Current stuff

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(maybe a personal blogpost to keep track of current things I'm involved in)

  • Writing (and meeting people from a telco or) a research project in 2008 about the user experience of mobile gaming.
  • Meetings with lots of people in Paris: j*b to chat about our current projects (bravo pour la thèse), Bruno Marzloff to discuss about possible collaborations (which starts with a short text I am currently writing), Pascal Salembier to talk about our current research project/positions as well as his recommendations for a young researcher like me (he advises me to write a book about space/location-awareness/mobility/collaboration), Rafi Haladjian to discuss Violet's project, his talk at LIFT and possible collaborations, and the FING people because it's good to hang out there.
  • A talk at the Cité des Sciences for the Rencontre des Cyberbases, an event organized by the big french bank Caisse des Dépots. It's basically their annual seminar where all their teams have workshops and seminars about technological issues. My talk was one of the three keynotes; speaking after the director of this initiative and a member of the European Commission, I presented what is Ubiquitous Computing are some critical elements about it (mostly the talk I've given here). Thanks Sophie Bernay, Isadora Verderesi and Charlotte Ullman for the invitation.
  • Get back home and headed for the third workshop of the in-betweeness series at the Waag Society in Amsterdam. Somehow related to urban computing, space/place and design, these workshops focuses on places that do not fall into the classic categories (home, café, work) and can be difficult to define: public waiting lines, transitional spaces, toilets, etc. The point of these workshops is to look at how people behave in these places or how things are designed to understand the implications for the design of future technologies. Organized by Karen Martin, Arianna Bassoli, Johanna Brewer, Valentina Nisi and Martine Posthuma de Boer. Enjoyed the informal+ethographical spin+discussion at this workshop. The field trip dimension of the workshop was very pertinent as well as the discussion of what each group collected, what they mean in terms of behavioral traits, social issues, and design implications.
  • Preparing a talk I will give tonight at the University of Geneva about location-awareness and social computing to students from a master in IT. Possibly material for future talk at research centers for two big IT companies
  • attend an event in Geneva about FON: the Geneva city council to sign a convention with FON to consolidate the small existing wireless network available in some key locations of the city. Discussed last month with Jean-Bernard Magescas about this.
  • writing research papers on my PhD dissertation, the first review from a journal paper came and have two other papers in the process
  • write a chapter about new interaction partners (pets and pervasive gaming) for the near future laboratory book
  • work on a survey/interview about mobile gaming.
  • work on some presentations about web2.0 implications for the video game industry or cognitive sciences and gaming for a client and finish the slide for my talk about tangible interactions the European Game Design Conference

Eavesdropping as a characteristic

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Just ran across that quote by Nigel Thrift (in this paper

"I have what I think is a pretty good test of whether a person is a social scientist or not: do they eavesdrop on a fairly regular basis on other people’s conversations on trains and planes, on buses, in the street, and so on? If they don’t, I suspect that they really want to be a philosopher or an architect – or both. The difference is crucial for me. One kind of work (mainly) involves trying to figure out what other people are thinking as they are doing. The other (mainly) involves thinking. They are not the same."

Why do I blog this? maybe it's a bit of a stereotype (especially towards architects) but I find that quote curiously exemplifies the empiricist versus speculative debate.

Watch+RFID keyring

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Watch+RFID An RFID keyring attached to a watch. Usually serves to open doors. The owner told me that recently his watch ran out of energy, he kept wearing it because it was convenient to keep thr RFID keyring there.

The importance of the bracelet to hold other things than time. Appropriation and personalization of the watch

Definitely shows the interlinkage between physical artifact mediated by digitality.

Why video telephones never...

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Forbes had a good bunch of articles about the future lately. Among them, the on about why video telephones never took off (even though they have been pushed on the public for more than 40 years) is quite interesting. The author, Neil Steinberg describes some reasons ranging from bad phone service, need for big bandwidth and need to have people with the device as well ("To invest in a PicturePhone for yourself was about as useful as buying one shoe," notes technology writer Jonathan Margolis). What is interesting there is how Steinberg highlight the problem of "futurism" in this context:

"Futurism has a tendency to take the products of today and merely extrapolate them. Thus TV becomes 3-D TV, cars become flying cars and telephones become video telephones. Sometimes it takes the sanity of the marketplace to dash cold water on those technological projections. We were all going to take our nutrition in pills until someone realized that preparing and consuming food was one of the primary joys of life, and no one wants to swallow food pills. (...) future marvels of the past--food pills, jet packs, flying cars and, yes, video telephones--have an inertia that reality doesn't seem to be able to completely thwart. They manage to be both old and repudiated, yet somehow retain their cachet as attractive potential future wonders. Video phones remain a real possibility--if they wish, people placing phone calls over the Internet can already see each other using Webcams. It's easy to imagine this becoming standard practice.

