SK8 object

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SK8 OBJECT 1.5 is a very interesting urban artifact designed by Melanie Iten and Gon Zifroni, commissioned by the city of Geneva. It's actually a mix of a bench and a skateboard bank:

Why do I blog this? simply because I find that kind of project interesting and curious. Readers here know my interest in skateboarding practices and how I see skateboarders as an interesting target group to foresee the future of urban behavior. In this case, what I find relevant is the fact that it's not the skaters who are innovative but urban designers. Beyond the shape and the affordance of the object that I like, the implications are very interesting here in the sense that the object can be used by different populations (BMX+rollers+skaters AND regular pedestrians). Of course, it can be employed by these different population at the same time, showing the urban tensions of urban furnitures.

I also find intriguing how it looks like a mix between a skatepark artefact and something more... urban, less artificial like the assumption that if you build a skatepark, people will go there.

The Globe as an entertainment platform

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Two app that I like lately, for their entertaining potential: It's a bit old but I am still fascinated by this "If I dig a very deep hole, where will I end up?". It's a very basic google map app where you can choose to dig up somewhere and see where you go to arrive on the other side of the Earth:

"Are you concerned about where you go to arrive if you dig a very deep straight infinite hole on Earth? Your problems are solved! Surf on the map below, choose where you will dig your hole and click there. After this, click on "Dig here!" and you will see the place where, one day, you will (believe me) put your feet."

And of course, flickr vision is also compelling. It shows realtime, geolocated Flickr photos on that globe:

Why do I blog this? Those are fascinating and ludic spatial application that I find enjoyable, no more, no less. There are not perfect of course but they reflect some interesting aspects as well as intriguing motivations (following people's photo streams, digging the earth, etc.).

Mobile Social Gaming

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One of the domain I have been interested in the last few months is mobile on-line multi-player games. Having done research in pervasive/location-based games and knowing that this path was still a sort of "ubiquitous computing proximal future" for various reasons, I started exploring less advanced projects such as mobile multi-player on-line worlds/games such as Mini Friday or TibiaME. Although I was silent about it, this was one of the project I work on at the Media and Design Lab. Both the game and the mobile industry are also quiet about this vector, but even old news show that this field start getting some attention. There are indeed various opportunities in this area, depending on various axes/design choices:

  • Be synchronous like Tibia ME or the upcoming DofusPocket (Ankama - Kalmeo) or asynchronous (turn-based game) like Armada Kingdoms (by Bloomsix)
  • Stand-alone virtual worlds such as Mini Friday (from Sulake, who also runs Habbo Hotel) or cross-platforms such as The Violet Sector.
  • Offering of a complete game/social experience or only a subset: for instance it can be very well tbe the "mobile companion" to computer-based MMO like Ragnarok Mobile Mage or this mobile service called Level Up Mobile that allows to manage your account (balance inquiry, password, lock/unlock), get news and guild message exchange. A bit similar to what Rupture or Magelo are doing except that it would be a mobile version.

There's a lot that can be done in that last area, as described in the gamasutra news.

"There are also social networking opportunities in World of Warcraft that could be done on mobile. Text and voice chat are obvious candidates for mobile, allowing players to keep in touch with their guilds when they are away from their computers. Also, things like browseable profiles and screenshot albums could be easily implemented. RSS-like news feeds by mobile could provide players with info on who leveled up or who joined a guild. Players might enjoy rating content that could be viewed on mobile such as rating quests or avatar appearance. Once the technology improves, Youtube style videos of World of Warcraft activities could appear on mobile. “It’s the perfect activity for mobile because it can take up as much or as little of the player’s time as desired,” Roy said."

That said, this wide spectrum of opportunity is not the only solution why I am interested in that. Being a user experience researcher, my focus is on how people use certain technologies (such as urban technologies, location-based services, games). Mobile on-line multi-user games interest me because I see them as interesting platform to study the hybridization of the digital and the physical, especially in contexts such as contemporary cities. Where do people play these games? How do that influence what they're doing after/before/during playing them? The whole interlinkages between the digital activities+context and the physical activities+context was the purpose of my work as EPFL last year. This is another vector than the one we're exploring with Julian since physicality, geolocation and motion is not taken account. In this case, I am interested in pure raw mobile applications deployed on phones that are available on the market.

