Pervasive games book

It seems that the book “Pervasive Games: Theory and Design – Experiences on the Boundary between Life and Play ” by Markus Montola, Jaakko Stenros and Annika Waer (editors) is finally out, published by Morgan Kauffman:

“Quickly emerging from the fast-paced growth of mobile communications and wireless technologies, pervasive games provide a worldwide network of potential play spaces. Now games can be designed to be played in public spaces like streets, conferences, museums and other non-traditional game venues – and game designers need to understand the world as a medium—both its challenges and its advantages.

This book shows how to change the face of play—who plays, when and where they play and what that play means to all involved. The authors explore aspects of pervasive games that concern game designers: what makes these games compelling, what makes them possible today, how they are made and by whom. For theorists, it provides a solidtheoretical, philosophical and aesthetic grounding of their designs.

Pervasive Games covers everything from theory and design to history and marketing. Designers will find 13 detailed game descriptions, a wealth of design theory, examples from dozens of games and a thorough discussion of past inspirations—directly from the game designers themselves.“

Why do I blog this? just saw this on, need to get it and peruse this interesting compendium of case-studies (Killer, Insectopia, Botfighters, Uncle Roy, etc.). People interested can also listen to the podcast by the editors.

Space, from above

“By looking at the satellite image we extract ourselves from our particular point of view, yet without, bouncing up to the bird’s eye view; we have no access to the divine view, the view from nowhere. We go from our bounded view to a sliding view that will carry us from a labyrinth of transformations to the general frame in which our daily action is set – and that will never be more than a few square centimetres big. The frame has the same dimension, in a sense, as the object it frames. The big is no bigger than the small“

“Paris ville invisible” by Bruno Latour and Emilie Hermant (1998).

Why do I blog this? writing a piece with Julian about urban computing leads me to revisit this nice book by Latour.

Johanna Brewer about ethnography and design

Back to EPFL today for a lecture by Johanna Brewer about “What can ethnography do for technology?”. She basically presented how ethnography, as a methodological strategy, is relevant for design in the context of her PhD projects. Johanna did her PhD with Paul Dourish at UCI Irvine and she recently launched a new start-up called frestyl (in the mobile/web music business).

After a brief introduction of *what is ethnography*, she showed how Human-Computer Interaction, initially based in Computer Science, evolved to include cognitive psycho concepts with a quantitative understanding of how humans interact with technology. Researchers recognized that this approach, though fruitful for certain purposes, could be complemented by others, such as ethnography. Which is *Ethnography met HCI*: as technology has become ubiquitous, multi-purpose, embedded, social, there was trend to move beyond lab-based studies of individuals and instead understand social use of technology. The point was then to leverage ethnographic techniques to seek inspiration for new designs. This quick summary was interesting but I think it partly ignores the use of ethnographically-inspired method in the broader context of design (that happened in parallel).

Johanna then summarized what *ethnography can do for HCI*:

1. broadening the notions of requirements gathering
2. understanding social context of service increases chances of adoption (rather than just the use of technology)
3. creating new engaging experiences (things that move beyond practices people are already doing, push the envelope, push the boundaries)
4. inspired by real-world social interaction

In human-computer interaction, the way ethnography is employed is different than its earlier roots in anthropology: field study is shorter (week-long rather than year-long but the rationale is that one day is better than no days at all!), there is a deep/narrow focus on particular setting (what’s like to ride the public transport in lausanne?), study of target users, with an eye towards technology design, not just understanding culture for the sake of it. Which led her to delineate two scopes: “open-ended, exploratory, revolutionary” versus “target, tailored, techno-centric” (look at a particular setting, or at particular features to be changed).

A big part of the presentation was then a description of the different techniques, which she categorized in two clusters:

• Traditional methods: participant observation (and the importance of taking personal field notes), photography, video, interviews
• Innovative methods: defamiliarization (looking at your culture with fresh eyes), people shadowing (following a person (often with consent), documenting their actions, in-situ discussions, ask “stupid” things: Why did you push that button here?), object shadowing (following things instead of people, like newspaper dropped on the tube in London), disrupting and intervention (shaking up a social situation and observing the result), cultural and technological probes (low-fi/hi-fi design interventions: exploring people’s reactions, probe a situation, once you have designed something)

After a brief description of the analysis part (documentation is analyzed through coding: looking for common themes in data), she presented the existence of various outcomes: a plan for follow-up ethnographic study (as it allowed to ask more questions), general guidelines for futures technologies, concept design, implementation of prototype, fully realized product. And all of this can take a large range of format: written document, video, photographic essay, design response/prototype to demonstrate ethnographic work.

