IEEE Spectrum on Megacities

The last issue of IEEE Spectrum is about "megacities" and how to solve some of the big engineering challenges we face as the world's cities multiply. There is a good bunch of articles about various topics. Some notes about the one I've been interested in: How to See the Unseen City By Sandra Upson That paper is about the density and complexity of subterranean networks which mirrors the congestion wealthy cities experience at their surface. What is interesting from a human perspective is that quote

"To many city dwellers—and even to many city officials—underground infrastructure is both out of sight and out of mind. When inspecting pipes, the city commonly uses electronic listening equipment as its first line of defense. Maintenance workers dangle a microphone down a manhole and attach it to a water main to assess whether flow has been disturbed by a leak. More detailed checks are conducted from within a pipe, using what is essentially a video camera on wheels. (...) Fixing a break in a line, whether pipe or wire, also entails finding it—and knowing what else might lie above it. Although individual utilities each have approximate maps of their own infrastructures, few have coordinated closely with other agencies. (...) Those who dig a hole also run the risk of unearthing a bone or two. To reclaim valuable real estate, many cities had to exile their cemeteries, which moved their headstones outside city limits but often left the bodies behind. (...) Vertical cemeteries by no means indicate that the underground frontier has been fully conquered."

How to Fight Crime in Real Time By William Sweet and Stephen Cass Rapid data retrieval that accelerates investigations in NYC is a topic tightly connected to ubicomp and foucauldian concerns. The articles describes how works the central computerized control room, the Real Time Crime Center (RTCC), which focus is “simply to speed up police reactions in emergencies, where seconds can be a matter of life and death.”

"Standing in the RTCC with Onalfo and D’Amico on a quiet spring afternoon, facing a theater-size display divided into six or seven changing rectangles, the lead author of this article gets a briefing on how the system works. To the lower left, there’s what’s often called a ticker (though it does not really resemble a list of stock quotations), showing a list of crimes reported in emergency calls to 911 or by officers to dispatchers. A red dot alongside an entry indicates the crime is in progress and deserves priority attention; yellow dots mark resolved situations. Another system of red and yellow dots shows whether police cars are immediately available for action. (...) Access to the data warehouse is granted only with passwords backed by the biometric ID cards that all NYPD employees carry, and every query is logged so that any suspicious entry into the system can be investigated"

Articles about garbage in megacities and electric infrastructures black-outs are also important to things in context. See here as well for a whole outline of the special issue.

(Picture taken yesterday in Geneva)

Why do I blog this? these papers gives some context about the reality of urban computing, all of them give a good overview of different aspects regarding urban issues.

Technology use in Spiritual Formation

It's mostly curiosity that lead me to this project led by Susan Wyche with Gillian Hayes, Lonnie Harvel, and Beki Grinter. As described on the webpage:

"Churches are increasingly using technology for spiritual purposes. Sermons are being podcast, PowerPoint slides are replacing hymnals, and e-mail is prompting prayer, all of which indicate religion’s growing presence in computer users’ lives. Despite churches’ rapid adoption, we know little about how to effectively design technology for worship services, what interface issues arise when computers are used to support prayer, or how to facilitate meaningful communication between church leaders and their parishioners. Our empirical study begins to answer these questions by examining how area pastors use communication technologies for spiritual purposes."

They wrote a paper about it for CSCW2006:

Wyche, S.P., Hayes, G.R., Harvel, L.D., and Grinter, R.E. Technology in Spiritual Formation: An Exploratory Study of Computer Mediated Religious Communications. To appear in the proceedings of CSCW 2006. Banff, Alberta, Canada. 2006

[Thinking about where the name CSCW comes from (Computer Supported Collaborative Work), it is exquisitely intriguing to see that the field started by looking at collaborative work/learning practices and is now moving to all sorts of collective activities ranging form gaming to religious practices.]

The paper offers some intriguing material about the uses of technologies in three aspects of "religious work": religious study and reflection, church services, and pastoral care. It also examines how the collaborative religious uses of technologies cross and blend work and personal life.

