Etech 2008: Tom Coates about Fireeagle

Tom Coates announced the launching of a geo-service called Fire eagle. 3 ideas behind the scene that informed this project: - we should build services that cam manifest everywhere the network touches - the back-end of ubicomp. - in this new world we're creating, the service should stay in a silo but they should play well with others. - decouple the creation and use of data: one service to create data, another one to use them.

These 3 things are particularly important in the domain of location-based services most of existing LBS are falling into one of these 2 categories: getting location / using location. Very restrictive. A better model: get location on one side and then other services for using location. But we can go past that: if any service in the world you inform any service.

Fire eagle: allows you to share your locations with other sites and services safely through a secure server. Fire Eagle keeps only the most recent piece of location information it has received. It helps you to share your location online as you want, control your data and privacy, easily build location services.

From the user perspective, very trivial, you go and set your location (text, GPS coordinates...) and you can connect with other applications such as Dopplr. And Dopplr can update your fireagle location depending on where you plan to be (the service provided by Dopplr)

Fire eagle is close to the idea of "Spimes", object that represents themselves in space and time.

Design as choice

Encountered yesterday in Venice Beach:

Why do I blog this? design is about choice, why have some letters been chosen on that keypad? why others have been discarded? perhaps there aren't anything that starts with "I" or "Y" in the choices proposed.

Another example about design choices: why there aren't any cut/copy and paste on the iphone?

Etech 2008: Fictional futures

"Fictional futures" by Matt Webb. Matt discussed his favorite concepts from science fiction because he likes to take the ideas in the science fiction and take them back to the everyday, inspire product design. To him, scifi is good to identify things that falls into the same metaphor species as design: "I don't make a distinction between scifi and reality". So, some examples he described:

1. One favorite is moving cities: kim stanley robinson's "meanwhile the city slid over us..." + archigram's walking city + cedric price (the aviary at London Zoo). What does that mean? what would that be to live in a moving city? How would that change our conditions?
2. another is the moon: Italo Calvino's cosmicomics: story of a sort-of second moon (Cruithne). Why this is interesting? think about what would it be like to live on a city like on the second moon? What would the everyday be like on that planet that have a 385 orbit?
3. show lots of pictures of stars... that inspire him to design lightcone "a constantly updating list of all the stars that have been enveloped by your own personal lightcone". You can subscribe to your own lightcone.
4. Still about stars, Lacerta is in Greg Egan’s book Diaspora. Impressive descriptions that helps the thing to be more true (and more believable to him than Gibon's descriptions in Neuromancer). What is the lesson here? It means that features outside of the main story are necessary for believability and for people to accept the narrative into their lives. It inspired him that design.
5. How low-level physics affect spatial patterns (in Greg Egan's Diaspora): separation of output and input, what you can grasp/reach versus what you can see and touch. In Second Life, your character is your output but you can move your viewpoint... which is weird, you can't do that in physical reality. SL is a world where you can move a camera separated from the body. That's an interesting design issue.
6. Slow species: creatures that live over a huge period of time (orion nebula) as seen in Olaf Stapledon’s book, Star Maker or in Diaspora by Greg Egan. Implications for design: what would it mean to think at a speed where it takes thousands of years just for a signal to pass from one side of your mind to the other? What about slow communication?
7. Shows lots of examples of network and closed systems: Birthday of the World (by Ursula Le Guin), people who spend 6th generation to reach a star: they live in a close system, what does that mean? contained space, they’ve no idea what shoes are—their world is carpeted. There’s no disease, no concept of going outside. The novel is about what religion does arise out of this? this is important because our planet needs to be thought as a closed system. Would Discovery, Le Guin’s generation ship, feel like Catalhoyuk, an old sumerian city that has NO STREETS (to get to your house, you had to climb up on top of the city). The web had no street at the beginning: no search engine, etc.

Notes from the Mobile City conference

Some notes of things that I found relevant to me at the Mobile City conference. Malcolm McCullough Malcom gave an insightful talk about the history of "urban inscriptions" and how the City has been the place of "marking" for a long time. First, "the city itself is an inscription" and there lots of instances of inscriptions from graffiti to state proclamations to the contentions of branding, and from petroglyphs to banners to lit facades, the architecture of the city has been layered with lasting messages. To him, there's an tension between "locative media/emergent culture of street level participatory urban computing" AND the "built environment as a new media", sort of "tagging versus LED display". In one case, it's about the fashion of blinking "push media" (displays), in the other, it's a rather "pull" mode. As he claimed "locative media is different from watching a war from your bed alone, it's like dog marking fire hydrant". And it asks the question "must media means remoteness?".

Moreover, the layering of cities have some analogies with past histories of electricity and print, that - in their times - also covered cities. Text was pretty scarce at first, but then handbills and gazettes started to spread and there was text everywhere. Electrification also gave rise to industrial design and situated technologies: lights, streets lamps. The tech then became ambient: air conditioning, radio advertising (through outdoor speakers)... he showed a very peculiar example of "rock speakers":

There is thus a "toxic data smog" along with "a competition for eyeballs on buildings". This pollution should be "managed" and although the answer in Sao Paulo (removal of urban ads.) is a bit extreme, it certainly acknowledges the presence of a problem.