She then showed various examples taken from her work. I enjoyed the part about how she chose the sample group for her interviews.

(undersound is one of the project that emerged from Johanna and her colleagues’ ethnographic research)

She used what she called “theoretical sampling”: chose a theoretically interesting sample of people (rather than statistically representative) who are interested by the experience of the context she was exploring (the tube). I was also intrigued by how she looked for inspiration for design, not guidelines, something that I was not surprised of given that this was the reason why I invited her PhD advisor to Lift last year. Her point was that ethnography can give an impetus that what you design is culturally relevant
as it roots your design in cultural underpinnings “when you go to a place and talk to people, you design sth that is relevant for them (and it also makes them appreciate what you do)“.

Why do I blog this an interesting overview that is certainly useful as I am preparing a course about these issues for next year’s class at the design school in Geneva.

Original design thinking approach for researching RFID

Designing with RFID by Einar Sneve Martinussen and Timo Arnall (presented at Tangible & Embedded Interaction 2009) is an highly interesting read if you’re into alternative visions to the internet of things. Based on what the authors call “a practice-driven design approach“, through sketching, making and form-explorations, they explore the possibilities for richer design of RFID products in everyday contexts.

However, I was even more interested by the design methodologies proposed in the paper. The way the articulate different techniques, such as sketching, modeling, form exploration or evaluation, is original and curious. What is relevant to me is the clear definition of a purpose (“to gain a rich working knowledge of the kinds of design qualities that RFID objects may embody“) and the way they proposed different investigation phases:

“product review (…) To understand the ways that RFID tags have been designed into consumer products, we conducted an extensive product review that documents many RFID products from around the world. This has been a process of reflection on existing industrial and consumer products.
(…)
design experiment that focuses on form and expression rather than specific applications or technical infrastructures. (…) Through a sketching process we developed an understanding of the relationships between physical forms and tags. Form-explorations were then used to visualise findings, to generate further models and to examine surface qualities. (…) The experiments were carried out and evaluated by a group of designers with diverse design skills: including model making, software programming, electronics hardware and digital 3D design. Subsequent iterations were informed by design evaluation and through teaching
(…)
Sketching is used as an analytic tool, to evaluate, not just for idea generation.
(…)
digital 3D modeling (…) act as a way of lifting the findings out of rough sketching and experimenting stage and towards a generalisation of the research. They effectively communicate the physical aspects of the design findings and help us to evaluate and refine a vocabulary of forms.
(…)
In industrial design the approaches to physical objects has included aesthetic taxonomies of form18 that codify various elements and properties of primitives such as geometry, orientation, symmetry, spatial matrices, forces and relationships between forms as well as intention and expression. Through introducing RFID as an element into this approach, we begin to design an inspirational or generative set of forms for RFID- enabled objects. (…) [it] helped to understand the fundamental properties that determine how RFID object could be used and designed.“

Why do I blog this? It’s been a long time that this pdf sits on my desktop. Knowing Timo and Einar’s work I was intrigued by both the topic AND the methodological approach. The two aspects of it are important but it was even more important to see how they exemplify an interesting approach to design research. Besides, such a description is rarely seen.

Surely some good material for my courses, and an opportunity to rethink about how to articulate user research can be included in such a process.

About why people hate Clippy

Taking some time reading about technological failures, I found this interesting reference by Luke Swartz called Why People Hate the Paperclip: Labels, Appearance, Behavior, and Social Responses to User Interface Agents. This dissertation deals with Office assistants on computers that seem to be a big pain for lots of people. The documents provides an interesting contextual history of such user interface agents and it tackles the user experience angle based on theoretical, qualitative, and quantitative studies, the author.

