My super quick notes about William @greatdismal Gibson's "Zero History"

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As discussed in his speech at the Cadogan Hall, few days ago (see write-up here), William Gibson's work is grounded into three interesting principles:

  • His approach to science-fiction is not about trying to predict the future, it's rather about the present.
  • He doesn't write about a distant future anymore. Instead he writes about the the contemporary present, which is more and more interesting to him.
  • The narrative is less important (and hence prominent) than the idea of "telling about society" (as Howard Becker - the american sociologist - would frame it). Gibson's book can be seen as a report about our society. A postmodern society to put it shortly.

With this in mind, reading "Zero History" made a lot of sense and I enjoyed spending time with Hubertus Bigend, Hollis Henry and other characters. I was certainly less impressed by the plot itself, but as mentioned above, it was something I expected.

The whole thing revolves around marketing strategies, trends evolution, the conquest of cool and the commodification of stylish fringes (which in this case corresponds to military outfits). Page 22 and page 216 offer a quick example of the topic at hand, showing how product design has been turned into storytelling and building narratives:

Also, my feeling about the book was certainly influenced by the fact that I read it exactly in some of the places described (London, Paris). For example: "he walked on shortly finding himself in what an enameled wall-signed informed him was the rue Git le Coeur. Narrower, possibly more medieval (...) He saw a magical-looking book-shop, stock piled like a mad professor's study in a film, and swerved, craving the escape into text. But these seemed not only comics, unable to provide his needed hit of words-in-row but in French as well"... which corresponds to one of my favorite book-shop in Paris:

As usual with Gibson, I liked the way he expresses things about this postmodern society of ours: "harshly tonsured child-soldiers, clad in skateboarding outfits still showing factory creases" or "eye that peered from face suggestive of gas-station taxidermy", "her Waiting for Godot outfit", "some complex electrotechnical Tesla-node no designer had even had to fake up", "he seemed to exist in his own personal time-zone" or "he looked like something that had gone wrong a computer screen". These quotes are amazingly well-put and manicured. Of course it's less stunning than the Sprawl trilogy but it's still enjoyable.

Beyond this, there are also some interesting perspectives and advices which always echo with my own activities and feelings: "when you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart. Another comment that I liked was the following:

"Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places, that had once belonged to cigarettes, now belonged to phones. Human figures a block down the street, in postures utterly familiar, were not longer smoking.""

(A picture of a friend which I found in line with the quote above)

Deconstructing Gartner's "hype cycle" myth

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Using this sunday afternoon to work on a book chapter, I was brought back to this peculiar tool created by Gartner called the "Hype Cycle"... defined in Julian's comments the other day on the near future laboratory blog as:

"The Gartner Hype Curve, where whatever the future is, it is sure to be oversold and overpromised, leading to the *trough of disillusionment and despair, after which the future sort of becomes more reasonable than the hype and slowly productizes itself. ((I’m still waiting for the Jet Pack future.))"

The underlying point of this cycle is that products/technologies have a peak of inflated expectations and it’s only after a period of disappointment that "they are adopted by people". Although the idea is promising a first, there are various problems with the cycle itself. The first one is that it doesn't look like a cycle at all, it's as if products/technologies only go through one disillusionment phase before becoming a success... which is utterly wrong. Some products fail several times, some never succeed... and what's a success anyway? We see it's about "visibility" but what does it mean more seriously? A second general problem is of course the idea that progress can't be stopped and that every single piece of tech will find its way to what other people call "the market". I've collected other problems below:

In addition, Richard Veryard has interesting points:

"Clue Number One: All technologies appear to have the same eventual outcome.

Clue Number Two: All the points are perfectly on the line. To a scientific mind, this indicates that the coordinates are not based on any real objective measurement, and that the curve itself is not subject to scientific investigation or calibration. The curve itself is based on a standard engineering pattern.

Clue Number Three: The shape of the line has not altered (or accelerated) in ten years. But all the evidence points to a shifting (shrinking) curve. For one thing, technology studies suggest that the half-life of new technologies is getting shorter. (This is sometimes known as the Red Queen Effect.) Furthermore, we might expect the quantity of attention received by each technology to be affected by the number of technologies competing for attention - and since this is increasing, the quantity and/or duration of hype might be reduced - in other words the hype curve getting steeper."

