Web presence for people, places, Things

In the paper, People, Places, Things: Web Presence for the Real World, researchers at HP described in 2008 how to support "web presence" for people, place and things. It actually refers to the Cooltown project, which has been conducted 5-6 years ago. Some elements from the paper:

"We put web servers into things like printers and put information into web servers about things like artwork; we group physically related things into places embodied in web servers. Using URLs for addressing, physical URL beaconing and sensing of URLs for discovery, and localized web servers for directories, we can create a location-aware but ubiquitous system to support nomadic users. On top of this infrastructure we can leverage Internet connectivity to support communications services."

Why do I blog this? Although the project was more about supporting communication services and providing nomadic users with an access to object/information without a central control point, I was interested in that from another perspective: the agency of artifacts. Beyond their potential accessibility through the Internet, what does that mean when my watch, my lamp or even toilets have a web presence? This aspect is not that addressed in the paper and more obviously connects with the near future laboratory interest in blogjects.

Reference: Kindberg, T., Barton, J., Morgan, J., Becker, G., Caswell, D., Debaty, P., Gopal, G., Frid, M., Krishnan, V. Morris, H., Schettino, J., Serra, B. & Spasojevic, M. (2002). People, Places, Things: Web Presence for the Real World, Mobile Computing Systems and Applications, 2000 Third IEEE Workshop on, pp. 19-28.

Some differences between physical and digital spaces

In their paper called "Emplacing Experience", the authors compare aspects of space and place in physical and digital gameworlds. They describe different characteristics that show the specificity of digital places:

"Players, through the agency of their avatar, may expend considerable time traveling to the location for a quest. (...) RPG game design has a conspicuous propensity to afford and then discard the notions of place that compel the player in gameplay. (...) players may visit such places only once in gameplay to realize the experience. After performing a quest the place might as well cease to exist, having little further role in gameplay. (...) Although often rendered in attractive detail, the space between the places where the gameplay activities occur is, for all intents and purposes, empty. (...) Computational resources are often diverted from peripheral details of a place or by rendering environmental assets “just-in-time”. (...) Gameworlds and other Virtual Environments (VEs) contain far fewer cues than the physical world and therefore tend to fall into the category of being unfamiliar, particularly when first encountered. (...) a quality of an interaction that allows sense to be made only in a specific spatial, temporal or social context. Such indexicality is used frequently, subtly and without much ado in the physical world. In gameworlds, indexicality is often overt and even clumsy, such as NPCs providing information at set locations. "

Why do I blog this? material needed to write an article about the evolution of mutual location-awareness interfaces over time, in MUDs, 3D games and pervasive gaming. The elements described here are useful to document how the environments (game spaces) are different.

Browning, D. Stanley, S., Fryer, M. & Bidwell, N.J (2006). Emplacing experience. Joint International Conference on CyberGames & Interactive Entertainment, Perth 2007 Published in ACM Digital library

Adam Greenfield at PicNic 2007

Adam Greenfield's talk at Pic Nic was entitled "The City is Here for You to Use: Urban Form and Experience in the Age of Ambient Informatics. His presentation is basically about the implications of ubiquitous computing on the form and experience of the city. After "Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing" Adam is now zooming on a more specific aspect of ubicomp: its influence on the urban environment. Inspired by Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander or Bernard Rurdofsky, he drawn our attention to their "generosity" about the life on the street and the recent changes exemplified by this quote from Alexander: "For centuries, the street provided city dwellers with usable public space right outside their houses. Now, in a number of subtle ways, the modern city has made streets which are for "going through," not for "staying in.". Through various examples, Adam showed how "we killed the street" due to cars, traffic, overplanning, the "repeating module of doom" (succession of franchises) leading to what Augé calls "non-places" and Rem Koolhas refers to as "junkspace". The city then becomes "stealthy, slippery, crusty, prickly and jittery" through defensible space elements such as the following one I spotted in Amsterdam last week:

This situation leads to various forms of "withdrawal syndromes": ipod usage, mobile phone/blackberry digging... and the city is less "a negotiation machine between humans". In sum, "we lost something" and instead of lamenting ("nostalgia is for suckers"), Adam highlights the challenge: to rediscover the city of Jacobs, Rudofsky and Alexander in a way that is organic to our own age. This means that ubiquitous computing can be a candidate for that matter.

