Taskscapes

Tried to dig the notion of taskscape lately as described in Ingold, Tim. (1993) "The Temporality of the Landscape", World Archaeology, 25(2): pp. 24-174:

"Just as the landscape is an array of related features, so -by analogy- the taskcape is an array of related activities. (...) In short, the taskscape is to labour what the landscape is to land, and indeed what an ensemble of use-values is to values in general"

The "taskscape" then describes the whole ensemble of activities undertaken by a society (or individuals). Why do I blog this? culture.

Information Aesthetics Roadmap

Seen at the Visualization Summit last tuesday:

It was the poster drawn by the group led by Andrew Vande Moere at the Visualization Summit. This group sketched a kind of roadmap that identifies information aesthetics as an emerging research direction in visualization.

Why do I blog this? general culture about infoviz.

Retrofrogging

Reading this interesting account of a session at Supernova07 (no joke please), I ran across this "retrofrogging" term used by Clay Shirky:

"There’s also retrofrogging. We had such great copper that we now lag the world in broadband. That was our Minitel."

I tried to google the term and nothing else showed up, although I found it exquisitely intriguing (even here). I guess it simply refers to innovations that push in a certain direction when new iterations or disruptions have challenged it. The implicit example for this can be determined by the "frogging" part: frogs = french people.... who developed the Minitel, a pre-Web online service that allowed to do all sorts of things (ebanking, chat, IM, forum, etc.)... which became an impediment for the adoption of the Internet in France.

Ambivalence in pop culture’s treatment of technoscience

Reading "Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes" while scouting for LIFT speakers, I was struck by this quote from Eugene Thacker (the interview is available here):

"these sciences and technologies are normalized in a way that the general public going to a film will “accept” their inclusion as a matter of course. Certainly there are always SF geeks who dispute the technical accuracy of how the genetic mutation actually creates the superhero or villain, but on a general level these technosciences have become a part of a certain cultural imaginary. So the question is “What conditions had to be in place such that these particular technosciences could become normalized as a part of a certain world-view?” Perhaps this process is somewhat parallel to the normalization of medicine and public health practices themselves.

So I think that popular culture is relevant, not because I believe that films should educate and moralize, but because there is actually a great deal of ambivalence in pop culture’s treatment of technoscience. We can’t live without it, and yet it seems to be our downfall. The movies that moralize about the ineradicable human spirit do so using the most advanced computer graphics and special effects. There’s also a sense in many of these films, books, and comics that we as a culture are not quite sure what to do with all of this information and all these gadgets. It’s almost as if the greatest challenge posed to SF now is finding something interesting to do with all the technology that exists."

Why do I blog this? because this is one of these questions that keeps me awake at night after a daily dose of "pop culture’s treatment of technoscience". As a user experience researcher, working with designers, engineers (both from academia and companies), I am concerned by this normalization and how to take other paths, other fringes (that's actually the near-future laboratory/liftlab's concern)

Sneakernet...

According to the Wikipedia, Sneakernet:

"Sneakernet is a term used to describe the transfer of electronic information, especially computer files, by physically carrying removable media such as magnetic tape, floppy disks, compact discs, USB flash drives or external drives from one computer to another. Sneaker refers to the shoes of the person carrying the media. This is usually in lieu of transferring the information over a computer network."

Some examples:

"Google has reportedly used sneakernet to transport datasets too large for current computer networks, up to 120Tb in size.

The SETI@home project uses a sneakernet to overcome bandwidth limitations: data recorded by the radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico is stored on magnetic tapes which are then shipped to Berkeley, California for processing.

When home broadband access was less common, many people downloaded large files over their workplace networks and took them home by sneakernet. Today when home broadband is more common, sometimes technical workers at institutions with congested WAN links do the reverse: downloading data at home in the evening and carrying the files to work on USB flash drives."

Why do I blog this? I remember the first time I connected to the Internet in 1995, I printed 200pages. It's interesting to see that the sneakernet practice is still around, there are other examples that I've seen, such as people exchanging files on USB key (and checking if the file is deleted after the cxchange).

"you can and must understand computers now"

This picture showed up in Michael Curry's talk tonight:

It's actually the cover of a book by Ted Nelson: Computer Lib (1974).

Why do I blog this? I was impressed by the "you can and must understand computers now" claim there, which definitely show the underlying values that pervaded our culture. The "understand" word is tough though, but as Nelson pointed out, people have resources to do so ("can") but also an obligation ("must")...

Technology use in Spiritual Formation

It's mostly curiosity that lead me to this project led by Susan Wyche with Gillian Hayes, Lonnie Harvel, and Beki Grinter. As described on the webpage:

"Churches are increasingly using technology for spiritual purposes. Sermons are being podcast, PowerPoint slides are replacing hymnals, and e-mail is prompting prayer, all of which indicate religion’s growing presence in computer users’ lives. Despite churches’ rapid adoption, we know little about how to effectively design technology for worship services, what interface issues arise when computers are used to support prayer, or how to facilitate meaningful communication between church leaders and their parishioners. Our empirical study begins to answer these questions by examining how area pastors use communication technologies for spiritual purposes."

