Trendwatching

An article in the WSJ about cool-hunting that express how things works in "fashion" industry. Some excerpts:

"The role of trend spotters -- sometimes also called cool hunters -- has grown in importance as the fashion cycle has speeded up. (...) Trend spotters can help mass merchandisers figure out which nascent trends from chic boutiques or even thrift stores might be hot sellers on a wider scale. Street style has become an important source of inspiration for retailers eager to lure shoppers with a taste for "fast fashion". (...) "There is the longstanding debate of what influences what. Does the street influence high fashion or does fashion influence the street?" (...) Equally important to identifying trends, is figuring out when they are over. (...) "You can tell when a trend sort of moves on," he said. "When you start seeing people who shouldn't be wearing a certain brand or look, that's when it's over." (...) It's getting tougher to figure out where to find fashionable folks. (...) St Tropez, rock festival in Denmark"

Why do I blog this? no, I am not interested in fashion hunting, this is interesting because of some elements that can be helpful in foresight or when studying innovation: where to look at? what looking at? spotting boundaries in time. However, this does not mean that things in the tech industry work as in fashion; for example I may question the assumption that the pace speeded up in technology (of course there's a lot of new gadget and stuff but reaching a mature market is often as slow as what happened in the past).

Awareness of the future and some thoughts about classification

Reading Mr. Heathcote's post about serendipity, it struck me as interesting that more and more awareness systems are directed towards the future. As Chris puts it "it’s exciting that there’s services looking at the future – much effort has gone into recording, collecting and remembering". For example dopplr allows people to say where you’re going to travel and when (eventually you're notified whether some contacts will be there too). Similarly, WAYN allows this for the present and the future. Another example is a whereabouts clock namad CLoc (slightly similar to the one designed by Microsoft) created at the Interactive Institute in Sweden. This clock is an interactive ambient display artefact that shows the current, past and planned location and activities of each member of a household. There is even a knob allows one to see the past location (captured through GPS reporting and radio beacons scanning) and the planned location proposed by the users. For more, see Fahlén, L., Frécon, E., Hansson, P., Avatare Nöu, A., & Söderberg, J. (2006). CLoc - Clock Interface for Location and Presence. ERCIM Workshop "User Interfaces for All", Bonn, Germany, 27 - 28 September 2006. What is interesting here is future location-awareness. Unlike past and real-time mutual location-awareness, it's impossible to capture future's location. What can be done is either to ask the user to give plans or to make automatic inferences based on data-mining of past locations and certain moments of time. Although automatic inferences can have some potential, the user explicitation of his/her future whereabouts is very pertinent IMO because it let the control (of revealing one's spatial behavior) in the hand of the user. This is extremely important in terms of user experience since it allows "intentionality": the giving of one's location is not a raw information, it's an act of communication that has underlying implications. In the dobblr, case, the underlying intention is declaring that one is free to contact the friend in the area: it's about declaring one's availability.

It finally occurred to me that the area of location-based application is now well differentiated by the time spectrum it covers. What I called mutual location awareness in my dissertation (knowing where other people are located) can relate to the past, the present and the future. Theories in Computer Supported Collaborative Work describes this in term of synchrony: participants may either be aware synchronously (knowledge about events that happen currently) or asynchronously (knowledge about events in the past). The problem here is that some asynchronous systems are both conveying elements about the past and the present; in addition, this variable does not account for knowledge about future events. Therefore, instead of using the synchrony metaphor, let's use "time span".

Why do I blog this? sorting out ideas for a paper about mutual location-awareness.

Rebecca Allen's talk at LDM

Rebecca Allen's talk at LDM. Raw and messy back in the days "computers are too important to be left to engineers" so use of computer graphics, take human forms into the computer, in a natural way examples: the catherine wheel (1982) with choreographer Twyla Tharp, musique non stop with Kraftwerk (1986), mostly music clips then hired as a "3D visionary" by a game company to shift the way programmers were designing game space (2D sprites versus 3D, assembler versus C++)... then all companies wanted to do quake-like games, so she moved to UCLA, interested less by shoot'em ups but virtual worlds.

sense of loosing control when you're working as a designer with virtual worlds, artificial creatures set up aesthetic rules and let people interact, things emerge the world has a flavor of a game but there is no winning or loosing emergence: explore the role of human presence in a world of artificial life

