The more comfortable we become with being stupid

(via) Sometimes you don't expect titles like that in scientific press but "The importance of stupidity in scientific research" by Martin Schwartz in Journal of Cell Science is an intriguing read. Some excerpts I liked:

"we don't do a good enough job of teaching our students how to be productively stupid – that is, if we don't feel stupid it means we're not really trying. I'm not talking about `relative stupidity', in which the other students in the class actually read the material, think about it and ace the exam, whereas you don't. I'm also not talking about bright people who might be working in areas that don't match their talents.

Science involves confronting our `absolute stupidity'. That kind of stupidity is an existential fact, inherent in our efforts to push our way into the unknown. Preliminary and thesis exams have the right idea when the faculty committee pushes until the student starts getting the answers wrong or gives up and says, `I don't know'. The point of the exam isn't to see if the student gets all the answers right. If they do, it's the faculty who failed the exam. The point is to identify the student's weaknesses, partly to see where they need to invest some effort and partly to see whether the student's knowledge fails at a sufficiently high level that they are ready to take on a research project.

Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. (...) The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries."

Why do I blog this? although I fully agree with the importance of absolute stupidity in scientific research, I think it's also an important attitude in design research. Some ideas to be explored later about this issue.

The red button interface

Possibly some weird work for computer case and cell phone designers: Parents should have a "red button" to disable a game they feel is inappropriate for their child, says the EP Internal Market Committee. So, the solution to avoid kids playing with games that are not suitable for them is... a red button. More information on the European Parliament website:

"Members of the committee are particularly worried about on-line games, which are easy to download onto a PC or a mobile phone, making parental control harder. Until PEGI on-line is up and running, the report proposes fitting consoles, computers or other game devices with a "red button" to give parents the chance to disable a game or control access at certain times."

Why do I blog this? A sort of red-button-determinism like this is quite hilarious. The idea of adding a new button that would comes out from the blue (like this) to prevent kids from inappropriate content sounds so passé that I can't help thinking about odd game devices (cell phones with gigantic buttons, desktop computers with switches) and, of course, the inherent problems that may happen!

Ubiquitous computing naming issue

There's an interesting discussion of the term "ubiquitous computing"by Mike Kuniavsky at Orange Cone. Mike basically explains the ambiguity of terms and deconstruct the very notion of ubicomp:

""Lately, I've been thinking about why "ubiquitous computing" has such problems as a name. When I talk about it, people either dismiss it as a far-future pipe-dream, or an Orwellian vision of panoptic control and dominance. I don't see it as either. I've never seen it as an end point, but as the name of a thing to examine and participate (...) Why don't others see it the same? I think it's because the term is fundamentally different because it has an implied infinity in it. Specifically, the word "ubiquitous" implies an end state, something to strive for, something that's the implicit goal of the whole project. That's of course not how most people in the industry look at it, but that's how outsiders see it (...) As a side effect, the infinity in the term means that it simultaneously describes a state that practitioners cannot possibly attain ("ubiquitous" is like "omniscient"--it's an absolute that is impossible to achieve) and an utopia that others can easily dismiss."

The problem is then that "Anything that purports to be a ubiquitous computing project can never be ubiquitous enough"! Then, what shall be done? As Mike points out, other terms such as "artificial intelligence" also had the same issues.

"Do we need to rename "ubicomp" something like "embedded computing product design," something that promises less so that it can deliver more? Maybe. I still like the implicit promise in the term and its historical roots, but I recognize that as long as it has an infinity in part of its term, there will always be misunderstandings"

Why do I blog this? preparing my Lift talk about failures I am interested in the difference between the imagined futures (endpoints such as ubiquitous computing, artificial intelligence or flying cars) and the reality as it is experienced by people (users?). Mike Kuniavsky makes interesting points about this issue here by looking at the how naming research domains/trends can be misleading.

Location-awareness and power management

The Potential for Location-Aware Power Management by Harle and Hopper is an interesting paper presented at Ubicomp 2002 that explore the use of location-awareness to dynamically optimise the energy consumption of an office. It basically shows how capturing workers' location can be helpful in a different domain than mobile social software or urban computing. (Figure taken from the paper: positions recorded for a particular user over four hours on a particular day across three floors)

The paper does not really describe an application, instead it demonstrates how an analysis of workers' location is relevant "to form a picture of how people work and what energy savings might reasonably be expected if we were able to prevent device ‘idling’". The authors link the discussion about "energy sinks" and workers' movement: is it possible to lower the power consumption of electrical devices when the users are not using them... by detecting whether the user is within range.

