Recent columns debunking videogame "trends"

Two interesting columns on Gamasutra caught my attention recently. Both of them have been written by people I follow for a long time and they both debunk myths about video games. On the one hand, Ian Bogost writes about how hard it is to make games and the inherent problem of "serious games" or "gamification" approaches. His point is that making game is super hard and that making good games to serve external purposes is even harder. Some excerpts I found important:

"key game mechanics are the operational parts of games that produce an experience of interest, enlightenment, terror, fascination, hope, or any number of other sensations. Points and levels and the like are mere gestures that provide structure and measure progress within such a system. (...) The sanctity of games' unique means of expression is just not of much concern to the gamifiers. Instead they value facility -- the easiest way possible to capture some of the fairy dust of games and spread it upon products and services. Games or points isn't the point -- for gamifiers, there's no difference. It's the -ification that's most important (...) In the modern marketing business, the best solutions are generic ones, ideas that can be repeated without much thought from brand to brand, billed by consultants and agencies at a clear markup. Gamification offers this exactly. No thinking is required, just simple, absentminded iteration and the promise of empty metrics to prove its value."

On the other hand, Greg Costikyan gives his perspective on the "social" of social games. He basically wonder about the asocial or even antisocial characters of these games:

" Developers of social games have clearly given great thought to using the social graph to foster player acquisition, retention, and monetization; but as far as I can see, no thought whatsoever has given to the use of player connections to foster interesting gameplay. It's all about the money, and not at all about the socialization.

The peculiarity of this is that social networks are actually far better suited than most online environments to fostering social gameplay. Messaging and chat are built into the system, and need not be separately implemented by developers; but more importantly, the social graph allows players to interact with people who are their actual friends."

Interestingly, Costikyan then describes what could be a "social gameplay": the value of having teams, diplomacy, negotiated trade, resource competition, hierarchy or performative play (not as "winning point to get the best performance", rather "speaking and acting in character").

Why do I blog this? These two columns are important and interesting read as they reduce the inflated reputation of two current "trend" candidates. They also offer relevant counter-versions about what is relevant in game design.

From Hal to Kinect: live visuals, music and body tracking technologies - Mapping Festival Geneva

A bunch of curious visuals from the nice media art exhibit at the Mapping Festival in Geneva. A festival dedicated to VJing practices, Mapping combines various events ranging from VJ sets to workshops, conferences and art installation.

In this context, I'll be moderating a conference session called "From Hal to Kinect: live visuals, music and body tracking technologies" on Wednesday 25, at 4:30pm (BAC):

"Recent advances in body-tracking technologies have lead to the emergence of mass-market products that can be repurposed for live visuals and music. The Nintendo Wii, Sony Move and Microsoft Kinect are the most recent ones but other platforms has been used for VJing and live performances. This session will give an overview of the opportunities they enable.

Speakers: Douglas Edric Stanley, Abstract Machine/ HEAD-Genève (FR/US), Jean-Baptiste Labrune, Bell-Labs (FR), James Cui, VJ Fader (US)"

Why do I blog this? Working on the user experience of gestural interfaces for quite sometime, I am curious to see a different pespective here. More specifically, I'm intrigued by how a community such as VJs repurposed gaming platforms for their own goals. Certainly a good domain to see détournement and bricolage for a peculiar angle.

About the influence of failed products on technological change

Design failures and recurring non-products is of course a favorite topic of mine. Hence, a paper entitled "The Curious Case of the Kitchen Computer: Products and Non-Products in Design History" by Paul Atkinson appears clearly promising for a Friday afternoon train ride between two European countries.

I wasn't disappointed. This article takes the Honeywell Kitchen Computer, a futuristic computer product that never sold, as a starting point to ask questions concerning design history, the significant agency that non-products can have and the role of a period zeitgeist in design.

