"Journals of Negative Results"

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A recent trend in academic sciences consist in the publication of "negative results". This is based on the idea that scientific articles published in traditional journals frequently provide insufficient evidence regarding negative data. More specifically, the point is to give a voice to negative results, experimental failures or results with low statistical significant. Some examples: Journal of Interesting Negative Results in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning As described on their website:

"The journal will bring to the fore research in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning that uncovers interesting negative results. (...) Insofar as both our research areas focus on theories "proven" via empirical methods, we are sure to encounter ideas that fail at the experimental stage for unexpected, and often interesting, reasons. Much can be learned by analysing why some ideas, while intuitive and plausible, do not work. The importance of counter-examples for disproving conjectures is already well known. Negative results may point to interesting and important open problems. Knowing directions that lead to dead-ends in research can help others avoid replicating paths that take them nowhere. This might accelerate progress or even break through walls!"

Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine As described on their website:

"Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine is an open access, peer-reviewed, online journal that promotes a discussion of unexpected, controversial, provocative and/or negative results in the context of current tenets.

The journal invites scientists and physicians to submit work that illustrates how commonly used methods and techniques are unsuitable for studying a particular phenomenon. Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine strongly promotes and invites the publication of clinical trials that fall short of demonstrating an improvement over current treatments. The aim of the journal is to provide scientists and physicians with responsible and balanced information in order to improve experimental designs and clinical decisions."

Journal of Pharmaceutical Negative Results As described on their website:

"Journal of Pharmaceutical Negative Results is a peer reviewed journal developed to publish original, innovative and novel research articles resulting in negative results. This peer-reviewed scientific journal publishes theoretical and empirical papers that reports the negative findings and research failures in pharmaceutical field."

Journal of Negative Results in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology As described on their website:

"The primary intention of Journal of Negative Results is to provide an online-medium for the publication of peer-reviewed, sound scientific work in ecology and evolutionary biology that may otherwise remain unknown. In recent years, the trend has been to publish only studies with 'significant' results and to ignore studies that seem uneventful. This may lead to a biased, perhaps untrue, representation of what exists in nature. By counter-balancing such selective reporting, JNR aims to expand the capacity for formulating generalizations. The work to be published in JNR will include studies that 1) test novel or established hypotheses/theories that yield negative or dissenting results, or 2) replicate work published previously (in either cognate or different systems). Short notes on studies in which the data are biologically interesting but lack statistical power are also welcome."

Why do I blog this? Writing the conclusion of my book about technological failures lead me to discuss the importance of documentation. I highlighted (bold) the variety of purposes, which are sometimes different from one journal to another.

Besides, the title of the papers are utterly fascinating. See for yourself: "Failure of calcium gluconate internal gelation for prolonging drug release from alginate-chitosan-based ocular insert of atenolol", "Influence of some hydrophilic polymers on dissolution characteristics of furosemide through solid dispersion: An unsatisfied attempt for immediate release formulation", "Some commonly observed statistical errors in clinical trials published in Indian Medical Journals".

Both French and Swiss systems

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There's this part of the airport in Geneva that has this fascinating setting. Several remarks:

  • You have traces of both French and Swiss systems: two separate phone booths (Swisscom and France Telecom), two separate mailboxes (French and Swiss Posts), two different fire extinguishers
  • You have both phones and mailboxes because it's a joint airport between the two countries. But this is from the French part of the airport.
  • As usual with French enclaves in foreign countries, the institutions do not seem to care much about their devices... as attested by the fact that you have an old mailbox model... and the previous logo of France Telecom.

Location-based services updates

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Few examples of location-based services that I ran across recently. Bluebrain reactive music based on location As described on The Next Web:

"We had this idea of having the music progress and change based on a person’s location. We decided to release an album that’s also an app with whole melodic phrases that change based on a listener’s location. (...) The most difficult part of making this new album wasn’t the app but writing the actual music,” explains Holladay, “It’s difficult to know what all the variables will be and making sure they all work on a musical level. (...) We spent a lot of time on The Mall in different areas and created zones in parts of the mall for each particular piece. Then we’d write music based on that area in different sections."