"Some religious uses of technology seemed similar to workplace practices. or example, in pastoral care, ministers (like employers) used technologies to coordinate action (...) And yet, while some aspects of technologically enabled religious practice seemed analogous to technologically supported corporate practice, others differed. Some practices echoed previous research largely focused on recreational groups, in particular on-line communities. For example, ministers described a dilemma with counseling, preferring to talk face-to-face, but recognizing that some people found it easier to discuss difficult topics in an electronically mediated setting."

Why do I blog this? curiosity, sunday reading blogged on monday.

Second Life evolutions

BW on SL and alternatives. The claim of the author is that "companies are thinking twice about the popular virtual world are finding more security and flexibility in alternatives". Why? some excerpts helps to describe the reasons:

"the Web-based parallel universe is a messy marketplace where you're as likely to see a bare-chested, rabbit-headed avatar trolling for adult-themed entertainment or vandalizing a digital store as a corporate suit leading a training session. And some companies want to target age groups younger or older than the average 30-year-old denizen of Second Life. (...) Starwood Hotels & Resorts discovered avatars don't need to sleep, and so a virtual hotel didn't make much sense in the long run. Unlike Adidas or General Motors (GM ), which sell digital versions of Reeboks and Pontiacs in the online world, Starwood didn't have goods to sell—and found itself unable to sustain avatars' interest."

So, some companies are adopting diverse solutions like creating their own world. Why do I blog this? curiosity towards the buzz about 3D virtual worlds. I don't understand why these articles never refer to past experiences such as There or Active World. People who want to ponder the arguments developed in the BW piece might have a look at csven's blog.

Landlines downhill

Seen this morning at Copenhagen airport

Communication in public space reshuffled... but it would perhaps be curious to keep a *telephone* area in which people can use their cell phone...

Reboot9.0 doggy bag

Some notes about the first day at Reboot9.0.

Highlights were: Kars Alfrink (Mobile Social Play) The talk introduced very relevant design guidelines to design for "mobile social play" 1. Design for different level of player engagement (casual, hardcore...). Keep people there, engaged gradually to provoke flow. 2. Provide players with roles, role creates dynamic, assigning roles to players so that social interaction emerges [I do think this is why games like WoW works better than social platforms like SL] 3. Encourage "meta-gaming" (like kids painting their miniature to play a tabletop game). It augments their engagement and keep them involved. 4. Support implicit rule creation. You should have hard rules encoded in the game BUT also unwritten rules that players agree on. Example: soccer on the street = soccer rules + rules negotiated by players about street constraints 5. Play with the game's existence

Aram Bartholl (Online Symbols in the offline world) He presented some intriguing art projects about how network data world manifest itself in our everyday life: - de_dust: The de_dust installation consists of a large number of various sized stacked crates arranged in a cluster. All the crates are printed with the same imitation wood texture from the computer game Counter-Strike. - WoW: people's name and identity is floating above people's head, visible to every body else in the street as in WoW. - Plazemark: real life representations of digital places generated by users of the Location Based Web2.0 platform Plazes.com. I also liked when he described how virtual places such as Countersike maps becomes part of people's memory, showing a CS map drawn in the sand.

Tom Armitage (The Uncanny Valet) A great talk about re-examining "the notion of manners on the web, and how we teach our software to be appropriate - but never too-polite. Tom's claim was that applications and tools that we are building define the manners of the web today, whether we like it or not. His point was illustrated by diverse examples. - modern web brings potential surprises (ajax, rich interface that zoom out, drag and drop that is only for nerds, click on RSS feeds that open up weird codes...). This is RUDE. - have a look at the Jack Principles, there are important lessons there - anthropomorphic representations (a la MS Bob, clippy...) destroy the sense of accomplishment for the users (“agents make people diminish themselves” and “redefine themselves into lesser beings.” Jaron Lanier) - a good example of a correct behavior is the email sent by the Little Moo robot:

" I'm Little MOO - the bit of software that will be managing your order with us. It will shortly be sent to Big MOO, our print machine who will print it for you in the next few days. I'll let you know when it's done and on its way to you. (...) Remember, I'm just a bit of software. So, if you have any questions regarding your order please contact customer services (who are real people) at: http://www.moo.com/service Thanks, Little MOO, Print Robot"

Why is it correct? because it's endearing, it reinforces the status as a computer, it better builds the user's relation with the company AND it naturally dissuades people from hitting "reply" to this email. SOme other stuff he mentionned, slightly less related to these notes: - kids use blank SMS to express their will to party - telescopes in the UK that tells on Twitter what they're looking at: a nice background machine. Tube lines in London that have twitter streams: it's polite and appropriate.