Christian Nold Nold 's presentation was entitled "The Locative Media Autopsy" as he criticized the notion of "locative media": what does it refer to? the community who created that term or the weird gadgets we are talking about? He thinks that these applications are not representing the right representations of cities. To him, the work of Blast Theory or GPS drawings are nice but are only a limited account of cities and wondered about the presence of people and social relationships in there (or the lack of). He then criticized projects such as Real Time Rome stating that they are interesting but are a techno-fetishistic way to represent Rome: where is the history of Rome? What kind of social relationships are represented behind these atomic explosions?

Locative Media, for Nold, is about verbs such as "gather/share/play/visualize/imagine" currently. And he thinks the field should rather focus on "collaborate (people, institutions), archive, educate, challenge (politics), change behavior (although it may sound instrumental) and organise". That's why he think Oakland crimespotting (Stamen Design) interesting because they re-interprete publicly available data and make then legible for people. He also showed very basic examples of "register your fruit tree": maps where people indicate where passers-by can collect fruits on certain trees.

He concluded saying that locative media can be a way to engage people in a long-term relationship with their environment and their issues of concern. To do so, locative media should take an extra step to really make it work.

Jeroen van Shaik This one was not a keynote presentation but one of the project description. Van Shaik described "Urbanism on Track", an urban planning project that explores the possibilities of the application of knowledge from research on activity patterns using new tracking technologies. His research question is "is it possible for urban planners to adopt these tracking technologies as a tool? is there a future for urban planning with these technologies?" and discussed why they can be relevant for urban designers/planners.

Using examples drawn from Spatial Metro, he showed how activity patterns can represent urban attraction, invisible borders, the structure of the city, the relation between movement and people's purposes or the relation between time spent in certain places and patterns of movements.

To him, tracking have challenges: - re-conceptualizes City-ICT relationships - tracking tech are space/time adjusting (see Jannelle and Gillespie, 2004: Space–time constructs for linking information and communication technologies with issues in sustainable transportation): there is a difference between cities (which are about building streets, material stuff), which tracking technologies is not. - re-ceonptualizes the role of urban research, urban design/planning OR merely a new research instrument? As Jeroen said, "perhaps tracking tech are nothing more than a tool but at least we have batter pictures". And they need to be combined with other design tools.

The problem of tracking tech is that it measures the past state of affair whereas design is about the future. And we can never track the future patterns.

Stephen Graham This talk was a presentation of Graham and Crang's paper entitled "Sentient cities ambient intelligence and the politics of urban space" published in Information, Communication & Society, a reflection on politics, locative media and ubiquitous computing and how we are moving towards "a society of enacted environments". With Ubiquitous computing, architecture and urban spaces are continually animated, brought into being and continually performed. This leads to a "calculative background", a "technological unconscious" that brings both opportunities and political questions. What was great in his talk was all this precise (and almost poetic) vocabulary social scientists/geographers have about the politics of urban computing, very much in the same vein of Rob Kitchin or Martin Dodge.

Graham proposed 3 starting points: 1) To abandon the notion of a "real" and a "virtual" world. The situation is best understood not as real/virtual binary but rather simply the latest process in a long history of remediation that refashions and extends earlier media (as proposed by Bolter and Grusin in 1999). It's indeed a "new layering" and holographics or cyberspace are wrong vision: we're not abandoning physical mobiltiy. 2) Cities can be seen to emerge as fluid machines, places which combine "distant proximity" and "proximate distance". It's more accurate to follow Deleuze and Guattari when they take the city as a process and not as a shape: with flows of energy, people goods, services, etc. Therefore it's interesting to see how locative media fit into cities as a process. 3) Like all new technologies, ubicomp and locative media tend to becomes hidden and disappear at precisely the moment they become most important. As Mark Weiser stated, "the most profound technologies are those who disappear" but we're not yet at that stage. But the SATNAV/GPS navigator tends now to disappear (to re-appear when they fail). Technologies becomes adopted and becomes a part of our infrastructure, creating a "sociological black-box", "th engineers' stuff".

For Graham, several trajectories of ubicomp are emerging, each struggling to becomes fixed, normalized and standardized: consumerisation, militarization/ securitisation and finally urban activism/democratization.

Consumerization is about creating the long-dream of "friction-free capitalism" and enhance the control of consumption, this sort of long-standing trope of perfect flow, complete efficiency, seamless interconnection and annihilation of space through time. What falls into this category: RFID for "smooth flows" and "just-in-time management", Microsoft Aura, software-sorting techniques that recommodify public infrastructure into neoliberal mobility marketplace (faster lane on the highway if you pay), prioritized internet traffic depending on services used, call-centres or on-line GIS that enable to get different services depending the neighborhood (software-sorted cities).

Militarization/ securitisation towards "passage-point urbanism" or "the clutter of concealment" or as a way to "differentiate the good and the bas people". The anonymity of the city is seen as a problem requiring profiling, data-mining, anticipation and tracking to identify targets. Hence the development of biometrics, detection of walking styles, etc. because "everyone is a potential war target" and identifying bad people is difficult because "leaders look like everyone else". A good example is also "privium" at Schiphol airport, which leads to "software-sorted mobility" or a selectivity of street usage through facial recognition. As he said, "we should all grow beards women included". Most of the time, technology is put in place for other reasons (for instance the congestion charge in London was meant to limit traffic) but then, once the system is in place, it can be used for other purposes than intended. So the question is how can you build regulation robust enough to prevent misuse? Graham recommends the work of Jordan Crandall about this.