Finally, Jorge Aranda add important elements to the discussion:

" found the curve fallacious and untrustworthy for two reasons:

Irrational optimism: The curve tells you that, no matter how wacky your technology is, and how unachievable its goals, after it fails to live up to its hype things are gonna get better, always! You’ll see the light at the end of the bad-press tunnel. I find this happy ending scenario very implausible, partly because some proposed technologies do simply crash without recovering, and partly because forecasters have mistaken their job for that of cheerleaders in the past.

Disappearing acts: If you compare the curve from 2005 (below, click for better view) with the most recent one from 2006, you’ll see a number of technologies that have simply fallen out of the radar. SOA is gone. Videoconferencing is gone. Podcasting is gone. Are they past the plateau? Are they not worth a mention?"

Why do I blog this? Deconstructing other's thinking tools is always curious. That said, it might be that the Hype Cycle should not be taken too seriously and that it's just an alibi to start a discussion about the maturation of certain technological products.

There are of course other kinds of diagrams (with their own problems), see my previous post about s-curves.

Scouring dot come era tech magazines in search of product ideas

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(pic by Mando Gonzales)

An interesting story from an old issue of Wired that I found on my shelf this morning:

"Morgan had become convinced that there was plenty of gold left behind when the rush ended in 2001. The idea took root in fall 2003, while he was reading The Victorian Internet, Tom Standage's history of the telegraph. Just like the most ardent promoters of the Internet, the telegraph's early boosters claimed that the fledgling technology would do everything from helping save lives to ushering in world peace. Over the half-century between the telegraph's rise to prominence and its eclipse by the telephone, it did change the way people lived and worked, but not in the ways its evangelists had predicted. "The lesson was that while new communications media do change the world," Morgan says, "they do it much slower than the early adopters think they will."

From there, it was a small step to the realization that perhaps some of the ideas from the Internet boom might simply have been a few years ahead of their time. Morgan began to revisit the startups he'd put cash into - those that had failed and those that were still breathing. "I was getting reinterested in consumer Internet plays," Morgan says. "Some of the companies I'd invested in were starting to look like they had made it through the nuclear winter, and I wanted to figure out exactly how they were different from the ones that hadn't made it." He set about systematically distilling the lessons of the recent past and applying those lessons to his evaluation of each startup that he considered funding."

Why do I blog this? Collecting examples for my book about failures and how their analysis is important in the innovation process. Of course, I am less interested in the VC thing than in the process of surfacing ideas from the past as a exercise to see what conditions have changed and how it can be relevant for the future.

Feedback viz in public space

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There seems to be growing and conspicuous increase of feedback indicator in public space, based (or not) on PPT metaphor. Seen in London last week.

Why do I blog this? documenting the circulation of artifacts from one space to another, and how public space is influence by this. It's funny to see how this kind of visual metaphor (sometimes very poor, like pie chart) finds it way in the streets.

"Ethno-mining": combining qualitative and quantitative data in user research

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Jan Blom told me yesterday about this approach called "ethnomining", a mixed methods approach drawing on techniques from ethnography and data mining. It comes from Intel and you can get a description about it called "Ethno-Mining: Integrating Numbers and Words from the Ground Up by R. Aipperspach, T. Rattenbury, A. Woodruff, K. Anderson, J. Canny, P. Aoki. The idea is to benefit from the integration of results coming from both the processes of ethnographic and data mining techniques to interpret data, inspire design [23] or facilitate finding patterns in social behavior. Some excerpts I found relevant in this paper:

"in practice, either qualitative or quantitative analysis is typically used in service of the other. (...) However, ethno-mining is unique in its integration of ethnographic and data mining techniques. This integration is carried out in iterative loops between the formation of interpretations of the data and the development of processes for validating those interpretations. (...) here are two key characteristics of the iterative loops in ethno-mining. First, they can be separated into three categories based on the amount of a priori knowledge used to find and validate interpretations of the data. Second, the results of the iterative loops are frequently, although not exclusively, represented in visualizations. Visualizations have two basic affordances: they can represent both quantitative and qualitative analyses, and they exploit the visual system to support more comprehensive data analysis, particularly pattern finding and outlier detection. (...) our method seeks to expose and explicitly address the selection biases in both qualitative and quantitative research methods by checking them against one another. Ethno-mining extends its scrutiny of these biases beyond simply comparing the biases embedded in standard qualitative and quantitative techniques. It does so by tightly integrating the techniques in loops, generating mutually informed analysis techniques with complimentary sets of biases."

