Les Editions Volumiques, Paper computing and curious reading interactions

Les Editions Volumiques finally launched their website showing plenty of curious and original products based on mixing paper and digital technologies:

"Here are the first pieces of les évolutions dynamiques following research on both volume and interactivity, playfully mixing paper and computation. By allowing interactivity and gameplay in the page (for example with the Duckette project) or between the pages (in The book that turns its own pages, or Labyrinthe), we try to bring new life to paper. We then pushed physical behavior to paper and ink (the book that disapears). There, the paper is no longer only the frame for representation, but at the same time the field of a real physical experience. We also played with the volume and perspective of book and content (paradoxales, Meeting-Zombies). And then, we tried to combine paper with this little computer-object almost of us all carry everywhere: our cell phone (the night of the living dead pixels, (i) pirates)."

Why do I blog this? I find these projects fascinating and love the idea of mixing digital tech with paper to create compelling user experiences. The examples showed on the picture (see more on their website) are stunning and show the future of books go far beyond boring reading machines. The use of playful metaphors and game mechanics in the work of Bertrand and Etienne are also highly intriguing for those interested in inspiring ways to renew the reading experience.

Besides, if you're interested in this type of "paper computing", be sure to check the Papercomp 2010 workshop at Ubicomp. Organized by friends from EPFL, it's based on similar ideas:

"Paper is not dead. Books, magazines and other printed materials can now be connected to the digital world, enriched with additional content and even transformed into interactive interfaces. Conversely, some of the screen-based interfaces we currently use to interact with digital data could benefit from being paper-based or make use of specially designed material as light and flexible as paper. In a near future, printed documents could become new ubiquitous interfaces for our everyday interactions with digital information. This is the dawn of paper computing. "

Verbs and design and verbs

Looking at interaction design metaphors lately, I've been reading Chris Crawford's "The Art of Interactive Design: A Euphonious and Illuminating Guide to Building Successful Software". As mentioned in this other blogpost, I like his approach that uses verbs:

Using linguistics as a metaphor for HCI/interaction design is of coruse very old and other people than Crawford proposed similar approaches. However, the idea of focusing on verbs (what people can do) in design is interesting and used here and there. See for example the recommendation #2 in Jyri Engeström's slides about designing social software ("define your verbs").

As appealing as it is, I found an interesting quote in Howard Becker's book "Telling About Society" that (IMHO) explain my interest in verbs:

"it's a confusing error to focus on nouns rather than verbs, on the objects rather than the activities, as though we were investigating tables or charts or ethnographies or movies. It makes more sense to see artifact as the frozen remains of collective action, brought to life whenever someones uses them - as people's making and reading charts or prose, making and seeing films. We should understand the expression a film as shorthand for the activity of 'making a film' or 'seeing a film'."

(Thanks Basile for pointing this out)

Why do I blog this? Material for my interaction design course about user observations and design. This notion of verbs is interesting given its 2-facets: you can design something by using the verb metaphor (you then define verbs that set what people can do) and study how people employs the designed artifacts by studying what they do (which is defined by the verb). The action, defined by the verb, is more important than the artifact (defined as a noun) itself.

Last week, recent encounters

[Short note: blogging is more and more difficult with travels, consulting gigs and the need to spend some time offline, i will try to post some form of weeknotes with a visual and short text twist. It's not very fancy, only curious stuff I've stumbled across and collected last week. Of course I'll post more meat if I have time.] An intriguing speech by Golan Levin at HEAD-Geneva (Geneva University of Art and Design) about interactive art and speculative HCI. Levin described some of his projects and framed them as "creating new forms of interactive experiences... some are very useful (immediate applications), some are absolutely useless and project possible futures that may or may not come into existence... propositions of how we might interact with objects and people". I liked the idea of "infoviz as self-examination for society" and his thoughts about the computer mouse: "a mouse is pathological, as one of my teacher told me: to interact with a computer is to have a computer that has a model of you as one finger", "a urinal knows more about me than a computer mouse"

Some visual research about the gamepad project, like this beautiful representation of what was needed in 1958 to play "Tennis for Two" on an oscilloscope [via].