Matt Jones (Travel and serendipity) Matt described Dopplr, a social software that allows you to share when and where you will travel. His talk had a very interesting subtitle: "How personal informatics are engineering coencidence, lowering environmental impacts and forging a new golden age of travel". This reminded me a research paper by Christian Licoppe. This researcher (see "ICTs and the engineering of encounters: a case study of the development of a mobile game based on the geolocation of terminals" looked at how Mogi designers created a system that "engineer" encounters and specific forms of social play. Mr. Jones showed how "Dopplr is about the future, which you can't automate. You have to declare it". The Dopplr interface is meant to lower the energy to declare it. This point is very important and directly relates to the conclusion of my PhD research: there is always a cost related to location-awareness. Generally the capture of the location information is either automatic (by a computing system) or self-declared. My dissertation examined this difference and showed the importance of self-declaration: the cost is higher than the automatic version for the sender BUT for the others, the BENEFIT is high: it's more than an information, it's an information AND an intention. Another good point here is that Dopplr focuses on a single benefit, instead of having tons of "features". Dopplr is part of a larger service called the "Internet", as Dave Winer described it for Twitter, it's a "coral reef" on which one can plug lots of other services. For example, when Julian asked Matt about the past locations, Matt said another services could provide that but Dopplr only focuses on the future. The point of Dopplr is to create a model of what's going on (for instance sparklines of people's location as one can see below or timelines between you and a friend) and the service allows you to change one's mind about our model of the future.

(Sparkline designed by Matt Biddulph)

I also enjoyed a lot Jyri Engeström (Microblogging: tiny social objects ad the future of participatory media) and Jed Berk's work but I was so tired after my talk that I could not take more notes.

My talk at Reboot9.0

Slides from my Reboot talk are here (pdf, 1.1Mb).

The presentation I made, entitled "Hybridization, fusing, melting, coalescence and salmagundi" was about hybridization. I basically gave an overview of what I find interesting in projects about hybridization of the digital and the physical, a sort of compendium of the consequences (from the cognitive to the architectural) and the implications. Take-aways of my talk are: - hybridization of the digital/physical are coming in a large variety of ways - leads to changes from the cognitive to the architectural levels - revisit false ideas: do not oppose the digital and the physical, less utilitarian future, digital takes room. - reality is complex, need to study situations (not just technologies)

Thanks Thomas for the invitation!

Wave your hand sign

This icon is used in danish trains to tell people that they can wave their hand in front of a sensor so that doors could be opened:

Interestingly, in other countries like Switzerland there are no signs, people just learn how this work and eventually wave their hand.

Love+access

Arrived in Copenhagen today, for Reboot.

Picture taken this afternoon, technology of access marked by a heart drawn by a passer-by. Love+access, there was surely some good motivations because there are no precise affordance to draw this shape around this key hole..

Ethnography and warfare

Via Space and Culture, the concept of "ethnographic intelligence". What a term, it reminds me of the name of a workshop at Doors of Perception called "Guerilla Ethnography". Here is how this concept is defined:

"As recent debate, especially in the services, attests, there is an increased demand for cultural intelligence. (...) "What we mean by EI is information about indigenous forms of association, local means of organization, and traditional methods of mobilization.

Clans, tribes, secret societies, the hawala system, religious brotherhoods, all represent indigenous or latent forms of social organization available to our adversaries throughout the non-Western, and increasingly the Western, world. These create networks that are invisible to us unless we are specifically looking for them; they come in forms with which we are not culturally familiar; and they are impossible to 'see' or monitor, let alone map, without consistent attention and the right training (...) Because EI is the only way to truly know a society, it is the best tool to divine the intentions of a society's members. "

Why do I blog this? it's intriguing to see how technologies are not the only thing militaries like to steal from researchers. Now, even ethnographical methods and cultural anthropology are possibly employed for warfare or military intelligence.

