Family names on door walls

Door entry seen in Brussels:

As the communication system is destroyed, people write their name directly on the wall... and one can see how names are updated over time. It's then possible to read the "history" of the building by looking at who lived there (and make assumptions based on the ethnicity of names). I would be curious to know (and see) who shade the previous names. What does that mean for urban computing?

(I removed the building number on the street, and some other information to avoid finding where this is located).

Talk at iMal in Brussels

Currently in Brussels where I gave a talk yesterday at iMal, a center for digital cultures and technology. The presentation entitled "Device art as a resource for interaction design and media art" was about the fading boundaries between interaction design, new media art and academic research. As a matter of fact, the hybridization of digital and physical environments (through locative media, urban displays, augmented reality or mobile games) is explored by a large variety of people and institutions. It's not only engineers and academic researchers but also artists and designers. The talk looked at why the projects from the new media art/interaction design/device art are relevant and what they tell about the design of future technological artifacts. Slides can be found on here (.pdf, 20Mb):

In a sense, this presentation emerged from the sort of things that appear on this blog, a mix of pasta (academic or R&D stuff coming from the research world) and vinegar (weirder projects coming form the design/new media art world). It was then about why vinegar is important for pasta. The presentation went through 7 reasons why projects form artists and designers are important, especially for academic researchers and engineers:

" (1) avantgarde: as they can announce things to come (new practices, new artifacts) (2) challenge existing practices (for example by highlight new interaction partners beyond the classical and canonical “human computer interaction”: blogjects, animal-controlled video games) (3) criticize the state of the world by making explicit invisible/implicit phenomena or certain aspects that are hidden (like pollution mapped on cityscape) (4) address issues in novel way that are not possible in academia or in private R&D: by using fakes, humor or non-utilitarian perspectices. (5) “breaching experiment”: When trying to predict or design the future of technologies, you can’t just rely on what exist today... you want “disruptions” as the literature about innovation states. So technologies developed in new media art / device art contexts are often DISRUPTIVE platforms that allow to investigate what changes. (6) arts+design do better to convey desire and emotions (and less mechanistic vision of humans who do not always want automation in their lives for example) (7) the design process: something is investigated in the construction of hypothetical artifacts, the design process itself is important and bring lessons. A totally different approach than engineering and academic research."

Thanks Yves Bernard for the invitation.

The amazing magic robot

ALWAYS gives the RIGHT answer!

Seen on a flea market in Brussels, this morning-

The E. about locating and tagging

In the last science and technology quarterly of the E, there are two interesting articles closely related with the hybridization of the digital and the physical: "Playing tag" and "Watching as you shop". While the former is about spatial annotation through mobile devices, the latter addresses locative technologies in shops. Notes about "Playing tag": the article is about the new "nirvana": "linking virtual communities such as Facebook or MySpace with the real world". The typical use-case they propose is the following:

"MAGINE you are a woman at a party who spots a good-looking fellow standing alone in a corner. Before working up the courage to talk to him, you whip out your mobile phone. A few clicks reveal his age and profession, links to his latest blog posts and a plethora of other personal information. To many, this sounds like a nightmare. "

. And the article goes by describing a new service called Aka-Aki which uses Bluetooth for that matter.

Notes about "Watching as you shop": the technology they describe aims at monitoring queue lengths, adjust store layouts and staffing levels or gathering data on where customers go, where and how long they stop, and how they react to different products (so that in-store designs and marketing campaigns can be improved). Some are even jumping on richer data acquisition processes: "These sensors recorded data on customer-traffic patterns, to which was added further information recorded by human observers. By comparing the resulting data with sales information, it was then possible to gain insight into shoppers' behaviour."

They obtain this sort of map, which is now common... as it is the sort of canonical representation of any spatial behavior analysis ranging from a supermarket to first person shooter games.

Why do I blog this? following the progress of this field for quite some time now and having written a PhD dissertation on the topic, I am always surprised by how locative or tagging technologies are presented. It's always the same story of weird use-cases (targeted to a certain elite or nonsensical to 99% of the population on earth)... and finally what we end up with is to have mobile social software that are (almost) not used AND monitoring systems that are more easily deployed in shops and supermarkets.

