A mechanical face in Milano

It’s always refreshing to leave a city with a mechanical face like this staring at you, anthropmorphism at its best (surely unintentional though).

Selective disConnectvity

Mindful Disconnection: Counterpowering the Panopticon from the Inside by Howard Rheingold and Eric Kluitenberg in Skor.nl challenges the “unquestioned connectivity” of the Internets and propose a possible alternative they call ‘mindful disconnection’, or rather the ‘art of selective disconnectivity’. Some excerpts I found relevant:

“We are not as convinced as others that technology is only, primarily, or necessarily a dangerous toxin. There is a danger in locating technologies’ malignancies in the tools themselves rather than the way people use them
(…)
Perhaps tools, methods, motivations, and opportunities for making the choice to disconnect – and perceiving the value of disconnecting in ways of our choosing – might be worth considering as a response to the web of info-tech that both extends and ensnares us.
(…)
In a world of prevailing disconnectivity, to be able to connect is a privilege (e.g., the ‘digital divide). In a world of always-on connectivity, this relation might very well be reversed and the real privilege could then be the ability to withdraw and disconnect – to find sanctuary from eternal coercion to communicate, to connect, or to be traceable.“

The article ends with a nice list about the “Art and Science of Selective disConnectvity”.

Why do I blog this? disconnectivity is a topic that I am remotely interested in, rather as a personal feeling about technologies than a research field.

This said, there might certainly be a need for a “disconnection literacy”, a concept closed to the “information literacy” and learning how to eat properly. The point would be to reach a balance between the connected and the isconnected status to ponder the information overload/attention disruptions.

Furthermore, what they describe in this article can even go beyond technological connectivity… I take jokes such as Isolatr very seriously: our world values connection so much that it’s not only connection to devices but also connections to people that are important. The word “serendipity” is now everywhere, what’s next: a renaissance of the misanthropes?

Notes from Frontiers in Interaction

My notes from Frontiers in Interaction in Milano, an italian event about user experience/interaction design that focused on the Internet of Things as well as Virtual Environments. Thanks Leandro Agro and Matteo Penzo for the invitation!

Fabio Sergio: “designing for the segment of one”

Fabio described the cell phone as the “personal remote control for life”, which is contradictory with the fact that cell phones have the same shell (hardware, physical appearance) and the same ghost (software). Obviously, this does not reflect the specific needs people have. At the same time, function fatigue is the number one complain of cell phone users (Source: forum to advance the mobile experience). As Don Norman said, “we want simplicity but we don’t want to give up any of the cool futures”, hence the myth of simplicity.

Fabio then described how the area should rather aim at simplicity, not simplification. To do so, he got back to the shell/ghost metaphor by proposing the following:

Shell: hardware is hard but it’s getting softer, as attested by some examples: Schulze&Webb’ metal phone, rapid manufacturing by Patrick Jouin, “3D software for the masses” (see this announcement for that matter). According to him, a near future path would be the 3D printing of your own shell (“to match the color of your shoes” as Fabio put on the slide). A last example he showed is Panoko, an emergent marketplace for 3D printing.

Ghost: there are some steps towards the direction of software personalization with Jaiku or MySocial Fabric or the advent of a widget-based model. Another important domain would also correspond to the “one field that rule them all” model: the google field search is indeed presented by Fabio as a relevant style of interaction (which claims is supported by a recent paper by Don Norman). There are already examples of this trend but ,as Fabio pointed out, it’s still lacking “Magic”.

Rafi Haladjian

This talk was a worthwhile and compelling account of the Nabaztag creation. As a minitel and internet pioneer, he was convinced by the idea of ubiquitous computing, he and his team wondered about “how to get there from here” (a recurring question for people interested in the future ). His point was that “there is life beyond CES”. Deploying what he called a “teddy bear theory”, they aimed at improving devices following the basic process: mechanical/functional (classic teddy bear or scale) to digital (singing teddy bear or enhanced scale) to connected.

