Food artifacts form the 21st century

Curious objects from today (tomorrow?) that I ran across lately: Candyfab (via, which is a home-built 3D sugar fabricator. It basically allows to 3D print objects out of pure sugar.

Gastrobots (robots with a stomach) like Chew Chew (a food-powered robot in the form of a little train). The idea here is to power a robot through the digestion of food making it eventually self-sufficient when operating in a self-sufficient natural outdoor environment.

Definitely not relationships between them (apart from the fact that the common thread here is food)

The mystery of the daytime idle

The San Francisco Gate has an intriguing article by Chris Colin about "the mystery of the daytime idle", i.e. "how come there are so many people out on the street all day, seemingly not working?". A sort of quick survey on these people showed a typology of tourists, retired people, street workers, people with disabilities, "in-between jobs" persons, sick-and-not-so-sick individuals, night workers, scribblers, freelance workers (writers? web-designers? students?)

Some excerpts:

"look out your window. Who are these people? At any given hour on any given workday, well, it turns out it's not a workday at all. (...) A funny thing about these swarms of daytime layabouts: They are quietly self-reflective swarms. Almost all of them admitted to me that they often wonder about their fellow malingerers. The funny thing is, everyone has an answer for themselves but is baffled by everyone else. Possibly this is like life itself. (...) "They can't all be writing the Great American Novel," said Joshua, 45, nodding in the direction of everyone else. Joshua recently left a large law firm to work on his own, hence his mid-afternoon workout downtown. "I used to wonder who all these people were. Now I'm one of them." (...) Aren't we the country that other countries make fun of for working too much? (...) Our workaholism has spawned entire walls of self-help books. And yet this parallel universe exists right alongside the work- obsessed one. It looks nice, too, as parallel universes go."

Why do I blog this? I also wondered about that when I was a kid and partly became part of that parallel universe (partly working at the office and from whatever place that suit current needs such as wifi or a good architecture to meet people). What is intriguing in that "parallel universe" is the semantic and the rhetoric that is adopted: "face time", "outside daytime job" and probably the best quote: "I don't know how I ever had time for a job".

Marginal practices and design

Finally got some time to read what inspired the Glowbot project blogged about recently: Ljungblad, S. and Holmquist, L.E. (2007). Transfer Scenarios: Grounded Innovation with Marginal Practices. In Proceedings of CHI 2007, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 28 April - 3 May, 2007, San Jose, California, USA.

In this paper, the authors interestingly describes a method they called "Transfer scenarios" that aims at "helping designers to come up with inventive ideas, and at the same time provide grounding in real human needs". The point is to look at "marginal practice" (in their examples having unusual pets, such as snakes and spiders) not to regard the persons involved as "end users" but instead as a way to understand underlying human interests and qualities of interaction, relevant for the design outcome.

Some excerpts I found relevant:

"We define a marginal practice as individuals sharing a specific activity that they consider meaningful. The marginal practice should consist of people that do not reflect the majority of end-users and may even be a group of people that are unlikely to be end-users of our proposed systems. The point is that such a practice can provide a new perspective on the use of the technology, raising design ideas that are based on alternative viewpoints and ways of doing things. A practice that is considered meaningful for a minor group, can still involve underlying needs that a more general group can benefit from."

The authors then proposes a 5-steps process:

"1. Learn about the technolog.y This step involves exploring and learning about the general properties of the technology. (...) The goal is to get an overview of the possibilities and limitations of the technology, rather than to get a deep technical knowledge.

2. Match the technology with a marginal practice. Another important step is to investigate potential marginal practices and decide for one.

3. Investigate needs and interactions. The third step involves investigating the human activities in the chosen marginal practice.

4. Analyze and Transfer Data to Initial Design. This step is about analyzing data, such as transcribed interviews or videos, to transfer the findings into design.

5. Detailed Design and Technology development (...) actual design of the technology, involving intended users."

Why do I blog this? because I have often felt that marginal practices are of interest because they involve passionate users about certain domains and areas. It makes me think of a book I've read recently called "Choosing Death: The Improbable History of Death Metal and Grindcore" (Albert Mudrian, John Peel), which should definitely worth to have a look for people in the music industry. I think the book is a good exemplification of a marginal practice (early 80s, people wanted to play music as speed as possible with extreme vocals) and the underlying motivations that enable it. Back to interaction design, I also like process as the one they presented.

Why the picture here? absolutely not part of their article but it's definitely my own marginal practice: taking pictures weird things such as plastic artifacts and toys in awkward contexts.

Accuracy versus Deployment of location-sensing technologies

A very relevant map that shows the diversity of location-sensing technologies.

