Cannes Reloaded

Cannes Reloaded is a workshop project carried out by WJ Mitchell’s students at MIT in 2003.

CANNES today functions mostly as a tourist, festival, and retirement destination. But it has the potential to play a new, far more dynamic role. Its climate and lifestyle attractions, its connections to the film and media world, and its proximity to the Sophia Antipolis technopole, position it to become a leading center of the creative industries.
The focus of this workshop is on innovative development, urban design, and technological infrastructure strategies to achieve that goal. The recent Nation Academies report “Beyond Productivity” will provide a starting point. Cannes has partnered with MIT to develop an approach for a new high-technology neighborhood on one of the last available waterfront sites (more than 30 ha) near the downtown. The workshop will challenge students to develop specific architectural, urban, and technological interventions that will initiate beneficial urban change.

There are some spare document about it on the web like this analysis, some pictures, the user profiles and so on.

The participants came up with various ideas like (great development/concept designs about it here:

• Monitors in public places




• Media juke-box




• Moving images, moving projections, moving audience




• Hot spots, hot things (Plugged-in zone)




• Site-specific light installations

Why do I blog this? this ideas of an über-technopole in Cannes really reminds me the Super-Cannes book by JG Ballad. It’s interesting to see how this partnership occurs and what it aims at. It’s a pity the documents about their “study on inluence of wi-fi to the built environment and work-life scenarios” is not more developed because it’s definitely a topic I am looking forward to know more (Mitchell deals with it in his book but not that much). Any good reference about how wifi/cell phones/locative tech reshape urban planning/urban practices? Apart from Do Android Crows Fly Over the Skies of an Electronic Tokyo?: The Interactive Urban Landscape of Japan by Akira Suzuki, I don’t have so much things. I am looking for stories like in the XIXth century rich people lived on the second or third floor (and poor people on the last floor). After the introduction of lifts, rich people ended up living on the last floor whereas poor people lived “closer to the sidewalk” on the first floor…

‘Enhancing and increasing the gaming experiences in card games’ project

An intriguing project: Enhancing and increasing the gaming experiences in card games by Johan Ohlsson and Per Hjalmarsson (Trans-Reality Game Laboratory):

The primary focus is to find out how computer technology can offer new and unique possibilities, rather than just replacing existing mechanisms in traditional card games. The project takes an analysis of existing card games and gaming mechanisms as a starting point (such as for example the game Magic the Gathering), in order to create new game ideas. The idea is to develop two diametrical different card games in order to approach the question at issue. TRGL and Chalmers will act as a creative partner and tutor for the project, as well as contribute with technology, but the project itself will be carried out by the students. The project will be disseminated in new playable games as well as a paper.

I am expecting something interesting and curious from this.

Truck babies

People like Patricia Piccinni always wondered where “gargantuan trucks – trucks as big as whales came from, where they were going, and especially the relationship between the families of trucks that travelled together“. That’s why she came out with this Truck Babies project:

Slowly I started to wonder where their young ‘uns were. How did they grow up? “Where are the truck babies?”, I asked myself.

Why would someone like me see a truck as they would see a whale. (In fact, where would someone like me see a whale?) I am really interested in a fundamental shift of association that has occurred between beasts and machines.

What parts of the Truck Babies make you think of real babies?
Listen to the Big Sisters giving the Truck Babies advice. What kind of advice would you give to the Truck Babies? What advice might they give you?
Why are the Truck Babies driving through the mountains and across the plains?

Activity analysis of CatchBob!

I am currently brainstorming about the activity analysis of CatchBob!. My aim is to study how coordination occur in the game. In line with this goal I am figuring out how to represent the joint activity along the time. I would like to take certain factors into account (i.e. representing them graphically to have a clear picture of how things are going):

• 3 players
• time (using Herbert Clark’s theory of coordination and how time is important like for opening the joint activity, dividing the action into individual acts…)
• individuals actions
• information inputs (location awareness, communications acts, proximity sensor…)
• coordination keys: grounded information among the group
• grounded plan at the beginning
• …

I will use all the data extracted from the game to do so: qualitative and quantitative indexes can give me a clear picture of what happened. Besides, tt would also be interesting to do this analysis for every group in both experimental conditions and then see whether there are differences in terms of coordination keys exchanged.