Creepy:

"an application that allows you to gather geolocation related information about users from social networking platforms and image hosting services. The information is presented in a map inside the application where all the retrieved data is shown accompanied with relevant information (i.e. what was posted from that specific location) to provide context to the presentation."

Street Pass (Nintendo 3DS)

StreetPass is a curious feature in the new Nintendo 3DS that allows multiple devices to connect with each other when in a certain range and exchange data. As described here:

"StreetPass Quest begins with your Mii trapped in a tower. To escape, you must use Miis you have collected via StreetPass and battle increasingly powerful enemies in turn-based combat. If you haven’t collected any Miis then you’re able to purchase a cat in armour to act as a substitute. You purchase this cat with two game coins, which have been previously detailed. The cat has two attack options: sword and magic. (...) The goal of StreetPass Puzzle is to construct a 3D puzzle. But to complete this puzzle you need to collect pieces by interacting with other folks via StreetPass. The more people you interact with, the more puzzle pieces you gain until you can finally complete the puzzle."

Why do I blog this? just keeping track of recent and interesting developments in the field of location-based applications.

Teardown culture and companies' reaction

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POPSCI has an article about the "history of the teardown" and what happens on websites such as ifixit.com/. (A robot tinkerer's desk at the design museum in Zürich)

The article describes the important of this kind of activity to understand how things work, child-like memories of bricolage and to generate a "culture of repair". But this is not the thing that attracted my attention, I was more curious about how companies react to this:

"A culture of repair fanatics would be rough on the tech manufacturers who rely on pumping out marginally changed gear, year after year, but would have a pretty astounding effect everywhere else. (...) The tech companies themselves aren't helping. "The manufacturers are more hostile now," says Wiens. "The Apple II came with complete schematics," but newer Apple products boast proprietary and hard-to-find screws, unlabeled components, batteries that Apple says must be replaced by the company and not the user, and no user documentation whatsoever. Apple is typically held as the worst or at least the most obvious example of this kind of repair-unfriendliness. (...) The iPhone 4, a few years later, features screws that were created by Apple expressly for this purpose. These weird, five-lobed, flower-shaped Torx screws have no practical advantage over, say, a Philips—except to keep tinkerers out. That didn't stop iFixit, of course: "We actually had to make a screwdriver—had to file a flat-head screwdriver down to fit [the Apple screw]," says Wiens (...) In Apple's case, it's probably a combination of secrecy and simple greed, but even some of the "good" companies, like Dell and HP, bury their manuals deep in their sites, difficult to find for many consumers."

Why do I blog this? This is a good example of a sort of "arm race", or a co-evolution between products and tinkerers (who need to design new tools to tear down products).

This also echoes a conversation that I had last week with some representatives of a domestic appliances company at Robolift. The notion of tinkering/repurposing/opening products is both seen as a challenge and an opportunity. But companies do not necessarily know if they should go against this. I wonder about what can be possible and what can be done with the right target group of people.

Video games that recently caught my attention

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Recently, a journalist asked me what are the console games that I found interesting lately. I froze for a while, told him about 3 games: Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress... and realize none of them were available on consoles... Few notes about these 3 video-games that caught my attention in the last few months. Each of them made me wonder about the possibility to go beyond standard console games through various aesthetics and forms of interactions.

Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP (S:S&S)

S:S&S EP is the video game that reconciled me with storytelling, a feature that I largely ignored in the last few years. Described as a "21st century interpretation of the archetypical old school videogame adventure, designed exclusively for Apple's touchtronic machinery", it's an intriguing mix of "laid-back exploration, careful investigation & mysterious musical problem-solving occasionally punctuated by hard-hitting combat encounters". Exactly what I needed after a tough series of weeks organizing conferences.

