Feel the city differently

A different way to experience the city (seen in Paris last monday). A non-frequent posture.

Manufacturing matters in the 21st century

Near-Future Laboratory colleague Julian Bleecker wrote an important piece about manufacturing (as part of the Share Festival Catalog 2008):

"First, we’re not talking about manufacturing (...) Manufacturing evokes cavernous, cold, awesomely huge assembly lines with scales all out of proportion to the experiences of mere mortals. (...) If anything, we’re talking about a kind of materialization of ideas. Slick connections between an your imagination, a circuit board and a 3D printer. It’s artful for its scale and personalization. Small-scale, passionate, individual ideas made material. (...) The sad consequences of manufacturing’s scale is that it defaults to the least common denominator. (...) True customization means materializing one’s own designs, one’s own imagination. This is where we begin. (...) What makes it worth talking about is that it is the power of creation that manufacturing is able to achieve, but done at an entirely different scale - quicker, cheaper, individually, with fewer intermediaries and fewer incumberances. (...) The “manufacturing process” is a kind of extended sketching activity. Ideas are first expressed informally, perhaps with a simple “wouldn’t it be cool if..?” question at a moment of inspiration."

And why this is important to interaction design:

"these expressive objects form their interactivity around physical actions that may include the Nabaztag’s articulating rabbit-like ears, or Clocky the coy alarm clocks that roll away when you try to hit the snooze button, or Maywa Denki’s punch-drunk dancing BitMan character. These are distinct kinds of digital objects that mix physical space, digital technology and design. (...) The weak signals suggest kinds of design-art-technology that are growing tired of the screen. (...) What is emerging is an ability to make your own stuff - not just “skinning” your mobile or modding an MP3 player. Materializing ideas is about making your own - “whatever” - unanticipated, unknow, visionary, expressive things. It is not a manufacturing process"

Why do I blog this? some important points here about why manufacturing is important, what is is and what does that mean for human practices. This is relevant at a time where hardware fabrication and manufacturing has been left over to south asian countries and that we should not give away our effort to build concrete things (and do only so called "virtual" building).

User Experience of TomTom

Jan Borcher's "ode to TomTom" in the last issue of ACM interactions addresses issues that are relevant to my interest in the user experience of location-based applications. First about usability issues of TomTom:

"City or street names are listed so close below each other that you keep selecting wrong ones—Fitts' law at work. I also got a furious call when my sweetheart first tried using it: Köln (Cologne) wasn't in the city list. It turned out TomTom had left out German umlauts from their onscreen keyboards (...) Oh, and turning it on is a nightmare. Pressing the tiny, half-sunken power button briefly is happily ignored, but keep pressing it a couple times at the wrong moment and it won't turn on at all."

Second, about weird features:

" Feature development doesn't stop at its sweet spot. Beyond the idea of providing reliable, easy-to-use directions, TomTom has since added an MP3 player, live updates through the wireless network, connections to "Buddies" (the use of which has escaped me so far), cooperative street updates, photo slide shows (I'm not kidding), and a stream of other features. Some of these are actually useful, but the original TomTom was the sweet spot"

... which he relies on to discuss the latest phase of product development which is a "baroque" step that "obeys the terrible law of feature creep". The new feature, instead of having a user value, make life more complex... and eventually makes it difficult to use the device in its first and intended use. Why do I blog this? Some interesting discussion about product development and evolution towards complexity (most definitely due to forces that aim at renewing products very often).

Fake power outlet on the street

Although it's a fake power plug (for an ad), it's often desperately needed for certain people on the street. Seen in Paris yesterday. Another sign of the need for certain (outdoor) infratructure

Design process at Apple

An interesting write-up of the contribution by Michael Lopp (senior engineering manager at Apple) at SXSW2008 describes some aspects of Apple design process (by Helen Walters):

"Pixel Perfect Mockups: “it removes all ambiguity.” That might add time up front, but it removes the need to correct mistakes later on.

Apple designers come up with 10 entirely different mock ups of any new feature (...) and give themselves room to design without restriction. Later they whittle that number to three, spend more months on those three and then finally end up with one strong decision.