A joghurt pot, 9115 kilometers and a lot of waisted petrol

9115 kilometer (= 5664.061 miles) is the distance a yoghurt pot have to travel to be manufactured: coming from Germany, criss-crossing central Europe from suppliers to suppliers as found by Stefanie Boege in 1992 (Wuppertal Institute).

Here is an interesting diagram (found here) about this phenomenon:

A “social” browser called ‘Flock’

Flock is a new browser that seems promising. This Palo-Alto-based company developed a browser based on Firefox with powerful social features:

Flock is a new browser, built on top of firefox. It is a functional browser with excellent features (including firefox features like tabbed browsing, etc.). What really makes is stand out are two additional features they’ve added to build social networking directly into the browsing experience: social bookmarking and a wysiwyg blog writing tool.

Flock has integrated del.icio.us-type features right into the browser. When you are on a page you would like to bookmark, simply press a “+” button on the top left of the toolbar and the page is automatically included in your bookmark area (called your “breadcrumbs”). You can also tag bookmarks, of course.
Additional features include your “watchlist” (people who’s bookmarks you would like to monitor), and “groups” (basically, defined groups of flockers linking to this category).
Breadcrumbs, Watchlists and Groups all have RSS feeds (of course).

Why do I blog this? I am looking forward to see more about this; I am very interested in augmenting browsing, especially with social features as we did with Roberto for our rss4you project (french aggregator). What is interesting in Flock is the interoperability with other applications like doing drag and drop Flickr photos into a post as described in social browser. However, calling this a ‘social browser’ is a bit like an overemphasis on the social thing, since social activities are richer than just tagging. It’s a good step anyway. I was also wondering about why developing a new browser instead of providing a plugin/add-on for Firefox; time will tell.

Technorati Tags: flock, social software, web

ActiveCampus: location awareness usage

W. G. Griswold, P. Shanahan, S. W. Brown, R. Boyer, M. Ratto, R. B. Shapiro, and T. M. Truong, ActiveCampus – Experiments in Community-Oriented Ubiquitous Computing” IEEE Computer, To Appear:

The UCSD ActiveCampus project is an exploration of wireless location-aware computing in the university setting. ActiveClass supports classroom activities such as anonymous asking of questions, polling, and student feedback. ActiveCampus Explorer supports several location aware applications, including location-aware instant messaging and maps of the user’s location annotated with dynamic hyperlinks of nearby buddies, digital graffiti, etc. This paper describes results on the use of these systems by several hundred students, drawing on observations, aggregate usage data, anecdotes, and the analytical perspective of Ecologies. Analysis exposes novel behaviors, the relevance of proximity in social computing, and a willingness to share location information with others.

Why do I blog this? the usage analysis is interesting:

we performed aggregated, anonymized analyses of our server data from ActiveCampus Explorer’s “launches” in April 2002 through May 2003. (…) We instead examined how many distinct people were creating content for each feature.

The top chart in Figure 3 [reproduced below] shows the number of distinct individuals who created each type of content during each month. The peaks correspond to the two launches. Generally, use decays at an exponential rate, a factor of two, over a month to month basis, until it stabilizes around 25 users. About a third of these are members of the ActiveCampus project. This disappointing outcome can be attributed to the ecological deterrents cited above.

Here are the most significant results:

Since one of the underlying principles of ActiveCampus is that location matters, we analyzed message sender and receiver locations. This analysis was limited to the 1597 messages for which both the sending and receiving PDA had been located by the automatic geolocation system within the previous 100 seconds. There are numerous reasons why a user might not be currently geolocating, including use of a non-located computer or the user’s choice to to hide location.