The Honeywell H316 was a so-called "pedestal computer", a sort of miniature computer compared to the mainframes, released in the 1960s. They were meant to be used for scientific and engineering calculations, processing business information, file handling and access to pre-punched computer cards. The design of the various models is quite radical with this intriguing pedestal form. As pointed out in Atkinson's paper, "the final result was a futuristically styled, red, white and black pedestal unit that looked as if it could have been taken straight from the set of Star Trek or 2001: A Space Odyssey".

(Image of the Kitchen Computer from Life magazine, 12 December 1969. © Yale Joel/Time & Life Pictures/ Getty Images)

What I found interesting in this article is the description of how a non-product such as his Kitchen Computer can influence technological change:

"As a ‘real’ product, the adoption of a science fiction-inspired form provided the means for Honeywell to promote itself as a progressive company, to differentiate itself from its more mainstream traditional competitors such as IBM, and to align itself with younger, more innovative companies such as Data General Corporation. The fact that actual orders were received for the product despite its being purely a marketing ploy is a reflection of its success and the acceptance of such iconography amongst at least some of its customers. As a non-product, the Kitchen Computer had even more agency. It created a huge amount of publicity for Neiman Marcus and, because of its price, reinforced the position of the company as an exclusive retailer to the upper classes. It also reinforced popular cultural representations of the domestic kitchen as the focus of family interactions with technology in the home, in a variety of fora. In addition, it inspired those working at the forefront of computer developments to realize that, despite the limitations of technology at the time, there was real value in seriously considering a domestic market for computer products. Finally, despite the fact that both the product and the non-product were consumed largely as a piece of visual culture, as a part of the cultural milieu or zeitgeist, they provided very pragmatic, positive results for both Honeywell and Neiman Marcus, as well as having a direct influence on the future direction of the computer industry itself."

Why do I blog this? Yet another great reference for my research about technological, product failures and their significance. Which, by the way, recently led to a French book about this very topic.

Map practice: temporary with chalk

A chalk map found on a wall in Paris last Monday. An interesting example of a temporary object employed for specific purposes.

Different kinds of feedback of what a robot is perceiving

One of the talk at the Robolift11 conference that I found highly inspiring was the one by Pierre-Yves Oudeyer. In his presentation, he addressed different projects he conducted and several topics he and his research team focuses on. Among the material he showed, he described an interesting experiment they conducted about how robot users are provided with different kind of feedback of what the robot is perceiving. Results from this study can be found in a paper called "A Robotic Game to Evaluate Interfaces used to Show and Teach Visual Objects to a Robot in Real World Condition. Their investigation is about the impact of showing what a robot is perceiving on teaching visual objects (to the robots) and the usability of human-robot interactions. Their research showed that providing non-expert users with a feedback of what the robot is perceiving is needed if one is interested in robust interaction:

"as naive participants seem to have strong wrong assumptions about humanoids visual apparatus, we argue that the design of the interface should not only help users to better under- stand what the robot perceive but should also drive them to pay attention to the learning examples they are collecting. (...) the interface naturally force them to monitor the quality of the examples they collected."

Why do I blog this? reading Matt Jones' blogpost about sensors the other day made me think about this talk at robolift. The notion of Robot readable world mentioned in the article is curious and it's interesting to think about how this perception can be reflected to human users.

Lift France 11 program

Lift France 11 (in Marseilles) is 7 weeks ahead and the program is now complete. The general theme revolves around radical innovation and disruptions: when (high- or low-)tech contributes to redefining a market's terms of reference, a whole industry, a share of social life, etc. The program basically consists in 5 main sessions with the following speakers :