Or not. Because no matter how cheap and easy pervasive computer technology makes video telephones, they still bump up against one central issue: whether people will want to see and be seen by those they communicate with. "People did not want to comb their hair to answer the telephone," said Lucky in an interview with Bill Moyers. Of course that could change, too, and wouldn't it be ironic if the breakthrough to popular video telephony ended up not being any technological advance, but a shift in human vanity. Once we stop combing our hair when we go out, then we'll finally embrace video telephones. "

Why do I blog this? critical foresight is about exactly this: understanding the reasons WHY something did happened or not happened, hence I always like reading about this sort of story. To some extent, "failed futurism" is one of my favorite topic.

Social value of location-based content collection

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In "Social Practices in Location-Based Collecting", O'Hara et al. describes an alternative approach for location-based technologies "by focussing on the collecting and keeping of location-based content as opposed to simply the in situ consumption of content". Their point is that collecting and keeping can have important social values over and above simply consuming the content in situ. They present here a user study of a "location-based visitor application at London Zoo where content triggers at particular animal exhibits allowed people to gather and consume location-relevant content on mobile phones". Let me go directly to the results obtained through qualitative analysis:

"Through the fieldwork in this paper what we have demonstrated is that over and above the instrumental value of location-based content, where the right information is provided at the right place/time, there are additional non-instrumental aspects ofthese location-based experiences from which value is derived. These have to do with the social motivations bound up in the collecting and keeping of content. This is more than simply the automatic logging of content accessed that you would get from the likes of the History section in a web browser. It was about the active construction of a meaningful set of the location-based content which made the act of collecting an end itself. (...) the role of the collection of location-based content in identity work; in developing a sense of challenge and achievement; in defining a sense of group camaraderie; and in creating a playful sense of competition among group members. Further, we see how narratives told around the collected location-based content over time imbue it with additional value. These narratives become part of the resources through which relationship with family and friends get actively constructed."

Why do I blog his? after the previous blogpost in which I complain about the fact that LBS usage have trouble going beyond past examples, this paper is quite refreshing in documenting how the collecting of content (tied to a specific location) have an important social value. It definitely shows the importance of location-based content, beyond the delivery model (and shows also the importance of time, a sort of asynchronous value)

O'Hara, Kenton, Kindberg, Tim, Glancy, Maxine, Baptista, Luciana, Sukumaran, Byju, Kahana, Gil and Rowbotham, Julie (2007): Social practices in location-based collecting. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2007 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2007. pp. 1225-1234.

Design for the Location Revolution?

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Reading Where Are You Now? Design for the Location Revolution on UX Matter this morning makes me wondering about the advancements in the location-based services area. Although I agree on the premise ("The true power of the mobile Web lies not merely in providing remote access to data, but in letting users view contextual information relating to location and interact with that information."), the rest is still a rehearsal of past arguments and examples:

"Mobile product innovator Apple showed in its Calamari iPhone ad how a person hungry for calamari can easily find a nearby seafood restaurant (...) Relative location data makes possible the first wave of mobile social networking applications—dodgeball,Loopt, and even the location plug-in for AOL Instant Messenger (AIM)—which inform users when friends or colleagues are in their vicinity. The value of this kind of communication is immediately apparent. I enjoy keeping up with friends and colleagues using LinkedIn or Facebook, but often wish I could have more personal interactions with people in my network rather than just relating in digital space."

Why do I blog this? I wonder about what will be the next generation of location-based services or how to improve the problems users face when employing place-tagging systems or buddy-finder. Although things have been achieved in the academia (and start-up projects), it's as if we had troubles going beyond the current state in gaming (it's all about treasure hunt and object collection), social computing (buddy finder suffer from lots of problem such as market fragmentation, low number of users, privacy tuning issues, etc) or navigation (the restaurant finder example never really took off). My point here is not to criticize this blogpost but rather to show that LBS innovation is VERY slow.

Podotactile affordances

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Two other uses of podotactiles encountered recently, two possible affordances: Cuieng thanks to podotactiles experienced this morning in Paris, France:

Thin podotactility

These thin podotactiles literally pave the way to a shop when exiting from the subway at the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie.

Another affordance of podotactiles is to use to avoid having stickers on certain surface, it's less common and it's exactly the same model as the one used to pedestrians stops on sidewalk edges.