Nabaztag sales figures

Quick note about Nabaztag, launched in 2005. I found some figures that might be of interest: 50,000 rabbits sold as of June 2006 (Source: Libération) 135,000 rabbits sold as of May 2007 (Source: Le Monde)

It's a pity the figures are only for France, but it gives an interesting picture of how this type of communication objects is sold. Sony sold 200,000 AIBOs worldwide (Source). And yes, I know it's like comparing apples and oranges but it gives a picture of the number of devices out there as well as how things evolve over time.

Urban hacking

Exposing the secret city: Urban exploration as ‘space hacking’ is an intriguing deck of slides by Martin Dodge. It's about urban exploration of "secret spaces, abandoned buildings, and other obscure, overlooked, underused, forgotten, unsafe, and disconnected built structures". Dodge, a geographer, investigated this phenomenon and some of the results are presented here, in this nice compendium of intriguing anecdotes, discussions and pictures. It describes the reasons (1. need to document space, 2. thrill of access to forbidden space, 3. desire for authentic spaces, 4. alternative aestheticism of spaces), their ethics (1. respect for places, 2. publish versus preservation, 3. freedom of access / illegality of trespass, 4. acceptability of anonymity). He then conceptualize this using the "hacker" vocabulary. The best part is certainly the end, in which he presents why "space hacking" would be important, some excerpts:

" 1. thinking through how space becomes: the space is performed through spatial practices - by sneaking in, climbing a fence, clambering down a drain, the search for good vantage points and the composition of photographs 2. the nature of territoriality: thinking about how cities are produced as ‘property’ (spatial fixity) and imagining an urban ‘right-to-roam’ (spatial mobility)? 3. ‘spatial hauntings’: the experience of place as opposed to written histories/testimonies, as a way complementing other representations, experiencing and then capturing in photographs the layers of memories in a place (memorialisation) 4. ‘cities without people’: perhaps a way of thinking post-human urbanity? what happens to space when people stop caring in the normative sense; when entropy runs unchecked 5. ‘exploration’ as method: can expeditionary practices open up ways of knowing that capture (at least partially) the fragmentary nature of places, the unknowing permeating through city, that other methods fail to capture; research becoming risky, finding things out becomes fun. UE as ‘post-method’ method, working without permission, without risk assessments, without ethical approval "

Why do I blog this Urban exploration, place hacking is a fascinating practice (tightly related to psychogeography to some extent). The conclusion is very insightful, Dodge claims that "urban exploration provide an interesting set of spatial practices through which to explore a range of geographic issues such as production of space, territoriality and property, memory and place, geographic knowledge".

The picture has been taken France few weeks ago when exploring some abandoned train station.

Feel the ground

Walking in Geneva this morning, I walked up some stairs near the Rhône river on which there is a message on each steps. One of them says "Depuis quand n'avez vous pas pris contact avec le sol?" ("since when haven't you feel the ground?"). This made me think our behavior towards the ground is very normative and, as a matter of fact, poor. Apart from specific cultures (mmh some backpackers in Marseille as depicted on the picture below), it's not good to sit/lay/do stuff on the ground (especially on pavements)

Why do I blog this? some curious design opportunities here... some already tried to do something with podotactility:

Or information visualization (to guide people going from one music spot to another)

Yet, it's still about seeing the ground or feeling it with the feet...

Why studying ubicomp applications?

What to expect from studies about ubiquitous computing applications is a topic I dealt with the other day in my presentation. Reading "Control, Deception, and Communication: Evaluating the Deployment of a Location-Enhanced Messaging Service" by Iachello et al., 2005, I found this very interesting quote:

"the results of our study required us to step back and reconsider our assumptions, which were based on our own common sense considerations and a straightforward interpretation of Weiser’s idea of calm technology"

Why do I blog this? although the studies we're carrying out in HCI lab are often about "evaluating" prototypes, I find important to have another goal on the agenda: reconsidering assumptions, criticizing normative vision of the future, and also investigating the social/cognitive/spatial effects of technologies that pervade the environment.

Intriguing spam

Spam received 5 minutes ago:

"You're just too ignorant to see the hundreds of explanations for why it's not that simple."

This is a nice quote, maybe the remark is true given the complexity of the problems to solve?