Why do I blog this? great article that covers methodological aspects we discussed internally. The combination of both quantitative and qualitative techniques to collect data (and make sense of it) is definitely something that we try to apply (both in Fabien's PhD research and mine). The paper here offer a relevant framework and a discussion of cases.

My (quick) notes from Playful10, London

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Gameification. Points. Badges. Gamepocalypse. External rewards. Every day the headlines about games remind us that there must be more to games than these keywords. The game industry has sometimes a bad navel gazing habit... which is why it's good to attend event such as the playful10 conference in London last Friday. The point of this conference is to "look at what PLAY means both creatively and culturally, and put speakers on the stage who offer different perspectives on where we are currently, where we’ve been, and where we’re going. We want people walking away talking about the nature of games… what they mean to different people inside, on the periphery, outside or miles away from the industry".

The playful10 conference was certainly as good as last year's: passionate speakers (ranging from comic book writers to hair dressers), intriguing topics (old jew jokes, item collections from badge to game controllers, Mad Men quotes, dead chicken, critics about gameification), good audience and cosy venue.

Some quick notes below about what inspired me:

In his introduction, Toby Barnes first claimed that "not all play is created equal" and that we need to go back again. To clarify this, he then pointed to H.G. Wells' classic victorian wargame books from 1913: "Little Wars" and "Floor games" with great quotes such as "the home that has no floor upon which games may be played falls so far short of happiness". or "How utterly we despise the silly little bricks of the toyshops! They are too small to make a decent home for even the poorest lead soldiers, even if there were hundreds of them, and there are never enough, never nearly enough; even if you take one at a time and lay it down and say, "This is a house," even then there are not enough". The importance of the floor (and other structures to play games) has also been re-asserted later on by another speaker who presented a project for racing games on sidewalks. Barnes' second point to start off the day was also that creating games is hard. Based on this tweet ("Deciding that games design is 20% fun, 80% frustration."), he showed that reversing the percentages is a matter of iterating (as suggested by Matt Locke), so "let's keep iterating".

Naomi Alderman discussed the problem of storytelling in video-games: "it's almost impossible to tell the player something about the character at the same moment you give him/her total freedom about what to do".

Paul Bennun, in his presentation about audio games, showed intriguing videos from loneconspirator. Based on this material, he described how audio games indeed make you look like a dork but the user is definitely "in flow". Audio games are just like any other games: some are good, some are bad. Eventually, when you get rid of the screen, you find yourself more free, have less constraints and it's because of how sounds work. As a matter of fact, the difficulty here is that sound can only be "in the moment" and this is why it's so immersive, especially for first person games.

Tom Muller unveiled inspiring examples of his work about graphic design and comic books. He basically showed the importance of typography in these fields and I quite enjoyed examples such as World's best robot, World war robot, Pop Bot and 24SEVEN, which seems to be tremendously interesting.

Development director at TT Games, Jonathan Smith worked for the production of LEGO Star Wars. In his talk, he claimed that game design revolved around a conflict finely described by Dr. Miller in the second episode of Mad Men (4th season):

"Faye Miller: Look, we're both in the same business. I'm not embarrassed to say. It's about helping people somehow to sort out their deepest conflict.

Don Draper: And what is that?

Faye Miller: In a nutshell, It all comes down to "what I want" versus "what's expected of me."

Freedom versus constraints. He showed that people who play video-games are not there to be indulged and that they want to be "directed by the system". They want to find the boundaries and the rules through communicated affordances. The game designer creates an awareness of the permitted possibilities... to create play.

Then Sebastian Deterding gave an insightful analysis of "gameification and its discontents". He started by asserting that there's a disease currently on the web: the "badge measle", i.e. the pervasive presence of rewards such as badges. These are being given for tons of reasons ranging from posting a blogpost to watching a TV channel. It is as if points and other rewards were given to achieve life goals. Deterding simply wondered about "what the hell is going here?". His critique focused on the idea that game mechanism are now perceived as a crunchy thing you can add to anything, a trend weirdly called "gameification" and propelled by game designers, "talking heads" and - worse - service vendors.

He followed on this by addressing what is wrong with gameification:

  • Confusion 1: games are not fun because they are games, they are fun because they are well designed! Sturgeon's Law "Ninety percent of everything is crap"
  • Confusion 2: rewards are not achievements, this is just bad psychology. Vendors who sell this have a Pavlovian model in mind. "it's so 1940" as Deterding said. He exemplified this by showing a game on which there's big button called "earn 1,000,000,000,000 $" on which you can click and win. Based on the reward model, this would be the best game. As described by Raph Koster, "fun in games arises from mastery".
  • Confusion 3: competition is not for everyone!

