GPS bottles and people representation of space

“Message in a Bottle” is an intriguing locative media art project by Layla Curtis:

“Fifty bottles containing messages were released into the sea off the south-east coast of England near Ramsgate Maritime Museum, Kent. The intended destination of the bottles is The Chatham Islands in the South Pacific Ocean. The islands, which are 800km east of mainland New Zealand, are the nearest inhabited land to the precise location on the opposite side of the world to Ramsgate Maritime Museum. It is anticipated that the bottles may be found several times before reaching the Chatham Islands. (…) Several of the bottles are being tracked using GPS technology and are programmed to send
their longitude and latitude coordinates back to Ramsgate every hour. The information they transmit is used to create a real time drawing of their progress.“

People who found a message could report it (and then replace the bottle’s contents, reseal the bottle and release it back into the sea to continue its journey to The Chatham Islands).

Why do I blog this? Beyond the poetic/aesthetic aspects of the lost bottles, I find this project interesting as it explores other use of GPS, related to the movement of objects in space.

Furtermore, an interview of Layla Curtis by Peter Hall in the Else/Where mapping book interestingly address some topics that are close to my research interests. Hall highlight the fact that “there’s a nice juxtaposition here between the precision of the GPS mapping system and the relative imprecisions of people reporting findings by email“. Of course, this is partly caused by the interface Curtis provided to report bottle’s findings; as people had to fill a form with “Place bottle found”. It can be very relevant to dig more into the naming of these places; I can imagine a sort of typology of mismatch that would be very informative for location-based services designers.

‘Mobilis In Mobili’

… is the motto of Captain Nemo in “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” by Jules Verne. It actually means “Moving in a Moving thing”… showing how change occur through a changing medium, very well in line with one’s behavior in a “worldchanging” environment.

“-Ware”

“Urban Computing” is defined by Kingberg, Chalmers and Paulos as “the integration of computing, sensing, and actuation technologies into everyday urban settings and lifestyles”.

That picture taken last week in Geneva appears to me as strikingly evocative of “urban computing”. The suffix “-ware” added on top of a physical layer indeed reflects how urban computing is not just about digital bits but also raw, messy and dirty material in the city of the near future. That said, it’s also interesting as the suffix “-ware” is used in a large variety of forms, sometimes without any reference to its origin (manufactured article of a specified type, made with particular substance).

Playing PONG against a fish

The idea of “new interaction partners” that we develop at the near future laboratory more and more echoes with projects here and there. For instance, Florent Deloison has an intriguing project about playing PONG with a fish (in french).

The system is based on mormyrophone, a device designed by biology researcher Christian Graff, able to detect and translate as image and sounds the electric discharges produced by a fish.

This was part of workshop at the Art School in Aix en Provence, France. Other students developed projects about allowing the fish to send e-mails or using the fish as THE interface.

Why do I blog this? reviewing some animal-based interactions that have I seen popping up lately is always refreshing. Although this looks a bit weird and pointless, I believe there is a great deal to explore in this “new interaction partner” vector.

Verne or Wells

As Jules Verne expressed it about H.G. Wells in “Invasion of the Sea“:

“We do not proceed in the same manner. It occurs to me that his stories do not repose on very scientific bases. . . I make use of physics. He invents. I go to the moon in a cannonball discharged from a cannon. Here there is no invention. He goes to the Mars [sic] in an airship which he constructs of a metal which does away with the law of gravitation. . . But show me this metal. Let him produce it.“

Why do I blog this? both Vernes and Wells were great futurists hidden under their novelist stance. I found that quote interesting and it exemplified the different way they proceeded.

Mechanical TicTacToe

An intriguing Tic-Tac-Toe game played by a robotic system constituted of two mechanical arms, designed by Guillaume Stagnaro:

Burglar vocabulary: location-based tagging

Last week in Brussels, I ran across this signs on the wall of that house:

It quickly reminded me my parents’ house on which we found the same marks. At that time, I remember the discussion with local police who told us that burglars use codes to annotate house. It’s generally tags like this, with black chalk that express relevant information for them such as the one exemplified below (as shown in France’s signs or Belgium’s signs).

Simply put, it means that the marks on that belgian house correspond to: one kid, unoccupied house and planned robbery. Although it’s weird to imagine only one kid in an unoccupied house, this is what the tag describe.

Why do I blog this? that’s an interesting example of location-based annotation. It simply shows an intriguing signal of practices at stake in contemporary cities, a specific form of graffiti that aims at describing places to rob. It’s a different form of spatial tagging not that explored by the locative media frenziness (for obvious reasons) that also represents the “transparent society” we’re reaching. See here too.

In addition, it’s curious from a collaboration POV, how this sort of tagging has been put in place by a group of people. At first glance, one can think burglary is a competitive practice, but it can go beyond that, as shown by the establishment of a common vocabulary.

Protecting one’s electricity

Different ways to protect one’s source of electricity:

Well covered in a french train:

With duct tape at the airport in Brussels:

Why do I blog this? in a time where we have our pockets full of mobile devices that require electricity, it’s always an issue to find a power plug. This is even more important when you hang out in Marc Augé’s “non-places”. Most of time, it’s in these areas that owners of the infrastructures are trying to design different ways to prevent you from accessing it. Even when there are still plugs for vacuum cleaners or christmas trees, there are always some possibilities to show you that you’re not welcome to steal a bit of volts.

