Shabbat and automation

In the "Home spirituality" track at CHI 2007, there is this paper that I can't wait to read:

Sabbath Day Home Automation: "It's Like Mixing Technology and Religion" (Allison Woodruff, Sally Augustin, Brooke Foucault)

Presents a qualitative study of the use of home automation by 20 Orthodox Jewish families. Offers insights and design implications for user experience with smart home technology and religious technology.

Why do I blog this? as I already blogged here, the topic of how people deal with religious constraints regarding technology is of interest. This is tightly related with the user experience of automation (and hence its inherent problems). I am looking forward to read more about this.

Rudeness in intelligent tutoring systems

Intelligent tutoring system is not a domain that I am interested in but sometimes there are some good elements to draw from other field. Especially, when it's about the behavior artificial agents (like tutors). As opposed to some research that assess the need to have polite intelligent tutor for effective learning gains, some researchers came up with this notion of a "rude tutor" (Natalie Person in here talk "Understanding User Emotion and Answer Quality In Dialogue Systems"):

Why Build a Rude Tutor? 1) Human tutors adhere to the cooperative principle and are polite Attend to students’ needs Minimize imposition on the student Speak off-record 2) Tutoring is Face-Threatening Social distance is great Power differential between tutor and student Tutor imposes on the student to provide information 3) Being too polite can interfere with effective tutoring 4) Some students may like it better

Some examples of the RT (Rude Tutor):

RT: I know that you know more than that. Say more. RT: Did you pay attention in class? How does Newton’s third law of motion apply to this situation? RT: No. Go back and answer the question completely. Can’t you add anything?

In one of her experiment (see powerpoint slides), she showed the differences between a polite and rude tutor in terms of various factors (learning gains, user acceptance...). It's difficult to generalize though. Why do I blog this? I am impressed by this notion of unpolite agents (or objects). Playing with bots or Nabaztags, it's very intriguing to see the disruptions that can be created by the utterance (or behavior) those technological artifacts can have (or are programmed to have). There is a lot to do here.

Brain Imagery navigation with a wiimote

Navigating in a 3D structure as complex as the brain is always painful. Therefore, some smart researchers chose to use the wiimote to do so. Check this Youtube video:

Second example, better quality...wii remote interfaced with glovepie gives to the research community a new type of human interface device. Interfacing this awesome object with intelligent key bindings, you can think about a new way to report, to interface with images, to explore the body volume. In a not so much far future, we can imagine and wonder to report radiology images in a "minority report" way. This is a simple example of me interfacing for window/level, zoom, pan & slice scrolling features on a CT set of images. I'm open to suggestions!

Why do I blog this? simply because I remember my courses in cognitive sciences and how hard it was to look at brain structures and PET visualizations. I haven't tried that system and do not know whether this is as compelling as the video shows it but it's definitely intriguing.

Prototype combining Wii remote input + physics

A very intriguing amateur game developed for the Wii that combine Wii remote input and physics. The game engage the user in a virtual version of a "devil stick" (a juggling game in which you flick a stick back and forth between other sticks). Loot at the video here (sources available there).

Entomological typography.

Research about insects and typography seems to be very curious, look at this description by Dexter Sear of how certain cultures (Egyptian and Mayan culture) incorporated many insects as characters of alphabets throughout history:

Photographer, Kjell Sandved summed up the motivation behind his life's work when he said, "It is written on the wings of butterflies." After over 25 years of field photography and scouring through museum insect collections, Kjell Sandved succeeded in finding all characters of our current alphabet within the astoundingly beautiful and varied wing pattern designs of butterflies and moths. Although our understanding of the biological purpose behind such elaborate beautification might focus on behavioral tactics, Kjell's achievement in producing "The Butterfly Alphabet" is a great example of cultural entomology.

More about the failure of location-based applications

Why LBS Applications Fail by David H. Williams is a good overview of issues regarding the problems of location-based applications. The author describes them at the 7 deadly sins... The Seven Deadly Sins of Location-Based Services. Source: E911-LBS Consulting 2006.