So, to some extent, as in the CatchBob project, I find interesting to employ mobile social games as platform to explore broader issues, especially the ones related to mobile user experience and what are the relationships between contemporary cities and these games. More about this topic later.

The Simpsons' Monorail and innovation

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The twelfth episode of The Simpsons' fourth season, called Marge vs. the Monorail is maybe one of my favorite episode and is definitely a great lesson in design. And this, not only in the conception of public transport, but also in terms of innovation as a whole. This episode focuses around the town of Springfield buying a monorail from a Lyle Lanley after earning lot of money, and instead of fixing more urgent problems like cracks on the streets. Only Marge seems to dislike the purchase but everyone in town seems to succumb to the glossy value of the Monorail. After a quick training, Homer happens to be the monorail driver. At first things run okay, but then some malfunction occur and the monorail accelerates dangerously. It's eventually stopped by Homer who launched an anchor on a big donut.

What does that say about design/innovation?

First, it's an interesting example of how a group of people puts lots of money in some sort of crazy things utterly cool that is not the most necessarily need of a community. When Marge tells Bart "Main Street's still all cracked and broken", he replies with the wisdom of the crowd motto: "Sorry, mom, the mob has spoken... Monorail! Monorail! Monorail!". As if the street, as a means of mobility, was boring, old-fashion and useless compared to the shiny representation of the future depicted by the monorail. What's funny is that even Lisa is fooled by the salesman when she tells him that such a transportation system would be useless in a low-density town such as Springfield. The promise of the value of a futuristic device such as the monorail is almost unquestionable (ah... progress), based on the common sense of the group.

Second, and surely a corollary, it also shows (and criticizes) how social pressure is important in the diffusion and acceptability of an innovation. "Ah it's not for you, it's more of a shelbyville idea" or"I've sold monorails to Brockway, Ogdenville, and North Haverbrook, and by gum, it put them on the map!" says the salesman showing a map of the US with only these cities on the map. To some extent, it follows innovation researcher from the 19th century Gabriel Tarde's laws of imitation: innovation are adopted faster when they have already been accepted elsewhere.

Why do I blog this? preparing material for a course, looking for interesting examples of failures. Reminds me of some innovations-who-became fads right? Of course every fad are not always comparable to the "springfield monorail" (scholars would say "isomorphic") but there are some good points in that episode.

People interested in the diffusion of innovation can find perfect exemplifications here:

  • The monorail as the invention
  • Springfield's inhabitants as the social structure. As usual when they have to decide municipal decisions, they gather in the townhall, under the guidance of Joe Quimby (the mayor), showing a very swiss landsgemeinde way of making decisions. Innovation researchers who employ the term "authority-collective decision" to describe how this choice to buy and build a monorail is made.
  • Lyle Lanley, the salesman, as the change agent external to the system
  • Lisa and then Marge as people who are part of the social system but who have doubts.
  • The monorail value proposition is the one of an innovation: faster than other means of transport, more sexy, complex and launched with the help of a VIP: Leonard Nemoy from Star Trek.

Of course, it does not depict the whole innovation diffusion, only the recurring failure of the monorail (based on different iterations) and how the salesmen made money out of it.

Street Electronic Journal

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Street Billboard This sort of device installed here used to be called "Journal Electronique de Rue" (Street Electronic Journal) in the 80s in France. What I find intriguing here is the assumption people had for this sort of urban screen: so much confidence in them led people to employ the word "journal" for a pretty basic display.