Vertical podotactility

Why do I blog this? From the spatial/design perspective, collecting and analyzing these elements is interesting, especially when you observe people's behavior (rubbing sneakers). It seems that I start having quite a bunch of examples like this, it's interesting IMO to note the different affordances as well characteristics such as shapes (thing, round), length (short and discrete, or continuous).

Experiencing NFC in mobile gaming

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"Experiencing ‘Touch’ in Mobile Mixed Reality Games" by Paul Coulton, Omer Rashid and Will Bamford is one of these papers which stand on my desktop for ages, waiting to be parsed and analyze (among lots of others). Found time to read it today in the train (heading back to Geneva from a three-day meeting series in Paris), possibly caused by a meeting with Rafi Haladjian at Violet yesterday. The paper describes the user experience of mobile phones equipped with RFID/NFC to play different games that involves RFID-tagged objects. NFC stands for "Near Field Communications" and is an interface and protocol built on top of RFID. The games described in this paper are PAC-LAN (a Pacman-like game in physical space), Mobspray (a virtual graffiti system) and MobHunt (a treasure hunt game).

The most interesting part of the paper (wrt my research) concerns the results from the results. They found that the system usability (touching tags) was efficient and not prone to social acceptability issue. Excerpts from the results:

The users found the objects very useful compared with just placing an RFID tag at a location as they found it much easier to see and felt it added to the immersion within the game play. (...) Another aspect of the objects was that for PAC-LAN, which was played at a much faster pace than the other two games, the players felt that the game disks were an important element of the game experience and minimized the time they had to spend checking their position on the mobile phone screen. Having played many location based games that rely on purely virtual objects we observed that players often become completely focused on the screen to guide them and often become oblivious to their environment which both defeats the premise of mixed reality gaming and can also be very dangerous. (...) One of the other aspects we experimented with was related to giving the user feedback after they have successfully read or written from or to a tag. For PAC-LAN we initially created version that had either visual feedback, through a pop-up note, or audio feedback, by playing a short tune. The audio feedback was unanimously preferred as players were often running at speed and the audio feedback was perceived much less intrusive on the game and harder to miss

Why do I blog this? after a discussion yesterday about gaming, RFID and social computing, it was funny to get back to this paper. Some curious things to draw here about feedback and immersion, quite important factor when designing gaming systems.

Coulton, P., Rashid, O., and Bamford, W., “Experiencing ‘Touch’ in Mobile Mixed Reality Games”, Proceedings of The Fourth Annual International Conference in Computer Game Design and Technology, Liverpool, 15th – 16th November 2006, pp 68-7

User experience of automation on context-aware applications

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Is Context-Aware Computing Taking Control Away from the User? Three Levels of Interactivity Examined by Barkhuus & Dey is an interesting paper about the users' experience of different degrees of automation in ubicomp. They investigated this through a user study of a context-aware application in which 3 levels of interactivity are defined:

"personalization, passive context-awareness and active context-awareness. Personalization is where applications let the user specify his own settings for how the application should behave in a given situation; passive context-awareness presents updated context or sensor information to the user but lets the user decide how to change the application behavior, where active context-awareness autonomously changes the application behavior according to the sensed information"

The results are intriguing (please see the details of the methodology in the paper):

"Our study found that users’ sense of control decreases when autonomy of the service increases, as suggested by previous research. We believed that personalization would be preferred and would be more accepted than both passive and active context-awareness, however, the results of our study do not support this. Instead we find that people prefer context-aware applications over personalization oriented ones. (...) participants felt they had less control in the context-aware groups but still preferred the context-aware approaches (...) The incurred cost due to loss of control can result in users turning off a service. While the participants initially liked many of the active context-aware services, they might become frustrated by their perceived lack of control and eventually turn the service off. (...) Our conclusion is that users are willing to accept a large degree of autonomy from applications as long as the application’s usefulness is greater than the cost of limited control. "

Why do I blog this? This is close to the debate about automation that I described here. I am indeed interested in this differentiation between levels of interactivity and how people felt them.

Barkhuus, L. & Dey, A. (2003). Is Context-Aware Computing Taking Control Away from the User? Three Levels of Interactivity Examined, Proceedings of UBICOMP 2003, The 5th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, pp. 159-166. October 12-15, 2003.