Regarding my own interests (the user experience of location-awareness), here are some excerpts that I found interesting:

Sin #5- Flawed Technical and User Design This is the failure to design toward the specific value proposition that is important to the target markets. Root causes include:

1. Inattention to use cases of the service, the associated user interface, and the degree of personalization of the service
2. Lack of creativity and innovation
3. Not recognizing all the complexities involved in an LBS deployment: application setup, network and operational processes and systems, business operations and customer service
4. Failure to adapt to realities of wireless device information presentation limitations

Sin #7 - Deficient Marketing This refers to the inability to get visibility in the marketplace. Root causes include:

1. Taking a mass market approach versus niche product marketing
2. A tendency to adopt a "Build It and They Will Come" mentality, while losing focus on the key value proposition(s)
3. Not recognizing that customer education and giving the customer a sense of personalization is essential

Why do I blog this? I am gathering some thoughts for a talk about the user experience of LBS, the situation is not that different form 2 years ago. The article offer some relevant insights but here are some weird points (like "An example of a company that does a good job of identifying and targeting opportunities is Virgin Wireless, one of Richard Branson's companies. The company's vibrant marketing strategy, using billboards and the company's website, clearly targets teenagers with its "cool" slogans, brightly colored phones and simple plans."). If that's a good way to "identity and target opportunities"... :(

Adaptive design and layers

One of the topic that struck me as very compelling in Dan Saffer's "Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices (VOICES)" was the chapter about smart applications and clever devices. In this part, the author describes the different ways to design with that goal in mind: give applications/services a sense of history, design for multitasking, allows customization, personalization, adaption or hackability. Among all the different "design for hackability" concepts, the one of "layers" (Steward Brand and Tom Moran) is very relevant. The idea lies on the discrimination of "fast layers" that can change frequently and easily, and "slow layers" that provide stability and continuity, like a foundation. As Dan Saffer describes:

If products are desgied so that the upper layers are more exposed (if the seams show, in other words), hackers can play with those, leaving the bottom layers to provide continuity and possibility to eventually integrate changes made in the upper level.

Such a concept is nicely exemplified in Tom Moran's talk about "Adaptive Design" at DIS in 2002 (see the powerpoint slides as well as Dan Hill's notes):

Moran describes why Victorian Houses are so "adaptable": it's because of their sturdiness , the generous hallway, the room is the module, not the dwelling unit and modular rooms (same size, generous, each has light, connectable). [An aparté here, this is very pertinent lately with computing pervading the environment, as described by Jef Huang's talk the other day that stressed this idea of having a core foundation and flexible components in the Swiss House].

Saffer then goes on:

If an application is designed so that those in the know can find the seams between some of these layers (for instance, form instructions hidden in the visible source code), then hackers can hack those locations to their heart's content.

He mentions people "in the know" who can "hack" but what about the down-to-earth end- users, what about giving them the opportunity to "slip between layers". Maybe what I am discussing here has no sense because this is only about turning every user in a hacker (Ã la Michel de Certeau).

One of the strength in Saffer's book is the well-informed interview that are smart enough to provide more context to his take. About this layer issue, Dan Hill's contribution is a good addendum. In this interview, one of his points regarding the creation of hackable products are to:

1. make sure affordances and seams are clear and malleable.
2. enable interrogation, cloning and manipulation on particular layers.
3. learn for the malleability, object-oriented nature and social behavior of code.
4. build products that are self-aware in terms of behavior/usage, which then present those findings back to the users.
5. enable products to emerge from this behavior, as well as from design research
6. enable social interaction around products

Why do I blog this Back to the idea of building "clever and smart products", I found this discussion very relevant, ten times more than the discussion about automation and intelligent agent that people keep bringing to the table. I am not referring to Saffer's book here, what I'd like to stress here is that the direction I see technological innovation heading will be closer to that vision of adaptive design.