At Media Lab Europe: notion of liminal devices: to explore the boundary between virtual and physical reality and between our inner and outer states of awareness (liminal = in between) to define subtle, intimate interface paradigm for mobile devices using biosignals and position to design simultaneous realities that allow us to see and sense more than the world in front of us in ways that enhance rather than overwhelm Project examples: - liminal identities: an interactive installation in the form of a wooden box, serves as a portal to the world of mixed reality. Through the holes in the box two people can mix their identities. - sleight of hands - body as interface: myophone (to get rid of heads-up display), project with Essilor (embed display in regular eye-glasses)

now: advisors on the "one laptop per child project"

Online play to tackle tough computational problems

There's an intriguing piece in Science news about using the power of online gaming to address big computational challenges such as language translation, refining online search, locating objects in images, etc. The point is to use the time, the energy and the mass of players to solve problems and collect data: "turning playtime to profit". Moreover, the researchers realize that computers are good at certain things but less at others, hence the idea of tapping into "human brainpower". Some examples described on the ACM Technews:

"One example is the ESP Game developed by von Ahn, in which two players come up with words to describe an image, and are awarded points when the words match; in this way, images can be creatively labeled to facilitate easier Web searching. Players are encouraged to choose more creative, less obvious descriptive terms by being restricted from using certain words. Training computers to determine the location of an image of an object is the goal behind Phetch, another game of von Ahn's in which players search for images that fit certain descriptions in a scavenger hunt scheme. One player or narrator types out a description of an image chosen from a database at random, and then several other players or seekers find the image by using a built-in browser; points are awarded to the narrator every time a search is carried out successfully, while the first seeker to find the image gets points and assumes the role of narrator for the next image. Von Ahn's latest game, Verbosity, is founded on the concept of building a database of common-sense facts through gameplay. In Verbosity, one player is given a word and presents hints about the word to another player in the form of sentences with blanks where words should go. Von Ahn says all his games have a time limit because he wants participants to play faster and thus generate more data."

Usage of data generated by tech in urban environments

Trying to expand on what fabien blogged (weblog as a way to elaborate our thoughts), I am digging the internets to find how digital information/traces/logs can be mined and of interest. The massive number of traces generated automatically (cell phone, wifi laptops) or by the user (synchronously or asynchronously with flickr pictures) can be used to perform inferences about spatio-temporal of city inhabitants. Fabien describes 3 main domains of applicability of the processing and visualization of these massively collected personal logs, traces: 1) Provide urban planners, transport authorities and traffic engineers with data to refine their models of citizens spatio-temporal behaviors. 2) Bring new perspective for decision making and policies building. 3) Raise awareness and effect the discussion making of individuals or of a crowd

(Picture: mapping by Fabien of Flickr images taken in San Francisco between March 11 and March 25, 2007)

Why do I blog this? IMO, beyond a representation of the digital layer, there is another level, that would be: how to use the data generated by people (cell phones call/sms, flickr pictures at certain location, lbs patterns, games...) to have a sort-of "infrastructure" that would allow to specific services. For example: is it possible to design a public transport information system relying on these information?

This topic is also addressed in the following paper: Ratti C., Pulselli R. M., Williams S., Frenchman D., 2005,"Mobile Landscapes", Environment and Planning B - Planning and Design. Some excerpts:

"A possible study would be to use this data to infer information about the ‘character’ of a neighborhood where the antenna is placed. At a simplistic level, districts with base stations showing a prevailing use during working hours are likely to have an office/business nature. Neighborhoods with high evening and early morning cell phone traffic are likely to have a stronger residential character. On the other hand, residential neighborhoods with high cell phone use during business hours may reveal emerging live-work situations. (...) our hypothesis is that the patterns of cell phone intensity correlate with the intensity of urban activity; revealing them can help monitor important urban dynamics. Critical points in the use of the urban infrastructure can be highlighted, as well as special events. Finally, a long-standing problem can be addressed: that of estimating flows in and out of the city: patterns of daily commuting, weekday versus weekend activities, holiday movements. Real time applications could also have new uses in emergency relief, based on broadcast alerts that would be different from one region to the other.

