No perfect i-roid

"Dreaming of a perfect i-roid, screaming cerebrum steroidFaking-jack decoys got beef with Ox You can get caught in my Real Earth chatterbox That's virtual (virtual), if you drunk a V8 You couldn't be parallel, because hell is vertical Aha, fooled ya, thought it was beneath you Got propelled in the sky, now soul is see-through But it doesn't matter cause there's no molecules"

Lyrics by Cannibal Ox, "Real Earth" (COld Vein)

Why do I blog this? just thought the lyrics sounded apropos with regards to some effects of technology on society: "I-roid", "now soul is see-through".

About delegation and design

A recent post by Mr. Chipchase addresses the issue of "delegation". Jan proposed that "from a design perspective a potential solution to pretty much every design problem is delegation - getting other people or technology to complete those parts of a task or activity that the user is unable to complete themselves.". This issue is of particular interest to me and though it has been addressed by lots of researchers, it's certainly Bruno Latour who refers to the concept of "delegation" in the brightest way.

In his article entitled "Where are the Missing Masses? Sociology of a Door" (Chapter 8 (pages 225-258) of Bijker & Law (1992) - Shaping Technology / Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change), Latour describes the "door" cases and compares two approaches of delegation: with humans and "nonhumans". He starts by introducing the problem of doors: people don't close them and and cold air rushes in... and heat rushes out... and eventually it's impossible train people to keep doors closed. Hence a delegation of this task :

"either to discipline the people or to substitute for the unreliable people another delegated human character whose only fonction is to open and close the door. This is called a groom (...) The advantage is that you now have to discipline only one human and may safely leave the others to their erratic behaviour. (...) the weak point of the tactic can be seen: if this one lad is unreliable then the whole chain breaks down (...) It is at this point that you have a relatively new choice: either to discipline the people or to substitute for the unreliable humans a delegated non-human character whose only fonction is to open and close the door. This is called a door-closer or a groom (...) Solved? Well, not quite. (...) We have all experienced having a door with a powerful spring mechanism slam in our face. For sure, springs do the job of replacing grooms, but they play the role of a very rude, uneducated and dumb porter"

Okay, now comes the important part:

"The interesting thing with such impolite doors is this: if they slam shut so violently, it means that you, the visitor have to be very quick in passing through and that you should not be at someone else's heels, otherwise your nose will get shorter and bloody. An unskilled non-human groom thus presupposes a skilled human user. It is always a trade-off. I will call the behaviour imposed back onto the human by non-human delegates prescription. Prescription is the moral and ethical dimension of mechanisms. (...) We have been able to delegate to non-humans not only force but also values, duties and ethics. It is because of this morality that we, humans, behave so ethically, no matter how weak and wicked we feel we are. (...) The non-humans take over the selective attitudes of those who engineered them. So, to avoid this discrimination, inventors get back to their drawing board and try to imagine a non-human character that will not prescribe the same rare local cultural skills to its human users."

The article goes with other incredibly valuable insights ("The debates around anthropomorphism arise because we believe that really there exist 'humans' and 'non-humans' without realizing that this attribution of roles and action is also a choice.") but I'll stop here because there is already a lot on our plate. Why do I blog this? sunday evening readings... how does that relate to Jan's proposition? it's just meant to remind us how the design of things (nonhumans, in Latour's terms) is highly subject to embedding "values, duties and ethics" in the produced artifacts (or experience).

Inappropriate responses by robots

Read in the last "technology quarterly" of "the E", this article about chatbot technology and call centres. It describes some potential problems of hooking speech analytics software to a call center:

"it will be also necessary to program chatbots to deal with verbal abuse. In some cases, (...), companies that have used chatbots to handle online queries have found that when confronted by verbal abuse or sexual innuendo, the chatbots were programmed to respond inappropriately in kind, with insults of their own"

Why do I blog this? this kind of story makes me giggling; this perspective of having people and robots insulting each other...

