William Gibson on scifi

New Scientist has a quick piece by William Gibson that is somewhat intriguing if you're interested in building near futures. A sort of extension of "the future is just here, it's not evenly distributed". See for example:

"The single most useful thing I've learned from science fiction is that every present moment, always, is someone else's past and someone else's future. I got that as a child in the 1950s, reading science fiction written in the 1940s; reading it before I actually knew much of anything about the history of the 1940s or, really, about history at all. I literally had to infer the fact of the second world war, reverse-engineering my first personal iteration of 20th-century history out of 1940s science fiction. I grew up in a monoculture - one I found highly problematic - and science fiction afforded me a degree of lifesaving cultural perspective I'd never have had otherwise. I hope it's still doing that, for people who need it that way, but these days lots of other things are doing that as well. (...) I took it for granted that the present moment is always infinitely stranger and more complex than any "future" I could imagine. My craft would be (for a while, anyway) one of importing steamingly weird fragments of the ever-alien present into "worlds" (as we say in science fiction) that purported to be "the future"."

Why do I blog this? very interesting elements here to link with what Charles Stross discussed recently concerning near future SF. Also important when you think how scifi is about the past and the present (or at least as a discourse about these different timeframes and what is important before and during the time the author wrote).

The relation to design? Simply, the Uncanny of the present is material for design.

Portable gaming habits

Some insights from a recent study by NPD about portable gaming (collected from over 3,200 pre-identified sample owners of portable devices from September 16-23):

"79 percent [of those polled say] they use their portable device in-home, far more than any other location. (...) Gameplay is the feature used by most (84 percent) on the PlayStation Portable. Slightly more than one third of PSP owners are watching movies (35 percent) and listening to music (33 percent) on their device (...) Ninety two percent of Nintendo DS owners are playing games by themselves followed by close to one quarter playing games with friends locally using one game cartridge.„ (...) Listening to music dominates iPod usage (96 percent) followed by playing games (20 percent) at a distant second."

Although it's not mentioned in the article, I guess it's a US study. The conclusion states that (1) these devices may be competing with more stationary entertainment devices for a user’s time, (2) the scope of gaming devices is changing to entertainment devices, (3) "„iPods/iPhones are being treated as entertainment devices. Why do I blog this? interesting evolution in the last few months wrt mobile entertainment. I also wonder about the range of applications, especially on the Nintendo DS as there are more and more cartridges which are not really games (such as Hello Kitty diary for example). The possibility to design non-games is more and more intriguing in this field.

Future of economic and cultural exchange

Recently been working on the future of economic and cultural exchange with a good bunch of people. The project is called KashKlash and has the following purposes:

"KashKlash is a lively platform where you can debate future scenarios for economic and cultural exchange. Beyond today’s financial turmoil, what new systems might appear? Global/local, tangible/intangible, digital/physical? On the KashKlash site, you can explore potential worlds where traditional financial transactions have disappeared, blended, or mutated into unexpected forms. Understand the near future, and help shape it!

Imagine yourself deprived of all of today’s conventional financial resources. Maybe you’re a refugee or stateless — or maybe it’s the systems themselves that have gone astray. Yet you still have your laptop, the Internet, and a broadband mobile connection. What would you do to create a new informal economy that would help you get by? What would you live on? E-barter? Rationing? Gadgets? Google juice? Cellphone minutes? Imagine a whole world approaching that condition. Which of today’s major power-players would win and lose, thrive or fail? What strange new roles would tomorrow’s technology fill?""

This public domain project is conceived and led by Heather Moore of Vodafone’s Global User Experience Team and run by Experientia, an international forward-looking user experience design company based in Turin, Italy.

You can check the project description for more info.

KashKlash also involved a participatory exploration phase in which you can join and follow the debate of our experts or contribute yourself by leaving a comment on the different matters or fill out our KashKlash questionnaire.