As the authors say, this seems to be a "new promising line of urban research: Making sense of the unlimited flow of data from the cell phone infrastructure in the urban context is still unexplored territory". Even though the article focuses on data gathered through cell phones, I think the situation is similar with all the digital information generated by ubicomp systems and social web applications (a la flickr).

"Offline gaming" opportunities in mobile gaming

Musing in the train this morning with Frederic, we discussed a near-future laboratory topic: offline-gaming that Julian describes more thoroughly here. This is also helpful for the presentation for Mobile Monday I am working on. Let's start with Julian's notes (the near future laboratory method is about knots):

"Can there be "offline gaming" where the screen disappears to the point of it not even being necessary? Where you sort of ambiently know that you're gaming in the sense that your actions and activities "offline" will register in the game world once you get back to your normal human computer later? Can you still be gaming while you're doing a run to the market, without being consciously and actively "in" the game while doing the grocery shop? But still, knowing in the back of your mind that, hey, cool! I'll get my shopping done and probably get a +2 power up!"

This said, it led Frederic and I to think about 2 main axes: the connection to the network (yes, the internets) and the use of the mobile device display as the output. Therefore, we have this simple 2x2 matrix that set the design space for mobile gaming opportunities:

Strictly speaking "offline gaming" should only refer to game played out of the network but we started using it for the square "no network/no display" (maybe because "off-the-screen-offline" is not really nice to pronounce). I've also put "crossmedia gaming" to represent games that (for instance) can be played on cell phone and then brought back to the computer either to benefit from a larger display or an access to the network (or a larger bandwidth...), that is the case with V-migo. Instead of using the crossmedia term, one can also say that a constant access to the network is hard to reach, thus even synchronous situations are alternance of sync/async moments.

Besides, the fact that the squares are empty on the picture above does not mean that nothing has been done in them; however I have to admit that the "offline gaming" square is maybe less crowded.

Now, that would be the way to design offline gaming interactions? let's wait a bit to gather some thoughts (but the use of motion is one of the avenue here).

Topology of dining

Yet another tableware project today (it's funny that this week has been filled by discussion about tables here at the lab): Topoware by Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino and Karola Torkos. The point of the project is to "questions the landscape of dining": is territory an adequate notion during a meal? could the observation of dining allows to make assumptions about eating behaviors? What about the way people occupy space?

"By looking at places, maps and especially contour lines, which define a landscape two dimensionally we decided to in turn "outline" the dining experience. This can also be interpreted as "zooming in" from the whole to the single item, from the tablecloth to the placemat down to the utensils.

The lines decorating the tablecloth are mapping the table, defining the space were people sit and interact at the dinner table. The closer to the person's designated space and area of intense interaction, the darker the lines become. The placemat helps keep the experience of complex dining simple or makes the simple dining experience feel special, each layer defining what comes first and where cutlery and tableware should be placed.

In a playful way the lines reappear on the tableware itself, be it plates, bowls and cups to illustrate, label and determine your dining habits."

Why do I blog this? I quite like this "With the Topoware collection, you are how you eat" motto. To me it's very a very pertinent way to make explicit invisibles (or implicit) phenomenon and behavior, especially in unexplored field such as dining.

Tangible table

The Tangible Table is a new table platform by Manuel Hollert and Daniel Guse:

"Our goal was to build a working prototype of a tangible table-based user interface. In contrast to a simulation, this environment facilitates the evaluation and testing of user interactions. That’s why the visual components on the table surface (such as scales) are quite basic and rough. The principles of interaction and graphical behavior had higher priority."

The technical implementation is described here with a description of how they used fiducial markers. Also, check the video

VR2.0 through gesture recognition?

In the last issue of BW, there is an article about motion capture and gestural interactions. So, this seems to be the new revolution, it traces back the trend to the VR attempts of the 90s, nintendo powergloves and other stuff. Then an Intel Chief Technology Officer claims that withing five years we "could use gesture recognition to get rid of the remote control" and that it willeventually "drive demand for its important new generation of semiconductors, the superprocessors known as teraflop chips, which Intel previewed in February" (I won't comment on this but... mmhmm... mentioning the supeprocessor issue when it comes to human-computer interaction seems not very apropos here). But why would it work this time?