"Each box’s horizontal span shows the range of accuracies the technology covers; the bottom boundary represents current deployment, while the top boundary shows predicted deployment over the next several years"

Taken from Hazas, M., Scott, J., and Krumm, J. Location-aware computing comes of age. IEEE Computer 37, 2 (2004), 95–97

Why do I blog this? some good material for a paper I am writing about location-awareness.

Troubles ahead for the game industry

Gamasutra features a very interesting interview of game designer Raph Koster about various trends regarding innovation and the video game industry (at the GDC07 his talk was interestingly entitled "Where game meets the web"). His claim is that the video game industry is "doomed because the web is stealing their thunder", which is an impression I share. Looking at the statistics shows that some web games such as Webkinz, (2.5 million uniques in December), Toontown or Club Penguin (4.5 millions uniques in december) attract more than MMOs. Why is that? mostly because they "don't think of them as being part of our industry", which oh-so-true given that they often feel more concerned by 3D engines, realism and AI. When chatting with companies about Habbo or Toontown, I have often encountered people telling me that "nah this is not in the video game industry so this is not our problem". Some key excerpts I found relevant:

" there’s something up with the ways we do our development practices. The web principles are release often and fail fast. We don't do that. We plan for two or three years, putting something together and then dumping it out there. With the web guys, it's just a whole different method of operating. Flickr patches every half hour.

I think we have to look at the current game industry as being a subset of big media, and big media is running into some issues lately. It's not that they're going to go away, and it's not that they're going to have less power. Well, maybe they will have less power in some ways. But what's happening in the other industries, like film, TV, music, publishing, is we are seeing a radical redistribution of power--where the money is going and where the eyeballs are going. Some of the industries have adapted better than others. We shouldn't kid ourselves; we're in the exact same boat. The only reason that isn't happening even more with us is that our industry isn’t relying on proprietary record play. Can you imagine if there was a standardized platform games, if PC were it, what would happen to the games business? The answer is, we'd be screwed. (...) The one thing the web makes sure of is that there are enough content creators to make any given content creator irrelevant, or superfluous at any rate."

Why do I blog this? I share Koster's concerns and don't really know how this will evolve. Personally I do think that the Web is a great platform because of (1) availability of a critical mass of users, (2) presence of open standards, (3) fast development process, less cycles.

Walled-up doorway

This doorway, spotted this morning in Saint Jean de Luz (France) is kind of special. When Louis XIV of France got married to the Infanta Marie-Thérèse, the doorway through which the royal couple passed has been walled up aftwerwards so that no one can use it anymore.

Why do I blog this? an interesting spatial marker of an historical phenomenon, not to mean that every walled doorways are so royal.

LEGO evolution

In the last issue of Escapist, there is a good piece about LEGO and games. It basically describes the different evolution and extension to the LEGO bricks. That part is interesting if you don't know what's up there but more relevant is the conclusion:

"To an extent, LEGO has always mirrored society. In the 1950s, the blocks were identical and interchangeable; in the '70s, you could buy mechanized kits to repurpose those blocks for many functions. Starting in the '90s, you could buy customized sets; now, there are online LEGO networks. We can imagine more innovation ahead, such as smart, networked, globally aware LEGOs with radio-frequency identification (RFID) tracking tags. (...) Inevitably, responding to the current zeitgeist, plastic building blocks will go open-source. The field of 3-D printers - "fabs" - is barreling along. In 10 years, maybe less, you'll have one on your desk, using Ldraw-based software to spit out LEGO-like knockoffs of your own design - thousands of them, for no more than the cost of the plastic.

Yet somehow The LEGO Group, given its high-tech savvy, will probably still make a fortune in brick-design licensing fees. Because LEGO has always mirrored society. Maybe once all those Mindstorms-trained robotics engineers grow up and get loose, it'll be the other way around."

Why do I blog this? the mirroring of the society is not very surprising (I guess marketing department take care of this) but it's intriguing to see how social and cultural changes are implemented in products such as toys. Besides, the 3d printing future seems curious and very well in line with LEGO's strategy.

The production of space

"Every social space is the outcome of a process with many aspects and many contributing currents, signifying and non-signifying, perceived and directly experienced, practical and theoretical. In short, every social space has a history. (...) history must account for both representational spaces and representations of space, but above all for their interrelationships and their links with social practice. (...) things could not be created independently of each other in space without taking into account their interrelationships and their relationship to the whole."