Paired Design Meetings: Every week, the teams have two meetings. One in which to brainstorm, to forget about constraints and think freely. (...) Then they also hold a production meeting, an entirely separate but equally regular meeting which is the other's antithesis. Here, the designers and engineers are required to nail everything down, to work out how this crazy idea might actually work. This process and organization continues throughout the development of any app.

senior manager outlining what they wanted from any new application: "I want WYSIWYG... I want it to support major browsers... I want it to reflect the spirit of the company." Or, as Lopp put it: "I want a pony!" (...) The solution, he described, is to take the best ideas from the paired design meetings and present those to leadership, who might just decide that some of those ideas are, in fact, their longed-for ponies. In this way, the ponies morph into deliverables. And the C-suite, who are quite reasonable in wanting to know what designers are up to, and absolutely entitled to want to have a say in what's going on, are involved and included. And that helps to ensure that there are no nasty mistakes down the line."

Why do I blog this? curiosity towards organizational/design process per se, especially at Apple. It's generally rare to see this things disclosed.

Dirtiness of touch interface

How touch interface can age... and get dirty over time. Seen in Paris yesterday, it's actually an old video rental booth down the street of the 11th arrondissement.

Why do I blog this? just find intriguing the role of aging (and dust!) in the design of interfaces (and then: interactions). Sometimes other services need to be put in place (like new kind of maintenance... that would clean the interface or keep it usable).

Tools for writers, design considerations

Funny piece in the NYT by Rachel Donadio about recent tools used by novel writers:

"Powers wrote in an e-mail message — or rather, dictated, since he uses the voice recognition software built into the Tablet PC operating system to compose everything, including his novels. (...) Powers has turned to a program rather ominously called Mindjet MindManager, which creates vast, sprawling outlines resembling family trees. (...) Powers created a visual outline for each character. It included material on his or her “life history, personality traits, physical characteristics, verbal tics, professional and educational background, choices and actions, attitudes and relations to the other characters,” he said. “As the material grew, I created topical sub-branches and sub-sub-branches (...) Vikram Chandra had similar results with Microsoft Project, (...) the program (which he says he first heard about from an Israeli crime novelist) helped Chandra keep track of the nearly three dozen characters across 900 pages — “not just people by themselves, but people in relation to time and place,” he wrote in an e-mail message. Since the novel uses flashbacks to cut between different plot lines — a narrative structure Chandra likens to a mandala, a series of concentric circles used as an Eastern meditation device — “it was really useful ... to be able to see the events arranged on a timeline.” (...) He is also a devotee of the Logitech io2 pen, which uploads handwritten notes from special paper and then converts them into searchable text (...) Excel spreadsheets helped Marisha Pessl structure her novel “Special Topics in Calamity Physics,” (...) Pessl made spreadsheets for each chapter and character. “Because I was plotting a mystery, I wanted to be very sure as to what clues I would plant.” It also helped her see who was doing what when. “With a first-person narrator it was really important,” she said. The novel’s protagonist, Blue, “has such a blinkered view of the world, and as the author you have to have a godlike perspective.” (...) Some novelists even admit to using screenwriting software (...) The program “prompts you step by step to answer a lot of questions,"

Why do I blgo this? what is interesting here is the discussion of the design process (it's not industrial or interaction design but still). For instance, the vocabulary about the process + how/what tools for what, how tool shape the design process are of considerable interest. And for naive people, as the conclusion says, "these computer programs may offer helpful frameworks, but they can’t substitute for talent and imagination.

Stir the pot

According to the Phrase finder:

"What does the phrase "to stir the pot" generally mean?

Deliberately provocative, yes, but not necessarily maliciously. Picture a pot of soup. A lot of ingredients have settled to the bottom, out of sight, until stirred. Metaphorically, a lot of issues/resentments/obligations can drop out of sight when nobody mentions them. One can "stir the pot" to bring issues to the surface, sometimes with malice, but sometimes merely to create awareness and effect change."

Why do I blog this? saturday morning search, when listening Prince Buster.

The "lagoon emergency button"

The "lagoon emergency button" is surely one the most interesting interface I've seen recently. I've stumbled across it few days ago, close to LucasArts offices in San Francisco.

The red button basically controls the (nice and fake) waterfall that operates on the left of the picture. What I find impressively curious (and odd I would say) is the notion that the whole semi-natural feature represented here can be "turned off" by pressing a button. Interesting enough is the gap between that small red thing and the big environmental surrounding. Can this be a "responsive environment" where the interaction is basic but still possible.

