Two intriguing examples of defensible space in the Paris metro, or how a certain steel structure prevent people to stand below the tv-screen. Curiously enough, it looks as if someone who stand in there to give you the same information delivered by the screen.
Signage to indicate that "This remote control will only work on hotel TV set", seen in Paris yesterday. Sort of ownership inscription.
A nice read in the last issue of Design Mind (by Frog Design): "Slow Innovation: Good ideas take a long time to perfect" by David Hoffer. Taking various examples (from Edison’s cylinder phonograph invented in 1877 to its plateau-ed end in 1910 or the 80 years duration of vinyls), the author shows that there seems to be 30-plus year innovation cycles and variations. This topic is of course highly explored in the literature about the diffusion of innovation (see for instance the work by Everett Rogers). The article sums up some of the results from this literature. See for example the discussion about the users' roles in innovation ("echnology may be advancing quickly, but that doesn’t mean humans have the interest or the aptitude to adopt it right away"). But more importantly, it's the implications for business that are the most relevant here:
"For businesses, slow is often a pejorative term, but slow innovation isn’t always a bad thing. Slow change can give entrenched industries a chance to gather their thoughts and respond effectively. Is it possible that a 19th-century buggy-whip company, faced with declining sales, started fashioning steering wheel covers, gearshift handle caps, and leather seating in cars? If not, they should have, thereby turning extinction into evolution. Businesses looking to innovate must always be paying attention to disruptions (and perhaps even doing a little disrupting of their own)."
Why do I blog this? updating the material I use for the courses I will give this semester about innovation, user research and foresight.
CIO has a recent article about the lessons learned by science-fiction writer about predicting the future of technology. This journal asked authors such as Larry Niven, Robert Sawyer, Nancy Kress and Charles Stross to discuss technology-related predictions. The whole article is a good read but I point here some of the lessons:
- "Look for the goals humankind will never give up. Instant travel, instant education, longevity. Then try to guess when it will appear and what it will look like.
- Pay close attention to parasite control. There is always someone who wants the money for something else.
- You're obliged to predict not just the automobile but the traffic jam and the stranglehold on gas prices
- The trap we science and space buffs always fall into is thinking that everybody will want the things that we want, they don't; they have their own agendas, and ultimately, as in everything, it's the economy, stupid. Just because you personally want something doesn't mean there's a market for it. Just because we technically could do something doesn't mean that's how others want to see their tax dollars spent."
- We can point to extrapolations of current technological and social trends, but we can't extrapolate on the basis of stuff that hasn't been discovered yet. For example: In 1962 it was possible, just about, to see the future of integrated circuitry (and even, if you were very far-sighted, to glimpse Moore's Law and its implications), but the CD player was right out of the picture— solid state lasers lay at least a decade in the future.
- The standard advice is to be aggressive in your predictions; there's this notion that the future always comes faster than you think it will (...) But, actually, I think a lot of us underestimated social inertia, Most of us predicted a secular 21st century, and it's anything but that. The world is like a person: It doesn't change as it gets older. Rather, it simply becomes more obviously what it always was. People always liked having phones and portable music, but most people never wanted to lug a camera, or an ebook reader, or a PDA around. The future is adding functionality to those things we've already admitted into our lives, not trying to convince people they need new categories of things; the iPhone—the all-in-one device that is, first and foremost, something familiar—is the correct paradigm.
- Study the cutting edge of the specific field. Create wild cards. And then don't worry about being wrong—it's science fiction."
Why do I blog this? some good tips here and ideas to be mentioned in upcoming work about failed futures and the importance of understanding failures. It echoes a lot with the talk I've given at Design Engaged, I will maybe reshuffle this for my introduction to Lift09.
Intriguing sticker found in Paris yesterday. Surely some trendy street-art phenomenon but the observing how it's inserted in the urban fabric is very compelling, as if the city infrastructure was referred to as "this is not a prototype"... as if people needed to be aware that this pipe was real and important.
Would be funny to have this kind of sticker "everyware" (please appreciate the pun here): "this is not a prototype... and you'd better care about this urban computing infrastructure".