1. URBAN - Who needs to become "smart" in tomorrow's cities? with Saskia Sassen, Robin Chase (GoLoco / Meadow Network), Adam Greenfield (Urbanscale) and Alain Renk (UFO / Cities Without Limits)
2. CARE - Disruptive innovation in healthcare and well-being with Paul Wicks (PatientsLikeMe), Tobie Kerridge (Material Belief), Jonathan Kuniholm (Open Prosthetics Project)
3. WORK/LEARN: Transforming the way we work, innovate and learn, with John Robb (Global Guerillas), Ville Keränen (Monkey Business) and Geoff Mulgan (The Young Foundation / Nesta)
4. SLOW - Can we use technology to reclaim control over how we and our organizations manage time? with Alex Soojung-Kim Pang (Microsoft Research / Contemplative Computing), Anna Meroni (Politecnico Milano / Slow Food movement) and Kris de Decker (Low-Tech Magazine)
5. OPEN - What happens when barriers to innovation become drastically lower? with Juliana Rotich (Ushaidi), Georgina Voss (CENTRIM, University of Brighton) and Gabriel Borges (AgênciaClick Isobar)

In addition, there will be a Masterclass session that will aim at giving learning material about emerging technologies with Remi Sussan, the futures of innovation and innovation management, with Philine Warnke, and the importance of data with Nicolas Kayser-Bril.

Moreover, there's also the open program. Feel free to submit your workshop :)

Potential user experience of pico-projectors

There's a currently a lot of interest directed towards screens and ubiquitous displays in interaction design. Interestingly, I've always been ambivalent about this topic and scarcely addressed it in my own research/consulting gigs. However, given that more and more client projects (as well as students/media requests) are related to multi-screen design, I started to collect material about it. The approach, as usual at the lab, is to investigate what one could refer to as the "Long tail of insights", that is to say, research results, informed opinions, expert views or little field observations that go beyond the general discourse about the topic at hand. Concerning multi-screen design, one of the sub-theme that I rarely see addressed consist in the body of work done on pico-projectors. The potential use of built-in projectors in mobile phone seems to be a curious prospect and researchers, designers and engineers of course wonder about what can be done once the camera in phones are not just an input and allow users to create so-called "mobile projections". As a matter of fact, the mobile character of this capability looks intriguing and the next question to be answered here concerns the "real potential uses of projections in the wild".

The uneventful train trip to Paris this morning provided a good opportunity to read a paper about it. Called "Pico-ing into the Future of Mobile Projection and Contexts" and authored by Max L. Wilson and his colleagues from Future Interaction Technology Lab at Swansea University in the UK, it reports the results from a study about how people will want to use such technology, how they will feel when using it, and what social effects we can expect to see.

On the methodology side, the paper adopt an interesting approach:

"Our first-phase study used the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) to elicit the reactions of participants to a range of media regardless of whether they would consider projecting them during undirected usage. In the second phase, we performed a diary study of potential mobile projection scenarios. Although consumer-level mobile projector phones were not available for use or study at the time, we believe that using prototype systems allowed participants to concentrate on the potential use of such devices, rather than the qualities of a finished product. The reactions in the first-phase study also helped to finalise the design of the materials in the second study, which in turn provided deeper insight into the reasoning behind the possible projections recorded in the second"

Some excerpts that caught my attention:

"the study noted a surprisingly negative response to potentially personal content, such as text messages, with some reporting that they felt anxious being asked to project such content on the wall. Further, we saw that public observers showed very little interest in the projections being made by study participants. We did not see any significantly negative responses to projecting in social situations, although people were significantly less anxious about projecting and finding suitable surfaces when not at work. We were also able to identify some usability constraints, where participants expected to be able to control a reasonable amount of focus and projection size within one arm length. For the sake of augmentation, we also recommend that projection technology face the same way as the device’s inbuilt camera.

Our second study revealed more direct insight into the types of content people actually wished they were able to project. Compared to a general study of mobile information needs, we speculate that participants might consider projecting information to solve around two-thirds of the noted scenarios. While a large proportion was time, location and object sensitive, participants also recorded many cases of projecting static text that had no immediate or short-term benefit."

The paper gives some details about surfaces sought for projection, the type of content people may want to project or temporality.

Why do I blog this? being agnostic about this topic, this kind of reading is meant to shape my perspective.

