Eavesdropping as a characteristic

Just ran across that quote by Nigel Thrift (in this paper

“I have what I think is a pretty good test of whether a person is a social scientist or not: do they eavesdrop on a fairly regular basis on other people’s conversations on trains and planes, on buses, in the street, and so on? If they don’t, I suspect that they really want to be a philosopher or an architect – or both. The difference is crucial for me. One kind of work (mainly) involves trying to figure out what other people are thinking as they are doing. The other (mainly) involves thinking. They are not the same.“

Why do I blog this? maybe it’s a bit of a stereotype (especially towards architects) but I find that quote curiously exemplifies the empiricist versus speculative debate.

Watch+RFID keyring

An RFID keyring attached to a watch. Usually serves to open doors. The owner told me that recently his watch ran out of energy, he kept wearing it because it was convenient to keep thr RFID keyring there.

The importance of the bracelet to hold other things than time. Appropriation and personalization of the watch

Definitely shows the interlinkage between physical artifact mediated by digitality.

Why video telephones never…

Forbes had a good bunch of articles about the future lately. Among them, the on about why video telephones never took off (even though they have been pushed on the public for more than 40 years) is quite interesting. The author, Neil Steinberg describes some reasons ranging from bad phone service, need for big bandwidth and need to have people with the device as well (“To invest in a PicturePhone for yourself was about as useful as buying one shoe,” notes technology writer Jonathan Margolis).

What is interesting there is how Steinberg highlight the problem of “futurism” in this context:

“Futurism has a tendency to take the products of today and merely extrapolate them. Thus TV becomes 3-D TV, cars become flying cars and telephones become video telephones. Sometimes it takes the sanity of the marketplace to dash cold water on those technological projections. We were all going to take our nutrition in pills until someone realized that preparing and consuming food was one of the primary joys of life, and no one wants to swallow food pills.
(…)
future marvels of the past–food pills, jet packs, flying cars and, yes, video telephones–have an inertia that reality doesn’t seem to be able to completely thwart. They manage to be both old and repudiated, yet somehow retain their cachet as attractive potential future wonders. Video phones remain a real possibility–if they wish, people placing phone calls over the Internet can already see each other using Webcams. It’s easy to imagine this becoming standard practice.

Or not. Because no matter how cheap and easy pervasive computer technology makes video telephones, they still bump up against one central issue: whether people will want to see and be seen by those they communicate with. “People did not want to comb their hair to answer the telephone,” said Lucky in an interview with Bill Moyers. Of course that could change, too, and wouldn’t it be ironic if the breakthrough to popular video telephony ended up not being any technological advance, but a shift in human vanity. Once we stop combing our hair when we go out, then we’ll finally embrace video telephones.
“

Why do I blog this? critical foresight is about exactly this: understanding the reasons WHY something did happened or not happened, hence I always like reading about this sort of story. To some extent, “failed futurism” is one of my favorite topic.

Social value of location-based content collection

In “Social Practices in Location-Based Collecting“, O’Hara et al. describes an alternative approach for location-based technologies “by focussing on the collecting and keeping of location-based content as opposed to simply the in situ consumption of content”. Their point is that collecting and keeping can have important social values over and above simply consuming the content in situ.

They present here a user study of a “location-based visitor application at London Zoo where content triggers at particular animal exhibits allowed people to gather and consume location-relevant content on mobile phones“. Let me go directly to the results obtained through qualitative analysis:

“Through the fieldwork in this paper what we have demonstrated is that over and above the instrumental value of location-based content, where the right information is provided at the right place/time, there are additional non-instrumental aspects ofthese location-based experiences from which value is derived. These have to do with the social motivations bound up in the collecting and keeping of content. This is more than simply the automatic logging of content accessed that you would get from the likes of the History section in a web browser. It was about the active construction of a meaningful set of the location-based content which made the act of collecting an end itself.
(…)
the role of the collection of location-based content in identity work; in developing a sense of challenge and achievement; in defining a sense of group camaraderie; and in creating a playful sense of competition among group members. Further, we see how narratives told around the collected location-based content over time imbue it with additional value. These narratives become part of the resources through which relationship with family and friends get actively constructed.“

