General

New blog platform

in

As you may realize... Pasta and Vinegar has moved to a new platform/server... hosted by LIFTlab. LIFTlab is actually the umbrella network/company that takes care, among other things, of the LIFT events, consulting work... and the publication of diverse things. Other blogs are gathered under this banner. See the ones from Laurent, Fabien or Roberto (and others will join). The idea was to join our forces on a common platform.

tou

What does that mean in terms of content on this blog? actually, pretty much nothing will really change, strange stuff (vinegar) will be mixed with more serious researchy content (pasta). It's just that it was time for a bit of change.

Time for me to give a very warm and special thanks to TECFA (University of Geneva, see the unit logo here), the research unit where I did my masters and which accepted to host my blog for the last 4 years. I am especially grateful to Daniel K. Schneider who supported me in this. + Thanks to Roby and Fabien for taking care of the migration (Technorati Profile).

"Digital entertainment and mobility" seminar

in

A short of summary at the "digital entertainment and mobility" seminar I attended yesterday in Lyon, France. My notes about what I found relevant for my work. The event was organized by Imaginove, a cluster association representing video game companies such as Atari, EA as well as animation/audiovisual producers. Philippe Jeudy (Sega Mobile) At SEGA, the mobile gaming department is different from the Mobile console department (Nintendo DS/PSP), which sparked lots of discussion about why (different competencies, different business models) and why not integrating them in a single business unit (even with the game design) to try to create a much more holistic experience, as well as connections/continuity between console games and mobile phone games. From my point of view, in terms of user experience, it's clear that it's not "2 industries" as people use to say in that business... the time spent playing on a Nintendo DS is definitely competing with the time spent on a mobile phone for example. There are different visions there and business examples shows that some like UbiSoft prepare selling their shares from their mobile arms (Gameloft) whereasr Electonic Arts is more integrative, as I've been told by a manager from EA Mobile Europe.

The most interesting part of Philipe's talk concerned the limits in the mobile gaming domain: - hardware and software: the mobile is no yet a laptop, smart phone only 5% of the european market (I've seent he same figure 2 years ago... the evolution is dead slow). When it comes to downloading a basic games, 15 millions of people in France can do it (out of 43 millions of call phone users). In addition, developing games for more than 300 models is terribly difficult (different resolutions...) then. - Network constraints: apart from 3 in italy, the mobile internet is not broadband (still have to wait 18-24 months). - Conditions of sales for phones, and people often don't know how to use them - Very complex return on investment, much more than the web - Usage and practices are still fuzzy, but research gives some hints - (Flat) Mobile Internet Fee aren't there yet, it's still way too expensive.

He also challenged the idea that the future of video game is on cell phone... a sort of gung-ho statement that is a bit fuzzy. Of course, as he said, there is a good and exciting potential but what happens is rather that mobile gaming support the trend started by Nintendo with the Wii and the DS about expanding its user base.

Currently when an editor sells a game for 5 euros, it earns 1... which is really low to invest in R&D, marketing, etc.

Marie-Christine Crolard-Lepany (NPA Conseil) A consultant in new media forms, she gave a very good overview of the near future changes to be expected about mobile television, comparing point-to-point/unicast (streaming on cell phone using 3G networks) to broadcast (one content broadcasted to all through DVB-H). The interesting thing with DVB.H is that it can reach lots of mobile devices (phones, mp3/video players, etc). Unlike streamed videos on cell phones, there is a crux need for quality images and no lag in this case.

She talked a bit about the demand for such mobile broadcast. The first demand concerns the accessibility to existing content (tv channels and shows that people miss). Showing charts, she demonstrated how the audience curves are different from home-tv, with peaks between 6-8pm (big peaks in home tV are after 8pm). They discovered that most of tv-channels are wondering what to put there.

The main limit she mentioned in mobile situation is the autonomy of the device, lots of people need to limit their mobile-tv usage on their phone, to keep some power left for using it to communicate with others.