From pervasive to invasive computing

Why do I blog this? it's impressive how interfaces (such as ear bud headphones) can become personalized and invasive through various solutions.

Various clock-like devices to express time in public space

Why do I blog this? fascinating towards the diversity of clock-related devices to indicate time in public space. The first one is definitely my favorite as it's sort of absurd.

It's been a while that i collect such examples, I don't know what to do with them. Perhaps something will emerge out of this, a typology or sth else and I'd have to think about a design research workshop with students.

Technological convergence in your toilet

Anyone interested in robots and networked objects in multi-functions artifacts may be intrigued by this gorgeous AM/FM restroom radio with telephone that I ran across at the flea market the other day.

This device is an intriguing example of technological convergence, the tendency of certain technologies to be combined in a single device (as opposed to their existence as multiple products).

Of course, it's an example of awkward convergence as you can imagine. However, I definitely find it highly curious. So much so that the use case provided on the package if quite important to observe:

... which is reminiscent of another brilliant (and more recent) converging device found by Fabien some time ago:

Why do I blog this ? basic observation about how convergence can lead to strange solution, especially due to contextual reasons. This led me back to what Henry Jenkins wrote some time ago:

"Rather than a single machine that suits every need, technology is converging into many Black Boxes that address the needs of the consumer depending on the constraints of their situation"

Tensions between #gamification elements and location-sharing in #Foursquare

At the recent workshop on Gamification and game design elements in non-gaming contexts at CHI 2011 in Vancouver, there was an interesting paper about Foursquare entitled Gamification and location-sharing: some emerging social conflicts. The paper reports various observations on conflict that appeared between gamification elements (supposed to drive user engagement) and other usage motivations for location-sharing. The results are based on users interviews, surveys and ongoing analysis of real-time ‘check-in data’ involving 20 active foursquare users from Sweden, The Netherlands and the US.

Some examples of the conflicts described in the paper:

• "Playing for points vs. ‘nonsense’ venues: A way to gain additional points and mayorships is creating new venues to check-into. However, venues that just have been created for ‘the game’, can also be a non-informational annoyance
• Mayors & badges vs. privacy & identity management: Mayorships are publically visible on users’ profile, and are also shown to any user checking- in to that venue. This means that mayorships can threaten privacy (...) Some participants worried about getting mayorships or badges that would threaten their identity. Would one want to become the mayor of the cheapest eatery in town?
• Mayorships vs. ownership: A mayorship appeared to communicate not only identity, but also public ‘ownership’ over a place, which was not always desired.
• Anti-cheating aka ‘you’re using it wrong’: services employing gamification need to consider which messages their ‘game-rules’ send to users who might have very well appropriated the service in other ways.
• Inappropriate can be more fun: Multiple participants described 'getting caught' and ‘doing it under the table’. Exactly this social unacceptable aspect of using the service also invoked playful behaviors"

It's interesting to see how their results show that game design elements such as mayorships, points or badges can both engage participants and restrict the use of the service.

Why do I blog this? I'm interested in this sort of frictions as they reveal relevant tensions in users' behavior. Mostly because we've been conducting a field study to understand the usage of Foursquare here in Switzerland. I'm looking forward to see the other results from this research team.

A visual taxonomy of objects by emphase.ch

An interesting project by emphase.ch encountered at the Panorama exhibit in Geneva last Saturday: ZWISCHENSAISON Knowledge Visualization is a visual taxonomy of an hotel archives (a set of artifacts). The list of artifacts is presented on the first page:

And then, each page keeps the same arrangement with pictograms to describe object traits:

Why do I blog this? Working on the game controller book project, I'm interested in different ways to depict object categories. It's interesting that design research seem to offer various exploration about how to create visual catalogues with compelling solutions like the one above.