As discussed by game’s creator/artist/animator Craig D. Adams in this interview, the game was inspired by Shigeru Miyamoto’s design sense with the original Super Mario Bros, Jordan Mechner’s original Prince of Persia and Eric Chahi’s Another World because all off these "have a cinema-influenced style, expressive human movement and a more grounded narrative concept". This combination of players' interactions with "sound, music & audiovisual style" underpinned by a basic narrative and very low-key dialogues made me tick. More specifically, I am impressed by the rhythm of the game, which is sometimes super slow/contemplative and sometimes very quick/nervous in combat.

Also, one of the curious feature of the game is the integration of social software in the game. You input your twitter login/password and you can broadcast dialog, hints, descriptions from the game to your twitter channel. It's pretty basic right now (lots of people tweet the same things) but I guess this is the beginning of something and there could be an interesting potential in also using content coming from tweets tagged with the #sworcery hashtag.

Minecraft (Markus Persson)

Minecraft has a very clear value proposition (I find this term funny), it's a (sandbox) game that engage users in placing blocks to build anything they can imagine. As described in the Wikipedia:

"The core gameplay revolves around construction. The game world is essentially made up of cubical blocks arranged in a fixed grid pattern, that represent different materials, such as, dirt, stone, various ores, water, tree trunks, etc. While the players can move freely across the world, objects and items can only be placed at fixed locations relative to the grid. The player can gather these material "blocks" and place them elsewhere, thus potentially creating various constructions."

The game was kind of a puzzle for the video game industry because of various characteristics. It doesn't follow the AAA marketing logic, graphics and are super basic, it's a simple download (no app store), you buy it with PayPal, no marketing/publicity, no publisher. But this is not what I found interesting.

Chris DeLeon has a good perspective on what makes Minecraft an important platform. He describes that it's a game about discovery:

"Discovering what’s beyond the horizon, discovering new cave systems, discovering incredible projects others have done, discovering new features snuck into updates, discovering new like-minded people, discovering architecture / electronics / sculpture / texturing / landscaping / action / photography / decorating / music / trading / storytelling / adventure / modding, and discovering that we all love to make things, provided that we have an accessible and cost-effective way to do so."

Dwarf fortress (Bay 12 Games)

Even geekier than Minecraft, Dwarf Fortress is a combination of a roguelike and city-building games in which the user interface has been limited to text. A sandboy-style simulation platform, it's a game that allows the player to build and organize a city of dwarves.

What I love in Dwarf Fortress is simply the spatial environment, its representation, how you interact with it as a player and how it's generated by the computer. As written in the Wikipedia:

"Prior to play, a world must be generated using the software or downloaded from the Internet. Each constructed world is unique; events that take place during play will affect subsequent games in the same world. World creation in Dwarf Fortress is elaborate: terrain is generated using fractals, erosion is simulated, then wildlife, towns, and other sites are placed. A specific history is attached to each site; references to these events can be found during gameplay (in artwork and conversations with non player characters (NPCs)), and development's current focus (as of April 2008) is to make world generation wars determine in-game territory distribution and NPC background stories."

Readers interested in this game can have a look at this masters thesis by Joshua Diaz about how the "space, code, and player choice (...) not only encouraged players to view the game as a world full of stories, but also gave players tools to craft their own kinds of tellable moments through the game".

Why do I blog this? Writing some quick notes about these games as a pointer in further discussion about the evolution of video games, the importance of looking at the fringes and the spatial component in virtual environments.

About gestures and mobile phone conversations

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"Not crazy, just talking on the phone: Gestures and mobile phone conversations" by Carolyn Y. Wei is an intriguing paper I ran across recently. It basically focuses on a phenomena you may have certain notice: why and how mobile phone users engage in vivid nonverbal communication behaviors that do not benefit their communication partner (gesturing, smiling, and nodding their head). The most interesting part of the paper is about the design implications, such as creating mobile phones that can be sensitive to nonverbal communication behaviors (with paralinguistic social cues such as tone of voice, pitch, and volume). The "Jerk-o-Meter at MIT Medialab is based on this approach:

"The Jerk-O-Meter (or JerkoMeter) is a real-time speech feature analysis application that runs on your VOIP phone or cellphone that remedies precisely that experience. It uses speech features for activity and stress (and soon empathy) to measure if you are 'being a jerk' on the phone. The phone displays messages in case you are, and can also be setup to inform the person on the other end of the line that you're extremely busy."

