Lift Seminar @ Imaginove about gestural interfaces

Yesterday in Lyon, Emmanuel Rondeau and myself organized a Lift@Home about gestural interfaces. We (Lift) indeed partnered with Imaginove, a French cluster of companies, research institutions and universities focused on video games, audio-visual, cinema, animation and multimedia. Several other Lift seminars will be organized around various topics such as the Social Web, 3D virtual environment, networked objects and locative media. We'll focus on the uses and practices of each of these technologies, to reflect upon how they are appropriated by users and how this information can be fed back into the design process.

Yesterday's seminar focused on how gestural interfaces such as the Nintendo Wii, new kinds of accelerometers and (3D) cameras are used in the context of video games. There were around 50 participants, mostly game designers, interaction designers and Human-Computer Interaction academics.

After a quick introduction about the evolution of video-game peripherals over time, I described the pros and cons of these kind of interfaces as shown on the following slide

In addition, I mentioned some of the projects we carried out when I worked at Phoenix Interactive, a French video-game studio based in Lyon. These projects showed how we studied the various ways to transmit/explain gestures to players, a project in collaboration with a laboratory in Cognitive Psychology.

The next presenter, Emmanuelle Jacques, a sociologist from the University of Montpellier, described some results from an ethnographical study of Nintendo Wii usage. She described the discrepancy between the gestures that game designers expected to be made and people's practices. As shown in the following picture, the movement amplitude of gestures is indeed quite different with expert players (the smaller girl) and novice players who think they must replicate real-world gestures. Emmanuelle discussed the implications of such notions, showing that playability is a much more complex notion than simply replicating what is done in the physical world.

The following presenters, Timothée Jobert from Litus/CEA and Etienne Guerry from XPteam in Grenoble presented an interesting case study of user-centered design. They described the results of an ethnographic study about how people use two sorts of gestural interfaces (the Nintendo Wii and the Bodypad). They then showed how these results were used in the design of video game prototypes based on a new kind of technology (a combination of an accelerometer and a magnetometer designed by Movéa). They ended their presentation with a demo of their prototypes, leading to a lively discussion about new technologies can overcome the problems game designers encountered with the Wii and the notion of realism.

Locative media projects that caught my attention

Interesting locative media project that I've found relevant lately:

Address necklace by Mouna Andraos and Sonali Sridhar:

"Address is a handmade electronic jewelry piece. When you first acquire the pendant, you select a place that you consider to be your anchor – where you were born, your home, or perhaps the place you long to be. Once the jewelry is initialized, every time you wear the piece it displays how many kilometers you are from that location, using a GPS component built into the pendant. As you take Address around the world with you, it serves as a personal connection to that place, making the world a little smaller or maybe a little bigger."

I like the idea of having a personal connection to a place and not necessarily a human being. This is so different than the raft of buddy-finder applications.

Compass Phone by HaYeon Yoo:

"This project addresses the issue of whether the mobile phone is a surveillance tool or a digital leash and explores designing an alternative means of communication which delivers a more poetic and aesthetic experience.

The Compass Phone does not support any verbal communication side, but has only a GPS function. It measures the distance between two people in real-time and then converts it to the time it takes for them to meet each other by either transport or time unit. A compass is hidden under the digit display. The centre of the compass always indicates the user's position and its needle indicates the other person's direction. "

This one is also interesting at it gives subtle cues about friends' movement in space; I see it as indicating a possibility, and less a factual or objective indication as other buddy-finder try to implement.

Petroski's "The Evolution of Useful Things"

Reading about technical objects evolution for the game controller project led me to The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts-From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers-Came to be as They are by Henry Petroski. Focused on forks, paper clips or spoons, the book asks this basic-but-interesting question: "how did these convenient implements come to be, and why are they now so second-nature to us?". It basically try to seek answers to "provide insight in the nature of technological development", and by approaching it with an evolutionary lense:

"Putting implements such as the common knife and fork and chopsticks into an evolutionary perspective, tentative as it necessarily must be, gives a new slant to the concept of their design, for they do not spring fully-formed from the mind of some maker but, rather, become shaped and reshaped through the (principally negative) experiences of their users within the social, cultural, and technological contexts in which they are embedded. The formal evolution of artifacts in turn has profound influences on how we use them."

Based on a wide array of illustrative examples, he debunks the "Form Follows Function" myth:

"Imagining how the form of things as seemingly simple as eating utensils might have evolved demonstrates the inadequacy of a “form follows function” argument to serve as a guiding principle for understanding how artifacts have come to look the way they do. Reflecting on how the form of the knife and fork has developed, let alone how vastly divergent are the ways in which Eastern and Western cultures have solved the identical design problem of conveying food to mouth, really demolishes any overly deterministic argument, for clearly there is no unique solution to the elementary problem of eating.

