Steampunk tangible interface for music

Being a great fan of all the electro-dub production of french label Jarring Effect, my interest has been drawn by a device designed for Ez3kiel's last show, created in partnership with Medias-Cités. That blogpost by Clement Thierry has a good write-up (in french though) about it.

Called "cycloharpe" (bike-harp), this installation is meant to allow the user to change the music titles of the band's new album. Pedaling and using old-school buttons on this Jules Vernes-like device allow to control samples through different melodies and rhythms.

Why do I blog this? just found curious this steampunk tangible interface to control sound.

Nomenclature of Wii gestures

Preparing my talk for the Game Design Conference about tangible/gestural interfaces, I ran across this very interesting Wario Ware Walkthrough guide by G. Louie (not only curious because of its ASCII layout). What struck me as very pertinent here is the nomenclature (the naming) and the description of moves. See for example this intriguing list:

"The Form Baton - The Balance Stone - The Remote Control - The Umbrella - The Handlebar - The Sketch Artist - The Chauffeur - The Samurai- The Tug-of-War -The Waiter - The Elephant - The Thumb Wrestler - The Discard -The Big Cheese - The Janitor - The Dumbbell - The Mohawk - The Finger Food - The Boxer -The Mortar and Pestle - The Diner"

With descriptions such as:

" The Handlebar "Turn the Form Baton sideways and grasp the ends firmly in both hands. Like riding a bicyle, perfecting this stance requires grace, steadiness, and tightshorts."

To do The Handlebar, turn the Wii Remote so that the 2 button is on the right. Place hands over the top so that palms are on the buttons. Uses for this form would be pumping and balancing. *Does not use remote sensor bar*"

Why do I blog this? what I find relevant here is the way people try to refer to gestures meant to control specific game interactions. Things get more complicated when the interface is gestural: how to name them? how to describe them not only to the users but in game guide? A solution as we se here is to rely on existing metaphors: type of activities (boxer), postures or animal that makes think of posture (elephant), moments (diner) or jobs (chauffeur).

Pumping like a shadok

As the Shadok say: "Better to pump even if nothing happens than to risk something worse happening by not pumping".

Why do I blog this? The Shadok was a french animated TV series from the late 60s that involved rough and stupid bird-like characters. One of the most curious aspect of this species is their absurd, useless and endless pumping. Surely invisible to non-francophone people, the series was a very weird mise-en-scène of various situations, with a whole world/vocablary/history/etc (see on youtube).

What is interesting here is the fact that this series set some standards in french's behavior towards progress, innovation or the passage of time. Quotes and mottos coming form the Shadoks are very commonly used in technological developments and projects as programmers, designers engineers often refer to them to criticize design. It's almost invisible to people who do not know them but a bit pervasive in the culture.

The Mobile City conference

The Mobile City is a conference on locative and mobile media and the city that seems to be interesting:

"Locative and mobile media can be seen as the interface between the digital domain and the city, bringing the digital world into the physical world, and at the same time uploading and sharing real world experiences back to the digital world.

1. From a theoretical point of view, what are useful concepts to talk about the blurring/merging of physical and digital spaces?
2. From a critical perspective, what does the emergence of locative and mobile media mean for urban culture, citizenship, and identities?
3. From a pragmatic point of view, what does all this mean for the work of urban professionals (architects,designers, planners), media designers, and academics?"

Why do I blog this? the program has not been announced yet but the topics seem to be very interesting.

Some urban computing projects

Last week I attended an interesting event organized by the foresight group of the Geneva State. The whole day was about the digital cities of tomorrow with an interesting set of speakers. I've been mostly interested in all the projects that speakers presented to describe either weak signals of urban computing or critical perspectives on that topic. Instead of putting on-line notes transcriptions, the list of projects is maybe more important to get a global picture of the discussion (mostly taken from Christophe Guignard and Bruno Marzloff's presentations).

Diurnisme (Philippe Rahm) is an environment that physiologically creates the conditions of night during the day. To some extent, it tryes to introduce the night during the day (Photo: Adam Rzepka, Centre Pompidou).

Jour noir (Philippe Rahm) is a negative urban standard lamp, producing the night during the day, physically. The lamp emits an invisible and cold electromagnetic radiation, like that emitted by the night sky (Photo: Philippe Rahm).

