Here (.pdf) are the slides I used this morning in my talk at the Villes2.0 seminar.

This talk was about showing which kind of topics I find interesting in my work about the relationships between technologies and space/place (as a researcher in human-computer interaction). Roughly speaking it's: understanding of socio-cognitive effects of technologies, visualizations of technology usage in space, explicitation of invisible phenomenon, hybridization of space, etc.

Then I narrowed down the focus on the CatchBob! project to show the need to adopt new methods in order to conduct meaningful studies about location-based applications beyond lab experiments. As a matter of fact, for the audience, describing the use of ethnographical techniques and other mixed methodologies (qualitative - quantitative) as we did in the project was new. Presenting some results form CatchBob! allowed me to describe how it helped and how we dealt with the complexity of field experiments.

My point in the conclusion was to show that the sort of study like CatchBob or other ethnographical (or mixed methods) investigation of ubicomp technologies was useful to explore the situatedness, particularities, detailed problems of innovation. The underlying point here is that all this enable to criticize normative visions of the future that lots of people take for granted (seamless mobile social software, intelligent fridge, etc.) due to various reasons (pop culture...).