In a panel at the Mobile City conference

Participated in a panel yesterday as the Mobile City conference in Rotterdam. The event was great and fully packed with a nice program and audience. The conference was a multidisciplinary even about locative media/mobile technologies and their relation to the City.

The panel was about “Designing for Mobile Media & Urban Spaces: between Theory and Practice” and addressed challenges and opportunities of the field, as well as the link between theory and practice. Although my panel-colleagues were speaking at high level socio-politic theory, my point was to focus on issues regarding interaction design and spatial environment (not that I dismiss the privacy issues of locative media or the politics of ubicomp but it’s not my field).

My point was to describe one of the limit of current location-based services design: the fact that most of the time space (the material environment) is assumed to be uniform and homogeneous. Based on the work we did in the CatchBob! project (a location-based gamed developed to be played on our campus), as well as some other material, I described how this was not the case. The organizers asked us to bring 3 pictures to exemplify this. These 3 issues/pictures are not exhaustive of course.

My first point was about the roughness of the environment: the world have flaws, breakdown, accidents, things are being repaired or regulations make systems more complicated. And because of that, users of location-based applications are sometimes lost, frustrated or clueless about what is happening on their screen. In our tests, we had some users who felt lost on our campus (where they have been studied for 3 years!). So the environment is dynamic and conditions change (not to mention the weather that could influence the positioning accuracy or the topography).

(Picture courtesy of Patrick Jermann)

The second point concerned the heterogeneity of space. The picture shows the mapping of WiFi antennas or our campus. As one can see, they are not evenly distributed and since we used Wireless signals to compute people’s location in space, it was clear that the accuracy was different depending on the location in space (it was less accurate in the lower part). In addition, the heterogeneity of space is also caused by topographical limits: indoor/outdoor transitions for example.

(Picture courtesy of Fabien Girardin)

And finally, that picture shows three different traces of a passage in space using a GPS. Depending on the level considered, the accuracy of the positioning is way different (from dots to a straight line). Sometimes it’s not even continuous, so how can we design a service based on that?

Down the road, my point was to show through these 3 examples that there are limits to the continuity of the user experience. All the components of the locative media ecosystem are complex and they can either be taken as limits or as opportunities.

Thanks Michiel and Martijn for the invitation. I’ll try to put my (long) notes later on.

Queues and interaction design

Donald Norman’s column about the analogy between “queues and interaction design” was very thoughtful:

“What is a buffer? It is a holding space between two systems, sometimes in space, sometimes in time, allowing the objects or information from one system to await the next system.
(…)
We can see buffers in operation almost everywhere. For example, when I walk into a dining room and see the food waiting to be dispersed to the guests, these are inventories of food, buffers. Even when eating from a plate heaped with food, the food not yet in the mouth is inventory, a buffer that makes it easy to select from the preferred orderings at the eater’s own pace.
(…)
Interaction design is about interfaces, which means it is about synchronizing the events of different systems, about memories, buffers, queues and waiting rooms. Waiting is an unavoidable component of interfaces, an unavoidable part of life.“

Why do I blog this? just found the analogy intriguing.

Metro pass surfaces

To access the underground:

To recharge your card/pass:

(Seen in Paris last week)

Why do I blog this? I just wanted to point the size and color of the contact area (coherence and homogeneity). This big violet circle is intriguing and as you can see on the second picture there is a sort of “tail” maybe to facilitate the passing of the card/pass when moving. The tail allow the user not to stop to validate his/her card.

Foresight session at LIFT08

Still a struggle to find time to blog my notes from the LIFT08 conference. Here are some notes from the session about foresight.

Scott Smith
As defined by his complany tagline, Scott talked about “seeing change differently” or how to help people to see change more clearly. He defined foresight as “keeping your mind and your eyes aware of the periphery as well as what is in the immediately linear future, as there is always something that could disrupt your path“. Following William Gibons’s quote that the “future is already here but it’s not evenly distributed”, Scott then described how the future is hidden in little places or pockets we are not always aware of and insisted on the important of qualitative data (over quantitative extrapolations). Hence the importance of ethnographical approaches. He insisted on a set of tips to adopt a qualitative foresight approach: (1) be aware of what’s going on around you, (2) scan, collect, organize, (3) look for patterns and deep currents, (4), understand the role of values, (5) have a view, but not an ideology (and be ready to step outside your boundaries), (6), stay grounded, (7), be prepared to leave behind the artifacts of your experience.