(A courier in Seoul who make gestures when using his mobile phone)

But the most intriguing one is described in the original article:

"Mobile phone design can also respect existing research that suggests gestures are more meaningful to the speaker than the listener, and thus focus on innovations that aid the speaker. An example of this kind of design would be a mobile phone that senses gestures or other nonverbal behaviors and compares them with the words being spoken. If the words being spoken match the amount and nature of gesturing, then the phone might alert the user that she is performing well. Light could be used in such an interface: if the user is gesturing and speaking very animatedly, then a light on the phone might hold steady to indicate appropriate activity. If there seems to be a disconnect, for example, where the user is not saying anything but still gesturing, then the phone could alert the user with a pulsing light that she might appear odd to others. Similar feedback could be offered with paralinguistic features such as volume to notify speakers that they may be speaking overly loudly."

Why do I blog this? Observing how people gesture when talking on the phone is a situation that I have always conducted with curiosity and fascination. Especially because you can see it as an indicator how these gestures are nearly more important for the speaker than the listener. It's therefore intriguing to see how mobile phone design can benefit from this.

Keyboard hack #3

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Another interesting keyboard adaptation that I ran across in one my course. This designer is working on a large graphic and needs to drag and drop lots of visual primitives here and there with Illustrator. She found it more convenient to use this quick and dirty solution by using tiny stickers with a visual representation of the graphical elements on each keys.

Why do I blog this? It's always good when you start clustering examples of user repurposing their own technologies. Along with the French-Cyrillic keyboard hack and fixed keyboard mapping, I now have a cluster of modification that show various possibilities.

Urban ratings: from flowers to @

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Yesterday, I went to a small village in Savoy, France. This was a good opportunity to take a picture of these two forms of signage that are pervasive in this country. On the one hand, you have the common "Ville fleurie" ('flowered cities') which corresponds to a sort of rating French cities get to evaluate the presence of flowers. The more flower you get on the signage, the better it is. This classification is pervasive and it's very rare not to find it. On the other hand, you have the sort of equivalent for the 21st Century: the "Ville Internet" ('Internet City') rating. Instead of flowers, it uses "@" symbols to evaluate the quality of Information Technology infrastructure of the city.

What's funny is that it's very difficult to encounter this label. Especially because they're only placed at city entrance, which means that you only see them while driving.

Why do I blog this? A fascinating encounter, especially in this little town, it's interesting to see the evolution of the indicators used to show different aspects of urban flavor. The internet is now as prevalent as flowers in French cities.

"we took note of every choice they made in cyberspace"

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"Jack: Although everything imaginable was on the web, certain texts had disappeared. Though interactivity and equal access to information were the cornerstone of the revolution's rhetoric, no one seemed to notice, or at least feel, the loss of expression officially deemed malcontent, antisocial, and sinful. I knew. I was the architect of the agency's demographics and target marketing programs. The people were our targets, and we listened to their language, we monitored their dreams, we took note of every choice they made in cyberspace, we studied their buying motives and propensities, then created messages that perfectly reflected their existing emotional states. No one could hide. Triple M could recognize any citizen as soon as they turned on their computer. The web would dynamically reconfigure itself to suite an individual. Something you could hold in your hand, read on your own, think about in private - this was considered elitist, immoral, and bad for business." Source: The Girl from Monday (2005)

GPS drawings to interpret the urban environment

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Drawing with Satellites is a "GPS project" carried out at the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture by Chris Speed, Esther Polak, Ross Cruickshanks, Karlyn Sutherland and second year Architecture students. The project led to this intriguing PDF booklet.

The brief engaged participants in exploring "how they might draw the city of Edinburgh". They were asked to do follow various strategies (work with 2 lines, relocate an existing, meaningful route, draw a spiral) which should all be meaningful walking patterns.