"The Production of Space" (Henri Lefebvre)

The picture above has been taken in Paris one month ago, I though it could illustrate Lefebvre: the notion of space as a production and the idea of history. On the picture, one could see different layers: - the physical environment in the form of pavement, that adopts a certain infrastructure driven by how things work in certain countries and culture. In this case, it is very french as attested by the type of concrete and stone used. - a regulation layer in yellow which depicts where people must not park - and some expression of people's creativity as shown this pink trace. It's actually a new new graffiti trick that consists in throwing paint on the ground.

About second skins for game controllers

Some random skins for game controllers taken from Google Image:

Why do I blog this? beyond the personalization trick, I'm sure there are some opportunities to create new gameplay based on game controller skins. How certain color/material/settings would afford specific interactions?

Pong game played with a laser-tracking system

A colleague sent me this wallpong project (by Adrian Wong and Bhavin Rokad from Cornell University) this morning. It's a pong game played with a lase-tracking system:

"The Wall of Pong brings the arcade PONG game to the real world by projecting an image of the pong ball on any flat surface and allowing players to play the game with real paddles. The game also targets all three of our personal objectives for our ECE 476 final project: an interactive electromechanical system with fast operation. We wanted a project that involved interaction between the user and the system with very fast response times to user's actions to give a satisfying experience. We also wanted to stress a project with electromechanical components, as we wanted something tangible with our project instead of a project based entirely in software."

Why do I blog this? yet another good example to explain the fusing of the physical and the digital.

Thoughts after the lab retreat

Today was the lab retreat day, a sort-of get-together moment in which we discussed the lab strategy, on-going research projects + pending projects. Given that I work here for one month, it was a good introduction for me to the lab mission as well as what people are doing there. The Media and Design lab's focus, broadly speaking, is the reinvention of space because of digitalization. Being part of both a computer science (Human-Computer Interaction) and architecture department makes it very multi-disciplinary. The research staff is indeed composed of researchers with interdisciplinary backgrounds, including architecture, robotics, electric engineering, information visualization, cognitive science, organizational behavior, psychology, and mathematics.

The lab examines the possibilities of merging physical and digital environments, by designing, making, prototyping and testing radically new technologies, such as interactive artifacts, mobile interfaces, and augmented architectural/urban spaces.

Some of the challenges we discussed: - The lab is about DESIGN+STUDY, with also a "meta" interest in methodologies (how to design, how to study what has been designed). - building and making is "a glue" for the team and also to bridge the gap between architecture and computer sciences. - architecture/design is beyond problem solving, it's about finding new problems - terminology issues like the fact that we artificially discriminate the "physical" and "digital" environments (and avoid to use the term "virtual" which is conflicting and often evocative of 3D worlds) - the lab is a platform for research and learning

Each of us discussed why we joined the lab and what do we want to get out from it, that was really interesting to see the diversity of opinions. As for me, my point was to be immersed in a design/architecture environment to learn about the culture (how they see space and place for example) and the processes (how to design, how they communicate, talk and produce things about projects). My point was indeed to confront my expertise (user experience research / psychology / HCI) to design/architecture concepts and methods to eventually enrich us accordingly.

Augmented sensory room

Adam Montando just sent me a project he is working on: Visual Voice Pro is an intriguing new product:

"Visual Voice Pro will create an immersive, reactive digital playspace. The Visual Voice Pro installation comprises of a sensitive microphone, a computer with a data projector, and custom software written especially for the space. The microphone will listen to all the sounds in the room, from footsteps to laughter to singing or even banging a drum. The computer will then instantly process the sounds to create abstract, beautiful graphics that illuminate the wall via the projector. Different sounds will create different effects. Loud noises can create big effects, quiet noises can create subtle effects, high pitches or low pitches can create different effects."

Why do I blog this it's interesting to see that these interactive products are now sold, I'd love to see what kids do out of it.

Describing a framework, but why?

Currently writing a paper about a framework for "mutual location-awareness" (i.e. the representation of significant others' whereabouts through specific interfaces), I felt the need to reading back some papers about needs of having a "framework". Reading some HCI literature is a good way to find some ideas about that; the excerpt I quote afterwards are not general theories about framework but examples of justification that are used for awareness and context-awareness in CSCW. First, most of the papers that present a framework starts by describing the extreme open-ness of the field and the inherent need to have a clearer picture: "no clear overall picture of awareness has yet emerged from the X community", "Considering the broadness of the term Y, it is difficult for any single research effort to engage the term as a whole", "As we shall detail, there are a growing number of X Systems and a diversity of approaches".