Design and the Uncanny

Old robots(Spare parts from an old robot encountered last year)

In "The Uncanny and The Everyday in the Design of Robots" (a paper submitted as a CHI workshop in 2004), Carl DiSalvo discusses an intriguing topic: how the design should not prevent people loosing sight how unusual certain artifacts are. He applies his reasoning to electronic products such as robots:

"Recently there has been a surge in the development of robots as products for use in offices, public spaces, and the home. (...) The forms and functions of robots are often explicitly constructed as imitations of living beings. Through these imitations, robots exhibit and are attributed qualities such as emotion, intelligence, and autonomy, (...) how can we avoid losing sight of how unusual it is to grant such qualities and roles to them? "

Di Salvo then proposes that "The Uncanny" is a relevant and critical approach to reveal the underlying issues and implications of robots. What he means by this term is simply that the familiar can act strangely, which is of course related to this "Uncanny Valley" notion:

"The Uncanny Valley is that point where the resemblance between a robot and a human is almost, but not quite, identical, and the tension between this difference/sameness is disturbing. Even though The Uncanny Valley has never been systematically examined, it is perpetuated in the robotics community as a place to be avoided. But perhaps, it is not a place to be avoided. Because The Uncanny causes us to confront basic assumptions central to the design of robots, perhaps it is exactly the place where a critical approach to the design of robots should focus. "

He then gives three conceptual propositions for the design of uncanny domestic robots:

  1. Robotic Vacuums That Speak Their Mind ("I have never been in this room before, please stay with me while I clean it.")
  2. Homely Homes For Robots, Unhomely Homes for Humans ("uncanny homes, homes that were unhomley for humans but homely for robots — redefining the artifact as an inhabit")
  3. Real Appliance Pets ("transform a robotic vacuum cleaner into a more realistic imitation of a pet")

Why do I blog this Beyond the fascination towards this sort of device (of course I'd love to have a nevrotic robot), I find this discussion about the Uncanny highly important. Not only about robots of course. Design is often based on the assumption that it will create objects and experiences that match up with people and their practices. Or that it can "integrate the new into the everyday". I wonder about different ways to go beyond this situation and what Di Salvo describes in this paper is surely an interesting solution to create enriching user experiences. I guess personalization is also another relevant possibility.

Location-based war game

It's been a while that I haven't seen lot of innovation in the field of location-based games. It's as if the game play were always repeated (object collection, finding a human who have to escape...). There were some good projects about this in the past but the field has some trouble going beyond a limited range of scenario.

Within this context, Turf Bombing, designed by Che-Wei Wang, looks intriguing:

"Turf Bombing is a location-based turf battle game which rewards and encourages traveling and learning about different neighborhoods.

This game requires a laptop and works anywhere in the world where there's a wifi connection. Your laptop's wifi connection is used to triangulate your position.

Gangs are assigned by the zip code of your home address. The goal of each gang is to gain as much territory as possible.

Territories are acquired as players plant time bombs at different locations in physical space. If the bomb is not diffused by a local gang member in time, the bomb will explode and the territory will be turned over to the gang that planted the bomb."

Why do I blog this? I find interesting the use of a location-based game as a way to encourage new transport modes. A sort of "serious game" in the field of pervasive gaming.

LBS troubles

Some material about location-based services... and how the user adoption of such artifact has been somewhat delayed (a topic I addressed copiously in my ETech 2008 presentation): First, this IHT article entitled "Still searching for profit in location-based services". It addresses how mobile operators are hoping that LBS can lead to new profit for quite a while now. The main issue is that while car navigation devices has been successfully adopted, other technologies typically remains "crude and unhelpful - and unused - for mobile navigation":

"Despite the increasing availability of GPS-enabled mobiles, many consumers are still reluctant to pay for mobile navigation, said Velipekka Kuoppala, a vice president for sales and marketing at Bluesky Positioning (...) How soon will the sales come? André Malm, a senior analyst at Berg Insight, offers this forecast: Global sales from location-based services will more than triple to $740 million annually by 2014, as the number of GPS users rises to 70 million globally from 16 million this year.

But for that to happen, Malm acknowledges, operators will have to sell mobile navigation services for which consumers are willing to pay."