Furthermore, the name of the button itself is fantastic ("lagoon emergency button") and I don't know if there are other combinations of the word "lagoon" and "button" in the same phrase (well...) but that sounds almost paradoxical.

That being said, the "blue lagoon button" sort of belongs to the technologies and infrastructures described in the "street as a platform", in a sort of weird way. And it's definitely related to the automatic component of the city mentioned the other day about Rotterdam.

Laundry list for ubicomp

In the last issue of ACM interactions, there is an interesting paper called "When users "do" the Ubicomp" by Antti Oulasvirta. The paper starts off by discussing the 2 perspectives of ubiquitous computing: on the one hand, the sort of research/outcomes you see in conferences and on the other hand, what the author calls:

"present-day IT infrastructure, the real ubicomp, is a massive noncentralized agglomeration of the devices, connectivity and electricity means, applications, services, and interfaces, as well as material objects such as cables and meeting rooms and support surfaces that have emerged almost anarchistically, without a recognized set of guiding principles"

... which is very close to what Bell and Dourish described in their paper Yesterday’s tomorrows: notes on ubiquitous computing’s dominant vision. Oulasvirta wonders if the inherent complexity of ubicomp is one one key explanation to why these applications have not conquered the consumer market. Relying on different results from ubicomp studies, he presents " a laundry list of approaches to improving ubicomp infrastructures":

"1) minimizing overheads that create temporal seams between activities; 2) making remote but important resources, such as connectivity or cables, better transparent locally and digitally; 3) propagating metadata on migration of data from device to device; 4) supporting ad hoc uses of proximate devices' resources like projectors, keyboards, and displays; 5) triggering digital events like synchronization of predetermined documents with physical gestures; 6) supporting appropriation of material properties for support surfaces"

Why do I blog this? some interesting issues to consider here, although I am not sure (or perhaps interested) in everyone of them, some are close to current interests (for example (2)).

Californian trip doggy bag

Having spent 2 weeks in California for ETech 2008 as well as meetings with other like-minded people (academics, designers, start-ups, people from the entertainment/design industries and foresight think-tanks/consultants), I tried to list some of the things that struck me ("what did I learn?"). The first thing that I really felt was the fear of an economic recession, especially for everyone relying on private money (even academics when they do private research). Lots of people, unlike Europe so far, fear something similar to what happen 7 years ago and led to lay-offs, less money in innovation/R&D/new media/weird stuff. The consequences that is often feared by people I met would be a the focus on the short-term (and US companies are already more short-term oriented than european one), more actionable/productive work than speculative/long-term projects.

Another element is that I encountered similar feelings that I have about academia being stuffy and the need to do "something different" but related to the circulation of knowledge and at the same time participating in design/foresight/shaping the future. Perhaps it's because I met people who did not have/wanted their tenure or the sacrifice of academic research competition.

So, I then notice how some structures receive some interest because they sit in between different worlds/process: Kitchen Budapest, Jump Associate or trendcentral (or even the near future laboratory). There seems to be a curiosity towards this new ecology of trendspotting, strategy consulting and think-made tank firms or boutiques.

Next, though was the difficulty in starting off ubicomp/"objects of the future" companies: both to find a domain and also because the western world has given up some much of its capacity (interest?) to create hardware (mostly to China) that it's difficult to make it possible and understandable to others.

As usual, it's always good to hang out/talk with people trying to work on similar aspects (user experience research, think tanks, foresight) because it allowed me to discuss potential services/ideas I/we can offer (though LIFT or the near future laboratory).

And of course, it was the opportunity to work on our pamphlet with Julian, observe California and take pictures of sidewalk, pavement, scifi city and other weird stuff as usual.

CACM on location-awareness and location-tracking

The last issue of Communications of the ACM featured an article about location-based services that deals with user perceptions of location-tracking and location-awareness services. Some excerpts I find interesting here: First, about the slow adoption of these technologies:

"Generally, the slow adoption of LBS has been explained primarily by three causes. First, the implementation of more accurate localization techniques (such as E-OTD, U-TDOA, or A-GPS) through providers has taken longer and has been more costly than expected. Second, the few available LBS applications display long response times, often too long for users to handle. And third, users are concerned about privacy issues that are an inevitable side effect of LBS. "