Preparing a speech about Science-Fiction and urban environments, I've been drawn to various representations of cities in the context of speculative movies. This picture of "Conquest of the Planet of the Apes" (1972) was of interest... as it shows how an existing US university (UC Irvine) was used as a scene for this movie.

WiFi Camera is a curious project that " takes "pictures" of spaces illuminated by wifi in much the same way that a traditional camera takes pictures of spaces illuminated by visible light".

Two visualizations by Barbara Hahn and Christine Zimmermann that caught my attention. It's a project called "Visual Atlas of Everyday Life at the Hospital" that represents selected organizational and communicative sub-processes within the patient process at Berne University Hospital. Some of the them are related with waiting times, others are about patient recovery and leaving the hospital. The fact that an hospital could used these data in this form is interesting. I've put this in perspective with Fabien's recent work about representing Geneva based on people's usage of Flickr and Foursquare:

This 8-digit calculator watch by Casio triggered some inspiring discussion about object convergence, an interesting follow-up to my post about the pianococktail. It left me wondering about a watch connected to the Internets. For some reasons, I haven't seen groundbreaking project along these lines. It's not that I want to connect anything to the réseau des réseaux but I am curious about interconnected time machines.

A trip to the funfair is always inspiring for informal observations of various forms of play. More specifically, bumper cars ("dodgems" in the UK, "auto-tamponneuses in France) were very interesting to observe driving behavior of people ready to bump into each other. What happens here? Why do people seem so happy doing this? Could it be an interesting metaphor for new car interfaces? I don't have the answer but I definitely have a gut feeling that bumper cars are an interesting answer to some problems (which remains to be found). Next step is to dig the scientific literature about this funfair device.

Actor-Network Theory and design

The paper "Making the Social Hold: Towards an Actor-Network Theory of Design" by Albena Yaneva is an interesting contribution to the role of Actor-Network Theory in design.

It basically shows how various ANT concepts can be relevant and insightful in the context of designing artifacts. Relying on notions such as scripts or delegation of action to objects the author examines various mundane artifacts (stairs, handrails, elevator buttons, etc.) and show how the way they have been designed triggers "specific ways of enacting the social".

Some excerpts I found interesting:

"If you follow me for a moment, again, in my trajectory, you will witness how the objects from my university mornings (my key, the door lock of the resource room, the elevator buttons, the staircase handle, the conference room arrangement) do not stand for social forces and divisions, nor do they symbolically represent the university’s order, hierarchy or divisions of labor; rather, they perform the social as we use them, and connect us in a new way with fellow colleagues, students and university administrators. (...) expanding the project of ANT to the field of design requires mobilizing this method’s persistent ambition to account and understand (not to replace) the objects of design, its institutions and different cultures. This means we must understand the designerliness of design objects, networks and artifacts, instead of trying to provide, by all means, a stand-in (social, psychological, historical or other) explanation of design, i.e. a psychological explanation of the creative energies of the inventor, a psychoanalytical explanation of the client–designer–user relationship, a historical explanation of the social contexts of design. (...) An ANT approach to design would consist in investigating the culture and the practices of designers rather than their theories and their ideologies, i.e. to follow what designers and users do in their daily and routine actions. (...) we should study the experiences of both users and designers, as well as the numerous connections that this research would reveal."

Why do I blog this? collecting material about ANT and design, a hot topic lately. What I find interesting here is that there the move from sociology to design is similar to the one we have seen in the 80s from psychology. At the time, cognitive psychology moved from explaining individual behavior by internal factors (the brain, a cognitive system bound to the individual) to explaining it with external factors (artifacts in our environment, the importance of context, the situated character of action). This led to the emergence of Situated Action or Distributed cognition. Conversely, sociology moves from the "social" to artifacts (non-humans) and show how social is inscribed in objects.

Another important point of this article is the proposition that Yaneva makes as a research agenda: instead of investigating the influence of external factors (be they economical, cultural, political) on design, the idea is to describe the design process itself by capturing "the movements of artifacts and designers in the design studio".

Yaneva, A. (2009). Making the Social Hold: Towards an Actor-Network Theory of Design. Design and Culture, Volume 1, Number 3, November 2009

Pianococktail and the convergence of artifacts

An intriguing encounter this afternoon with a pianococktail, i.e. a piano that mixes drinks based on the combination of keys played. Being a reader of Boris Vian, running across this crazy object he described in his novel “L’ecume des Jours” ("Froth on the Daydream") is always a pleasure. The one I saw this afternoon has been designed by Géraldine and Nicolas Schenkel in Geneva.