He then presented how ubiquitous computing (everyware) is already affecting cities. Information processing, sensors start showing up in new places at different scale. At the body level, he cited the Nike+ipod example, at the urban level, some dynamic signs allow people to be aware of bus schedule or use contact-cards, leading to more agency in infrastructures. This enable new model of interaction and "information processing dissolving in behavior". The upside of this might be that people can get information about cities and their pattern of use, visualized in new ways (Stamen Design's cabspotting, crime and real estate mapping, map of cities with WiFi hotspot)... and that information can be made available locally on demand in a way that people can act upon. Would ubicomp turn cities in more efficient and sustainable places? Possibly this is meant to allow better choices and entirely new behavior might emerge, will we get a participatory urbanism? a "genuine read/write urbanism" as he mentioned?

How will it affect urban forms? Adam showed some instances of how information as output at the building envelope: living glass modified by CO2 or the Blur Building by Diller-Scofidio (from swiss expo02). Ambient information becomes addressable, scriptable and/or query-able objects such as in the Chaos Computer Club Blinkenlights project.

(Picture courtesy of Diller-Scofidio)

One of the downside he presented concerned how this can lead to new inscriptions of class. He showed a DVD rental booth in NYC that allows cash to rent DVD but needs a credit card to access it. Another problem concerns the over-legibility of things: when there is too much explicitness and not enough ambiguity on plausible deniability, when everything is made public, what happens? maybe we do not want all our friends to know where we are, of course there are special case but not all the time.

Visualizing the geometry of relative distance

Wegzeit is a project by Dietmar Offenhuber that I found interesting:

"Wegzeit is a project about Los Angeles and how it is transformed when brought to relative space. Asking someone in L.A. about the distance between two locations usually prompts a response in minutes. It seems paradoxical that people rely on subjective parameters for their spatial decisions in a city with a largely regular, cartesian layout. But especially here, where the influences of physical space are leveled by this regularity, the importance of subjective, relative spaces become visible more strongly. The project consists of six dynamic virtual environments that propose models of how to visualize three-dimensional relative spaces. They deal with certain properties and effects caused by the nature of relative space such as the asymmetry of temporal distances. (...) in this example all the streets are represented by "rubberbands" between their intersections. temporal distance can now be introduced as force or rest length of the rubberband, and thus deforming the whole system. the topology of space is preserved this way, the result is a global, balanced view of the temporal space."

Why do I blog this? I found intriguing this way of representing "temporal distance", the visualization of space/time issues. Curious phenomenon to be reflected to city dwellers.

Video games as research tools in psychology

(cross-posted at Terra Nova) Being a researcher interested in the user experience of interactive technologies, I have always been following how video games are employed as platform to explore certain topics and practices, especially in social sciences/psychology. The use of such kind of platform has already been discussed in the human computer interaction field for a long time. In psychology, especially, you have papers from 1995 about "Video games as research tools" by Donchin or some statements by HCI researchers (like Holmquist in "The right kind of challenge").

Several scholars have stressed the interest of using virtual environments like video games as research tool for psychological investigation by citing three major reasons.

First, computer games are motivating and fun, and successful experimentation is easily achieved. Maintaining one’s undivided attention in video games is certainly easier than in other experimental environments. The use of a game metaphor has the advantage that it allows the presentation of complex problem solving tasks in an enjoyable environment, thus maintaining a high level of motivation amongst subjects. Besides, recent developments in augmented reality described by Nilsen have highlighted the motivational value of using game in HCI. Second, a game, especially a mobile computing one, involves participants in a context with a certain ecological validity. A game in public space indeed creates a certain kind of complexity with passers-by or real-world features. Another useful aspect is the fact that they attract “participation by individuals across many demographic boundaries such as, age, gender, ethnicity, educational status and even species” (quoted by Kowalski). We thus expected participants to have a higher level of involvement in a game than in another kind of complex task. However, these statements only hold for subjects that find such games enjoyable, those with little interest in games can fail to engage with the game, finding both the task and the interface difficult and confusing. Therefore, we chose to design simple games to avoid failures and misunderstandings.