Of course, apart from the technological side, the main issue at stake in this kind of research vector is the following:

"we emphasise that any changes should not frustrate users. As an example, we informally asked a number of computer users in various commercial and non-commercial settings why they did not have their desktop machines automatically power down, suspend-to-disk, or go to sleep after a specified time. The majority cited the frustration of having to wait for the system to reach a usable state as a major contributing factor. We cannot afford, then, to assume that an aggressive power saving policy will necessarily lead to power savings since it may prove very unpopular and be circumvented. Instead workstations in the scheme discussed must be powered up and in a usable state before the user is physically upon them. "

Why do I blog this? home/office automation is an favorite topic of mine as it uncovers important issues regarding the loss of control from users. Of course, I find the use of location-awareness relevant in this sort of context and I am wondering about other way to deploy this sort of solution without frustrating users. The paper offers a good discussion concerning such issues.

RFID key mixed with and old key assemblage

An intriguing mix of the bleeding-edge of recent times (seen at my hotel in Paris yesterday): - this rfid key that you swipe on your door to enter your room - the stability of the past: this old and commong keyring which is so heavy that you would not keep the rfid key in your pocket during a whole day: you must put it back at the hotel desk when you get out (delegation in design).

The flat, sober and white plastic key and the old copper keyring.

Lift09 tag cloud

A tag cloud that my colleague John Elbing generated using the information Lift participants entered to describe their interests.

Why do i blog this? As a program organizer, it's interesting to see the profile and the interests of Lift attendants. Using this wordle is a good way to get an impression of what defines the conference. It's surely messy but there are some clear vectors: innovation is the main track with subthemes such as design/interaction design, technology and mobile. It's also important to see that there are less and less people interested in the Web ;)

The importance of blinking lights

This article in IEEE Spectrum made me think about this earlier post about what stays awake during the night. In the article, Robert W. Lucky describes the importance of blinking lights in hardware.

He takes the example of modem boxes which are full of indicator lights and explain that "people want blinking lights" as it shows whether the device is sick or in full swing.

"Often, you have no idea whether or not the gadget is working. When it doesn’t do something you expect it to do, you stare helplessly at the box. “Are you alive in there?” you ask plaintively. (...) Quite often there is no visible activity on my computer screen, but I see the hard-drive light blinking furiously. What is it doing? I wonder. At least the little light tells me that it is alive, though I worry about why it is so busy. At such times I often wish that there were a special key labeled “What are you doing?” I’ve always found the task manager rather useless for this purpose, and no human being could possibly interpret the gibberish that fills your screen following the dreaded “blue screen of death.” (...) Instead of an unintelligible binary dump, my imagined key would give a simple English explanation: “I’m busy at the moment reformatting your hard drive,” it might say"

And the author wonders about new design that does not include any blinking lights. The roar of air-conditioning is then the last sign of life inside the computer.

Why do I blog this? The aesthetic representation of blinking lights aside, these observation are interesting as they uncover people's practices with regards to technology. We have been used to get some concrete signs of activity in our artifacts. Small details like these lights are not so simple as we might think. The nice light ballet you can observe when glancing at your details are all but useless.

Removing the lights also make me think about all these studies about cars that make almost no noise, which are terribly dangerous in cities.

Speaking objects in Amsterdam

Two curious encounters on my way from the Waag to the train station: the interesting use of speech bubbles in both cases, as if the designers of these elements wanted to convey the message that objects are close to have self-expression.

This way to express objects' agency in our physical environment is certainly close to the blogject meme where "artifacts" and places would be more talkative in the near future. One can qualify the Internet of Things as "more than mere speech bubbles".

If as a citizen you can no longer fix your own car...

Finally got some time to meet-up and discuss with Rob van Kranenburg yesterday in Amsterdam at Waag. It's been a while that we only briefly exchanged during conferences and I wanted to know more about his work. It also immediately led me to read his recent book about the internet of things.