In response to this activity, the participated created various drawings represented in the booklet. Each of the drawings correspond to different ways to interpret the urban environment:

  • Social Practices tended to use the habitual journeys of people, whose Edinburgh is defined by professional, institutional and occupational routines. Following people, or carrying out processes that adhere to centers of employment or practice, these works offer an insight into the city as a container for production.
  • Temporal Projects: the GPS receiver tends to concentrate the user on time: the time that it takes to walk routes, the time between way points, the time between partners.
  • Code Controlled: a series of drawings used Code to inform their development. Following rule bases that were developed, written down and then performed across the city, drawings that used Code tended to reveal the city’s structural properties, and less the social.
  • Ludic: the drawings that embody a Ludic quality that negotiated the landscape through amusement and fun."

Why do I blog this? Even after few years following GPS drawing and the locative media meme, I'm still fascinated about its relevance to analyze urban behaviors. What's interesting IMHO is also to put the drawings next to each other and compare them as represented in the picture above.

Design form guide

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The "Formfächer" (Formguide) is an instrument I stumble across when visiting the design studio emphase.ch two weeks ago:

"The "formguide" explores the potential of language for the description of objects and forms. Using examples, a professional terminology is developed which aids communication about design in practice and education. The versatile vocabulary can be used to describe design solutions more precisely. Hundred products were selected for this purpose and are presented with photography and a brief description of their origin, making the form guide a helpful and informative tool for everyday use."

This publication for designers is the result of a collaborative research project between the Industrial Design Department of the Zurich University of the Arts, the Design collection of the Museum of Design Zurich and the Idea Institute of the Burg Giebichenstein, University of Art and Design Halle, Germany.

Why do I blog this? I quickly became intrigued by this tool because of our current project with Laurent Bolli concerning the classification of video game controllers. What's interesting with this form guide is simply the terminology proposed in there and the way it can be used to sort different artifacts.

A glimpse at the robolift program

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A quick update about the robolift conference program, I've been building over the previous months. The event is in two weeks and I'm looking forward to see the presentations and debates! We finalized the line-up last week and here's the latest version:

  • The Shape of robots to come: What should robots look like? Is it important that robots look like humans or animals? Are there any other possibilities? What alternatives are offered by designers? With Fumiya Iida (Bio-Inspired Robotics Laboratory, ETH Zürich), James Auger, (Auger-Loizeau) and Dominique Sciamma (Strate College)
  • The social implications of robotics: What does it mean for society to have personal and socially intelligent robots? What are the consequences for people? What are the ethical challenges posed by robots that we can anticipate in the near future? With Cynthia Breazeal (MIT Medialab Personal Robots group), Wendell Wallach (Yale University: Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics) and Patrizia Marti (Faculty of Humanities, University of Siena).
  • Expanding robotics technologies: robot hacking, augmented humans and the military uses of robots. As usual with technologies, robots can be repurposed for other kinds of objectives: programmers « hack » them to test new opportunities, the military deploys them on the battlefield, and robotic technologies are adapted to « augment » the human body. What does this mean? What could be the consequences of such repurposing? With Noel Sharkey (Professor of AI and Robotics, University of Sheffield), Daniela Cerqui (Cultural anthropologist, University of Lausanne) and Daniel Schatzmayr (Robot hacker)
  • Human-robot interactions: Robots seem to live either in the long-distant future or in the realm of research labs. This vision is wrong and these speakers will show us how nowadays people interact with them in Europe and in Japan. The session will also address how robots can be useful in developing or understanding our emotions. With Frédéric Kaplan (OZWE and Craft-EPFL), Fujiko Suda (Design ethnographer, Project KOBO) and Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino (Evangelist, Lirec)
  • Artificial intelligence: acquired versus programmed intelligence? Artificial Intelligence used a recurring objective of engineering. This session will give an overview of the recent progress in this field and the consequences for robotic technologies: How much pre-programming can you put into robotic intelligence? Can robots learn on their own? With Pierre-Yves Oudeyer (INRIA) and Jean-Claude Heudin (Institut International du Multimédia)
  • The Future of robotics: This session will feature two talks about how robots might be in the future. From assistive care products to new forms of interactions, we will see tomorrow's technologies, their usages and applications. With Tandy Trower (Hoaloha Robotics) and Jean-Baptiste Labrune (Lab director at Bell Labs Alcatel-Lucent)
  • Debate: Errare Humanoid est? Should robots look like humanoid? How do/will people interact with them? To conclude the conference, we will get back to the topic of the first session and discuss the importance of humanoid shapes in robotic development: Is it necessary? What are the limits and what opportunities? What could be the alternatives? With Bruno Maisonnier (Founder of Aldebaran Robotics) and Francesco Mondada (Researcher in artificial intelligence and robotics, EPFL).