Warning signs using digital/physical hybridization

As it says: "If you pee here, please smile, you're videotaped... find the video on www.youtube.com" (seen in Lyon, France, last saturday)

Why do I blog this? using the power of IT network to prevent people form doing certain things (haven't found any videos of this on youtube (yet)). Surely some interesting material for urban computing.

Aquarium phone booth

Street encounter in Lyon: a phone booth turned into an aquarium (by Benoit Deseille and Benedetto Bufalino), as part of the Lyon Light Festival:

As the designers express it:

"With the advent of the mobile telephone, telephone booths lie unused. We rediscover this glass cage transformed into an aquarium, full of exotically coloured fish; an invitation to escape and travel."

Why do I blog this? an interesting way to explore how artifacts from the 20th century can be turned into other sorts of objects in the city of the near future.

Ethnography as Design Provocation

Going through the EPIC 2007 proceedings, I ran across this interesting paper entitled "Ethnography as Design Provocation" by Jacob Buur and Larisa Sitorus. The paper starts off my explaining how the use of ethnography in technology development has been limited to data collection, which led to isolate the researchers from design (which is R.J. Anderson's point) and a limit to the way practice and technology can evolve together (Paul Dourish's point). The authors advocate for another approach in which ethnography can "provoke new perspectives in a design organisation". They describe this stance through case studies of "design encounters" (i.e. workshops) showing how ethnography could be "shared material", "embodied in design" and a way to frame "user engagement". The conclusion they draw are also interesting:

" Firstly, to engage the potential of ethnography to provoke organisations to rethink their understandings of problems and solutions, the textual form may not be adequate. Neither are insight bullet points, as they submit to the logics of rational argumentation that hardly provokes questioning and engagement. Instead, we find it paramount to develop ways of engaging the organisation in sense-making through the use of visual and physical ethnographic material.

Secondly, the ethnographic theory building, though crucial to design, cannot progress independently of the prevailing conceptions of (work) practices ‘out there’ in the organisations – and these may not become clear to us until we confront the organisation with our material. Better sooner than later.

Thirdly, to move collaboration beyond requirements talk among the design team, organisation and participants, needs well-crafted ethnographic material to frame the encounters to focus on fundamental issues and perceptions."

Why do I blog this? interesting reflections about methodologies, a good follow-up to this other post.

Workshop on Pervasive Visual, Auditory and Alternative Modality Information Display

Pervasive Expression: Workshop on Pervasive Visual, Auditory and Alternative Modality Information Display is a workshop Oorganized at the 6th International Conference on Pervasive Computing (Sunday 18 May 2008, Sydney, Australia).

It's organized by Andrew Vande Moere, Kirsty Beilharz, Bert Bongers and Stephen Barrass and it will address the following topics:

"This workshop wants to bring together researchers, practitioners, technologists and artists from different domains, interested in the visual or auditory representation of information for users in the pervasive realm. We also hope to explore how novel visual, auditory and alternative modalities (e.g. tactile, olfactory, visceral) materials can function as a physical communicative layer that is truly pervasive. A few potential questions to be discussed in the workshop include: - How to embed pervasive expressive displays in physical reality and materials, such as artifacts, garments and spaces? - What are valid data mapping metaphors for expressive displays that are pervasive, and still can be intuitively understood? - How can the design of pervasive expressive displays influence the experience (e.g. engagement, reflection, persuasion, interpretation), conviction, attitude or behavior of onlookers, users, wearers or any person in its vicinity?"

Design as a compromise

Found this paragraph in Bill Buxton's book "Sketching User Experiences":

"People on a design team must be as happy to be wrong as right. If their ideas hold up under strong (but fair) criticism, then great, they can proceed with confidence. If their ideas are rejected with good rationale, then they have learned something. A healthy team is made up of people who have the attitude that it is better to learn something new than to be right."