The problem is also that gameification also has side-effects: it creates unintended behavior, people game the system and it messes with implicit social norms.

When people take gameification too directly, they generally miss that games are about: fictions, make believe, talk, and freedom to play ("whoever plays plays freely, whoever must play cannot play!"). Playing = "as if" and playing is fun because of the autonomy. As shown on Deterding's slide below, this is the difference between work (a spreadsheet) and play (Eve On-line):

After this, Bertrand Duplat from Editions Volumiques showed some of the awesome prototypes they recently produced. And then I had to catch my flight missing the last speakers.

Do Robots Dream of Spring? Ken Rinaldo exhibit at the Swiss Museum of Science Fiction

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Last saturday, I made a quick trip to the Swiss Museum of Science Fiction for the opening of an highly intriguing exhibition called "Do Robots Dream of Spring?". It features the work of Ken Rinaldo, an american new media artist who specializes in exploring the confluence and coevolution of organic and technological cultures.

This 6-month retrospective exhibition opening in Switzerland features a diverse set of artifacts and documents. Most of the work showed at the Maison d'Ailleurs is made of curious installations that promotes "communication between species". See below some examples that attracted my attention:

"Autopoiesis"

This one was my favorite in the exhibition. This installation consists of six robotic sound sculptures that interact with the public (using IR sensors) and modify their behaviors over time. These big robotic arms (made out of Cabernet-Sauvignon grapewine and steel wire) talk with each other through a computer network and audible telephone tones, which act as a musical language for the group. The group consciousness of the sculptural robots corresponds to "a cybernetic ballet of experience" with the bots and and viewer/participant involved in a grand dance of one sensing and responding to the other (the photo above depicts a science-fiction writer interacting with one of these arms).

The piece explores the idea of group consciousness and the notion of Autopoeisis coined by Francisco Varella and Humberto Maturana. As described by Rinaldo:

"Autopoiesis utilizes a number of unique approaches to create this complex and evolving environment. It uses smart sensor organization that senses the presence of the viewer/participant and allows the robotic sculpture to respond intelligently. (...) Each sculpture also generates bit strings of information as algorithms using an internal numerical randomizer. These randomizers effect overall sculptural form and the evolution of the sound environment. Additionally, the tones are a musical language that allows individual robotic sculptures to communicate and give the viewer a sense of the emotional state of the sculptural elements as they interact."

"Autotelematic Spider Bots"

This installation is a sort of playground in which spider-like bots sense and interact with the public in real-time. This artificial life piece is based on the idea that the bots can modify their behaviors based on interactions with each other (communicating like twittering birds), the public, the environment and "food source". Some can activate viewers' cell phone.

"The Augmented Fish Reality"

This interactive installation is made of 3 rolling robotic fish-bowl sculptures that is meant to explore interspecies and transpecies communication. Interestingly, this fish-driven robots are controlled by Siamese fighting fish chosen here for two reasons: (1) they have good eyes (which allow them to see for great distance), (2) they associate humans with food. The picture above shows the curious human-robot interactions at stake here. As Rinaldo described:

"This design uses 4 active infrared sensors around each bowl which allow the fish to move forward & back and turn the bowls. By swimming to the edge of the bowl the fish activate motorized wheels that move the robots in that direction. Humans will interact with the work simply by entering the environment. (...) these are robots under fish control and the fish may choose to approach and/or move away from the human participants and each other. These bowls consist of a living environment of peace lillys, which help to absorb the waist stream from the fish. The bowls and robots are designed to allow the fish to get to within 1/4 inch of each other for visual communication between the fish, both male and female."

Overall, I found that these superb artifact looks like giant and sleek exoskeleton (from the fish's viewpoint!) that are very distinct from the common armour-like devices that robotic research produces. Can we think about peculiar type of exoskeletons for human? without any reference to the shape of our bodies? Not necessarily a fish bowl for humans, but eh, you get the point.

Beyond this, what's interesting in this project is simply that observing the fish leads the viewer to wonder about its very intentionality: Does the fish really move to get closer to humans? What makes it move? How does the environment/other fishes/human beings influence the movement?

