In this hotel I was staying at, there was this nice map in the lobby. Someone told me that the hotel was previously an oil company that has been refurbished into an hotel and this map would be showing some relevant things for the company concerns.
Why do I blog this? I just like this map
I was not aware of this concept of “cross media entertainment” that I saw on the Mind Candy Company. Christy Dena defines it as:
CME is also interchanged with ARG (alternate reality gaming) by ARG practitioners. I see ARGs, however, as a sub-category, a genre within CME (of which there are many).
I employ “cross-media entertainment” in two ways: as a top-level term to encompass all forms of entertainment that are distributed across platforms, in a variety of ways; to encompass all forms of entertainment that have multiple units (eg: locations and producers) but are not necessarily distributed across platforms (multiple websites for instance). In short, CME is multi-platform entertainment!
A cross-media creator is a conductor of an orchestra of media channels & arts types; an imagineer, constructing fictional worlds that cover the planet; a programmer, interpreting conversations between technology and nature; a sorcerer conjuring awesome events even they are surprised by; an audience member that wanted more, and so made a pact with The Creator to change the world.
More definitions of the CME world in this wiki.
The other day, preparing the “place” planel at the networked publics conference, Kazys Varnelis sent us (panelists) a list of questions that we would discuss. I just pasted them there with some the answers I thought about during a jetlagged night. It’s messy of course:
1. What are three ways in which pervasive networks refashion our relationships to place?
2. Speculate on how networks that pervade physical space might knit together in differentiated ways our relationships to our social Networks.
it might make people aware of certain things… only if they pay attention to it…
3. What kinds of social interaction rituals are distinguished or made possible by the existence of digital networked publics?
4. Are RFIDs revolutionary or merely glorified ID tags?
they are promising:
- it’s still yet another card
- especially if everybody can have a reader (cell phones)
the RFID washer: jammer is more promising to me
5. What are some pedestrian instances of how networked publics matter vis-a-vis space and place?
some navigation systems (gps but I don’t really believe in that), urban information display (bus, metro, train, interoperability of schedule, reported to the public)
more interesting to me: GAMES: location-based games, mobile games, alternative reality games because it reshapes the way we leave the city (dérive/drift), can help discovering new things about the city
6. What about our need to escape from the net?
more important then ever, a crux issue
especially from the cognitive point of view (too much information, cognitive overload, partial attention)
“cold spots”
- electronic ghetto: for poors -> mike davis (blog)
- for the rich who can manage to escape from the net and who knows that they should do it: they are “netless” literate)
7. What is our relationship to place when we use devices that network us while we are moving (walking or driving) versus those that connect us to a network while we are relatively immobile? That is, has our sense of place become as fluid and mobile as our relation to the network?
the attention is different, cognitely speaking
for instance I am lost in a city and very hurried I won’t look at my gps phone but ask someone
our attention is still limited anyway
the device engages us with the place to a certain extent
8. More and more of the devices which network us are screen-based, with some visual display and an input device of keyboard, touch pad or touch screen? What do you think are the key reasons for the intransigence of the screen in our social practices of interaction?
that’s a pity and I don’t like that, my favorite mobile game device would have no screen
we’re fed up with screens but currently there are some tech limits, especially in cell phones regarding the massive development of applications that would use lbs, voice or tangible interaction, the industry goes where it’s easier: developing on-screen applocations.
but ringtones + the way people personalize their cell phones shows that there is a need to go beyond the screen!
the other problem is that the screen is the standard, the dominant design and it’s hard to engage users (I mean ALL users, not just early adopters) in other interactions
9. VRML blew it. Will there be a successor spatiality to HTML?
of course there are stuff like that, especially in the GIS world + also in the open cartography community
there are already few instances: annotating space with metadata; about building semantic models of places; about exchanging geospatial data in RDF, what Jo Walsh does
a simple vocabulary for describing physical spaces and the connections between them
there is also PML: Psychogeographical Markup Language:
PML is a unified system to capture meaningful psychogeographical [meta]data about spaces which can be used to compose psychogeograms: diagrammatic representations of psychogeographically experienced space.