What is intriguing is that psychologists often use virtual environments as a way to study phenomenon in physical space that can be difficult to explore. Virtual environments are then used as a substitute, which draws questions concerning the transfer of results from virtual environments to the physical. As described in a paper by Yvonne Slangen de Kort, this is not trivial:

"Whether research in VEs will – to a smaller or larger degree – substitute for research in the real world remains to be seen and will definitely require significant progress in technology and a more thorough understanding of the human factors issues involved. However, the fact that VR-technology has already been embraced by large numbers of professionals in design, urgently calls for research to increase our understanding of person-environment transactions in virtual worlds. The need for more research that addresses applications of perceptual simulations in general and related questions of validity and reliability has been stressed ever since the emergence of environmental simulation as a research paradigm."

Chronotopic visualizations: representing traces of people in spatial environments

Reading the newsletter of the french consulting group Chronos, I ran across a term used by Bruno Marzloff that I found intriguing: the concept of "chronotope" defined in Wikipedia as:

"The Russian philologist and literary philosopher M.M. Bakhtin used the term chronotope to designate the spatio-temporal matrix which governs the base condition of all narratives and other linguistic acts. The term itself can be literally translated as "time-space" (...) the chronotope is 'a unit of analysis for studying language according to the ratio and characteristics of the temporal and spatial categories represented in that language'. Specific chronotopes are said to correspond to particular genres, or relatively stable ways of speaking, which themselves represent particular worldviews or ideologies. To this extent, a chronotope is both a cognitive concept and a narrative feature of language."

It seems that this concept if more about narrative and literature analysis but I found it quite relevant when thinking about the evolution of location-based services. Five years ago, location-based services was all about "annotating places" or having "location-based buddy-finder", a more distinctive line of research is now gaining more and more weight: the collection and representation of traces left by people in space through technologies. Will be word "chronotope" be pertinent to refer to these visualizations?

Two examples of "would-be" chronotopic visualization that I find intriguing and relevant (among others):

Sashay (by Eric Paulos et al.):

"Sashay is a mobile phone application that leverages the fact that every fixed mobile phone cell tower transmits a unique ID that can be read within the phone’s software. As a user moves throughout an urban landscape this “cell ID” changes. Sashay keeps track of the temporal patterns, history, and adjacencies of these cell encounters to help it build a visualization of connected “places”. (...) The value of Sashay is not in helping you navigate or realize that you are in downtown Austin or at a park in Boston. It is meant to explicitly remove such labeling and leave only an intentionally skeletal sketch of a person’s personal patterns across a city, leaving the individual to wonder and construct their own narrative and meaning. The temptation to build a labeled map is so compelling to many researchers that we are reiterating and advocating the extraordinary value of keeping such visualizations free from literal place labelings."

Real Time Rome by Senseable City

"Real Time Rome is the MIT SENSEable City Lab’s contribution to the 2006 Venice Biennale, directed by professor Richard Burdett. The project aggregated data from cell phones (obtained using Telecom Italia's innovative Lochness platform), buses and taxis in Rome to better understand urban dynamics in real time. By revealing the pulse of the city, the project aims to show how technology can help individuals make more informed decisions about their environment. In the long run, will it be possible to reduce the inefficiencies of present day urban systems and open the way to a more sustainable urban future?"

Why do I blog this? what I find interesting here, more my researcher's POV is the new affordance created by these type of information. It's less about a direct use of space but rather the availability of traces that can be employed to represent city usage or life pattern at a meta level. What would be these new affordances? Of course, lots of emphasis has been put on social navigation ("navigation towards a cluster of people or navigation because other people have looked at something") but how to go beyond that? - make explicit phenomenon that are invisible (lots of projects are about pollution measures) - use these data for urban planning and architecture, to understand "usage of city". I am wondering about how this would benefit to that crowd (that's why I am now working in an architecture lab). See for example Fabien's project for that matter: he investigates spatio-temporal patterns of pictures uploaded on Flickr. - give users some feedback about their activities, closing the control loop as in the Wikicity project (possibly to "empower users, make them in control of their environment"). - create new services based on this information - ...