... as attested by this recent news which shows that Google is shutting down the mobile social network it bought few years ago (Dodgeball). Dennis tells us more about hiss perspective on the near future of social LBS:
"And just on a sidenote, the whole mobile + social space is still pretty open. Even, what?, 5 years after Alex and I launched dball in April 2004, no one is really doing anything new. Sure, Brightkite showed us "Place Snap" and Loopt's rocking "Mixx" (ha!), but no one is really thinking about this space beyond just "Twitter with whereabouts"... so maybe Naveen and I can take a stab at fixing that."
Why do I blog this? an interesting sign that that the evolution of social LBS takes time and that we're not there yet as a large market (will we ever go there anyway is also an interesting question).
A good list of papers from the Automated Journeys workshop (at Ubicomp 2008) has been put on-line recently. This event was about examining how automation reconfigure people's interactions with cities and speculate on what innovations might be to come. I unfortunately missed it, although this is a favorite topic of mine.
I haven't checked all the papers but I was intrigued by the one called Automation as a Very Familiar Place written by Mads Ingstrup. Some excerpts that I enjoyed:
"The constraints set by the infrastructures supporting our journey through spaces we create are a strong determinant of how we experience those spaces and their places. We argue that rigidity of infrastructural constraints causes familiarity, and that familiarity breeds the automatic experience. (...) They are familiar because they are stable across a variety of contexts—a journey by train in Scandinavia now compared with one in Japan some hundred years ago, while not exactly the same, has some stable and defining features: the passive traveler situated in the train car, observing the landscape passing by the window. (...) What happens to our experience of journeys such as train travel if it is infested/blessed with the wave of technologies ubicomp represents—enabling people to increasingly personalize their surroundings? (...) Digital technologies that increase the opportunity for personalization may change the ways in which infrastructure influence our experiences. In particular, we raised the question of whether it makes the meaning of our experiences more personal and therefore less shared. Further we suggested that the notion of automation can usefully be analyzed in terms of where control is situated and in terms of the rigidity of its implementation."
Then "Connectability in Automated Journeys" by Shin'ichi Konomi & Kaoru Sezaki is also interesting as it uncovers a specific dimension of automated journey: connectabiliy:
"Ubicomp technologies can enable new forms of connectability in a city, and technologies for supporting connectability need to be integrated into subtle human processes. We then introduced the 6 dimensions that could be used to explore the design space for supporting connectability:
- People - things - spaces Connections can be made within and across the following categories: people, things and spaces.
- Digital - physical Connectability can be represented by using digital, physical, as well as ‘hybrid’ media.
- Explicit - implicit Connectability can suggest connections explicitly or implicitly. Connectability can be ambiguous.
- Real time - batch Connectability can be identified in real time (e.g., Lovegety) or through batch processing (e.g., post hoc analysis of GPS traces)
^
- One Time - repeated Some opportunities to connect arise only once. Others arise multiple times and even repeatedly. This dimension is also relevant to serendipity.
- Ignorability Connectability can/cannot be ignored without causing negative effects (cf. “plausible ignorability”)"
Why do I blog this? Automation is one of the dimension of technology that I find the most interesting since it's an obvious locus of research. It directly embeds the topic of human relationship to technologies given that automation is often a goal for system designers (as a substitute for human activities) and if often leads to failures and troubles.
As seen on an Air-France counter, a tactile device to get people's feedback. What is interesting here:
A quick update on Lift09, the conference is taking shape. It's 6 weeks ahead, a good list of people registered already and the program is completed (apart from the sustainable evening event) and we are looking forward to have the whole bunch of speakers who will talk about the implications of technologies in society.
Also, for those who want to attend the Lift conference, there's only one day left before the end of the early bird pricing. And there is still room in the open program with workshops, short speeches and discussions.
Looking forward to it! Lot of work till then anyway.
How to display automatic flush, seen in Paris Orly airport. Color and flow are explicitly described in a politically correct way.
As described by Jorge Luis Borges in of his novel:
"... In this empire the art of cartography had reached such a perfection that a map of a single county covered a whole city, and a map of the empire that of a whole county. Finally, a point was reached when these colossal maps were no longer considered satisfactory, and the institutions of the cartographers made a map of the empire which was as large as the empire itself and coincided with it point for point. Later generations, who were less prone to practice the art of cartography, came to realize that this vast map was useless and through some neglect abandoned it to the forces of sun and winters. In the deserts of the western regions [of the empire], home to beasts and beggars, there remained dispersed ruins of the map, but otherwise there were no remains of the practice of geography in the whole land."
