Hidden webcam: the reluctance to be observed

Observed on one of my student's laptop. He told me that he "did not want to be observed" (nor he wanted his laptop to be controlled from elsewhere). Which is why he he put a (French) stamp ("easy to remove", he told me) on the camera.

Why do I blog this? This is an interesting example of these little signs of how users try to reclaim a form of control on digital technology. Even if the laptop has a LED that indicates whether the webcam is working on not, this user prefers to have a better control on this device.

IEEE Pervasive computing issue on "Ubicomp computing at 20"

The engineering journal IEEE Pervasive Computing has a special edition on the twenty years of the Ubiquitous/pervasive computing trope. It's actually a commemoration of the 20th anniversary of Mark Weiser’s seminal article, “The Computer for the 21st Century” first published in Scientific American in September 1991.

Some relevant articles:

"“Ubicomp Systems at 20: Progress, Opportunities, and Challenges,” by Ramón Cáceres and Adrian Friday, is a fascinating retrospective on 20 years of systems-oriented ubiquitous computing research. They also discuss remaining challenges to taking ubicomp systems to the point where they indeed become ubiquitous. (...) The second article, “Interacting with 21st-Century Computers,” by Albrecht Schmidt, Bastian Pfleging, Florian Alt, Alireza Sahami Shirazi, and Geraldine Fitzpatrick, focuses on the research challenges of designing the interface between humans and ubicomp systems. (...) In “From Context Awareness to Socially Aware Computing,” Paul Lukowicz, Alex “Sandy” Pentland, and Alois Ferscha consider the evolution of this area and present a thought-provoking vision of the future in which reliable recognition of complex contexts and activities is possible (...) “Pervasive Tabs, Pads, and Boards: Are We There Yet?” Maria Ebling and Mary Baker consider how far toward Weiser’s vision we have come with respect to commercial deployments of the devices he described. This review evaluates the commercial success of tabs, pads, and boards and discusses their real-world use. (...) In the article, “20 Years Past Weiser—What Next?” Alois Ferscha discusses the results of a large-scale European initiative to collect a list of challenges in the area of pervasive computing. (...) The European theme continues with an interview with Norbert Streitz who reflects on the early days of ubiquitous computing and the role of the Disappearing Computer initiative in helping to shape the European research landscape in the field."

Why do I blog this? Because this kind of special issue is a good occasion to understand what mattered as important for a community of researchers. Curiously (or maybe not), the perspective is largely focused on devices and technicalities, and less about people, culture and usage

Theoretical bases for Smart Cities

"A theory of smart cities" by Colin Harrison and Ian Abbott Donnelly offers an overview of the different theoretical bases for the "Smart Cities" trope. As the author mentions, "the current ad hoc approaches of Smart Cities to the improvement of cities are reminiscent of pre-scientific medicine. They may do good, but we have little detailed understanding of why".

After a quick introduction in which they describe what is hidden behind this term (use of digital sensors, penetration of networks that allow such sensors and systems to be connected, computing power and new algorithms that allow these flows of information to be analyzed in near “real-time”), they highlight two theoretical approaches:

"One of these is work in scaling laws going back to Zipf, but enormously enriched in recent years by theoreticians such as West and Batty to name but two. (...) This body of work provides evidence that although many behaviours of complex systems are emergent or adaptive, nonetheless there are patterns or consistent behaviour at the level of macro observation. (...) The second body of work considers cities as complex systems. (...) This approach introduces concepts such as interconnection, feedback, adaptation, and self-organization in order to provide understanding of the almost organic growth, operation, decline, and evolution of cities."

Why do I blog this? I'm preparing a speech that I'll deliver at the "Beyond Smart Cities" event in Madrid next week at the BBVA innovation center. My aim is to give a critique of the prediction trope in Smart Cities projects. The aforementioned article offer a relevant starting point for this top happen, even though their perspective is quite partial in terms of academic references. The paper is also interesting to understand the kind of assumptions IBM make when addressing these issues (as attested by the partial list of references).

Baudrillard on the difficulty to grasp people's needs

A good quote by Jean Baudrillard, Selected writings (1988):

"...he is forced to represent the individual as a completely passive victim of the system... we are all aware of how consumers resist such a precise injunction, and of how they play with needs, on a keyboard of objects. We know that advertising is not omnipotent and at times produces opposite reactions; and we know that in relation to a single need, objects can be substituted for one another... if we acknowledge that a need is not a need for a particular object as much as it is a need for difference (the desire for social meanings), only them will we understand that satisfaction can never be fulfilled, and consequently that there can never be a definition of needs."