Would it be possible to link those thoughts to the discusson about granularity in uibcomp that Fabien mentions, in his blogpost on that topic?

E-Rex: moving robotic display

Some time ago, I blogged about Rob-o from LOEIL (laboratoire objet espace intelligence langage, Aix en Provence, france). I recently stumbled across another piece that I found stunning. It's called E-Rex (same naming pattern). E-Rex is basically an interactive installation made of a robotic screen ("Ecran Robot Exploreur" = Robotic Explorer Display) located on a huge mobile "arm" that can be manipulated by spectators using an spherical interface. The E-Rex device can make circular movements and shown videos/3D scenes. What's intriguing is the integration of motion and speed of the display since the video control the rotation of the arm.

Why do I blog this? I quite like the way this piece looks, it's massive and fluid at the same time.

Design principles for tangible interactions?

The case of sculpting atmospheres: towards design principles for expressive tangible interaction in control of ambient systems by Philip Ross and David V. Keyson (Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 11(2), 2007, pp.69-79). The paper addresses an important issue in the field of tangible interactions: the lack of proper design methodologies/principles/knowledge. The authors derived some principles from the literature, which they applied in a case study about a living-room interface:

1. Consider the context of interaction: An interface that is always present in the home environments should be considered an integral part of home life. (...) the ambient device may become a part of the daily rituals and thus should fit into daily home activities.
2. Map and relate human expressiveness to physical interaction possibilities: Understand what a person may wish to express via the interface, Devise a model that allows a computational system to describe the human expressiveness, Design physical interaction possibilities that allow a person to express the relevant expressive dimensions, Design a model to interpret the expressive behaviour elicited by the physical device.
3. Capitalize on the expressiveness of form, materials and movement expression: use of form, materials and movement of physical objects can serve as a strong means to convey expression and offer a rich palette that can be used to elicit expressive actions and create meaning in interaction.
4. Make actual experience pivotal in the design process: Real-life ‘experiential’ testing is crucial to learn how design decisions may influence the interaction experience of people... A ‘Wizard of Oz’ approach
5. Consider the subjective nature of expression: each individual may interpret the expressiveness of a system or device differently. Secondly, the physical actions of a person have an individual nature since every individual has a different perceptual-motor system. Even within a particular person differences in expression may occur over time due to factors such as refinement of motor skills, mood changes and motivation. Thus it is important that the expressive interface allows for individual creativity and fluctuations in expression.

The principles they consider aims at providing "guidance" to both design decisions and conception of the design process as well as creating a context for an interaction experience (rather than focusing on technological/ergonomica issues).

It's also interesting to see how they deal with the design of gesturing interactions: they carried out a "gesturing workshop" with designers asked to make gestures corresponding to the living room interactions (expressing activities, warmth or attention). They then translated those gestures into mock-up interaction possibilities that they tested.

Why do I blog this? this sort of design principles are interesting starting points; I use them in discussion with game designers for some private projects. The crux issue in tangible interaction is that there is really a lack of methods (think about designing games for the Wii or the DS), especially when it comes to gestures. This paper is a good step towards what I am looking for but the literature about gesturing interfaces/guidelines is still scarce.

Lazarus/Zombie devices

On waiting and killing time: doing hanging around is a paper by Mark Perry that would surely be of interest for Karen Martin, Arianna Bassoli and Johanna Brewer who organized a workshop on this topic ("Waiting: a workshop on place/time and future technologies"). In this short paper, the author explores what he calls "the reality of waiting" and inevitably, this lead to the concept of "dead time" that lots of tech designers try to fill in with crazy technologies; based on the assumption that dead moment needed to be filled:

Information technology use plays an important role in contemporary waiting, especially through the mobile telephone, which allows us to act somewhere other than where we are waiting. We have called these technologies (see Perry and Brodie, 2005) Lazarus devices (reviving dead time), although more realistically they should be seen as Zombie devices (only partial reanimation). (...) Industry rhetoric would like us to think about technology as a post-modern agent in ‘the death of time’, but our data does not suggest this; rather it can offer a resource to making more effective use of our time, or to perform our activities in a different way or temporal sequence. But this is hardly radical. People make use of this technology (in the same way that they used paper previously) precisely because they are waiting, and not because the concept of waiting has been weakened or vanquished. (...) technology developments can do more than simply allow us to fill this time with things that we could only otherwise do elsewhere (...) we could improve the quality of the waiting rather than trying to diminish its resource constraining effects on our plans.