These assertion leads researchers to express their concerns towards a "void" or a "lack a firm foundation"" that has consequences:

"Most importantly, this void means that groupware designers have little principled information available to them about how to support awareness in other domains and new systems. Faced with a blank slate for each new application, designers must reinvent awareness from their own experience of what it is, how it works, and how it is used in the task at hand."(Gutwin and Greenberg, 2002)

As expressed by Jones et al. (2004), a framework would enable to clarify the "design space":

"in particular, there is no agreed-upon conceptual framework for describing the design space. Without such a framework, it is difficult to characterize precisely what different systems have in common, let alone to explore systematically the range of possible designs. A framework can identify key challenges and suggest important research opportunities. "

So it's about: (1) organizing the design space (list features, show choices to be made), (2) showing how important certain tasks can be supported, (3) suggesting ways in which key topics can be addressed, (4) enable to explore unexplored research areas. The point is then - as described by Gutwin and Greenberg (2002) - to have " a descriptive theory of awareness for the purpose of aiding groupware design":

""The framework provides designers with a structure to organize thinking about awareness support, a vocabulary for analysing collaborative activity and for comparing solutions, and a set of starting points for more specific design work. We do not give prescriptive rules and guidelines, however, since each groupware application will have to operate within particular awareness requirements dictated by the task and the group situation.""

Now, regarding how to achieve such a goal, building framework is about giving sense to the existing: "We synthesize and organize existing research on Y, and extend this work through a conceptual framework" as claimed by Gutwin and Greenberg (2002) using observations and insights of other developers, employing theories (psychologists, linguists, ethnographers, etc.), carrying out observational studies, developing technologies and applications.

Vanica toilet radio

One of the mysterious encounter of this week in Amsterdam was this truly nice radio mounted on a toilet paper-roll, designed by Vanica.

Why toilet+radio? According to Zyra:

"Advantages: You are entertained when using the toilet. You learn a lot of snippets of knowledge at random. Learning is automatic and without commitment in an environment usually devoid of intellectual sound. You can always tell if someone else is using the toilet even if they do not lock the door and do not whistle, as you can hear the radio. After the installation of the toilet radio, everyone remembers to shut the toilet lid after use (because no-one is so careless that they'll wastefully leave the radio on!) As you use the toilet at night sometimes, you get to hear unexpected items on nighttime radio. Makes good humour in relation to something considered taboo. Visitors make comment on the ingenuity and comedy value of the toilet radio arrangement.

Disandvantages: (none)"

Why do I blog this? certainly an intriguing combination of artifacts, nice to observe and worth a try. This encouragement to stay in this 4th place (i.e. toilet) was however contradicted by an automatic shut-off light system that obliged to wave my hands above my head (where the motion detector was located). What an experience only to keep listening to radio programs.

Defensive space in Amsterdam

If you scratch the surface of Amsterdam, you can feel the contrast between the open-ness of transparent window and these signs of defensive space as shown by these pictures. This is not a critique, but there is certainly a relationship between certain people's behavior and the presence of almost invisible aggressive protection systems.

Quick and dirty typologies of pet's reactions to video-games

One of the near future laboratory interest concerns what I called "new interaction partners", e.g. the inclusion and participation of pets in the social web. This is why I was very interested in this Joytiq blogpost about pets confused by video games. The author of the blogpost ask people to write some examples of past experience about "animal stories": "Have a cat that flips out with the Wii pointer on the screen? Do you also have a dog who howls along like he's wolf".

The research-y side of my brain made my look more closely at the content of the narratives. So here are 2 quick and dirty typologies. First about the features that make them react: - visual features in the game: visible (bearded characters, bark at cats) or less visible (cat obsessed with laser pointers, chasing them) - audio: high pitch, howl-like noise - lots of physical activities around the pet

(Picture taken from lameazoid)

And, more interestingly the reactions are very diverse: - pet wants to participate and do similar movements: "we had a number of rounds of Wii Sports (...) One of my dogs saw us jumping around in front of the TV so he decided to join in". - pet becomes mad: "both of my dogs freaked out when the dog in the video started howling", "they still kept barking for at least a minute after that" - pet shows signs of fear: " My cat gets freaked out whenever I howl in Zelda. Her fur stands on end and she starts looking around the ceiling and walls " - look at tv, try to paw at it when certain event happen: "my dog always wanted to grab mario", "my cat, zelda, loves the horse running around in shadow of the colossus and will paw the tv at it" - demands attention, come and expect treat: "I can't use any of the voice functions on my DS at home due to the dogs - In Nintendogs they come running and expect treats when I tell the virtual dog to do anything."

