on holidays

nothing here till sept 4th

Experientia’s new blog about playful learning with tangible interfaces

Experientia‘s new blog about playful learning with tangible interfaces is there.

Playful & Tangible is about playful learning with new interfaces, particulary in museums and entertainment environments. It documents many inspirations and examples of playful and tangible interactions and interfaces, and has a strong interaction design focus. Most of the content is by Héctor Ouilhet and Alexander Wiethoff, who worked as Experientia interns during the summer of 2006.

Good stuff.

Futurology

Michael Rogers a MSNBC columnist yesterday described his thoughts after the World Future Society’s annual meeting in Toronto dealing with foresights and futurology. Here are some excerpts I found interesting:

Some presentations were quite speculative: one fellow describes neural implants that would rewire our brains to let us perceive things like a fourth primary color. (“Why would we want to do that?” one audience member wanted to know. The speaker explained: “Because it would be interesting.”)

Other presentations were serious looks at corporate future-gazing by companies such as Johnson & Johnson, Philips and BASF. It’s clear that European firms tend to be more interested in futurism — which they often call foresight analysis — than are Americans.
(…)
There was, however, relatively little focus on more negative aspects of human behavior, beyond a few sessions on the future of law enforcement and terror prevention. On balance, the futurists seemed to be an optimistic bunch, which may be self-selecting. If you’re going to spend your career thinking about the future, you might as well feel good about it.
(…)
in the end, making lots of accurate predictions isn’t necessarily the job of the futurist. It’s more the act of stimulating creative thought about the future that, in turn, influences how we act today. At the Toronto conference, veteran futurist Joseph Coates put it this way: “Being right or wrong isn’t so much the point as being useful. The ultimate purpose is to change people’s minds.”

Innovation niches, beyond user-centered design

In BW, an interesting article about next-to-be innovation niche: “What niche fields will contribute to tomorrow’s great innovations? Ecology, gaming, and social networking, for starters” by Andrew Zolli. Some excerpts I found interesting below… first a statement:

Wander the halls of any of today’s ever-multiplying corporate-innovation conferences, and you’ll find experts playing to packed houses, evangelizing the power of user-driven design, the importance of ethnographic research, and the value of an internal “innovation culture.” (…) Then what? To find the next deep wellsprings of innovation, you have to learn to listen to “weak signals”—fringe ideas today that will be
common wisdom tomorrow.

It also addresses some innovation niches:

Videogames have begun to outgrow their entertainment context and find new uses as innovation discovery engines. That’s because the agent-based models that drive games under the hood are becoming sophisticated enough to model real-world social, marketplace, and competitive scenarios.
(…)
Making the Invisible Visible: As companies such as Procter & Gamble (PG) and Target (TGT) increasingly look outside their walls for their next breakthrough, they must rely on specialized maps of their innovation networks. The fields of social network analysis and network cartography are rapidly maturing and allowing companies to visualize their customer base, their supply chain, and their field of influence.

Workshop about Mobile Multiplayer Games at CSCW 2006

Mobile Multiplayer Games: Designs, Studies and Reflections a workshop at ACM CSCW 2006 by Matthew Chalmers and Steve Benford:

A number of researchers have used mobile multiplayer games either as a topic of study in itself or as a vehicle for more general investigations in computing, collaboration and information. Set within the context of increasing commercial significance of both games in general and mobile games in particular, this research has used the energy and ingenuity of players to test interfaces, infrastructure and design concepts, and to drive new technological developments. Commercial games are appearing that take advantage of commodity mobile phones’ burgeoning capabilities for interaction, awareness and collaboration. In-depth studies of mobile multiplayer games are also beginning to appear in greater numbers, and growing experience of design and use opens up new possibilities for conceptual work on the mixture of media, people and environments that constitute such games. This workshop’s aim is a broad view of this young research area, spanning and connecting system design, user studies and theoretical reflections.

Why do I blog this? this right on spot of what we do; I don’t know whether it qualifies to be called “serious game” (i.e. using a game in another purpose than just entertainment) but that’s how I used a pervasive game to deepen the understanding of socio-cognitive processes at stake in collaboration. Don’t know whether I would have time (and $$ to go there) to write a position paper about that

Video games and innovation

the age has a good article about John Buchanan (professor from Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Centre in Adelaide). Some excerpts I found interesting here:

“The video game industry has reached a point where its success is strangling innovation within the field. Developing games is now a high-risk endeavour. The cost of prototyping becomes expensive because of the technology needed to build it. When interacting with characters in a video game, their behaviour is scripted and hard coded. Programming the behaviour (by) anticipating for all possible scenarios makes it very expensive. The cost of failure is expensive, we need to fail cheaper.”

His latest idea to keep costs down is game sketching, through which his team builds tools that are used in puppeteering to build a game idea.

“We use a puppeteer, an actor who sits in front of a computer and reacts in real time to what the guest is doing,” he says.

“People with a game idea can send us a script and we can play through the sketch of the game. The guest can interact with the experience of the timing of the events of the game.”

Telephone affordance

When there is no clear physical affordance… a metaphor can be useful:

(Spotted in Zurich today)

AOL dataset plots

Some folks already plotted stuff coming form the super-quickly-available-and-vanished AOL datasets. See for instance u500k.erinye.com, who calculated various indexes and plotted some data (below is one of them that I picked up randomly). If you’re one of the 10,000 users, this is a glimpse of your private life:

Kevin Kelly on “street use”

Following William Gibson’s quote, Kevin Kelly now has a blogpage about “Street use”:

This site features the ways in which people modify and re-create technology. Herein a collection of personal modifications, folk innovations, street customization, ad hoc alterations, wear-patterns, home-made versions and indigenous ingenuity. In short — stuff as it is actually used, and not how its creators planned on it being used. As William Gibson said, “The street finds its own uses for technology.” I welcome suggestions of links, and contributions from others to include in this compendium. — KK

Some examples (shovel pan and dashboard oven):

Why do I blog this? It seems that Michel de Certeau is very trendy lately. I already quoted Lucie Girard who summarized de Certeau’s work:

Michel de Certeau’s social philosophy was based on the notion of détournement and collage (…) What was at stake for him was the way people use some readymade objects, the way they organize their private space, their office, or their working-place, the way they “practice” their environment and all public space available to them (shopping malls, town streets, airports and railway stations, movie theatres, and the like). By so doing, Certeau focused his reflection on the ordinary “practices” of every man and woman in his/her everyday life.

Interactive fiction programming language

According to the Wikipedia, Inform is:

Inform is a programming language and design system for interactive fiction originally created in 1993 by Graham Nelson. In 2006, Graham released version 7, a completely new language based on principles of natural language and a new set of tools based around a book-publishing metaphor (“Inform 7″ or “Natural Inform”).

Why do I blog this? I wonder what would be the combination of this in a pervasive environment.