Urban activism and democratization: this is where might the re-enchantment can come from, to re-politicize the city: to reclaim the potential of augmented space, re-appropriate technologies (calls for new forms of public action) and new social performances. What is interesting is that technologies often start military, then are commercially exploited or tweaked by artists.

He concluded saying that multiple visions of "sentient urbanism" are struggling with these new technologies of locative media to become fixed into infrastructure, striving to remediate urban life in various ways. He argued that relations between these multiple visions are poorly understood. Also, temporality is important because it's about inferring the future and delegating agency to invisible and sentient systems.

SHARE (Turin) about manufacturing

Next week's must see event in Turin, Italy: SHARE, a conference curated by Bruce Sterling:

"The theme for the 2008 edition, which will dominate the contents of the conferences, round tables, workshops and performances, is the new materiality of digital arts. In the 90s the net art phenomenon addressed a need to reach beyond its own limits, drawing immateriality into the equation and threatening the real. Nowadays, society relates to technologies in a natural way by allowing the immaterial to become real. By exploring new, intelligent interaction between man and machine, this relationship has been completely integrated into everyday life. In the new millennium man and machine interact on the same level, shaping and changing the surrounding environment as they see fit."

Won't be able to make it there but the line-up is very good:

"Speakers and guests are many, including Montse Arbelo, Andrea Balzola, Massimo Banzi, Luis Bec, Gino Bistagnino, Julian Bleecker, Chiara Boeri, Stefano Boeri, PierLuigi Capucci, Stefano Carabelli, Antonio Caronia, Paolo Cirio, Gianni Corino, Lutz Dammbeck, Luca De Biase, Kees de Groot, Hugo Derijke, Giovanni Ferrero, Fabio Franchino, Joseba Franco, Piero Gilardi, Owen Holland, Janez Jansa, Nicole C. Karafyllis, Maurizo Lorenzati, Mauro Lupone, Giampiero Masera, Motor, Ivana Mulatero, Daniele Nale, Anne Nigten, Donald Norman, Marcos Novak, Gordana Novakovic, Giorgio Olivero, Claudio Paletto, Luigi Pagliarini, Katina Sostmann, Stelarc, Bruce Sterling, Pietro Terna, Franco Torriani, and Viola van Alphen."

Near future of pervasive games at USC

This afternoon, I was invited by Julian to give an informal talk at USC in his "experimental game topics" course. I showed a bunch of projects from others that I find interesting and it triggers a discussion about the near future of mobile/pervasive games, what are the main factors, the limits, the "pain factors" etc. Slides can be downloaded here (pdf, 8Mb). It's just a compilation of various projects to reflect on different topics.

AK-47: criteria of good design?

Read in Good

"The problem is that “good design” didn’t look much beyond the object itself. An AK-47 rifle, for example, makes use of sound and appropriate materials and it demonstrates other criteria of good design, such as solid workmanship, efficiency, and suitability of purpose—the gun was designed so that nothing, from sand to ice, could get in and prevent it from firing. Plus, its robust and “honest” appearance is pleasing. For many, the AK-47 is a classic in the annals of good design (it also happens to be most popular firearm in the world). But the question then is: good for what and for whom?"

People who wants more details can also read the Wikipedia entry about the comparison between the AK-47 and the M16:

"The M16 and the AK-47 design, capabilities, and role on the battlefield were reflections of the different experience and doctrine of the United States and the Soviet Union. (...) The AK-47 was the result of Soviet combat experience during. Studies of battlefield reports showed most combat occurred within 300 meters, and the winner was usually the side with the most firepower. (...) The M16, on the other hand, was influenced by the U.S. Army's preference for an accurate semi-automatic weapon. Although the U.S. Army’s studies into World War II combat accounts came up with very similar results to that of the Soviets', the Army maintained its traditional views and preferred highly accurate weapons."

Why do I blog this? interesting issues regarding controversial objects and the role of "theory"/doctrine in designing an object. It makes me think that machine guns from the french army have "ultima ratio" carved on them (which means "last resort").

The mechanical and electronic processes of Rotterdam

Having spend few days in Rotterdam makes me realize how this European city was a very interesting example of how the spatial environment can show heavily-visible signs of mechanical and electronic processes. And this, with different levels of interaction with regards to whom (or what) can influence this process. Let's pick up son pictures from my urban safari to illustrate this. Given its geographical location, Rotterdam has a big port. Therefore, you have plenty of devices that are related to how a port process material. Cranes for example are omnipresent but other devices are just remnants of past activities (and machinery to activate them)

Still in terms of mechanics, bridges can be moved above canals (as in other cities in the Netherlands) and automation seems to be pervasive as indicated by those signs:

But the environment can also be responsive, as attested by these red crane-like objects on Schouwburgplein square. Designed by West8, theses hydraulic cranes can be controlled by a panel situated on the square so that anyone can set the position of the light.

Of course, this is also reflected in the architecture through very classical ambient displays such as the cladding of Renzo Piano's building for KPN Telecom. It acts as a giant billboard that displays patterns that change throughout the day.