Here's how Vian explains how the device works:

"For each note there’s a corresponding drink – either a wine, spirit, liqueur or fruit juice. The loud pedal puts in egg flip and the soft pedal adds ice. For soda you play a cadenza in F sharp. The quantities depend on how long a note is held – you get the sixteenth of a measure for a hemidemisemiquaver; a whole measure for a black note; and four measures for a semibreve. When you play a slow tune, then tone comes into control to prevent the amounts growing too large and the drink getting too big for a cocktail – but the alcoholic content remains unchanged. And, depending on the length of the tune, you can, if you like, vary the measures used, reducing them, say, to a hundredth in order to get a drink taking advantage of all the harmonics, by means of an adjustment on the side."

Why do I blog this? sunday encounter with a curious object that corresponds to the absurd convergence of two very different artifacts. The idea of mixing distinct functions in one object is an interesting innovation process but it's sometimes more poetic and intriguing to do it with very distant class of objects.

As a general exercise to envision alternative near future worlds, it would be good to think about similar convergence between very remote objects. Making two functions converge is a difficult purpose. This example reminds me of a talk by Ben Fullerton at interaction 2010 in which he described a project he worked on at IDEO forBang&Olufsen: a music player that was also a phone, as opposed to a a phone that would also be a music player. This kind of approach is inspring IMHO as it forces to rethink the role of the two objects in very different ways.

Phone surface

Give people a surface next to a phone... and it's going to be used for annotations and crazy scribblings. Seen at CERN last week.

"Research" in Design

Lift10 is over and I finally found some time to work on my stack of books. Which lead me to this book that Lysianne gave me during the conference: Recherche-création en design. Modèles pour une pratique expérimentale. This book (only in French) is the final milestone in a swiss research project called "CreaSearch" that I discussed a while back. For English readers, some of the material covered in this book can also be found in "Creasearch - Methodologies and Models for Creation-based Research Projects in Design" (from the proceedings of the Swiss Design Network Symposium 2008) by Magdalena Gerber, Lysianne Léchot Hirt, Florence Marguerat, Manon Mello and Laurent Soldini.

The aim of this project is to discuss the different forms of "research" in arts and design practices out of commercial spheres: What's doing research when you are a designer working in an academic institution? How does (academic) designers' activities compare to researchers practices? Can research in the field of design go beyond new product development or sociological/aesthetic studies of designed artifacts? Is there a common thread between all the activities based on creating objects? Fueled by the current debate about doing research in arts and design schools, the questions addressed in the book echoes a lot with my current interest in design research.

In this research project, the authors defines the notion of "creation-research": "research activities, in design and in art, which incorporate the creation process (or the conception process) in a research process". They than maps how it is understood and practised in design/arts communities and to what extent it provides a pragmatic context for developing research models that are methodologically acceptable for designers focused on a creative activity and for the international design research community. As such, it sets off to propose an epistemology of design research by showing the specificity of the knowledge it can produce.

Exemplified by case studies, this proposition revolves around a methodological model for research creation projects in design that is copiously described in the project deliverables and the book. See for yourself:

Why do I blog this? This is an interesting framing to engage (or continue) the discussion about what is research in the field of design. I liked the way the authors did not fetishize too much the idea of a framework. The elements that are defined in the model above can be seen as heuristics, instead of a prescribed step-by-step process.

It's also interesting to compare the discussion about "research in design" with the current debate about "design research" and its role in new product development. The two are very distinct and emerges out of different constraints.

A definition of transduction

An interesting quote that will certainly frame our current work on the gamepad project:

"the term [transduction] denotes a process – be it physical, biological, mental or social – in which an activity gradually sets itself in motion, propagating within a given area, by basing this propagation on a structuration carried out in different zones of the domain: each region of the constituted structure serves as a constituting principle for the following one, so much so that a modification progressively extends itself at the same time as this structuring operation. (...) The transductive operation is an individuation in progress; it can physically occur most simply in the form of progressive iteration"

From: Simondon, G. (1964/1992) ‘The genesis of the individual’, in J. Crary and S. Kwinter (eds.) Incorporations. New York: Zone Books.