Francesco Cara
Francesco works at Nokia, he’s design strategist and basically described the sort of approach to innovation he favors. He started by insisting on the notion of ecosystem and complex systems drawn from Piaget that shaped his vision hereafter. Looking at the evolution of mobile communication, he showed how the ecosystem got more complex over time: from GSM phone units (closed by regulators, carriers, manufacturers) to WAP-based phone with more capabilities to exchange “with the outside” and finally a third stage with new services that tap into the Internet (maps, email…) and new entrants (Google, Apple).
To do so, he actually used visualization from a project conducted at our EPFL lab called “Mapping the Digital World, Visualizing the fundamental structure of the digital world in mobile devices . This last stage forms a sort of “cloud” of services that is so complex that our way to interact with it are totally different. But the problem is the one of the interface: how to interact with this complex ecosystem?

(Picture taken by Bruno Giussani)

Francesco showed the different approaches adopted by companies such as Blacberry (specialized: email), chaotic interface with various ways to use services (Sony Ericcson), desktop-based (Apple iPhone) or portal-based (Windows). He then advocated for “fresh” innovation. And why is this in a foresight session? Francesco’s point is that sometimes innovation does not lie in observing the past or looking for weak signals but rather to develop brand new approach and create new metaphor (that can of course be based on analogical reasoning, taken from other domains). His claim was not that the stuff presented by Scott is wrong but rather that innovation if a combination of both and it all boils down to the level of granularity in the data you need to inform design.

Bill Cockayne
Bill started off by making a strong point that what he talks about is not “futurism” but “foresight” and the role it plays in the innovation process. What he means is rather how to inform the building of something that is 1-2 product life cycle away. Depending on the products (car: 10 years+, nokia: closer), what happen is generally 1st product cycle (made now), 2nd product cycles (strategized now) and what happen for the 3rd product cycles?

Bill focuses on where you kind of start the whole process. He explained how the ideas he presents has been developed as Stanford. For instant, they adopted the ambiguity curve as a way to decribe the process. It’s used by Prof. Leifer at Stanford and it’s inspired by work from MIT+Buckminster Fuller. The ambiguity curve is not explicitly referenced but it shows how the situation evolves. At the beginning, you have ideas (beginning of a problem) with a vast ambiguity (“but we have to live in it”). All the way to shipping a product you retain ambiguity but there are different stages:

The thing is that people are having a problem to figure out where to fit in this process, to be aware of one’s strength or how to maximize them. What is design, what is foresight? How to connect d+f? The problem between r+d= people from research why what they give to developers is shipped and people from development never visit the researcher’s office because they have work to do today. And there are same issues with foresight and design. However, there are no breaks between r and f or between r and d, eventually you have to ship products! There are 3(+1) stages: (0), wallow (what Scott described: looking for the future, not ready to start the projects, be aware and intuitive, scan/look/analyze data), (1) foresight (prepare and sense), (2) research (form and analyze) and (3) design (integrate, develop)

What is important here is the notion of roles, which was developed afterwards. I strongly recommend here to have a look at at the impressive work done by Michele Perras, who recreated the images form Bill’s slides. For example the one that shows the different types of roles (see also Bill’s discussion of the role on her blog which nicely covers the topic in greater details):

(Re-created by Michele Perras)

Bill then described what roles can fit with what part of the process and along the ambiguity curve. He also presented what sort of process takes place: informal/formal/corporate.

His last advice was to know yourself, and what role you can play:
1) if you wanna be an expert, please remain an expert; stay at school kids, focusing on what you’re good at
2) t-person: learn another language, something complementary (take a design degree if you’re en business expert), vast need for this people
3) break your breadth, take a new expertise
4) come talk to people like scott, francesco, bill and read widely

Why is that important? why did he talk about roles and not tools to predict the future? Because change is constant, which means that new opportunities appear constantly and “we love opportunities because that’s where innovation comes from” and knowing where you excel at will help you to know who you are and make you more comfortable in the change environment and help you tell other people where you’re good at.

Notes from Paris digital city conference

Some notes from the urban computing symposium I attended in Paris last week. The whole thing was about what the organizers call “Villes 2.0″ (i.e. City 2.0) based on the assumption that the transformation the Web have seen (from its first use to a second generation much more participative) is an interesting model to observe what is happening nowadays in urban environment. They have a whole research transfer/workshop program about this topic and this event was focused on “new urban perspectives”.

Isabelle Mari (JCDecaux) and Bruno Marzloff (Groupe Chronos)
The discussion was about the bike renting system put in place by JCDecaux (see the one in Paris) for example. To them, the biggest surprises were:

1. The service was a success unlike what the marketing studies they’ve done before had revealed. People seemed to be not interested before the introduction of the service but their offer revealed a latent demand from city dwellers
2. The service was a success very quickly and with an incredible richness of appropriation, as attested by pictures on Flickr, lots of curious practices and tools created by people (mash-ups).
3. They expected people to get bike pass (because it’s more convenient) but people acted as “reccuring occasional users” by paying only when they needed a bike. As if people wanted to minimize the constraints and employ the service to optimize their liberty of use.