Why do I blog this? I found quite interesting how this quote shows how design is compromise, it's also something I should add up to the post

Blitz game designers on the wii controller

An interesting talk I attended yesterday at the Lyon Game Developers' Conference was the on entitled "Creating Great Games for the Nintendo Wii and Its Unique Controller" by Philip and Andrew Oliver from Blitz Games:

"Even though the ideas are fairly simple to prototype, getting the feel of each control system just right was a challenge in itself. Detecting the correct motion of the controller had to be very specific and tested thoroughly as different people held the controllers in sometimes very different ways. The problem of how to convey the instructions for the controller types within the game had to be addressed. As we all know, nobody reads the manual, especially at the target age range. A series of images, text prompts and even animated movies were experimented with, all with different results. Testing and interpreting these methods were key to getting a successful title."

Some of the results they described about designing wii movements:

"- swiping is tiring and it's difficult to sync movements on the screen - driving using the wiimote as a steering wheel that you can push/pull to accelerate/brake did not work because it was too tiring and small movements were unnoticed... and they noticed how an abstract notion like accelerating is better conveyed by pressing buttons - people hold the wiimote VERY differently. Kids tend to hold it very loosely and do movements with large amplitudes whereas adults hold it more firmly and do not swing it away too much (as if it was a sacred grail or a TV remote control) - certain controls that require player to hold the wiimote vertically did not work... because people do not hold it vertically: people do not look at the wiimote especially when standing. Asking someone to hold the wiimote vertically is difficult because it depends on situations: sit at a desk, lie on a bed, standing, standing with friends. - distance between the wiimote and the screen was easily detected and that variable was very accurate to be employed in a game mechanic."

Why do I blog this? these few elements are interesting and echoes with the (private) work I have done about this. More specially it resonates quite well with the importance of context in playing with the Wii. I am currently thinking about a study concerning how people have expectations about the wiimote, how they understand its usage. It would also be interesting to observe how people naturally hold the wiimote

Fake roadsigns in Lyon

The good thing when having a conference in France is that I had time to wander around and dig up some of the weird things that you can find on the streets. This time, it was the following road sign:

This was part of a project called bopano organized by french design clique Kanardo (also see their blog). 105 fake road signs as been designed by 47 artists (in 2005 or so) and attached to streetside poles. The one I have found has been designed by NYC-based artist evaq.

Why do I blog this? In the same vein of this lovely heart shaped streetlight, this sort of stuff is interesting in terms of city arrangements; new sorts of things that can be announced in places where you wouldn't think about. To some extent, this shows street re-appropriation; how would that be if people were asked to design their own street signs?

Talk at the Game Developers Conference about gestural interactions

Gave a talk at the European GDC today in Lyon. It was called "5 lessons about tangible user interfaces" and addressed an overview of classic misconceptions concerning tangible user interfaces. It's actually a modified version of an earlier talk I gave last year at Nokia Design in Los Angeles; I added few things I've done since then. It's always interesting to give such a talk to different audiences; the way it it is received by industrial designers is totally different by game developers, fully different insights and discussions. The slides are here (.pdf, 9.8Mb):

Tangible interfaces hold lots of promises ranging from being more intuitive or realistic, being more appealing to users to enabling people to get some physical exercises in the process. User experience research about it shows that things are not so simple. This presentation discusses 5 misconceptions and why they are wrong. Each can be exemplified by arguments drawn from user studies, which are of importance for game designers: 1. Inert objects do not lead to tangible interactions or how non-gestural interfaces such as TV remote control can be gestural 2. Direct mapping between the physical movement and the interaction in the digital world is simple and intuitive or how direct mapping is not always efficient for players or accurately detected. 3. physical interfaces offer a larger variety of control than standard controllers, and are more realistic and intuitive": depending on the task, tangible interfaces actually do not necessarily lead to intuitiveness and ease of control. 4. The starting point of designing TUI is to look at real-life counterparts... so let's design guns for shooting games, a flute for musical games...: there are actually other alternative that are almost never investigated, taking the opposite direction of direct mapping. 5. Tangible interfaces are ubiquitous and allows mobile/seamless interactions or how tangible interactions do not appear in a vacuum and lots of problems due to the context can happen.

The description of why these ideas are misconceptions lead to important implications and design lessons about how to go beyond current implementations in video games.

The conference was interesting, sometimes a bit too techno-centric for me, I will try to write something about my notes from the sessions I found relevant.