Thanks to all the speakers who accepted to participate!

Event recap: Lift seminar @ Imaginove about gamification

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Last week saw the first of my lift@home series for this year, in partnership with Imaginove, a French cluster made of video-game companies, animated movie studios and web/mobile design firms.

As an echo to the debate at the Game Designer's conference in San Francisco, we chose to talk about gamification, which is defined in the Wikipedia as:

"Gamification is the use of game play mechanics for non-game applications (also known as "funware"), particularly consumer-oriented web and mobile sites, in order to encourage people to adopt the applications. It also strives to encourage users to engage in desired behaviors in connection with the applications. Gamification works by making technology more engaging, and by encouraging desired behaviors, taking advantage of humans' psychological predisposition to engage in gaming. The technique can encourage people to perform chores that they ordinarily consider boring, such as completing surveys, shopping, or reading web sites."

Given the heated debates lately about this topic, the point was to go beyond this buzzword and discuss the implications of using game mechanics for non-game applications.

In my introduction, I drew a parallel between the Serious Games meme and the Gamification meme... to show that there's a long time interest in translating "something" from games to other domains. My point was that this "something" varies over time: game mechanics, game play, game-like visuals. Interestingly, this transfer can be caricatural. At worse, gamification means "add external rewards such as points or badges to your service" and Serious Games sometimes corresponds to "add 3D graphics to your training program and you'll learning how to use this CRM". This is a bit sarcastic but it's unfortunately the case. Concerning gamification, my introduction focused on some of the limits of this approach:

  • Being engaged in a video-game is not just a matter of earning points and rewards, there are different motivational aspects that ranges from learning the interface, discovering the challenges to be completed, the completion of these tasks, the fun of being with others.
  • One should distinguish what's called internal motivation (playing the game itself) and external motivations (being rewarded for the task completed). It's as if proponents of gamification only focused on the second one.
  • Above all, playing a game is fun because of its design, not just because you can get points (what Steffen Walz called "pointification" in his talk at Lift11) and go from one level to another.
  • A gameplay (or a game design pattern) is much more than "earning points" or "collecting artifacts". A game is fun to play because there's a good team of game designers who created it, not just because of basic cooking recipes.

The two other speakers built upon this to demonstrate the limits and opportunities of employing game mechanics. The first one dealt with the importance of this approach for Social Web platforms and the second one showed the potential of game design for urban informatics.

Josselin Perrus

A consultant in User Experience design Josselin started off by showing the drawbacks of external rewards (points, badges). The underlying idea with "gamification" is that designers identify a certain behavior, find a metric that would represent this behavior... and reward the performance of this behavior. In return, this results in participant trying to maximize this metric. Which is very close to performance or sales management with KPI.

Josselin's argument is that this situation is fine in the short term but it doesn't work in the long run because it's not user-centric. For example, the accumulation of badges on Foursquare becomes difficult to understand over time. If you're browsing friends' profile, you see their badges but it's sometimes difficult to get what they mean... because they're only designed as a reward system. A more interesting approach in Social Web design would be to generate rewards as "social indicators": hierarchical cues or categories that are actually relevant for users and which help them to get a perspective on a certain person. Meaningful badges would make users' profile more legible to others.