The phone diversity issue in ubicomp

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If one take cell phones as the prominent ubiquitous computing platform, an important problem is the one of the platform diversity. Greenhalgh and colleagues tackles this issue in their Ubicomp 2007 paper called "Addressing mobile phone diversity in Ubicomp experience development". Phones vary enormously in their capabilities and designers face a trade-off between capability and availability: " between what can be done and the fraction of potential participants’ phones that can do this" Comparing four cell phones platform (SMS, WAP/Web, and J2ME, Python and native applications), the authors interestingly propose "four development strategies for addressing mobile phone diversity: prioritise support for server development (including web integration), migrate functionality between server(s) and handset(s), support flexible communication options, and use a loosely coupled (data-driven and component-based) software approach".

Why do I blog this? documenting reasons of failures for certain projects in the field of consumer electronics.

Greenhalgh, C., Benford, S., Drozd, A., Flintham, M., Hampshire, A., Opperman, L., Smith, K. and Von Tycowicz, C., 2007. Addressing mobile phone diversity in Ubicomp experience development. In: UbiComp 2007. 9th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, Innsbruck, Austria, 16-19 September 2007. pp. 447-464

"Keeping aging systems on their feet"

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The inevitable aging and depletion of components of a design object is an often overlooked topic that is addressed in this IEEE Spectrum article. Some excerpts I found relevant:

" At the very least, the quest for an obsolete part can escalate into an unexpected, budget-busting expense. Electronics obsolescence—also known as DMSMS, for diminishing manufacturing sources and material shortages—is a huge problem for designers who build systems that must last longer than the next cycle of technology. (...) The crux is that semiconductor manufacturers mainly answer the needs of the consumer electronics industry, whose products are rarely supported for more than four years. Dell lists notebook computer models in its catalog for about 18 months. This dynamic hurts designers with long lead times on products with even longer field lives, introducing materials, components, and processes that are incompatible with older ones. (...) The systems hit hardest by obsolescence are the ones that must perform nearly flawlessly. Technologies for mass transit, medicine, the military, air-traffic control, and power-grid management, to name a few, require long design and testing cycles, so they cannot go into operation soon after they are conceived."

Hence the existence of "company that provides obsolescence-related resources" such as Qinetiq Technology Extension Corp and the need to develop "tools to forecast and resolve obsolescence problems":

"To deal with that growing pile of unavailable supplies, engineers in charge of long-lasting systems must basically predict the future—they must learn to plan well in advance, and more carefully than ever before, for the day their equipment will start to fail. (...) Such companies as i2 Technologies, Qinetiq, Total Parts Plus, and PartMiner have produced commercial tools that forecast obsolescence by modeling a part's life cycle. To derive a forecast, the services weigh a product's technical attributes—for example, minimum feature size, logic family, number of gates, type of substrate, and type of process—to rank parts by their stages of maturity, from introduction through growth, maturity, decline, phase out, and obsolescence. (...) However, predicting when parts will become unavailable is still not enough information on which to build a business plan. "

Why do I blog this? curiosity towards this intriguing and overlooked problem.

Shared mobility

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Beerbike Seen in Amsterdam last fall, beyond tandems. What I like here is that there is a potential to have this sort of device circling around a certain path, taking and letting people along the way, each of the participant giving a contribution to the movement. In the case above, it's not really like that, it's simply a "beer bike" :) A curious form of mobility anyway

Technology paternalism, ubicomp and the role of exceptions

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In "Technology paternalism – wider implications of ubiquitous computing", S. Spiekermann and F. Pallas deal with how people can maintain control in environments that are supposed to be totally automated. They coined the term "technology paternalism" to describe the situation where "people may be subdued to machines’ autonomous actions". They take the example of car that beeps when you don't fasten your seatblet and show how such situations meet the same criteria as the one that define paternalism:

" the definition of Technology Paternalism extends the general notion of paternalism with respect to two aspects: one is that actions are being taken autonomously by machines. The other one is that by their coded rules, machines can become ‘absolute’ forces and therefore may not be overrulable any more."

