, you and your buddies can instantaneously exchange your locations on campus, talk to users nearby, and microcoordinate more effectively. If you are a geek, you will even be able to arrange meetings in real time using the group's center of gravity!iFIND aims to give full control of location to the users. It is you who can choose, on a peer to peer basis, when to disclose your individual data and to whom.
Technically speaking, it's based on PlaceLab:
Your location is derived from the signals that your laptop's (for example) wireless card detects in its vicinity. Thanks to the high density of WiFi access points on the MIT campus, the software can compute your location accurately (we'd say within a few meters).
It's kind of weird but after blogging about the "urban radar" I now ran across this Urban Juice project by Mine Danisman Tasar done at the Umea Institute of design (and Philips), which expands the notion of travelogue:
Prior to a trip, the modern nomad can not afford time to get acquainted with a new location. Besides that, it is challenging to be fully prepared for a new place. Urban Juice turns your travel experience into a fun activity by letting you get on-the-spot information and keep a log of your trip. By incorporating a social network of travelers, it provides you with the accumulated information.
There is a lot more to draw from the project report (beware! 23Mb pdf!). It explains the 3 modes of the projects: map (get location information, tag places, document your trip...), menu (travel planning), camera/augmented reality (take picture and document your trip in the camera mode OR get on-the-spot information in the augmented reality mode).
Why do I blog this? it's yet another system that aim at gathering traces of people's activity (like location tagging) to share them and create a filtering system about cities and travels.
I just attended a talk by Alexander Repening about the use of mobile computing and simulation for "social learning". One of the project he mentioned is quite relevant to my research. It's described in his paper Mobility Agents: Guiding and Tracking Public Transportation Users :
The Mobility Agents system provides multimodal prompts to a traveler on handheld devices helping with the recognition of the “right” bus, for instance. At the same time, it communicates to a caregiver the location of the traveler and trip status.
What is interesting to me is the location-awareness interface:
For advanced travelers, we included a tool called the Urban Radar to find bus stops by pointing out the relative position of nearby recognizable landmarks such as restaurants. Tourists exploring an urban environment can use the Urban Radar to find interesting spots. The Urban Radar uses the current location of the traveler and a specified interest, e.g., the interest in food, to find nearby locations. The radius of the search sweep can be constant but can also be switched to automatic mode. (...) Caregiver Interface: (...) The ideal application would allow a much more peripheral sense of observation that requires only a small amount of screen space and provides a concise representation of the location and/or situation of the traveler. In addition, travelers as well as their caregivers wanted to have control over who could access their data. (...) in the form of an IM client
Why do I blog this? I am less interested in the project than in the location-awareness interfaces that I am describing in one of the chapter of my dissertation. Both the traveler and the caregiver's interfaces are interesting and fits with the classification I've done (close to Jaiku, which share similar ideas with this urban radar).
Gilles Paté's "Le repos du fakir" ("Fakir's rest") is finally available in the DVD format. It's actually a short movie that describe the concept of "defensive space": all the transformation in space that aim at preventing people to have a specific behavior... such as sleeping on a bench, doing skateboard, sitting next to a window... In this short movie, the author try to sleep at diverse places in paris, having to stretch his own body to find a proper position...
Why do I blog this? as an observer of city phenomenons (as well as for potential urban computing research projects), I am always impressed by the devices people design to reshape behaviors. This ons is frightening:
Working lately on visualization of coordinating agents, I ran across old work about cyberspace visualization that struck me as very intriguing. See for instance Cyberspace geography visualization: Mapping the World-Wide Web to help people find their way in cyberspace by Luc Girardin (bro of fabien).
The central goal of this paper is to give information about virtual locations to the actors of cyberspace in order to help them solve orientation issues, i.e. the lost-in-cyberspace syndrome. The approach taken involves low dimensional digital media to create the visualization that can guide you. (...) To perform this task, the self-organizing maps algorithm is used because it preserves the topological relationships of the original space, conjointly lowering the dimensionality. (...) By geometrically approximating the vector distribution in the neurons of the self-organizing maps, this method provides a means to analyse the landscape of the mapping of cyberspace.