Real room (fabric.ch) is an experimental architectural project for the Nestlé World Headquarters in Vevey (Switzerland) that insert computer device in offices which can diffuse temporalities and places, and interface light, sound, heat, humidity or information (instead of displaying images or printing documents on paper). It's actually informed by atomic clocks, luminosity, heat, pressure and humidity sensors, distributed in a regular framework across a space representing the entire globe. These "RealRoom(s)", connected permanently, directly recreate in an artificial but perceptible way, a global "terrestrial spatiality" fitting to the scale of Nestlé in 2005 (Photo: Fabric.ch).

City Wall is a large mutli-touch display installed in a central location in Helsinki which acts as a collaborative and playful interface for the everchanging media landscape of the city. It displays photos and videos which are continuously gathered in realtime from user-generated websites such as Flickr or YouTube.

Dash is collaborative GPS device: an internet-connected automobile navigation system that helps user to "know the best routes around traffic using up to the minute information provided by the Dash Driver Network", "find virtually anything—nearby or near your destination—using Yahoo! Local search"> and "Send an address from any computer right to your car with Send to Car. What is interesting here is the social navigation of such a tool, and of course that it might be relevant for pedestrians as well (see more elements here).

Bruno Marzloff also mentioned how Toulouse-based transport company Tisséo displays travellers' faces on subway screens or how Twitter is used by the BART both as a service system (e.g. receiving updates about delay) and a social space (e.g. people sending messages to each others).

Why do I blog this? this list is definitely a raw description of the projects that struck me as pertinent during this event; they cover a certain range of the urban computing spectrum. The first projects a re definitely more about interactive art whereas the others are a bit more utilitarian. In both cases, they exemplify interesting tendencies regarding urban computing with different level of scales.

Encouraging uses of location-aware systems

Reading (again and again) articles about location-awareness for a journal paper I am writing, I ran across "The Carrot Approach: Encouraging use of location systems" by Kieran Mansley, Alastair R. Beresford and David Scott which I found quite interesting. The paper addresses the lack of understanding about why location-aware applications can be useful and what factors can motivate people to use them, through a case study of AT&T's Bat system. The use of Bat they're interested in here is the one of the person-locator application or of context-aware paging. As they describe, the system is quite efficient as an indoor positioning provider. Accuracy and coverage are excellent but they noticed a "lack of genuinely useful applications and a strategy for their deployment". they developed a classification of the intended users of the location system (in their case, the staff and students within the lab) with the aim of targeting applications at the needs of specific social groups. Using the prisoner's dilemma approach, they show which ones are relevant.

What they found is that:

"We model the utility to an individual of an application by the formula Utility = AU2 + B where U is the number of participating users and A and B are constants. AU2 is the Metcalfe-effect and B the single-user payoff. Applications fall into one of three categories: Type I : those useful to isolated individuals (high B); Type II: those useful to small subgroups (high A, small set of users U ); and Type III: those only useful when the whole lab participates (high A, whole lab U ). Many traditional applications (e.g. the “person-locator”) are Type III applications; most of the applications we present here are either Type I or Type II. (...) We analysed the recent decline in Active Bat usage from a game-theoretic standpoint and argued that many existing location-aware Type III applications have fallen into disuse as a consequence of the well-known Prisoners’ Dilemma. We described how this trap could be avoided if Type I or Type II applications are provided which are of immediate use to individuals and small social groups. Furthermore, increased overall participation has an overwhelmingly positive effect as users of the location system receive a community benefit from increased take-up, both from being able to locate colleagues more reliably and from increased privacy. We claim this principle justifies the existence of applications that have no intrinsically useful purpose (such as games)."

Why do I blog this? quite relevant for current writings and talks about location-awareness in mobile social computing. The game-theory approach is original and brings interesting arguments to the table.