Why do I blog this? In this excerpt, Borges mock the utopian 1-1 cartography of the world by showing how such a mapping would be as large as what it represents. I found interesting to use this quote to demonstrate the difference between reality and what can be mapped.
In his recent column at ACM interactions, Lars Erik Holmquist deals with two basic problems encountered by mobile social software: battery life and critical mass.
"The first may seem trivial, and more than one startup seems to simply shake it off—isn't everything in electronics getting better all the time anyway, according to Moore's law? No, this is actually a real killer. A device that pings its surroundings wirelessly with regular intervals, using Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, will drain any sensibly sized battery in a few hours at most. Continuously pulling up and reporting a GPS location can be even worse. It is highly unlikely that users will stand for carrying half a dozen replacement batteries, and barring an unprecedented breakthrough in battery technology, the only fix on the horizon is some kind of push solution based on network cell location. Unfortunately, to be useful this requires a degree of cooperation between network service providers that is still a long way off.The second issue stems less from a lack of user interest and has more to do with the extremely fragmented mobile device market. Whereas signing up for a Facebook account can be done in a matter of minutes, downloading and installing a mobile application has been lots of hard work and beyond the reach of most normal users. This might change very fast, however. With Apple's iPhone 3G and the accompanying Appstore, there is now for the first time an attractive platform and sales channel for mobile software. In response the rest of the market is likely to finally consolidate around a small number of standard operating systems (including Android, Symbian, and Windows Mobile). This means that quite soon, we will see people downloading and using social software on their phones—and those that hook into existing networks will have a head start. Already, iPhone versions of AIM and Facebook are among the Appstore's top downloads, with others such as Twitteriffic and MySpace also gaining headway."
Why do I blog this? This discussion echoes with the chapter of my locative media book which deals with the limits faced by location-based services. Both problems are highly important and limiting for the development of the field, even fifteen years after the first prototypes.
Reading books about urban sociology on the bus in Guadeloupe made me think about this quote by Georg Simmel:
"Before the development of buses, railroads, and trams in the nineteenth century, people had never been in a position of having to look at one another for long minutes or even hours without speaking to one anothe"
Georg Simmel, Soziologie: Untersuchungen Über Die Formen Der Vergesellschaftung (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1958), 486
A follow-up on the internet idioms and letter I dealt with the other day. As Steve Woolgar wrote back in 2002 (in Virtual Society?: Technology, Cyberbole, Reality), the "e-" prefix is part of an 'epithetized' phenomena. That is to say, the addition of this letter to almost any activity or institution to signify novelty (beyond electronics):
"While it is often unclear from these labels exactly how the application of the epithet actually modifies the activity/institution in question, a claim to novelty is usually central, especially at the hands of those promoting the new entity (...) The implication is that something new, different and (usually) better is happening"
Why do I blog this? gathering quotes while reading books about the STS... the use of these letters to embed something new is decidedly fascinating. Besides, the "m-" (standing for "mobile") and "u-" (ubiquitous) are of course the followers...
In his presentation entitled Is "digital art" Western ? Digital art or the utopia of "world art"? Orange researcher Emmanuel Mahé deals with the relationship between R&D and Art. Some excerpts I found relevant to me:
"The relationship between R&D and Art happens at two levels: LEVEL 1 : Artistic practice and related fields (such as design) as an object of research to find solutions either in terms of uses or technical solutions:
- Subject of analysis (measure the effects between IT and uses, understand the social mechanisms, etc)
- Innovation method (collaborations between artists and engineers , multidisciplinary cooperation, etc)
LEVEL 2 : Artistic practice and related fields (such as design) as a subject of research to create new problematics, to ask new questions:
- hypothesize objects, in the sense of “research hypothesis”
- construct new communications hypotheses
- use these new hypotheses to create new models which may be used for creating services, fundamental research etc."