People interested in this should have a look at Sheryl Brahnam's work, the paper 'Gendered bods and bot abuse' (CHI 2006 workshop Misuse and abuse of interactive technologies) is kinda scary as what it reveals about human beings.

A kirkyan

When talking about connections between the material world and digital environments, terminologies are still fuzzy, a kirkyan is a new word coined by csven:

"A kirkyan is similar to a spime or blogject, but different in that a kirkyan is actually a Thing comprised of a combination of reality instances. One instance exists in our physical world (kirkyan P) and one or more “sibling” instances exist in their respective, independent virtual worlds (kirkyan V1′, V2′, V3′, aso). They are independent yet part of a whole. (...) Kirkyans are not “virtual objects first and actual objects second” in the literal sense. It is not necessarily a product of CAD/CAM. A kirkyan might start as a sculpted ceramic piece with embedded firmware and then be three-dimensionally scanned, with all data representing the physical instantiation, kirkyan P, then used to create the transreality sibling(s). A physical replacement would, however, be replicated through a network-controlled process; most likely additive. Consequently, kirkyans do not necessarily begin as data (...) Each instantiation carries the “DNA” with which to create the other(s). Each carries the history and learnings of the other(s), so that when one expires, an evolved version can replace it; created from the data stored in the transreality sibling(s).

A kirkyan can be a blogject, with the physical instantiation involved in the physical world as an interactive component of a network that includes the virtual instance(s). Additionally, each instantiation of a kirkyan independently has most of the qualities of a spime"

Why do I blog this? kind of late reading and parsing csven great blogposts about transreality.

New rules of solving problems

(Via Dr Fish), An article from mechanical engineering magazine (by Kathryn Jablokow) addresses the new rules for solving problems nowadays. Although it's written for engineers, there are some pertinent elements for other domains. Some excerpts:

"The number of problems we each can solve alone is getting smaller. Not only are there more problems than any one person can handle, but no one person has the brainpower to cover—on his or her own—the wide range of knowledge and expertise that is so often required (...) To gather all the knowledge we need to solve complex problems, we know that we must collaborate. Working together is no longer optional. Paradoxically, in order to collaborate and solve problems effectively, we need to know even more—and about different things."

The article then describes a very cognitive-centric vision of problem solving ("problem solving level (...) problem solving style"). It's however very pragmatic and it gives interesting insights about to apply this with some concrete examples/stories. I won't enter into much details here but it's basically about problem solving, Adaption-Innovation theory, which states that people differ in their innate preferences for structure in problem solving. Very polemical but the examples are intriging. Why do I blog this? some good thoughts about collaborative problem solving and design.

A safe maze

Looking on the internets for an image that would represent an environment that would be both playful and secure for kids, I stumbled across this maze by Peter Randall (photo credit: Martyn Barratt):

Why do I blog this? this is tight to my interest in spatial environment and their legibility. This one is outdoor but you have museums that have indoor maze for kids; those need to be safe and allow people to escape quickly (and the walls are sometimes 30cm high).

Habits of thoughts

The last chapter of "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" by Jane Jacobs offers a very thorough and pertinent description of what the author calls "habits of thoughts" for complex problem solving. In the context of this book about urban environment, Jacobs starts by describing "the kind of problem a city is", explaining that cities pose the same kind of problems than life sciences and that the "tactics to understanding both are similar". She then provides the reader with 3 propositions (I removed every reference to cities on purpose):

1) To think about processes: (...) objects can have radically different effects, depending upon the circumstances and contexts in which they exist (...) once one thinks about city process, it follows that one must think of catalysts of these processes, and this too is of the essence (...) these processes can be understood by anybody (...) 2) To work inductively, reasoning from particulars to the general, rather than the reverse: (...) inductive reasoning is just as important for identifying, understanding and constructively using the forces and processes that are relevant (...) too complex to be routine (...) always made up of interactions among unique combinations of particulars and there is no substitute for knowing the particulars

3) To seek for "unaverage" city clues involving very small quantities, which reveal the way larger and more "average" quantities are operating: (...) statistics almost tell nothing about how the quantities are working in systems or organized complexity. (...) To learn how things are working, we need pinpoint clues (...) The "unaverage" can be physical, economic, cultural, social (...) "unaverage" quantities are also important as analytical means - they are often the early announcers of the way various large quantities are behaving or failing to behave, in combination with each other.