I really liked this excerpt too because I find quite revealing:

This perspective on the wait differs from those expressed earlier, in the notion of work-as-waiting. Certainly, the time is being filled, but worthlessly, and is consequently experienced as a drag. A similar view can be seen in the groups of teenagers hanging around fast food restaurants, perpetually waiting for some (often never actuating) event to happen (often termed ‘loitering’, not just the neutral form of waiting)

Why do I blog this working on consulting projects regarding mobile/casual gaming, I have always been amazed by this tendency to fill dead moments. But the situation is really more complicated (not to mention the benefits of "down moments") The arguments described in this paper interestingly address those issues. Besides, there will be a lot to discuss on the "aggregated waiting experience" topic but I leave that for another time.

Do you need to lock your doors when you can track your belongings

In "Visionary in Residence: Stories" (Bruce Sterling), there are different short stories. In one of them, there is this email discussion about the design of a new category of product based on location-based technology:

If Al has the location and condition of all his possessions cybernetically tracked and tagged in real time, maybe Al is freed from worrying about all his stuff. Why should Al fret about his possessions any more? We've made them permanently safe. Why shouldn't Al loan the lawnmower to his neighbor? The neighbor can't lose the lawnmower, he can't sell it, because Al's embedded MEMS monitors just won't allow that behavior. (continued)

So now Al can be far more generous to his neighbor. Instead of being miserly and geeky "labeling everything he possesses," obsessed with privacy--Al turns out to be an open-handed, open-hearted, very popular guy. He doesn't even need locks on his doors! Everything Al has is automatically theft-proof--thanks to us. He has big house parties, fearlessly showing off his home and his possessions. Everything that was once a personal burden to Al becomes a benefit to the neighborhood community. What was once Al's weakness and anxiety is now a source of emotional strength and community esteem

Why do I blog this? because the excerpt describes a relevant possible consequences of location-based services that has not been explored so far in what I've read concerning their usage.

Many Eyes: crowdsourcing + social computing + InfoViz

After selling its PC division, IBM recently dropped the printer business. At the same time, they explore other paths such as the super-mediatized SL but also other interesting platforms. I have intrigued by Many Eyes. Internet News has a short discussion about it:

IBM (Quote) launched a new social computing site today called Many Eyes, which allows users to upload very large data sets, choose different visual representations for the data sets, and engage in an online discussion of what the data reveals. Each visualization will allow for an active discussion to take place and become a common area to share ideas, add insight and understand the visualization in a group setting. (...) an attempt to learn whether the principles of crowd-sourcing can be applied to the analysis of visualized data, in the hopes of generating broader and deeper analysis of data.

Why do I blog this? I find interesting the IBM attempts to try and test new applications in the domain of social computing.

Empty query on Google

Google prevent users from typing nothing in the search engine. It's a pity, I'd be curious to know what should come out from a research on an empty query.

Why the hell an empty query would be important in a search engine? At first glance, it's a weird idea because if you go to a search engine, it's basically because you want to look up something on the information superhighway. But why not allowing people to search for nothing? This lead to the question of leaving a blank space on a query. On some platforms it could be used as starting point to have an overview of the situation; for example, on a map engine, it could be a way to have the overall representation of the earth; or in an address book it would be an easy manner to get the whole list of people. The problem is that we've google, the domain's huge. I would have expected an empty query to bring me on some sort of representation of the globality as described by Google. They actually do have a good representations of what's available on the noospherian web, so why not providig the users with a sort-of depiction of this? I also expect it to be more elaborated and revealing than the Google Zeitgeist.