I found interesting the framing in the article in terms of "humans" and "non-humans" although it's not referring to Latour's work: "one of the entities, whether human or non-human, is always the object of LBS, that is, it is the entity about which location information is recorded". The authors also make the distinction between location-aware systems and location-tracking services:

"Location-tracking services provide information about a user's whereabouts to entities other than the user, while location-aware services supply the user (the information requester) with personal location data. In the case of location-aware services, the location-information- causing entity is the recipient, whereas for location-tracking services, an external third party requests and receives location information about another entity. A car navigation system is a location-aware service. Here, location information is provided to the requester (the driver) who, in return, receives real-time navigational services. Other examples of location-aware services include location-sensitive billing (paying while passing toll stations), and location-specific store advertisements sent to a consumer's mobile phone when the person is in proximity."

In their lab experiments, the authors found that people found location-tracking capabilities more useful than location-aware services. Why do I blog this? the situation concerning LBS seems to be the same as time unfold, the same questions as the one discussed in the last 5 years are still unsolved (privacy is and will always be a problem. Things discussed in this paper echoes a lot with my ETech 2008 presentation.

Framing the inter-relationships between ICTs and urban environments

One of the best book I've read recently is certainly "The Cybercities Reader (Routledge Urban Reader Series)", a collection of articles selected and commented by Stephen Graham. The whole thing is about the ICT's influence on forms, processes, experiences and ideas of urban life. To some extent, it's one of the most important resource to frame "urban computing". The introductory chapter (and the introduction to Section 2 ) is of great relevance to describe the debate about the relationships between ICTs and urban realities. Graham presents the 3 dominating types of conceptual and theoretical discourse that analyses the inter-relationships between cities and ICTs: - substitution and transcendence: human territoriality and space/place-based dynamics can and will be replaced by using new ICT technologies. Authors in that vein: thinkers like Toffler, Virilio and technologists like Negroponte, Kelly. - co-evolution: both digital spaces and territorial spaces must be produced together as part an on-going process (which is capitalism). Authors in that vein: Castells. - recombination: there is a fully relational view of the links between technology, time, space and social life. Authors in that vein: inspired by Latour and Haraway, Thrift, Bingham, Graham, etc.

The "substitution" model is the one that received the most attention, implying that space will disappear, distance will disappear, cities will vanish and that cyberspace would replace it. And also it was the model that seems to be recurring over the years (was what happened last year about Second Life). Graham describes the 4 characteristics of this discourse: - he speaks of a "Post-Urban fantasy", Bolter and Grusin use the term "Theology of Cyberspace" for the "stream of excited, romantic and often utopian accounts of the ICT-based demise of cities". - it's generally about having a "friction-free" capitalism, with "perfect transactional fluency". - ICTs are expected to meld communities and mediate democratic processes. - a strong libertarian component.

What is implied by this substitution model is the technological determinism assumption, an "hyperbole of unlimited power" of ICTs and cyberspace. The most striking example here is the use of the "impact" metaphor: something (internet/mobile phone) that comes out from the blue, like an asteroid would arrive "out there" and influence everything in a very straight-forward or linear cause-and-effect chain. This view is wrong and it's funnily not the first time that I hear a critique of the word "impact" (the other person who mentioned it to me was the anthropologist Daniela Cerqui). What is important here is to keep in mind that innovation do not comes from disembodied asteroids and that it's definitely part of a socio-political process. Of course, it's not the first time in history that substitution model are called upon, TV, magazines, radio, telephones, publishing, photography, etc were also mistaken.

This is why Graham, after Bolter and Grusin, prefer to talk about "remediation":

"not as a revolution but as a complex amalgam of new technologies and media fused on to and 'remediating' old ones. (...) we are experiencing a complex and infinitely diverse rang of transformations where new and old practices and media technologies become mutually linked and fused in an ongoing blizzard of change."

Graham identifies 6 majors flaws in the "substitution" discourse that predict the end of the city/distance/space: - being wrong empirically: data shows that urbanisation and ICTs goes hand in hand: mobility is not reduced. - ignorance of the material realities that make the cyberspace supposedly "virtual" possible: infrastructures are needed and often noticed when broken. - over-generalization and not locally-described: the vision imply that all experiences are the same anywhere and that ICTs relate to all cities in the same way. - tendency to overestimate the capabilities of ICTs to mediate human relationships and underestimate the richness and power of co-presence of human bodies. - promotion of simplistic, biased and glossy ideology of the "information age" (as a camouflage for neo-liberalism) - show depoliticised depictions of cities being "impacted" by waves of "autonomous" technologies arriving out from the blue as if there were not place for policy innovation in cities or higher-level institutions (regions, states, supranational).