Robotic lamp

Via Fabien, AUR: a Robotic Desk Lamp by Guy Hoffman (MIT Medialab Robotic life group):

"AUR is a robotic desk lamp, a collaborative lighting assistant. It serves as a non-anthropomorphic robotic platform as part of my Ph.D thesis on human-robot fluency and nonverbal behavior. The lamp's design was conceived around an existing 5-DoF robotic arm, and is aimed to evoke a personal relationship with the human partner without resorting to human-like features. By retaining the lamp's "objectness", I hope to explore the relationship that can be maintained through abstract gestures and nonverbal behavior alone.

The lamp is animated using a custom pipeline enabling the dynamic control of behaviors authored in a 3d animation system, and will perform in a unique human-robot joint theater performance this spring."

Why do I blog this? looking at human-robot interaction for possible client work, this artifact is interesting to me because it reflects the convergence between robotics and ubiquitous computing. Non-anthropomorphic behavior seems IMO a very relevant approach, leading to projects about a new category of objects.

Semi-inhabitants of the city

Spotted two days ago in Marseille, France:

This looks like "On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time" to use Guy Debord's formulation. What happened to the other halves of their physical presence? What does that mean?

Social software about things

Not really concerned by the web2.0 frenziness, I still have a look at all these social software that pops up everyday. Recently, two of them caught my interest: Mythings and Wakoopa (what a name!). Let' start with the former:

"MyThings is, an online service that helps keep track of belongings—when and where they were bought, for how much, the services provided with them, and their value. We offer useful services and deals, such as valuations, accessories, warranties, lost and found, and product updates and information. Why catalog your things online? For many reasons! Perhaps you want one safe place to house all those details—you know, the random receipts and warranties you’ve stuffed in a shoebox or in that famous junk drawer. Or maybe you want to better manage your things—like when you need to upgrade or replace certain items, see what’s missing in your favorite collection, or time which wines to drink within the year. Or perhaps you want to know how much your cache of valuables is really worth. It can be any of these things but the point is with MyThings, you can have peace of mind because it is safe and secure and can be accessed anytime, from anywhere.

So what’s in it for us? We think that as consumers we’re bombarded with product and services information. But we also know manufacturers, retailers, and other sellers want to offer a better way to provide their services to you. With MyThings we provide that option based on your preferences. We can all appreciate when the right offer or information comes to us at the right time—such as rebate information when you trade in your old MP3 player for the latest model.Or how about when an auction house has an interesting sale coming up of 1960s comic books? Even when someone is ready to sell their porcelain pug dog collection. You get the idea.

MyThings is an infomediary, a trusted third-party between buyers and sellers."

As a side note, this is very close to the "my space of things" we discussed last year at the 2nd blogject workshop (and in my talk with Julian at Reboot 2006).

The latter has a similar purpose, except that it focuses on "digital artifacts", i.e. software.

"Wakoopa tracks what kind of software or games you use, and lets you create your own software profile. Ready for you to share with the world. Why? Because what you use on your desktop is who you are.

With Wakoopa you know what software you've been using, and how long you've been using it. But you also get updated when a new version comes out, or somebody writes a review about your software. Wakoopa allows you to share your software usage and your opinions about software. Just invite your friends to view your profile, or put a widget on your own site. If you still don't know what anti-virus program to use, or what games to play, then just look in our database. We know what the cool kids use! Browse by tag or category, it's all there."

Why do I blog this? an interesting link here between social software that focuses on things, digital or physical. don't know whether this will take off but that's an intriguing attempt.

My talk at the seminar in Marseille

Here (.pdf) are the slides I used this morning in my talk at the Villes2.0 seminar.

This talk was about showing which kind of topics I find interesting in my work about the relationships between technologies and space/place (as a researcher in human-computer interaction). Roughly speaking it's: understanding of socio-cognitive effects of technologies, visualizations of technology usage in space, explicitation of invisible phenomenon, hybridization of space, etc.

Then I narrowed down the focus on the CatchBob! project to show the need to adopt new methods in order to conduct meaningful studies about location-based applications beyond lab experiments. As a matter of fact, for the audience, describing the use of ethnographical techniques and other mixed methodologies (qualitative - quantitative) as we did in the project was new. Presenting some results form CatchBob! allowed me to describe how it helped and how we dealt with the complexity of field experiments.