Why do I blog this? This quote struck me as highly useful to frame the evolution of joypads in the game controller project. Will certainly include it in the theoretical framing of the study as it enable to describe how different objets evolves through iterations with "constituting principles".

An old phone booth

Yes, phones are mobile and everywhere now. But before that, public phone used to sit inside a booth... and before that they were also out of the booth. People would take the phone and put your head inside this kind of device encountered at CERN the other day (te gent on the picture is Mr. Woebken).

Why do I blog this I wonder when this sort of protection will be re-installed in cities. A a sort of place where it's convenient (and acceptable) to make a phone call. It reminds me of the use of cell-phones in public phone booth.

Location-awareness sharing and affordances in the subway

Two recent articles about location-based platforms caught my eyes Seeburger, J., & Schroeter, R. (2009, Nov 23-27). Disposable Maps: Ad hoc Location Sharing. In J. Kjeldskov, J. Paay & S. Viller (Eds.), Proceedings OZCHI 2009 (pp. 377-380). Melbourne, VIC: The University of Melbourne.

"The gathering of people in everyday life is intertwined with travelling to negotiated locations. As a result, mobile phones are often used to rearrange meetings when one or more participants are late or cannot make it on time. Our research is based on the hypothesis that the provision of location data can enhance the experience of people who are meeting each other in different locations. This paper presents work-in-progress on a novel approach to share one’s location data in real-time which is visualised on a web-based map in a privacy conscious way. Disposable Maps allows users to select contacts from their phone’s address book who then receive up-to-date location data. The utilisation of peer-to-peer notifications and the application of unique URLs for location storage and presentation enable location sharing whilst ensuring users’ location privacy. In contrast to other location sharing services like Google Latitude, Disposable Maps enables ad hoc location sharing to actively selected location receivers for a fixed period of time in a specific given situation. We present first insights from an initial application user test and show future work on the approach of disposable information allocation."

(Thanks Antonio!)

Belloni, Nicolas and Holmquist, Lars Erik and Tholander, Jakob (2009)See you on the subway: exploring mobile social software. In: In Proceedings of the 27th international Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 4-9 April 2009, Boston, USA.

"This project explores the social possibilities of mobile technology in transitional spaces such as public transport. Based on a cultural probes study of Stockholm subway commuters, we designed a location- based friend finder that displays only people in the same train as the user. (...) The interviews showed that the users did not always have an obvious idea for what actions to take once they realized that a friend was on the same train (...) This points to the complexity a social situation like this and the multitude of social layers that comes into play for designers of social services. In this case, it seems like the user didn‟t feel close enough to his work colleague for taking contact at this particular moment. (...) Adding the possibility to call the person or send a text message could be one of functionalities improving the user experience."

Why do I blog this? Collecting material for current projects about location-based services. Both papers describe relevant studies about the user experience of location-awareness and the complexity of building social applications on top of it.

Cern input interfaces

A bunch of curious input interfaces I encountered at CERN today. Interesting diversity: lots of specific affordances, several distinct constraints that lead to a wide variety of possibilities.

They control information and fluid through mechanical, electric, electromechanical and electronic mechanisms. Some are shiny and colorful, others are dirty and old.

And yes, we've had our fifth Lift conference!

Wifi sharing request

An interesting encounter last week in Lyon: a message stuck on a door from a person who want to share a wifi connection. The translation in English goes like:

"Hello, I would like to share a Wi-Fi connection with someone. I need the internet for my studies (till June) but I do not want a subscription for 3 months. Anyone interested? You can leave me a note in my mailbox or come see me on the 4th floor. Thanks."

Why do I blog this? An interesting example of how a technology (and also the business model of such technology) foster foster social interaction and forms of communication about it.

In addition, it's also curious to see what sorts of infrastructure are shared (or willing to be shared). While it seems socially acceptable to share wifi (or to ask for it), what would be the situation if someone asked for water, gas or electricity?

Recap of Lift seminar @ Imaginove

Yesterday evening, I co-organized a Lift seminar in Lyon, in partnership with Imaginove, a cluster of digital content companies. Located in a an old flour mill, the seminar was about new forms of video game play with a specific focus on Transmedia and Location-Based Games.