"The Enteric Consciousness"

This one is an artificial tongue activated by living bacteria that gives viewer a massage on a robotic chair (shaped into a massive tongue). This work is concerned with our "microbiome" and the symbiotic relationships humans share with bacteria. It also proposes a new form of interactive robotic installation that involves direct touch and smell.

Why do I blog this? Documenting these fascinating examples of how new media arts, science-fiction and robotics intersect led me to think about some issues raised by artificial life, robots and technology:

  • The very definition of robots and their shape. As you can see on the picture above, the devices do not really like your common R2D2/Bender/C3PO. However, they sense things in the environment, they compute this information and they react with movements and interactions... which corresponds to being a robot.
  • The self-organization of robots behavior based on what is sensed.
  • The feedback loop between robots, other robots, the environment and the viewers (which are turned into "participants" in Rinaldo's work).
  • The notion of intentionality: Are the movements of the fish/arms intentional? What influenced their movements?

Another aspect that I found relevant in Rinaldo's work corresponds to how close it is to science fiction. In his introduction to the booklet about the exhibition, Patrick J. Gyger shed some light about this aspect:

"Naturally, as a creator of systems which imitate the behaviour of living organisms, Rinaldo knows full well that the determinism of their programming prevents any evolutionary independence. But his uncanny ecologies allow a reversal of perspective. They succeed in suspending the onlooker's disbelief and incite their wonder, as perhaps only science fiction at the height of its inventiveness can. Thus Ken Rinaldo goes beyond the clichés which link robots and science fiction and sets our imagination in motion. He proves that science fiction art is not limited to the cinema, novels or illustration. He has appropriated an essential contemporary science fiction technique. He has taken ownership of the technologies that surround us, and his poetic interrogations of these technologies cause us to wonder if robots really can wait for the arrival of better days."

To which, i would point to a quote from Bruce Sterling in his speech during the opening: "Robots have been invented as performing artists [by Kapek's brothers], and they're still are performing artists".

Skateboards, golf clubs and other bodily engaging artifacts

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This quick varial observed in Geneva few years ago is one of these pictures that I keep using to show how skateboard practice is interesting in the context of tangible artifacts. As a matter of fact, my argumentation about it is more based on personal intuition (and gut feelings) than serious observations. Which is why I was intrigued by this academic article I ran across recently. In Bodies, Boards, Clubs and Bugs: A study of bodily engaging artifacts, Jakob Tholander and Carolina Johansson adopt a rather interesting perspective about non-digital artifacts. They examine how the examination of golfers, skateboarders and body buggers can be relevant for design purposes. Their approach shed some light on the "qualities for design of interaction that allow for full body experiences, and engagement of a rich array of our senses and bodily capabilities for being-in and moving-in the world." The authors also compare their observations and results from interviews to a new interactive device designed for movement and bodily engagement (called the BodyBug).

Based on different artifact descriptions and experiences, the articles describes various lessons drawn from their observation and certain design implications:

"key qualities for design of interactive artifacts that connect body and world in an intriguing way:

  • make it necessary to engage with the physical environment
  • avoid perceptive modalities (in our case vision) that remove attention from body and environment
  • the response should not be discrete but open up for individual experience and interpretation
  • the artifact should allow users to continuously be socially aware."

This challenges designers of experience-oriented artifacts for body and movement to view the artifact as a medium for engaging in movement based activities, while not letting it become the sole and primary focus of the movement. This would allow the “outcome” of the activity not to be determined by the output of the system, but to be determined by the experience of the user.

Among the three examples, it's the description about skateboarders that I found the most intriguing with comments such as "The skateboard was rarely a primary element of what they talked about; instead focus was on the embodied experience or "Skateboarders talked about “surfaces” such as slopes or rails and how they were used to carry out tricks".

Why do I blog this? sorting different papers for my class about user research and interaction design. This one is relevant as it shows how the study of non-digital activities can inform the design of tangible artifacts.

In addition, this paper is relevant to my current research because it moves from observing humans to the analysis of non-humans (objects). There would be a lot to draw from analyzing both skateboards and skateboard places (street furnitures, bowl, etc.).

Evolution in rapid prototyping/3D printing

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A common remark I've heard at Lift France 11 about the session focused on fab labs and rapid prototyping dealt with the lack of business opportunities in these fields. Interestingly, the NYT had an overview of the current possibilities in this article. Various companies ranging from HP to Boeing are mentioned, showing the importance of this topic. But it's not what caught my attention. (A Fab bot encountered in Paris few months ago)

Instead, I found relevant to see what has changed in the field:

"The technology has been radically transformed from its origins as a tool used by manufacturers and designers to build prototypes.