What form does follow is the real and perceived failure of things as they are used to do what they are supposed to do. Clever people in the past, whom we today might call inventors, designers, or engineers, observed the failure of existing things to function as well as might be imagined. By focusing on the shortcomings of things, innovators altered those items to remove the imperfections, thus producing new, improved objects. Different innovators in different places, starting with rudimentary solutions to the same basic problem, focused on different faults at different times, and so we have inherited culture-specific artifacts that are daily reminders that implements used to effect it. (...) The form, nature, and use of all artifacts are influenced by politics, manners, and personal preferences as by that nebulous entity, technology, manners and social intercourse. (...) it is really want rather than need that drives the process of technological evolution"

Although I found the argument a bit too mono-causal, it's highly interesting to read this kind of assertion from an engineer. While I agree that form may follow failure (and my interest in design failure is certainly related to this opinion), it is as if Petroski was too quick to dismiss other kinds of influence. There are *other" divers of innovation.

It's also relevant to see him acknowledging, after G. Basalla, that the existence of continuity in technical objects "implies that novel artifacts can only arise from antecedent artifacts - that new kinds of made things are never pure creations of theory, ingenuity and fancy". This is a favorite topic of mine, that I already addressed here. Petroski illustrates it with the example of the paper clip:

"the invention of a new paper clip will not occur in some amorphous dream world devoid of all artifacts save imaginative shapes and styles of bent wire or formed plastic. Rather, any new clip will come out of the crowded past of reality."

Another aspect of the book I was interested in is the vocabulary employed to refer to evolution of technical objects. The evolutionary metaphor is exemplified using the following terms extracted from geography, genealogy or biology:

"a route, detours, layovers, wrong-turns, retracings and accidents, paths... antecedents, ancestors... variations, new models... a vestigial trait/feature, a survival form... precursor... the idea of XXX long survived in such diverse applications"

Why do I blog this? Some interesting insights here about the evolutionary metaphor in the design of technical objects. The book gives plenty of details about interesting examples and is a bit short on theories. That said, given its origin (Petroski is not an STS researcher), there are some good points and pertinent elements we can re-use in the game controller project.

Delicate protection

An interesting assemblage observed recently, certainly influenced by the length of the iPhone charger cable.

Superimpose various urban realities

Received today my copy of You Are the City: Observation, Organization and Transformation of Urban Settings by Petra Kempf, definitely a gem in my collection of books and artifacts about urbanism. Made of 22 transparent slides in a folder, and a 16 page brochure, as described by the author:

"this publication offers architects, urban planners and general readers interested in city design and growth a novel approach, a mapping tool that creates a framework for understanding the continually changing configuration of the city. With the aid of themed transparencies, the tool allows one to superimpose various realities in layers in order to create new urban connections, thus inviting readers to immerse themselves in the complexity of our cities."

Readers interested in Petra Kempf's work may be interested in this interview, from which I took the following excerpts:

"there are many ways to represent cities and each of the mapping technologies available certainly have their value and importance. However the technologies that are currently available, are mostly based on numbers and facts, not personal experiences. But to really experience a city one must be part of it. This is an analog process, by which we engage with a city’s intricate fabric. To re-create that analog process, in this project, I needed to use a tool that helped me simulate that experience. The limitations and computational restrictions of a computer program did not allow me that opportunity. (...) Mapping human flows in cities is a daunting task. I have mixed feelings about mapping these flows, since it could easily shift into ‘the big brother is watching or tracing’ the flows of people. Examples are already at hand with tracing people through their mobile phones, personal GPS security devices, ISP addresses, debit cards or passports. I think one needs to be very diligent with this subject. When I think of mapping human flows I think of Michel de Certeau or Henri Lefebvre, to name just two. They thought of the urban inhabitant as someone who could never be traced, since he/she always slips away from the ‘official’, traceable path. In this way each individual creates their own path, which can not be traced—even though they shape the city and the city shapes them."

Also about how cities have always been informed by the traces we leave here and there:

Why do I blog this? What I find intriguing with this "instrument" is that the transparent sheets enable readers to perceive the city by isolating and superimposing different urban components. Doing so, one build his or her own representation of what a City can be.

Beyond the author's purpose, these sheets remind me of Dan Hill and Andrew vande Moere's workshop exercices. As you may notice, it's perhaps the use of transparent and overlays that made me think about it. I like this project both for its aesthetics (and how it reshape the notion of maps) and as a methodology to observe and discuss about the urban fabric. The manipulation of transparent sheets (superimposing various versions) enable to trigger interesting conversations and I am pretty sure that the design of similar maps for a specific neighborhood can also be a curious tool in workshops.