There is one aspect of his work that I find strikingly important and that is developed in the book: the connection between objects characteristics and people's agency. See these excerpts:

"Just think back a decade or so. Did you not see cars on pavements and guys (mostly) trying to fix them? Where are they now? They are in professional garages as they all run on software. The guys cannot fix that. Now extrapolate this to your home, the streets you walk and drive on, the cities you roam, the offices in which you work. Can you imagine they would one day simply not function? Not open, close, give heat, air…

As citizens will at some point soon no longer be aware of what we have lost in terms of personal agency. We will get very afraid of any kind of action, and probably also the very notion of change, innovation - resisting anything that will look like a drawback, like losing something, losing functionalities, connectivities, the very stuff that they think is what makes us human. (...) If as a citizen you can no longer fix your own car – which is a quite recent phenomenon - because it is software driven, you have lost more then your ability to fix your own car, you have lost the very belief in a situation in which there are no professional garages, no just in time logistics, no independent mechanics, no small initiatives. (...) Any change in the background, in the axioms that make up the environment has tremendous consequences on the level of agency of citizens. They become helpless very soon, as they have no clue how to operate what is ‘running in the background’, let alone fix things if they go wrong. As such, Ambient intelligence presumes a totalizing, anti-democratic logic."

Why do I blog this? these excerpts echoes with lots of various discussions I have lately during a foresight project concerning the future of the internet. The importance of hardware and knowledge about it is a crux issue that seems a bit left aside in the occidental world (as if it was ok to shy away from techniques and infrastructures). There are some consequences of this situation and Rob describes both what they are and how to act in his book.

Mobile Monday Amsterdam

Some random notes from Mobile Monday Amsterdam, where I was invited last monday (to give a talk about "what the hell happened to location-based games"). The event was more specifically about mobile gaming/entertainment:

• Jeroen Ellferich interestingly brought this intriguing question: would you differentiate an iphone from an ipodtouch? is a Nintendo DS a mobile game platform? what about eee pc?
• He also reported on the odd fact that the most downloaded games today are the same as 5 years ago: tetris, pacman, who want to be millionaire, monopoly here and now, bejeweled, showing how the field is not very innovative.
• To him, the dark side of the mobile industry have the following characteristics: flattening growth traditional developers and publishers on mobile in troubles, fragmentation and porting hell (450 phone models!), flawed vale chain and low rev shares, lack of innovation in past years
• BUT, he showed that there is some hope: iphone and android trigger mobile content revival, flat-free and connectivity become the norm, there is a business case for location-based games (!?), social networks and games are a "killer combo", touchscreen, tilt, compass are opportunities too
• Kamar Shah, formerly at Nokia, described how users are far from the dream of having a simple mobile entertainment platform (as simple as we had on TV). He showed how people are tired because of fragmentation (operators, services, partners), experience is generally shit, it does not work, people pay twice... and unfortunately bad meme spread faster
• Kamar also mentionned that people want to watch stuff, tv, high def, replicate their experience on the mobile: it's the platform and the content that will drive the revenue, not the hardware.
• His main point was that the consumer experience is based on 5 key elements: how to find, try, buy, manage and share:
  1. we should make content accessible (over the air, on device, off the portal, on the portal...), consumer choose afterwards and have different habits: "content is king, distribution is king kong"
  2. people need to be able to try: demo, free-trial (website, on the phone), engage consumers otherwise the top 3 games will still be tetris and pacman!
  3. you have to enable all payment and billing mechanisms (micropayments...)
  4. when you buy food, you put it in the fridge, where do you put mobile games? there's a need of storage and manage in an easy place; apple does that really well: they have a marketplace where to go
  5. sharing content for free: it has to work, if you like sth, you'd like to pass it on, you should be able to send it via email, bluetooth...
• Redefining the consumer experience implies taking care of these 5 issues.
• He concluded that the financial crisis will have important consequences: people loose their job, can't pay the rent, how will they find the money to buy games? what's gonna happen? Kamar said that (1) people will have more time, (2) consumer demand will go down, people will learn what to do with what they have (the complexity of mobile phones), will educate themselves. It's good for our industry, because it's expensive for the industry to educate consumers. They will do it by themselves, (3) we will be able to take our technology right (and it takes time)

Thanks Yuri van Geest and Maarten Lens-FitzGerald for the invitation!