That said, the book itself does not dismiss current transformations but rather describe the complexity of the inter-relationships between ICTs and urban environments.

Why do I blog this? that sort of discussion is an important framing for current research about urban computing, also at a high-level, it's an interesting overview of the different models promoted about how technologies and human activities are inter-related in a more nuanced way than what we read here and there. Will probably re-use this material in course and talks.

Whrrl: Social discovery for the real world

Recently stumbled on whrrl.com, which is yet another place-based recommender/annotation system that runs on mobile phones. The tagline is "Share real-world adventures and discover places, events, and people through the chronicles of others". Why do I blog this? As lots of similar system (mobile/social software actually), the difficulty lies in bootstrapping the process, or how to have a user-based large enough so that "something happened" out there. For that matter, the FAQ is interesting as it describes to the users how things can be eased:

"But what if I don't have any friends in Whrrl yet?

First off, invite some! Whrrl is all about tapping into your friends' knowledge about the real world and sharing your own with them.

But let's just say for the moment that you don't yet have any friends in Whrrl. Try this: find a couple of places you love. While you are contributing your own reviews for those places, look at others who have reviewed them and share your opinions. Then become a fan of these folks. Suddenly, everything they review is at your fingertips—now you can see interesting places they like displayed right on your map. You'll also be able to filter based on the reviews of people you became a fan of."

Traces of contact in a contactless interaction

Seen in San Diego this week. A near-field interaction device, aimed at being contactless... but the patina clearly indicates some contact traces. This pictures shows the paradox between the sort of interaction we are expected to have in the city of the near future (contactless?) and past practices (contact). Moreover, the patina also reveals the messiness of technologies and the inevitable presence of dirt at some point. Digital is physical to some extent.

Locate outdoor power outlets

Plugfinder is a website that helps people find electricity outlets in the city, and encourages them to do some activities using them ("Charge your cell phone, cook food on a hotplate, project slides onto a building, or maybe install an inflatable sculpture"). As the FAQ says:

"Why map out electricity outlets?

A: Lots of reasons:

1. Gives people an excuse to walk outside AND visit parts of the city they have never gone to before. We just covered essential public health and economic initiatives in one swoop. Bam! 2. InfoNomads always need a quick burst of electricity to charge up there gear. Your city WANTS to attract the creative class, right? If your city is smart, you'll get corporations to freely give out electricity on the street as part of Payment in Lieu Taxes (PILOT) plans. 3. Making electricity outlets public has all kinds of positive unintended consequences: think about the reduced property damage when kids can project their graffiti rather than put it on the wall with all those awful chemicals. 4. It'll make your city more interactive. Thats cool right? Like Archigram envisioned, but more diffuse and street level. 5. Democracy requires communication. Communication increasingly happens with ICT. ICT requires electricity. Democracy requires electricity? 6. Don't take my word for it. You'll probably only listen when the venture capital starts to roll in, anyways. This is America after all."

(Picture taken last week in Burbank, California, an outdoor power outlet located on a train platform).

Why do I blog this? Electricity is more and more an important resource when you're outdoor, especially when traveling. Although certain commodities like water (toilets, and sometimes WiFi) are made free on the street, electricity is scarcely made available (even in public places such as airport, train station). Moreover, I like the contrast of having external/outdoor power plugs and the possibility of rain.

Therefore, I find Plugfinder more interesting because of what it reveals (the need to get access to electricity, and the assumptions made by the designer for how it can be useful) than the real service it provides so far.

San Diego: scifi city

Wandering around San Diego for ETech 2008 makes me realize how this city displays a peculiar sense of science fiction. It's not the first time that I visit that place but it's perhaps the conjunction of that tech conference and the watching of Battlestar Galactica that made me me thinking about this. Downtown SF definitely looks as if colonial spaceships-shaped building had to suffer for a temporarily grounding and were ready to take off or spacefold to another dimension:

That impression also materializes at the ground level with all those city infrastructures that are generally hidden/covered but not here:

Unlike Rotterdam that I described last week as the automatic/mechanic/electronic city to shows how the town is a "process", San Diego looks rather more about "shapes". Processes are present of course but they are more hidden, often more about access to buildings (through contactless cards) or the presence of the wifi clouds.

