NordiCHI Workshop highlights (day 1)
Posted: October 15th, 2006 | 4 Comments »A kind of super-quick synthesis of the main highlights from our workshop at NordiCHI “Near Field Interactions the user-centered internet of things“. This is not the final report and it only reflects what I found relevant with regards to my research practices.
Timo started by introducing the aim of the workshop. His point was to start with some examples of the industry view of the Internet of Things (arphid-like supplly chain management…) and stating that we would like to address the other side of the coin: from the user’s viewpoint, how would this look like? He then listed some possible examples of such approach: blogjects, spimes, everyware or spychips. Actually, near-field interactions (now allowed by NFC technology) could be a way to meet this end: it brings new way to interact with technology raising important questions about near-fieldness and touch. Timo then quoted applications such as Thinglink (ulla-maaria mutanen), NFC presence (janne jalkanen), hovering, cookies (katherine albrecht), “pick, drag and drop” or spyware (people avoiding to be tracked by puttin copper lines in the pockets of their jeans). With this characteristics (near-fieldness and touch), and those technologies, the interface semantics might change leading to new way to bridge first and second life (physical/virtual environments). These tropes could create new affordances and the workshop was meant to explore that.
After each others’ introduction, we had a 5-minute madness presentation (everybody presented his or her work in 5 minutes). This was followed by talks by some presenters; we actually picked up 5 persons with different research angles so that we could address various perspectives. All presenters deserved to be quoted for their work but I would only describe 3-4 highlights:
Chris Heathcote described how NFC is about what is here (near-field interaction) and he wondered about what happen when you’re not here… how would I access to “my things far away”? what would be “actions on my things far away”? He presented some examples like Smart2Go which allowed to get an helicopter view starting from one’s location to see what is around. The same goes with time: NFC is about the present but how can I access past interactions? Another concerns he had was that “a touch is a touch” so it’s discrete but can we record other touch so that we make something out of it? (To which Timo added that he read how the Nintendo Wii will log every user interactions in the internal calendar). Actually, Chris listed the design decisions they made at Nokia when describing the NFC standard specifications.
Ben Cerveny explained how people won’t understand these new affordances easily: or only if they are drawn to it step by step. That’s what he explored in his recent work, by learning how people interact with objects and presenting clues of how interaction might takes places so that people know how to interact with them.
Ulla-Maaria talked about how to create “social affordances” for material objects (According to Gibson, affordances = material properties of an object that indicate the possibilities of interaction with it). So how could affordances could be socially constructed and shared? She is interested in how to do that but not in a pre-determined way, rather as a user-generated manner. Her point was that it would pertinent to add objects with a new property: personal relation to the object. For instance, it could be about tagging an objects “I made it/I own it/I like it/I want it…”, so that it accumulates and it is hence organized around shared motives. Matt Biddulph then exemplified what a middleware for such a system would work.
Also with an interest about bottom-up approach, Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino focused on how to design for sustainability: how to do more with less. To her, personalization could be a solution for users to engage with high-tech devices and not trashing them two months after buying them. She showed how the “positive history” an user have with an object could be of interest: “I want to keep that things because I made it and it reflects my positive history with it”: the design trop here = beyond product obsolescence, you keep an hold on it: use positive history to create precious objects. Some argued that we may not allow back-ups in that context (so that an object is really dead once data are lost). Alexandra also mentioned the concept of “Agathonic design”: designing objects so that they improve over time.
Why do I blog this? these are just quick issues that has been raised on the first day of the workshop. Others things have been mentioned and we will describe them later on in the write-up.
I’m afraid I don’t understand how “blogjects, spimes, everyware, or spychips” can be considered examples of — if I understand the preceeding sentences — a “user-centered approach to the Internet of Things”. You could hardly find vaguer terms; blogjects and spimes are not examples of anything, they’re neologisms for a vaguely defined set of properties that don’t actually exist in anything real. And what, for that matter, does “near-fieldness” mean?