Spotting high buildings through GPS viz

Reading Stamen's work about cab spots with Eddie Elliott. They actually used the Cabspotting API to produce high-res long-term point maps of San Francisco with cab GPS lcoations. Part of the result description attracted my attention:

"downtown buildings are so high and close together that GPS signals can't make it down to the ground with very much accuracy, bounce around off the glass and steel, and give "bad" results. Fair enough; downtown's not so accurate. But what it means in terms of urban area chartings, where cabs tend to stay in very narrow street slots, is that you can use a visualization like this to tell immediately where the high buildings are by the degree of fuzziness in the map, and if you mapped the height of the buildings over this image, they'd probably overlap prety much one-to-one. (...) you and I live in a world where normal people can look at complex data visualizations of urban environments, notice anomalies in the display, go to the web to find information about where that place is, and then make pretty good guesses as to why the data is showing up the way it is. It needs smart people with some non-trivial technical knowhow to make these particular views on it possible, sure. But once that's done, there's a very quick path available to free information that can be used to reinforce, disprove, or generally poke at the way that the world is, and why it is that way, and it's fluid and easy and you can start asking real questions very quickly.

I think this is a new thing."

Why do I blog this? documenting new processes about the implications of urban visualizations when discussing in a bar with Fabien.

Virtual space evolution according to Korean developer Jake Song

(cross-posted at Terra Nova) Last month, I had the pleasure to co-organize a small event in Seoul about digital and physical space, and how technologies reshape them. One of the speaker, Jake Song gave an interesting talk about the evolution of "virtual space" in multi-player games. A South Korean programmer, regarded as one of the greatest game developers in Korea, Jake is one the of the creator of Lineage and is now CEO of XL Games.

He started by describing text MUDs (1978), in which 100 to 200 concurrent players wandered around virtual places in the form of interconnected rooms. He described to what extent today’s MMORPG inherits most of its design (chat, emote, social structure, etc) but more interestingly pointed out how MUD space was "not correct in 2D sense" using the following schema:

The next step corresponded to 2D MMORPG such as Lineage or Ultima Online, which involved 3000~5000 concurrent players per world. Due to the technical impossibility to have everyone in the same place, there are "parallel universes. As opposed to MUDs, space in geographically correct and as he showed with exampled, players approximately needed about 2 hours from end to end by walking. Through various examples, he showed how buildings are smaller than real world and the necessity to have fast transportation methods (horses, teleportation, etc.)

Then, with 3D MMORPG like EverQuest, Lineage II or WoW, game space is designed for 2000~3000 concurrent players. Compared to 2D MMORPG, the number of concurrent players are reduced somewhat because server has to handle more complex 3D data. The game space generally corresponds to 20 × 20 km in size and transportation methods are needed more than ever (mounts, flying mounts, teleportation). Level design included place utility buildings for players to access conveniently. Shops, banks, etc can be placed far from each other to make players feel the city big, but it will make players inconvenient (" Down time means idle time such like staying in town, moving to other place, etc."). The virtual environment is large enough to feel like the real world and is similar enough to use common sense to navigate.

He concluded with the challenges: the difficulty to have larger game world, the possibility to have user-generated content (to populate worlds), the difficulty to have "one big world" and the ever-growing inclusion of environmental change (weather changing accordingly with weather feeds), evolution over time (deformable terrain destructible building, changing forest, buildings turned into ruins, etc.

So, down the road, the main issues are:

• geographical correctness: should the system looks and behave like a real-life equivalent (which somehwat connects to the work of Harry Drew).
• given that geographical correctness is now common, time and transportation is an issue: it takes time to go from A to B and transportation systems must be designed (teleportation, flying in Second Life).
• presence of concurrent players.
• presence of "places" with functional capabilities (communication, trading).

Although this may look obvious to many reader, this description if interesting from the research point of view (as well as to have the developers' opinion). In my case, this is important for my research about how location-awareness interfaces can convey information about people's whereabouts in digital spaces. Given the differences to represent space, there are some implications in the way location-awareness tools can be designed. More about this topic later.