The next question for them was then “where to start”? This is where he explained why they chose the rabbit as a prototype of an ubiquitous computing artifact. Some reasons:
- there was a rabbit on his desk at that moment, when they were brainstorming.
- it’s a message to show people that it’s possible: if you can connect a rabbit on the internet, then you can connect anything.
- it’s not utilitarian, and people won’t have high expectations.
- a rabbit can be the “Pong” of ubicomp
- it’s cute

They had 3 ambitions with this project:
- popularizing the idea that there is a life after the PC: the world is not reduced to a screen.
- experimenting screenless ways to provide information (sound, light, movements but not in a “new age” way)
- bringing virtual worlds to the real life: a physical avatar.

The challenges were not so simple, the point was to start facing the real life challenges of ambient devices: how do you live with a screenless one button-device? how to face the complexity of un-interactiveness? how to manage serendipity? There were also important technical design challenges (local/networked). Moreover it was also challenging to see how existing information could be used.

Rafi Haladjian highlighted the importance of bottom-up innovation in their project: as he said “we don’t want to invent the life of people”, therefore their approach was to to sell this connected rabbit and see what emerges: how would people invent the “Internet of Things”? (And people said “Wow” as he expressed). Violet’s strategy is to empower people by making things they can play with.

The next big thing after the release of the Nabaztag/tag will be in september: Nabaztamps, RFID stamps that one can put on objects to track certain activities (or to let people imagine new applications):

Jeffrey Schnapp
I took less notes here but I was impressed by how he described successful innovation as a “tradition of productive failure, failed interaction and failed immersion”, which he exemplified by virtual reality examples that aimed at replacing the physical. Another hint from him that I liked (and that resonated with my talk) was the aim of “replacing total immersion, total interaction and reality replacement paradigms with partial, distracted play-based paradigms that exploit and interconnect the specificities and experiential potentialities of physical and digital things“.

I was also interested in talks by Alexandro Valli (io agency), Teresa Colombi (LudoTIC, she presented an insightful study of eye-tracking device employed to analyse the UX of WoW) and Francesco Cara although they were in italian. Valli described three interesting ideas:
- how “digital does not exist” but is only a form of representation, the digital being an enabler of possibilities.
- the importance of being “cold”
- simplicity as the ultimate sophistication (Leonardo da Vinci).

Shared map anotations

Seen in Milano this morning, some annotations shared on the metro map.

Frontiers in interaction talk

Currently at Frontiers in Interaction in Milano where I gave a talk entitled “PeopleSpaceThings: hybridization over the internets” (Slide can be found here).

The talk was basically a critique of assumptions in ubiquitous computing, relying on current literature (Bell and Dourish, Graham, etc.) and show how some alternatives could be possible, mostly projects that I am doing with Julian and things I like (Jaiku, Isolatr).

Cooperation between designers, engineers and scientists in HCI

Bartneck, C. & Rauterberg, M. (2007). HCI reality—an ‘Unreal Tournament’?, Int. J. Human-Computer Studies 65 (2007) 737–743.

This article addresses the cooperation between designers, engineers and scientists in the HCI community. It reports the results from an empirical study about the barriers between these professions. The authors describe these barries using the term “Unreal Tournament” because of the “shouting match between academics and practitioners” between researchers in some conferences.

The description of the barriers is quite insightful:

“Barrier 1: Engineers {E} and scientists {S} make their results explicit by publishing in journals, books and conference proceedings, or by acquiring patents. Their body of knowledge is externalized and described outside of the individual engineer or scientist. These two communities revise their published results through discussion and control tests among peers. On the other hand, designers’{D} results are mainly represented by their concrete designs.
(…)
Barrier 2: Engineers {E} and designers {D} transform the world into preferred situations, while scientists {S} mainly attempt to understand the world through the pursuit of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws.
(…)
Barrier 3: Scientists {S} and designers {D} are predominantly interested in humans in their role as possible users. Designers are interested in human values, which they transform into requirements and eventually solutions. Scientists in the HCI community are typically associated with the social or cognitive sciences. (…) Engineers {E} are mainly interested in technology, which includes software for interactive systems.“