Anne Bationo-Tillon (France Telecom R&D) Anne, an HCI/ergonomist researcher addressed the usages and practices of mobile devices related to Mobile TV, through various studies her team carried out at Orange. The sort of studies they do are mostly qualitative, aiming at revealing usage logics and dynamics about reception/production of contents, when and where they are used and the link with the context in which they're employed.

Some results: About the place where mobile contents are consumed: - at home: sit or on bed (protected space), avaiability of preferred content (when dad or husband is watching soccer) or used as a second screen. The interesting aspect they notice is the flexibility of the posture in diverse situations (people laying on bed and looking at the phone above) - "static mobility": sat in public transport, or in gardens...

The content is mostly consumed as an interstitial moments (free time, between two activities), also targeted at short contents. Some means: For 3G: 10minutes, For Video glasses: between 20 and 45 minutes, for laptops: 90minutes. As for the links with the environment: in private places = to isolate oneself (one's "bubble") and in public places to be disengaged from others (in public transports for example) and get some distractions.

Anne also tried to describe her vision about the mid-term evolution of mobile devices. Some highlights she gave: - a different place depending on the ages: multimedia (kids) versus instrumental/utilitarian object (more than 30s) - the range of usages is increasing depending on the memory of mobile phone - purists will still have their dedicated devices (console for gaming, camera for pictures) but the cell phone is a way to replace them when you can't carry lots of thing or in certain contexts. - a fine and reinforced articulation between the mobile phone and other devices... As Ernest Adams (that I mentioned the other day), she claimed that other mobile devices will include phone (or communication) capabilities. It's indeed the case with the DS and the pictochat but the inclusion of 3G in a game console or a digital camera remains to be seen...

Why do I blog this? a very interesting overview of the area, and good discussions with practitioners who really have pragmatic issues far from über cool pervasive gaming applications (but still opened to hear about it).

Talk in Torino

in

Currently in Torino, where I gave a talk yesterday organized by Experientia and the Order of Architects of the Province of Turin. My talk "Designing a new ecology of mixed digital and physical environments" was a critical overview of ubiquitous computing (slides as a pdf) based on current research in the field (showing what people like Paul Dourish or Genevieve Bell are discussing but also geographers such as Stephen Graham), art/start-up/research projects and alternative visions such as what I am doing with Julian Bleecker. As I said in the talk, lots of the aspects presented here as design challenges are messy to reflect the complexity of ubicomp design

Thanks to Mark Vanderbeeken, Jan-Christoph Zoels and Michele Visciola as well as the Order of Architects of Turin for setting this up!

"Interactive cities" excerpts

in

Finally got some time to read "Interactive cities" that was mentioned here a while ago. Some excerpts I found relevant to my work below: Editorial The editorial by Valérie Chatelet gives a good overview of the research questions at stake in urban planning/architecture with regards to ICTs.

"What are the implications of this new urban condition ? How do planning strategies make use of this technology ? Does the use of such technology simply enable people to improve projects or does it entail deeper changes ? What are the relevance and impact of organisational structures and the economic and social models linked to the growth of such technology ? (...) the integration of three kinds of information and communication technology (ICT) for town planning purposes : - as a tool for regulation and communication, this technology is now involved in the very functioning of towns - as a tool for measuring and examining a town. In this respect the availability of data, increased calculation capacity and advances in programming now mean that the scale of a district can be studied to the same extent as that of a town system - as a design tool, the use of digital technology means that the intervention of other players can be taken into account, along with changes and a constantly updated flow of data "

Sense of the City : Wireless and the Emergence of Real-Time Urban Systems (Carlo Ratti and Daniel Berry) In this chapter, Ratti and Berry describes some projects they're conducting about making explicit the usage of cell phone, to show patterns of activities in cities (the Mobile Landscape project). The chapter interestingly describes the added value of such information:

"Mobile landscapes could give new answers to long-standing questions in architecture and urban planning such as 1) how to map the origins and destinations of vehicles; 2) how to understand patterns of pedestrian movement; (3) how to highlight critical points in the urban infrastructure; (4) how to establish the relationship between urban forms and flows, etc. In this sense, the study of mobile landscapes could have a great impact on space syntax11, complementing and possibly substituting traditional pedestrian surveys in the future. (...) Mobile Landscape : Grazis thus a means of listening, observing, and reading the city, a tool that interprets the city as a shifting entity formed by webs of human interactions in space-time, rather than as a fixed and purely physical environment. On the one hand, it provides an analytical mechanism to further understand the urban condition in real-time. On the other hand, it provides feedback, allowing the user to change from being a passive/observed entity to an active participant. (...) initiatives that respond to the urgent need to develop new knowledge tools that mobilize these technologies to better understand the urban domain. In a certain sense, it can be said that the very technology that is changing urban patterns can be used to make them more intelligible. (...) Projects that engage the city in its present, technologically-enhanced state could begin to provide architecture and urban planning with new channels to intervene in the urban realm"

(Picture taken from the project website)

I'll get back later on the chapter by Huang and Waldvogel Why do I blog this? the two chapters I have quoted here are interesting to me because of my interest in the hybridization of the digital and the physical with regard to urban computing issues. Given that they had been written by architects, they are important because they provide some contexts to my research about what practitioners are interested in, what are the questions they want to address and what are the solutions they bring at the table.

Notes from a talk by Michael Curry

in

Tonight's talk at the EPFL Urban department seminar was "Digital individual: place, memory and the anxiety of reference" by Michael Curry (UCLA). My notes are a bit rough, taken in real time and reshaped in the train... Curry's talk was about the redrawing of the boundaries between the forgotten and the remembered caused by technologies. He went through 4 projects to show the trend towards "the multiple problems of forgetting and anxiety for references": 1) Vannevar Bush's Memex ("intimate supplement of memory", "networked Memex: sneaker network") 2) Ted Nelson's Xanadu, mirrorworlds. 3) Mirror Worlds by David Gelernter (1992): "put the universe in a shoe box": a software model of a piece of reality. You can see the mirror world through the computer screen: an annotated version of the world: a notion of a world where everything has a location, space as a framework focus on density, condition, status, a bit like google mash-ups 20 years later! 4) this is even more epitomized by Gordon Bell's MyLifeBits: a portable memory... putting one's life online, electronic bits in one's local cyberspace (texts, photographs, owns...). Everything can be monitored for the person's point of view (through wearable monitors). But, it should more accurately be termed "bits of my life" because it involves selection and censorship remains (because of legal issues + people still sleep and dream). What is different here is that inmylifebits, it's "the world as I see it, private and personal": it operates on a cartographic model, see the world from above, different from the curiosity cabinets.

To him, there is here a reminescence of curiosity cabinets like musei wormiani historia (worm, 1655). At that time, there were seen as a representation of the world: knowledge was not categorized as in natural sciences here but as a synthesis only based on a visual correspondence + aestetical resonance. A cabinet was a world full of objects that lack order... and then a structure was derived with the assumption that the world needed to ordered. There was a strong visual component given that they were meant for information retrieval through patterns of association (the cabinet as a mnemonic function, a mean of information storage). Still, it was knowledge was contemplation... the knowledge acquired was in a service of the state.

Nevertheless, neither of these piece capture the experience of necessity and uncertainty that we need in our everyday life: the ethics of forgetting is blurred. They can be uses as sources of information for others (and generally use the same categories and variables that can be used to look for terrorists). This way to see the world has taken considerable currency.

What would be missing in these system: judgements and not facts, we make statements like this all the time, we narrativizing/re-caterorizing the past all the time. What would happen when rewinding the past in mylifebits? that's what we do everytime, we revisit things we partly remember and partly forgot. Besides, there are interindividual difference about memory (a large majority of people need order to remember things and do it personally), about how people remember and forget stuff. This also does not take into account the process of re-enactment of events: people return to places where they don't feel lost, they establishment of routines of doing things. Mylifebit misses all of this. They less allow for uncertainty.

What happens is what Curry calls "anxiety of reference", a new sort of anxiety: "oh my god I will forgot what I've done when I was a kid, I'm better off recording everything from now on": this anxiety appear today in a networked worlds, a common glue on the new cabinet of curiosity: the www... which turns to be a Bentham's panopticon. And there is more to worry about: this is a real marketplace!