Why do I blog this? thinking about qualitative aspects of research, this description resonates with diverse methodologies I use; it's definitely close to user experience analysis, as well as critical foresight methods.

My notes from Geoware2007

Yesterday, I attended Geoware 2007, some of my notes (not on every talks but quick highlights of the day).

Ed Parsons gave a good overview of what is meant by "Geoware", using the term "neogeography": when geography meets web2.0 and rocket science tech becomes everyday. To him, the most important changes in the last couple of years is the fact that big organizations (Yahoo, Google...) licensed information and made them available for free to the users (through a specific business model). Ed's point is that "location" could serve as a contextual filter for information stored in databases. A cardinal rule of geographer is "Everything happens somewhere": that shows the importance of geography. To Ed, the best services won't be about allowing a person to ask where he/she is but rather to offer a service based on where the person is: location is not an add-on, it's too difficult to query a map on a cell phone when biking in a city, there is a need to have another model: location should be implicit, less explicit. Porn adopted it already: see the website that propose you people in the vicinity! He also cited an example of a cell phone he'd like to have that would offer him choices depending on the context: for instance if he is stuck in a traffic jam on his way to the airport, he'd like to have a 2 options choice like "delay plane" and "call XX".

Lukas-Christian Fischer (Plazes) also offered few hints about their strategy. For them, presence is a powerful factor, an answer to establish a contact (prior to communication). It comes down to who did what where, who has done what where and who will be doing stuff where. The 3 functions of Plazes he described are (1) coordination (meeting up with real people), (2) collection (identity from where you've been), (3) exploration (finding new corners of the world). Plazes takes location as a social object, this statement has been interestingly thrown out by Sean Treadway and it quite reminds me of Jyri Engestrom's work (and after a quick chat with them, they referred to jyri...). Besides, they decribed how Plazes is the largest database of hot-spots. What I find good about Plazes (and also about Jaiku) is that the user is in control and that the system convey intentionality (that's the sort of things I discuss in my talk).

Jeremy Irish presented elements about geocaching ("mark a location and go find it"). From this simple point, things evolve to more complex situations such as: waymarking that allows to attach data to a point, build communities around unique and useful locations in the world, encourages participants to use GPS units to mark locations and take photos, locations are searchable by category. But, as he said, people want to make puzzle caches more interactive: WHEREiGO: free tools for creating media-rich GPS experiences, instead of marking a point, you create a zone in a region: real-world adventure game, tour guides. His point is to turn a point into an experience. His conclusion: "it's time to go outside and play".

Another great talk has been given by Carlo Ratti (MIT Senseable city). Carlo presented different projects they carry out at his lab (RealTime Rome, Mobile Landscape Graz, iSPOTs, iFIND and Wikicity). His lab's mission is rethinking in a creative way the interface between people, mobile technology and the city. He nicely referred to situationism (homo ludens!) by saying that what they keep from this area is the notion of "environment as flows and less built space". The project he mentioned are mostly based on how to represent cities using various traces (such as mobile phone calls). In the last one (wikicity), the point if get these data back to citizens (a sort of "feedback control system"), One of the project that is of interest to me is the AC Milan traces analysis:

"Information about the movement of soccer players on the field during a match can be useful for strategic and physiologic analysis, directed at improving the performance of the players and that of the team. The use of electronic sensing techniques – mostly computer vision – for automatically tracking the players has been an area of active research for many years. An optimum solution, however, has yet to be found. The problem is challenging from a technical point of view because the sensing area is large compared to the moving actors (players), the actors move fast and occlusion and congestion occur frequently."