Why do I blog this? Because it encapsulates a lot of the problems I see in the debate around user needs: the difficult to define what it is, the relationship betweens needs and product communication, etc. Surely useful for discussion with students next weeks in my user-oriented design class.

New URL for pasta and vinegar!

As my main affiliation is now the Near Future Laboratory, Pasta and Vinegar moved to this new cosy URL. More news later on.

Subjective subway map

"Mon plan du métro de Paris" by Pierre Joseph is an interesting representation of the author's memory of Paris:

Why do I blog this? Maps based on people's recollection of souvenirs and past experiences are always insightful. They tell stories about the person's subjectivity, what count for certain individuals and what is left out of the picture (metro lines/stations...). The use of the same graphical code as the real subway makes it even more intriguing than hand-drawn map as it give an awkward perspective on the city itself (see the real map below). In addition, the different between the two maps highlight the person's perspective in a very coherent way.

When on the field, I enjoy asking informants to draw maps of their mobility patterns. It'd be curious to expand this method to such kind of representation too.

A study about mobile phone location data and recommendation systems:

People who played with location-based recommendation systems may have been confronted to a common issue: when you start using the application, you do not necessarily have a "location history" (no list of past "check-in" if we translate this in the Foursquare idiom), hence it's difficult to get relevant recommendations. This phenomenon has been called "the mobile cold-start problem" in this paper. This academic article written by Quercia et al. for the IEEE ICDM 2010 conference addresses this problem in the context of mobile recommendation systems, apps that can identify patterns in people’s movements in order to recommend events and services. The researchers investigated how social events can be recommended to a cold-start user based only on his home location. They conducted a quantitative study to investigate the relationship between preferences for social events and geography. They tested a different set of algorithms for recommending social events and evaluated their effectiveness.

Some excerpts of the results that caught my attention:

"In a situation of cold start (user preferences are unknown), recommending geographically close events produces the least effective recommendations, while the most effective recommendations are produced by recommending social events popular among residents of a specific area. (...) Interestingly, there are geographic areas that are more predictable than others, and this does not depend on the number of residents we consider in each area. We are trying to obtain sociodemographic data for Greater Boston to test whether sociodemographic factors such as income and inequality would explain those differences. If that would be the case, to produce effective recommendations, one would then need to complement real-time mobile data with historical sociodemographic data.""

And this bit about the data themselves is relevant too:

"To infer attendance at social events, one needs large sets of data of location estimations. Often such sets of data are not made available to the research community, mainly for privacy concerns. Such fears are not misplaced, but they gloss over the benefits of sharing data. That is why our research agenda has been focusing on situations in which people benefit from making part of their private, aggregate data available. This paper put forward the idea that, by sharing attendance at social events, people are able to receive quality recommendations of future events."

Why do I blog this? Working on the user experience of location-based services, I've always been curious about recommender systems and the problem designers face developing them. What's so fascinating is that they are based on basic and somewhat intuitive ideas about the way city-dwellers behave. Studies about their usage often reveal the complexity such systems.

PHOTO/NYKTO: a game played by switching on and off the lights

PHOTO/NYKTO is a project designed by my colleague Annelore Schneider & Douglas Edric Stanley at HEAD in Geneva:

"« Photo/Nykto » is an experimental game conceived by Annelore Schneider and Douglas Edric Stanley as part of the « Unterplay » project at the Master Media Design —HEAD, Genève. It is a game for nyktophobes and photophobes. It is played by switching on and off the lights in order to avoid reaching the edge of the screen. The score increases exponentially near the edges, and speeds up with each change from light to dark and back."

Why do I blog this? Fascinating gameplay!

About location-based advertising

Few articles raising doubts about location-based advertising: Unni, R., Harmon, R. (2007) Perceived Effectiveness of Push vs. Pull Mobile Location-Based Advertising. In: Journal of Interactive Advertising, Vol. 7, Nr. 2:

"Pull LBA fared better than push LBA. However, value perceptions of LBA and intentions to try this service appear to be quite low. Also, privacy concerns relating to location data were high, and perceived benefits were low. (...) Interestingly, initial surveys by market research agencies such as Driscoll and In-Stat showed a high level of interest and willingness to pay for location-based services such as navigation (driving directions), maps and guides, and traffic updates. Unlike LBA, these services are perceived to be more utilitarian and hence benefits and perceived value are easier to communicate. Results of our study show that the perceived benefits from LBA are low."