Some of the results:

“Among the findings were that labels—whether internal cognitive labels or explicit system-provided labels—of user interface agents can influence users’ perceptions of those agents. Similarly, specific agent appearance (for example, whether the agent is depicted as a character or not) and behavior (for example, if it obeys standards of social etiquette, or if it tells jokes) can affect users’ responses, especially in interaction with labels.“

But my favorite part is certainly the one about mental models of Clippy:

“Two interesting points present themselves here: First, beginners—the people who are supposed to be helped the most by the Office Assistant—are at least somewhat confused about what it is supposed to do. Especially given that beginners won’t naturally turn to the computer for help (as they seek out people instead, it may be especially important to introduce such users to what the Assistant does and how to use it effectively.

Second, that even relatively experienced users attribute a number of actions (such as automatic formatting) to the Office Assistant suggests that users are so used to the direct-manipulation application-as-tool metaphor, that any amount of independent action will be ascribed to the agent. For these users, the agent has taken on agency for the program itself!“

Why do I blog this? collecting material about technological failures and their user experience, this research piece is interesting both in terms of content and methodologies. Besides, I was intrigued by the discussion about mental models and how people understand how things work (or don’t work). There are some interesting parallels between this and the catchbob results. Especially in how we differentiated several clusters of users depending on how they understood flaws and problems.

Map incompleteness

Map incompleteness is something that I am very intrigued about. As shown in the example above taken in Paris, the city itself is well represented but as soon as you leave the “périphérique” (the highway-like infrastructure that surrounds the french capital), it’s a blank grey void as if no one leaves beyond this limit. It’s a phenomenon you also encounter with weather maps as you can see below: weather forecast generally stops at the border (clouds don’t go through the customs, do they?). You can see the swiss map as if it was a stand-alone territory (lots of countries do it anyway).

Why do I blog this? Map incompleteness is understandable in terms of information design: the use of “white space” can be relevant to “balance composition and induction properly”. Designing maps and signage is a matter of simplification so that people could easily grasp the situation at hand. However, in both situations above I am often bothered by the simplification; not that I need to go across the border and would be happy to know the temperature, rather because it discretized phenomena that should be represented as continuous.

Testing the Nintendo DSi

Recently acquired a Nintendo DSi. Although I have a DS for sometime, I wanted to see how the user experience could be reshuffled through the new features provided by Nintendo.

The first interesting change is that you can download games from DSi ware virtual shop. Simply put, there’s no game sold with the console! You plug in the interwebs, see what you can buy with 1000 points and download it onto the internal drive of the DSi. It takes a short amount of time that you spend watching a bunch of Nintendo characters who race to fill box with blue liquid (which means that the game download is complete). Fortunately, this time, the web browser (Opera) is free. What this means is that part of the software is dematerialized (no cartridges).

Another important addition consists in the two cameras that allow you to take photos with eleven different lenses and exchange photos with other Nintendo DSi systems. The basic piece of software enables the user to manipulate content in very basic ways (stretch a photo, add moustaches…) and create new game mechanics (as in the Wario Ware game you can buy with your 5000 points). Of course the quality is so-so but I am more intrigued by how basic games could be implemented on top of that, than using the DSi to replace my camera.

Perhaps the most striking change lies in the small improvements and variety of usage allowed by the new features: web integration/access is very interesting and it turns the console into a platform to do other things than gaming. I actually used it last week in our Lift weekly meeting to access Google docs. The whole user experience is improved through very simple UI transformations. It’s interesting to observe how dealing with memory issues on the DSi has changed: you have virtual “slots” where you can download applications from DSi ware and the addition of an SD card slot is also a good move to enable the use of external content.

On the minus side though, the loss of the GBA cartridge slot (then no weird add-on!) and the “yet another new power adapter” is again an issue. Moreover, it’s not possible (so far) to read MP3 because they wanted to support the AAC music format; I know it allows you to alter the pitch and speed but I don’t have anything in this format (yet).

Why do I blog this? as a user experience research intrigued by mobile technologies, the DSi is an highly curious piece with good things ahead. For two reasons:

1. it’s not longer a device uniquely devoted to gameplay: users can be engaged in web-based interactions, play with pictures and sounds and I am pretty sure there will be improvements and tools to build sth around them.
2. it also disrupts the mobile gaming experience: playing with cameras or material from SD cards is perhaps more common after seeing games on cell-phones but it’s still a good step for the video game console designers. For instance, Wario Ware micro-games with the camera are very curious (although a tad difficul depending on the light conditions). Furthermore, It seems to me that the social component will also be a hot topic using different contextes (colocated versus distant play).