If indicators became pertinent for others, they would count as intrinsic motivators:

  • As a way to access to a representation about oneself: mirroring your activities, giving you the opportunity to learn about your behavior.
  • Conveying information to others, showing them implicit cues about your behavior.

Philippe Gargov

Philippe followed up on this by questioning how the video-game culture (and video game mechanics per se) can be a facilitator for urban design. He began his speech by showing what he called a triforce of current urban challenges:

  1. City 2.0: the need to integrate citizens in public debates,
  2. Livable city: the importance of favoring more sustainable practices,
  3. Social innovation: the need to facilitate the participation of citizens in the co-conception of public services.

For each of these challenges, Philippe exemplified how certain services anchored their design in game-related elements: 3D platforms employed to engage citizens in discovering how their neighborhood may evolve, the role (and the limits) of visual codes coming from video-games to be more appealing to users, etc. He then focused on two striking examples:

  • Chromorama by Mudlark: a game that shows participants their movements and location as they swipe use their transportation card in the London Tube. The point of such platform is to "connect communities of people who cross paths and routes on a regular basis, and encourages people to make new journeys and use public transport in a different way by exploring new areas and potentially using different modes of public transport".
  • Waze: a social mobile application providing free navigational information based on the live conditions of the road (reported by participants who receive rewards for their input).

Philippe concluded by encouraging game designers in the room to participate to this shift. Their expertise and the solution they put together in their games can resonate with urban services... in a way that is not necessarily as limited as what gamification advocates.

Forgers versus Honers

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An excerpt from Diamond Age Neal Stephenson (1995)

"Hackworth was a forger, Dr. X was a honer. The distinction was at least as old as the digital computer. Forgers created a new technology and then forged on to the next project, having explored only the outlines of its potential. Honers got less respect because they appeared to sit still technologically, playing around with systems that were no longer start, hacking them for all they were worth, getting them to do things the forgers had never envisioned."

Why do I blog this? an interesting metaphor to be re-used in an upcoming talk.

"Field research for design" course 2011

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Students are back from vacation and my course about design ethnography at HEAD-Geneva just started. This year the number of students has doubled compared to last year, the diversity is quite good in terms of nationality (Swiss, French, Polish, Russian, Chinese, Brazilian, Dutch) and specialities: I have students with backgrounds in Media/interaction design, others in industrial design, graphic design and architecture. The course aims at giving students a crash course in design ethnography methodologies. It will mostly focus on observation and interviewing techniques, with an emphasis on how to turn field results into design deliverables (topics, personas, activity sequences), insights (user requirements, opportunity maps) and potential solutions (scenarios). The course is divided into lectures and a project conducted by groups of students.

This year the design brief for students project is quite simple:

"Explore how people *********** and design concepts of relevant product/services based on your findings. The solution should somehow be based on disruptive practices, found problems or curious behavior.

*********** =

  • People’s relationship to electricity (in order to design a solution to make people more aware of their energy consumption and drive a change of behavior)
  • How people cook/relationship with recipes (in order to design a solution to help/improve/modify how people prepare meals)
  • How people do physical exercise in an urban context (in order to design a solution to do physical exercise, indoor/outdoor)"

Personal object tagging practices

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Two remarkable forms of "object tagging" encountered recently at ENSCI two weeks ago: 1. Tagging for temporary storage

ENSCI is a design school in Paris. The kind of place where students need stuff for their practices, which means that they have storage facilities (small boxes made of steel). Besides, students are encouraged to take one semester abroad, off the school OR to make an internship in a design studio. This situation often leads to what you can see on the picture below: there's plenty of packages and student's boxes distributed in the different rooms of the school building. Some leave bike frames, others leave their old tent. And some students have the delicate practice of tagging their belongings with their names/email/telephone/reason for being elsewhere/time of return.

