Research

City Metabolism

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Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE Read in London Calling (interesting report about 3G cell phone could modify London) :

London is a city of flows. An endless stream of people, goods, information and money flow into the city, around the city and out of the city, supported by a complex infrastructure of networks. Sometimes haphazard, sometimes meticulously planned, these networks are crucial to the life of the city.What they do is connect, by adding new links and increasing the total number of transactions and interactions available to us. Every extension or improvement to London’s transport, utilities or telecommunications networks accelerates the pace of the city’s metabolism, driving and maintaining its success as a truly global city and the UK’s centre of wealth creation.

I like this idea of city metabolism and flow/stream of stuff

Design for Grounding

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Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE After all the work on how people use space (my literature review, my masters thesis), Pierre and me came up with the idea of “Design for grounding”.

Grounding is one of the most important process that occurs during collaboration between people among a group. It refers to the effort of constructing and updating the information about team-mates involved in a joint task. Grounding consists in being aware of what is going on (and what was going on) as well as acknowledging the partner that understood what happened.

Besides the fact that spatiality constrains social interactions, we found in various socio-cognitive experiments that space helps collaborative problem solving in different ways :

- augmenting the performance to the task - modifying communication, and mostly simplifying referential/deictic acts. - improve coordination

Our idea is hence to emphasize the notion of “Design for Grounding”. By this concept, we refer to the design of virtual environments such as groupware, CSCL platforms as well as mobile computing environments. The thing is that people use space topology (i.e. space, place, the artifacts available…) in order to solve their problems/tasks. Therefore when designing a multi-user environment, one must ask three questions :

- What are the kind of social interactions are required for the joint task ? What are the forms of interactions that could ease the task ? - Which are the topological properties of space that ease those interactions ? For instance : which artifacts, where… - How to design space with those constraints, pre-requisites ?

about proxemics and mobile devices

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david agnelii, a student of the Ivrea Interaction Design institute, works on the relationships between the use of mobile communication devices and proxemics. His claim is that " Mobile and handheld devices, in conjunction with contextualized and personalized digital information could generate a layer of digital space connected to the physical space of the body, the architectural space, and the territory of the city"

He wants to use proxemics studies to explore, understand and map some of the relationships between humans and mobile communication devices.

xml-rpc

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Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE According to Dave Winer, XML RPC "is a spec and a set of implementations that allow software running on disparate operating systems, running in different environments to make procedure calls over the Internet. It's remote procedure calling using HTTP as the transport and XML as the encoding. XML-RPC is designed to be as simple as possible, while allowing complex data structures to be transmitted, processed and returned."

For newbies -> a tutorial And a cool tutorial

RPC is a very simple extension to the procedure call idea, it says let's create connections between procedures that are running in different applications, or on different machines. The procedure call is remote (RPC stands for Remote Procedure Call). XML-RPC uses XML as the marshalling format. An XML-RPC message is an HTTP-POST request. The body of the request is in XML. A procedure executes on the server and the value it returns is also formatted in XML.

The thing is that it is possible to make query on google via XML-RPC : google gateway/

Video Games Research framework

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Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE The book J. Goldstein & J. Raessens (Eds.): Handbook of Computer Game Studies. (Boston: MIT Press) provides game researchers with an interesting framework.

According to the authors, there are six approaches (description taken from th level up conference introduction :

- “Computer games” with a focus on on computer games themselves. : ‘What’s in a game?’, ‘What games are made of’, ‘Narrative’, ‘Exploration’, ‘Text and textuality’ and ‘Pervasive games’. - “Design” concerned with the relationship between the designer and the game. Two sub-sections describe game development from the designer’s point of view, - “Reception” that focuses on the individual player’s relationship to the computer game. For instance, empirical research on the psychological effects of computer games is reviewed in ‘Kids and fun’. - “Games as a cultural phenomenon” takes a cultural approach (gender and cultural studies). - “Games as a social phenomenon,” considers normative aspects of computer gaming the effects of games on social behavior. - “Research methods”

collaborative mobile learning

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Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE Today, at the CRAFT reading group, we had a very interesting discussion about the added value of mobile devices (cell phones and PDA mostly) for collaborative learning. What we think is that it is very difficult to merge the three domaines : learning/mobility/collaboration for various reasons :

- collaboration and collaborative learning is a very fuzzy notion. The only thing we know is that it refers to situations that involves two or more persons who share the same goal and work on a joint activity (fuzzy innit ?). - apart from field studies, mobility is not really helpful with regard to pedagogical concerns (or we miss something ?) - when we try to put together all those three dimensions, there always something's missing : for instance, it is easy to conceive an application in which you can provide B with an information written by A depending on the context... but then what's the learning gain ?