David H. Williams at Directions Mag has its own bits about why LBS fails to reach a mature market. He sketches 7 deadly sins:

"Sin #1 - Poorly Identifying Opportunities Sin #2 - Poorly Articulated Customer Value Proposition Sin #3 - Weak Business Case Sin #4 - Inflexible Business Model Sin #5- Flawed Technical and User Design Sin #6 - Inattention to Intellectual Property Sin #7 - Deficient Marketing"

Also very interesting for that matter, Gerhard Navratil and Eva Grum from the Institute for Geoinformation and Cartography (TU Vienna) have a paper about What makes Location-Based Services Fail? that gives a good overview that overlaps with my etech talk. They basically explain how technical solutions, legal restrictions and usability influence the design and efficiency of LBS. What is interesting there is that they show how the failure is systemic, that is to say, how the combination of factors per se leads to a problem in user adoption:

"A reason for failure could be that one of the three influences limits the service. It may be that the technology simply does not allow locating the mobile phone accurate enough or the LBS is not accepted because it is too difficult to use. Also threats of a lawsuit for violation of patents or copyright law may stop an LBS."

Why do I blog this? material for a book about LBS/locative media.

Incomplete buildings

Different levels Incomplete buildings are something that fascinate me. The raw backbone of the buildings looks as if it had been never finished or strip naked after a momentarily stopped renovation. To me, the city of the near future definitely looks like this sort of architecture. And this fascination is not just poetic, it's a very recurring encounter in lots of cities due to economic and cultural issues in construction.

For example, the picture above has been taken in Cusco, Peru. It nicely reveals how the floors reached different levels of completeness. The one above is a restaurant where I had lunch in august, whereas the two other stories below have a totally different affordance. Sometimes, it's even more fascinating when you have incomplete skyscrapers, falling into despair. Some are totally abandoned, some only partly... with pockets of emptiness. These structures often lead to interesting new forms of socialization that would surely need some time to be uncovered.

If like me you're into this sort of things, you may be intrigued by a french architecture firm called coloco which works on this concept. Régine pointed me to their Skeleton Observatory. It's actually a summary of their exploration, about why the think this architectural typology is important and may play a role in the near future. It eventually lead them to describe projects about "inhabiting the skeletons", i.e. the re-appropriation of abandoned and incomplete architectures. The skeleton becomes and "invitation à l'usage" (i.e. "an invitation to be used"). They even have their own France-based abandoned building to test their hypotheses.

Why do I blog this? cataloguing curious signals about new forms of architecture on a pure exploratory angle.

Ethnography and design

In "Experience Models: Where Ethnography and Design Meet" presented at the EPIC2006 conference, Rachel Jones discusses the roles of ethnography in design. She gives a quick overview of the literature regarding this topic:

  • "Identifying “sensitizing” concepts (the identification of researchable topics)
  • Developing specific design concepts (studying settings that may shed light on what abstract design concepts might mean concretely in order to sketch out and work up potential design solutions)
  • Driving innovative technological research (explore the sociality of novel design spaces opened up by radical technology in real world settings)
  • Evaluating design (conduct a “sanity check” on the design. Ethnography has also been used to inform the iterative design)
  • Context awareness (immersing researchers, designers and sometimes clients in the setting, for the purpose of understanding the context in which a product will be developed)
  • Identifying key emerging themes (an area of study, and developed with a view to identifying design opportunities and influencing design solutions)
  • Developing experience frameworks (models that identify the key components of an experience and indicate the structural relationships between those components... facilitate the generation and mapping of opportunities)"

Why do I blog this? interesting overview, material for my UX course where I show the importance of "people research" (based on ethnography-inspired methods) for design.

On a different note, I am less and less using the term ethnography because (1) I am not an ethnographer, (2) the use os methods coming from ethnography is far different from conducting ethnography, (3) there seems to be some weird trend currently that confuse ethnography with data collection.

What to do with light bulbs?