Matt Jones on mujicomp and mujicompfrastructures at Technoark

Two week ago at the the "New Digital Spaces conference at Technoark in Sierre, Switzerland, Matt Jones gave a talk called "people are walking architecture". You can see the video here. (Fabien's picture of Matt Jones at Technoark)

In his presentation, he introduced the notion of "Mujicomp", a portmanteau word made of "Muji" (the japanese retail company which sells a wide variety of household and consumer goods) and "Computing". What does it mean?

According to Jones, the idea of "mujicomp" revolved around the notion that ubiquitous computing needs to "become sexy and desirable... able to be appreciated as cultural design objects rather than technology... they should be tasteful, simple, clear, clean, contemporary, affordable in order to be invited into the home". If designers and engineers want to "make smart cities bottom up with products and not academic ubiquitous computing which are always postponed", he argued that ubicomp will need some "muji". And of course, as shown by Jone's use of the quote from Eliel Saarinen, "always design a thing by considering it in its larger context... a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment".

Starting from the ground-up can lead to some "almost mujicomp" products he mentioned ranges from energy monitor (Watsson, Wattcher) to more curious devices such as Availabot or Olinda that they develop at BERG. The fon phone is also an example here.

As computing requires not only artifacts but also infrastructures, there's a need for "mujicompfrastructures":

"could you create infrastructures with desirable things? the importance of threshold: how could we look at the spaces where we used our devices in a same way architect look at things? like bottom-up urbanism? different elements/gray shades between the private and the public: street, sidewalk, pavement, porch, home this connects to jane jacobs: intervening is not just about creating big infrastructures but sidewalk-scale system that could leak out into the home"

Also in his presentation, Matt talked about the "patchy homebrew equivalent of the nearly-net that would work", relying on Clay Shirky's Permanet, Nearlynet, and Wireless Data:

"Call the first network "perma-net," a world where connectivity is like air, where anyone can send or receive data anytime anywhere. Call the second network "nearly-net", an archipelago of connectivity in an ocean of disconnection. Everyone wants permanet -- the providers want to provide it, the customers want to use it, and every few years, someone announces that they are going to build some version of it. The lesson of in-flight phones is that nearlynet is better aligned with the technological, economic, and social forces that help networks actually get built."

Why do I blog this? took some time to sort my (messy) notes that highlight interesting aspects of ubicomp evolution and the role of designers in this.

Famous user figures in the history of HCI

Marketing people, engineers and designers often rely on persona, i.e. fictional characters created to represent the different user types within targeted characteristics that might use a service or a product. In the history of human-computer interaction, some user figures have been so prominent that it is important to keep them in mind.

Two of the most prominent characters are Joe and Josephine, a fictional couple described by Henry Dreyfuss, in "Designing for People" with plenty of simplified anthropometric charts. Dreyfuss introduced what has been called "Human Engineering" in the form of this couple, his common denominators for all dimensions. Simply put, Joe and Josephine representing the numerous consumers for whom they were designing:

""if this book can have a hero and a heroine, they are a couple we call Joe and Josephine.... They occupy places of honor on the wall of our New York and California offices.... They remind us that everything we design is used by people and that people come in many sizes and have varying physical attributes.... Our job is to make Joe and Josephine compatible with their environment... consider josephine as a telephone operator". It wasn't too long ago that she had the mouthpiece of the phone strapped to her chest and the earphones clamped to her head."

Another good example is Sparky, the "Model Human Processor", introduced by two HCI researchers: Stuart Card and Thomas Moran in 1983. In this case, Sparky was less a persona than a model of user interaction with the computer. For these authors, the goal was to build a model of computer users based on their perceptive, motive and cognitive abilities to interact with digital artifacts.

Perhaps the most caricatural is Sally, the fictional secretary from Xerox PARC. You can find the following description in a conversation with Douglas Englebart:

"But fashion shifted. XEROX PARC was formed. The 'inn' thing to do was to focus on the 'real' user - personified at PARC by 'Sally' the secretary. She need to have a computer she could figure out how to use quickly and have her paper-based work on, after all, XEROX was a 'document company'. The thinking was very far removed from augmenting the executive 'knowledge worker'."

As discussed by Thierry Bardini in his book:

"the real user was born, and her name was 'Sally' (...) Two main characteristics defined this new model of the user: Sally was working on paper, on her Royal, but in the professional business of publishing, and she was a skilled touch typist. (...) Sally, "the lady with the Royal typewriter," once and for all validated Licklider's conclusion that the real users, "people who are buying computers, especially personal computers, just aren't going to take a long time to learn something. They're going to insist on using it awfully quick - easy to use, easy and quick to learn."

You can also traces remnants of Sally in this research paper where she's back with a guy called Bob.

Why do I blog this? This is only a limited list of classical persona in the history of HCI, I am pretty sure there are others. There were helpful in my presentation (in french) about how networked objects are designed with limited models of targeted users. As you surely realize, these fictional characters tend to exhibit important bias and flawed representation of human beings. Thanks Emmanuelle Jacques for pointing me to this line of work! What is of interest here, is simply to trace reasons of design choices made by certain "innovators" over time.