My point here is that I prefer to see mobile applications as a way to support collaboration (for iinstance to foster matchmaking or social navigation) and this could be used in a learning script/scenarios.

Reading note : Team situation awareness in dynamic decision making

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H. Artman and R. Granlund. Team situation awareness using graphical or textual databases in dynamic decision making. In Proc. 9th Conference on Cognitive ergonomics, pages 149--155, 1998. This paper reports on a experiment about how people share information within a team when controlling a dynamic system (a simulated fire : geographically large, require cooperation between several actors). Four people worked together on a joint task in a layered organisation :

- layer 1 is operative : two fire chiefs who are commanding two fire units each - layer 2 is supervisory: two persons that are to co-ordinate the fire chiefs. receives all information from the fire chiefs but has to construct an overall picture (situation awareness) of the area.

In order to conduct this experiment, they used a microworld (c3) that is model of the real task. There was two conditions :

- Textual : the operators share a textual database where they can and should register the incidents and what they have done about it. This database is accessible to all operators, and constitutes a kind of collective memory of the units actions. - Graphical : a Geographic Information System (GIS), which visualizes the ambulance’s location in the area for which the team is responsible.

General hypothesis : the team using the graphical database will have more a higher correspondence of SA with the state of the world AND hence will be more effective.

Procedure : Seventy-two undergraduate students, The task is to extinguish this fire with four fire fighting units. The problem is that each person in a fire fighting unit only can see a limited window, 3 X 3 squares. The whole area is 20 X 20 squares. Two supervisories (emergency co-ordination centre operators) that control two operatives (control all four fire engines as ordered by their superiors). They should try to save the houses as well as extinguish the fire.

They were given a survey about how they experienced the fire, the co-ordination between team members, some questions related to situation assessment as well as to the interface (4-graded Likert scale).

Results : - no significant performance differences between conditions. - participants in the graphical condition did better mapping the map with the ”real” world, at least in the first session. - learning effect, especially for the textual condition - Team SA consist more of awareness of co-ordination than perception of system dynamics. About Mutual Modeling : the subjects think that they need to know what others are doing. The more successful teams are more likely to do not think it is as necessary as the less successful teams. The more successful teams think they know what others are doing without others telling them than is the case with less successful teams. Thus, successful teams seems to care less about what others are doing, or / and can infer this from other information. It could be that successful teams rely more on silent co-ordination.

Two key concepts :

new research agenda

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Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE After a short meeting with my phd advisor, we plan to move now on technical stuff. The question is how to provide iPAQ users with position/location of their partners.

I should try to list all the process as well as all the problems that could occur (wifi hotspot on different levels/floors...), position precision, which technology are available, zoom ? (possible, usability concerns), different colors ? distance computation ?, is it possible to know if a guy is at a certain location on a regualr basis (link with the database ans schedule), stand-by problem (if the ipaq is turned off, how could it communicate with the antennas ?), social dimension ( give colours to groups from same section...), fading (location history with a black to white path...), scale problem (if the user choose the wrong scale, shoudl it adapt to show the partner's location or just giving an arrow to tell the dimension).

how to do this practically ?

