My talk at Reboot9.0

Slides from my Reboot talk are here (pdf, 1.1Mb).

The presentation I made, entitled “Hybridization, fusing, melting, coalescence and salmagundi” was about hybridization. I basically gave an overview of what I find interesting in projects about hybridization of the digital and the physical, a sort of compendium of the consequences (from the cognitive to the architectural) and the implications. Take-aways of my talk are:
- hybridization of the digital/physical are coming in a large variety of ways
- leads to changes from the cognitive to the architectural levels
- revisit false ideas: do not oppose the digital and the physical, less utilitarian future, digital takes room.
- reality is complex, need to study situations (not just technologies)

Thanks Thomas for the invitation!

Wave your hand sign

This icon is used in danish trains to tell people that they can wave their hand in front of a sensor so that doors could be opened:

Interestingly, in other countries like Switzerland there are no signs, people just learn how this work and eventually wave their hand.

Love+access

Arrived in Copenhagen today, for Reboot.

Picture taken this afternoon, technology of access marked by a heart drawn by a passer-by.
Love+access, there was surely some good motivations because there are no precise affordance to draw this shape around this key hole..

Ethnography and warfare

Via Space and Culture, the concept of “ethnographic intelligence”. What a term, it reminds me of the name of a workshop at Doors of Perception called “Guerilla Ethnography“.

Here is how this concept is defined:

“As recent debate, especially in the services, attests, there is an increased demand for cultural intelligence. (…) “What we mean by EI is information about indigenous forms of association, local means of organization, and traditional methods of mobilization.

Clans, tribes, secret societies, the hawala system, religious brotherhoods, all represent indigenous or latent forms of social organization available to our adversaries throughout the non-Western, and increasingly the Western, world. These create networks that are invisible to us unless we are specifically looking for them; they come in forms with which we are not culturally familiar; and they are impossible to ‘see’ or monitor, let alone map, without consistent attention and the right training
(…)
Because EI is the only way to truly know a society, it is the best tool to divine the intentions of a society’s members. “

Why do I blog this? it’s intriguing to see how technologies are not the only thing militaries like to steal from researchers. Now, even ethnographical methods and cultural anthropology are possibly employed for warfare or military intelligence.

Nabaztag sales figures

Quick note about Nabaztag, launched in 2005. I found some figures that might be of interest:

50,000 rabbits sold as of June 2006 (Source: Libération)
135,000 rabbits sold as of May 2007 (Source: Le Monde)

It’s a pity the figures are only for France, but it gives an interesting picture of how this type of communication objects is sold. Sony sold 200,000 AIBOs worldwide (Source). And yes, I know it’s like comparing apples and oranges but it gives a picture of the number of devices out there as well as how things evolve over time.

Urban hacking

Exposing the secret city: Urban exploration as ‘space hacking’ is an intriguing deck of slides by Martin Dodge. It’s about urban exploration of “secret spaces, abandoned buildings, and other obscure, overlooked, underused, forgotten, unsafe, and disconnected built structures“. Dodge, a geographer, investigated this phenomenon and some of the results are presented here, in this nice compendium of intriguing anecdotes, discussions and pictures.

It describes the reasons (1. need to document space, 2. thrill of access to forbidden space, 3. desire for authentic spaces, 4. alternative aestheticism of spaces), their ethics (1. respect for places, 2. publish versus preservation, 3. freedom of access / illegality of trespass, 4. acceptability of anonymity). He then conceptualize this using the “hacker” vocabulary. The best part is certainly the end, in which he presents why “space hacking” would be important, some excerpts:

“
1. thinking through how space becomes: the space is performed through spatial practices – by sneaking in, climbing a fence, clambering down a drain, the search for good vantage points and the composition of photographs
2. the nature of territoriality: thinking about how cities are produced as ‘property’ (spatial fixity) and imagining an urban ‘right-to-roam’ (spatial mobility)?
3. ‘spatial hauntings’: the experience of place as opposed to written histories/testimonies, as a way complementing other representations, experiencing and then capturing in photographs the layers of memories in a place (memorialisation)
4. ‘cities without people’: perhaps a way of thinking post-human urbanity? what happens to space when people stop caring in the normative sense; when entropy runs unchecked
5. ‘exploration’ as method: can expeditionary practices open up ways of knowing that capture (at least partially) the fragmentary nature of places, the unknowing permeating through city, that other methods fail to capture; research becoming risky, finding things out becomes fun. UE as ‘post-method’ method, working without permission, without risk assessments, without ethical approval “

Why do I blog this Urban exploration, place hacking is a fascinating practice (tightly related to psychogeography to some extent). The conclusion is very insightful, Dodge claims that “urban exploration provide an interesting set of spatial practices through which to explore a range of geographic issues such as production of space, territoriality and property, memory and place, geographic knowledge“.

The picture has been taken France few weeks ago when exploring some abandoned train station.

Feel the ground

Walking in Geneva this morning, I walked up some stairs near the Rhône river on which there is a message on each steps. One of them says “Depuis quand n’avez vous pas pris contact avec le sol?” (“since when haven’t you feel the ground?“).

This made me think our behavior towards the ground is very normative and, as a matter of fact, poor. Apart from specific cultures (mmh some backpackers in Marseille as depicted on the picture below), it’s not good to sit/lay/do stuff on the ground (especially on pavements)

Why do I blog this? some curious design opportunities here… some already tried to do something with podotactility:

Or information visualization (to guide people going from one music spot to another)

Yet, it’s still about seeing the ground or feeling it with the feet…

Why studying ubicomp applications?

What to expect from studies about ubiquitous computing applications is a topic I dealt with the other day in my presentation. Reading “Control, Deception, and Communication: Evaluating the Deployment of a Location-Enhanced Messaging Service” by Iachello et al., 2005, I found this very interesting quote:

“the results of our study required us to step back and reconsider our assumptions, which were based on our own common sense considerations and a straightforward interpretation of Weiser’s idea of calm technology“

Why do I blog this? although the studies we’re carrying out in HCI lab are often about “evaluating” prototypes, I find important to have another goal on the agenda: reconsidering assumptions, criticizing normative vision of the future, and also investigating the social/cognitive/spatial effects of technologies that pervade the environment.

Intriguing spam

Spam received 5 minutes ago:

“You’re just too ignorant to see the hundreds of explanations for why it’s not that simple.“

This is a nice quote, maybe the remark is true given the complexity of the problems to solve?

Robotic lamp

Via Fabien, AUR: a Robotic Desk Lamp by Guy Hoffman (MIT Medialab Robotic life group):

“AUR is a robotic desk lamp, a collaborative lighting assistant. It serves as a non-anthropomorphic robotic platform as part of my Ph.D thesis on human-robot fluency and nonverbal behavior. The lamp’s design was conceived around an existing 5-DoF robotic arm, and is aimed to evoke a personal relationship with the human partner without resorting to human-like features. By retaining the lamp’s “objectness”, I hope to explore the relationship that can be maintained through abstract gestures and nonverbal behavior alone.

The lamp is animated using a custom pipeline enabling the dynamic control of behaviors authored in a 3d animation system, and will perform in a unique human-robot joint theater performance this spring.“

Why do I blog this? looking at human-robot interaction for possible client work, this artifact is interesting to me because it reflects the convergence between robotics and ubiquitous computing. Non-anthropomorphic behavior seems IMO a very relevant approach, leading to projects about a new category of objects.