What's interesting IMO wrt to person-locator is this notion of

"from a game-theoretic standpoint, this application may be modelled by a multi-player prisoners’ dilemma. In real-life each person chooses whether to wear their bat or not whereas in the prisoners’ dilemma each prisoner chooses whether to co-operate with the authorities or not. Both wearing a Bat and co-operating have an associated (small) cost. If everyone co-operates (i.e. everyone wears their Bats) then the whole group receives a benefit. However, from the point of view of an individual it is always better not to co-operate (i.e. not wear their Bat) while secretly hoping that everyone else does; this is said to be the dominant strategy. It does not matter how great the benefit (i.e. the size of the coverage area) is; if all the players are rational then no-one co-operates and no-one wears their Bats. Therefore coverage area and applications like the “person-locator” cannot explain the difference in uptake between the LCE and AT&T. "

Mansley, K., Beresford, A.R. & Scott, D. (2004). The Carrot Approach: Encouraging use of location systems. In Proceedings of Ubiquitous Computing: 6th International Conference, Nottingham, UK, September 7-10, 2004, pp. 366-383.

Implications for Design: responsibilities and framing

In "Responsibilities and Implications: Further Thoughts on Ethnography and Design continues to elaborate on the use of ethnography in human-computer interaction and the "implications for design" issues he addressed at CHI2006 (see my notes here). In the CHI paper, he argued how the use of ethnographic investigation in HCI is often partial since it underestimated, misstated, or misconstrued the goals and mechanisms of ethnographic investigation. Which is problematic since researchers aims a deriving "implication for design" from these investigations. The DUX paper continues on that topic to show how ethnography is relevant but not in the bullet-point "short term requirements" way some use to think about. As he says, "the valuable material lies elsewhere" or "beyond the laundry list", which is described through 2 case studies about emotion and mobility.

Then what should be these implications for design (voluntarily skipping the examples, see the paper pls)?

"The implications for design, though, are not of the “requirements capture” variety. They set constraints upon design, certainly, but not in terms of operationalizable parameters or specific design space guidance. What they tend to do, in fact, is open up the design space rather than close it down, talking more to the role of design and of technology than to its shape. (...) A second observation about the implications is that they are derived not from the empirical aspects of ethnographic work but from its analytic aspects. That is, the ethnographic engagement is not one that figures people as potential users of technology, and looks to uncover facts about them that might be useful to technologists (or to marketers). Instead, ethnographic engagements with topics, people, and fieldsites are used to understand phenomena of importance to design, and the implications arise out of the analysis of these materials. (...) the theoretical contributions that the studies provide have a considerably longer shelf life, and a relevance that transcends particular technological moments.

Is it a cop-out to say that what these studies provide is a new framing for the questions rather than a specific set of design guidelines? Hardly.

In addition, his discussion about the responsibilities is also important:

"The engagement between ethnography and design must be just that – an engagement. Ethnography and ethnographic results are part of that engagement. (...) I’d argue that it is no more the ethnographer’s responsibility to speak to design within the context of each specific publication than it is the designer’s responsibility to speak likewise to ethnography. Rather, the responsibility for ethnographically grounded design results is a collective one.

Why do I blog this? This is a topic Paul Dourish will address at LIFT08 in Geneva. Beyond that, this article echoes a lot with both reviews I received from academic papers (criticisms towards implications for design that are too broad and not short term requirements) and what can be observed from designers' practices at the Media and Design Lab I joined 6 months ago.

Closer to my own research, I like the way he frames this notion of implication; and indeed ethnography can bring more than sort term recommendations as it can uncover motivations for action, needs and deeper human rationale. In my research about location-awareness, we explored the differences between self-disclosure of one's location and automatic positioning; in this case, the crux issue was not to oppose the two sort of interfaces but rather, to show how each of them was different and had different implications in terms of human motivations (for example, self-disclosure of one's location is linked to communication intentionality).

Dourish, P. 2007. Responsibilities and Implications: Further Thoughts on Ethnography and Design. Proc. ACM Conf. Designing for the User Experience DUX 2007

J.G. Ballard and empty swimming pools

Reading Ballard lately, I am always struck by his fascination with empty swimming pools. See for example in "Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown" (1967):

"Usually accompanied by Leonora Carrington, he visited the Mullard radio-observatory near Cambridge and the huge complex of early warning radar installations on the Suffolk coast. For some reason, empty swimming pools and multi-storey car parks exerted a particular fascination. All these he seems to have approached as the constituents of a mental breakdown which he might choose to recruit at a later date."

And much later in "Super Cannes":

"Ten thousand years in the future, long after the Côte d'Azur had been abandoned, the first explorers would puzzle over these empty pits, with their eroded frescoes of tritons and stylized fish, inexplicably hauled up the mountainsides like aquatic sundials or the altars of a bizarre religion devised by a race of visionary geometers."