These days it is giving rise to a string of never-before-possible businesses that are selling iPhone cases, lamps, doorknobs, jewelry, handbags, perfume bottles, clothing and architectural models. And while some wonder how successfully the technology will make the transition from manufacturing applications to producing consumer goods, its use is exploding. (...) Advocates of the technology say that by doing away with manual labor, 3-D printing could revamp the economics of manufacturing and revive American industry as creativity and ingenuity replace labor costs as the main concern around a variety of goods. (...) Manufacturers and designers have used 3-D printing technology for years, experimenting on the spot rather than sending off designs to be built elsewhere, usually in Asia, and then waiting for a model to return. Boeing, for example, might use the technique to make and test air-duct shapes before committing to a final design. (...) Moving the technology beyond manufacturing does pose challenges. Customized products, for example, may be more expensive than mass-produced ones, and take longer to make. And the concept may seem out of place in a world trained to appreciate the merits of mass consumption.

But as 3-D printing machines have improved and fallen in cost along with the materials used to make products, new businesses have cropped up."

Why do I blog this? Following up on previous talks at past Lift conferences, putting things in perspectives.

Recent "you are here" encounters

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London, UK: the delicate use of a pointing finger.

Istanbul, Turkey: the finger is now turned into an arrow, that indicate the location.

Faial, Portugal: a common "you are here" symbol with a bullseye signage that replaces the finger/arrow metaphor.

Lyon, France: an interesting example of a semi-bullseye signage linked to an indication of a walking path. There's a direct continuity between the two. Interestingly, this kind of representation shows a direction, where one could head to.

Paris, France. Perhaps the most intriguing as it says "vous êtes ici" printed on the sidewalk, a "you are here" indication that it not really useful as you already know that. Certainly a playful graffiti to indicate that there's something relevant in the area (one of my favorite book shop in Paris: Bimbo Tower). What is curious here is the direct inscription of the symbol in the context of the person.

Why do I blog this? sorting out the main categories of "you are here" symbols with a limited sampling (recent encounters) allows to understand the evolution over time and the design space (possibilities). Nothing digital here but I'll get to it later on.

Article about relying on failures in design (ACM interactions)

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My article about technological failures has been published in the last issue of ACM interactions. It addresses the possibility to use failure as design tactic:

"failures and mistakes are important too because they are implicit signs of a need or problem that requires a solution. The examination of failures reveals what is commonly referred to in HCI as the “gulf of execution,” i.e., the difference between the user’s expected actions to achieve a goal and the actual required actions

my quirky mind-set left me wondering about the role of failure in design research: If problems and mistakes are so interesting and insightful, why not be a bit more bold and enlist them as a design tactic? I am suggesting the conscious design of “questionable” prototypes to investigate user experience. (...) In doing so, what kind of insights can be derived from leading people in the wrong direction?"

Attaching stories to objects: the return of the blogject meme

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This article in the NYT made me think that there seems to be a new bubble in platforms that allows attaching stories to physical objects. The article mentions Tales of things (" Slap on a sticker with a newfangled bar code, and anybody with a properly equipped smartphone can scan the object and learn..."), Itizen ("a tell-and-tag approach") and Sticky Bits (" can also be used to link content to an existing bar code").

Some excerpts I found interesting:

"Goldstein theorizes that the motive was the same “microboredom” that inclines users of mobile check-in apps to announce that they’ve arrived at Chili’s — except that users could broadcast not just where they were but also what objects were around them. Some do use StickyBits to communicate something specific to people they know, but many essentially use it as a media platform. (...) Under that scenario, things are being linked to a story not so much in the form of narrative as of cumulative data. The continuum moves even further in the direction of raw information when you consider what tech experts call the “Internet of things” — more and more stuff produced with sensors and tags and emitting readable data (...) As more objects have more to say, the question becomes what we want to hear, and from what."

Curiously, I haven't seen any mention of Thinglink, which was one of the first platform to propose a globally unique object identifier. Developed by Social Objects Oy, a company founded by Ulla-Maaria Mutanen and Jyri Engeström, it's now a platform where the thinglink object code is linked to further references, such as photos, descriptive text, tags, maker(s), owner(s), and web links.