Back on Schouwburgplein square, very curious clock-like shapes are adopting dancing patterns in a somewhat ambient display-like ballet:

At the individual level, there are also lots of examples of spaces from everyday life that becomes reliant on software (sort of what Kitchin and Dodge refer to as "code/space"). See for instance, the use of chipkaart (metro pass), the omnipresence of chipknip or how the inhabitants can use their cell-phone to deal with parking lots:

That is even more intriguing when you encounters buildings whose shape adopt the form of machinery:

Why do I blog this? To some extent, I've been amazed by how wandering around in the city gave a feeling of "urban computing" at the lower level sense. As if there was some background sense of systems operating implicitly, quietly in a sort of ballet of movements and displays more or less controlled by the inhabitants. IMHO, it definitely exemplify the city as a dynamic process with changing shapes. My examples are of course not exhaustive, and some of them can also be found elsewhere but the combinations there seemed to be utterly explicit.

In addition, beyond "urban computing" notion such as location-based services or touch-interactions, it's rather when I encounter street signage about "automation" that I feel the digital city.

In a panel at the Mobile City conference

Participated in a panel yesterday as the Mobile City conference in Rotterdam. The event was great and fully packed with a nice program and audience. The conference was a multidisciplinary even about locative media/mobile technologies and their relation to the City. The panel was about “Designing for Mobile Media & Urban Spaces: between Theory and Practice” and addressed challenges and opportunities of the field, as well as the link between theory and practice. Although my panel-colleagues were speaking at high level socio-politic theory, my point was to focus on issues regarding interaction design and spatial environment (not that I dismiss the privacy issues of locative media or the politics of ubicomp but it's not my field).

My point was to describe one of the limit of current location-based services design: the fact that most of the time space (the material environment) is assumed to be uniform and homogeneous. Based on the work we did in the CatchBob! project (a location-based gamed developed to be played on our campus), as well as some other material, I described how this was not the case. The organizers asked us to bring 3 pictures to exemplify this. These 3 issues/pictures are not exhaustive of course.

My first point was about the roughness of the environment: the world have flaws, breakdown, accidents, things are being repaired or regulations make systems more complicated. And because of that, users of location-based applications are sometimes lost, frustrated or clueless about what is happening on their screen. In our tests, we had some users who felt lost on our campus (where they have been studied for 3 years!). So the environment is dynamic and conditions change (not to mention the weather that could influence the positioning accuracy or the topography).

(Picture courtesy of Patrick Jermann)

The second point concerned the heterogeneity of space. The picture shows the mapping of WiFi antennas or our campus. As one can see, they are not evenly distributed and since we used Wireless signals to compute people's location in space, it was clear that the accuracy was different depending on the location in space (it was less accurate in the lower part). In addition, the heterogeneity of space is also caused by topographical limits: indoor/outdoor transitions for example.

(Picture courtesy of Fabien Girardin)

And finally, that picture shows three different traces of a passage in space using a GPS. Depending on the level considered, the accuracy of the positioning is way different (from dots to a straight line). Sometimes it's not even continuous, so how can we design a service based on that?

Down the road, my point was to show through these 3 examples that there are limits to the continuity of the user experience. All the components of the locative media ecosystem are complex and they can either be taken as limits or as opportunities.

Thanks Michiel and Martijn for the invitation. I'll try to put my (long) notes later on.

Queues and interaction design

Donald Norman's column about the analogy between "queues and interaction design" was very thoughtful:

"What is a buffer? It is a holding space between two systems, sometimes in space, sometimes in time, allowing the objects or information from one system to await the next system. (...) We can see buffers in operation almost everywhere. For example, when I walk into a dining room and see the food waiting to be dispersed to the guests, these are inventories of food, buffers. Even when eating from a plate heaped with food, the food not yet in the mouth is inventory, a buffer that makes it easy to select from the preferred orderings at the eater’s own pace. (...) Interaction design is about interfaces, which means it is about synchronizing the events of different systems, about memories, buffers, queues and waiting rooms. Waiting is an unavoidable component of interfaces, an unavoidable part of life."

Why do I blog this? just found the analogy intriguing.

Metro pass surfaces

To access the underground:

To recharge your card/pass:

(Seen in Paris last week)

Why do I blog this? I just wanted to point the size and color of the contact area (coherence and homogeneity). This big violet circle is intriguing and as you can see on the second picture there is a sort of "tail" maybe to facilitate the passing of the card/pass when moving. The tail allow the user not to stop to validate his/her card.

Foresight session at LIFT08

Still a struggle to find time to blog my notes from the LIFT08 conference. Here are some notes from the session about foresight. Scott Smith As defined by his complany tagline, Scott talked about "seeing change differently" or how to help people to see change more clearly. He defined foresight as "keeping your mind and your eyes aware of the periphery as well as what is in the immediately linear future, as there is always something that could disrupt your path". Following William Gibons's quote that the "future is already here but it's not evenly distributed", Scott then described how the future is hidden in little places or pockets we are not always aware of and insisted on the important of qualitative data (over quantitative extrapolations). Hence the importance of ethnographical approaches. He insisted on a set of tips to adopt a qualitative foresight approach: (1) be aware of what's going on around you, (2) scan, collect, organize, (3) look for patterns and deep currents, (4), understand the role of values, (5) have a view, but not an ideology (and be ready to step outside your boundaries), (6), stay grounded, (7), be prepared to leave behind the artifacts of your experience.