Banerjee, S. & Dholakia R.R. (2008) Mobile advertising: does location-based advertising work?, MMA International Journal of Mobile Marketing,

""location inertia" seems to characterize consumer responses from a private location. We use the term location inertia because this relative unwillingness to shop when advertised in private places has nothing to do with geographical distance from the store. In the LBS scenarios, private or public locations, the distances of the advertised store were specified as exactly the same (less than 0.1 mile away) but it appears that the actual distance does not matter; despite knowing that the store is the same distance away, a consumer is less likely to avail the offer when the ad is received at a private location than a public location. (...) The example of mobile advertising discussed in this paper can be simply viewed as an Internet pop-up ad that has traced the consumer's location and accordingly appeared on his mobile phone."

Why do I blog this? I'm not necessarily into this kind of application but I'm often asked by clients and journalists about the co-called "effectiveness" of using location-based ads in a "push" mode. My general understanding of these technology is that users find it intrusive and not very useful but it's good to have more data up my sleeve to discuss the complexity of people's perspective on this.

The main problem I see in the research papers about this is that they generally focus on projective methods (as opposed to following people using location-based advertising platforms).

From idiosyncratic detail to design

Preparing my course about interaction design next week, I got back to the work by Bill Gaver about cultural probes:

"Tactics for using returns to inspire designs

1 Find an idiosyncratic detail: Look for seemingly insignificant statements or images.

2 Exaggerate it: Turn interest into obsession, preference to love, and dislike to terror.

3. Design for it: Imagine devices and systems to serve as props for the stories you tell. 4. Find an artefact or location. - Deny its original meaning. What else might it be? - Add an aerial, what is it? - Juxtapose it with another, what if they communicate?"

Why do I blog this? Although the quote above is about probes, this is exactly the sort of direction I try to show as an alternative to "standard" (or utilitarian) user-centered design. As a design exercise, it would be good to use this in a cadavre-exquis way (observation/design/observation/design...).

Sugar-spoon interface

A fascinating interface design seen yesterday in Lausanne. Although the aesthetical quality of this is a bit weird, I am fascinated by the way the physical metaphor is employed here.

Weeknotes

Always good to do some weeknotes once in a while, as a way to reflect what has been done in the past few days. Monday was devoted to Lift12, working on the program of the upcoming conference in Geneva... getting the ducks lined up, discussing with the last speakers, calling people interested in workshops.

Tuesday was a conference day, at the Serious Game Expo in Lyon, France, where I participated in a session about location-based games with Mathieu Castelli, as mentioned in my earlier post. It was also a good occasion to catch up with him and test his new project called Meatspace invasion. The rest of the day (4 hours of train and the whole afternoon) has been spent on data analysis: videos and picture from a field research projects that involves mobiles phones and 3D.

Wednesday was a mix of discussion with masters students at HEAD-Geneva about their masters thesis, the monthly meeting with colleagues and... a session of data analysis (for the aforementioned projects)... and a 3-hours workshop at EPFL in which we engaged engineers in a series of creative activities to design an accessory for book reading (based on assignments such as post-its brainstorming and drawing exercises with storyboards).

Thursday was a combination of client meetings, data analysis, fondue with the friend at Bookap in Lausanne and a workshop with a client (an electricity utility) that finished with a cooking workshop in Vevey.

Today was a conference day, the annual Swiss Design Network conference in which I participated in a panel about design research, games and cognitive sciences. It was a good opportunity to meet up with like-minded people such as Gesche Joost, Martin Wiedmer, Alain Findeli, Massimo Botta and the guys from emphase.ch.

Talk about location-based applications and serious games

Today, I made a quick trip to Lyon, to give a talk about location-based applications in the context of serious games. The talk was made with Mathieu Castelli, that P&V readers may know because he was one of the founder of Newt Games which created the first commercial location-based game: Mogi. Slides from the presentation are available on Slideshare:

[slideshare id=10277326&doc=2011-sge-lyon-111122140737-phpapp01]

The discussion at the end of the panel revolved around the fact that there's definitely a return of location-based games nowadays.