And discuss that in conjunction with Weiser's notion of calm computing:

"If machines are controlled, then they are not calm any more. There is a clear disaccord between the concept of disappearing technologies and the attempt to remain in control. Control premises attention and visibility whilst Ubicomp environments are designed to be invisible and seamlessly adaptive. Can this dissonance really ever be resolved? "

And of course there is a part about who's responsible of technology paternalism:

"Of course, this power does not lie in the hands of technology itself. Technology only follows rules implemented into it. Therefore, the question arises: who WILL be the real patrons behind Technology Paternalism if it were to become a reality? Who will decide about the rules, the ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’ of every-day actions? (...) three groups as the potential patrons behind Technology Paternalism: engineers and marketers of Ubicomp technologies as well as regulators influencing application design. "

Why do I blog this? Some relevant issues regarding the notion of control in ubicomp. The authors finally come up with a series of recommendations. The one that strikes me as fundamental is the following: "there should be a general possibility to overrule ‘decisions’ made by technology and any exceptions from this should be considered very carefully". The notion of exception is a crux issue that is often diminished by lots of engineers I talked to wrt to autonomous technologies such as "intelligent fridges" or location-based services. Exceptions breaks patterns and habits tracked by sensors, disrupt machine learning algorithm and are eventually impediments to prediction-based system that would send emergency messages to 911 because granny did not open her fridge for 2 weeks (because she unexpectedly decided to visit her grandson).

Paris, invisible city

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Paris, invisible city Finally managed to read the oversized Paris ville invisible book by Bruno Latour and Emilie Hermant (1998). The whole thing is an amazing photographic essay on the "social" and technical aspects of the city of Paris ("social" in Latour's sense). It's a bit like Susan Star's article called The Ethnography of Infrastructure but definitely in Latour's words (and yes it's definitely french). There is also a web version, defined as "a sociological web opera".

For this post, I am mostly concerned by the notion of traces, their visibility and their implications. An important part of the book is about various "channels of signifiers": from collected data like temperature or time to their computation by intermediaries (sensors, computers) and the map and model outputs employed by institutions such as telecom operators or police departments

Paris, invisible city

Some excerpts from an english translation by Liz Carey-Libbrecht:

"Megalomaniacs confuse the map and the territory and think they can dominate all of Paris just because they do, indeed, have all of Paris before their eyes. Paranoiacs confuse the territory and the map and think they are dominated, observed, watched, just because a blind person absent-mindedly looks at some obscure signs in a four-by-eight metre room in a secret place. Both take the cascade of transformations for information, and twice they miss that which is gained and that which is lost in the jump from trace to trace – the former on the way down, the latter on the way up. Rather imagine two triangles, one fitted into the other: the base of the first, very large, gets smaller as one moves up to the acute angle at the top: that's the loss; the second one, upside down in the first, gets progressively bigger from the point to the base: that's the gain. If we want to represent the social, we have to get used to replacing all the double-click information transfers by cascades of transformations. To be sure, we'll lose the perverted thrill of the megalomaniacs and the paranoiacs, but the gain will be worth the loss. (...) The more information spreads and the more we can track our attachments to others, since everywhere cables, forms, plugs, sensors, exchangers, translators, bridges, packets, modems, platforms and compilers become visible and expensive – with the price tag still attached to them. the reader will perhaps forgive us for our myopic obsession with the trails of traces"

Paris, invisible city

About how to reveal the invisible and the role of this book:

"the visible is never in an isolated image or in something outside of images, but in the montage of images, a transformation of images, a cross-cutting view, a progression, a formatting, a networking. (...) In photos and text we've attempted to highlight the role of the countless intermediaries who participate in the coexistence of millions of Parisians. In the series of transformations that we followed with myopic obsession, we would have liked to have kept each step, each notch, each stage, so that the final result could never abolish, absorb or replace the series of humble mediators that alone give it its meaning and scope. "

Why do I blog this? The book is a very intriguing read for anyone interested in contemporary cities and their underlying activities/infrastructures. If you liked Italo Calvino's "invisible cities", that book written by Latour (with pictures from Emilie Hermant) is a must read. The notion of traces described here is very Latour-ian to some extent and it's interesting how he uses it to describe what happens in a contemporary city such as Paris. What I find relevant here is this idea of "intermediaries" and the observation of the transformation he discusses.