Vending machine interface design

The evolution of vending machine interfaces is highly curious. Seen in Amsterdam yesterday, at the train station in Schiphol. This train ticket machine sports weird spikes. What do they mean? What are they intended to do? preventing people to put stickers? Or it can be a way to prevent credit card skimming (the practice of retrieving and using the information that is encoded on the magnetic strip of a legitimate credit card).

The way they are place on the interface is very odd. Any clue?

Augmented meeting point

An interesting cluster of services at Schiphol airport near Amsterdam. This meeting point is enriched with:

• A physical whiteboard so that people can leave messages, notes and writes stuff.
• A dual screen that: (a) explains how to send SMS messages, (b) list the different messages that people sent with their mobile phone. You can send messages to greet people and tell them you're arriving (or simply to take a certain transport mean).

Why do I blog this? It's interesting that both media (physical and electronical whiteboard) are present. Each of them have their own values (the physical one is available in case of power failure or if the tv screen is our of order) and allows a sort of presence mediated by different characteristics of the artifacts employed.

I also find relevant to observe how cluster of services are deployed in physical space, see also here.

Electricity and decay

Seen in Guadeloupe last month. Made me think about this quote:

“The world constantly decays. Moisture gets in. Damp hangs around. Ice expands joints. Surfaces wear thin. Particles fall out of suspension. Materials rot. Insects breed. Animals chew. All kinds of wildlife war with all kinds of fabric. Humans make errors. Each process of dilapidation does its special harm and releases new ‘wastes’"

Graham S. and Thrift, N. (2007). Out of order, Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 24, No. 3.

Repurposed object

When the mailbox is too small, the door handle can serve a relevant alternative. These package (4-5 newspapers) is indeed to thick to be posted in the mailbox.

An intriguing example of a repurposed object, mundane creativity on the street.

User experiences deliverables

People interested in design process and deliverable should read "User Experiences Deliverables". The blogpost summarizes a wide array of elements that can be used over the course of a design project. The treasure map (.pdf) offers a good summary.

Why do I blog this? One month ago, I blogged about the different representations of design process as compiled by Hugh Dubberly. The description of design deliverables is also an interesting topic in conjunction with process descriptions. This is both material to rethink my own work process and a good content to discuss in class with students.

Design add-on

A magnifying glass added to shopping carts in my grocery store in Geneva. An interesting add-on for shoppers who may need this feature. Will help to perceive some details not easy to see.

It's funny to see that while in some places shopping carts are enhanced with rfid reader, this shop has chosen another design direction to help its consumers.

Console game as a social place

It seems that we finally have some good research material about the user experience of the Wii. Working on this topic for two years for a client, I was amazed by the lack of paper concerning how players use the Nintendo console and its gestural interaction devices. It seems that "Wii All Play: The Console Game as a Computational Meeting Place by Amy Voida & Saul Greenberg is a good step towards the understanding of Wii UX.

The paper reports the results of a field study that focused on examining collocated group behavior. What is interesting here is the analysis of console gaming as a "computational meeting place for a diverse population of gamers": a family entertainment device of some sort. The main claim of the paper, supported by results from the field study lies in showing that what makes video-game fun is not the game itself but the "sociability that surrounds the gameplay".

I won't enter the result details, but the paper shows the different roles the console has in being "a meeting place":

"Console games serve as:

• a meeting place for social interaction
• a meeting place with porous boundaries
• a meeting place for gamers with varied levels of expertise
• a meeting place for gamers with varied preferences for gaming genres & styles of gameplay
• a meeting place between interpersonal relationships and the competition of gameplay
• a meeting place between gaming and its stereotypes, and
• a meeting place between adults-as-parents and adults-as-gamers"

The paper describes each of these roles by showing various examples. Any interested reader should read them btw, things such as "Anything electronic I would do" are gems!