Less related to my work and the stuff I like, there was a talk by Morten Kromann Larsen (TNS-Gallup) in which he explained how billboard companies (JCDecaux and Clearchannel) assess the exposure of people to commercial in the streets. The talk was a comparison between "GIS versus GPS": 1) GIS: people are contacted and interviewed by the phone and they have (at the same time) to go online to draw their daily path in the city on a map. It's basically a recollection based on people's memory. 2) GPS: people are given a GPS device they put in heir pocket while wandering around in the city (they only take 50 persons because the cost is higher). There is hence an automatic collection of the movement in space. Morten then showed slides depicting the results: when comparing the 2 methods, they found the same pattern of behavior: there is a 82% overlap. So they recommend the GIS method as a favored approach, since it's easier and less demanding from respondents. I am less interested by the purpose of the trials, but rather by what they guy was saying: how people are good to remember their path is space (especially when you have a person on the phone helping them with cues, landmarks, reminding them their activities...).

A quite good event and a superb organization. Good chat with lots of people!

SLambx

(via), this press release from Philips describes how Philips ambx teamed-up with Rivers Run Red to produce a "dedicated amBX-enabled environment" for Second Life (they actually license the ambx technology to RRR):

"This will offer Second Life users the opportunity to experience their virtual world through real world amBX experiences, including light, air movement and rumble. The amBX agreement also extends to all-new commercially driven experiences, for future brand marketing campaigns, and builds on a highly successful relationship between Philips and Rivers Run Red and their long-running involvement with the development of the ‘immersive spaces market’. "

Why do I blog this? because it's yet another example of connecting the physical and the digital world through technology.

Walled gardens: new medievalism?

The creation of walled gardens has always been an amazing topic in architecture; and it certainly has important implications. The IHT has a good piece about walls.

"Like their 13th- to 15th-century counterparts, contemporary architects are being enlisted to create not only major civic landmarks but lines of civic defense, with aesthetically pleasing features like elegantly sculpted barriers around public plazas or decorative cladding for bulky protective concrete walls. This vision may seem closer in spirit to Leonardo da Vinci's drawings of angular fortifications or Michelangelo's designs for organically shaped bastions than to a post-Cold War era of high-tech surveillance. (...) To some, compromise may be preferable to surrounding our cities with barbed wire and sandbags. The notion that we can design our way out of these problems should give us pause, however. Our streets may be prettier, but the prettiness is camouflage for the budding reality of a society ruled by fear."

The article then lists some examples ranging from war zones to great cities:

" the Green Zone, the American encampment in Baghdad, where the 3.6-meter, or 12-foot, high concrete slabs that surround Saddam Hussein's former palaces have infused the city within a city with the ethos of the gated suburban enclaves of Southern California. (...) even the most thoughtful solutions, like the gracefully curved steel tubes that defend the plaza of Thom Mayne's Caltrans District 7 headquarters building in Los Angeles or the faceted bronze bollards on Wall Street, suggest the fragile balance today's architects are struggling to reach between assuring the freedom of movement that is vital to a functioning democracy and bolstering security. "

Why do I blog this? this is interesting in terms of understanding the environment in which people act (and then where technologies are deployed). At a higher level, this "new medievalism" as described in the article can also be perceived as a metaphor of existing practices in virtual environments or for accessing data on certain devices.

The picture has been taken in Zürich, it shows how conspicuously walls can be erected to set a boundary between different areas (in this context a residential area versus a derelict industrial zone). You take few wooden decks, cardboard, old doors; fix them with duct tape and then you have a wall.

Talk At Geoware

Here are the slides (3.32Mb) of my talk at Geoware called "The user experience of location-awareness", a very thoughtful event I've been invited to as a speaker by the Innovation Lab. Thanks Ander Morgensen, Christian Lausten and Peder Burgaard for the gig! The talk was basically a discussion about how multi-user location-aware applications have troubles reaching a more mature market. Starting from s-curves showing side-by-side the evolution of navigation systems (Garmin, TomTom) and location-aware apps, I described how the former are now well established and used by a large number of persons, whereas the latter still has trouble finding its market. The s-curves depicted different "waves" of locative systems, and stated how we're in a sorta disillusion phase (as represented on the Gartner Hype Cycle). This led me to show different quotes form trend reports that keeps postponing this ideal proximal future of powerful mososo.