If you've read Dan Hill's post "The Street as a Platform", that book is a theoretical exploration of the issue of technologies in city space. There is of course much more to draw from this book, which I will explore in following blogposts.

From the ground to satellites

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Street level antennas Seen last week in Geneva, next to temporary constructions for immigrants. What can we see here in this interesting "point of contact" - almost all have the same orientation (= same channels? same cultural group of viewer?) - they are grounded, do not at their regular position on the roof (= left here in a a hurry? not possible to climb to the roof) - they are very close to the sidewalk where people pass by (low number of people passing here anyway)

The Economist on digital nomads

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The last issue of The Economist ha a special report on mobile technologies and nomadism. The report features relevant articles but there was one that I don't really agree with. For example, the one called "location, location, location" definitely overestimate the short term and is in contradiction with currenf facts (see the previous blogpost):

"Most obviously, this means that “the idea of being lost will be unheard of”, he says. More interestingly, it allows people to become “more immersed in the real world around them”."

The most interesting part is certainly a short video on their website where they asked Jan Chipchase to self-document his nomadic life in Tokyo and Seattle, taking pictures and leaving phone messages.

More notes about this report later.

How GPS alter navigation/orientation

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In-Car GPS Navigation: Engagement with and Disengagement from the Environment by Leshed, Velden, Rieger, Kot, & Sengers is a paper presented at CHI 2008 that deals with the relationship between GPS car navigation and how people interpret their environment or navigate through it. What's interesting here is that they avoid technological determinism (technology as the external causation of change) and the traditional lament/pessimisn about technologies influence on social change. Using an ethnographically-informed study with GPS users, the authors show that GPS disengages people from their surrounding environment, but also has the potential to open up novel ways to engage with it". The issues of environmental engagement and disengagement are the following:

  • Pre-navigation/Route Choice: "“Finding” the destination is thus modified from a relative spatial activity to correctly keying in the address"
  • Route Following: GPS eliminate the attention to objects in the paths, some people less blindly than others.
  • Orientation in Unfamiliar Areas: " the GPS disconnects the drivers from the external environment, as they no longer need to find out where they are in order to avoid getting lost or for getting oriented when already lost. This issue is intensified when the GPS automatically and quietly recalculates a new route when its directions are not followed unintentionally (e.g. because of a mistake) or intentionally (e.g. because of road constructions and detours): the practice of re-orienting and consciously re-routing oneself is not necessary anymore. However, some informants reported that they do like to know where they are

    • Orientation in familiar areas: people do not want to have oral instructions, sometimes disagree with paths, use the gps "just for fun" or use it mark place they know.

  • When driving: social Interactions around the GPS: with: "interaction with other passengers in the car has altered given in-car GPS units. With vocal directions from the GPS unit, a passenger who serves as a navigator in the car is no longer in need, and so the driver/navigator roles are modified"
  • When driving, the GPS is often treated as an "active agent", socially speaking: naming the device, talking to him.
  • When driving, the interaction with the external environment and locals is also altered. For instance, the digital representation is not accurate enough so people have to look outside and see if their POI is here or it can allow to discover new elements (rivers or parks) on the way. And interaction with other people are less needed (to ask a direction).

Based on these results, the author provides some "high-level guidance rather than feature-centered design" ideas:

  • "GPS instructions could refer to landmarks in aiding navigation.
  • Highlight the ambiguity of GPS data (...) to minimize risks associated with over-trusting an automated device.
  • Extend context-aware capabilities: distinctive usage of the GPS in familiar areas
  • Support the car as a social place: Instead of secluding the passenger seated near the driver (...) we can engage them in the interaction with the GPS unit."

Why do I blog this? great paper from lots of criteria (theoretical justification, nice exemplification of techno-social recombination, design implications). Moreover, the design implications are close to what we found in another location-based context: in the CatchBob experiment, while studying how WiFi positioning is employed by players (I'm currently writing a paper with Fabien about it). That paper is also interesting at it contradicts what that "location, location, location" article in the last Economist report state (the fact that we will never be lost or be more immersed in the physical world.