Then the study also offers some pertinent results (summarized in two words below but I encourage reader to look more closely at the paper):

“Scientists, with their logical positivistic paradigm on the one side, and engineers and designers with their constructivistic paradigm on the other side, appear to have different attitudes toward REALITY. Our study attempted to find empirical proof of this difference.
(…)
Interestingly, among the three professions, engineers appear to be the cohesive element, since they often have dual backgrounds, whereas very few participants had dual science/design backgrounds. Engineers could, therefore, build a bridge between designers and scientists, and through their integrative role, could guide the HCI community to realizing its full potential.“

Why do I blog this? articles about how a field such as HCI is organized are always interesting to understand the underlying dynamic in research communities. Although what is described there (and that I have put the emphasis on) is a bit stereotypical, lots of things are true and can be relevant to get what is at stake.

The materiality of networked cities

Stephen Graham, in his essay entitled “Strategies for Networked Cities” has some very convincing arguments against supporters of “ICT-based end of city visions” who ignore the very material realities that make the supposedly “virtual” realms of “cyberspace” possible:

“in their obsession with the ethereal worlds of cyberspace – with the blizzards of electrons, photons, and bits and bytes on screens – end of city commentators have consistently ignored the fact that it is real wires, real fibers, real ducts, real leeways, real satellite stations, real mobile towers, real web servers, and – not to be ignored – real electricity systems that make all of this possible. All these are physically embedded and located in real places. They are expensive. They are profoundly material.
(…)
Because the material bases for cyberspace are usually invisible they tend only to be noticed when they collapse or fail through wars, terrorist attack, natural disasters, or technical failure.“

Why do I blog this? some good points there to keep in mind when designing ubiquitous computing applications (which need electricity, access to a network, etc.), material to be quoted in presentations to come.

Twitter-like device from 1930?

Location-based microblogging in the 30s: this “robotic” messenger display aims at “TO AID persons who wish to make or cancel appointments or inform friends of their whereabout“:

Why do I blog this? definitely not twitter but somewhat related to the same practice of sharing micro-content. It did not seem to take off though.

Intel Ubifit Garden

Eric Savitz, in an article about Intel in Barrons describe the Intel Ubifit Garden:

“Intel built a device roughly the size of a pager that contains a variety of digital sensors, including a thermometer, a barometer, a 3-axis accelerometer, a microphone, a digital compass and sensors for humidity and for visible and infrared light. Worn on your collar or belt, the device then tracks all of your physical activity during the day. Based on the sensor data, plus some special algorithms, it can apparently tell when you are standing around doing nothing and when you are walking, running, biking or doing other physical tasks. The data are then sent wirelessly to your cellphone, which displays — I am not making this up — a bunch of digital flowers. The more activity you engage in, the more your digital flowers grow.“

Why do I blog this? another example of a ubicomp lifelogging device, what I am curious about here is how this whole range of sensor is employed, how do they turn this constant flow of information (temperature? pression? microphone?) into something meaningful. The underlying question being: how a huge mess is transformed into a relevant summary of the situation (for the user)?

Besides, the article describes some examples of the Intel Day 2007, have a look also on the company website (e-Madrasas in Morocco, new models of time in mobile situations, portable navigation devices that would automatically aligning the displayed map with the real world, etc.), some intriguing stuff there.

Protected source of electricity

Had to deal with that yesterday in a french train:

A protected source of electricity… that prevented me to use an electrically-powered of some sort that I often employ in train for my work.

Is it because they do not want to provide electricity for commuters/travellers? In this case no, because there are power plugs elsewhere in the train. Simply, as I’ve been told there by the controller, this plug is covered because it’s a 380V and they don’t want kids/people to toy around with so much electricity (so why is it written 230V????).