Why do I blog this? this is not very rocket-science thoughts, just psychogeographic feelings on a sunday morning.

My talk at O'Reilly ETech 2008

Yesterday I gave a talk at ETech 2008 entitled "Mobile Social Software from the inside out", which was an updated version of my overview of the issues (and some solutions) regarding multi-user location-based applications. People interested in the slides can have a look at the annotated version I've put here (pdf, 14.5Mb). The reason why I gave an existing talk was that I've never presented that one in the US (only in European countries and South Korea) and was curious of the reactions.

ETech 2008: Wagner James Au on Second Life

Although I am really not into Second Life, I have been to the Why Won't Second Life Just Go Away, Already? Understanding Web 2.0's Most Misunderstood Phenomenon by W. James Au at ETech. The blurb was:

"Throughout 2007, reputed publications like Wired, Forbes, and the LA Times pronounced Second Life over-hyped, while negative press over Ponzi schemes, porn, etc. suggested imminent disaster. While all this negativity continued almost unabated, however, the world’s user base tripled (both in terms of monthly active and maximum concurrent users), and continues attracting about a half million new sign-ups a month. How can this possibly be happening?"

As backlash continues, user base keeps growing. Companies are continuing to invest heavily in SL (Cisco for instance), not just for marketing but practical applications (to see where resources/servers are being used). Even marketers are getting innovative (L'Oréal): companies adjusting to what people want to do in SL but corporate presence per se has never been the main story. Then why is it working? 3 reasons according to him: 1) Mirrored flourishing: what you do in SL should make you better in the world out there 2) Bepop reality ("the virtual world as a 3d jazz combo"): class atmosphere, diversity of genre/species, space station next to a church. 3) Second Life as a impression society: impression in the sense of cool, about creating something "cool", how much interactivity you can bring to the creativity + impression about long-term activity (how long you will stay in this environment): "whaddya got and how long are you gonna stick with it?

As a result: Second Life is a international cutting edge creative space with high barriers to entry (bad interface, frustrating rights form the start), a Metaverse like Mac World. And it leads to practical inovation: web2.0 innovation in 3D (HBO produced a machinima with SL as a platform), Ajax Life (web-based SL), 3D architectural design and prototyping tool in SL (like on a wiki in a webpage).

Why do I blog this? as I stated before, I've never really been into SL so I was curious about what is happening there now that the press is less talking about it. Some elements are interesting but I am still not convinced and the fact that some companies invest a lot in SL and virtual world seems as if it was meant this "social 3D web" was a self-fullfilling prophecy.

CACM about "urban sensing"

Urban sensing: out of the woods is a paper by Dana Cuff, Mark Hansen, Jerry Kang that deals with embedded networked sensing that successfully shifted from the lab to the environment. Some excerpts I found interesting:

"urban sensing shifts focus and control away from the scientist at the center. We can anticipate new forms of science built from large-scale citizen-initiated data collection. Data will also be collected, then interpreted, in ad hoc ways by everyday citizens going about their daily lives. (...) There are at least two concerns: bad data processing and the "observer effect." First, when amateurs collect data through cheap, unverified, uncalibrated sensors, the immediate fear is "junk data." (...) Second, observation generally and surveillance specifically alters human behavior. (...) The data commons and citizen-initiated sensing will provide answers, pose new questions, and open new opportunities for public discourse.(...) urban sensing has the potential to generate a "data commons." By this, we mean a data repository generated through decentralized collection, shared freely, and amenable to distributed sense-making not only for the pursuit of science but also advocacy, art, play, and politics. (...) Today's exotic and disturbing data collection practices may appear banal 10 years hence. To the extent that privacy preferences are adaptive to the environment in this manner, we must be aware that today's policy choices will have long-term path-dependent effects."

Why do I blog this? some interesting issues regarding urban sensing. I am personally interested in how they can be used, how these networked objects can create new applications in the city of the near future. As I blogged the other day, is it useful for urban planners? architects? city dwellers? Can we design intriguing services or playful environment based on them?

Cuff, D., Hansen M., & Kang, J. (2008). Urban sensing: out of the woods. Communications of the ACM, 51(3), pp. 24-33.