Based on my phd research, talks and side experiences, my point was to show 6 problems that makes these applications developed by academic labs or start-ups failed: 1) Privacy issues 2) Lack of critical mass of users (cluster effect) 3) The belief in robust, seamless and perfect infrastructures 4) Bad user interfaces (on mobile devices, plus the fact that maps are difficult to read anyway) 5) Bad user experience (not conveying intentions, lack of granularity, mismatch between people's representation) 6) Bad integration in people's practices and context

Playing the party pooper so far, I tried to not dismiss location-awareness but rather bring 5 relevant avenues that we can take as opportunities (and not direct solutions to the problem cited before): 1) Assist, not automate: in terms of privacy what people do not like is the feeling to be seen without the ability to see (Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon) as Michel Foucault argued. BUT people are OK to disclose things when they can control what they see and when they can see others (the masquerade). 2) Seamful design (Matthew Chalmers): reveal the “seams” (limits, boundaries, uncertainties), provide opportunities to show the imperfections, can be used a trick to lie. 3) Beyond GIS information (Kevin Slavin): “Location is more than GIS information” 4) History matters: the asynchronous character of location-awareness have an added value and can be used to create conversations AFTER the events (comments). 5) Beyond humans: we can think about applications for other beings such as animals (blogging pigeons) or to create new connections between the physical environments AND the digital worlds

The picture shows the conference venue, ARoS, the Arhus Kunstmuseum.

Warren Spector and MMO

An interview of Warren Spector on Gamasutra. Some excerpts I was interested in:

Gamasutra: You've been a long time proponent of single player roleplaying experiences, what do you think of MMOs?

WS: Honestly, I don't much care for them. If I'm going to have a social experience, I'd rather have it in person. I feel like a blind, deaf and dumb person watching a movie while I'm playing an MMO because the social experience is really shallow. Again, this is one of the things I'll end up talking about at the GDC, but I'm, perhaps to a fault, a story person. I really need narrative. The level of narrative that people have been able to achieve in MMOs has been so shallow. I'm one of those people who doesn't find anything interesting at all in leveling up, finding a +3 sword or paper-dolling a character with a purple cloak. That doesn't appeal to me in any way as a human being. Put that all together and the play experience of MMOs is on par with roleplaying back in ‘87. In all fairness, my wife is a World of Warcraft addict. (...) I think if someone solves the problem of “I don't want to interact with 10,000 of my personal friends, ever, and somehow make 10,000 people all be the hero of a compelling story,” then I'll be a lot more interested in that game style.

Why do I blog this? even though I do not agree with him, it's interesting to hear his argument about MMO. His background in writing might explain this stance and the way he thinks about game design is a different approach that can be good to take into account. (There is a lot more to draw in this interview)

LEGO CEO on play

In the paper edition of Monocle, there is an interview of LEGO's CEO (Mr. Knudstorp). An interesting part of it deals with two aspects that are relevant for critical foresight of gaming (it's short but it's from the Lego guy):

M: Have electronic games changed the way that kids play?

JVK: That's a good question. But the fact is, play is not changing. Kids still compete, they fight, role-play. They play the world you and I live in because they aspire to be in it. They love running after a football and they'll do that 20 years from now.

M: Let's look forward. What excites you within these walls?

JVK: We are working on some projects in virtual space, including Lego factory, wich has the potential to be as important to the Lego world as Second Life is to the rest of the world

Why do I blog this? in terms of foresight, the first assertion is interesting because it describes "play" (and side-aspects such as competition, physical exercices) as a driving force for kids. Though I am more intrigued than excited by the second part, the Lego MMOG appears to be a step towards that direction ("The LEGO Group and NetDevil will launch a LEGO-themed Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG), bringing the LEGO experience into a new, safe, and fun virtual environment.").

See also the 291Mb video of the interview.

I/O Wall

The I/O Wall is a project carried out by David Gerber, Mark Meagher and Gerber's students from Sci Arc.