Automation, light and door sensors

Last week I had two interesting encounters with gestural interactions. The first one was in the super-fancy double decker train that goes from Geneva to ZanktGallen/Zurich. In that train, there is a sensor to open up the doors between wagons. People, if they’re slow or if they don’t know that there’s a sensor generally walk in, wait a bit and then come in as the door opens up when the sensor detect the presence of a body. But usually, commuters know that they can wave their hand next to the sensor as I did here (very weirdly with the left hand):

In other trains, the sensor is situated on the floor. Standing next to this door during the whole trip to Zürich was a fantastic opportunity to observe the range of behavior in that kind of situation. I did not count or ran precise analysis but I tried to categorize these behavior in a sort of ludicrous way:
- old people clueless about the sensor presence but slow enough to see the door opened when they approach it
- people who knows that there’s a sensor, so they wait and go through the door
- commuters well-versed into swiss train sensors who wave their arm
- people in the rush who almost run and bump into the door because the sensor did not have time to detect the body
- commuters who know how the sensor works, wave the arm and fail to open it (for some reason… because technology sucks), so step back and try again 1 or 2 times. A variant is when you have people then looking at the sensor, sometimes talking to it.
- one person even try to open the door manually but he failed because there is no clear handle (nor affordance) to do so. He the looked at me and sighted.

Quite an interesting list and I am sure there can be other curious use case as I haven’t seen kids or people with loads of luggage. The underlying variables here are the following: the location of the sensor, its visibility and affordance to the user as well as the delay between body detection and opening of the door. It was obvious that all of them were problematic.

The second encounter was in Brussels, in an hotel loo, there was a sensor that detect a body presence to switch on/off the light. What happened inevitably is that the light went off and I found myself waving my arms here and there… eventually above my head… because I did not know where was the sensor. What happens? Who tuned the sensor? How did they tune that bloody sensor? Did they run user studies about how people spend time in bathrooms? In any case, what happened is that they created a sort of norm in that building, that tell people how long they must or must not stay there. The whole experience then becomes weird although I can adapt and find funny to wave my arm around.

Why do I blog this? there are two interesting aspects here: the mix of gestural sensing and automation. All of this is based on the assumption that the best way to interact with technology is to make things more naturals, more physical by removing any transducers between people and artifacts. No buttons, no switches to open doors or switch lights on. In a sense there is still an interface, that is gestural but as it is no self-revealing, people have troubles knowing what to do. And you have, on top of that, the clumsy automation issue: automation indeed create new operational complexities as shown by Wood.

On that topic, see also Fabien’s experience as well as Fabio Sergio’s story. Clive Grinyer has good thoughts about it too.

“Design matters”

Was in Grenoble yesterday, attending an event called “Design Matters organized by the big nanotechnology operation they have there as well as several other partners. The gig was about design in the context of industrial innovation: “Is it possible to see designs as fundamental processes developed by a multi-partner, multi-disciplinary innovation hub which will allow us to combine the essential elements of research, analysis, conception, creation and production to develop highly valuable technological products?“. Speakers ranged from philosopher (Bernard Stiegler), UX specialist (Adam Greenfield), design (the director of a french design school, Federico Casalegno and a designer from Alcatel) and design/branding (SEB). Some of the elements I found interesting are summarized below.

Bernard Stiegler gave an inspiring talk about the evolution of techniques (externalization as described by Lerhoi-Gourhan) that lead to technosciences. He showed how the role of design evolved over time and how we reached a situation in which people/structures who build/design technologies are separated from users, now called “consumers”. He pointed how today there’s a “desire crisis”, a sort of exhaustion of desire in which the individual is disaffected. His claim is the techniques used to create “consumer behavior” amount to the destruction of psychic and collective individuation. According to him, technoscience developments became opaque and distabilize biological, physiological and geographical systems. For the individual, it’s a loss of intelligibility in the system as well as a loss of participation. He then advocated for more open and distributed design process in which people can participate. To some extent, Stiegler justifies bottom-up innovation by a psychological impetus necessary for our society to go beyond today’s desire exhaustion.

Federico Casalegno presented the eLense project and the Landmark interactive bus stop (in which my colleagues Enrico Costanza and Mirja Leinss participated). Federico showed their design approach at the MIT Mobile Experience Lab, exemplifying today’s design methods there.

Attending Adam’s “Everyware” talk for the 4 of 5th time is always interesting. Especially to see how things eveolved over time. For example, I was struck by his new slides about “what does it suggest that the same presentation was illustrated last year with prototypes is now exemplified with existing products“. His addition of Deleuze work (see Postscript on the Societies of Control) is also strikingly relevant. It was important also to see what Stiegler had to say about Adam’s work, as he pointed our the importance of going beyond resistance (which reminds of “nostalgia is for suckers” that Adam threw at LIFT Korea) to participate and invent.

After this very high level discussion, a former designer at Alcatel described the role of a prudct designer according to him. Although what he presented was very conventional to me, it was interesting to see the designers’ stance in these big french operations. He claimed how design was blurry, intangible and “difficult to measure” in this context, showing example of meetings in which the person with the vaccum cleaner in the corridor is asked if she preferred “product A” or “product B” or how the CEO needs to get back the products at home and ask his wife about it. I quote that example because I was kind of astonished by the gender assumptions there, as if I had been swamped background in time. I also found curious the sort of design he presented as he never mentioned “critical design” or less mechanistic and utilitarian approach.

Finally, the manager of branding at SEB described the relationship between branding and product design. What was very inspiring there was his description of the failures of some products who wanted to jump in a certain bandwagon (like… designing ironing devices in an “apple-like” way with translucid material), forgotting to match the brand of the product. He also describes some of their process based on “affordance test” of pans, coffee-machine and toasters: how they ask 100 persons (who are presented the product) to use it, how they would hold it, use X and Y functionalities. In a sense, what he described what very close to usability testing in which people begins to explore freely the usage of a physical artifact.

Why do I blog this? although a bit loosely coupled at first, the program was very interesting in the sense that it showed the sort of messiness of approaches and perspectives, especially in the context of France. Good meetings there as well.