Light bulb An occidental kitchen, classic, with postcards, boxes and... this lighbulb. Why would people keep this? To have it up one's sleeve if another one breaks? Actually no, the bulb is sitting there because the owners do not know where to put it. In a 21st century society where you cannot trash anything (especially in Switzerland), when you don't know how to toss something, you preciously keep it.

Why do I blog this? thinking about practices related to electricity for my course/lecture in Paris tomorrow.

Instances of touch-based interaction

Touch arphid key

Touch interactions

touch

Some design issues that emerge from few instances of touch-based interactions: different sorts (touch, press, wave ...), different attitude (hold when waiting before your can touch on pic 1), use of different hands (left/right, influence of one's lateralization), the role of signs on the surface to be touched, the surface texture, presence/absence of cues indicating where to touch, multitasking with your hands (holding and touching on picture 3), etc...

About nokia open studio

The recent "Nokia Open Studio: Engaging Communities" published by Younghee Jung and Jan Chipchase is worth to read for various reasons. The obvious one is to know more about open studio/innovation and how they conducted research along this line. Their case study shows how the purpose is not to generate ideas of services but instead, to "generate inspirational and cross-referential material about the role of future technologies in participant’s lives by giving residents the opportunity to articulate their needs and aspirations, and present these in the context of their everyday life". Another reason to read it carefully is more general and concerns the underlying issues regarding UX research in a company such as Nokia (an issue I already described here). Some snippets from the document:

"The decision of what to research is decided on an approximately 6-12 month’s basis with some themes drawn from corporate strategy, guided by a consumer insights team that highlights trends of interest, and based on team member’s instinct of what will have the most impact within the corporation. The style of research could even be described as migratory in the sense that the team is drawn to where the resources - research topics of interest, and the means to carry out that research are richest. A major challenge of any kind of corporate field research is finding the right balance between field work and maintaining relevance within the corporate structure, which can involve anything from the face to face sharing of the results to hands on application of what was learned into the design process. The challenge boils down to: how to efficiently and meaningfully gather credible and interesting data, within a relatively short period of time in the field (which for us equates to about two weeks) from a research location anywhere on the planet?"

Why do I blog this some interesting material about the link between UX and design... some interesting reflections that can be useful to rethink my presentation about how field research can inform design.

The document is an interesting use case that shows the different issues related to this sort of approach.

HCI and grounded versus speculative reasoning

There's an insightful discussion going on at "interaction culture" (Jeffrey Bardzell's blog) about grounded versus speculative reasoning in HCI. It basically revolves around how HCI, though crying out for new approaches is still based on the normative notions of science, and therefore have trouble accepting other forms of knowledge productions. Namely, more speculative forms coming from philosophy (but I would also add, to some extent, more design-based discourse). What generally happens in peer-review is the following, as decribed by Bardzell:

"Part of social science’s rigor is in “grounding.” There are two acceptable ways (well, more than two but I’m focusing on two here) to ground reasoning in social sciences: one is through the careful collection, analysis, and interpretation of data. One eye opener for me as a humanist entering HCI years ago was (to me, at that time) obsessive care with which claims were made. It seemed to me then that social scientists would only make the tiniest, safest, most conservative claims; they shied away from the bold and interesting ones that really push understanding. Now I understand why that is the case: when you are making truth claims about reality, unless you have that care, there can be serious consequences as a result of speculation not only to knowledge of a state of affairs, but also action taken based on the assumption that that knowledge is true (policymaking, design, and other human interventions intended to change our world for the better). The other acceptable way to ground reasoning is by appealing to some other authority who has already done such an analysis. In this special and limited context, appeals to authority in the social sciences are, if not logically airtight, at least able to provide the epistemological foundation required for the work of the field. (...) Philosophy and more generally the humanities, in contrast, are not as strongly oriented toward truth claims about the world as it actually is. (...) So the most important question of a philosophical paper about principles in HCI is not whether the argument is grounded (an ontological concern), but rather whether the paper helps us think more productively about our field (an epistemological concern)."

To which I generally agree, based on the comments I received on paper I submitted in journal or conferences. This sort of issue was one of the reason I turned myself to design research.