To deal with this, I invited two bright contributors: David Calvo who is Creative Director from French video game studio Ankama (as well as a fine writer, comic-book author) and Mathieu Castelli from C4M, who was also the founder of Newt Games, the now defunct company which was a pioneer in location-based games in Japan.

David started with a presentation in which he descried in personal vision of what the "Transmedia" domain consists in. He basically debunked the fuss around this term by showing how this term is now used as a buzzword. According to him, adopting a "transmedia" perspective corresponds to the following approach:

• Building a "world model" with its own background and constraints (because design emerges out of constraints)
• Nurture this world model by elements coming from users, but not in an explicit "user-generated content way" in which you would ask people to contribute: it's rather about having ears on the ground and observing Anakama players in game conventions, looking at forums, comments on websites, the way people name objects and gods in the game, etc....
• Instantiate these insights into characters, book chapters, magazine articles, game mechanics, background changes...

In sum, it's a sort of implicit user-generated content harvesting that can be turned into game material for Dofus or Wakfu (and all the books, manga, magazines and on-line platforms about them).

In the second presentation, Mathieu told us the story of Mogi, a mobile service in which which the game play somehow evolves and progresses via a player's location. Developed 7 years ago for the japanese market by a French company, Mogi was one the few commercial products that reach the market. Mathieu highlighted the difficult evolution of such games and recapped some issues they encountered such as: the fairly low number of phone with GPS (at the time and now), the difficulty to test game mechanics (because you need to go on the field), the need to have a critical mass of players, etc. which are very close to what I described in my book about locative media.

Mathieu concluded his presentation by showing Playground, a new initiative that aims at providing LBS designers with a point and click platforms to implement and test their own games. This "playground" system would be tool set for the creation of what they can "Real World games" and grow the community of developers.

Gestural interaction when reading

Observing how people read on displays is a fascinating endeavor. One of the interesting interaction mode with on-line media I noticed recently concern the gestures people make when reading. Lots of folks have focused on how people would touch or gesture to interact with information as an INPUT. But less attention is paid to the OUTPUT and how certain gesture may occur. The example below shows an interesting trick I noticed (and now use) when sat in the train in Switzerland. Some people (at least this is what the guy told me) are so overwhelmed by animated advertisements that they put their hand on top of it. In doing so, the guy reported not being "attacked by those constant moving crap" that prevented him to quietly focus on his perusal.

Calm computing to some extent.

Why do I blog this? collecting gestures with electronic content linked with new forms of interaction. This guy's insight could be a good starting point to explore other kinds of gestures linked with new media consumption.

Tangible interaction frameworks

Two interesting frameworks I often use in design research about tangible/gestural interfaces:

The first by Benford et al. (2003) is focused on three components: "Movements of interfaces can be analysed in terms of whether they are sensible, sensable and desirable. Sensible movements are those that users naturally perform; sensable are those that can be measured by a computer; and desirable movements are those that are required by a given application.". Their framework is based on these 3 components and they show how " how a systematic comparison of sensible, sensable and desirable movements, especially with regard to how they do not precisely overlap, can reveal potential problems with an interface and also inspire new features":

Source: Benford, S., H. Schnadelbach, B. Koleva, B., Gaver, A. Schmidt, A., Boucher, A., Steed, R. Anastasi, C. Greenhalgh, T. Rodden and H. Gellersen (2003). "Sensible, sensable and desirable: a framework for designing physical interface, Technical Report Equator-03-003, Equator.

The second is by Bellotti et al. (2002) and it proposed 5 "questions posing human-computer communication challenges for interaction design". Each of these issues can provide "the beginnings for a systematic approach to the design of interactive systems":

Source: Bellotti, V., Back, M., Edwards, W.K., Grinter, R.E., Henderson, A., and Lopes, C. Making sense of sensing systems: five questions for designers and researchers. In CHI, 2002, 415--422.

Why do I blog this? Preparing my interaction design course led me to these paper. Might prove handy to discuss framework (roles, interests, limits) in the context of gestural interfaces such as the one depicted at the beginning of this blogpost. As usual with theoretical insights like this, there are pluses and minuses, but I often find them relevant to systematically approach new kinds of interactions.