Pervasive gaming, laser-games and the "skatepark" model

Last week at PicNic, during the very interesting panel that I participated in, a question from the audience sparked some discussion among us. The attendee slightly complained about the fact that Fabien or myself were a bit too pessimistic about pervasive gaming. Our two presentations, although very different posited that ubiquitous/pervasive computing was difficult to achieve for infrastructure/technical reasons... which leads to user experience issues. The discussion then shifted to "what's the target of pervasive gaming?", I answered that before thinking about a target, one should find the "settings" or context in which pervasive gaming can work. I don't know remember how I phrased the following, so let's see what Tom Hume transcribed it: "It's a bit like laser games, requiring a place with a specific infrastructure. My fear is that it could be turned into theme parks. It might be designed for specific targets or niches".

I tried to elaborate more what I have in mind and think that there are indeed different models of location-based games.

The first one is a bit too utopian: it's thinking that technologies are seamless, hardware and software robust and that no problem occur. In that case, one can envision über-cool location-based networked games running on cell phones everywhere everytime. Although this seems unlikely, one can at least think about this possibility.

At the end of the spectrum, I mention the worse-case scenario: the "laser-game" model in which the game can only be played in a specific time and place. This is what happened in planned games or exhibits (see for example what Blast Theory did with Can You See Me Now?): in this case the game was played in various cities, controlled by the game designers. One can also think about fixed places, as with laser-games, in which horde of players would come and play.

A mid-point on this spectrum would be to have an approach to combine the two. And I quite like the skateboard metaphor for that matter. You can do skateboard freely in lots of places (streets, parking, etc.) and also go to skateparks. In the former, the infrastructure of the everyday environment constrain the skateboarding tricks whereas in the latter the skatepark design is meant to allow certain tricks. What is interesting as well is that in street skating, there is a pleasure associated in finding nice and relevant spots, whereas in skateparks, things are more under controlled.

So, to get back to the topic at hands here, what would be the equivalent if the skateboard practice with regards to pervasive gaming? I think it may corresponds to designing for both targets in minds: both the daily and everyday environment (with its constraints, problems, issues) and for the "laser-park" equivalent in which the control of certain parameters would allow to go beyond the daily environment. And what would be a good candidate (as a device) for that? What corresponds to the skateboard?

Picture taken in Lyon, last month.

Why do I blog this? quick thoughts to be re-used in the future.

Questioning the TomTom effect(s)

A quite interesting session at the Association of American Geographers Annual Conference: Situating Sat Nav: Questioning the TomTom Effect (transferred to me by Fabien). Organized by Chris Perkins and Martin Dodge, the session deals aims at questioning the social effects, cultural meanings and political economy of in-car satellite navigation:

"Comprehensive in-car satellite navigation (Sat Nav) systems have rapidly become affordable and ‘must-have’ mass-market accessories, advertised on television and the focus of ‘scare’ stories in the tabloid press. With their driver’s-eye position, dynamic maps and an authoritative voice telling you where and when to turn, these archetypal geographical gizmos depend on the ‘magic’ locational power of a cluster of unseen satellites and the global reach of corporations marketing the latest consumer fad. SatNav offers technologically sophisticated spatial data models of the world, but the technology quickly sinks into taken-for-granted everyday driving practices, such that its social and political significance is hard to assess. The gadgets themselves take space on the dashboard and windscreens, but also make new senses of space for the driver, well beyond the car. What exactly is the nature of this TomTom effect? "

Why do I blog this? it seems it's too late to submit something there but it connects with my interest in studying the user experience of location-aware technologies. My PhD research addressed the socio-cognitive implications of mutual-location awareness. How this connects to the present session? The results from my dissertation would be interesting to discuss in conjunction with features such as TomTom buddies that lets you track your friends on the road. A friend locator coupled to a car navigation systems? What's new? What are the constraints? What can be the impacts? etc. Perhaps that can help "questioning the TomTom effect".

Trends in media consumption (Stefana Broadbent at Pic Nic 2007)

Stefana Broadbent gave a very insightful talk at Pic Nic 2007 (called "Trends in Communication and Entertainment"), in a misconception-countered-by-data fashion that I liked. She and her colleagues at Swisscom Innovation built a "observatory" which aims at following behavioral trends regarding communications and digital practices (through looking at 250 households/800 persons each year). They basically collect tons of data (timelines, diaries, how people fill their days, look at ipod content, make lists, check internet usage with people. This is then turned in a classic social-sciences way (although more descriptive than explicative) into pattern descriptions. Some resulting patterns (sorry if I miss all the data that support these claims, like countries of origins):