Inflatable simulated targets in the form of tanks/aircrafts

Military Decoy is a company that sell huge military-like inflatable objects such as tanks, aircraft and trucks:

Founded in 1992, Shape International, Inc is a world leader in the research, development and manufacture of simulated military target equipment for the industry. We specialize in inflatable simulated targets satisfying the needs of legitimate defense clients worldwide. Utilizing cutting edge camouflage technology, Shape provides its customers with beyond state-of-art simulated target equipment. Innovative development allows Shape to achieve unprecedented unprecedented and extraordinarily realistic camouflage and target simulation for a variety of strategic defense applications.

Why do I blog this? because I am crazy of inflatable stuff. Those objects are terrific and there could be very intriguing use for them. In the last issue of Carhartt's Rugged magazine, some folks explain that it can be deployed for keeping your spot on a parking lot.

How to drop evidences of futuristic technical development

A quote I like, taken from "What If Our World Is Their Heaven? The Final Conversations Of Philip K. Dick" (Gwen Lee, Doris Elaine Sauter, Tim Powers). Also pointed by Tim Powers in the introduction of the book:

"That's another technical advice, you casually have one character say to the other, 'Where did you put the biochips?' 'I put them back in the cupboard where they belong.' That's all you need to say... See it's amazing how easy it is to write if you know how...

Why do I blog this? PKD's was of describing the future is awesome, I really like the way he only drop words and concepts that build a sort-of ambiance of the future.

RepRap: cheaper 3D printing

RepRap seems to be a Bruce Sterling -esque tool that may allow the existence of spimes. What's curious here is that it will be cheaper, based on an open source model and available on various computer platforms.

RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper. It is a practical self-copying 3D printer.

RepRap will make plastic, ceramic, or metal parts, and is itself made from plastic parts, so it will be able to make copies of itself. It is a three-axis robot that moves several material extruders. These extruders produce fine filaments of their working material with a paste-like consistency. If RepRap were making a plastic cone, it would use its plastic extruder to lay down a quickly-hardening 0.5mm filament of molten plastic, drawing a filled-in disc. It would then raise the plastic extrusion head and draw the next layer (a smaller filled disc) on top of the first, repeating the process until it completed the cone. To make an inverted cone it would also lay down a support material under the overhanging parts. The support would be removed when the cone was complete. Conductors can be intermixed with the plastic to form circuits - in 3D even!

The RepRap build cost will be less than $400 US for the bought-in materials, all of which have been selected to be as widely available everywhere in the world as possible. Also, the RepRap software will work on all computer platforms for free. Complete open-source instructions and plans are published on this website for zero cost and available to everyone so, if you want to make one yourself, you can.

The work of Athanasius Kircher

Athanasius Kircher was a 17th century German Jesuit scholar who invented a large amount of interesting artifacts ranging from speaking tube, perpetual motion machines to cat pianos. Among the devices this Renaissance man created, there are two that I found amazingly intriguing, in terms of ubiquitous computing. The first one is a projector that used candlepower to cast images from glass plates onto a wall (as explained here):

By the flickering light of an oil lamp, Athanasius Kircher projected a series of images engraved on glass onto a wall. He could use his projector to illustrate lectures or simply to amuse his visitors.

And more interestingly, the following picture (from Musurgia Universali (1650)) has been recognized as being a very important step in the history of acoustic theory. This work shows how echoes and reverberations can be bounced for long periods of time in complex wall structures. It's basically a "piazza-listening device". As described in this paper, "the voices from the piazza are taken by the horn up through the mouth of the statue in the room on the piano nobile above, allowing both espionage and the appearance of a miraculous event".

Why do I blog this? I've heard about that incredible man the other day during Jef Huang's presentation at the "classroom of the future" workshop and thought it was a good time to dig more about his work. This sort of design research is impressive and strikingly relevant today when thinking about roomware.