Here are maps of three websites:
Why do I blog this? The aim and the viz are interesting. At that time, there was this navigational issue of how people would navigate in the hypertextual virtual world. Now things changed a bit actually and it seems to me that the hypertext has been either forgotten or taken for granted (well the wikipedia is a cool hypertext isn't it?). More here
People who are into "duct tape" (like me) must have a look at this history of tape published by Ambidextrous (by Jonathan Edelman). It provides a very curious timeline that starts from "Earthenware pots mended with an adhesive substance made from the sap of trees" to Johnson and Johnson or 3M inventions. Fish-based glue as well as many patents issued for glues using fish, animal bones, milk, rubber, and starch are presented.
It’s hard to imagine a world without tape. It mends our precious keepsakes, holds parts together as a quick repair, keeps our wounds together—and sometimes saves lives. The film industry is a virtual slave to tape: gaffer’s tape, paper tape, camera tape. Supposedly Socrates used an animal hide with some kind of sap to repair a hole in his home. We at least know that before tape, there was glue, fabric, paper, animal skins, and string; when tape came on the scene, everything changed. This timeline puts into perspective how tape has changed the very nature of adhesion and, along with it, designers’ manipulation of the world.
Why do I blog this? duct tape is a very intriguing innovation. As a user experience researcher, duct tape always makes me wonder about how people tune, tinker, craft, modify artifacts. It's not only an indicator of situations that should or have been tuned but also a a superb example of a way to let people create "stuff" (see this book:"Tape: An Excursion Through the World of Adhesive Tapes" by Kerstin Finger)
Sincerely, look at your environment, try to find where people leave duct tape.
Today I gave a presentation about the "Internet of Things" at a foresight meeting in Geneva.I spoke after Lara Srivastava from the ITU who described the ITU's vision about that topic. In my talk, I tried to show an alternative vision, as propelled by artists or researchers. My point was to show through various projects how the Internet of Things can be described: locative media as first incarnation, visualizations of networked communication and above all blogjects.
Notes from Sami Coll's presentation about a sociological perspective on the Internet of Things:
- nowadays, we leave lots of traces (fidelity cards, credit card transactions, cell phone usage...) - sometimes it's possible to access to these traces (it's even possible in Switzerland with supermarket cards) - use of traces: marketing, digital marketing, amazon's propositions... list pirates/terrorists, fight against social abusers - "savoir c'est pouvoir" ("knowing, it's exerting power")
two faces of the same coin: - convenient technologies - "technologies of surveillance": leave traces in the daily experience of users, produce very valuable information. this secondary function is not always conscious to the users.
paradox: we've never give a so important value to individualism (technologies aim at making people free) BUT the individuals have never been tracked that way... production of a new type of knowledge about people. this paradox is very important with regards to consumption practices: liberty but it's also the place in which we produced the most important amount of information.
traditionally, people are very reluctant towards the State (the price to pay so that it can guarantee different things?)
laws (the point in Switzerland = data belongs to whom they concern) transparency and access to the owner right to ask their suppression and people have the responsibility to protect oneself
BUT this responsibility depends upon the sociocultural categories and even when it's perceived this potential of surveillance is not seen as dangerous ("I don't have anything to hide so there is no problem" as Sami's studies showed) and very individualist approach
however...a fact should be acknowledged: modern societies need surveillance surveillance started in 18th century: how to maintain a social order with the demographic explosion (mad people, criminals... prisons...) then in 19-20th century: industrial revolution: surveillance of factories, workers... to optimize production 20-21th century: new problem = we produce more than we consume, then a necessity to exert control on people so that they consume more (ad...growth). surveillance now concerns everyone of us
our daily life in the Internet of things? less "spaces" that are not under control we will leave more traces in places that will be more intimate it will allow to optimize our life (maximize the profit, minimize losses)
do we really need all those technologies and produce all those information to be more free? from what should we be more free? isn't it a way to create a new type of individuals?