They then presented the reasons why an outdoor advertising company such as JCDecaux becomes a “mobility company”. One of the reason is that people are used to a fluidity of services and information; they than have similar expectations for urban services. The problem is that city councils or other public bodies don’t have resources/time/expertise to do that. Therefore some public/private hybridization with new actors are appearing. The problem is then to have a continuity of services between all these actors. The advantage of a company such as JCDecaux is that they’re already working with networks (of physical objects, i.e. billboards, people, subcontractors, etc.). The network organization is a fundamental aspect of mobility.

The last thing they discuss was the similarity between the web and the city (in this web2.0/city analogy): people on the web buy “display”, a need to have an embodiment and it’s the same in the city. She also made an analogy with digital music which is now a commodity and it augmented the value of concerts. In the city, there will be new commoditized services that will augmented the value of city activities.

Jean-Louis Fréchin
Jean-Louis talked right after me, in the session about the invisibility of the digital city. More specifically, his presentation was about urban signs and identity (see his slides in french here).

The identity of a city is built through: monuments and symbols (Eiffel Tower), history (traces of the past), signs that are sometimes discreet (manhole covers), signs (street plates), road signs, infrastructures (like Guimard’s entrance in Paris subway), companies signs. This often lead to a “ville-spectacle” (spectacle-city). On the other hand, the signs and the identity of a city are participative. graffitis, space invaders, political announces.

Through various examples, he then detailed the issues at stake concerning signs for digital services: should we create new signs? new objects? old objects (can we reinvent the orientation table?)? or should we combine signs to other infrastructures? What should be the level of precision? Do we need the information to be legible? What about the regulation? who will control these signs? Can it be participative?

Yo Kaminagai (RATP)
Yo is a design director at the Paris transport utility company RATP. Personally, I always enjoy his talks as they’re a mix of down-to-earth and design description. The sort of thing I get from his talks are elements such as “we need 20 square meters per metro station to put infrastructures for GSM covering of the whole subway system and we never have enough room in corridors built in 1910. So there is less room for people, less for billboards and our revenues drop”. As a matter of fact, he started by discussing how the immaterial, what some call “the virtual” is material and that people, users, are impacted by that. Thus, space is not an adjustment variable but a parameter.

A big part of his talk was about the design guidelines they set to create metro stations (easy to use, reliable, enriching, regulating, safe) and the importance to link (or not to link) the underground city and the city above. And he highlighted how the disorder of spatial environment often reflect the communication problems between people who are taking care of it.

Part of their problem is also that they need to think at different scales. For instance, they will soon renew their metro trains. What happens is that they buy something that will last 60 years (and will only be renovated once). So planning is VERY important: taking new needs into account, flexibility (how to design billboard 30 years before), how to combine safety, comfort and huge numbers of users (3 lines on 14 are overcrowded today, in 10 years, it will be 10 on 14!).

In that context, they consider building new (digital) services (for orientation, supporting conversations or meetings…) but given that the subway is already crowded it can be perceived as an aggression (too much information!) by users. This is why they think about “doubling” the physical environment with digital representations (hence their interest in platform such as Second Life).

So transparent that you need to make it visible

Sometimes, transparency is so well achieved that you have to put a sign that something transparent is really there. In the example above, the glass is so transparent that a sign has to be put indicating the presence of “glass” (in french, it says “Beware! Glass”).

Why do I blog this? This example is interesting because it’s the same problem faced by digital services in contemporary cities. It’s also an intriguing design issue, to balance transparency and visibility is a bit tricky and sometimes external factors could help: in this case the presence of dirt/dust will inevitably lead to the removal of the sign.

Maps as abstraction

Current discussions lately have led me to have a glance at the “critical cartography” field. Reading An Introduction to Critical Cartography by Jeremy W. Crampton and John Krygier was a good introduction to that.

The part that interested me most was the one about the critiques of maps, as shown by this quote by Yves Lacoste:
“The map, perhaps the central referent of geography, is, and has been, fundamentally an instrument of power. A map is an abstraction from concrete reality which was designed and motivated by practical (political and military) concerns; it is a way of representing space which facilitates its domination and control. To map…serves the practical interests of the State machine (Lacoste 1973: 1). “

Back to Crampton and Krygier:

“We define critical cartography as a one-two punch of new mapping practices and theoretical critique. Critical cartography challenges academic cartography by linking geographic knowledge with power, and thus is political.
(…)
The explicit critique of cartography and GIS that arose in the late 1980s should therefore be understood in this much longer tradition. While the former is better known, to overlook the latter is merely to “accept what cartographers tell us maps are supposed to be” (Harley 1989: 1). In fact, cartography as a way of knowing the world has constantly struggled with the status of its knowledge in a manner similar to that of the geographical discipline (Livingstone 1992). “

Why do I blog this? having worked on the user experience of location-based services, it’s important to keep in mind how maps are not absolute representation of the reality but are definitely influenced by other factors (such a political or economical factors).