*sigh* PhD thesis submitted *sigh*

It's called "THE INFLUENCES OF LOCATION AWARENESS ON COMPUTER-SUPPORTED COLLABORATION" and the abstract can be described as follows

Abstract: "Where are you?". This recurring question when opening a mobile conversation attests the importance of spatialisation in social interactions. More and more applications support mutual location-awareness: they enable members of a group to locate their partners both in the physical environments and virtual worlds. This thesis contributes to the research in the field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) by examining how location awareness tools influence collaboration and what interpretations are drawn upon them in a collaborative context. Our research question concerns the effect of location-awareness on group cognitive processes such as communication and the modeling of others’ intents (a process we referred to as “mutual modeling”).

After a critical review of the existing mutual location-awareness interfaces, a theoretical framework grounded in psycholinguistics is introduced. It describes location-awareness as a "coordination device" that allow members of a group to have a shared understanding upon which they could mutually infer their respective intentions. Three studies have been realized in the form of semi-controlled experiments in two multi-user games; one in a 3D virtual world and two others in the physical environment, based on a location-based game.

The first study demonstrated how the presence of a location-awareness interface did not necessarily imply its use. More surprisingly, in the second experiment, this type of interface had inhibiting effects on communication within groups and on the recall of partners' past positions. It also made the group more passive than those who did not have this interface. Our third study showed how location-awareness is integrated among a set of coordination devices, namely the plan players established before the game. In addition, the three studies brought forward the various roles of mutual location-awareness ranging from a resource for division of labor to the facilitation of situation understanding or the use of past positions to draw hypotheses about the partners' future behavior. We also developed visual representations of coordination to depict the effects of location-awareness tools on collaboration. These visualizations allowed us to represent these negative effects and to refine our understanding of their influence over time. Such results finally allowed us to discuss how automating location-awareness can be detrimental to group collaboration in certain situations.

As most of the research in human-computer interaction has rather focused on optimizing the accuracy of location sensing and representation, the work done in this thesis is meant to ponder this agenda by bringing forward unexpected issues regarding how collaboration can be undermined by location-awareness.

Keywords: coordination, CSCW, geolocation, group cognitive processes, location-awareness.

Now, let's prepare the defense.

3D printing in 2007?

Some like-minded people give 2007 outcast on CNN Money, among other predictions, I found that one more interesting:

Paola Antonelli (MOMA design and architecture curator) I'm looking forward to the next steps in 3-D printing, where a laser beam solidifies a liquid or a powder to form intricate solid shapes. It currently takes seven days to make a chair from scratch, but soon enough it'll take seven hours, and then seven minutes. You'll be able to inject different colors and textures. People will be able to design their own objects, and 3-D objects will at last join the open-source movement. There will be 3-D printing stations in all neighborhoods all over the world. That will save energy because there will be no need for warehouses and trucks. And the process will use just as much material as is necessary - no waste. This, of course, is a few years from now, but the beginning of the future is today.

Why do I blog this? I don't know whether this should be expected for 2007, nor if all the issues mentionned will be solved by 3D printing but it's an intriguing trend that can have some good implications (about DIY gear and new consumer practices).

Geo-games: M3 glider

Geogames is a dutch company that proposes services regarding geo-simulated environments such as M3D Glider.

M3Glider delivers add-on for Google Earth allows you to interactively explore the world in all informative detail - on demand. Smoothly glide from the global to local level while M3D Glider instantly presents you with high quality images, photography and location-based information streamed from anywhere on the internet. Unlike other simulation systems M3D Glider offers a truly light-weight plug-in in an open, Ajax and web 2.0 oriented solution.

This technology offer tools to simulate 3D environments on Google Earth. As stated by one of their employee:

Our idea at GeoGames is that avatars should be seen as a transparent, fluid entity - not an end in itself. They become usefull when they function as tools for the personal data mining and search activities that geo-simulated environments will offer soon.

Why do I blog this? looking at all those tools that focus on how to improve Google Earth's interactivity as a virtual world platform is very intriguing; might this platform be used as a social space at some point?