virtual reality 1.0 was a bust. The hype was too loud, computers were too slow, networking was too complicated, and because of motion-sickness issues that were never quite resolved, the whole VR experience was, frankly, somewhat nauseating. (...) VR 2.0, enhanced by motion capture, is different in many critical ways. Most important, the first batch of applications, such as the Wii, while still primitive, are easy to use, inexpensive, and hard to crash. You don't get anything close to a fully sense-surround experience, but neither do you feel sick after you put down the wand. The games are simple and intuitive (...) system enables a presenter to take audiences on a tour of a 3D architectural design or on a fly-through of a model city. And the presenter's measured theatrics make a big impression. "Everyone's looking for the new, sexy way to communicate with their employees and their clients. We're selling their ability to sell,"

Why do I blog this? well, I am not sure the reasons the VR failed for the reasons mentioned, they were surely part of the problems but there is still a misunderstanding about interactions in VR and the notion of 3D. There is still this belief that replicating reality in a 3D digital space is the must, and that gestural interfaces is then the solution because it's more natural (given the direct mapping).

Back to gestures, some excerpts that I liked in the BW article though:

"Any company that creates a product used by people needs to understand how the human body moves," (...) Aeronautics veterans who hear about this program are sometimes skeptical. "When people cannot touch a prototype, it's always a hard sell "It's early, but such simulations could be one of the most profitable areas in the future," (...) "The Wii is helping debug this question about how you move in virtual ways," says Jaron Lanier. After a year with the Wii, society "will be better educated about the overlap of the virtual and the real world," he says.

Urban tapestry for real

Spotted in Lyon last saturday, this looks like a real tapestry in an urban environment (next step is there?).

Mobile games and standards

TR dealt with mobile gaming few weeks ago (because of the GDC). The article was about the (possibly) biggest problems in the field: a lack of standards:

"The mobile-phone environment unfortunately has been driven by the service providers, and they have different demands for what technologies can and can't be used," says Michael Zyda (...) "It's a crazy era, much like the early days of computing, when each manufacturer was making their own operating system and there weren't standards for interoperability,"

TR describes the fragmentation caused by hardware and software issues: presence of different physical controls (button placement), different software platforms... leading developers to test it on "12 platforms" (I quote it because my feeling that the correct number is 1000). The problem being that... companies do not really want to standardize stuff ("They want to lock you into the way they do things"), so it's still about walled gardens. Game designers (like the ones at Shufflebrain) then rely on networks rather than on cell phones. Why do I blog this? stuff for my presentation next week at Mobile Monday, Bcn, about mobile gaming (and its crux need for new metaphors).

Physical space / Virtual space

Büscher, M., P. Mogensen and D. Shapiro (2001). Spaces of Practice. In Jarke, M., Rogers, Y. and Schmidt, K. (eds), Proc. ECSCW 2001: The Seventh European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Bonn, 16-20 September, Amsterdam: Kluwer Academic Press, pp. 139-158. Using a case study, the paper interestingly discusses why mimicking physical workspaces in digital environments is naive and inadequate.

"straightforward reproduction is not even the most appropriate ambition for a digital environment. This is in part because the physical environment has constraints that it may not be helpful to reproduce, and in part because the digital environment may be given different and helpful capacities that the physical environment cannot match."

Some example the authors gives relates to - the three-dimensional arrangement and manipulation of material in space is constrained by things such as gravity (" Documents etc. can only be placed on horizontal surfaces, or pinned to surfaces in other planes") and this is not always helpful. - elements from the environments cannot fall conveniently fall at hand - the material available have a both an ephemeral (" easily created and easily changed or destroyed") and persistent character ("things ‘stay where they are put’"). This can have advantages and drawbacks ("The result of this combination of ephemerality and persistence can easily be just a clutter in which materials are neither in a meaningful arrangement nor ‘in their proper place’).

So what the authors proposes is to build upon these problems to create new kinds of digital workspaces that also take advantages of sociality:

" sometimes with a ‘minimal’ form of digital workspace, which users need never move beyond if they do not wish to; sometimes by reintroducing emulated physical properties such as gravity, stickiness, momentum and friction; sometimes through new behaviours for objects such as returning to a default position, or animation; and sometimes through extended properties that can be given to digital spaces, such as parallel universes, folding and tunnelling."