Quick notes on Jan Chipchase's talk

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Watching Jan Chipchase's talk at Nokia Connection 2007 (see the podcast here), I tried to take some notes about the sort of questions Jan addresses related to the "material" he and his team collect:- find the lessons about why people are doing x and y? what motivations and apply it to other contexts - does results x and y apply to the consumption of digital content? or tangible media? mobile phone design? - what is the digital equivalent to x and y phenomena? - if you see that people use x and y objects (e.g. straps) what kind of services you can have with X and Y? - challenge people's opinions with baseline data - yield not facts but informed opinions

Why do I blog this? quick notes after listening to a podcast, what inspires me most in Jan's work is precisely how to go beyond the collection of "data" and what sort of questions one can address using them.

Doing research

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Doing research is facing this sort of email in the same hour:

"Email 1: Dear Mr. Nova, I have the pleasure to announce you that the Advisory Board of XXXXX has chosen your proposal ...

Email 2: Dear Dr. Nicolas Nova, We have received the reports from our advisors on your manuscript, "Blah Blah Blah", which you submitted to the Journal of XXXX XXXX. Based on the advice received, I feel that your manuscript could be reconsidered for publication should you be prepared to incorporate major revisions...."

Of course they're not directed towards the same publication but the effect is always curious.

Street complexity

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Complexity of signs #1 The complexity of indications on street pavement in Geneva: - Green is to represent tram paths but the information is for pedestrians, cars and bikes since the tram pilot knows obviously that he/she only go straight. - Red is to represent bike paths: useful for cars and pedestrians to know where NOT to go since it's actually the portion of bike lanes near cross-roads - White is to represent road/street boundaries for cars, bikes and trams (stop/do not cross the line) - Yellow on the street is for pedestrians (to cross the road + to show the limits of the bike lanes) - not present on the picture is also the podotactiles on the sidewalk, for pedestrians.

Complexity of signs #2

Why do I blog this? I find intriguing how the use of such signs for cueing behavior is more and more complex. See also the subway platform example.

Digital input on the street

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I love these street-machines that allow you to print your pictures. The best part for me is the INPUT system, look at that machine spotted yesterday in Renens, Switzerland: Interface observed on the street #3

2 interesting things: - Such a great variety of input (I only miss the floppy disc reader). One can also wonder if there are other street machines which allows not only INPUT but also OUTPUT like... going to a vending machine with a USB key to download TV series, prOn, games, etc. - Think about the motivations for people to actually go there and use it, instead of uploading the pics to a webserver and waiting them to be shipped. A truly urban computing node?

The layering of infrastructures in urban computing

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In Getting Out of the City: Meaning and Structure in Everyday Encounters with Space , Bell and Dourish addresses the different layering of infrastructures in any urban environments: it's physical (topologies), historical and cultural. On top of that, ubiquitous computing adds new infrastructural layers. This is made apparent by activities such as wandering around to find a Wifi or cell phone signal, or locate Mecca through mobile services. The central argument of this short workshop paper lies in what follows:

"spaces have structure and meaning for us in terms of our relationship to a variety of infrastructures of action and interpretation. (...) space is organized not just physically but culturally; cultural understandings provide a frame for encountering space as meaningful and coherent, and for relating it to human activities. Cross-cultural explorations of urban experience can draw attention to these issues. (...) architecture is all about boundaries and transitions and their intersection with human and social practice. (...) We need to think architecturally about the mobile and wireless technologies that we develop and deploy, the human side of infrastructures. (...) new technologies inherently cause people to re-encounter spaces. This isn’t a question of mediation, but rather one of simultaneous layering. (...) we are creating not a virtual but a thoroughly physical infrastructure, and we need to think about it as one that is interwoven with the existing physical structure of space. (...) there is already a complex interaction between space, infrastructure, culture, and experience. The spaces into which new technologies are deployed are not stable, not uniform, and not given. Technology can destabilize and transform these interactions, but will only ever be one part of the mix."

Why do I blog this? although very short, this article summarizes the main points about urban computing issues. They do set the trends that they will develop in further papers and it's relevant to see the main highlights here with concrete call for research actions. I am personnaly very intrigued by "the human side of infrastructures" and the hybridation of these spaces.

Bell, G. and Dourish, P. 2004. Getting Out of the City: Meaning and Structure in Everyday Encounters with Space. Workshop on Ubiquitous Computing on the Urban Frontier (Ubicomp 2004, Nottingham, UK.)