Evaluation methods in the CSCW literature

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Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE Read here, evaluation methods in the CSCW literature :

- Heuristic evaluation (HCI): relies on an evaluator's immediate reactions, intuitions and predictions, categorised under a set of Design Principles and Usability Attributes. - User testing (HCI) - Lab experiments (Cognitive/Social Psychology) : collect quantitative data about a single specific factor, attempting to screen out other influences (decontextualised and artificial nature of these experiments) - Interviews & Questionnaires, Focus Groups and Customer Feedback (Social Psychology) - Longtitudinal trials and Semi-realistic ethnography (Sociology). - Ethnography (Sociology) - Conversation Analysis and Interaction Analysis. (Ethnomethodology) - Breakdown Analysis. (Computer Science/Philosophy) A breakdown is defined as any incident where the user has cause to focus on the system rather than the task.

william gibson and virtual space (2)

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I don't know if you ever noticed the very close relationships between the way William Gibson designed/imagined virtual space and gestalts forms !, for instance this kind of forms or relations :

He saw cyperspace has "A graphical representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the non-space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data." like he proposes in Neuromancer, 1984. Even though he did not give any graphical representations, readers were left by his very nice description. In my vision, the way he depicts virtual space (namely cyberspace) rely on Gestalt.

That is why the author talks about "the media gestalt" : "jacked into the media gestalt". Indeed, Gestalt theorists were intrigued by the way our mind perceives wholes out of incomplete elements. To the Gestaltists, things are affected by where they are and by what surrounds them...so that things are better described as "more than the sum of their parts". Gestaltists believed that context was very important in perception.

william gibson and virtual space

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Via jahsonic "In his science fiction novels, William Gibson's hallucinatory account of cyberspace provided the first social and spatial blueprint for the digital frontier. In his 1984 novel Neuromancer – a colorful, disturbing account of our emerging information society – he added the word "cyberspace" to our vocabulary. His writings explore the implications of a wired, digital culture, and have had tremendous influence on the scientists, researchers, theorists, and artists working with virtual reality. Gibson's notion of an inhabitable, immersive terrain that exists in the connections between computer networks, a fluid, architectural space that could expand endlessly – an invitation to "jack in" to the "digital matrix" – has opened the door to a new genre of literary and artistic forms, and has shaped our expectations of what is possible in virtual environments."

phd bazar

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Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE Modélisation de la position de mon partenaire dans un groupe de travail. En quoi cela affecte ma compréhension de la tâche, la performance, les interactions, la répartition des rôles...

face à un objet que l'on doit étudier, quelle position adopte l'expert ?... la position de l'expert par rapport à l'objet permet de mieux comprendre le phénomène... je sais que si l'expert a regardé l'objet ainsi, c'est que c'est une face intéressante

craft meeting 12th november

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Wednesday, we will have a workshop at CRAFT about Mobile Learning, with people from Taiwan. I have to prepare a talk on my phd topic. Here is the outline : - At CRAFT, we are concerned with studying collaboration : CSCL/CSCW. Describing briefly the collaborative processes. - Spatiality is of importance in social interactions (global picture) - Spatiality is of interest in collaborative problem solving (4-5 results in multi-user envirnoments like Bootnap, Triviaworld, Proxima and Spaceminers) - ... my phd scope : studying the socio-cognitive impacts of spatiality (location awareness) one collaborative processes (grounding, division of labor, mutual modelling).

bluetooth mail and messaging

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Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE I am currently testing bluetooth application for my iPAQ. Proximitymail by Inventop "ProximityMail(TM) turns PDAs into a localized community messaging network. ProximityMail is a collaborative communications application for Bluetooth PDAs that enhances the way localized communities of people network, communicate, and collaborate." ProximityMail turns groups of Bluetooth PDAs into a spontaneous "random area network" .

stuff about spatiality

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Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE Via CSISS : the Simonett's Cube provides a model of the various essential components of geography (taken from their learning resources corner) :