10. Are MMORPGs just glorified MUDs? Or do they really portend a new
spatiality?
there’s indeed a big debate about it
raph koster talked about that http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/03/31/are-muds-and-mmorpgs-the-same-thing/
graphics are not always more immersive (uncanny valley!)
the level of information available is hugely more important in MMORPG
YES NEW spatiality
in terms of spatiality, the physical representation can create local affordances (topology)
but the main change is that there is an isomorphic representation of the character to the player: it’s not textual: then there could be Proxemics issue (Philip Jeffrey’s study), you can also follow eye gaze: COPRESENCE AFFORDANCES are very present in MMORPG and different than in MUD (it was more explicit: you had to type: look at XXX)
11. How will space and architecture deform in connection to place? Will
cities transform radically as they did during the development of modernity?
the end of cheap oil may be a more radical change
but as jeffrey huang said there are new places
+ electronic ghettos
+ disconnected ghettos for the rich
13. Is our culture of connectivity also a culture of disconnectivity? How much is the real world losing to the virtual? Is it?
THERE should absolutely be a culture of disconnectivity:
1) the systems are not semafuls, people should be aware of that, to deal with uncertainty, discrepancies (fabien’s thesis)
2) people should understand the value of being disconnected
14. What is more important today, the visible or the invisible? What is their relationship?
the articulation of both
the advent of virtual space made think that the invisible was important but it’s not true
15. What is the future of place?
more variety, more intricacies (a place is not just a café: it’s a café+ meeting room + working place…)
and those who will make the changes possible are not the one you expect: JC Decaux, bathroom facilities (geberit)… they are ubiquitous and want to take advantage of that
Today at the Networked Publics Conference and Media Festival, there was a very interesting panel about “infrastructure”. It started with 3 great video presentations available here (by wally baer, francois bar, shahram ghandeharizadeh, fernando ordonez, aram sinnreich and todd richmond). Each of them describes three possible network futures.
Why do I blog this? each video offers a pertinent foresight of how network evolved over time and what can be new path that are expected.
It seems that Google recently bought sketchup, a simple 3D modeling program:
Google SketchUp (free) is an easy-to-learn 3D modeling program that enables you to explore the world in 3D. With just a few simple tools, you can create 3D models of houses, sheds, decks, home additions, woodworking projects – even space ships. And once you’ve built your models, you can place them in Google Earth, post them to the 3D Warehouse, or print hard copies.
For instance, here is the University of Southern California (USC) Tower:
Then it’s of course possible to search, store/share those models here.
Why do I blog this? with Second Life, there seems to be a good trend towards this modeling thing. Clickable Culture has a good point about Second Life as a production tool: using the World Wide Web as a 3D design platform. I found intriguing the way virtual space and the real world can be intertwined by such practices.
Interesting chat yesterday at the korean restaurant in Koreatown with Julian Bleecker, Adam Greenfield and Raphael Grignani. Raphael’s working at Nokia Design (previously with the ever watchful Jan Chipchase), he briefly explained us what they basically do with their ethnographic studies (finding behavioral patterns and then trying to make them match with the company’s technology roadmap). I am particularly fascinated by the second part of the process (after the conduction of field studies, be it ethnographic or more experimental as in my phd research); that’s a topic I am trying to work on for my research and foresight work: what can be transfered? how? what would be a good design process (in the case the research outcome are design-oriented)? how this would help strategy people (in the case the research outcome are strategy-oriented)? Don’t know whether they can communicate about it but I guess there’s a lot to think about here.
The discussion also addressed the often emptiness of conferences presentation, which I sometime tend to share event as an academic.
We recently got the results from the evaluation survey of LIFT06. As one of the organizer I am quite happy with what people said. The response rate is significant (173 attendees out of a total of 285 (not counting speakers and organisers) completed the survey. This is a very respectable 60% response rate which conforms to an acceptable sample size for a population with a finite size).