Why do I blog his? after the previous blogpost in which I complain about the fact that LBS usage have trouble going beyond past examples, this paper is quite refreshing in documenting how the collecting of content (tied to a specific location) have an important social value. It definitely shows the importance of location-based content, beyond the delivery model (and shows also the importance of time, a sort of asynchronous value)

O’Hara, Kenton, Kindberg, Tim, Glancy, Maxine, Baptista, Luciana, Sukumaran, Byju, Kahana, Gil and Rowbotham, Julie (2007): Social practices in location-based collecting. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2007 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2007. pp. 1225-1234.

Design for the Location Revolution?

Reading Where Are You Now? Design for the Location Revolution on UX Matter this morning makes me wondering about the advancements in the location-based services area. Although I agree on the premise (“The true power of the mobile Web lies not merely in providing remote access to data, but in letting users view contextual information relating to location and interact with that information.“), the rest is still a rehearsal of past arguments and examples:

“Mobile product innovator Apple showed in its Calamari iPhone ad how a person hungry for calamari can easily find a nearby seafood restaurant (…) Relative location data makes possible the first wave of mobile social networking applications—dodgeball,Loopt, and even the location plug-in for AOL Instant Messenger (AIM)—which inform users when friends or colleagues are in their vicinity. The value of this kind of communication is immediately apparent. I enjoy keeping up with friends and colleagues using LinkedIn or Facebook, but often wish I could have more personal interactions with people in my network rather than just relating in digital space.“

Why do I blog this? I wonder about what will be the next generation of location-based services or how to improve the problems users face when employing place-tagging systems or buddy-finder. Although things have been achieved in the academia (and start-up projects), it’s as if we had troubles going beyond the current state in gaming (it’s all about treasure hunt and object collection), social computing (buddy finder suffer from lots of problem such as market fragmentation, low number of users, privacy tuning issues, etc) or navigation (the restaurant finder example never really took off). My point here is not to criticize this blogpost but rather to show that LBS innovation is VERY slow.

Podotactile affordances

Two other uses of podotactiles encountered recently, two possible affordances:

Cuieng thanks to podotactiles experienced this morning in Paris, France:

These thin podotactiles literally pave the way to a shop when exiting from the subway at the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie.

Another affordance of podotactiles is to use to avoid having stickers on certain surface, it’s less common and it’s exactly the same model as the one used to pedestrians stops on sidewalk edges.

Why do I blog this? From the spatial/design perspective, collecting and analyzing these elements is interesting, especially when you observe people’s behavior (rubbing sneakers). It seems that I start having quite a bunch of examples like this, it’s interesting IMO to note the different affordances as well characteristics such as shapes (thing, round), length (short and discrete, or continuous).

Break pressure measurement

Break pressure measurement, as seen in the subway in Paris.
Designed or not designed for the subway users?

Experiencing NFC in mobile gaming

“Experiencing ‘Touch’ in Mobile Mixed Reality Games” by Paul Coulton, Omer Rashid and Will Bamford is one of these papers which stand on my desktop for ages, waiting to be parsed and analyze (among lots of others). Found time to read it today in the train (heading back to Geneva from a three-day meeting series in Paris), possibly caused by a meeting with Rafi Haladjian at Violet yesterday.

The paper describes the user experience of mobile phones equipped with RFID/NFC to play different games that involves RFID-tagged objects. NFC stands for “Near Field Communications” and is an interface and protocol built on top of RFID. The games described in this paper are PAC-LAN (a Pacman-like game in physical space), Mobspray (a virtual graffiti system) and MobHunt (a treasure hunt game).