A week in Paris

This week, I'm in Paris for few things:

• A workshop at ENSCI-Les Ateliers with Raphael Grignani (Method). It's a week-long training in field research for design. We basically engage students in a short-but-intense observation session followed by analysis and prototyping steps. This time, the brief is the following: Bike share programs like Velib are becoming more and more popular around the world which leads novice cyclists and tourists to take the road... more often than not carelessly. In this engagement, you will observe and document how various demographics use Velibs in Paris - you are free to set the parameters of your observations. From these observations and insights, you will design a product or service that improves the overall Velib experience (safety, navigation, attachments, availability, etc.). The solution should somehow be based on disruptive practices, found problems or curious behavior. You have 5 days.
• A panel at IxDA Paris with Raphael and Moka Pantages Wednesday evening at Le Lieu du Design
• A short speech at ENSCI this Thursday at 1pm in the cafeteria (brownbag seminar!) about "unmet needs as an innovation Holy Grail"

"Game Story" exhibit in Paris

Yesterday I went to le Grand Palais in Paris to attend "Game Story". This exhibit organized by the RMN (a French museum institution) and MO5 (an associated devoted to video-game and computer platforms) addressed the history of video games, from "big white squares" to 3D displays, from arcade box to mobile consoles.

The exhibit is not just about looking at old cubic machines scattered in the magnificent palais since people can also play with most of the devices. This is actually quite interesting as there are two things that attracted my attention there: the game platform and the way people used it. As most of the pieces are not brand new (and given that people could use them) you could see traces of dust and dirt here and there... which is always a good indicator of an artifact relevance. Those traces of human activity reminds us that these pieces make sense to people and they really enjoy using them.

Observing how people "use" with pieces in museum is generally limited to Contemporary art exhibit with interactive artifacts... and perhaps it's far less interactive than a whole aisle made of video-games. Even security members chatted with visitors to discuss the pluses and minuses of game controllers and specific titles.

Interestingly, the exhibit is not just about platforms; you also have plenty of artefacts from what shaped the video game culture : RPGs, toys, magazines among other pop-culture objects. This is quite good as it allows the attendants to draw some comparisons between contextual elements (that could be related to kawai or heroic-fantasy content) and what's exposed on the game console per se.

Such an exhibit also reminds us of the difficulty to maintain this sort of non-tangible material. Most of the pieces presented are based on cartridges and electronic devices (with some CD/DVD-based games) but it becomes harder with cassette and even more impossible if you want to consider early network-based platforms (Minitel games, the beginning of the Web).

Why do I blog this? On a more personal note, I definitely enjoyed spending time there because of the game controller book project. No big surprise for sure but it was an occasion to see the artifacts I am writing about and to observe how people interact with them.

Get inspiration from artifacts

Found in "Design as art" by Bruno Munari, Penguin, 2009

"Go into the kitchen and open the first drawer you come to and the odds are you’ll find the wooden spoon that is used to stir soups and sauces. If this spoon is of a certain age you will see it no longer has its original shape. It has changed, as if a piece had been cut obliquely off the end. Part of it is missing.

We have (though not all at once, of course) eaten the missing part mixed up in our soup. It is continual use that has given the spoon its new shape. This is the shape the saucepan has made by constantly rubbing away at the spoon until it eventually shows us what shape a spoon for stirring soup should be.

This is a case (and there are many) in which a designer can learn what shape to make the object he is designing, especially if it is a thing destined to come into frequent contact with other things, and which therefore takes it particular shape according to the use to which it is put."

Why do I blog this? I find that this excerpt is a good example about how objects (reflecting traces of human activity) can lead to inspiration in design. Will try to use this in the workshop at ENSCI tomorrow.

"degamification" as a design tactic

(Via Tom Ewing and metagaming) An intriguing question addressed on blackbeardblog:

"So presumably the removal of game mechanics from things which possess them might also have an effect on those things. And then I had to ask: would the effect of that removal – that degamification - always be undesirable? I think it wouldn’t.

Part of the reason I think this, I admit, is my own experiences playing Dungeons and Dragons and other tabletop games in the 80s and 90s, when the more I immersed myself in the hobby the more I was drawn to rule-light or even rule-free systems. D&D has – as you’ll know if you ever played it – a vast and hydra-headed system of rules. At first we would modify them, as almost all players did – dropping the ones that weren’t fun. But eventually we abandoned the rules entirely, shifting to what used to be known as “freeform” gaming – something more like interactive storytelling.