Fundamental Concepts: The Spatial Perspective

I. The Spatial Perspective A. Maps: the cartographic tradition has always been unique to geography. B. Scale 1. Global/Regional/Local 2. Interaction across scales C. Location 1. Absolute Location: latitude and longitude coordinates 2. Relative Location: location in relation to other places 3. Site vs. Situation a. Site: actual place and its physical characteristics b. Situation: external reference or context of the place D. Distance 1. Absolute Distance: measured in a standard metric 2. Relative Distance: measured in time or economics E. Direction 1. Absolute Direction: North, South, East, West 2. Relative Direction: more colloquial, i.e. "the deep south," or "the far east" II. Maps in Human Geography A. Geographic Information Systems and GIScience 1. "GIS's are simultaneously the telescope, the microscope, the computer, and the Xerox machine of regional analysis and synthesis of spatial data." Ron Abler. 2. GIScience involves research emerging from "...the generic issues that surround the use of GIS technology, impded its sucessful implementation, or emerge from an understanding of its potential capabilities." Michael Goodchild. B. Maps and place attributes 1. Cultural and Physical attributes 2. Structured place attributes/spatial distribution a. density: points/unit area b. linear, clustered, or dispersed arrangements 3. Interaction among places a. accessibility: characterisitc of a spot (i.e. the Netherlands rail system) b. connectivity: the characteristics that fuse and hold places together c. First law of Geography: "everything is related to everything else, but relationships are stronger when ther are near to one another." Waldo Tobler C. Maps and Environmental Issues 1. Environmental pollution (risk studies) 2. Human-Environment interaction (maps of deforestation in the Amazon) 3. Remote Sensing 4. Global Positioning System (GPS) D. Maps and Human Mobility --Volume (i.e. migration systems) use arrows and line thickness to indicate volume and direction or outmigration probabilities plotted on a contour map E. Depicting Regions on Maps 1. Criteria and attributes 2. Formal Regions 3. Perceptual Regions 4. Functional Regions 5. Hierarchical Regions F. Maps in the Mind 1. Helpful for understanding human behavior 2. Culturally influenced and subjective 3. Mental maps (James and Colleen's maps) 4. Environmental Perception III. Insights of Geography A. Places have location, direction, and distance with respect to other places B. Scale is important--places may be large or small C. A place has both physical structure and cultural content D. The characteristics of places develop and change over time E. Places interact with other places F. The content of places is rationally structured G. Places may be generalized into regions of similarities and differences IV. Map Projections A. Perpetual problem of projecting a spherical surface onto a planar surface --scale: map units/units in the real world B. Properties of the globe grid: 1. All meridians are of equal length; eah is one half the length of the equator 2. All meridians converge at the poles and are true north-south lines 3. All lines of latitude (parallels) are parallel to each other and the equator 4. Parallels decrease in length as one nears the poles 5. Meridians and parallels intersect at right angles 6. The scale on the surface of the globe is the same in every direction C. Geometrical Projections 1. Graticule is transferred to geometric shape (plane, cone, and cylinder) and shape is cut and flattened 2. Orthographic projections: light source is at infinity 3. Gnomonic projections: light source is at the center of the sphere 4. Stereographic projections: light source is at antipode D. Mathematical Projections 1. Emphasize and preserve elements of a globe grid that perspective projections cannot. 2. Map Distortions: a. Equal area maps preserve proportional size but distort shape b. Conformal maps preserve true shape and directionality for small areas c. Equi-distant maps correctly represent true great arc distances between 2 points on maps but distance between other points is distorted d. Azimuthal maps preserve directionality when direction is radiating from one central point 3. All maps will be distorted, must decide what it is you want preserved and choose map accordingly.