Leshed, G., Velden, T., Rieger, O., Kot, B., & Sengers, P. (2008). In-car GPS navigation: Engagement with and disengagement from the environment. Best Paper Award. To appear in Proceedings of CHI 2008, Florence, Italy.

Blizzard's design process and the role of failures

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11 innovation lessons from creators of World of Warcraft by Colin Stewart is a very interesting discussion. I don't agree with all of them but some are important. That one struck me as relevant:

"6. THE IMPORTANCE OF FREQUENT FAILURES “One of the mantras that a large software development company uses is ‘Fail Often, Fail Fast,’ ” Wartenberg said. “As Alan Mullaly said when he led Boeing Commercial Aircraft, ‘We celebrate mistakes; bring them into the open, because we can’t help fix what we don’t know about.’ ” To show Blizzard’s devotion to this principle, CEO Morhaime and other executives listed the titles of canceled games Blizzard had worked on: Nomad, Raiko, Warcraft Adventures, Games People Play, Crixa, Shattered Nations, Pax Imperia, and Denizen. “We don’t have a 100 percent hit rate. We just cancel all the ones that aren’t going well,” Morhaime said. “Failure begets success,” intellectual property attorney St. George said. “Many successful companies and CEOs have noted that their best successes have come from failures. The lessons learned from failures will provide the stepping stones for the next innovation.”"

Why do I blog this? gathering notes about failures for a personal project. It's also interesting to see that game companies are only reaching the stage where they figure out the lessons described in that paper ("GO BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD", "MAKE CONTINUAL IMPROVEMENTS").

Micro-mobility devices to handle "micro-distance"

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When it comes to mobility, people are in general mesmerized by Velib or Zipcar lately but there are there sorts of devices that I find very intriguing: aluminium scooters or K-2 Kickboard Scooter. Some people would argue that this for start-up pricks (because real value is in pure P&P skateboarding gear) or that it is childish and useless but I don't think so. I don't have any scooters but what I find interesting here is the notion of "micro-mobility" and the balance of cost: the cost to use the device is low (lower than unfolding the A-bike Adam gave me for instance). And it's way cheaper than a Sidekick. Another characteristic is that it can be used indoor/outdoor.

Invented around 2000 by dutch/swiss banker Wim Outboter, these scooters are still very popular. His point at that time was to solve this concrete problem:

"When Wim was 30 years old and living in Zurich, he came across a problem. His favourite sausage shop was too far away to walk, yet not far away enough to take the car out of the garage. 'I called it a microdistance,' he says. 'I made a primitive scooter using the wheels of some inline skates and it worked. The only problem was that when I went down town on it, people laughed at me.' With his characteristic mixture of a kid's desire to be cool and a grown-up's application of technology, Wim worked at the scooter until it was small enough to hide in his backpack. It still took another 10 years (and the constant encouragement of his wife) to get the invention on the road."

Why do I blog this? interest in less common means of transport and their implications in terms of design (of the device itself as well as the infrastructure to support it). Micro-mobility devices also seems to be a bit dismissed in the discourse about the future of mobility in urban environment, although scooters, lifts, elevators, electric sidewalks, etc are prominent in our everyday life. And high-rise architects surely have to deal with that.

About pneumatic network

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Pneumatic tubes and networks (as the one described in Boris Vian's novels) have always fascinated me. The name itself is gorgeous and it really looks like a strange vehicle. Although there are sometimes still use to transport cash and documents (transparent supermarkets pneumatics are intriguing), their usage has often stop or led to new possibilities: using tubes to put optic fibers to serve as internet infrastructure OR use both technology and pneumatic to vehicle paper documents which still matters in the 21st century. Also of interest is the mapping of pneumatic networks, see for instance the Paris network as shown in this article:

Why do I blog this? What is interesting here is not that you can get web-based remote control of an electro-pneumatic (nor the impact on net neutrality) but rather the existence and sometimes the resilience of this communication network. An old version of the "city of flow" sort-of.