About that topic, see also: Collective remembering and the importance of forgetting: a critical design challenge by Anne Galloway (2006) Places to read anonymously: The ecology on attention and forgetting by Michael R. Curry and Leah A. Lievrouw (2004)

Urban hacking

in

Exposing the secret city: Urban exploration as ‘space hacking’ is an intriguing deck of slides by Martin Dodge. It's about urban exploration of "secret spaces, abandoned buildings, and other obscure, overlooked, underused, forgotten, unsafe, and disconnected built structures". Dodge, a geographer, investigated this phenomenon and some of the results are presented here, in this nice compendium of intriguing anecdotes, discussions and pictures. It describes the reasons (1. need to document space, 2. thrill of access to forbidden space, 3. desire for authentic spaces, 4. alternative aestheticism of spaces), their ethics (1. respect for places, 2. publish versus preservation, 3. freedom of access / illegality of trespass, 4. acceptability of anonymity). He then conceptualize this using the "hacker" vocabulary. The best part is certainly the end, in which he presents why "space hacking" would be important, some excerpts:

" 1. thinking through how space becomes: the space is performed through spatial practices - by sneaking in, climbing a fence, clambering down a drain, the search for good vantage points and the composition of photographs 2. the nature of territoriality: thinking about how cities are produced as ‘property’ (spatial fixity) and imagining an urban ‘right-to-roam’ (spatial mobility)? 3. ‘spatial hauntings’: the experience of place as opposed to written histories/testimonies, as a way complementing other representations, experiencing and then capturing in photographs the layers of memories in a place (memorialisation) 4. ‘cities without people’: perhaps a way of thinking post-human urbanity? what happens to space when people stop caring in the normative sense; when entropy runs unchecked 5. ‘exploration’ as method: can expeditionary practices open up ways of knowing that capture (at least partially) the fragmentary nature of places, the unknowing permeating through city, that other methods fail to capture; research becoming risky, finding things out becomes fun. UE as ‘post-method’ method, working without permission, without risk assessments, without ethical approval "

Why do I blog this Urban exploration, place hacking is a fascinating practice (tightly related to psychogeography to some extent). The conclusion is very insightful, Dodge claims that "urban exploration provide an interesting set of spatial practices through which to explore a range of geographic issues such as production of space, territoriality and property, memory and place, geographic knowledge".

Forgotten space

The picture has been taken France few weeks ago when exploring some abandoned train station.

Empathy and innovation

in

In a speculative blogpost about what can be recommended to foster innovation, Steve Portigal gave different answers. One of them is a very pragmatic and relevant answer that I I fully agree with:

"I would introduce empathy processes into government, especially departments that interact with the public or with businesses. Everyone - EVERYONE - will go through the process that their “clients” go through, on a regular basis (say, once per year). (...) The neat trick with empathy is that it leads to understanding, and then leads to problem solving."

Why do I blog this? I quite like this idea of promoting empathy (i.e. the ability to put oneself in other's shoes) as a user-centered design practice.

An bunch of old stuff

in

Old keytags Why do I blog this? I just found nice this picture of old keytags (taken last week in Nice, France). To me, it's very evocative of the passage of time and how design evolves. In addition, think about the value of objects and how this little artifacts made sense in certain period of your life: this bunch of keytags is then full of history that we can never parse since the owners are gone. Maybe it's too poetic here and a pessimistic mind would say that they're just promotional garbage that has been left out. But still.

Video hat for policemen

in

(Via Ananova) look at this news:

"Police in a Chinese city have been equipped with video hats. More than 100 patrol officers have been issued with the cameras which link to digital video-recorders attached to their belts.

Head Officer Diao, of Chongqing City Police, said: "The officer only needs to turn it on, and the machine starts to work. It has 1 gigabyte of memory, so recording for one hour should be no problem. Diao says the equipment can save police officers from being investigated for misconduct and protect them from being framed. "It happens that suspects sue police for unjustified or unlawful practice, and with this device, everything will be clear," he said. "Some of the clips could also be edited for TV.""