Human Settlements -- Central Place Theory

I. Cities and Technology A. Technology causes growth and transition B. John Borchant's Evolutionary Epochs: 1. Sail-Wagon (1790-1830)--Eastern Seaboard 2. Iron Horse (1830-1870)--The Train, leads to macro settlements 3. Steel-Rail (1870-1920) a. Industrial Revolution b. Strong in the Northeast c. Distance between places matters less d. Some suburbanization at this point (for those who can afford it) 4. Auto-Air-Amenity (1920-1970) a. Greater connectivity between places b. Increasing suburbanization c. Amenities start driving locational decisions 5. High-Technology (1970-?) --Telecommunications --"Armoured Train" painting by Gino Severini--movement in futurist art, predicts the fast-paced life of cities II. Keith Clarke's Urban Growth Model III. Central Place Theory A. Definitions: 1. Centrality: amount of draw to a particular place 2. Threshold: minimum population for normal profits 3. Range: distance consumer is willing to travel to purchase a product B. Assumptions 1. Uniform spatial distribution of population income 2. Isotropic transport surface 3. Consumers will patronize nearest market 4. No excess profits (range = threshold)-- hexagonal pattern C. Higher order cities have higher order services --large market in the middle contains very high order functions that require a large market area D. Relax Assumptions: 1. Population income variation--wealthy vs. non-wealty areas, wealthy areas do not usually need as large of a threshold 2. Variation in transport surfaces 3. Consumer Behavior/Individual Preferences 4. Profits E. Applications to Retail and settlement_systems 1. Equal Distribution/Patterning of Space (i.e. video stores) 2. Do cities of similar size have approximately equal spacing? F. Christaller and Central Place Theory 1. Functional Structure 2. CBD at center, then central city, then suburbs IV. Urban Ecology: Classic Models A. Concentric Zone: Burgess in the 1920's B. Sector Model: Hoyt in the 1930's 1. Do not see concentric zones when you look at the land 2. Sectors: Industry, high rent near recreation/retail C. Multiple Nuclei: Harris and Ulman in the 1940's --Example: Los Angeles--all kinds of zones, quite partitioned D. Urban Realms Model --a CBD, but multiple suburbs that have suburban downtowns, also, a "New Downtown" outside of the CBD V. Urban Renewal and Gentrification --"Yuppy" movement back into downtowns--higher-income, single, or no children couples living in suburban downtowns or "New Downtown" --Gentrification: the rehabilitation of deteriorated inner-city housing with favorable locations relative to the CBD

DESIGN AND LOCAL KNOWLEDGE: DOORS IN OSLO

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Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE Via doors of perception : "What kinds of value reside in a locality? What tools are available for mapping communication flows, and for the notation of local knowledge? What are the success factors for design projects in real-world situations? If your project contains answers to any of these questions, tell us about it. We are looking for best-practice case studies, and exploitable insights, for the Spark! conference in Oslo next May. The event is for research and project managers in postgraduate design and architecture education, together with their clients in cities and companies. Spark! is a project of Cumulus, Europe's association of design and art universities, together with Doors of Perception. The conference, which is hosted by the University of Oslo's School of Architecture, is on 5 and 6 May, 2004, Oslo. The conference website and call for papers is at: http://www2.uiah.fi/virtu/spark/conference.html

concepts from elsewhere

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Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE Via reading notes : about a book from The spaces between buildings by Larry R. Ford : "Spaces between buildings are considered subordinate and ordinary but they are spaces that exist in the collective memory as the factor that makes the sense of a place. The spaces surrounding buildings loom large in my memories of growing up in the city (...)The author is concerned with ordinary spaces between buildings, including those architectural features like window types and door placements, porches, steps, walkways, gates, gardens, driveways, sidewalks, lawns, street trees, alleys, patios, decks, cellar doors, fences, court-yards, parking lots...The idea is to concentrate on particular types of ordinary spaces and how they came to be, what they look like, and how they are used. He introduces several larger urban design concerns along the way, such as the economic and social impact of the increasing dominance of space over buildings. For the most of the book the author concerns with the details including observations of different types of ordinary spaces, speculations on how and why they evolved, what they mean in our everyday lives, and what trends exist that might change things in the future."

locative media : state of the art

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Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE I am currently working on a state of the art/literature review of all the technologies, concepts in the field of 'locative media'. I would like to classify all those devices with regard to their spatial awareness features.

Categories : - spatial annotations - events triggering - informal awareness tool (who has been there...) - social navigation - discovering a place : collaborative mapping ? - matching (social mapping) : FOAF stands for 'Friend Of A Friend' : person A knows person B, person B knows person C is geographically close to C -> So that A and C can be notified of their proximity and their connection through mutual friend B

roadmap_30-10-2003

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Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE - find applications for I&C building (LCD screen + camera + sensors) : what content to display ? - talk November 12nd about spatial awareness and collaborative tasks - finish paper for CSCW - paper for Journal of Multimedia - SMS project : card ! map of Lausanne ! - find collaborative game for iPAQ. - … - phd application form -> Pierre -> telatar