Why do I blog this? It's been a while that I follow this trend and it's funny so much activity along these lines. Possibly some interesting things to be discussed at Lift11. What I am curious about is how this is connected to blogjects and how things have changed in the last few years.

Lift seminar@imaginove about robots/networked objects

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A quick update on the Lift@home front, we're going to have a Lift seminar with Imaginove on September 29th in Lyon. We'll talk about how networked objects and robotics can offer an interesting playground for digital entertainment. The event will be in French and we'll have two speakers. Etienne Mineur from Editions Volumiques, a publishing house focusing on the paper book as a new computer platform, as well as a research lab on book, computational paper, reading, playing and their relation to new technologies. The second speaker, Pierre Bureau from Arimaz. will discuss how robots and networked objects can be connected to virtual environments to create innovation gameplays. I'll give an introduction about this field and moderate the session. (A "beggar robot" encountered last week in Trento, created by Sašo Sedlaček)

Very related to this, we are now officially working on a new conference about robotics. The "Robolift" conference will take place on 23-25 March in Lyon, during the first edition of inno-robo, the European trade show dedicated to robotic technologies organized by the French Robotics Association Syrobo.

Designing alternative presents and speculative future

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Last week I attended the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology conference in Trento, Italy. I went there presenting my work about game controllers and user appropriation of these devices. One of the most interesting session I attended was part of a track called "Speculation, Design, Public and Participatory Technoscience: Possibilities and Critical Perspectives". Focused on speculative design, the talks in this session explored how design is increasingly cast as a possible mode of intervention into technoscience. James Auger's presentation in this session was highly inspiring. Entitled "Speculative Design by Practice: robot case study", it addresses Auger's approach to design for speculation. He basically described this perspective with the following diagram:

As presented on his blog, this matrix can be read like this:

"At the origin we have the here and now; everyday life and the real products that are available on the high street. The lineage of these products can be traced back in time to where the technology became available to iterate them beyond their current form. The technology element on the left hand side represents research and development work, the higher the line the more emergent the technology and the longer and less predictable the route to everyday life (domestication). As we move to the right of the diagram and into futures we see that speculative design futures exist as a projection of the lineage; they are developed using a methodology that consciously focuses on contemporary public understanding and desires to make these speculations both tangible and desirable. Alternative presents step out of the lineage at some poignant time in the past to re-imagine our technological present. These designs challenge and question the existing systems and objects that arise from current modes of manufacture."

Such diagram is an interesting model that allows to explore product evolution in a non-standard way. One can see it as a generative tool to investigate design fictions that target potential futures or alternative presents. For instance, based on a certain technology, one can start designing original products that would challenge how we're using it. The key thing with this matrix is the context of origin (the "here and now"): where are we doing it? when are we doing it? Another interesting point IMO is also the notion of "product lineage" (see the work by Simondon). The use of past technologies and products influence potential future avenues and past failures can also be recombined to create original design.

He exemplified this with a robot case studies, which could be seen as myths/failed visions of the future. Although technologies move forward, the visions and the promises remain the same, as attested by useless humanoids devices such as Asimo. Auger shows how looking at context (what influences classical product design) leads to more meaningful and less spectacular robot design. Looking at what makes people tick (such as a video of lizard that catch fly on a restaurant table) enables to speculate and design about a potential robot that would do the same.

This part reminded me of Sara Ljungblad's work about how the observation of marginal practices can provide a new perspective on the use of the technology, raising design ideas that are based on alternative viewpoints and ways of doing things. In her work, she showed how the observation of people who collect unusual pets, such as snakes and spiders) can be relevant to understand underlying human interests and qualities of interaction, relevant for designing robots.

This corresponds to the Carnivorous Domestic Entertainment Robots we shown at Lift10. See for example the coffee table mousetrap robot:

What's important here, as claimed by Auger, is that the term "speculative" is flawed. It gives the sensation that the artifacts does not exist. By existing for real, the public treat them as more seriously because it resonates with their everyday life.

Auger also discussed several principles that guided his work:

  • Ignore the stereotypical representation of robots and acknowledge existing contextual artifacts (tables, lamps...)
  • Produce "objets of desire" that people would be happy to have in their home,
  • Get to a new kind of relationship with objects.
  • Using this to question technology

Why do I blog this? the interest here is triple: (1) My personal interest in design fiction (and an upcoming talk about it as the Swiss Design Network conference!), (2) The design tactics used in this context and how they can be transferred to design research/field research, (3) The robot case, which resonates with current Lift Lab projects about networks objects and robots.