The design of cell-phone trees

The ubiquitous presence of cell phone towers in urban and rural landscapes have led to protestation against their visual presence (the ugly mast/transmitter aesthetics) and their electromagnetic waves (which are invisible). A side-effect of people's "need" for uninterrupted connectivity, the design and building of phone towers is now influenced by various strategies. One of them consist in the use of camouflage techniques... and obviously the "natural" metaphor plays an important role here, as attested by these examples encountered in Lipari, Sicily last week.

Fake trees such as these palm transmitter species are great candidate but there are also other concealment possibilities such as fake chimneys, cross ("already a transmission tower of sorts", clock tower, water towers, etc.

As pointed out by Rick Miller and Ted Kane in their chapter on mobile phones in The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles edited by Kazys Varnelis:

"the result is the camouflaged cell phone tower, the by-product of the only position available to communities who oppose cell phone towers, that is to demand their invisibility. Hiding its presence from public view, the ubiquitous cell phone tower camouflaged as a palm tree becomes an appropriate icon for the private infrastructural network of our day"

It would be intriguing to discover the whole design and construction process, especially how the the details have been taken care of. See for example the tower base and the antennas below... the design of the trunk, the branches and the leaves is of great quality, leading to some surreal piece of nature. Even more important here is the fact that the tree itself is (or must be) protected because it's an infrastructural installation that have inherent dangers for the genpop (electricity, etc.). The tree itself is just part of this ecosystem of components (electricity adapater, barriers, light system for night inspections, etc).

Why do I blog this? I see this sort of design as a curious sign of how certain norms lead to fascinating (absurd and perhaps depressing) solutions like transmitters concealed in fake trees:

• Social and aesthetic norms about what should be visible or not and the type of tree/leaves that can be employed in an italian island.
• Technological norms about how certain technologies should be protected, concealed or be accessible 24/7 (hence the presence of light).

"An internet of things that do not exist"

In a recent article about the Internet of Things for ACM interaction, Chris Speed discusses the notion of "a continuum of artifacts that are more or less valuable in their material or immaterial form". (Networked objects being designed at the HEAD-Geneva design school)

On this continuum, Speed distinguishes two poles: "things that are actually in the world, and things that are not actually in the world"... which raise interesting new question from both a design and cultural standpoint. To him, the materiality of both is influenced by their potential "information shadow", what Speed describes as "an immaterial other".

This decoupling between material things and their immaterial counterpart may lead to interesting "design futures" described in the articles... and that explain the title of the paper ("An internet of things that do not exist"). Some excerpts that caught my attention:

"we may need to design blank objects that have no other function than to become the host for memories that have lost their connection with the original physical artifact. Other times, discarded and culturally lost objects may be used because they retain some of the physical attributes that trigger associations with immaterial things (e.g., memories) that have lost their original material partner. (...) As well as becoming conduits that allow us to recall information from the past, things will help us to recover memories that have lost their physical place in the world (...) In the Internet of Things, objects may end up on your mantelpiece with associated memories of completely different artifacts. The value of these vessels and our attachment to them will likely depend on the social data stored in them, rather than on their physical form."

(Potential candidates as blank objects meant to receive memories?)

Why do I blog this? simply because I find interesting (culturally and design-wise) this distinction and the consequences that the author describes. The idea of having blank objects (and designing them) or to associate immaterial counterparts to objects which are totally different may lead to curious avenues. This is of course a shift that will be important to explore in several context and I wonder about the implications for the kind of domains we are interested in at Liftlab.

Series of articles about failures

There's suddenly a surge of interest in failures (technological, entrepreneurial, social) in the press. Curiously, I encounter various of these last week when traveling.

First, it was a piece on the Wired UK 05.11 issue which gives an account of various entrepreneurial stories and approaches. The article shows the importance of failures and the cultural lessons one could draw out of them ("Fail fast"...).

More specific and full of interesting details and analysis is the April issue of the Harvard Business Review. Although this is a journal I don't read very often, the material was kind of inspiring. The articles addressed several aspects such as the reasons to "Crash a Product Launch", the reluctance from entrepreneurs to learn from failures, the failures-that-look-like-successes, effective strategies to learn from failures, ethical issues, etc.