" The goal of the project has been to design a new room-scale interface to computer functionality and data: the wall will keep track of the objects stored on its shelves using RFID readers, and will provide an interface for searching the stored objects. Proximity sensors will provide some additional data on patterns of use in relation to the presence or absence of specific objects on the shelves. (...) One of the research questions we’re addressing is how the digital affordances of the wall can be expressed through design (...) We’re finding that the design of the nodes containing the sensors is a critical to the success of the wall project: both because the node design has a direct impact on the functionality of the sensors, but also because the design of the nodes (form, materiality, tectonics) is the primary means we have for communicating the functionality of the wall, and the range of interaction that it affords."

(Image courtesy Jun Yu, David Gerber)

Why do I blog this? My interest in tangible interfaces explains why I am curious about that project; the dimensin I find pertinent is the expression of certain technological aspects. How would this be reflected in the design per se? Maybe the answer lays in the project title.

The importance of sidewalks

Last week, there as bit a quite impressive boom of reader here due to my post about anti-skateboard devices in San Francisco. This definitely echoed with "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" (Jane Jacobs) that I was reading this week end. The description of sidewalks and their importance is very well written and thoughtful. Some excerpts I liked:

"There is not is no point in planning for play on sidewalks unless the sidewalks are used for a wide variety of other purposes and by a wide variety of other people too. (...) Roller skating, tricycle and bicycle riding are the next casualties. The narrower the sidewalks, the more sedentary incidental play becomes (...) Sidewalks thirty or thirty five feet wide can accommodate virtually any demand of incidental play put upon them - along with trees ti shade the activities, and sufficient space for pedestrian circulation and adult public sidewalk life and loitering. (...) Sidewalk width is invariably sacrificed for vehicular width, partly because city sidewalks are conventionally considered to be purely space for pedestrian travels and access to buildings, and go unrecognized and unrespected as the uniquely vital and irreplaceable organs of city safety, public life and child rearing that they are.

Why do I blog this? definitely some thoughts for urban computing projects (I'm currently in the process of writing a project about urban gaming).

The picture shows pavements from a sidewalk in Geneva, which seems to have been fixed with duct tape. It also reminds us how the different type of pavements allows or not certain kinds of activities. That one is very skateboard-friendly.

Phd defended!

Slides from the defense (3.3Mb):

Everything went well, still have to include remarks and ideas in the dissertation, I'll post it later. It seems that I am a Doctor in Computer Sciences.

Mistakes in foresight

Reading "Manuel de prospective stratégique, tome 1 : Une indiscipline intellectuelle" (Michel Godet), there was an interesting chapter about the most frequent error when doing foresight. General causes are: 1) Forgetting change (over-estimation) and inertia (under-estimation). 2) "Announcement effect": some predictions only aim at influence the evolution of the phenomenon and then contribute to its realization 3) Too much information (noise), few strategic information 4) Inaccuracy of data and instability of models (one should always ask whether a small modification in input data will change the output) 5) Error of intrepretation 6) Epistemological obstacles (looking at the tip of the iceberg / or where the light is)

Specific causes: 1) Uncomplete vision (leave behind other variables, disruptions, new trends...) 2) Excluding qualitative variables (that cannot be quantified 3) Thinking variables have static relationships 4) Explaining everything by looking at the past 5) Single future 6) Excessive use of mathematical models (mathematical charlatanry) 7) Conformism to gurus