The complex relationship between people and domestic appliances

Reading the last issue of "Design and Culture that Basile pointed to me few weeks ago, I ran across this paper yesterday that deals with "homemaking". Working on a small projects about networked objects in the home context, it's quite relevant:

Crewe, L. (2009). The Screen and the Drum: on Form, Function, Fit and Failure in Contemporary Home Consumption, Design and Culture, November Volume 1(3) pp. 307-328.

The aim of the paper is the following:

"this paper explores consumers’ connections to their domestic objects. Focusing on two particular objects (televisions and vacuum cleaners), the paper reflects upon why consumers desire particular domestic objects and how they assemble, arrange and use things in the home. It reveals how functionality is intimately infused with form, how design informs the consumption of everyday domestic objects and how both function and form can fail, deceive and trick."

I found it interesting as it describes the complex relationships people have with their domestic appliances. Based on studying two specific artifacts (televisions and vacuum cleaners), the researchers explores 3 dimensions of this relationship: "the role of product branding, representation and design; the significance of consumer agency and desire; and the influence of commodity form and function in shaping home consumption".

Here's a summary of their conclusion:

"commodity meanings are mobile and diffuse; they are configured, inscribed and appropriated by consumers through placement and use and not just at the point of production. (...) commodities require emotional, sensory or performative investments by consumers in order that their value be realized. Brand value needs to be retrieved, or excavated through consumer practice – quite literally brought alive by consumers. (...) this is important as it suggests that the material qualities of objects may take on a far greater significance than those who produced them could possibly have envisaged. (...) what emerged from the research was how some of the most ubiquitous and ordinary domestic objects were those with the most interesting stories to tell. The important point here is that the normative assumptions one might hold about the aesthetic and technical conventions imputed to everyday objects are largely just that – scripts, projections, imaginings and conventions that are rarely, if ever, evident in practice."

The paper is full of interesting examples such as:

"Another focus group participant – Laura, the vacuum owner who had just left her husband – revealed her intentional destruction of an unwanted vacuum cleaner in order that she could purchase a Dyson. Such sabotage is clearly willful and goes beyond the mere incompetence of users who fail to read operating and maintenance manuals. Laura cut the cord of her old Electrolux, thereby disabling it. (...) One participant discusses how he uses an old conventional vacuum cleaner in the student house he rents out as a mechanism to ensure that his tenants vacuum the house once a week. Here we see how the traditional bagged vacuum cleaner serves a particular purpose that would be impossible with a Dyson. As their landlord, Henry prohibits the students from emptying the vacuum cleaner bag: he visits the house once a week and changes the bag (...) The vacuum bag thus becomes an instrument of surveillance at-a-distance, a tool for the external management of approved cleaning practices and a weapon of financial punishment where necessary."

Why do I blog this? Both the theoretical aspects and the concrete examples drawn from the field are important. In the context of the consulting project I am working on, it enables to broaden the scope of the very notion of networked objects.

Digital plumbing and the deployment of Ubicomp at home

(A broken interface that would certainly need a digital plumber, seen in Amsterdam)

An interesting article about the deployment of ubicomp at home: Tolmie, P., Crabtree, A., Egglestone, S., Humble, J, Greenhalgh, C. and Rodden, T. (2009) Digital Plumbing: The Mundane Work of Deploying UbiComp in the Home Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 10.

The article contrasts the vision of "invisible computing" by Mark Weiser to the concrete deployment of such technologies at home. It focuses on what the author calls "digital plumbing, i.e. the mundane work involved in installing ubiquitous computing in real homes". Based on an ethnographic study, it covers the work of installation, the competences involved on the part of users, the practical troubles they encounter, and the demands that real world settings place on the enterprise which create these systems. What is interesting here is that Ubicomp is here described as "an explicit intervention into everyday life".