He then gives the example of current artistic work about invisibility and shows how artists are "creating new ways (techniques and uses) to make visible what is at the moment invisible and to make audible what is no longer audible. In this way, they are not resisting progress, just modifying it; they are redefining forms. These are the people who are the driving force behind these current developments". Why do I blog this? the issue of art and R&D is a topic I do not work on in my UX research but I tend to follow it carefully, especially for its potential in foresight work. This articles delineates some of the reasons why it's important to understand how artistic projects pave the way for near futures.
Different forms of social navigation:
What's more important: the yellow/blue tagging on the tree? or the fact that the passage of people left a continuous trace showing a path? Which one will you trust?
Some interesting internet icons and idioms ("hot hot spot") from Guadeloupe, France. The first one above has been taken on Marie-Galante, a small island south of Guadeloupe. The internet café seems rather old and abandoned.
The "@" is highly common if you already followed past episodes. The "W.W.W." is here followed by dots and doesn't seem to refer to any specific url: it's rather employed as a brand. The fact that the "@" is really bigger may indicate that this sign is a more important metaphor of the information super-highways. And why using both the "@" and "www"? Does that mean that @ is something different, perhaps referring to email?
The "hot hot spot" below is highly intriguing, perhaps referring to the fact that locals have "le sang chaud" (literally "hot blood"), meaning that they can get emotional easily. Maybe it shows how emotions/sens of relationships can be conveyed through the wires. Or how email/web communication could serve "hot" purposes.
Fax seems to be still important as attested by the big signage one can see on picture 2 and 3. Sending faxs is as important as dealing with "Photo" and perhaps a bit less than the Web (if I follow the hierarchy of picture 2). On picture 3, you can as well note the arrows on the fax tag which indicates how the device can send and receive information: this part is tremendously interesting since it shows the underlying features of this tool.
Also, the "Gwadaweb" subtitle under the "cyber-espace" ("cyberspace") logo is interesting too. "Gwada" is short for "guadeloupe" in creole, meaning that there seems to be some part of the cyberspace that are explicity from this culture:
Why do I blog this? fascination towards the representation of "the digital" (i.e. access to the internet, virtual worlds, etc.) and how they are made manifest in the physical environment. Cultures which favor paintings on shops always have curious ways to depict this matter and I try to document it when travelling. There is a lot to draw from this, especially in terms of people's representation of telecommunication devices.
Not exactly the type of self-constructed architecture described by Bruce Sterling in "Distraction" but very close: R-O-B by Gramazio and Kohler from ETH Zürich:
"R-O-B extends the traditional prefabrication process of construction: the robot leaves the protected environment of the production hall and ventures out to the building site. Housed in a modified freight container, the R-O-B mobile fabrication unit can be used anywhere in the world. It combines the advantages of prefabrication – precision and consistent high quality – with the advantages of short transport routes and just-in-time production on the building site. Furthermore, the mobile fabrication unit is not restricted to a predefined manufacturing process or a particular building material. Making use of computer methodologies in the design and fabrication process allows for manufacturing building elements with highly specific forms, which could not be build manually."
Why do I blog this? curiosity towards the application of robotics in architecture. The thing recently participated in the construction of this Wall presented at the Venice Biennale
It's 2009 and we have to make choices, as proposed by Julian Bleecker in A Manifesto for Networked Objects — Cohabiting with Pigeons, Arphids and Aibos in the Internet of Things few years ago:
"we'll have to begin choosing our prepositions with care — we are now in an era of pervasive networks and are thus more properly "in", not "on" the network. Careful choice of prepositions that help us orient matters deeply, and it helps think more clearly about not only the stakes of cohabiting with Things within the networked world, but also for thinking about how to design experiences for this very different mode of occupancy"
Why do I blog this? writing a chapter this morning about blogjects, I am digging stuff from relevant reports about the topic. This quote struck me as highly relevant for the new year.
I am often fascinated by the use of prepositions to refer to artefacts and services. The Internet is certainly an intriguing context to observe how people refer to accessing/going on/surfing on the network. Besides, are you on Facebook or "in" Facebook?
Seen this afternoon in Marie-Galante (a french island in the Caribbean sea), a desktop PC screen that someone tossed 2 meters from the sea. Computing is reaching the very end, isn't it?
Last post for 2008.