1. Writing communication preavails (over oral/mediated): people write more than they speak over the phone.
2. Written channels are used as background to other activities (like working), mostly to keep contact with loved ones.
3. People with digital video recorders do watch commercials, 40% of people with PVR or TiVO do not skip them.
4. On-line video does not substitute TV: 33% indicated that they watched more TV, 13% decreased
5. Concentrated viewing is short on TV (30 minutes) and even shorter on PC (5-7 minutes)
6. Lots of activities in front of TV: talking, eating, reading... internet, playing video games (portable, mobile).
7. Local radio are NOT dead, high level of consumptions. Less than 10% reports less time listening to local radio due to time spent on MP3 players.
8. Newspapers are not dead, at least in their "free" form: +12% increase in the last 5 years. They're free and they're distributed at the consumption points.

Her message was then that there is no substitution, everything is added: more devices, more channels, more media and nothing is thrown out. What happens is that every media is moving in the background, becoming wallpaper: IM+email are ran in the background, Music IS the background, TV is being viewed in background, Daily newspapers are read in the background.

What I really enjoys in Stefana's presentation is that she does not only feed you with plenty of data indicating new trends; she also goes deeper by connecting them to higher level issues (in that case, cognitive psychology). What does "in the background" mean, in terms of psychological processes: it means that media consumption is less conscious and that less attention is provided. This is done through the creation of routines: automatization of procedure. We then develop "media routines": Radio channel: listen to during breakfast / News show before going to bed / webpage news skimmed through when arriving at work / call to mother on sunday / SMS to say I'm on my way.

The problem, as she described is that the whole industry is going against this "routine" trend ("Bye Bye routines") through VOD, HDD recorders, ipTV, personalized radio/TV, VoIP or podcasts. As a matter of fact, users can only multitask if they are not required to give ALL their attention: choosing kills routines and require attention, it moves attention to the foreground and means commitment, and being in control means being focused.

Quotes from Pic Nic 2007

Some quotes heard at Pic Nic 2007, in Amsterdam: "At that time, Lisa was the female of Bart" - The Simpsons director.

"Games are about expectations and permissions slips: you give players the fact that everything is permitted" - Katie Salen.

"Lots of picture of the Wii are not picture of games but of players and their hands" - Julian Bleecker.

"How do we prioritize good content over garbage in mobile anotations? A classical question about user-generated content" - Matt Adams.

"The reality around us (...) the repeated module of doom: banks, dunkin donuts, nails, franchises" - Adam Greenfield.

"Play is about fluidity, work is about crystallization - Play as the negative space of work that allows work to continue" - Ben Cerveny.

The embodiment of space

"We cannot express its relation to ourselves in any other way than by imagining that we are in motion, measuring the length, width and depth, or by attributing to the static lines, surfaces, and volumes the movement that our eyes and our kinesthetic sensations suggest to us, even though we survey the dimensions while standing still. The spatial construct is a human creation and cannot confront the creative or appreciative subject as if it were a cold, crystallized form."

- Schmarsow, August (1994)

Why do I blog this? I quite like how that quote reflects the importance of the body in space: it's because we are embodied that we can create a spatial construct which corresponds to our reading of the spatial environment. An example? See this street spotted in Amsterdam below, if you're a skateboarder, this quote will make sense: you felt the curved sidewalk only by seeing it, feeling how this would be experienced afterwards with your board. And indeed, the affordance is to make an ollie and use it to jump.

Now, what does that mean for the design of ubiquitous computing systems? I don't have a unique answer but it certainly gives some inspiration about how to create affordances that can be bodily experienced through shapes, forms or representations.

Intriguing signs in Amsterdam

A short collection of signs I encountered in Amsterdam this week:

Is there a pattern here? No, there are warnings of course My favorite? certainly the "surprising toilets" one, with an awesome blue-to-red-meter visualization that I don't really grasp.

Why do I blog this? certainly material for saturday discussions about affordances.