2. Tagging to give names for one's artifacts

Another curious example consists in this series of artifacts owned by one of the students I taught to last week. Each object (apart from the glasses) have a dedicated name indicated by the colored adhesive tags. The heart-shaped mirror is called "Pocahontas", the Black-Berry cell phone is called "Johnnie" (it's a "she") and the deck of cards is called "Suce-Vieille" (which is hard to translate literally in English, it means something like "Blowing Old"). The owner of these objects told me that it was important to give a name to objects which are close to her. Definitely uncommon with tiny objects like this but much likely in the case of cars, vaccum cleaners or roomba bots recently.

Why do I blog this? Preparing a speech about the people's practices in the house of the future, I am convinced that these two observations have something to say about our interactions with objects. Whenever you chat with people with similar practices, you end up discussing very important matter concerning how they project meaning in their personal artifacts. Working on a conference project about robots definitely makes me think about such elements.

Facebook and spatial implications in Menlo Park

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I'm generally not that interested in social networking sites per se... but this article in the WSJ sent on the Dr. Fish list caught my attention. It basically addresses the implication of Facebook upcoming move from Palo Alto (University avenue) to Menlo park on a new campus, which it is taking over from Sun Microsystems.

What's interesting in this article is simply the whole set of questions that is raised by this move. Some excerpts I found intriguing:

"The proposals will tackle how to refine the perimeter of the fortress-like campus, how to handle traffic as Facebook boosts staffing as well as how to build up housing and services such as stores in an area that currently doesn't even have a major grocery market. (...) At a city hall news conference Feb. 8 to announce Facebook's arrival, Mayor Richard Cline acknowledged there were debates to come. "We're going to talk about what we can do, what we can't do, we're going to talk about traffic, we're going to talk about transit, we're going to talk about tax money and we're going to talk about public benefit," he said. "We're going to have a fight and it's going to be loud." (...) Facebook doesn't require city approval to move in this summer, since it is taking over an existing (albeit largely empty) campus (...) Part of Facebook's interest in the community stems from its desire to replicate the college neighborhood feel it had in Palo Alto as a start-up. That won't be easy on the former Sun campus, which was once dubbed Sun Quentin by employees—a reference to the San Quentin prison—because it is separated by a major highway from the rest of the city. (...) "The real issue is density. If the intent is to increase density substantially, the problem is that the infrastructure for it just doesn't exist.""

Why do I blog this? This is just fascinating, especially when thinking of Facebook as a dual entity: a huge on-line community on one side and a company on the other side. I am wondering on how the culture developed by such a company influence the spatial/environmental/social decisions it will take in a place like this.

Bloom.io: "Pop-cultural instruments for data expression and exploration"

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Bloom.io seems to be an interesting platform and their tag-line is just fantastic.

"Our mission to bring you a new type of visual discovery experience is already underway. We’re building a series of bite-sized applications that bring the richness of game interactions and the design values of motion graphics to the depth and breadth of social network activity, locative tools, and streaming media services.  These new ‘visual instruments’ will help you explore your digital life more fluidly and see patterns and rhythms in the online services you care about. And they’re coming to a tablet, media console, or modern web browser near you!"

via blog.bloom.io

Why do I blog this? it seems to be an interesting platform for what Fabien calls "sketching with data. The motivation from Bloom's team is quite relevant too:

""The ways in which people interact with computation are changing swiftly as we move into more casual relationships with our digital services on tablets, big screens, and across social networks. We believe we have some compelling answers about how digital experiences will evolve into these new contexts. Please, follow along with us and explore these playful, dynamic instruments of discovery together."

Urban tragedy: a street sign that lost its performativity

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This street sign, which indicates that it's not allowed to park your car along this sidewalk recently went through a very intriguing process: it used to be several inches on the right, next to the curb (a careful observer would see a tiny black dot on the sidewalk). Being there, it was conveniently placed to prevent cars to be parked on the sidewalk. Few weeks ago, the signage has been moved next to the wall... It plays a limited role in preventing cars to park there.

The signage used to have both a meaning AND an affordance (preventing cars to park there)... it now has only a meaning... that people generally do not follow because they park their cars there in the evening.

To put it differently, these street signage lost its performativity; the capacity of an artifact (or language) to intervene in the course of human events.