(Picture from Ananova)

Why do I blog this? sort of "ubiquitous computing of the present", but here it's mostly meant for a weird sousveillance trick.

Urban "sinkholes" and the habit to fill holes

in

According to the wikipedia: a sinkhole is:

" a natural depression or hole in the surface topography caused by the removal of soil or bedrock, often both, by water. (...) Mechanisms of formation may include the gradual removal of slightly soluble bedrock (such as limestone) by percolating water, the collapse of a cave roof, or a lowering of the water table. (...) Sinkholes have been used for centuries as disposal sites for various forms of waste. A consequence of this is the pollution of groundwater resources, with serious health implications in such areas."

Now, let's look at this picture I took in Geneva the other day: City sinkhole

It's of course not caused by a natural process (but rather by the constant trend lately around my block to dig holes and changes underground tubes/wiring) but it strictly follows an interesting urban rule: "when there's a hole, it's gonna be filled with junk". Holes really have good affordances.

Why do I blog this? interested by people's practices in space/urban environment, I am often amazed by how people trash stuff. I termed this "interstitial practices" because it's really about filling gaps, using whatever holes or interstices to drop artifacts. And it occurred to me that there is a lot of creativity here: people like to trash stuff in certain ways: either to hide the junk or to make it as small as possible (compressing it into a small pipe as seen below):

Interstitial practices Interstitial practice (3)

Interstitial practice (2) Interstitial practice (1)

Back to my/your interest in the future, user experience or tech foresight, how come this is pertinent?

Starting a new job

in

New job starting from April 1st, 2007 is researcher at Jef Huang's Media and Design Lab (Swiss Institute of Technology Lausanne / EPFL). What for? as described in the contract: "to explore research & funding opportunities, and conduct interdisciplinary projects at the intersection of gaming platforms and spatial environments (ranging from on-line worlds to tangible interactions/ubiquitous computing)".

In a sense, doing research projects about the user experience of gaming/game interactions and examine the opportunities of a having a research group on these themes. This means setting a strategy, finding academic partners, company sponsorships, build stuff, do projects, etc.

Awareness of the future and some thoughts about classification

in

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

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

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

Criticisms towards 3D VR in 1998

in

Kaplan, F., McIntyre, A., Numaoka, C. & Tajan, S. (1998). Growing virtual communities in 3D meeting spaces , Proceedings of the First International Conference on Virtual Worlds, pp. 286 - 297. The paper describes essential or desirable features needed for community formation in "3D virtual world systems" and discusses how the requirements are met in existing text-based and 3D environments. IMO the paper, though old, is still relevant when it comes to criticizing different dimensions:

An attractive 3D interface is assumed to be sufficient to encourage the emergence of a community. (...) The promotion of 3D virtual world systems for this use appears to be motivated by the assumption that the ’familiarity’ of the world – with its physical spaces and embodied avatars – will make it more accessible and intimate than more abstract environments. (...) is the ’meeting place’ model of community necessarily the most appropriate one for exploiting the potential of 3D virtual worlds? If we adopt this model, what can the 3D world contribute in terms of improved interaction quality which can justify the extra cost of the client? Are there other techniques we could also use to promote community-building in our virtual worlds?

The paper goes on by identifying "some essential or desirable features needed for community formation – Identity, Expression, Building, Persistence and Focus of Interest". For each of them, it criticizes how the virtual worlds available in 1998 perform and propose improvements. Though the problems they raise have been solved (identity or building are now well taken care of), some are still present:

"Expression support in 3D virtual worlds is problematic. Gestures and facial expressions are often exaggerated, and do not necessarily map well to different avatar types (if your avatar is a fish, how do you convey surprise or happiness?). Moreover, it appears that users do not easily mix text and graphics. (...) observation suggests that users are likely to be more tolerant of the limitations of a tool if they have a valid external reason for using it. If we want people to use our 3D virtual worlds instead of the simpler, swifter channel of IRC, we need to look for applications in which the use of a 3D virtual world provides an added value, rather than merely an encumbrance. Finding suitable applications is a wide-open research area. One possibility would be to move away from the ’meeting space’ model towards the ’role-adopting’ model, and use the power of the 3D world to create a compelling context for interactions"

Why do I blog this? gathering some elements for a presentation about the evolution of 3D digital worlds (to provide some context for a seminar about SL). The last point about ’meeting space’ versus ’role-adopting’ model is quite relevant (see WoW versus SL... although Habbo works pretty well with that model).