Foursquare data analysis about users activities

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Bitsybot has an interesting set of visualizations about Foursquare usage. Called Foursquare Trends, it shows users' behavior over time by visualizing a week’s worth of Foursquare checkins. Bitsybot is interested in using this to "develop a suite of similar tools to help small brick and mortar businesses understand their micro market landscapes":

Why do I blog this? another type of material that is relevant for our study of Foursquare usage. This type of graph is relevant as a way to show rythms and usage patterns. The example above is based on activity analysis (each activity actually corresponds to a certain set of places).

For us at Liftlab, it's also interesting to compare this to our current musings about spatial occupancy analysis. See for instance Fabien's work about:

"We retrieved a couple of months of records produced by 5 Bluetooth scanners, deployed by the Mobility Service of the city of Barcelona on light poles and traffic poles in the Barcelona city center in the Plaza Catalunya – Puerta del Angel – Rambla – Cathedral area. BitCarrier’s solution aggregated over 4 millions non-unique devices (about 1 million unique devices) into periods of 15 minutes, and we discarded the periods with less than 100 detected devices. The database provided a first understanding of the cyclical nature of passing Bluetooth traffic at the nodes and routes forming a connected graph of sensors."

Motivations for "off the grid check-in" on Foursquare

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TechCrunch is generally not a website I follow that much, but there's an interesting article by a Guest Author about "Off the Grid" check-ins on Foursquare. Following up on the blogpost about automatic location capture I wrote last week, I think it's worth having a look at this survey mentioned in the TC article. The survey was about the purpose of using the "OTG" feature, i.e. the possibility on Foursquare to avoid disclosing the location where you checked-in to your contacts. Being "off the grid" however enable to gain points, badges and compete for mayorship. Although the methodology may be a bit rough in terms of sampling (I wonder less about the quantity of peeps who participated than the stratification), here are the conclusions I found interesting:

  • "The single largest reason for OTG was hiding from friends [46%]. People gave a variety of motivations [examples: buying a gift for girlfriend, on a date, avoiding someone in particular, hiding one’s poor eating habits from friends, and seeing a doctor.]
  • 60% of respondents cited the desire to keep track of where they’ve been for their own future reference. (...) your Foursquare History is a flat set of your check ins but the user interest here points to the opportunity for a much more robust feature. (...) loyalty programs and offers; customer acquisition and retention instruments.
  • 34% of respondents used OTG to check into a location that could have been considered confidential or sensitive to their job.
  • Mayor stalking was the surprise motivation for many OTG check ins since they count towards mayorships but don’t display your name associated with the venue.
  • Only 15% of users report using OTG to signal a “check out” — leaving a venue and not wanting to publish location out of concern friends will arrive to find you departed.
  • 26% of people utilize OTG for repeat check ins at a location over the course of a few days (such as a hotel). These could easily be public but collapsed into a single line. Or subsequent check ins might be public, but not published as alerts."

Why do I blog this? Simply because we (Lift Lab) are currently conducting a short user study of Foursquare with both lead users and people who abandoned using it after a while. Our approach is much more open-ended and based on visualization of spatial data (such as the one generated with where do you go). The TC data will allow to triangulate our qualitative data with this quantitative insights.

What can we learn from the analysis of disorientation?

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An excerpt from this presentation by Ruedi Baur:

"We simply allow ourselves to be guided by the system, led by the hand, almost to the point of losing any notion of orientation in the process. So we can fairly easily imagine this future world in which everyone would be systematically guided by his device, connected to the synchronized global network, and gradually lose any sense of natural orientation. It is a matter of everyday observation that being guided considerable reduces our capacity to know where we are and have any spontaneous sense of the route towards our chosen destination. Neither is this phenomenon only connected with satellite navigation technology; more generally, any guidance by a reliable artificial system tends to reduce our capacity to orientate ourselves naturally, that is to interpret what is in front of us in the environment and independently take decisions that would truly enable us to find our way. (...) What can we learn from disorientation? How can a design project leave room for individual choice? How can we orientate without guiding?"

Why do I blog this? Although the tone here is slightly over-deterministic, I like the design issue that is at stake when creating urban signage (supported by digital and non-digital means). There's plenty of study about how people orientation but it would be good to grasp the user experience of disorientation... and use it as a starting point to create meaningful systems.