Francesco Cara Francesco works at Nokia, he's design strategist and basically described the sort of approach to innovation he favors. He started by insisting on the notion of ecosystem and complex systems drawn from Piaget that shaped his vision hereafter. Looking at the evolution of mobile communication, he showed how the ecosystem got more complex over time: from GSM phone units (closed by regulators, carriers, manufacturers) to WAP-based phone with more capabilities to exchange "with the outside" and finally a third stage with new services that tap into the Internet (maps, email...) and new entrants (Google, Apple). To do so, he actually used visualization from a project conducted at our EPFL lab called "Mapping the Digital World, Visualizing the fundamental structure of the digital world in mobile devices . This last stage forms a sort of "cloud" of services that is so complex that our way to interact with it are totally different. But the problem is the one of the interface: how to interact with this complex ecosystem?

(Picture taken by Bruno Giussani)

Francesco showed the different approaches adopted by companies such as Blacberry (specialized: email), chaotic interface with various ways to use services (Sony Ericcson), desktop-based (Apple iPhone) or portal-based (Windows). He then advocated for "fresh" innovation. And why is this in a foresight session? Francesco's point is that sometimes innovation does not lie in observing the past or looking for weak signals but rather to develop brand new approach and create new metaphor (that can of course be based on analogical reasoning, taken from other domains). His claim was not that the stuff presented by Scott is wrong but rather that innovation if a combination of both and it all boils down to the level of granularity in the data you need to inform design.

Bill Cockayne Bill started off by making a strong point that what he talks about is not "futurism" but "foresight" and the role it plays in the innovation process. What he means is rather how to inform the building of something that is 1-2 product life cycle away. Depending on the products (car: 10 years+, nokia: closer), what happen is generally 1st product cycle (made now), 2nd product cycles (strategized now) and what happen for the 3rd product cycles?

Bill focuses on where you kind of start the whole process. He explained how the ideas he presents has been developed as Stanford. For instant, they adopted the ambiguity curve as a way to decribe the process. It's used by Prof. Leifer at Stanford and it's inspired by work from MIT+Buckminster Fuller. The ambiguity curve is not explicitly referenced but it shows how the situation evolves. At the beginning, you have ideas (beginning of a problem) with a vast ambiguity ("but we have to live in it"). All the way to shipping a product you retain ambiguity but there are different stages:

The thing is that people are having a problem to figure out where to fit in this process, to be aware of one's strength or how to maximize them. What is design, what is foresight? How to connect d+f? The problem between r+d= people from research why what they give to developers is shipped and people from development never visit the researcher's office because they have work to do today. And there are same issues with foresight and design. However, there are no breaks between r and f or between r and d, eventually you have to ship products! There are 3(+1) stages: (0), wallow (what Scott described: looking for the future, not ready to start the projects, be aware and intuitive, scan/look/analyze data), (1) foresight (prepare and sense), (2) research (form and analyze) and (3) design (integrate, develop)

What is important here is the notion of roles, which was developed afterwards. I strongly recommend here to have a look at at the impressive work done by Michele Perras, who recreated the images form Bill's slides. For example the one that shows the different types of roles (see also Bill's discussion of the role on her blog which nicely covers the topic in greater details):

(Re-created by Michele Perras)

Bill then described what roles can fit with what part of the process and along the ambiguity curve. He also presented what sort of process takes place: informal/formal/corporate.

His last advice was to know yourself, and what role you can play: 1) if you wanna be an expert, please remain an expert; stay at school kids, focusing on what you're good at 2) t-person: learn another language, something complementary (take a design degree if you're en business expert), vast need for this people 3) break your breadth, take a new expertise 4) come talk to people like scott, francesco, bill and read widely

Why is that important? why did he talk about roles and not tools to predict the future? Because change is constant, which means that new opportunities appear constantly and "we love opportunities because that's where innovation comes from" and knowing where you excel at will help you to know who you are and make you more comfortable in the change environment and help you tell other people where you're good at.

Notes from Paris digital city conference

Some notes from the urban computing symposium I attended in Paris last week. The whole thing was about what the organizers call "Villes 2.0" (i.e. City 2.0) based on the assumption that the transformation the Web have seen (from its first use to a second generation much more participative) is an interesting model to observe what is happening nowadays in urban environment. They have a whole research transfer/workshop program about this topic and this event was focused on "new urban perspectives". Isabelle Mari (JCDecaux) and Bruno Marzloff (Groupe Chronos) The discussion was about the bike renting system put in place by JCDecaux (see the one in Paris) for example. To them, the biggest surprises were:

1. The service was a success unlike what the marketing studies they've done before had revealed. People seemed to be not interested before the introduction of the service but their offer revealed a latent demand from city dwellers
2. The service was a success very quickly and with an incredible richness of appropriation, as attested by pictures on Flickr, lots of curious practices and tools created by people (mash-ups).
3. They expected people to get bike pass (because it's more convenient) but people acted as "reccuring occasional users" by paying only when they needed a bike. As if people wanted to minimize the constraints and employ the service to optimize their liberty of use.

They then presented the reasons why an outdoor advertising company such as JCDecaux becomes a "mobility company". One of the reason is that people are used to a fluidity of services and information; they than have similar expectations for urban services. The problem is that city councils or other public bodies don't have resources/time/expertise to do that. Therefore some public/private hybridization with new actors are appearing. The problem is then to have a continuity of services between all these actors. The advantage of a company such as JCDecaux is that they're already working with networks (of physical objects, i.e. billboards, people, subcontractors, etc.). The network organization is a fundamental aspect of mobility.

The last thing they discuss was the similarity between the web and the city (in this web2.0/city analogy): people on the web buy "display", a need to have an embodiment and it's the same in the city. She also made an analogy with digital music which is now a commodity and it augmented the value of concerts. In the city, there will be new commoditized services that will augmented the value of city activities.