Interestingly, Adam Greenfield commented on the blogpost, which is quite interesting as "Everyware" is a highly relevant piece even if, by science standards, it falls out of academic work in HCI. An excerpt from Adam's comment:

"I’m under no illusion that my work is informed by any particular intellectual rigor, let alone anything that would pass academic muster, but by the same token I obviously feel it represents some contribution to the field. Prior to publication, my expectation was very much that my book on ubicomp would be ignored by HCI-at-large, which is to say not discussed and certainly not cited. I was very pleasantly surprised that this has not been the case, which seems to me to constitute proof from existence that the field (at least as instantiated by certain institutions and powerful individuals, and at certain times and places) is able to welcome input external to almost all of its mechanisms for assessing rigor/”groundedness.”

As far as I’m concerned, that presents a felicitous picture: one of a discipline with considerable reserves of intellectual confidence and maturity."

Why do I blog this? this is an important discussion about the evolution of a field such as HCI/interaction design. Although I generally agree with Bardzell, I hope that examples such Adam's work can pave the way for the integration of more speculative work in the field.

Persuasive design

Two intriguing examples of persuasive design encountered at ENSCI in Paris: Incentive

The first one, next to the stairs, is an invitation to use the staircase as opposed to the elevator so "harden your butt".

Incentive

The second is a sticker that someone have put on the toilet hand dryer. It says "What's the largest contributor to global warming?" with two answers: "Dry one's hand with a tissue?" and "Press a button?".

Subtle cueing to invite for behavioral changes.

Different under the surface

An interesting quote from "Halting State" (Charles Stross):

"We used to have sliderules and log tables, then calculators made them obsolete. Even though old folks can still do division and multiplication in their heads, we don't use that. We used to have maps, on paper. But these are all small things (...) The city look the same, but underneath its stony hide, nothing is quite the way it used to be. Somewhere along the lines we ripped its nervous systems and muscles out and replaced them with a different architecture. In a few years it'll run on quantum key exchange magic, and everything will have changed again. But our time-traveller - they won't know that. It looks like the 20th century"

Why do I blog this? I found intriguing this familiar-but-different depiction. The scene happens when 2 characters of the novel wander around Edinburgh in 2018 and discuss how it would look familiar to a time-traveller coming from the 50s and how it's only underneath the surface of buildings and infrastructures (as well as clothing style and presence of cell-phones) that things work very differently.

This is quite interesting as it seems to follow how innovation works (step by step most of the time) with disruptions under the surface of things.

Simondon on technical and cultural objects

In his "On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects", french sociologist Gilbert Simondon interestingly addresses the flawed distinction between culture and technique:

"Culture has become a system of defense designed to safeguard man from technics. This is the result of the assumption that technical objects contains no human reality. We would like to show show that culture fails to take into account that in technical reality there is a human reality, and that, if it is fully to play its role, culture must come to terms with technical entities as part of its body of knowledge and values. (...) The opposition established between the cultural and the technical and between man and machine is wrong and has not foundation. (...) It uses a mask of facile humanism to blind us to a reality that is full of human striving and rich in natural forces. This reality is the world of technical objects, the mediators between man and nature"

And he goes on be raising an interesting point: art pieces and more aesthetic objects are not criticized in the same way. A painting is part of culture but a robot isn't:

"Culture is unbalanced because, while it grants recognition to certain objects, for example aesthetics things, and gives them their due place in the world of meanings, it banishes other objects, particularly technical things, into the unstructured world of things that have no meaning but do have a use, a utilitarian function. (...) Our culture this entertains two contradictory attitudes to technical objects. On the one hand, it treats them as pure and simple assemblies of material that are quite without true meaning and that only provide utility. On the other hand, it assumes that these objects are also robots and that they harbor intentions hostile to man, or that they represent for man a constant threat of aggressions or insurrection."

Why do I blog this? Simondon is always refreshing and his writings (not very common in english) quite pervaded sociology and philosophy nowadays (Bruno Latour, Bernard Stiegler) and theories such as ANT. What I find relevant here is the importance of locating technique (i.e. technologies) where it belongs and not distinguish from other human-based creation.