PicNic Talk: pervasive gaming and pets

This morning, Julian Bleecker, Fabien Girardin, Dennis Crowley and myself participated in a panel called The Near Future of Pervasive Media Experience. Here is the annotated version of my slides from the PicNic talk (pdf, 9.5Mb):

The talk entitled "new interaction partners: perspectives on the pervasive media world for pets" was basically the proposition of bringing "new interaction partners" in the pervasive game model. A problem in that field is that designers actually took the technologies from ubicomp as well as the assumptions coming from that field: seamlessness, technology that is “pervasive” (everywhere, every moment)... BUT, and yes there’s a “but”, the world is not like that. The reality is a bit more like a pig farm: it’s dirty, messy, accidents happened, technology sometimes fails, interoperability fails, etc. and above all: there are other beings that humans and technological artifacts. If we think about with whom we have most of our playful interactions, it’s simple: the environment (parks, sport areas, etc) and animals. My previous work has focused on the environment, I am now interested in animals as a way to renew the visions of pervasive gaming. What about having “new interaction partners”, i.e. including new beings such as pets?

I then presented various examples that I already blogged here such as Augmented Animals by Auger-Loizeau, Wim van Eck's pacman with cockroaches, etc. as well as two projects I am doing with Julian Bleecker:

• we have a dwarf on World of Warcraft that is played by a dog (sensors track its physical activities). So this little character is running around and it has a very basic grammar of interactions in the game. What is interesting here is to study the implications for participants. There will be a new type of characters, which won’t be played by a human nor by and Artificial Intelligence (Non-Playable Character)
• A raddish toy meant to be employed by cats: when the cat touches the raddish, it sends a message on Twitter, when the owner sees it there, he/she ca reply and the toy would vibrate or glow. A two way relationship of some sort.

This talk was a little bit provocative and funny... meant to show that other sensations or desire could be mediated in a pervasive game. It’s not only about pets or even plants but also the weather, the environment, data feeds extracted from contextual events. The point is that to be rich and playful, pervasive gaming should benefit from other things than just human or computers actions.

Phone booths

... or how phone booths can be turned into bike parking lots... seen in Amsterdam today.

Why do I blog this? yet another usage of phone booths, at least in this case the phone itself is still there.

Physical instantiations of "Processing"

Concrete is a quite trendy store in Amsterdam, NL that sells clothes, toyz as well as designers' accessories. Yesterday, it proposed some work by Casey Reas (viz/image design) and Cait Reas (dresses).

Why do I blog this? what was intriguing there was the presence of the book "Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists" (Casey Reas, Ben Fry) that is, essentially, the bible to employ this programming language, which allowed the design of the viz on the wall and the dress such as the one represented on the picture above. Physical-to-digital-to-physical translation.

Trans-media gaming

Given that I am at PicNic, the "cross-media" topic is everywhere (from talks to random people met on streets of Amsterdam). Being interested by that topic as well, it made me think of this pdf that stands on my desktop for ages: "Transmedial Interactions and Digital Games, actually a description of a workshop organized by Shaowen Bardzell, Vicky Wu, Jeffrey Bardzell and Nick Quagliara. Some excerpts that I found interesting:

"Transmedial access should not be confused with what is currently labeled as “cross-platform” games, where a particular game is developed for the console, PC, and mobile. Cross-platform games, are generally variants the same game, customized for a given set of user inputs, but they are not a single game experience accessible from multiple devices. For example, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within is available on Xbox, PC, and mobile phones, but they are three separate games, and a mobile phone user cannot access her or his Xbox version of the game from the morning train. Providing this ability to access and interact with a game anywhere, anytime is the primary goal of TMA, (...) Although any game with elements of persistence or community-driven content will benefit from transmedial interactions, persistent online worlds especially stand to benefit (...) Transmedial interactions offer an infinite variety of possibilities for game design, as the following examples illustrate: - A collectible-card game, such as Perplex City which introduce players in an alternate reality game. - A team-based alternate-reality simulation spread across diverse “stations,” - Both Nintendo’s and Sony’s dabblings with GameBoy-GameCube and PS3-PSP connectivity - A guild management tool, where increased connectivity leads to increased social networks and a richer, more realistic experience. (...) Beyond the games themselves are meta-game content, such as blogs, guild pages, and social network sites, strategy guides, mod sites, and so on. Most of this content is player-created and accessed through different mechanisms. Devices or interfaces that aggregate meta-game content in ways that help create coherent, if not seamless, game experiences represent another potential area for transmedial interactions to improve gaming."