(Some wiring installation recently encountered)

Some excerpts I found interesting about the challenges of deploying new technologies in existing home environments:

"Digital plumbing is indispensable to the migration of research technologies out of the lab into real homes. It is a largely ignored area of work however (...) the study has revealed four major areas where the development of support for digital plumbing might be considered:

• The deployment of research technologies in real homes requires a great deal of preparatory work. This includes planning what is to be installed and where in cooperation with household members, and understanding existing technological arrangements that new devices and components will be integrated with. The development of methods and tools that enable the digital plumber to map these may be of considerable use to the work of planning.
• In order to install planned arrangements the digital plumber needs to assemble the right tools and parts for the job. This includes configuring and testing the necessary hardware and assembling the software that will definitely be required and that which will possibly be required. The development of online solutions, including extensive archives of software versions, drivers, updates, patches, etc., and which permit reuse, may be of considerable utility to the work of assembly.
• No matter how well planned an installation is, contingencies inevitably arise. Online archives may go some way to address them, though troubleshooting and faultfinding rely on technical competences that extend beyond the particular technologies being installed. The development of online resources, including FAQs, knowledge databases, and even remote fault diagnosis, may be of considerable benefit in the effort to manage the contingencies of installation.
• Installation occurs over time and often involves more than one digital plumber, whether working consecutively or one after the other. Tracking and managing the changes made by particular digital plumbers therefore becomes a matter of some importance. The development of a ‘record of works’ that detail changes and their implications may provide useful support for coordination and awareness amongst digital plumbers."

Why do I blog this? Although these results echo with existing research about other installation work (from conventional plumbing to fitted kitchens, as pointed out by the authors), this article highlight interesting specificities. Quite handy for a current client project about networked objects in the context of the home environment.

Crowd dynamics determined by more than physical constraints

A long time ago, while still doing a bachelor degree in biology, animal cognition was a pet project of mine. Ants and bees or ethology methods were highly intriguing and paved my way towards more technology-oriented studies of behavior. I still keep an eye on this field and the following paper from one of the lab I followed recently caught my attention (via): Moussaïd M, Perozo N, Garnier S, Helbing D, Theraulaz G (2010) The Walking Behaviour of Pedestrian Social Groups and Its Impact on Crowd Dynamics. PLoS ONE 5(4).

(Pedestrian flows in Toulouse, France as observed in this study)

Some excerpts I've found interesting (my emphasis):

"Human crowd motion is mainly driven by self-organized processes based on local interactions among pedestrians. While most studies of crowd behaviour consider only interactions among isolated individuals, it turns out that up to 70% of people in a crowd are actually moving in groups, such as friends, couples, or families walking together. These groups constitute medium-scale aggregated structures and their impact on crowd dynamics is still largely unknown. In this work, we analyze the motion of approximately 1500 pedestrian groups under natural condition, and show that social interactions among group members generate typical group walking patterns that influence crowd dynamics. At low density, group members tend to walk side by side, forming a line perpendicular to the walking direction. (...) when crowd density increases, the group organization results from a trade-off between walking faster and facilitating social exchange."

Why do I blog this? what is interesting in this work is that the crowd dynamic model should take into account the presence of people who put more emphasis on social activities than on movement efficiency. It basically shows that pedestrian flows are complex and not determined by physical constraints induced by other pedestrians and the environment, but also significantly by on less utilitarian reasons (communicative, social interactions among individuals). This result is perhaps taken for granted in the social sciences but it's curious to observe it with this kind of modelling work.

Manual check-in versus automatic positioning

The picture above shows the difference between asking where someone is with an SMS and getting this information automatically with a location-based software such as Aka-Aki. This was a big debate few years ago. A more recent debate concerns the manual check-in versus automatic positioning with mobile social software.

The whole argument about manual check-in on platforms such as Foursquare versus automatic positioning (on Google latitude for instance) is fascinating to me. While some pundits criticize the idea of letting people manually check-in, various empirical studies shows why automation can be problematic. It's crazy how some people get grumpy and think that self-declarating one's location is old-school and passé. Some examples below of academic work about this issue. Of course it's not directly about current applications such as Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt or Latitude but it certainly gives some perspective.

Vihavainen, S., Oulasvirta, A., Sarvas, R. "I Can’t Lie Anymore” - The Implications of Location Automation for Mobile Social Applications. Proceedings of MobiQuitous 2009, IEEE Press.