The reason we did this is that we’d reframed the aim of the activity to be creative rather than simply competitive or even co-operative. Once we’d done that, the game mechanics became a hindrance to play, rather than a spur."

Why do I blog this? The idea of "degamification" as a design tactic is interesting and the author presents it in a compelling way. What I find important here is that the removal of certain external rewards can be relevant for participants over time, "handing over more responsibility and autonomy" as said in this blogpost.

For those wondering about how this "subtraction"-oriented design approach can be applied, the author also gives an example:

"Tumblarity – the short-lived popularity measure on Tumblr introduced back in 2009, which had the effect of radically jacking up engagement and activity but in directions Tumblr management allegedly didn’t expect or like. So they degamified the site, removing Tumblarity, and found that the popularity of their service continued to grow but that the artificial metric no longer distorted the content on it quite so much. The behaviour Tumblarity artificially encouraged - chasing popularity, content inflation, and so on - didn’t go away, but its levels stayed manageable. Degamification rewarded its creative users at the expense of its game-playing ones."

William Gibson on "unanticipated impacts" of technology

Interesting insight from William Gibson in this interview:

"The strongest impacts of an emergent technology are always unanticipated. You can’t know what people are going to do until they get their hands on it and start using it on a daily basis, using it to make a buck and u­sing it for criminal purposes and all the different things that people do. The people who invented pagers, for instance, never imagined that they would change the shape of urban drug dealing all over the world. But pagers so completely changed drug dealing that they ultimately resulted in pay phones being removed from cities as part of a strategy to prevent them from becoming illicit drug markets. We’re increasingly aware that our society is driven by these unpredictable uses we find for the products of our imagination."

Why do I blog this? This is a common lesson in sociology or in history of science and technology but it's always intriguing to see it formulated by a fiction writer. What I find interesting here is the final sentence, in which Gibson argues about how our society is increasingly driven by these unanticipated uses.

Video series about Social computing by Tom Erickson

Preparing my Interaction Design course at HEAD Geneva about social computing, I received a timely email from Mads Soegaard about an highly relevant series of video about this very topic. It's actually written by Tom Erickson an interaction designer and researcher in the Social Computing Group at IBM's Watson Labs in NY.

The video is going to be public pretty soon and it's good to see a preview of this material. It basically consists in a good overview of the design and social issues at stake in social computing; a domaine that can be defined as following:

"when we speak of social computing we are concerned with how digital systems go about supporting the social interaction that is fundamental to how we live, work and play. They do this by providing communication mechanisms through which we can interact by talking and sharing information with one another, and by capturing, processing and displaying traces of our online actions and interactions that then serve as grist for further interaction."

Interestingly, videos are commented by various researchers from this field such as Elizabeth Churchill, David W. McDonald and Andrea Forte. A comment from Churchill's caught my attention as it exemplifies what I show to students and clients: the role insights coming from field research and their use in design:

"The idea of conducting field investigations that open our eyes to differences in ways of thinking and different norms for social action is not new, but it is easy to forget to look out for how our technologies are being adopted, adapted and indeed appropriated. Tom reminds us to move beyond simple characterizations of other perspectives and to field our technologies with a view to being surprised. Indeed, he suggests if we are notsurprised, perhaps we are not designing well enough. The humility of this approach is very appealing to me."

Why do I blog this? I have only watched half of the videos but they present a rich overview of Social Computing. From Slashdot to Chatroulette, from CSCW to social media, it's good to see this sort of panorama that show the evolution of this field. Especially given that it considers early projects and posit that platforms such as FB or Twitter embed traces (and design issues) already at stake 10 or 20 years go in other computing domains.

Thanks Mads for letting Pasta and Vinegar readers to access this material before the public release.

Pre-Internet of Things Objects ID

One of the current obsession consists in observing the meta-data given to things in the physical world. They're generally used to give an ID to a certain artifact (in order to performance maintenance acts) or its status. Some examples recently encountered: Power plugs at London Heathrow:

Extension chord at the local design school:

Switch at Lift Conference offices:

Why do I blog this? I use this as an example in talks/courses about innovation to show that so-called "breakthrough" (such as the Internet of Things) should be pondered... and the evolution of technology is a: - A slow movement: the idea of giving an ID to objects is not coming out from the blue, it existed before the IoT, - Technology is not the only underlying factor here: the "social" (here: a decision between a group of people to name artifacts to keep track of their status) and the "technological" (here: the thing itself as well as meta-data systems/reading devices) are closely intertwined.