Jean-Louis Fréchin Jean-Louis talked right after me, in the session about the invisibility of the digital city. More specifically, his presentation was about urban signs and identity (see his slides in french here).

The identity of a city is built through: monuments and symbols (Eiffel Tower), history (traces of the past), signs that are sometimes discreet (manhole covers), signs (street plates), road signs, infrastructures (like Guimard's entrance in Paris subway), companies signs. This often lead to a "ville-spectacle" (spectacle-city). On the other hand, the signs and the identity of a city are participative. graffitis, space invaders, political announces.

Through various examples, he then detailed the issues at stake concerning signs for digital services: should we create new signs? new objects? old objects (can we reinvent the orientation table?)? or should we combine signs to other infrastructures? What should be the level of precision? Do we need the information to be legible? What about the regulation? who will control these signs? Can it be participative?

Yo Kaminagai (RATP) Yo is a design director at the Paris transport utility company RATP. Personally, I always enjoy his talks as they're a mix of down-to-earth and design description. The sort of thing I get from his talks are elements such as "we need 20 square meters per metro station to put infrastructures for GSM covering of the whole subway system and we never have enough room in corridors built in 1910. So there is less room for people, less for billboards and our revenues drop". As a matter of fact, he started by discussing how the immaterial, what some call "the virtual" is material and that people, users, are impacted by that. Thus, space is not an adjustment variable but a parameter.

A big part of his talk was about the design guidelines they set to create metro stations (easy to use, reliable, enriching, regulating, safe) and the importance to link (or not to link) the underground city and the city above. And he highlighted how the disorder of spatial environment often reflect the communication problems between people who are taking care of it.

Part of their problem is also that they need to think at different scales. For instance, they will soon renew their metro trains. What happens is that they buy something that will last 60 years (and will only be renovated once). So planning is VERY important: taking new needs into account, flexibility (how to design billboard 30 years before), how to combine safety, comfort and huge numbers of users (3 lines on 14 are overcrowded today, in 10 years, it will be 10 on 14!).

In that context, they consider building new (digital) services (for orientation, supporting conversations or meetings...) but given that the subway is already crowded it can be perceived as an aggression (too much information!) by users. This is why they think about "doubling" the physical environment with digital representations (hence their interest in platform such as Second Life).

So transparent that you need to make it visible

Sometimes, transparency is so well achieved that you have to put a sign that something transparent is really there. In the example above, the glass is so transparent that a sign has to be put indicating the presence of "glass" (in french, it says "Beware! Glass").

Why do I blog this? This example is interesting because it's the same problem faced by digital services in contemporary cities. It's also an intriguing design issue, to balance transparency and visibility is a bit tricky and sometimes external factors could help: in this case the presence of dirt/dust will inevitably lead to the removal of the sign.

Maps as abstraction

Current discussions lately have led me to have a glance at the "critical cartography" field. Reading An Introduction to Critical Cartography by Jeremy W. Crampton and John Krygier was a good introduction to that. The part that interested me most was the one about the critiques of maps, as shown by this quote by Yves Lacoste: "The map, perhaps the central referent of geography, is, and has been, fundamentally an instrument of power. A map is an abstraction from concrete reality which was designed and motivated by practical (political and military) concerns; it is a way of representing space which facilitates its domination and control. To map…serves the practical interests of the State machine (Lacoste 1973: 1). "

Back to Crampton and Krygier:

"We define critical cartography as a one-two punch of new mapping practices and theoretical critique. Critical cartography challenges academic cartography by linking geographic knowledge with power, and thus is political. (...) The explicit critique of cartography and GIS that arose in the late 1980s should therefore be understood in this much longer tradition. While the former is better known, to overlook the latter is merely to “accept what cartographers tell us maps are supposed to be” (Harley 1989: 1). In fact, cartography as a way of knowing the world has constantly struggled with the status of its knowledge in a manner similar to that of the geographical discipline (Livingstone 1992). "

Why do I blog this? having worked on the user experience of location-based services, it's important to keep in mind how maps are not absolute representation of the reality but are definitely influenced by other factors (such a political or economical factors).

What appearance means...

as shown by satellite antennas In Swiss Mountains, they can be decorated as typical housing add-ons. In the example below, the owners have put a sort-of typical paintings (with cow going up the mountains, a sort-of "poya"):

At Reuters Headquarters in Geneva, the situation is different and antennas are huge and protected by barriers:

Both are integrated differently in the landscape, but both are upload/download devices.

Talk in Paris about the invisibility of the digital city

Yesterday, I was in Paris to attend a Villes2.0 event (a sort of urban computing symposium) organized by the french think tank FING. The theme of the afternoon was "Cities and mobility: new urban perspectives. It was a quite packed conference with lots of interesting speakers coming from different fields such as transportation operations (RATP), sociology, entrepreneurship, design or big french technological companies. My presentation was about the invisibility of the digital city. If you've read Dan Hill post last week about the "street as a platform", it basically starts from the same point: cities of today are filled with digital services that Hill's blogpost describes very nicely. But most of the time these services are invisible.