Why do I blog this? this is related to some current train of thoughts about representations of the future.

Well, maybe it's not important at all, and spotting 2 references to empty swimming pool may seen weird. However, in the context of J.G Ballard's work, it makes sense and I find intriguing this sort of recurring representation of the future.

Why is that so? First because it may represent the future of a distopyan future one would fear. Second because an empty swimming pool is no longer used by humans, as if that facility was left for other inhabitants. What remains is the empty infrastructure, with its shape and emptiness. I am personally more interested in this second issue and what it tells about infrastructures.

Assumptions of future studies

I already mentioned how "Foundations of Futures Studies: Human Science for a New Era: History, Purposes, Knowledge (Human Science for a New Era, 1)" by Wendell Bell was a relevant reference about future studies/foresight. One of the book chapter deals with the assumptions of future studies:

"

1. Time is continuous, linear, unidirectional and irreversible (...) the continuum of time defines the past, present and future.
2. Not everything that will exist has existed or does exist. Thus the future may contain things that never existed before.
3. Futures thinking is essential for human action.
4. In making our way in the world, both individually and collectively, the most useful knowledge is "knowledge of the future". In making plans, exploring alternatives, choosing goals, and deciding how they ought to to act, humans have a need to know the future and how past and present causes will produce future effects.
5. The future is non-evidential and cannot be observed; therefore there are no facts about the future. Nonetheless (...) it is possible to have 'conjectural' knowledge.
6. The future is not totally predetermined. It is more or less open.
7. To a greater or lesser degree future outcomes can be influenced by individual and collective action.
8. The interdependence in the world invites a holistic perspective and a transdisciplinary approach both in the organization of knowledge for decision making and in social action.
9. Some futures are better than others

"

Why do I blog this? these assumptions give an interesting frame as they give rationales and directions for future studies. As the author mentions, it's a selection of them that he exemplifies in his book in more actionable ways.

Urban decay

The last two days have been very fruitful in terms of urban decay. Yesterday, in Lyon, there were these fantastic two encounters:

And this the morning in Lausanne:

Why do I blog this? why being passionate about this sort of things? about creeping infrastructures? simply because it reveals interesting aspects of how we behave. Sometimes it's even more explicit with signs that express how this our "own decay" (although I am not sure about it). Also, I am find important to think about the history of these things. Every week I take that street in Lyon and encounter this bench which obviously was in its last stage. Every week I see this man sign that is disappearing as Marty McFly's hands in back to the Future. And of course, it's about chaos.

What about urban computing and decay?

New LIFT visual

The new poster design of LIFT is out:

It's actually made of 150 drawings from Gaël Vuillens composing a network of Lift people and moments.

The Economist about the future of futurology

Just found this article about "the future of futurology" in The World in 2008 of The Economist. It starts of by describing how the word “futurologist” has disappeared from the business and academic world, so has the so-called "futurology" discipline (although "there are still some hold-outs prophesying at the planetary level"). The new thing is rather about scenario-building and storytelling, which is not a surprise. What is interesting is the underlying reason proposed by the author:

"We can see now that the golden age of blockbuster futurology in the 1960s and 1970s was caused, not by the onset of profound technological and social change, but by the absence of it. The great determining technologies—electricity, the telephone, the internal combustion engine, even manned flight—were the products of a previous century, and their applications were well understood. The geopolitical fundamentals were stable, too, thanks to the cold war. Futurologists extrapolated the most obvious possibilities, with computers and nuclear weapons as their wild cards. The big difference today is that we assume our determining forces to be ones that 99% of us do not understand at all: genetic engineering, nanotechnology, climate change, clashing cultures and seemingly limitless computing power. When the popular sense of direction is baffled, there is no conventional wisdom for futurologists to appropriate or contradict."

The author also points out to some advices:

1. the next rule lays in thinking short term (“Microtrends”... "nanotrends")
2. " say you don’t know. Uncertainty looks smarter than ever before"
3. "for the budding futurist: get embedded in a particular industry, preferably something to do with computing or national security or global warming. All are fast-growing industries fascinated by uncertainty and with little use for generalists. Global warming, in particular, is making general-purpose futurology all but futile. When the best scientists in the field say openly that they can only guess at the long-term effects, how can a futurologist do better?"
4. "talk less, listen more. Thanks to the internet, every intelligent person can amass the sort of information that used to need travel, networking, research assistants, access to power"

Why do I blog this? quite interesting food for thought here, and I agree with the rules.