The most interesting part of the paper (wrt my research) concerns the results from the results. They found that the system usability (touching tags) was efficient and not prone to social acceptability issue. Excerpts from the results:

The users found the objects very useful compared with just placing an RFID tag at a location as they found it much easier to see and felt it added to the immersion within the game play. (…) Another aspect of the objects was that for PAC-LAN, which was played at a much faster pace than the other two games, the players felt that the game disks were an important element of the game experience and minimized the time they had to spend checking their position on the mobile phone screen. Having played many location based games that rely on purely virtual objects we observed that players often become completely focused on the screen to guide them and often become oblivious to their environment which both defeats the premise of mixed reality gaming and can also be very dangerous.
(…)
One of the other aspects we experimented with was related to giving the user feedback after they have successfully read or
written from or to a tag. For PAC-LAN we initially created version that had either visual feedback, through a pop-up note, or
audio feedback, by playing a short tune. The audio feedback was unanimously preferred as players were often running at speed and the audio feedback was perceived much less intrusive on the game and harder to miss

Why do I blog this? after a discussion yesterday about gaming, RFID and social computing, it was funny to get back to this paper. Some curious things to draw here about feedback and immersion, quite important factor when designing gaming systems.

Coulton, P., Rashid, O., and Bamford, W., “Experiencing ‘Touch’ in Mobile Mixed Reality Games”, Proceedings of The Fourth Annual International Conference in Computer Game Design and Technology, Liverpool, 15th – 16th November 2006, pp 68-7

User experience of automation on context-aware applications

Is Context-Aware Computing Taking Control Away from the User? Three Levels of Interactivity Examined by Barkhuus & Dey is an interesting paper about the users’ experience of different degrees of automation in ubicomp. They investigated this through a user study of a context-aware application in which 3 levels of interactivity are defined:

“personalization, passive context-awareness and active context-awareness. Personalization is where applications let the user specify his own settings for how the application should behave in a given situation; passive context-awareness presents updated context or sensor information to the user but lets the user decide how to change the application behavior, where active context-awareness autonomously changes the application behavior according to the sensed information“

The results are intriguing (please see the details of the methodology in the paper):

“Our study found that users’ sense of control decreases when autonomy of the service increases, as suggested by previous research. We believed that personalization would be preferred and would be more accepted than both passive and active context-awareness, however, the results of our study do not support this. Instead we find that people prefer context-aware applications over personalization oriented ones.
(…)
participants felt they had less control in the context-aware groups but still preferred the context-aware approaches (…) The incurred cost due to loss of control can result in users turning off a service. While the participants initially liked many of the active context-aware services, they might become frustrated by their perceived lack of control and eventually turn the service off. (…) Our conclusion is that users are willing to accept a large degree of autonomy from applications as long as the application’s usefulness is greater than the cost of limited control.
“

Why do I blog this? This is close to the debate about automation that I described here. I am indeed interested in this differentiation between levels of interactivity and how people felt them.

Barkhuus, L. & Dey, A. (2003). Is Context-Aware Computing Taking Control Away from the User? Three Levels of Interactivity Examined, Proceedings of UBICOMP 2003, The 5th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, pp. 159-166. October 12-15, 2003.

Quick notes on Jan Chipchase’s talk

Watching Jan Chipchase’s talk at Nokia Connection 2007 (see the podcast here), I tried to take some notes about the sort of questions Jan addresses related to the “material” he and his team collect:
- find the lessons about why people are doing x and y? what motivations and apply it to other contexts
- does results x and y apply to the consumption of digital content? or tangible media? mobile phone design?
- what is the digital equivalent to x and y phenomena?
- if you see that people use x and y objects (e.g. straps) what kind of services you can have with X and Y?
- challenge people’s opinions with baseline data
- yield not facts but informed opinions

Why do I blog this? quick notes after listening to a podcast, what inspires me most in Jan’s work is precisely how to go beyond the collection of “data” and what sort of questions one can address using them.