Why blogging this? because they are deeply engaging narratives about the implications of video games for animals as well as curious description about how they can be engaged in a technosocial situation. In a sense, they reflect how a basic interaction (human+console+tv) is a more complex system that is made of other participants (humans/non-humans), tools (pen to draw things, cheatcodes or walkthrough described in magazines).

Difficulty in 3D perception

A Survey of Design Issues in Spatial Input by Ken Hickley, Randy Pausch, John C. Goble, and Neal Kassell (1994), Proc. ACM UIST'94 Symposium on User Interface Software & Technology, pp. 213-222. Even though the paper is a bit old, it gives a comprehensive summary of the design issues regarding spatial input, especially regarding the perception of 3D. The authors describes how users have difficulty understanding three-dimensional space, based on user studies.

" Anyone who has tried to build a stone wall knows how difficult it is to look at a pile of available stones and decide which stone will best fit into a gap in the wall. There are some individuals, such as experienced stone masons, who have become proficient with this task, but most people simply have to try different stones until one is found that fits reasonably well. In general, people are good at experiencing 3D and experimenting with spatial relationships between real-world objects, but we possess little innate comprehension of 3D space in the abstract. People do not innately understand three dimensional reality, but rather they experience it. (...) Previous interfaces have demonstrated a number of issues which may facilitate 3D space perception, including the following: Spatial references, Relative gesture vs. absolute gesture Two-handed interaction, Multisensory feedback, Physical constraints"

Why do I blog this? looking for references about how 3D is experienced. Why? because this topic is back again (with the SL frenziness) and that I often find myself in situations where I have to explain why 3D s problematic. It's quite interesting because it engages me in reading old paper from 10-15 years ago, as if everyone forgot the research that has been done.

Left pair of shoes

Left shoes (as well as other kind of clothes) are usual suspects in cities, it's very often that you can encounter them. Gloves are perfect condidates too but it's less intriguing to understand what happen after a person lost his/her gloves than the shoes. What is even more curious is when you have the pair of shoes nicely dropped at certain places, as shown on the pictures here.

Who does this? Why? Apart from smiling, what happen when you see this?

Anyway, unnoticed by lots of people, this sort of street artifact is part of the cultural life of cities, always refreshing to run across. The peculair ways they are positioned (especially when you have a pair) a good trigger to imagine what could have happened in these situations. To some extent, it forces the observer to try inferring the history of that place.

(First picture spotted yesterday in Amsterdam, second picture three years ago in Zürich)

Distributed cognition assumptions

In Distributed Cognition: A Methdological Note, cognitive scientist David Kirsh describes six assumptions that "guides his own research":

"1. We act locally and are closely coupled to our local environment (two entities that reciprocally interact) 2. We externalize thought and intention to harness external sources of cognitive power 3. Economic metrics have a place in evaluating distributed systems, but they must be complemented with studies of computational complexity, descriptive complexity and new metrics yet to be defined. 4. The best metrics apply at many levels of analysis, from the system level where our concern is with the goodness of a system's design to the level of individual artifacts, where our concern is with the goodness of the design of the artifacts individuals interact with. 5. Coordination is the glue of distributed cognition and it occurs at all levels of analysis 6. History matters"

Why do I blog this? because the work of David Kirsh is very interesting to me, this assumptions are a kind of summary of his work. Each of them are well described in the paper and are supported by methodologies (or methodological tricks) that are useful for a researcher.

Vocabulary of dual ecologies

Kuzuoka, H., Kosaka, J., Yamazaki, K., Suga, Y., Yamazaki, A., Luff, P. & Heath, C. (2004). Mediating Dual Ecologies, Proceedings of CSCW 2004, Chicago, 8th – 10th November 477-486. In this article about using robots as a communication medium/surrogate device to convey information between people located in different places, there is a pertinent discussion about "dual ecologies. Some excerpts:

"When people communicate via video-mediated communication systems, however, the relationship between space, gesture, and speech can become fragmented and gestures become relatively ineffective. For example, an individual may try to point to an object that is physically located within the remote environment by gesturing at their screen. The remote participant, however, is unable to connect the gesture as it appears on their monitor with the actual object in their environment and may not be able to make sense of what is being referred to (...) the use of a remote-controlled robot as a device to support communication involves two distinct ecologies: an ecology at the remote (instructor's) site and an ecology at the operator's (robot) site. "

Why do I blog this? I am less interested in the robotic aspects and how it supports mediated communication than in the vocabulary employed here about "dual ecologies" (very well connected to the discourse about "hybrid ecologies"), proximate/distal activities (ecology of the remote/ecology of the operator). This is of interest for my new project about the hybridized spaces. There does not seem to be a clear consensus on terms and how to express this different spaces that are fusing/merging.