My point was to show that there was a paradox here: since urban computing (as derived form ubiquitous computing) is partly meant to make explicit/visible some phenomena that are invisible, it's quite surprising that it itself invisible! I took some examples such as Tunable Cities (revealing electromagnetic fields) by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Rabby, the D-tower (to reveal emotion in cities), Beatriz Da Costa's pigeon blog systems that reports about city pollutions and of course the huge list of location-based services (Intel's Jabberwocky to reveal familiar strangers).

To some extent, the "disappearing computing" paradigm that Mark Weiser described has been some taken to the letter that digitality services are invisible. There is a very intriguing and recursive tension here that can be summarized by this dilemma: "how to make visible invisible techniques that aim at making visible the invisible". It sounds like a tongue twister but that's the reality faced by some urban companies I discussed with after my talk. The other layer of complexity is also "urban computing" has a huge component that is often left out: it is sometimes "unexpected ("imprevisible" in french) given that some parts can fluctuate (network signals, GPS accuracy...).

The other part of the talk was a sort of examination of the solutions to make the digital city more "visible". I took the example of the availability of Wifi and other services.

I started with signs: like the "((o))" that shows wifi presence in Switzerland or the lovely "Internet" signs that you spot all over the place (especially in exotic countries where they're often put with flowers). I also showed Timo Arnall's graphic language for Touch to describe the visual link between information and physical things.

In addition, the use of location-bases services themselves (as a sort of information-"push" system) that would deliver information to people based on their location. I spent here a little bit of time to explain why lots of them fails to do so.

Then I've showed some examples of cluster of services like phone/wifi booth and insisted that the future was closer to a JCDecaux mobile furniture I've seen in Mexico: a sort of billboard with a chair (used by people who wax shoes). In a sense clustering various services - digital and not digital - is a solution currently to make services more visible. For example, in Switzerland in railway station, you often have photographing booth+picture printing+phone booths+wifi+vending machinges next to each others.

(Left picture by Fabien Girardin)

There are also new devices such as Wifi detectors, even on shirts that can explicit the presence of open networks. Those of course are gadgets and possibly meant to be integrated in other devices. I am wondering why phones does not (yet) have a WiFi indicator; my Nokia E65 phone can get Wifi but I need to do complex tricks to know if there's a network that is available.

And finally I advocated for more complex modes of interactions and that is not only a matter of "seeing" the digital city but rather to perceive it. Here I discussed podotactiles as an example of a different way to "feel" the city. As you may know podotactiles are textured strip which runs along the edge of the metro/tram station platform or even sidewalk, which one can feel with the feet. What I find interesting there is that (1) it's both about vision and proprioception, (2) it's not yet-another-device that gives you location-based information but a rather contextual marker in the environment. The street pavement as an interface if you will.

My last point was about the users of such systems who often realize the presence/availability when there are physical/digital frictions: breakdowns, adaptive behavior from other users (you see a person employing a laptop while sat on church's stairs), or when you see specialist fixing a problem (network problem, broken cables), etc.

Thanks Thierry Marcou and Fabien Eychenne for the invitation! I'll post my notes about the other speakers soon.

Nintendo DS+iphone band

iBand is a curious Nintendo DS+iphone band:

Check the YouTube video too. Why do I blog this? although it is very basic, I found the minimalism appealing (small instrument, small band, minimal tunes). And I love Elektroplankton. Somehow related to device art.

The user experience of broken artifacts

The other day, looking at toys in a kid store, I ran across this robotic horse and my attention was instantly attracted by the missing left ear:

Why do I blog this? My interest towards the user experience of broken artifacts. This poor robotic pet has lost an important body part. But important for whom? Obviously it would not really change the robot itself (I don't think there was any noise sensor in there) but what does that mean for the robot "user" (I put it into brackets because it's difficult to define a stereotypical "user"). It made me think of the uncanny valley (as defined in Wikipedia: the emotional response of humans to robots and other non-human entities). How uncanny is uncanny? Would it repel kids? Would they find it curious? What would be the discourse around this?

Is it possible to take advantage of defunct parts of artifacts? Can design take this into account? I was wondering if there could be a sort of long-term design perspective in which you create objects with intended malfunctions (to foster specific user behavior).

Beyond Usability: Exploring Distributed Play

[Last year, I wrote a paper for a workshop at a human-computer interaction conference about the user experience of video games, actually it briefly presents the work I am doing with game companies. The paper was not accepted and I thought it would be pertinent to leave it online anyway] Introduction Video game companies have now integrated the need to deploy user-centered design and evaluation methods to enhance players experiences. This has led them to hire cognitive psychology researchers, human-computer interface specialists, develop in-house usability labs or subcontract tests and research to companies or academic labs. Although, very often, methods has been directly translated form classic HCI and usability, this game experience analysis started to gain weights through publications. This situation acknowledges the importance of setting a proper method for user-centered game design, as opposed to the one applied for “productivity applications” or web services. The Microsoft Game User Research Group for example has been very productive on that line of research (see for example [5]) with detailed methods such as usability tests, Rapid Iterative Test and Evaluation [4] or consumer playtests [1]. Usability test is definitely the most common method currently given its relevance to identify interfaces flaws as well as factors that lower the fun to play through behavioral analysis.

That said, most of the methods deployed by the industry seem to rely heavily on quantitative and experimental paradigms inherited from the cognitive sciences tradition in human-computer interaction (see [2]). Studies are often conducted in corporate laboratory settings in which myriads of players come visit and spend hours playing new products. Survey, ratings, logfile analysis, brief interviews (and sometimes experimental studies) are employed to apprehend users’ experiences and implications for game or level designers are fed back into game development processes.