Object evolution

A recurring topic on this weblog is the evolution of technical objects. The game controller project is of course one of the reason for this interest but it goes beyond this category of artifacts. Some examples of genealogy trees we are inspired of in the project below. They come from a book by Yves Deforge, a french researcher, who produced lot of material about this topic. His book "Technologie et génétique de l'objet industriel offers an interesting introduction to theoretical constructs (based on Gilbert Simondon's work) and a good series of examples:

mapenvelop: post it from the exact place

mapenvelop is a project by beste miray dogan that I like a lot: the inner walls of the envelope are blanketed by a Google map that indicates where the sender's address is. As described by the designer "post it from the exact place".

Why do I blog this an interesting low-tech approach to adding locational information to a message. A sort of locational information that adds subtlety in communication given that a map can be perceived as "richer" than a written address. It would be even more intriguing to have such envelopes for places you visit... you would buy a map of barcelona and pinpoint where you wrote the letter... so that your contact can be aware of where you thought about them. Surely something that is possible with digital communication through location-aware devices but that is even more curious on paper.

There are unused icons on your desktop

Seen the other day at the airport in Newark, USA. When the reality of Windows OS is brought to the foreground for non-obvious reasons. Why would we care, as users of this display, to see this message?

ixda interaction 2010 in Savannah

Back from interaction10, the annual conference hosted by the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) in Savannah, Georgia. A good occasion to visit the deep south (aka "dirty south 2) that I did not know at all. More observation on this at the end of this post, let's focus first in lessons learned at the conference.

Before coming, I was not sure about the whole thing, wondering whether the talk/audience would be into web-stuff or other concerns. After three days there I have to admit that I am really happy with the quality of the talks as well as the diversity of the conference formats. As opposed to lots of events, it seems that the venues have certainly contributed to the quality of the interactions (definitely no big hotel-chain lobby with their cheesy carpets). Furthermore, I was also glad to present my talk about failures and get some interesting feedback to go further.

Instead of a selection of semi-automatic writings of the talks as I've done after the Microsoft Social Computing Symposium, I tried to put together a selection of insights I collected at interaction2010. Overall, I was struck by the following three elements:

Incentives and rewards

A recurring topic was sur toutes les lèvres: the notion of providing "incentives and rewards" for the use of certain services. Be it about changing one's behavior to reach a more sustainable development model or as a way to let people use applications they wouldn't otherwise. This was a term I've heard in talks, conversations, participative activities and side activities. The break-out group about Foursquare at the Microsoft Social Computing Symposium the other day also connects to this discussion because I think 4^2 epitomizes by-products of incentives. Simply because one the rewards the interaction designers of this location-based system created turned users into point-addicts. Although the design community has always talk about this, my impression was that design was more about creating "affordances" than incentives. Where the former lies in perceptual and cognitive psychology, industrial design and human–computer interaction, the latter stemmed from economics and sociology. I don't judge anything here, I just see a pattern, perhaps design is well qualified to use both metaphors in its creative repertoire. The very notion for service design is perhaps useful here to understand this shift and I've heard someone arguing that an incentive was an "immaterial affordance" (which made me frown).

(someone typing notes without bothering looking at the blue-glow display)

About models

In addition, one of the theme I was interested in was the way designers work, achieve their projects and think. Which is why I paid close attention to tools, methodologies and abstractions. Fortunately, most of the presentation I attended showed some interesting examples of "models". See for instance the two examples below: Nathan Shedroff's model of experience/meaning (see his presentation for more) or Timo Arnall's interesting model of the 3 levels for designing networked objects, and the one presented by Mike Kruzeniski.

Shedroff's model was descriptive: as he explained, it helped him to show how meaning works in experience and the 6 dimensions of what constitutes an experience: significance, breadth, intensity, duration, triggers and interaction. As shown on this checklist, the role of the model is also prescriptive because it helps practitioners making decisions and acting upon other insights (i.e. user research).

Timo's model is different, it originated in the categorization of experiences with networked objects, which can be:

1. Immediate tangible experiences: glanceable and that do not take too much attention as the Nabaztag, Nike+ or Chris Woebken's animal superpower
2. Short term connecting and sharing: where the purpose is to share/get immediate feedback from friends such as the on-line component of Nike+
3. Long term service, data & visualization of the data produced that become social objects

What was interesting in Timo's talk was that he showed afterwards how these three central aspects could be used to evaluate existing objects AND as a basis for designing new artifacts that could be used as an iterative cycle. The model is therefore evaluative and generative.