The culture of mistake

The NYT has a piece on the "culture of mistake" that I found intriguing

"good grades are usually a reward for doing things right, not making errors. Compliments are given for having the correct answer and, in fact, the wrong one may elicit scorn from classmates. We grow up with a mixed message: making mistakes is a necessary learning tool, but we should avoid them.

The resistance to making mistakes runs deep, he [Mr. Schoemaker ] writes, but it is necessary for the following reasons, which he outlined in the article: - We are overconfident. “Inexperienced managers make many mistakes and learn from them. Experienced managers may become so good at the game they’re used to playing that they no longer see ways to improve significantly. They may need to make deliberate mistakes to test the limits of their knowledge.” - We are risk-averse because “our personal and professional pride is tied up in being right. Employees are rewarded for good decisions and penalized for failures, so they spend a great deal of time and energy trying not to make mistakes.” - We tend to favor data that confirms our beliefs. - We assume feedback is reliable, although in reality it is often lacking or misleading. We don’t often look outside tested channels."

Why do I blog this? all of this is exemplified a lot in the psychology literature but I still find this very interesting. Especially if you think about the context of technology design, these elements echo a lot with some problem in how certain technologies are designed. My favorite, and the one I try to face in my work with designer is certainly the "We tend to favor data that confirms our beliefs"... as user experience researcher, it's always a matter of challenging people's mindsets... which is often turned to belief confirmation.

Weird personas deck

Some weird cards that I use for [absurd] persona discussion. Each of this very nice portrait has on the other side: its name, job and description. Exercise for today: Try to design for "Teddy" an officer of the US navy (and try to spot him on these cards).

Phone directory spot

Spotted last week in Lausanne:

Phone directories without any public phone booths. The last remnants of a technological past where phone in public spaces were in booths. The directories there are updated though. It's no longer of a phone booth but a "directory spot".

Get "My Location" sans GPS

Wrt my research on location-awareness, My Location is an interesting new google beta application that find people's location of people using its mobile mapping service (even if the phone isn't equipped with a GPS receiver). A feature available for most web-enabled mobile phones, including Java, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Nokia/Symbian devices. What is interesting is the display of uncertainty (as a light blue circle) if you don't have a GPS-enabled phone around the blue dot (which corresponds to your GPS location). This uncertainty is claimed to be around one-quarter to three miles of a user's location. But advantages for this ranges from getting a location without GPS, draining less power than GPS.

This "My location" feature map the coordinates of the cell tower the cell phone is registered with. This way, Google taps in the large number of its mobile maps users who have GPS phones (not locked by the carriers) and it's a work-in progress process as described here:

"the database that identifies the location of a mobile phone is still under construction, so the service still sometimes draw a blank. The company expects to fill in the holes as more people use the service, Lee said. The tracking system's database currently spans more than 20 countries, including United States, much of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, the Russian Federation and Taiwan. It doesn't yet work in China or Japan."

Also have a look at NYT blog where the Google PR explains this a bit better:

"The story also talks about where “you are”. We don’t actually know who the person is or reliably where the phone is. We know that specific queries where the map is centered have come from a unique id number. Sometimes that map will be centered because that is where you are (centered yourself or by use of My Location), or it is centered because that is where you are thinking of going, or it is centered because you are curious about a location but have no intention of actually going there. From our logs, we are not able to distinguish these three very common use cases. Also, users have the ability to re-set the unique client id number as often as they would like. Finally, we do not know who “you” are and don’t have any way of finding out. There is no name, phone number, address, email or account login associated with this information."

It's also relevant to browse some of the blogs and the comments / reactions

Why do I blog this? interesting stuff about my research interests. That approach (although not very new) is quite interesting and it's intriguing to see how the interface reflects the different accuracy levels.

6 months in a design lab

It's been 6 months or so that I am working at the Media and Design Lab, a structure led by Jef Huang that sits both in architecture and computer sciences faculties. My motivation to join this lab, as a researcher, was both to work on architecture/urban projects and to learn more about design thinking. My background being mixed up (undergraduate degree in cognitive sciences/psychology, MSc in human-computer interaction in a psychology a faculty, PhD in human-computer interaction in a computer science faculty) I quite like discovering new territories, epistemologies, methodologies and purposes. Therefore, discovering and working with architects and designers (other than game designers with whom I work for 7 years now) is very worthwhile and relevant. Given my interest in "user experience" research (or behavioral studies/psychologie ergonomique/...), it's important to live with people who create, design, build and think technologies or services, especially in domains that I am interested in (urban computing , mobile applications, tangible interfaces, games).