Wrestling with what the [mobile phone] platform actually is

Reading the notes taken from Raph Koster's thoughts at MIT’s Futures of Entertainment 2: Mobile Media, I ran across this:

"what’s kind of fascinating is seeing the wrestling with what the platform [mobile phone] actually is. (..) Broadcast? Input device? Truly interactive? Synchronous or asynchronous? (...) TV could have been far more interactive from an early stage, but it drifted into broadcast. The Internet could have been more about broadcast, but instead its DNA pushed it in a different direction. The reasons aren’t solely technological, I don’t think; some of it is network effects, some of it is about what businesses succeed early on. (...) Which makes me think that probably as we think of things like immersive gaming in the real world, ARGs, massively multiplayer geotagged environments, and virtual worlds on the phone, there may be a dedicated device that does it better. Most of these other examples have been of migrating capabilities to the devices. But the interesting stuff that will be the true core use of the devices will be the things that arise from the device — and it will be at its best when the other stuff isn’t there to serve as a distraction, in the way that the best GPSes don’t try to also be TVs but instead try to enhance the experience of geolocation."

Why do I blog this? in a sense, he summarized one of the main mobile application/location-based services question: "what is the platform".

Design research and social scientists

"Design Research for Social Scientists: Reading Instructions for This Issue by Hummels, Redström & Koskinen is an interesting introduction to the relationships between design research and social sciences. It's actually the introductory paper of a journal issue about that topic. A relevant excerpt:

"what determines what knowledge will be pursued within ‘design research’, is not necessarily what other research disciplines find to be scientific but what knowledge design researchers, design professionals, and perhaps especially design education find important, relevant, and even necessary for the advancement of their practices. (...) ambitions to completely fit within any particular existing framework is likely to be of secondary interest here although there are strong ambitions to build on more general ideas about science and research as to foster a solid knowledge discourse. Within the fairly new field of design science, design researchers are still exploring the boundaries of what science means from a design perspective; for example, some researchers consider their products/ prototypes as being a physical hypothesis and testing them as a hypothesis-generating method. (...) Design researchers do not aim at advancing knowledge in sociology or management science, but utilize well-established theories and practices from those disciplines to advance technological development."

Why do I blog this? coming from social sciences and working with designs led me to similar issues described here. The whole issue seems interesting to learn more about to find a common ground as well as processes that would be relevant for both communities.

Hummels, C., Redström, J. and Koskinen, I. (2007). "Design Research for Social Scientists: Reading Instructions for This Issue. In Hummels, C., Koskinen, I. and Redström, J. (Eds.) Knowledge, Technology & Policy, Special Issue on Design Research, Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 11-17. Springer.

The use of wax

A bench in Zürich, conspicuously rubbed with wax by skateboarders... reduced friction, makes is easier to grind the bench.

Why do I blog this? The tweaking of urban elements in an interesting practice to observe. What does that say about urban computing? possibly that a certain audience can modify the infrastructure they need to operate with regards to their needs. At the social level, the presence of wax on curbs/bench is also a trace of people activity, a social navigation indicator that skateboard hang out there. I recently wrote a short article about that topic for a trend book for JCDecaux (the street billboard/furniture/toilet/biking company) on cities, mobility and new media.

"Remarkable hope in seams and scars"

As a complement to the discourse about showing the seams (and seamful design), I found these lines by Anne Galloway very relevant:

"seams and scars point to where we have in the past made or become something else—and yet they also remind us that we can do so again in the future. If we treat them not as irregularities to be hidden but as indicators of our abilities to intervene in the world, seams and scars offer us glimpses of how we shape and re-shape ourselves, each other, and the worlds in which we live. (...) I find remarkable hope in seams and scars. But because liminal spaces, like all potentials, are also rather uncertain I find good reason to proceed with care. (...) Who is making the cuts? Who gets left behind? What goes forward? Who does the suturing and sewing? Has there been suffering? Healing? Are the seams ugly? Are the scars beautiful? What can we learn about ourselves and others by attending to the seams and scars our work creates and leaves behind?""