A third sort of model was the one showed by Mike Kruzeniski in his talk. In his work at Microsoft, his purpose is to connect engineers with a more emotional vision of innovating. The problem they encountered was that developers tended to cut features and design elements with a specific rationale which did not take into account emotional factors. The first model/metaphor they chose was the tree (cutting two many features of a product may lead to a weird tree) but it was not efficient. Thus, they adopted the "Body, Heart, & Soul" framework to qualifies, validates, and prioritizes the intangible qualities of design work alongside the more practical concerns of our Engineering partners. To put it shortly, categorizing features as "heart" or "soul" was a more legible way to prioritize (and suppress design elements). The soul is untouchable, the heart elements support the soul and the body is the rest. Each of this component has certain rules ("no more than 5 "soul" features) and it was a more humane way to prioritize than "p0", "p1" and "p2". This kind of model was metaphorical in the sense that it helped engineers talk in a different way, a "beginner's design vocabulary to start with an grow from". Additionally, doing the simple work of categorizing features in these 3 topics was about articulating what matters emotionally to users (and then making choices). In this case, the model is both metaphorical (to convey this emotional sense) and operational (to enable easier prioritization).

These three examples are interesting given they exemplify the use of abstract models by designers from the ixda community. It as if the notion of model had been re-appropriated in a flexible way to serve the designer's purposes, which is a relevant locus of observation. Make not mistake here, these are only examples I've seen and I won't generalize from this sample. I am pretty sure you would also find predictive abstractions in designers' work. However, it's curious to point them out to show how models here are more seen as "tools to give structures to help you think" than explicative elements. The difference between designers and scientists in the way they build and use models, some epistemological comparisons may be intriguing here and I feel I am just scratching the surface.

(Wifi data points on a post-it in the washroom)

Showing products or not?

My third comment on the conference was the surprising lack of examples/products/services in lots of the presentation. I expected a design conference to be much more evocative in terms of design examples and it was not the case. Of course there are exceptions (as if Matt Cottam, Timo Arnall or Dan Hill's presentation were exceptions) but it's as if all the potential examples had been vacuumed and resurfaced in Paola Antonelli's talk.

The interest in objects

The mention of Antonelli's work allows me to make a smooth transition to a trend I find interesting: the increasing interest (or the resurgence of interest) in technical objects and a way to talk about them, to analyze them (Timo's model is inspiring for that matter) and how the history of digital artifacts matter. In her talk, she described how objects have always spoken to her and she summarized an upcoming MOMA exhibit that will cover the evolution of new media/digital technologies. Perhaps it's just me reading The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts-From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers-Came to be as They are (Henry Petroski), Carl di Salvo's new blog about objects, discussions with my neighbor or the game controller project with Laurent Bolli, but I am feeling a renewal of interest in analyzing objects (rather than users).

Not so much time for a write-up about the city itself but some pics are always worth a thousand words.

(The intriguing repartition of green pockets in Savannah)

(The pervasive presence of a local design school)

(Savannah has remnants of old shops)

(Luxuriance on the street, lovable pipes and nature around)

(Cultural shock for me maybe)

(Gorgeous brick buildings to be rented, a common feature in this town)

(Evocative drain pipe)

Slides from interaction2010 talk

The annotated slides from my talk "Design and Designed Failures: From Observing Failurs To Provoking Them" at ixda interaction10 are now available on Slideshare. The video of the talk is here as well.

Failures are often overlooked in design research. The talk addressed this issue by describing two approaches: observing design flops and identify symptoms of failures OR provoking failures to document user behavior.

This talk was actually a follow-up of my introduction to the Lift 2009 conference a bout the recurring failures of holy grails. It was very much inspired by Mark Vanderbeeken (Experientia) who pushed me to go further than pointing out product failures and exploring why it's important as a design strategy.

There was a good crowd of people and someone interestingly commented on the fact tat I may have made my presentation intentionally a failure to make the crowd react.

Thanks for the ixda interaction 2010 committee for letting my present this work!

Charting circulation

"Charting the Beatles" is a project that I find highly intriguing. One of the visualization that I find highly interesting for that matter is the "Self Reference" representation. As described by the authors: "The lyrics of the Beatles include a number of references to their own previous songs. This diagram explores these connections, noting the exact referencing lyrics and at what point in each song they can be found."

This is surely a recurring topic on Pasta and Vinegar. Perhaps because of the ongoing discussion I have with my neighbor who works on this the circulation of cultural elements and will surely appreciate (and re-use) this example.

Why do I blog this? looking for inspiration mostly, this chart provides a good example of the circulation of "designed elements" that may prove useful in out gamepad evolution project. The point would then be to map how certain elements (such as the direction-pad on the Game&Watch electronic games) have circulated over time to be adapted in different joypad iterations.

The link granularity (explicit/implicit reference, reference with melodic parallels) is very relevant because it shows the different granularities in how an element can circulate from one data point (a song in this case, a joypad model in the case of our project) to another.