The part about design recommendation is also highly worthwhile, see some excerpts:

"Games designed to provide a meeting place for groups of gamers should undertake some combination of the following:

• Allow gamers to rotate in and out of the gameplay easily
• Make use of input devices with intuitive mappings (button-based input devices were less well-liked by the gamers in this study than gestural and physical input devices)
• Combine a shallow learning curve for novice gamers with more challenging gameplay for more expert gamers
• Provide modes of gameplay that allow players with different skill levels to play with or against each other
• Explore modes of gameplay that alter the game in significant ways for different groups of players so that the owner of the console or the game does not always have an advantage
• Provide modes of play that downplay competition between players (e.g., fostering non-serious competition or competition between the gaming group as a whole and the computer)
• Appeal to gamers with different gaming preferences within a single game (e.g., by offering compelling gameplay for a gamer who is typically drawn to strategy games while also appealing to other gamers who may be drawn to games with more challenging puzzles or immersive stories)
• Foster audience participation or an otherwise enjoyable audience experience
• Explore ways of extending the social experience of group console gaming into the larger ecology of shared media."

Why do I blog this? lot of material here for a new research vector about the Nintendo Wii. I am really glad to have found a reference about this topic. Will try to accumulate material about this before hiring an intern to help on this. Plus, I like the message here, about the "computational meeting place", well-supported by the data analysis.

Awareness, visibility and Twitter

Looking at the webosphere, it's funny how certain topics appear to be new and shiny when they exist for quite a while. The notion of "ambient awareness" is one of these terms that you hear here and there as if it was brand new. It generally refers to the possibility to stay tuned with what your contacts/social network is doing, will do or think. A social radar of some sort, enabled by microblogging platforms such as Twitter or Jaiku (or Facebook status). What's intriguing is that the whole discourse about these services neglect the large array of research about "awareness". In the last twenty years, authors such as Paul Dourish, Saul Greenberg or Thomas Erickson have produced a lot of material, studies, guidelines, theories and recommendations about this. In this blogpost, I wanted to get back to this issue since it's important to describe what has been done in the past about it, before looking at the Twitter example. A brief recap of the research about Awareness

All started in a research domain called "Computer-Supported Collaborative Work", the branch of Human-Computer Interaction which looks as how technologies can support and enrich collaboration practices. Now this field is more and more concerned by other contexts than work (such as education or games) so we can perhaps use the term "social computing" to make it broader. The last twenty years of research in this field acknowledges the relationship between collaboration "efficiency" and the visibility of group members’ activities across time and space; namely enabling what has been called awareness by the research community (see for example Dourish and Bellotti, 1992, Dourish and Bly, 1992; Gutwin et al., 1995, Erickson and Kellogg, 2000).

Historically, the notion of awareness has been drawn from two domains. On one hand, it emerged from field studies of collaborative work in co-present work settings (Heath, & Luff, 1992; Heath and Hindmarsh, 2000), which focus on how workers systematically coordinate their activities by relying on changes in the local context as well as on their partners visible contributions. In this context, awareness is seen as the ‘mutual visibility’ of each other’s actions, conveyed by the continuous broadcast of information generated during the course of action. Of course, as Heath and Luff (1992) point out, this mutual visibility/observability of actions relies on the active practice of team members who make their own actions ‘visible/observable’ to the others. On the other hand, the notion of Awareness appeared in computer science, as a concept relevant to design collaborative technologies (Dourish and Belloti, 1992; Gutwin et al, 1995; Erickson and Kellogg 2000; Gutwin and Greenberg, 2002). As opposed to the richness of a copresent situation, geographically dispersed collaboration engages participants in joint activities with a low visibility of each partner’s contribution to the main goal of the group. This is why ‘awareness interfaces’ or ‘awareness tools’ have been designed to convey more visibility, showing group members representation and actions.

As stated by Schmidt (2002), the term awareness is highly equivocal in the sense that it is used in a lot of different ways and is often qualified by many adjectives like ‘general awareness’ (Gaver, 1991), ‘workspace awareness’ (Gutwin and Greenberg, 2002) or ‘informal’ or ‘passive’ awareness’ (Dourish and Belloti, 1992). Definitions indeed range from knowing who is present in the environment to the visibility of others’ actions (Heath and Luff, 1992). These limits, however, did not prevent the CSCW community from using the ‘awareness’ concept as the starting point for many original and innovative collaborative technologies. In this thesis, we will not enter into this debate about setting a proper definition but instead focus only on the awareness of people’s location in a shared environment, be it physical or virtual.