They wrote a paper about it for CSCW2006:

Wyche, S.P., Hayes, G.R., Harvel, L.D., and Grinter, R.E. Technology in Spiritual Formation: An Exploratory Study of Computer Mediated Religious Communications. To appear in the proceedings of CSCW 2006. Banff, Alberta, Canada. 2006

[Thinking about where the name CSCW comes from (Computer Supported Collaborative Work), it is exquisitely intriguing to see that the field started by looking at collaborative work/learning practices and is now moving to all sorts of collective activities ranging form gaming to religious practices.]

The paper offers some intriguing material about the uses of technologies in three aspects of "religious work": religious study and reflection, church services, and pastoral care. It also examines how the collaborative religious uses of technologies cross and blend work and personal life.

"Some religious uses of technology seemed similar to workplace practices. or example, in pastoral care, ministers (like employers) used technologies to coordinate action (...) And yet, while some aspects of technologically enabled religious practice seemed analogous to technologically supported corporate practice, others differed. Some practices echoed previous research largely focused on recreational groups, in particular on-line communities. For example, ministers described a dilemma with counseling, preferring to talk face-to-face, but recognizing that some people found it easier to discuss difficult topics in an electronically mediated setting."

Why do I blog this? curiosity, sunday reading blogged on monday.

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".

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.

A huge research tool

Visit of the CERN yesterday, had a look at the Atlas experiment:

... this huge particle detectors that help the observation of the collisions of particule in the Large Hadron Collider (surely one of biggest research tool ever made)... which made me think of this quote:

"Research is best seen as a collective experimentation about what humans and nonhumans together are able to swallow or to withstand. (...) Research is this zone into which humans and nonhumans are thrown, in which has been practiced, over the ages, the most extraordinary collective experiment to distinguish, in real time, between "cosmos" and "unruly shambles" with no one, neither the scientists nor the "science students," knowing in advance what the provisional answer will be. "

Bruno Latour (in Pandora's hope).

How discourse about cybernetic pervaded other fields

Having just read last night "L'Empire cybernétique : Des machines à penser à la pensée machine" by Céline Lafontaine. In this essay, the author aims at showing how the "cybernetic" paradigm (Wiener) as well as the vision it promoted, has influenced the scientific and intellectual worlds. Starting from Norbert Wiener's work and Macy conferences, she describes how these notions and visions pervaded psychology (Bateson, Palo-Alto group), Systems Theory, french structuralism, postmodernism (okay: Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard, Derrida and Foucault), neo-liberal economic theories and eventually the general discourse about cyberspace (Kevin Kelly, Pierre Levy who use reference to Pierre Theilard de Chardin). For the latter, it's funny that she stopped to this references and not pay attention to more recent developments about this issue (in which Levy has been slightly forgotten, even tough the ideas proposed are still the same). The book is also a critical overview of how this influence has anti-humanist underpinnings: by advocating for a "sujet informationnel" ("informational subject") and an inescapable progress, a reductionist vision of the world is at stake and lead to a very determinist view of society.

Why do I blog this? enjoy reading this kind of book, easy to read and some criticisms are fair as as important to keep in mind. Although it's a good read, I am quite skeptical about some aspects such as the methodology and/or a somewhat over-focus on surface traits of the theories influenced by cybernetics. As a matter of fact it's a very theoretical discussion, rather philosophical than empirical (in terms of content analysis I mean). I would have liked to see more elements about the "humanist" arguments (sorry for my ignorance) and some more conclusive statement at the end of the book about how to get back to a more humanist paradigm in science and technology (how would this look like?). Anyway, perhaps proposing solutions is not the point of this sort of books.

Some critics in french here and there.

Sticked objects

Sticking objects on street premises seem to be a new trend as one can see with this floppy disk above or the lego blocks hereafter:

After tags (and painted walls in cave), stickers, striped glasses, now it's about sticking objects. The first picture has been taken in Lausanne and the second in Geneva, Switzerland.

Why do I blog this? I find interesting the way objects populates street. Even though these examples are really uncommon, they are intriguing in the sense that they're part of a trend that leans towards reconfiguring physical artifacts in a spatial environment.

Science fiction and predictions

"Corporate research evolved in the 1990s from the invention of science fiction to creating scientific and technological fact (...) the wonders science fiction authors predicted for around the year 2000 - such as mass transportation to the moon and glass-doomed cities on the ocean floor - are within the grasp of modern technology. However, he adds, they are not about to come to pass. The reason: "[writers] forgot the marketing dimension. Nobody is out there that is willing or capable of paying for that"

Wolf-Ekkehard Blanz quoted by Robert Buderi in "Engines of Tomorrow: How the World's Best Companies are Using Their Research Labs to Win the Future" That is why some sci-fi authors prefer to write about things that CAN happen, about problems that could occur in the current situation of R&D prototypes.