300km per hour

tgv "Ladies and Gentlemen, our TGV is running at its maximum speed at 300 kilometer per hour" as announced by the train controller. Revealing the company's (and country's) pride? Informing passengers of service quality (assuming that speed is quality)? Telling consumers that they're taken care of by recurring feedthrough information?

Baroque, creolization, cannibalism and technology adoption

"Mobile technology appropriation in a distant mirror: baroque infiltration, creolization and cannibalism" by Bar, Pisani and Weber is one of these mysterious academic paper that I enjoy running across. It basically investigate appropriation of mobile phones in Latin America, and how this technology is embedded within people social, economic, and political practices. Relying on the classic literature about appropriation (for example S-shaped curves and Roger's theories), they show how technology evolution progress through successive phases of adoption, appropriation, and reconfiguration. By analogy with the historical process of cultural appropriation in Latin America, they draw a parallel between these steps and the 3 following modes: “baroque”, “creolization” and “cannibalism”:

"Baroque layering: The most basic way in which users can appropriate a technology is for them to use the personalization features that are provided to them with that intent in mind. As technical objects, mobile phones come with many such affordances. These include for example the ability to change the ringtone, screen wallpaper, upload one’s phonebook, set up short-cuts for most-often called numbers, download games, and upload one’s music, photo, or video collection. (...) Creolization represents a deeper transformation, a more profound form of appropriation. It refers to practices where the user recombines or reprograms elements of the technology. In this appropriation mode, by contrast with baroque layering, users are more deeply involved in changing the technology. They now explore ways to adapt the technology beyond the options that have been designed by the phone makers and service providers. (...) Cannibalism: This third form of appropriation is the most extreme in the sense that it corresponds to practices where the user chooses to engage in direct conflict with the suppliers of the technology (or at least with the power relation as embodied in the technology.) Cannibalism includes modifications of the device that place the user in direct opposition with the providers’ business model, destruction of the device."

Why do I blog this? following theories of technology adoption for a while (especially for a course I give about innovation and foresight in a design school), I read a lot about s-shape curves, 3-steps theories and found this one quite intriguing. Also because after going 3 times to latin america for one year, I noticed how it could be an interesting field of observation. This paper is interestingly anchored in both relevant theoretical and empirical points that I may reuse in the course as well as in my research. The part about designing for appropriation is also relevant as it points out the role of taking into account these 3 phases in creating meaningful products and services.

From AI to ubicomp

"Interactionist AI and the promise of ubicomp, or, how to put your box in the world without putting the world in your box" by Lehau, Sengers and Matcas makes an interesting analogy between Ubiquitous Computing and the situation encountered by Artificial Intelligence in the 1980s. They state how the current debate in ubiquitous computing regarding how a computational system can both make sense of the environment AND respond to it in a sensible way belongs to the same class of problems AI had to face in the past:

"In particular, ubicomp is currently facing a series of challenges in scaling up from prototypes that work in restricted environments to solutions that reliably, robustly work in the full complexity of human environments. These challenges echo problems AI researchers tackled as the field sought to move beyond ‘blocks-world’ solutions to build real-time systems that could work in dynamic, complex environments."

Part of the paper is about this analogy (in terms of the difficulty encountered by both fields), another part is about proposing interactionist AI (e.g. autonomous agents) as a potential solution to scale ubicomp prototype to real-world deployment. Why do I blog this? For people interested in the debate about the capture of context, there are some interesting points here about how to reframe classic ubicomp issues, as well as answers to some concerns raised by Bell and Dourish.

Pre-computing dashboard

Computing computing A fascinating stack of notes with numbers, additions and corrections encountered recently in a very old-school french grocery store. This awfully nice pile of duct-taped paper looks very pre-computing and surely plays more role than calculations: it's clearly as dashboard for the salesman as he told me he uses it as a reminder for customer credit "emprunts".

The importance of paper, again.