Even though awareness is a broad and blurry concept, in the epistemological sense, there are some recurrent definitions set by scholars. Among all the terms that are used in conjunction with this notion of awareness, the one that has received the most important attention is certainly the “workspace awareness” that Gutwin and Greenberg (2002) describe as “the up-to-the-moment understanding of another person’s interaction with the shared workspace” (Gutwin & Greenberg, 2002). More precisely, according to these authors, awareness refers to the perception of changes that occur in the shared environment. These authors also highlight that awareness is part of an activity, such as completing a task or working on something. The main objective of awareness is not only to perceive information but also to recognize the contextual elements required to carry out a joint activity. This is what Dourish and Belloti expresses by saying that awareness corresponds to: “an understanding of the activities of others, which provides a context for your own activity” (Dourish and Bly, 1992, p.107). These definitions emphasize the idea that awareness is meant to enrich the context of collaboration; they also implicitly state that maintaining awareness is not the purpose of an activity but instead a basis for completing the task.

Types of Awareness and usage

Starting from the previously described definitions of awareness, Gutwin and Greenberg (2002) differentiated the core components of awareness according to simple questions such as “Who, What Where, When”. According to these authors, awareness can be described in terms of the period of time it covers, conveying information about the present state of the environment (“synchronous awareness”) and or about past occurrences of events (“asynchronous awareness”), which corresponds to the “When” question.

So, to some extent:

1. the "who" question corresponds to notification tools which enables to know who is contacted on your IM client.
2. the "where" question corresponds to location-based services as they allow the user to be aware of his or her's contacts whereabouts.
3. and so on.

Knowing what others are doing or where they are located can be useful for various reasons: simplification of communication, help people to coordinate, supports inferences regarding the partners’ intentions, know if a partner/colleague/friend needs help or just to get a vague feeling of presence (belonging to a community of friends, family...).

Awareness and Twitter

Time for more recent applications. In her paper called "The Translucence of Twitter" presented at EPIC 2008, Ingrid Erickson examines Twitter in conjunction with the aforementioned theories about awareness and visibility. The paper is a field study which examines the use of Twitter and conclude "there are certain obvious ways that Twitter showcases people’s thoughts and behaviors, but less obvious ways in which interlocutors signal their awareness of being noticed. ". The author compares the notion of Awareness as described in the work of Erickson and Kellogg (about "social translucence") and Twitter usage to show the discrepancies and alternate means of establishing awareness:

"Indirect Awareness: awareness can be evoked via Twitter, just not always in a direct manner. (...) Twitter here is a visible trigger for a host of possible awareness-oriented response mechanisms, from the completion of a work task to a physical meet up to a phone call. (...) receives a phone call because of a Twitter post he makes, this act raises his awareness that his messages are not falling on deaf ears. In turn, he is less inclined to falsify or make irresponsible posts in subsequent communications. (...) Awareness by Incident: Microblogging during a critical incident, such as inclement weather, appears to bring together individuals across community levels (i.e., perceived close and extended) out of a common need for timely information exchange. (...) Within this critical incident, Twitter became a real-time forum to make reports from respective outposts both to signal well being and to check in with others, despite varying levels of intimacy."

Why do I blog this? I am trying to sort out some ideas about microblogging platforms and theories about Awareness. Of course, one of the underlying theme I am interested in refer to mutual-location awareness and how tools such as Twitter and Jaiku engage people in new ways to discuss spatial issues.

Simplicity according to the Log Lady

Recently got back to the Twin Peaks series, I was struck by this quote form the log lady in the seventeenth episode:

"Complications set in--yes, complications. How many times have we heard: 'it's simple'. Nothing is simple. We live in a world where nothing is simple. Each day, just when we think we have a handle on things, suddenly some new element is introduced and everything is complicated once again. (...) "What is the secret? What is the secret to simplicity, to the pure and simple life? Are our appetites, our desires undermining us? Is the cart in front of the horse?""

Why do I blog this? just found this quite intriguing to think about, especially considering the whole discourse about simplicity and design.

Touch / don't touch

Above in Paris, below in lyon. Duality of signs to encourage or prevent people with certain norms (use of the red color...)

How can I not be intrigued by this odd sign that prevent people from using a specific device (a container of salt to be put on sidewalks)? This gentle "touch" hand with a crossbar to indicate the restriction.