The mapping of playing objects from one game to another

in

A very intriguing patent filed by 3DO eleven years ago: Networked computer game system with persistent playing objects (William M. Hawkins, Oren J. Tversky, Nick Robins, Stewart K. Hester):

Abstract: The mapping of playing objects from one game to another. In one embodiment, generic attributes of an object may be mapped to game-specific attributes. The mapping may either change or maintain the look and feel of an object. For example, a fast but lightly-armed starship in one game may be mapped to a quick but weak warrior in another game. (...) In one embodiment, the playing objects have an existence and value outside of any individual game. (...) Modification of a playing objects either inside or outside a game may be done by mutation, replication, recombination, etc.(...) In yet another aspect, playing objects are persistently modified over time. Such modifications can arise either through game play or by on-line acquisition of improvements, or by another mechanism.

Look at the examples they give:

"could be used in other programs such as screen saver, or as audio/visual addressing in e-mail messages (...) they may be viewed in a browser or traded in a marketplace. They may be represented by cards, action figures or other physical items"

Why do I blog this? There is more to read in the patent description but this is interesting for various reasons: (1) the concept of moving objects (and characters) form virtual worlds to others is relevant in terms of the user experience of how digital environments can intersect, (2) to see WHO has the patent (for the record 3DO is a defunct company), (3) the continuum between virtual spaces and physical instantiation is present, which is quite in line with current trends.

Flavonoid

in

Speaking about 1st Life and 2nd Life connections, the Flavonoid project by Near-Future Laboratory colleague Julian Bleecker is of great interest. To put it shortly, it's a mechanism for translating embodied, kinesthetic activity into 2nd Life actions.

A homebrew, Internet-enabled kinesthetic sensor, conceptually similar to a traditional pedometer, is being designed as a networked object that bridges the geophysical worlds (1st Life) and online digitally networked worlds (2nd Life). By providing data feeds about the kinesthetic activities of the person wearing Flavonoid, various embodiments representing that data can be created in 2nd Life, such as the appearance of online avatars, or that avatar’s wealth or capabilities.

So how does it work?

The Flavonoid Kinesthometer, a wearable networkable device, can transfer data as a networked object, providing simple data feeds of one’s movement over long periods of time. This data provides a channel of RSS information used as a baseline of information that can be translated to 2nd Life representations. (...) Flavonoid is envisioned as a platform, using standard, open feed technologies, for a variety of embodiments. The initial embodiment being a dynamic site “badge” — a small snippet of HTML that can be embedded on virtually any site, such as one’s blog or social networking home page.

The Flavonoid project proposal gives a more thorough description of what is aimed at here.

Why do I blog this because this project takes the "Internet of Things" in a more interesting mode that what we've seen so far. By creating a framework for linking digital environments and the material world ("the leakage of digital networks into the physical world turns that world into a framework for a hybrid 1st Life/2nd Life"), it redefines the notion of embodiment in both environments.

This is an issue that interest me both to think about the future of ubiquitous applications and also as a user experience researcher. From a psychological point of view, there are intriguing questions to address here; especially regarding the overlap of spatial environments, their perception and how the interaction in each of them have an influence in the others.

Interlaced scenarios for the near future?

in

on the road Those splinted lines that you see in this tunnel make me think about the near future: interlaced scenarios of moments yet to come. Different possibilities, histories, inflexion points and beakthroughs. This exactly depicts some elements we tackled at the LIFT07 workshop about "designing the future": the thinking about "when change happens".

This is one of the crux element we have to tackle while doing critical foresight: unfolding the history backward from and end point to now, by describing what happenned in the forms of changes/events. The lines here can be seen as a metaphor of two different histories that unfold.

(The pic has been taken on my way to the moutains for a snowboarding trip, a sortof postLIFT07 moment)