Space, cognition, interaction 4: the importance of territories

This is the fourth blogpost of a serie that concerns my thoughts about the topic “Space, cognition, interaction” that I address in my dissertation . Step 4 is about the importance of territoriality (see step 1, step 2, and step 3). When dealing with people and location, the fundamental use of space concerns human territoriality. It reflects the personalization of an area to communicate ownership. Territories as specific context support social roles among a community (Prohansky et al., 1970). Therefore, the meaning of a particular place is endowed through its exclusive use. Each place thus corresponds to a set of allowed behaviors. There is a strong inter-relation between group identity (feeling that we belong to a larger human group) and spatial identity (based on our habits, experience and knowledge about the environment). Jeffrey and Mark (1998) found that territoriality was an important feature in the context of virtual worlds. For example, building one’s house in Active World is a way “to provide a territorial marker and provide a feeling of ownership for the owner” (Jeffrey and Mark, 1998, p. 30). Furthermore, it seems that people build their house in existing neighborhoods rather than in uninhabited places. Additionally, territoriality could be defined as a way to achieve and exert control over a segment of space (Prohansky et al., 1970) and then to maintain and achieve a desired level of privacy. According to Minami and Tanaka (1995, p45), "group space is a collectively inhabited and socioculturally controlled physical setting". The activity then becomes a group activity in terms of interactions with and within space as well as a control to the degree of space maintaining.

Another concern linked to the topic of human territoriality deals with the visibility and the permeability of its boundaries. There are not only fixed and impermeable community perimeters (closed by walls for instance), but also invisible temporary group territories. Small conversing groups in public places are an interesting example: fixed barriers are replaced by what Lyman and Scott (1967) call “social membranes”. Knowles (1973) studied which factors affect the permeability of those invisible boundaries. Using spatial invasions, he showed that people tend not to invade other group territories even if they are in a public space or path (Knowles, 1973). Furthermore, Cheyne and Efran (1972) found that group spaces feel invaded if the boundaries become fuzzy or if the distance among group members becomes large. If this distance is above four feet, the boundary becomes ineffective and passers by begin to walk through the group. Space thus models group interaction. Agreements on spatial territory (Lyman and Scott, 1967) or the closeness of members (Cheyne and Efran, 1972) are examples of rules that govern group interaction.

References:

Cheyne, J. A., & Efran, M.G. (1972): The effect of spatial and interpersonal variables on the invasion of group controlled territories. Sociometry, 35, 477-487.

Jeffrey, P., & Mark, G. (1998). Constructing Social Spaces in Virtual Environments: A Study of Navigation and Interaction. In K. Höök, A. Munro, D. Benyon, (Eds.) Personalized and Social Navigation in Information Space, March 16-17, 1998, Stockholm (SICS Technical Report T98:02) 1998) , Stockholm: Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS), pp. 24-38.

Knowles, E. S. (1973). Boundaries around group interaction: The effect of group size and member status on boundary permeability. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 26, 327-331.

Lyman, S. & Scott, M.B. (1967): Territoriality. A Neglected Sociological Dimension. Social problems, 15, pp. 236-249.

Prohansky, H.M., Ittelson, W.H. & Rivlin, L.G. (1970). Freedom of choice in a physical setting. In H.M. Prohansky, W.H. Ittelson, & L.G. Rivlin, (Eds.) Environmental psychology: People and their physical settings (pp.177-181). New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Minami, H., & Tanaka. K. (1995). Social and Environmental Psychology: Transaction Between Physical Space and Group-Dynamic Processes. Environment and Behavior, 27(1), 43-55.

Foresight at Design2.0

To complete my notes on the LIFT07 workshop about foresight, there is a very dense and insightful podcast of Bill Cockayne's talk at Design2.0 (mp3, 15.41 Mb). In this talk, Bill explains that one of the challenge for take companies/student in engineering schools is to get people understand the bigger context, complexity and big systems. Bill started as a technologist and migrate as a technology-foresisght/strategy person. His point is to ask questions such as "where is it going?", "why is it going there?". This is not a matter of being a futurist, not about predicting anything but rather to work on "how do you think about this coming technology?" "how do you think about this coming social change?". Technology sometimes drive social change, does not, sometimes, maybe but the question is how do you know when?. It's not predictions, it's something that comes out of knowing where information comes from.