Those Magnificent Men in Their Failing Machines

...or how a "litany of failed aircrafts" is a good metaphor of design iterations.

Read in "Hailing, Failing, and Still Sailing" by Richard Saul Wurman, a chapter of "Design Disasters: Great Designers, Fabulous Failures, and Lessons Learned":

"It made me think about the beginning of that wonderful film, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, in which you see a litany of failed aircraft. You laugh, but you also see how seriously involved everybody was in trying to fly. All the failure, all the things that didn't work, make you realize that the Wright brothers were really something. All the paths taken, all the good intentions, the logistics, the absurdities, all the hopes of people trying to fly testifying to the power we have when we refuse to quit.

There should be a museum dedicated to human invention failure. The only problem it would face would be its overnight success. In almost any scientific field, it would add enormously to the understanding of what does work by showing what doesn't work. In developing the polio vaccine, Jonas Salk spent 98 percent of his time documenting the things that didn't work until he found the thing that did."

Why do I blog this? Preparing a speech about failures led me to revisit my bookshelves. This chapter is great and I remember this very excerpts in the movie. As a kid, I used to watch this part again and again as I found it hilarious. More seriously, this excerpt is important in the sense that it reveals the notion of iterations in innovation.

A museum of human invention failure also strikingly connects with Paul Virilio's Museum of the Accident.

Supermodern spaces. Places to go through

An interesting definition of "supermodernism" found in Desolation Jones, a comic book series written by Warren Ellis:

"Supermodernism. The fact that we don't build places to just be in anymore. We build places to go through. To wait in. To be transient. You ever watch 'Cribs' on MTC? All those pop stars' houses? They're all beige and white. They're the colour of airports. All those houses are decorated like hotel rooms and waiting lounges. You never wonder why?

Supermodern spaces. Places to go through. An now look at this bloody city [Los Angeles] Two hundred thounsand fucking miles of road. Not event a city. A dozen towns stitches together by motorways. Housing that goes up today and get knocked down tomorrow. LA's a supermodern space. A place you dont' stop in"

Also check Ellis's commentary on his website:

"Supermodernism: a term I first encountered in architecture, coined by Hans Ibelings, used to describe buildings constructed without context or integral information. Airports are supermodern spaces. Just pipes and sockets, there to pass through or plug into. Places to facilitate swarms and flow. An outsider’s view of LA. Which, I’d remind people, is exactly what Jones’ view is. He’s not looking at LA like a native, a committed long-term resident, or even someone who likes the place much"

Why do I blog this? gathering insights about society from various types of media is always a pleasure. In this case it's about the evolution of spaces and places. Also look at the illustrator's trick to put these quote in context with a "red line" that connects up the whole page with a map and the discussion with the two protagonists.

See also Jack Schulze's remarks about this very same comic page.

Another apple "pad" grabbed my attention

Yes, there's the iPad but it's a different Apple "pad" product that grabbed my attention. This morning, I received this morning a package from Honk-Kong with this curious gamepad that was designed for the Pippin, a console/multimedia platform designed by Apple and produced by Bandai back in 1995. Pippin was actually derived from the second generation of Power Macintosh computers. It was unfortunately a failure.

The game controller was called "AppleJack" (a name that eventually has been re-used because it's now a command line user interface for Mac OS X). White models like this one were called "Atmark" (for the "@" mark) and were only marketed and sold in Japan. What's curious here is that it features two interesting elements:

• A centre built-in trackball, which is highly uncommon on game controllers (instead of a joystick)
• Two front mounted orange select buttons designed to replicate the features of a computer mouse.

Apart from that it's quite common: boomerang-shaped, direction-pad on the left and four action buttons "laid out in the classic Super Nintendo diamond design + the button colors are a match for the PAL SNES controller" as pointed out here. What's maybe relevant in terms of design is the button shape with tiny braille-like dots to indicate the user which one he/she is using without looking at it.

Another curious aspect is the fact that the Applejack controller was sold with a floppy disk that contains the "Applejack Software Developer's Kit" for editing the `pippin mapping resource, and an Applejack 2.2.0 system extension file. Which means that you could customize the `pipp' mapping resource of the Applejack input device drivers.

Why do I blog this? this pad goes straight into the collection/project about gamepad evolution. Although it was a failure, it's definitely an interesting artifact that tried to innovate (trackball!) and its "boomerang" shaped was also the one Sony showed as an early version of the PS3 controller. A sort of evolutionary dead-end to some extent because of the trackball.

Mobile to-do list?

A to-do list found inserted between bike spokes, found in Geneva this morning. The urban scout is left to his/her own hypotheses about why this sheet of paper ended up here.

Widget-ized wristwatch

Circulation of the widget-meme into *other* touch-interfaces.