The paper examines a sample of users of Jaiku, a social networking, micro-blogging and lifestreaming service bought by Google three years ago. Using this platform, the researchers investigated the appropriation of this service that automates disclosure and diffusion of location information. Here are some excerpts I found relevant in Vihavainen's paper:

"Human factors research has shown that automation is a mixed blessing. It changes the role of the human in the loop with effects on understanding, errors, control, skill, vigilance, and ultimately trust and usefulness. We raise the issue that many current mobile applications involve mechanisms that surreptitiously collect and propagate location information among users and we provide results from the first systematic real world study of the matter. (...) The results reveal both “classic” human factors problems with the automation’s logic and novel issues related to the fact that location automation at times compromised their control of social situations. (...) The results convey that unsuitable automated features can preclude use in a group. While one group found automated features useful, and another was indifferent toward it, the third group stopped using the application almost entirely. (...) These differences highlight the importance of needs, activities, and structures of the intended user groups as factors for acceptance of automation."

S. Benford, W. Seagar, M. Flintham, R. Anastasi, D. Rowland, J. Humble, D. Stanton, J. Bowers, N. Tandavanitj, M. Adams, J.R. Farr, A. Oldroyd, and J. Sutton. “The error of our ways: The experience of self- reported position in a location-based game”. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing. (UbiComp 2004), Nottingham., pp. 70-87,

In this paper that is a bit older, the researchers studied how users of a collaborative location-based game employed self-reported positioning by manually reveal their positions to remote players by manipulating electronic maps. Results were the following:

" It appears that remote participants are largely un- troubled by the relatively high positional error associated with self reports. Our analysis suggests that this may because mobile players declare themselves to be in plausible locations such as at common landmarks, ahead of themselves on their current trajectory (stating their intent) or behind themselves (confirming previously visited locations). These observations raise new requirements for the future development of automated positioning systems and also suggest that self- reported positioning may be a useful fallback when automated systems are un- available or too unreliable."

Nova, N., Girardin, F., Molinari, G. & Dillenbourg, P. (2006): The Underwhelming Effects of Automatic Location-Awareness on Collaboration in a Pervasive Game, International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems (May 9-12, 2006, Carry-le-Rouet, Provence, France).

Finally, this is also an issue I addressed in my Phd research concerning the automation of location-awareness, I also address these problems with a different angle. We also used a collaboration location-based game (a quite common platform for running field studies at the time) and uncovered that automating a process such as location-awareness is not always fruitful. Letting people send their own position appears to be more efficient than broadcasting mere location information:

"To some extent, not giving location-awareness information can be a way to support collaboration more effectively; since players may communicate more and better explain their activity and intents. Self- disclosure can hence be more effective since users could express both information about their intents relevant for the task context and their location. They could also send it whenever they want to express either their current or past positions or the intended places they are heading to. Another interesting benefit of letting the users express their position is to give them the control of privacy issues, one of the major issue related to LBS usage. They have indeed the choice to disclose information about their whereabouts, which is of tremendous importance to avoid the users’ perception of privacy invasion."

Mobile social software norms

An interesting news on the Foursquare newsblog is about the "cheater code", i.e. a way to catch users who check in from their couches to steal mayorships. Interestingly, it seemed to be one of the most requested feature by people. Of course, it's not that easy to implement and the solution that has been chosen... lies in using the phone’s GPS (or another way to get the user's location) "to try to verify this". What I find interesting here is that the ambition is deliberately low (hence the "try"). The reasons why they do so are simply that it's hard:

" We are seeing some issues where people should be getting points / badges / mayors but they’re not. This could be because the GPS location your phone gave us was slightly off or because the address / pushpin where we located the venue wasn’t quite right."

Another valuable bit reveals a lot about the usage/norms about what is considered acceptable:

"Also worth noting that we’re fine with pre-checkins and post-checkins… you know, the checkins you send *before* you’re at a place (“I’ll be there in 10 mins!”) and the checkins you send us *after* you leave when you realize you forgot to check-in while you were there. (Trust us, we do it too to fill out our history pages!) The only difference now is that to unlock foursquare rewards - mayors, points, badges, etc - those checkins needs to be sent from that place."

Why do I blog this? I am fascinated by this kind of elicitation as it uncovers norms and behavioral issues that people put in place when using location-based services. Preparing a field study about the usage of this platform, I find interesting to take this into account.