These are fascinating ideas, which is why it’s a shame that their possible elucidation so often drowns in a jumble of verbiage. Might there be opportunities for conceptual development through more careful writing? Or is that too much to expect from a blog?
1) these are my raw notes (my blog is a notepad in which I keep track of things I see), that’s why it’s messy, unstructured and not very detailed.
2) what I meant by “blogject, spimes or everyware as user-centered approach to the Internet of Things” (actually what Timo meant in his presentation) is that those concepts are not defined by the industry (which largely define the internet of things through rfid and related issues) but by “other persons”. And yes it’s vague because apart the internet of things is still speculative. Anyway, blogject examples like the one we discussed at the different workshop are instantiations of such “vague” concepts.
3) yes there might be “opportunities for conceptual development through more careful writing” but things take time, we’re involved in different projects (as a side note my interest in blogjects is different from what I do at my research lab so sorry for working that on week-ends and not writing very accurate report as you expect me to do it) and we don’t always have time to do what we want… at least the workshop write-up may clarify those points.
Nicolas is being polite, because he’s a polite kinda guy.
As it happens, though, I am not. So I’ll feel free to express the opinion, David, that it was completely inappropriate to call him to account for these matters in the way that you did.
Let’s have a look at your assertions. If I’m reading you correctly, you argue that “spime” and “blogject” are terms without value because they refer to loose and vaguely-defined assemblages of attributes that have not as yet appeared so-constituted in actuality. Never mind that Bruce intended his (not-unproblematic) coinage precisely to refer to a theory object; never mind that this has been sufficiently well-discussed over the past two years that a trivial Wikipedia search answers all of your objections. Where I really begin to get irritated is with your sideways assertion that the property of “actually existing in anything real” is the necessary threshold of interest in writing or reading about these topics.
I will grant you that the specifics of user interaction are exceedingly difficult to discuss meaningfully, outside of the context of deployed systems. I will not grant you, or anyone, the suggestion that it is somehow not valid or legitimate to attempt a fairly schematic description of interactions with such systems, especially given their exceedingly ambitious potential domain of operation. We can see them coming, in some form – slouching toward Bethlehem, as it were. Why should we not try to wrap our collective head around them?
And finally we arrive at “too much to expect for a blog,” which really is de trop. Why should Nicolas, or anyone else, be expected to hand you all the answers? You’ve got a computer at hand, and a Web browser. With all due respect, the onus is on you to get off your ass and do some research.
I’m afraid I wasn’t clear. I don’t object to (nor am I ignorant of) the terms “blogject”, “spime”, “internet of things”, or “everyware”; they are useful signifiers of interesting conceptual areas, good for focusing thought and provoking discussion. The problem arises when their speculative nature becomes a excuse for vagueness. If we would instead discuss specific aspects or examples of these terms along with their implications, we would articulate knowledge that cannot be found in simply a wikipedia definition. There are, of course, many particulars and examples in this blog post and other related writings, but they often appear incidental rather than a means of understanding and exploring the broader subject. As an exception, I would mention “Living in a World of Smart Everyday Objects – Social, Economic, and Ethical Implications” by Bohn et al (http://www.vs.inf.ethz.ch/res/papers/hera.pdf). This work demonstrates the value of developing specific examples into a more general understanding, in contrast to the relative lack of analysis and synthesis often found in writings on these matters, particularly those that tend towards the use of the neologisms mentioned previously. This is the danger of such phrases: their potential to conceal unclear thought in imprecise expression. It’s one thing to take, say, “spime” as a starting point for conceptual development; quite another to refer to it as an example whose implications can be used to understand something else.
It was hardly fair to take this blog to account for any such shortcomings (as it serves more as a record of a pre-existing conversation than a careful explication of the topic), but the objections I raised seemed representative of a larger trend and commenting offered an easy way of reaching, it appears, at least two figures of prominence in the field. So consider this simply a general request for more careful expression in the continued conversation of these fascinating subjects. Our words should aid, not cloud, our thinking.