Why do I blog this? this is material for a new research projects I am starting about digital/physical worlds interconnections. I am quite interested in how to augment games with new layers of interactions (both in mobile and fixed contexts). But, as opposed to certain arguments in this paper ("Time investment for players must be reduced to achieve the market’s growth potential, recapturing those who quit because of demanding commitments in real life, and attracting those who never even made the effort to begin."), I am more interested by the new forms of interactions that may appear than by market growth or filling every human's free time with content.

Lying in design research

Funny highlight of the day: Dan Saffer's talk at Design Research 2007 entitled "How to Lie with Design Research". Have a look at the slides (.pdf, 9.5Mb) or watch the video. The talk is a funny description of tips about how to lie in design research. Saffer describes how to "Deliberately misinterpret data", " Willfully confuse correlation and cause. Pick the reason you like the most", " Toss out data you don’t like" or "don't be objective", etc.

Further out, I was very intrigued by this presentation because of his first point. He started the talk by showing picture from Japan, describing their implications and finally throwing possible design principles... and then tell the audience "All the images you just saw, I collected off Flickr in one afternoon. Voila, saved myself a trip to Osaka. I’ve never even been to Japan.". Which lead him to these tips:

"1. Don’t do any design research. Make it all up. / Don’t go into the field unless you have to. Why do research when you don't really need to? Most of the time companies are just looking to have their ideas validated. Why not give them what they want using carefully chosen photos and "stories" from the internet. TIP: Wacky cultural practices always impress. For "international" research, be sure to throw in a couple of unexpected cultural practices to make people feel that they've really taken the time to consider diverse perspectives. TIP: Don’t lie about the easily (dis)provable.

This resonates with the discussion about second-hand data, their values and their implications in social sciences (leading to terms such as "armchair anthroplogists"). It made me think of what Anne wrote last year about design ethnography: "If armchair anthropology was a product of colonialism, then design ethnography is a product of capitalism" to some extent.

Why do I blog this? Working in academia and thinking about this hints with regards to social sciences methodology makes it even more hilarious. He makes here a really good point about how user/context research can be abused and to what extent results are skewed to meet the needs of researchers, companies or other stakeholder in the process. As usual, it's not only fun but very relevant to see the mistakes, flaws and problems of a research process.

Alien architecture (pre-20th Century)

Alien Architecture: The Building/s of Extra-terrestrial Species - Pre-twentieth Century is a Georgia Leigh McGregor's Honours Thesis from UTS. It deals with what kind of architecture is portrayed by pre-20th century "extra-terrestrial literature". It's basically a study of architectural imagination based on textual research (". It includes both fiction and non-fiction and draws on a range of narrative and scientific works, including utopian, satirical, comedic, philosophical and adventure texts.") that takes architecture as a "tool for understanding" the relationship between ourselves and an alien species, "proposing that architecture is one of the means by which the character of an alien species is read." Few curious insights from the conclusion:

"Consistently the architecture of alien beings has been the architecture of humanity with the wholesale transfer of architectural assumptions. The application of anthropometrics to alien forms, assuming a relationship between dimensions of an extra-terrestrial and their buildings, was made evident (...) In one way the architecture of extra-terrestrial civilisation has remained the same but different, to refer to Ben Jonson’s concept. The conventions of earthly architecture are repeated in space though changing and transforming over time. The twentieth century would see an explosion in the quantity of other worldly literature and new media, with the advent of film and television, through which extra-terrestrial cultures would be portrayed. In the process many of these conventions would be reused and reinvented. Yet some of the most significant conventions arose prior to the twentieth century. (...) Extra-terrestrial architecture moved from representation at an individual level to a portrayal of society, as a whole, integrated with its urban fabric in this period. Architecture was used to create difference and to link to the familiar. Architecture and technology were confirmed as definitive evidence of an intelligent civilisation"

("A View of the Inhabitants of the Moon" - Illustration from an 1836 English pamphlet, publisher unknown - "Note the biped beavers on the right") Why do I blog this? my interest about space, technological implications in space and sci-fi led me to this paper. Lots of interesting stuff here (although it's more food for thoughts than material for my research). I quite like the analysis of the implications as well as the description of the connections between the pieces of text and their context of production (in terms of scientific discovery, etc).