Space and place consideration in the use of public WiFi

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Morning read in the train: Of Coffee Shops and Parking Lots: Considering Matters of Space and Place in the Use of Public Wi-Fi by Alena Sanusi & Leysia Palen. The paper reports an exploratory about how the understanding of space and place matters in accessing free and public WiFi. The emphasis is put on the terms that are employed by wifi seekers and how they reflect spatial notions of ownership, legitimacy and hospitality. The questions they deal with concern the following:

"Wi-Fi challenges us to reconsider space and place theoretically and practically because it offers another layer for possible interaction in spaces, yet its boundaries are not well-articulated. (...) Unlike architectural space, Wi-Fi boundaries are not visible, as they exist in the airwaves. Wi-Fi signals can be sensed with certain software applications, but they cannot be sensed with bodily sensations. Like the wind that makes itself visible through its effects on objects on which it blows, Wi-Fi’s presence can be sensed only by seeing its effects in that space where Wi- Fi is available. We do know something is different about a space, after all, when a bevy of laptops are flipped open at the coffee shop we’ve just entered. (...) Does the space of the wired coffee shop (and the extent of the owner ’s rights) end at the walls of the shop, or at the furthestmost reaches of the signal? Do the social expectations of what should appropriately be done in a coffee shop – buy a cup of coffee, especially when the customer is going to use free wireless service – extend to the walls, or to the parking lot, or to the edges of the signal? How (if at all) is the Wi-Fi user to interact with the signal beyond the bounds of the physical space of the coffee shop? Does the nature of Wi-Fi create a place whose boundaries do not coincide with the place of the coffee shop? Does Wi-Fi create a place whose behavioral expectations of the people there are not the same as those of the coffee shop where it originates? And if so, what are the rights of the owner of the Wi-Fi signal beyond the spatial boundaries of the coffee shop? "

An example I found particularly relevant present a mobile worker in the US who has no time to return to the office and need to send off an urgent email. She drives nearby a coffee shop that does not secure a WiFi network, use their ample parking lot and find an open connection. She sends off her email and takes this as an opportunity to look for incoming email. According to the authors, this scenario constructed from multiple anecdotal reports shows the following:

"This example shows how Wi-Fi connectivity creates new opportunities for interaction with some people and deliberate non-interaction with others. Through connectivity, the mobile worker may be seeking interaction with the email recipient, but it is doubtful that she is seeking interaction with the owner of the hub. (...) When Wi-Fi extends beyond the spatial bounds of walls, then, how are we to interact with it in those overflow spaces? (...) After all, according to conventional understandings of place-behaviors in parking lots, these lots have been designed to be freely used by anyone with a legitimate reason to be there. However, she may be a little uneasy about her right to be in that spot using the overflow Wi-Fi signal, even though it may be entirely unclear from whom she could seek permission, and even though it is unlikely that anyone would challenge her legitimacy as a guest. What we would like to point out here is how intimately our mobile worker ’s understandings of space-based ownership rights and place-based expectations of appropriate behavior and legitimacy are entwined in her experience of using the Wi-Fi signal. "

Why do I blog this? at first it looks like something a bit far from my own research, but as I started piling up material about infrastructures (as a vector for the near future laboratory), it seems that this study echoes with some discussions that happened here: the perception of infrastructure and the corresponding spatial behavior. Of course, there is a lot more to draw in this paper. Having received a Fonera recently I am curious to observe what's happening.

Sanusi, A. & Palen, L. (2007). Of Coffee Shops and Parking Lots: Considering Matters of Space and Place in the Use of Public Wi-Fi. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (online first).

LIFT08 program released

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We presented yesterday the current state of the program of LIFT08 in Geneva. As last year, we will have workshop on wednesday (Feb 6th) and talks/discussion on thursday/friday (Feb 7-8). We will announce other speakers soon, with some potential surprises. Current tracks and speakers:

  • Internet in society -- With Jyri Engestrom (he just sold microblogging platform Jaiku to Google), Jonathan Cabiria (on virtual environments and social inclusions) and others
  • User experience -- With two tech anthropologists, Younghee Jung (Nokia, Tokyo) and Genevieve Bell (Intel, Seattle) and UCI researcher Paul Dourish.
  • Stories -- With serial entrepreneur Rafi Haladjian and others to be announced.
  • A glimpse of Asia -- With Marc Laperrouza, a specialist of new tech in China, Heewon Kim, a Korean researcher on teens and social networks, and others.
  • New Frontiers -- With "cyborg" Kevin Warwick, Henry Markram who's trying to simulate the functioning of brain cells, and Holm Friebe talking about new forms of cooperation and collaborative work.
  • Gaming -- With Robin Hunicke (who worked on games for the Nintendo Wii) on gaming trends, and others.
  • Web and entreprises -- With David Sadigh and David Marcus on how the web is reshuffling work practices.
  • Foresight -- With future researchers Scott Smith (Changeist) and William Cockayne (Stanford) and Nokia designer Francesco Cara.