Then Olivier Liechti presented some more concrete elements, using great examples such as the life of cows and RFID usage. What attracted me in his presentation was this:
RFID exists for 50 years so why do everyone talk about it nowadays? - standardization (legal obligation + commercial reasons such as Wal Mart asked its suppliers to use them - higher/increasing volume - interoperability - new applications and technologies (sensor networks...) - their cost went down - globalization (use this information in all steps of the supply chain
yet another example of graphical music annotation:
Why do I blog this? as an example of visualization for my dissertation.
okay time for a quote by Bruno Latour, from his well-known dialogue with a a student:
"Student — But that’s exactly my problem: to stop. I have to complete this PhD. I have just eight more months. You always say ‘more descriptions’, but this is like Freud and his cures: indefinite analysis. When do you stop? My actors are all over the place! Where should I go? What is a complete description? Professor — Now that’s a good question because it’s a practical one. As I always say: a good thesis is a thesis that is done. But there is another way to stop than by ‘adding an explanation’ or ‘putting it into a frame’. S — Tell me it then. P — You stop when you have written your 50.000 words or whatever is the format here, I always forget. S — Oh! That’s really great! So my thesis is finished when it’s completed… so helpful, many thanks! I feel so relieved… "
Why do I blog this? it's very apropos with my current situation ;)
In the last issue of ambidextrous, there is a 2-pages paper by Genevieve Bell and Brian David Johnson entitled Picking Up Insights... and Bugs: (Mis)adventures in Field Research, which is bascially a description of how ethnographers bring back more from the field than "informations". The article gives some highlights.
"Our medical records give a very different picture of those cultural encounters. Food poisoning, allergies, tropical ulcers, dysentery, colds, eye infections, a brush with the plague — you name it, we’ve had it. Seeking local cures for some of them, we’ve picked up boiled Coca-Cola with shaved ginger, and Hainan chicken rice (good for the soul?) along the way. (...) The very depth of field research that gives us insight also exposes us to messy, unexpected surprises. But dealing with that messiness — getting injured, taking care of ourselves, and finding help in an unfamiliar place — deepens our understanding of our surroundings."
Why do I blog this sometimes it's good to see the "behind the curtain" view of research methods :)
I am deep into writing the diss hence the low number of post here... so let's loop back in the 95's web icons:
the icons actually makes me think that the "eternal beta" from the web2.0 frenziness are nothing more than the revival of the "under construction" motto from the past.
This video is quite intriguing. It shows how some wii-fans used the wiimote to play Half-Life 2 on a windows-machine:
Why do I blog this? it's interesting because it ask the question about to design proper FPS control with gestural interactions, I don't know how hardcord gamer would feel this...
A concept I just ran across: L-System:
An L-system or Lindenmayer system is a formal grammar (a set of rules and symbols) most famously used to model the growth processes of plant development, though able to model the morphology of a variety of organisms. L-systems can also be used to generate self-similar fractals such as iterated function systems. L-systems were introduced and developed in 1968 by the Hungarian theoretical biologist and botanist from the University of Utrecht, Aristid Lindenmayer (1925–1989).
Why do I blog this? a friend of mine in the game design industry used it today in a presentation about successful transfer from the academic world to the industry (especially game designers).
A quote from Rodney Brooks forecast in NS that I found relevant:
Show a two-year-old child a key, a shoe, a cup, a book or any of hundreds of other objects, and they can reliably name its class - even when they have never before seen something that looks exactly like that particular key, shoe, cup or book. Our computers and robots still cannot do this task with any reliability
Why do I blog this? the quote is self-revealing to me, especially with regards to AI promises.
The rest of the excerpt that I haven't reproduced here is about the fact that, though we handled the generic object recognition problem, researchers still need to benefit from psychophysics and brain to open up the possibilities of more thorough recognition.