Why do I blog this? working on a presentation about SL, virtual worlds and the importance of spatial metaphors. The paper gives some very relevant elements about this topic; to put it shortly the argument can also be read as "the 3D metaphor is good for certain things, bad for others". People interested in this can listen to the interview of Raph Koster by Adam Reuters (at South by Southwest Interactive festival)

BiPodding and thoughts about 2-outputed devices

According to the Urban Dictionnary:

"BiPodding: Sharing a single set of headphones attached to one iPod. One person holds the iPod and takes the left earbud, the other takes the right earbud. Can be performed while moving.

Example: They biPodded down the street; Jane had the left ear-piece, Sarah the right."

Why do I blog this? this is an intriguing practice that emerged; it's of great interest to observe what happen when you have artifacts with two outputs like headsets (yes we have two ears). Some people have on the earbud in the ear to have their music/podcast/whatever and the other ear free to conversations/public events. It's about sharing one's attention and sharing public/private information.

Besides, it reminds me of the headset splitter, an ancestor of bipodding that we used to plug in our walkmans, when I was a teenager:

Physical instantiation of a location-based ringtone

(picture taken by myself in lyon this morning)

I don't imply it it's really what this title want to express but: Location-based: because it's something contextualized and inscribed in a place. Ringtone: what is represented here is a short melody so, by analogy, it can be thought as a ringtone (although the person who drew it is not that literate in music annotation). In the end, this can be described as a "physical instantiation of a location-based ringtone", no device needed!

Video games and warfare

An interview of Dr Malcom Davis, a lecturer in Defence Studies with the Defence Studies Department of King's College London, in which he describes his research interests hugely relevant to modern combat game design. Most of the interview is about the spatial environment: the importance of urban environment ("Most warfare in the future will take place in complex urban environments, where house to house fighting") its realism ("What is missing is the chaos of battle"), the missing notion of embodiment ("consumer military simulations are never going to be totally realistic because ultimately people don't really die or get injured, and thus the fear element is never going to be there"), the lack of mixed settings ("what is missing, particularly in an urban environment, are civilians mixed in with military forces").

Also of interest:

" the enemies of the future will always be trying to threaten or degrade our military-technological advantage, and one of the best ways that they can achieve that is by attacking our information systems, and the networks which generate the 'sensor to shooter' link. Thus it is important not to make an assumption that the data-links and networks will survive for very long. We have to be able to fight and win when the networks go down."

Why do I blog this? some interesting ideas here about spatial environment (how is it lived) and translation from gaming to reality.

Dog and augmented reality soccer

(via fabien) For intrepid readers only: an intriguing video of a dog playing augmented reality football on a reactrix setting.

Why do I blog this? food for thoughts for a near future laboratory project about "new interaction partners", or how pets can be partners in technologically mediated interactions. This seems to be a pertinent example and the immersion appears to be working (especially the dog owner who is encouraging the animal). Don't know about the animal frustration or whether this is good or bad.

Scifi writers and foresight

A good read in Information Week about how science fiction and technology. It's essentially about John de Lancie ('Q' in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Star Trek: Voyager) who gave the keynote address at the InfoSec World Conference in Orlando, talking about how "today's technology, whether it's cell phones or Second Life, is feeding off the fictional technology dreamed up by science fiction writers years ago".

"Science fiction is a place where people can talk about things," said de Lancie (...) "I began reading more books and they all seemed to be the same sort of guys," he said. "They knew things and they knew how to use things and they made things better for themselves." That, he added, sounds an awful lot like high-tech professionals. (...) What's amazing is they are the ones who can put this all together. That's science fiction becoming science fact. It invites people to think outside the box and be bold and fearless and be explorers and get to the other side. What's exciting is the desire to explore."

Besides, the conclusion intriguing too:

he was quick to add that not everything about Star Trek's fictional advances were a real plus. "I have to say, though, that I never saw them have a really good meal," he said laughing. "And I hated the colors. It all looked like a Holiday Inn. It looked like everyone was living in a hotel somewhere eating bad hotel food. There are a lot of things that are really wonderful the way we have them and that don't need to be changed."

(Picture taken by myself, in Geneva)

Why do I blog this? the relationship between sci-fi writings and innovation, NPD, tech development, diffusion of innovation has always been of interest to me. As a matter of fact, I do really prefer reading sci-fi, instead of so-called "futurists".