My point in the conclusion was to show that the sort of study like CatchBob or other ethnographical (or mixed methods) investigation of ubicomp technologies was useful to explore the situatedness, particularities, detailed problems of innovation. The underlying point here is that all this enable to criticize normative visions of the future that lots of people take for granted (seamless mobile social software, intelligent fridge, etc.) due to various reasons (pop culture...).

Seminar Villes2.0 in Marseille

Today was in Marseille (France) for a multi-disciplinary seminar about "urban research" and IT that gathered social scientists, companies (transportation systems) and managers form the public sector (city council, region, the "State", funding bodies) led by french think tank FING. Discussions were mostly about how to work together, how each of us experienced it and what are the role of the partners. I haven't really taken notes, rather some thoughts that I was interested in.

The assumptions The assumption here was to if the purpose is to develop urban innovation (develop applications, systems... invent the future of urban services somehow), it's not possible to do it alone but there's a need to act as a group. So if a research project about developing certain systems want to be efficient, it should involve all these people. In addition, there is also a need to be accepted. For instance people from a city council dismiss research about certain ubiquitous computing applications because the project did not involve "urban" people: "Did you work with transportation companies? Did you have a partnership with citizen's association? No hmmm okay so your project is interesting but far from reality".

Incentive to work with each others? That said, the problem is that all the potential actors (researchers, city councils, engineers, designers, funders, etc) have different ways to apprehend reality and are evaluated differently. Alain D'Iribarne for example mentioned that researchers need to publish, politician to be (re-)elected and companies to have ROI or to have a proper time-to-market R&D (as wanted by the french state who gives tax rebate). What happen is that in the last 20 years these criteria have been strengthened and led each group of actor to follow their own path. This is clearly what I feel as a research in which the only incentive I have to work with some companies is curiosity to work on specific situations/problems (and funding of course). What is left after this categorization is that some people act as bricoleurs and try to do research that fit with companies or city councils' interests... but they have their own academic niche or stop doing what is thought as "pure" academic research.

Classic debate All of this lead to the classic debate about the role of researchers in our modern societies: who should pick up the research topics? why funding that? A public company complained about the fact that they haven't found any interesting new theories that would change the way they act as a transportation structure in the last 20 years (as opposed as the person said, to "big science" who can sinking their teeth into big physics theories...) I don't know if this is a fact or an opinion (I'm prudent but IMHO it's an opinion) but it shows that there is certainly a problem here.

Of course, companies (public or private) brought to the table the fact that they need a more finalized research both about the content (research questions) and the method ("we don't want 120 pages report"). There is indeed a growing need to have researchers working with company people and implement their ideas, "not just throw them in the air".

Different rhythms A side topic was also the importance of time. It has been said that railways or metro are build for a certain amount of time (100 years for railways, 40-50 years for metro), given the investment. One of the attendant was concerned about how to articulate this with technologies that change every 2-3 years. How to predict that you may need to build infrastructure (like metro tunnel and station) that are big enough to be modified with new technologies? Where can you put electrical infrastructures, GSM and Wifi boxes in a 100 years-old metro station when it's impossible to add any new artifacts because it's so packed that fear to fall on the railways?

What did I learn? Of course this debate about what research should be is a bit cliché but we really have to deal with it. I can feel it in my own professional work: how to balance the need to have multi/inter/trans-disciplinary work required by ubiquitous computing and the current system? That is to say, more pragmatically, how to survive as a researcher who need to publish but might break the "rules" of publication by adopting new methods, concepts, paradigms, etc.?

Further out, this leads me to think that there is a strong need for certain stakeholders (city coucils, regions, public companies, private companies) to conduct projects at the crossroads of research and consulting. Hence a need, perhaps, of new structure closer to think tanks than consultancies. This definitely resonates with all the shell I belong to (simpliquity, near future laboratory, liftlabs).

(Tap) Interface of the day

Encountered this morning in France, at the train station in Lyon:

It' been a while that the tap was not delivering water. Instead of putting a warning sign about this, some folks preferred to add a piece of steel to cover the sink... What a great affordance.