Next, we compared each sender-receiver pair’s average distance at the time of messaging to their average distance in general. The lower chart Figure 3 shows this relationship. For 473 out of 539 pairs the distance when messaging was less than the average distance. For 311 pairs the average messaging distance was less than 50 feet. This tendency held up when members of the project were excluded from the analysis, as well as data from the Explorientation. In short, relative location as a context seems to matter in community-oriented computing. Perhaps ActiveCampus
Explorer’s presentation of nearest buddies at the top of the list highlighted their proximity. At the shortest distances, the pairs may have physically seen each other in the same room (using IM as a back channel) or knew they should be in class together.
Finally, we examined privacy issues. Just 1% of users changed their default privacy settings to hide location from buddies, and 8.2% exposed their presence and location to non-buddies (0.3% more exposed just presence). In short, users seem unconcerned about location privacy with friends. A modest percentage will even trouble themselves to share location with non-buddies, perhaps as a way to meet people.

Relationship between game space and ‘real’

John Paul Bichard works on the relationship between game space and the ‘real’ as he says there.

I explore evidence spaces where generic game style scenes are recreated as real crime scenes; an in-game photoshoot of crime scenes in max Payne 2 and now in my research in a project with the Interactive Institute that sets out to develop games in the everyday environment

The project is described here
What if you could play a videogame that was ‘within’ the real world – if the objects surrounding you had hidden meanings, stories and relationships that went beyond their own history and purpose, beyond their everyday existence. What if you could play with everything, leave in-game objects wherever you wanted, enter game spaces through ‘real’ doorways, search your surroundings for the traces of someone else’s gaming adventures.

I like this example he takes:

…you have been driving the same way for the past 4 days so you know all about the mean old guy at the petrol station who won’t talk to you. Come to think of it, every gas station attendant seems to be hiding something – what if they are all in league with each other… what are they trying to hide? How do you get any of them to talk? Do they know anything about how Mrs Lundberg disappeared? You know that someone was seen near the railway bridge. What if you searched the bottom of the riverbed beneath the bridge, using the aqualung you picked up from the last village… Not today, as the car turns before the bridge, you’re going a different way into town. You see a phone box coming up on the right… the phone rings!!! … pointing your device at the phone, you answer it. A woman’s voice tells you quietly and deliberately that the person sitting in the back seat of the car in front is the detective searching for you… time to put on the sunglasses you found last week at the bus stop and what about changing into in the clothes that are sitting in a pile on the floor of the phone box…

BBC on Proboscis

(via the urban tapestries weblog) There is an interesting article on the BBC website by Bill Thompson about the failure of technology/application to establish a ‘wired world’. The author exemplify the approaches he estimates relevant (which I fully concur with) with the work done by Proboscis and their Urban Tapestries project.
I have to admit that one of my favorite part of the article is the one that describes Proboscis:

It was run by Proboscis, one of those groups of intimidatingly clever people who occupy nondescript offices around London and do work which nibbles away at the edges of our current models of the world until the whole edifice comes crashing down.

Why do I blog this? What I find interesting in this description is the balance between the fact that the future is invented their and how the buidling may look like. It seems to be slightly different from the garage metaphor to describe entrepreneurial succes stories. Perhaps that’s the point, such a place is the equivalent for R&D structure of the garage thing for start-ups!

Screen Wall installation

I like this ‘Screen-Wall’ installation at ‘LIQUID SPACES’ exhibition by Ruth Ron:

This installation challenges the conventions of public and private spaces in a museum. The ‘service’ or ‘private’ parts of the museum, such as the archives, offices or the guard booth, which are traditionally closed to the public, become the subject of the display, reversing the relationship of ‘watching’ and ‘being watched’. Influenced by the expending presence of surveillance in our daily life, we appropriate the panoptic gaze onto concealed parts of the museum to become the content of the exhibition display.

concept: The opaque solidity of physical architecture is challenged by multiple layers of the screen, the image of the wall and the transition to live video feed. The distance between remote spaces in the museum collapses, and digital and visual continuity is created. The network portal extends beyond the properties of the flat digital screen to become a reactive ‘window’ to unexpected places.

system: Parts of the gallery walls are replaced by small flat monitors. At first, the screens perform as mute, still images of their supporting walls. Once an observer draws near, the image transforms into a live video feed of a remote ‘service’ location of the museum, streaming via the internet.