Beyond tools to design for today's future (ethnography, brainstorming prototypes) and those for going a little further (scenario planning), the point is to go much further: how do you critically assumptions and build models. Oddly enough this stuff is simple, using 3 tools he describes. My raw notes below:

3 tools: point of view questions, X-Y graphs (out to get there by telling stories, looking for triggers of change, think about to get there when we think about what want to be, being normative (design a better future), defensive (design for a future that is coming but we don't like it), how to prepare for that kind of things),

1) Simple rule: You won't get there from here

let's say you design a toothbrush, you observe current users so you're going design today for a year from now as you get out past 7 years that does not work, who are you going to observe? this is all a POV: get out there with

2) X-Y graph: a structured brainstorming tool Issues: A versus B. So discuss with your team: What would be the 2 most salient issue? issues being one on X and one on Y. So you have 4 endpoints. What would the salient issues that affect the questions we're asking in 20 years? It is going to be perception? a social issue? no tech change? Older people (with experience) are better doing this because they've seen change (they felt what is 5 years). After a whole day, you may have 10 good X/Ys. Good = something you learn over time and sth you feel intuitively. Tell stories when you're doing it, catchphrases, funny stories...

What you want to look for is whitespots = possibilities, you can make a difference here either no one is going there because is difficult or it is an opportunity how might we put something there? a toy, a computer, a social change

3) Then you start building scenarios, like design but way far out, 20 years ahead what if have 3-5 stories? what would the world be out there? the most important things about these lines: no changes, lots of changes, one big sweeping change...

tell a story in 5' and then spend the rest of the afternoon going backwards, tell me what had to happen all along the way, tell me when it had to happen, give me a timeframe, the trigger, the driver, when does something has to happen is very critical as you being to go backward, you realize what has to happen (before a product occur, need of having another tech, so another guy has to invent this tech)

As you begin to go further out in time, you have a much harder time to say how close your change drivers are going to be. Then assume that all the decisions you make are too pessimistic and far out. In near term, assume that everything you say is too slow

Long term changes tend to have trigger than is not necessarily in the center of where the change is occurring when economics are changing is not that because a person stood up and said "Wall Street is going into that directions" it's more that you watch the housing data, you watch the number of kids that are how many kids are being born, breastfed,... and then you ask where is another change coming further off and how is it going to be its impacts?

The questions were quite interesting. One of the person asked what is the biggest mistake made by companies. Bill argues that most big companies forgot that research existed for two reasons: invent new things and spend a lot of money obtaining patents, the other is to have a bunch of guy who sit around, doing this kind of things he presented in the afternoon, drinking their coffee. Another issue is the fact that None of us read enough, none of us talk to smart people enough.

"Read methodologies and then read WSJ, E, NYT, CSM... daily because you needs to start getting a feel of where data comes from. You may be watching very closely where your products are going to be but something is changing in an area you never even thought but that could infect it, that could be an opportunity. READ MORE

These publications have the broadest range of readers they have op-eds. Get a broad view of business, social, economics, random technology stuff. Take the biggest daily newspaper that don't focus on news, more like the economist, that look for the analysis, context, why this happened, why A did X... Over time you build up and ability, look for different views, it's not a bias you're looking for, but a a different viewpoint"

Why do I blog this? great food for thoughts, methods and ideas about how to structure what I am doing in something more formalized. Besides, the question of "data" in foresight, addressed in the talk, is of great interest to me.

The tongue becomes a surrogate eye

More about tongue-based interfaces. This is a bit old but I ran across it yesterday: using the tongue as a "surrogate eye" (News from 2001).

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin Madison are developing this tongue-stimulating system, which translates images detected by a camera into a pattern of electric pulses that trigger touch receptors. The scientists say that volunteers testing the prototype soon lose awareness of on-the-tongue sensations. They then perceive the stimulation as shapes and features in space. (...) The Wisconsin researchers say that the whole apparatus could shrink dramatically, becoming both hidden and easily portable. The camera would vanish into an eyeglass frame. From there, it would wirelessly transmit visual data to a dental retainer in the mouth that would house the signal-translating electronics. The retainer would also hold the electrode against the tongue.

(Picture K. Kamm/U. Wis.-Milwaukee)

Why do I blog this? though this is designed for blind people, there are some intriguing potentialities in terms of human-computer input!