Chaos theory and hype around scientific trends

Discover Magazine has a good piece about what happened to the overhyped Chaos Theory

"From The Simpsons to Jurassic Park, chaos theory became fashionable and funny, terrifying and true. In the 21st century, chaos theory, for all its previous pomp, makes barely a peep on the mainstream radar. Still, it hasn’t gone away—far from it, says Harvard University physicist Paul Martin says. “It’s a collection of tools, and it’s a way of understanding phenomena that occur over a wide range of fields.” "

Why do I blog this? overhyped phenomenon in science and technology is a very interesting topic to me. I am often amazed by how certain topics (fractals, web 3D, artificial intelligence, neural networks) gain some incredible attention and then leads to intriguing judgments, decisions and actions. I don't mean here that this topics are not good or interesting but instead that the overemphasis/over-expectations lead to some failures or sometimes hide the genuine importance of what they bring to the table.

However, should such a hype be dismissed? personally I would say no and when it pervades pop culture (the simpsons, sci-fi novel) it can also be a way to bring people to work on these issues. That may be the flip side of the coin.

A simple agenda

A picture I took from a colleague's office. The guy has a simple todo list: "Fix mem bugs": sometimes, people's agenda are clear enough that it can be written in few words.

The simplicity of his agenda is very evocative.

Valentin's day, Switzerland Circa 2007

Heard in the train between Geneva and Gstaadt: "Have you heard what I told you yesterday in WoW?" [World Of Wacraft] "hmm?" "I told you five times that I'll visit you this afternoon to give her present to Cathy"

What's this "user" term anyway?

Yesterday I had a meeting with Dominique Foray, a professor at EPFL who will participate in one of the LIFT07 panel about the "user-centered economy". His perspective is about innovation management and the economics of creation. At a certain point, I realized that the term "user" he was employing was slightly different than its usage in my research field (HCI/CSCW/cognitive sciences with a strong spin on user studies of technology). Then today I ran across this research project by Alex Wilkia about this very issue:

My research project is an ethnography of interaction designers and related innovation actors embedded in a multinational microprocessor manufacturer who models users, assembles interactivity and thereby guides product design and development processes as well as informing the long-term strategic thinking of the organisation. The aim is to examine in detail the discourse and practices in which multiple user representations facilitate user-centred design (UCD) and innovation practices in relation to technological development. (...) To map empirically the diverse uses of the ‘user’ within a research environment and development programmes that employ or are engaged with UCD practices and outcomes.

Why do I blog this? boundary objects like the term "user" are very important, especially when dealing with innovation and design, which encompasses a very large area of fields and interests.

Deltron 3030's virus

"Deltron 3030" (Deltron 3030)

Was just listening to Deltron 3030 Virus... and I ran across those lyrics:

a virus To bring dire straits to your environment Crush your corporations with a mild touch Trash your whole computer system and revert you to papyrus (...) Society thinks thier safe when Bingo! harddrive crashes from the rendering Alot of hackers tryed virus's before Vaporize your text like so much white out I want it where a file replication is a chore Lights out shut down the entire whitehouse I dont want just a bug that could be corrected Im erecting immaculate design Break the nation down section by section Even to the greatest minds its impossible to find

Wardriving with cabs

According to O'reilly radar, there's a plan from Ericsson to find cellphone coverage holes in the New York City area by deploying modem-sized sensors in cabs that will report back signal strength and clarity. I liked this part of the interview:

Ericsson chose cabs because they are always on the road and they cover most of the city. They've used other methods in the past. "Our favorite vehicle is the taxicab because of the randomness in its circulation," said Niklas Kylvag, Ericsson's manager of fleet services. But, he added, "We have used trains, trucks, buses, delivery vehicles, limousines, pretty much anything that is moving and has electricity in it. I have myself done testing in the Swiss Alps with this on my back at a ski resort."

Why do I blog this? it's interesting IMO to see how the discovery of seams in techological infrastructures is now rooted in possible end-users' behaviors.

History of tape

People who are into "duct tape" (like me) must have a look at this history of tape published by Ambidextrous (by Jonathan Edelman). It provides a very curious timeline that starts from "Earthenware pots mended with an adhesive substance made from the sap of trees" to Johnson and Johnson or 3M inventions. Fish-based glue as well as many patents issued for glues using fish, animal bones, milk, rubber, and starch are presented.

It’s hard to imagine a world without tape. It mends our precious keepsakes, holds parts together as a quick repair, keeps our wounds together—and sometimes saves lives. The film industry is a virtual slave to tape: gaffer’s tape, paper tape, camera tape. Supposedly Socrates used an animal hide with some kind of sap to repair a hole in his home. We at least know that before tape, there was glue, fabric, paper, animal skins, and string; when tape came on the scene, everything changed. This timeline puts into perspective how tape has changed the very nature of adhesion and, along with it, designers’ manipulation of the world.

Why do I blog this? duct tape is a very intriguing innovation. As a user experience researcher, duct tape always makes me wonder about how people tune, tinker, craft, modify artifacts. It's not only an indicator of situations that should or have been tuned but also a a superb example of a way to let people create "stuff" (see this book:"Tape: An Excursion Through the World of Adhesive Tapes" by Kerstin Finger)

Sincerely, look at your environment, try to find where people leave duct tape.