Speaking about projects, the lab is a bit scattered as each of us have his or her own project but there are some common ones that involves everyone and most of the time we're required to give feedback on each others' work (be it about teaching or research). It's especially during those moments that I feel how we can learn the richness of multidisciplinary design work.

(Picture of a lab meeting)

Over time, I tried to take notes of the elements that I found interesting and that seems to be referred to as "design thinking". Coming from more structured research traditions (HCI, psychology and social sciences), it's pertinent for me to see the differences as well as the idiosyncrasies of that group work. Reading this made me think that I should post about it. So here are some of the elements I spotted a interesting [if you're from the design community, you might find that a bit dumb]:

The first thing that is striking when you come from more monolithic-science department is the use of artifacts during the project process. I won't enter into much detail about it (rather read "Sketching User Experiences" by Bill Buxton) but it's important to notice how artifacts such as posters, sketches, drawings, cardboard stuff are not an end but a way to convey and discuss ideas. See for example the huge posters below that we used for a project, it was mostly to discuss the evolution of interface design. Over time, there has been at least 8 iterations of different visualizations, all supporting the arguments. Hence the gathering of artifacts in sourcebook that can be reused afterwards as inspiration.

The corollary of this is the importance of prototyping and hence the presence of fascinating material all over the place (not that different from computer sciences department though):

Of course, this does not mean that the end product/report does not also benefit from this... there is comparison between reports/presentations that I have seen in some academic psychology/HCI contexts and what is in that community.

Another side issue is the importance of the design critique in the process, which is quite surprising you're thrown in the arena, having to criticize architectural projects you have no clue about how to articulate the validity. Over time, you grow and habit and learn what elements can be criticized, especially about how the design process has been achieved, what has been done from the starting point and whether there are flaws in the reasoning/building of the artifact.

Something that keeps surprising me about this is both the "tabula rasa" attitude in which, at the end of the day, the ideas and artifacts are stored somewhere and the next day starts with new ideas. I don't mean here it's a constant attitude but I noticed the tendency of architects to do so (without reinventing the wheel afterwards). This is linked to the design thinking/process that is very different from what scientific research in the sense that it's much more creative and based on defining different vectors, evaluating their pertinence, exploring others in a less incremental way than engineering or scientific research.

In sum, I am happy to see that and how I can adjust my own research to this. Of course, this is just after 6 months there but I really have pleasure to discover all of this and to compare it to other settings. And not only to scientific research, my biggest surprise (in retrospect) is to notice how video game design suffers from the lack of design thinking, how they're definitely closer to the engineering way of thinking (problem/technological solution) and that there is a whole set of things to apply there. This is not astonishing as the work I am doing for certain video game companies for few years is spot on this (user-centered design, ethnography, foresight).

As a side note, what I wrote here mostly emerges from my academic work. Foresight and research work don with Julian at the Near Future Laboratory explores that area in different ways.

Mapping the HCI communitiy

In "How do Design and Evaluation Interrelate in HCI Research?", Wania et al. investigates the relationship between two communities in human-computer interaction: those who focus on designing for usability and the ones who evaluate usability. Their goal was to discover how design and evaluation are related through an analysis of the citations in the HCI literature over a fourteen-year period in a database of over ten million documents (and bibliographic cocitation analysis). The result of their analysis allowed them to get this co-citation map:

Some interesting remarks from the paper:

"There are authors who draw attention to the fact that design and evaluation go hand in hand. But even some of those who do draw connections between design and evaluation seem to spend most of the time talking about them separately and then spend a short time talking about both design and evaluation together. (...) two orthogonal dimensions and these were discussed above. One, vertically, shows high involvement with end users (at the top) and low involvement (at the bottom). The second dimension, running horizontally, shows a strong focus on theory development (on the left) and a strong focus on system building (on the right) (...) While this analysis is clear about who is at the center, we must speculate about why this particular set of authors is at the center. (...) We believe that the central theme that ties these five authors together is a focus on the context of use of systems. Suchman’s situated action and Hutchin’s cognition in the wild have a clear focus on context. Fischer’s seeding-evolution-reseeding model of system development bases design decisions on studies of systems in their context of use. (...) There are distinct clusters here, but there are not clusters consisting only of design methods and others consisting only of evaluation methods. Rather, each of the seven clusters contains examples of both design and evaluation methods. What, then, is the glue that holds each cluster together? (...) To some extent, there is some mapping of problems to approaches, but it seems that the ties are weak. (...) The next hot research area will be the one in the center of the HCI map. (...) We predict, therefore, that the next hot topic in HCI will be a focus on understanding design and evaluation in the context of use."

Why do I blog this? it's interesting to read this sort of article to get an overview of a field. Of course it's a pity this only concern academic work (and not other interaction design actors) but only the academic system would allow such analysis based on publications and co-citations.

Wania, C.E., Atwood, M.E. and McCain, K.W. (2006): How do design and evaluation interrelate in HCI research?. In: Proceedings of DIS06: Designing Interactive Systems: Processes, Practices, Methods, & Techniques 2006. pp. 90-98.

A user study of Dodgeball

The last issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication is devoted to social networks. Among all the papers they have about this topic, there is one that is closer to my own research about location-based applications and services: Mobile Social Networks and Social Practice: A Case Study of Dodgeball by Lee Humphreys. It interestingly investigate the nature of interactions that develop around a mobile social network site such as Dodgeball and how these interactions might change the way users think about and experience urban public spaces.

The interesting thing in taking Dodgeball as a location-based application is that it's based on self-disclosure of one's whereabouts. Looking at the findings from this year-long qualitative field study is very informative. As the conclusion summarizes:

"The messages exchanged through Dodgeball did help my informants to coordinate face-to-face meetings among groups of friends. In addition to this functional purpose, Dodgeball messages also served a performative function by allowing informants to associate their identity with the branding of a particular venue. Sometimes a Dodgeball message could be interpreted as a member demonstrating a kind of social elitism. At other times, sending check-in messages with one's location to Dodgeball was a means of social and spatial cataloguing. In this way, Dodgeball can serve as a social diary or map. (...) Some of the social connections and congregations facilitated by Dodgeball are similar to those found in third places, but Dodgeball congregations are itinerant spaces for urban sociality. In contrast to place-based acquaintanceships, third spaces allow for habitual, dynamic, and technologically-enabled face-to-face interaction among loosely tied groups of friends. (...) A related implication of Dodgeball use was social molecularization. By communicating about locations in the city, my informants could cognitively map urban public space. In addition, Dodgeball users can move through the city differently, based on the social-location information available to them. If they know friends are at a bar, they can go join them. In fact, the more friends who check in to a bar, the greater the pull to meet up with them. In this way, Dodgeball use contributes to a collective experience and movement of social groups through urban public space."

Why do I blog this? being interested in my research in the role and affordances of location-awareness, this study is important as it unveil some usage of that information. It complements some of the other affordances described in HCI (I am currently writing two journal papers about this).

Furthermore, since I am interested in how such features may affect urban environment and cities, the last result is quite interesting. It's actually very close to other writings about micro-coordination. See for example “Nobody sits at home and waits for the telephone to ring:” Micro and hyper-coordination through the use of the mobile telephone by Rich Ling and Birgitte Yttri.

Humphreys, L. (2007). Mobile social networks and social practice: A case study of Dodgeball. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 17.

"TGV hitch-hiking"

This morning in the french news, a story of furious commuters, unhappy with the delay of their trains who stopped a high-speed train (TGV) in France. After few weeks of transport strikes and regular delay, the commuters on this line were so edgy that they warn the station manager that they would stop the TGV. As the article says, it's about "TGV hitch-hiking", a very discreet practice. Why do I blog this? in terms of (sub) computing urban or mobility applications would there be some interesting applications for transport regulation to think about based on this sort of practice?