What appearance means…

as shown by satellite antennas

In Swiss Mountains, they can be decorated as typical housing add-ons. In the example below, the owners have put a sort-of typical paintings (with cow going up the mountains, a sort-of “poya”):

At Reuters Headquarters in Geneva, the situation is different and antennas are huge and protected by barriers:

Both are integrated differently in the landscape, but both are upload/download devices.

Talk in Paris about the invisibility of the digital city

Yesterday, I was in Paris to attend a Villes2.0 event (a sort of urban computing symposium) organized by the french think tank FING. The theme of the afternoon was “Cities and mobility: new urban perspectives. It was a quite packed conference with lots of interesting speakers coming from different fields such as transportation operations (RATP), sociology, entrepreneurship, design or big french technological companies.

My presentation was about the invisibility of the digital city. If you’ve read Dan Hill post last week about the “street as a platform”, it basically starts from the same point: cities of today are filled with digital services that Hill’s blogpost describes very nicely. But most of the time these services are invisible.

My point was to show that there was a paradox here: since urban computing (as derived form ubiquitous computing) is partly meant to make explicit/visible some phenomena that are invisible, it’s quite surprising that it itself invisible! I took some examples such as Tunable Cities (revealing electromagnetic fields) by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Rabby, the D-tower (to reveal emotion in cities), Beatriz Da Costa’s pigeon blog systems that reports about city pollutions and of course the huge list of location-based services (Intel’s Jabberwocky to reveal familiar strangers).

To some extent, the “disappearing computing” paradigm that Mark Weiser described has been some taken to the letter that digitality services are invisible. There is a very intriguing and recursive tension here that can be summarized by this dilemma: “how to make visible invisible techniques that aim at making visible the invisible“. It sounds like a tongue twister but that’s the reality faced by some urban companies I discussed with after my talk. The other layer of complexity is also “urban computing” has a huge component that is often left out: it is sometimes “unexpected (“imprevisible” in french) given that some parts can fluctuate (network signals, GPS accuracy…).

The other part of the talk was a sort of examination of the solutions to make the digital city more “visible”. I took the example of the availability of Wifi and other services.

I started with signs: like the “((o))” that shows wifi presence in Switzerland or the lovely “Internet” signs that you spot all over the place (especially in exotic countries where they’re often put with flowers). I also showed Timo Arnall’s graphic language for Touch to describe the visual link between information and physical things.

In addition, the use of location-bases services themselves (as a sort of information-”push” system) that would deliver information to people based on their location. I spent here a little bit of time to explain why lots of them fails to do so.

Then I’ve showed some examples of cluster of services like phone/wifi booth and insisted that the future was closer to a JCDecaux mobile furniture I’ve seen in Mexico: a sort of billboard with a chair (used by people who wax shoes). In a sense clustering various services – digital and not digital – is a solution currently to make services more visible. For example, in Switzerland in railway station, you often have photographing booth+picture printing+phone booths+wifi+vending machinges next to each others.

(Left picture by Fabien Girardin)

There are also new devices such as Wifi detectors, even on shirts that can explicit the presence of open networks. Those of course are gadgets and possibly meant to be integrated in other devices. I am wondering why phones does not (yet) have a WiFi indicator; my Nokia E65 phone can get Wifi but I need to do complex tricks to know if there’s a network that is available.

And finally I advocated for more complex modes of interactions and that is not only a matter of “seeing” the digital city but rather to perceive it. Here I discussed podotactiles as an example of a different way to “feel” the city. As you may know podotactiles are textured strip which runs along the edge of the metro/tram station platform or even sidewalk, which one can feel with the feet. What I find interesting there is that (1) it’s both about vision and proprioception, (2) it’s not yet-another-device that gives you location-based information but a rather contextual marker in the environment. The street pavement as an interface if you will.

My last point was about the users of such systems who often realize the presence/availability when there are physical/digital frictions: breakdowns, adaptive behavior from other users (you see a person employing a laptop while sat on church’s stairs), or when you see specialist fixing a problem (network problem, broken cables), etc.

Thanks Thierry Marcou and Fabien Eychenne for the invitation! I’ll post my notes about the other speakers soon.

Nintendo DS+iphone band

iBand is a curious Nintendo DS+iphone band:

Check the YouTube video too.
Why do I blog this? although it is very basic, I found the minimalism appealing (small instrument, small band, minimal tunes). And I love Elektroplankton. Somehow related to device art.