What struck me when comparing both the Wired issue and the HBR articles was that the entrepreneurs/innovators' testimonials were rarely interesting and pertinent... compared to external analysis (meta or not). As if there was some sort of blindness that prevented people from analyzing the problems at stake.

The Economist's Schumpeter gives a quick overview of this HBR issue with the following excerpts:

"simply “embracing” failure would be as silly as ignoring it. Companies need to learn how to manage it. Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School argues that the first thing they must do is distinguish between productive and unproductive failures. There is nothing to be gained from tolerating defects on the production line or mistakes in the operating theatre. (...) Companies must also recognise the virtues of failing small and failing fast. (...) Placing small bets is one of several ways that companies can limit the downside of failure. Mr Sims emphasises the importance of testing ideas on consumers using rough-and-ready prototypes: they will be more willing to give honest opinions on something that is clearly an early-stage mock-up than on something that looks like the finished product (...) But there is no point in failing fast if you fail to learn from your mistakes. Companies are trying hard to get better at this. India’s Tata group awards an annual prize for the best failed idea. Intuit, in software, and Eli Lilly, in pharmaceuticals, have both taken to holding “failure parties”. P&G encourages employees to talk about their failures as well as their successes during performance reviews."

Why do I blog this? I just completed a book (in French) about recurring technological failures (title and cover are provisional, to be released at the beginning of June)... and it's interesting to see that there's a kind of momentum on these issues.

"Augmentable, Believable, Improvable and Invisible": exploring identity management services

Augmentable, Believable, Improvable and Invisible is a project by Ina Xi (Art Center College of Design) that aims at reinventing social media and identity management services. What attracted my attention is that the project is based on the research of social media users' misleading behaviors online. It basically "speculates how we can design the social network if it were to afford human conditions such as lying and hiding, even when it's offline".

Ina's research was informed by an on-going discourse about social media users' virtual identity and its security resulted from the increasingly publicized personal data, and is greatly inspired by anecdotes and stories of using technologies to selectively hide from and lie to members in one's virtual network for varied social purposes, which also has an impact on one's real-world relationships", which had led to the summary of four main typographies of dishonest behaviors and their outcomes: "The 'Augmentable Me' is driven by the motivation of a better self-image in front of the chosen audience, and based on what one wants to gain out of being the way they choose.

The 'Believable Me' is a virtual identity associated with credible, authentic informations of a real person, regardless of whether what has been said or done is exactly what has happened. The 'Believable Me' is motivated by the intention of preserving privacy through actively spreading their private information to the world.

The 'Improvable Me' is the result of a built-up online reputation on top of a bad, or a damaged one.

The 'Invisible Me' is an anonymous identity due to a missing link or a mismatch between the virtual identity and the real person. The value of the Invisible Me is rewarding especially when the identity used to be more public, exposed or discussed."

These personas were then used to translates the observational research into a series of user experiences and scenarios described on her website. See for instance this design fiction which is very compelling:

"Peter always saw Lisa on the metro train home. He wanted to approach her but, instead of coming up and say hi, he tried to find her online. Putting together the observed characteristics of Lisa and pretending to be the guy Robert who said hi to her once on the train, Peter had Lisa accept him as a friend in the virtual network.

Carefully he created a desirable picture of himself through a falsified identity seen by Lisa alone, based on the algorithmic analysis of her online profile, activity history, group discussions and contact list. A discussion between her network friends has shown Peter an opportunity to meet Lisa in real life, making her reach out naturally to him.

With everything planned out and the handy tips of talking ready, Peter went to the bookstore where Lisa works part-timely as a store assistant. Everything happened as expected, except, however, the fact that Lisa was not there to talk to him, and neither does she work at the store.."