Why do I blog this? "seamful design" or how to reveal the seams/limits of technologies is an interesting proposal in terms of design thinking. However, what it implies is often quite difficult to conceptualize in terms of consequences. The paper provides some elements about it.

Galloway, Anne. (in press) “Seams and Scars, Or How to Locate Accountability in Collaborative Work,” in Uncommon Ground, Cathy Brickwood, David Garcia and Willem-Jan Renger (eds.), Amsterdam: BIS Publishers.

Tangible UI and Minority Report

In his blogpost about "unconscious gestures", at a certain point, Matt Jones has a good rant about the cultural ownership on the touch interface of the iphone. As if all the other products which use touch/gestures had been copied ("with pride"):

"That last remark made me spit with anger - and I almost posted something very intemperate as a result. The work that all the teams within Nokia had put into developing touch UI got discounted, just like that, with a half-thought-through response in a press conference. I wish that huge software engineering outfits like S60 could move fast enough to ‘copy with pride’.

Sheesh.

Fact-of-the-matter is if you have roughly the same component pipeline, and you’re designing an interface used on-the-go by (human) fingers, you’re going to end up with a lot of the same UI principles.

But Apple executed first, and beautifully, and they win. They own it, culturally."

Why do I blog this? speaking of cultural ownership, what is even more puzzling is all the press about the prominence of "minority report" in terms of interface paradigm.

As if every single gestural/touch UI that we have today have something to do with Minority Report, as if that movie taught people that it was where innovation in that field started. So you have newspaper article about the phone/table/display that-mimics-minority-report-gestural-interface. It's really weird since the interface employed by Tom Cruise et al. are very different. There is really something here about the normative future created by a cultural artifact such as movies and tv series.

Apart from that, Matt's also complains about the fact that what is pursued is more "deliberate touch interfaces - touch-as-manipulate-objects-on-screen rather than touch-as-manipulate-objects-in-the-world for now", which is a relevant remark.

Who need protection

Why do I blog this? this sort of element brings to some questions such as who needs to be protected? what object here is the most valuable? to whom? (Seen in Zürich this morning)

Electrical friday

2 encounters on friday afternoon made me wondering whether I should really pay attention to this topic:

Where the first picture is a book about studies concerning social representations of "electricity", the second is about an exhibit about "what's behind the electric power plug"

What I think about now when looking a these two elements is this quote from Michel de Certeau in ""The Practice of Everyday Life":

"Many, often remarkable, works have sought to study the representations of a society, on the one hand, and its modes of behavior, on the other. Building on our knowledge of these social phenomena, it seems both possible and necessary to determine the use to which they are put by groups or individuals. For example, the analysis of the images broadcast by television (representation) and of the time spent watching television (behavior) should be complemented by a study of what the cultural consumer "makes" or "does" during this time and with these images. The same goes for the use of urban space, the products purchased in the supermarket, the stories and legends distributed by the newspapers, and so on."

Why do I blog this? Electrical infrastructure and usage of electricity, an interesting topic for a cold sunday. The fact that I encountered these 2 elements on the same afternoon is definitely no coincidence, it's definitely that I have an interest towards a such topic. Should dig it in the future. Why de Certeau here? because it might be a starting point.

"The future is already there" and goldsmith

A very interesting corollary to William Gibson's assertion "the future is already there, it's jut not evenly distributed" is discussed by Bill Buxton in "Sketching User Experiences:

"we should not count on any deus ex machina. We should not expect any magic bullets. It is highly unlikely that there will be any technology that we don't know about today that will have a major impact on things over the next 10 to 20 years. (...) innovation is not primarily about alchemy. Rather than trying to make gold, it has far more to do with learning how to find it, mine it, refine it and then work it into something of value. If Gibson is right, then the innovator is likely best to trade in his or her alchemist's chemistry set for some prospecting tools, and learn about geology, mining, smelting, design, goldsmithing, sales and marketing, so to speak. (...) it is generally not the underlying technology itself, but its deployment and associated value proposition that brings us suprise and delight, as well as generated wealth for those who executed well on their insights"

Why do I blog this? I like the analogy with geology and digging stuff about things to come.