All the movements made in the space of one year by a student

The famous drawing extracted from "Theory of the Dérive" (Théorie de la Dérive) by Guy Debord. As explained by the author:

"In his study Paris et l’agglomération parisienne (Bibliothèque de Sociologie Contemporaine, P.U.F., 1952) Chombart de Lauwe notes that “an urban neighborhood is determined not only by geographical and economic factors, but also by the image that its inhabitants and those of other neighborhoods have of it.” In the same work, in order to illustrate “the narrowness of the real Paris in which each individual lives . . . within a geographical area whose radius is extremely small,” he diagrams all the movements made in the space of one year by a student living in the 16th Arrondissement. Her itinerary forms a small triangle with no significant deviations, the three apexes of which are the School of Political Sciences, her residence and that of her piano teacher."

Why do I blog this? Tracing some documents and insights about chronotopic representations.

Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium 2010

Last week, I was at the Social Computing Symposium at the ITP in New York; a small event sponsored by Microsoft Research’s Creative Systems Group that "brings together academic and industry researchers, developers, writers, and influential commentators in order to open new lines of communication among previously disconnected groups".

The theme of this symposium this year was “The city as platform”, which revolved around various sub-topic such as urban informatics, the city as a social technology, pervasive games and government infrastructure/data. My notes are definitely messy and incomplete but I tried to cobble some excerpts below as a reminder of what I learnt there. Sorry this is a blog and I have less and less time to make my notes very coherent.

Kevin Slavin gave an insightful presentation that connected lots of various fields that I found refreshing to hear about, I've taken (badly) handwritten notes (see below) so readers may want to access Liz Lawley's more legible write-up.

In the afternoon, Adam Greenfield gave a short presentation about "what cities are for?":

"what functions and activities they have evolved to support? plausible deniability (but with technologies such as social software... life become explicit and declarative), anonymity (but tech can determine whereabouts, activities and intentions), reinvention (but tech re-laminates our "separate masks"), forgetting (but tech leads to a global mnemonic), becoming urbane/confront the others (but networked tech can undercut the logic of networked sociality)."

In her ignite talk Alice Marwick dealt with the following issue: "Why kids do care about privacy?":

"there is this misconception that kids don't care about privacy but this is not the case there's a range of privacy concern; 3 categories of people: privacy pragmatists (open-minded liberals), privacy fundamentalists (cynical concealers) and privacy unconcerns overlapping spaces: public/private/semi-public... opting out of social media is a great disadvantage for kids AT&T family map = invasive privacy invasion! kids deeply care about their privacy whatever they define it"

Which was nicely complemented by Alice Taylor's presentation about the fact that teenagers don't change much ("teens don't have ADD, they're just bored) and Genevieve Bell's discussion about how the notion of "digital native" is a wrong paradigm... "because in general natives lost (at least where I come from [australia] should we talk about refugees? squatters? there a new nomenclature. On a different note, she also cited some interesting statistics (26% of americans who don't use the internet) and the fact that for some user groups "the internet is just for TV or for phone call".

On Day 2, the morning was devoted to "The City as Social Technology". As proposed by the session organiser (Mr. Tom Coates, thanks for the invitation!):

"It's an attempt to bring together the various levels of the built environment (the home/office, the city etc) with the "Social computing" in the name of the event. The basic premise is that the city is an invented thing, designed to support, extend and derive value from human socialising, collaboration and labour - and that new pervasive technologies (sensors, programmable environments etc) are going to take all of that stuff to a completely new level.

Tom reminded us how the city emerged and different implications of the city as a social platform:

"the city only appeared VERY recently, about 12,000 years ago urbanization has increased dramatically but why? what functions did it fulfill? numbers of theories: agricultural societies that fostered more resilience, static population are more robust/protected, better for trades once cities have appeared, they gave massive advantages to the collective, making it more efficient + doing more together than was possible to do apart not only the city is a social technology but other tech came from the city: money, alphabet & writing, law & government le corbusier: a machine for living in but the city has also costs: infectious diseases spread more in cities... hygiene, sewage, crime, pollution... there is another leap forward right now. the city will be upgraded sensors will transform the idea of the city as a social technology"

As a follow-up, Molly Steenson gave us an historical perspective on the way that architecture and computers were imagined as a symbiosis in the late 60s and early 70s. She started by quoting various quotes from the 60s by JC Licklider ("The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly" or "your computer will know who is prestigious in your eyes and buffer you from a demanding world") to show that the ideas we are discussing nowadays have been around for quite sometime. Then she exemplified the 3 ways these ideas affect the city (or were supposed to affect it):

• Representing and visualizing: computer graphics... which comes from wing/cockpit design and mechanical engineering. Ivan Sutherland's sketchpad (1962)
• Defining the right problems to solve: c. alexander, was interested in defining problem to solve and apply analysis (1963: "design today has reached the stage where sheer inventiveness can no longer sustain it")
• Generating symbiotic systems: "someday machines will go to libraries to read and learn and laugh and will drive about cities to experience and to observe the world." Negroponte, 1995 in his booked called "The Architecture Machine: Toward a More Human Environment.