Why do I blog this? This project is close to what a student of mine is doing at the design school in Geneva (creating bots that interact on social networking sites). The idea of using this kind of research , material and narrative to explore the complexity of identity management services is interesting. I particularly like the emphasis on various sorts of interfaces in the video.

Kevin Lynch's "Image of the City" with a graphic design treatment

"The Image of the City" by Kevin Lynch is an important contribution in urban design thinking. The perspective expressed by the author, as well as the methodology (description of mental maps drawn by residents in several cities such as Boston, Los Angeles and Jersey City), is insightful. Interesting, Gabriel Pelletier, a graphic designer added a new perspective on this book using the following treatment:

"Excerpts from Kevin Lynch's "Image of the City" were graphically treated according to their respective themes. The blue color was used throughout all the document is used to recall blueprints.

Each section's beginning was created using the graphic symbols located throughout it's pages. The cover was done in the same fashion, taking all graphic elements of the book and adding them to note the notion of unity when talking about the city's elements."

Why do I blog this? First because I like this book and enjoy this kind of graphic design. Second because it's interesting to see how the material presented in the book can be enhanced through the kind of representations proposed by Pelletier. The idea of using blue shapes is intriguing as it is sort of reminiscent of building blueprints.

Easter encounter with a chair

"Take me, sit on me, love me" :)

Using historical research in HCI/Ubicomp

"Historical Analysis: Using the Past to Design the Future" by Wyche, Sengers and Grinter is an article about how the discipline of history similarly can contribute to research about human-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing. The authors takes the example of a specific context, domestic environments, to show that history can go beyond inspiring "new form factors and styles such as retro" by providing "strategies that, like anthropology, unpack the culture of the home and, like art-inspired design, defamiliarize the home".

The process is described as the following:

" First, we analysed historical texts to identify major themes in the development of technologies (often automation) for the activities under investigation, in our case housework. Second, we gained a broader understanding of the existing technological design space through the search of patents. Third, we developed a personal sense of the changing nature of housework through examination of primary sources from popular culture. Finally, as part of broader fieldwork we gathered oral histories from older people, using a designed, material artefact that reflected the popular history of housework to stimulate memories and reflections."

And here's how they saw a contribution:

"It was effective in helping us understand the subtle changes that have resulted with the introduction of new domestic technologies and in opening new space for design. Although the historical texts already revealed themes pertinent to ubicomp design (i.e. labor-saving debate and technology’s gendered character), by drawing on popular texts, patents, and interviews with elders as well, we learned things that could not easily be gleaned from texts alones. (...) With current interest in restoring felt experience as central to design, we believe that historical analysis is an important source for becoming aware of sensual aspects of experiences that have become lost but could be addressed in new forms of technology design. (...) In addition to revealing how felt qualities are altered with the introduction of new technologies, another benefit of our historically grounded approach is its potential to inspire radically novel design concepts. A collection of speculative design proposals resulted from our process [see 30 and 36 for details]. Like ethnography, history forces designers to become more aware of their preconceptions about a topic."

Why do I blog this? Working on the history of game controller, I am currently putting together a list of references about the role of history and historically informed approaches in (interaction) design research. This paper gives some interesting pointers about it.

The slow evolution of AI in video-games

Just read on gameplanet.co.nz:

Rather than trying to program enemy AI to think, behave and play like a human, developers simply imbue them with increased hit points, better statistics, or any number of favourable benefits whilst removing the same attributes from the players themselves. Manipulating these variables commonly forms the structure of a difficulty level.

In the quest to present the player with an action-packed experience, developers often sacrifice realism to keep the story flowing, or keep the participant at the crest of a wave. It's unlikely, after all, that precise emulation of a Special Forces raid in war-torn Afghanistan would lend itself well to the gaming public.

Why do I blog this? Artificial Intelligence is one of these Holy Grails some people are looking for. The term itself is fascinating as it encapsulates some sort of magic. Referring to something as "AI" leads to some expectations on the part of the observers and it's funny to see how people in the video-game industry describes the evolution of such tech.