Why? for several reasons: (a) narratives are good way to give a flavor of the future, of things to come, (b) Scifi folks write about problems, why things work, do not work, lead to crisis, create social issues (or social issues that create innovation), (c) they put things in context, and when talking about design and NPD CONTEXT is one the crux issue that is often not taken into account, (d) they have their own rules. To some extent, reading scifi is somehow like opposing "critical foresight" to "futurism".

The picture above is a playground in Geneva, it's only meant to show how scifi can be a creative playground in foresight, bringing together a particular kind of "data".

Open space internets

Les internets à ciel ouvert, temporary visibility of infrastructures.

"Infrastructure is both relational and ecological—it means different things to different groups and it is part of the balance of action, tools, and the built environment, inseparable from them. It also is frequently mundane to the point of boredom, involving things such as plugs, standards, and bureaucratic forms"

Star, S. Leigh, (1999) The Ethnography of Infrastructure. American Behavioral Scientist, Col. 43 No.3, pp 377-. 391. New York: Sage Publications, Inc

"A theory of wondering why"

Attribution theory is a subdomain of social psychology that looks at how people explain social behavior. It's quite interesting and I had to deal with it in my PhD research but it might be pertinent to look at how it can be applied to nonhumans (i.e. objects). Let's look for instance at the "theory of wondering why". I am quoting Bertram Malle and Joshua Knobe (this paper):

"We propose that at least three conditions must be satisfied for people to wonder why an event occurred:

Awareness. For people to wonder why an event occurred, they must first be aware of the event (i.e., notice, observe, or think about it). Lack of awareness can be due either to limited epistemic access (e.g., people rarely know the thoughts and feelings of others) or to limited attention (e.g., people rarely pay attention to their own gestures).

Nonunderstanding. Once people are aware of an event, they wonder why it occurred only if they think that they do not already have an explanation. They must be in a state of nonunderstanding (also referred to as a "knowledge gap". Note that the condition of nonunderstanding is a subjective one--for people to wonder why, they must believe they lack an explanation (even if in fact they do have one). Likewise, if people believe they have an explanation (even if in fact they do not), they will not wonder why.

Relevance. Once people are aware of an event and think they do not understand why it occurred, they may or may not care about their own lack of understanding. They will care about it, and be motivated to wonder why, if their state of nonunderstanding challenges a current or enduring goal, in particular the need for control and prediction, for self- integrity, or for conceptual coherence."

Why do I blog this? gathering thoughts about how people project meaning on artifacts and interactions.

Value profiles of objects

In his paper entitled "Everyday robotics: robots as everyday objects", (Proceedings of the 2005 joint conference on Smart objects and ambient intelligence: innovative context-aware services: usages and technologies), Frederic Kaplan defined the notion of "Value Profiles" to describe how the experienced value of an object change over time:

"Experiences change the value of objects. In some cases, high expectancies are followed by disappointment. In others, unexpected qualities are discovered after a while. Time increase the historical value of some objects and make other obsolete. Such kind of evolution may be rapid. It takes only a few minutes to be excited or disappointed by an object. But it also involves long-term dynamics. In some cases, the same objects can continue to be used for many years. (...) A value profile is meant to capture in a single hypothetical curve the evolution of the experienced value of an object. Immediate value is characterized by the first minutes of interaction with the object. Short-term value corresponds to a time range that starts with the first days of usage and lasts for over a month. Eventually long term value is characteristic of the evolution over months and years."

Acoording to him, 9 features characterize the experience with objects and then contributes to the value profile: versatility, social orientation, network factor, investment, historical capacity, personalization, control types. Data mining techniques on examples led him to put the emphasis on historical capacity, social orientation, network effect and control type. He then interestingly represents hypothetical curves of various value profiles: fashionable clothe (a), a computer (b), a corkscrew (c) and a notebook (d):

Why do I blog this? although his point in the paper is to investigate the potential value profile of robots, I think the concept can be applied elsewhere and may interestingly be pertinent for discussing design problems. Would it be possible to create unusual value profiles (with spikes?) or take advantage of the existing value profiles to create new objects in different area?

For instance, the value profile of a Nabaztag is quite flat and spiky, depending on the moment you receive messages (or if the rabbit does tai chi movements). Would it be possible to have the equivalent of the notebook value profile? yes for sure if the historical capacity of the object could be raised (a la blogject, creating some positive history as described by Alexandra D.S.