The survey and its analysis has been conducted by Glenn O’Neil from the independent company called Benchpoint:
LIFT06 was assessed as a success by most attendees – 93% plan to attend LIFT07. According to the attendees, LIFT06 was successful in providing information and influencing their attitudes about emerging technology. One third of attendees saw the main benefit of attending LIFT06 as networking and are looking towards more facilitated networking at LIFT07. The quality of the presentations varied considerably for many attendees and a different selection process may be appropriate for LIFT07. In terms of the conference format, attendees suggested more interactive sessions and workshops around the conference. LIFT06 was successful in connecting people and provoking ongoing discussions amongst attendees and beyond the conference.
Why do I blog this? this push us to do something even more interesting next year. Our challenge would be to keep the ambiance and improve the interactions between people. This is the main thing we have to work on as shown on this pie chart (the rating of the social events is notable for the number of attendees that did not participate in a social event.)
As for the variety of feeling towards some presenters, it’s very funny, some people were really impressed by some speakers and other persons did not get anything from the same one; my feeling is that it’s good: it shows that we manage to bring people from different interests.
Last week, I was on a small island in Greece and this week in Los Angeles, two different ways of dealing with spatial issues:
Though empty on the pictures, both of them are taken by cars (which have different size anyway).
Augmenting the City: The Design of a Context-Aware Mobile Web Site by Jesper Kjeldskov, Jeni Paay in Gain: Journal of Business and Design.
The authors present “Just-for-Us” – a context- aware web site for mobile devices augmenting the social experience of the city.
Informing design, field studies of social groups’ situated social interactions were carried out in a new civic space in Melbourne, Australia followed by paper prototyping and implementation of a functional mobile web site. The produced solution augments the city through web-based access to a digital layer of information about people, places and activities adapted to users’ physical and social context and their history of social interactions in the city. The system was evaluated in lab and field, validating the fundamental idea but also identifying a number of shortcomings.
Why do I blog this? I am less interested in the outcome (the website) than in the process that leads to the design of such system. The gathering of information about people and the way they think in terms of space and place is quite relevant here.
One of the key findings from the field studies was that the physical space of Federation Square is divided into four districts each with distinct features and landmarks. Like many other places, the space has significant focal structures but it is difficult to find out what is going on behind the facades.
(…)
Another central finding from the field studies was that people typically coordinate meeting up with their friends in a highly ad-hoc manner. Typically, this involves a lot of communication negotiating who, why, where and when to meet.
(…)
Another finding from the empirical studies, which had impact on the design of Just-for-Us, was that places and spaces are dynamic and that setting matters immensely for the quality of socializing – especially in relation to its physicality, the presence and activities of other people and convenience in terms of proximity.
(…)
A fourth finding from the field studies of socialising at Federation Square, which had impact on the design of
Just-for-Us, was that people make sense of a place through the social affordances provided by other people; where they are and what they are doing there.
Yesterday at the student presentation (Interactive Media Program at the Annenberg), there was a guy who briefly talked about the use of Nintendo DS’ pictochat as a backchannel device during conferences. I found it pretty neat. Quoting his friend who gives the account:
The third best thing about the show was apparently the amount of Pictochat action going on in all the major keynotes. Of course, this anonymous metachat style leads to merciless barbs, such as when Valve’s Gabe Newell accidentally started talking about ‘beef’ (as opposed to ‘brief’) in his Choice Awards intro spot, to a chorus of Pictochatted ‘LOL’ comments. Next time, GDC, let’s see the Pictochatrooms projected on the screen behind the speakers – OMG?
More about what they do at the Zemeckis Media LAb in terms of backchannel in this paper: Justin A. Hall, Scott S. Fisher (2006) Experiments in Backchannel: Collaborative Presentations Using Social Software, Google Jockeys, and Immersive Environments. CHI 2006 workshop about Information Visualization and Interaction Techniques
for Collaboration across Multiple Displays.
A pictochat picture taken from the Wikipedia:
Why do I blog this? I find backchannel interesting, especially when using simple and ubiquitous devices such as the Nintendo DS with its simple pictochat interface. It’s a very efficient way to create and ad-hoc discussion. With this sort of things (as well as the Opera web browser), the DS is starting to be more and more relevant as a platform to do more things than video-games.
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