While these approaches proves to be fruitful (as reported by the aforementioned papers which describe some case studies), this situation only accounts for a limited portion of what HCI and user-centered design could bring to table in terms of game user research. Too often, the “almost-clinical” laboratory usability test is deployed without any further thoughts regarding how players might experience the product “in the wild”. For example, this kind of studies does not take into account how the activity of gaming is organized, and how the physical and social context can be important to support playful activities.

What we propose is to step back for a while and consider a complementary approach to gain a more holistic view of how a game product is experienced. To do so, we will describe two examples from our research carried out in partnership with a game studio.

Examples from field studies

Our first example depicted on Figure 1 shows the console of an informant: a Nintendo DS with a post-it that says “Flea market on Saturday” and an exclamation mark. The player of “Animal Crossing” indeed left this as a reminder that two days ahead, there would be a flea market in the digital environment. This is important in the context of that game because it will allow him to sell digital items to non-playable characters in the game.

This post-it is only an example among numerous uses of external resources to complement or help the gameplay. Player-created maps of digital environments xeroxed and exchanged in schools in the nineties is another example of such behavior. Magazines, books and digital environment maps are also prominent examples of that phenomenon, which eventually leads to business opportunities. Some video game editors indeed start publishing material (books, maps, cards) and try to connect it to the game design (by allowing secret game challenges through elements disseminated in comics for example).

Figure 2 shows another example that highlights the social character of play. This group of Japanese kids is participating the game experience, although there is only one child holding a portable console. The picture represented here is only one example of collective play along many that we encountered, both in mobile of fixed settings. They indicate that playing a video-game is much more than holding an input controller since participants (rather than “The Player”) have different roles ranging from giving advices, scanning the digital environment to find cues, discussing previous encounters with NPCs or controlling the game character.

Another intriguing results from a study about Animal Crossing on the Nintendo DS has revealed that some players share the game and the portable console with others. An adult described how he played with his kid asynchronously: he hides messages and objects in certain places and his son locates them, displace them and eventually hide others. The result of this is the creation of a circular form of game-play that emerged from the players’ shared practice of a single console.

Conclusion

Although this looks very basic and obvious, these three examples correspond to two ways to frame cognition and problem solving: “Distributed Cognition” [3] and “Situated Action” [6]. While the former stresses that cognition is distributed the objects, individuals, and tools in our environment, Situated Action emphasizes the interrelationship between problem solving and its context of performance, mostly social. The important lesson here is that problem solving, such as interacting with a video-game is not confined to the individual but is both influenced and permitted by external factors such as other partners (playing or not as we have seen) or artifacts such as paper, pens, post-its, guidebooks, etc. Whereas usability testing relates to more individual model of cognition, Situated Action or Distributed Cognition imply that exploring and describing the context of play is of crux importance to fully grasp the user experience of games. Employing ethnographic methodologies, as proposed by these two Cognitive Sciences frameworks, can fulfill such goal by focusing on a qualitative examination of human behavior. It is however important to highlight the fact that investigating how, where and with whom people play is not meant to replace more conventional test. Rather, one can see this as a complement to understand phenomenon such as the discontinuity of gaming or the use of external resources while playing.

One of the reasons why this approach can be valuable is that results drawn from ethnographic research of gaming can be relevant to find unarticulated opportunities. For example, by explicitly requiring the use of external resource or the possibility to have challenges designed for multiple players as shown in the Animal Crossing example we described.

In the end, what this article stressed is that playing video-games is a broad experience which can be influenced by lots of factors that could be documented. And this material is worthwhile to design a more holistic vision of a product.

References

[1] Davis, J., Steury, K., & Pagulayan, R. A survey method for assessing perceptions of a game: The consumer playtest in game design. Game Studies: the International Journal of Computer Game Research, 5(1) (2005). [2] Fulton, B. (2002). Beyond Psychological Theory: Getting Data that Improve Games. Game Developer's Conference 2002 Proceedings, San Jose CA, March 2002. Available at: http://www.gamasutra.com/gdc2002/features/fulton/fulton_01.htm [3] Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the Wild, MIT Press. [4] Medlock, M. C., Wixon, D., Terrano, M., Romero, R., Fulton, B. (2002). Using the RITE Method to improve products: a definition and a case study. Usability Professionals Association, Orlando FL July (2002). Available at: http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/c/c/5cc406a0-0f87-4b94-bf80-dbc707db4fe1/mgsut_MWTRF02.doc.doc [5] Pagulayan, R. J., Keeker, K., Wixon, D., Romero, R., & Fuller, T. User-centered design in games. In J. Jacko and A. Sears (Eds.), Handbook for Human-Computer Interaction in Interactive Systems, pp.883-906. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates (2002). [6] Suchman, L.A. (1987). Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge Press.

[Now it's also interesting to add a short note about WHY the paper has not been accepted The first reviewer was unhappy by the fact that many ethnographies of game-playing have been published. Although this is entirely true in academia, it's definitely not the case in the industry (where ethnography is seldom employed in playtests). And my mistake may have been that I frame the paper in an game industry perspective, using the literature about gaming usability. The second reviewer wanted a more extensive description of a field study and less a scratch-the-surface approach that I adopted. My problem of course is that it's always difficult to describe results more deeply because most of the data are confidential... This is why I stayed at a general level]