Her presentation was very visual based on seminal texts by the authors mentioned above. See some example from my Flickr stream:

Then Duncan Wilson + Dan Hill from Arup showed some projects going on right now in the architecture community. They called it "digital built fabric":

"Sustainable dev: - making the invisible visible (barangaroo in Sidney) via real-time data on neighbourhood activity projected throughout site, acting as a civic-scale collective smart meter. - infographic sketches for responsive street furniture throughout site, inspired by vernacular symbols traditionally found at docks - smart-meter style dashboard schematic indicating zones of responsibility and contribution as well as consumption - Forcefield (London, Arup): LED-based lighthing structure responds to proximity and movement of visitors - unfolding resource use: fitzroy street, london (arup)... hard to read for people: who knows what is the baseline (what number is wrong or good?) - EST (environment sustainable...) low2no (helsinki)... with web-based and phone-based services, carbon-shadow (yours in comparison with others) - Kurilpa bridge, Brisbane: LED-based lighting structure capable of responding to environment... we tend to avoid the "big screens" (non-screen, LED instead)... to show collective wifi

"Encrusting the building with sensors"

Aaptive ambient information: HINTeractions, Green screens (Chiswick park)

Wireless civic spaces: state library of queensland (use of wifi, transformation of public space, library used 23 hours per day, safer, more active)... what can we learn these activities? what sort of patterns can we reveal? tag cloud of internet connections within public wi-fi space: what countries? tag cloud of term extraction of public wifi: nouns or people's names currently being browsed in this space? what if we could put these viz back into the pace? interactive installations

Responsive architecture: mediamesh (UTS broadway competition entry): reveals character of production within building by tapping into the wifi

Mazdar: parasol star... plaza that plays back pattern of activities collated through the day; city centre acts as dashboard/central processing unit for wider city

Persuasive public transit: post-hoc analysis of large data-sets (real time rome), "smart light fields" (Jason mcdermott: traces of BT enable phone), "Mobile sensing" (can we trace where people are, how space is used in real-time...), active wayfinding"

In this talk, Usman Haque started by 10 things he doesn't believe in" and turn them into insights about what he is interested in:

" make data public ...which becomes... public make data more data is more useful ...which becomes... more context is more useful freedom from constraints is the end goal ...which becomes... constraints provide hints local = proximal ...which becomes... local = shared (we have neighbor but they are asymmetrical) stanislaw lem's about robots fucking other robots (inorganic evolution) architecture is about organizing ...which becomes... architecture is about disorganizing (h. von foerster: there are no such things as self-organizing system), it's about putting something out there that reconfigure/re-adapt people need simplicity ...which becomes... we are complexity processors (granularity is essential), people learn to understand the tokyo map! we should not dumb down representations; it's not about simplifying but creating multiple levels of granularity individualism is the key to behavior change ...which becomes... neighbours just as important! (natural fuse project)"

After that, we had different break-out groups. Mine was called "From instrumentation to social technology" and here is a summary of what we dealt with:

" The digitization of the contemporary cities with technologies embedded into its streets and buildings and carried by people and vehicles has appended an informational membrane over the urban fabrics. Location-based services,  interactive architecture, real-time visualizations of cities activity provide new means to make decisions and navigate city space. However, by being more operationally efficient, there is a risk that the urban environment becomes limited to an utilitarian perspective: going from A to B as quick as possible, receiving geolocated-café coupons or getting updates about contacts' whereabouts can be seen as the new cliché of this model.

Questions to be addressed: 1) Yesterday: What have we learnt from the past 10 years in the field (beyond the usual clichés I listed above)? Where did this system fail? 2) Tomorrow: How to go beyond these issues? What kind of problems will emerge? Is there a balance between utilitarian and more desirable systems? What's the stupidest idea one can we think about? 3) Summary: Can we discuss a roadmap of possibilities/problems for the near future?"

In the afternoon of the second day, the topic was "Cities and Play". Kati London started off by showing an interesting set of projects such as "avatar machine" by mark owens, and the surge in location-based games (or Mobile social software that uses game mechanics): Parallel Kingdom (a mobile location-based MMO), Mytown, or Monopoly city street. Dennis Crowley from Foursquare also showed some interesting lessons they drawn from the platform evolution and how it's differentiated from other friend-finder systems.

Why do I blog this? It was an interesting event, very diverse in terms of the topics that people presented and perspectives. What I found relevant was that "social computing" was not taken to the letter, which is good. Surely, some elements to be directly re-used in current projects.