The Sci-Fi angle in Love&Rockets

One of my favorite graphic novel series lately is “Love&Rockets” by Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez. More specifically, it’s Jaime’s Hoppers 13 which gets me all hopped up. It basically tells the story of a group of chicano girlz in their teenage years (Margarita Luisa “Maggie” Chascarrillo and Esperanza “Hopey” Leticia Glass as well as tremendous quantity of secondary characters) in the SoCal punk-rock scene.

An interesting aspect consist in the mix of science-fiction elements at the beginning of the series, especially in Maggie the Mechanic, surely on of my favorite comic-book. The SoCal world is mixed with sci-fi fantasies that some folks referred to as “window dressing”… which I disagree with. Although this futuristic twist is sort of left out of the pictures afterwards in the comic series, I found it highly intriguing.

“Maggie the Mechanic” is about Chascarillo’s adventures as a world-travelling “prosolar mechanic” (working on space-rockets) with Rand Race (a famous prosolar mechanic who becomes Maggie’s love interest). The plot revolveds around Maggie and Race who get a job in Rio Frio (an island in the Pacific) where the weird Dr. Beaky wants them to fix robots on the isle of Chepan, so he can say he’s employing Race to his rival H.R. Costigan (more about it here if you’re lazy). Let’s have a look at sci-fi ingredients in there.

The first thing that struck me as fascinating was the general aesthetic: parts of a broken spaceship crashed in the jungle, a bunch of old robots that need to be fixed, dinosaur-encounters after fixing a spaceship. There is a sense of fascinating “retro-futurism” in there through a mix of “almost-space-opera” and mexican wrestlers. Written in 1984, technology is definitely not digital as it’s mostly all about mechanical engineering. The idioms are curious too, starting with this “pro-solar mechanic” job title or the presence of “hover-bikes” and “mini-tram”. Even the french translation that I had a glance at kept these good memes. The beautiful drawings of Hernandez, as well as the writings make the whole atmosphere very special. For example, the tone (see the panel above) is both humorous and casual while describing fantastic situations.

And the second aspect that I found important was that how science-fiction characteristics are only depicted as background elements, with a strong plot around it. They just fade in the background and are then taken for granted. You can find broken robots, odd animals such as dinosaurs or awkward spaceship but you never really see where they can bring you to. It’s just part of the ambience and it’s fine. The emphasis in the graphic novel is clearly on relationships, not on weird and crazy technological items. As Jaime’s brother claimed:

“What’s very interesting about the science fiction stuff is that the question we get asked the most, at least out loud, is “Where is the rocket? That’s the real Love and Rockets.” Oddly, that’s the smaller segment of the audience–they’re just more vocal. The real audience is the one who followed Maggie and Hopey’s adventures as real girls, so to speak, and the Palomar stories. That is the real Love and Rockets reader. But for some reason we have the most outspoken ones saying, “When are you going to do the rockets? It’s called Love and Rockets!” That’s fine, we love doing rocket stuff, but the real Love and Rockets is what we are famous for.“

Why do I blog this? saturday afternoon musing about interesting cultural items sitting on my desk. Tried to rationalize a bit why I found this piece intriguing. What I find important here, and perhaps as a take-away in my work, is that science-fiction bricks and components should not be fetishized, instead they can act as “hooks” to create a certain atmosphere. Perhaps this atmosphere allows to create an interesting imaginary realm where new ideas about more abstract maters can take place. The parallel I draw here concerns the role of sci-fi items in design and foresight: the items are not the most important part, it’s the implications and what people do around/with them that counts.

2.0

A reminder that the “2.0″ meme has not always referred to “user participation/sharing” (on the World Wide Web in the Web 2.0 trope or in other fields such as in “enterprise 2.0″, “city 2.0″ or “human 2.0″). And don’t get me started on that term…

EPFL IC research day about invisible computing

[Local news] The School of Computer and Communication Sciences at EPFL (my alma mater) has a research day on June 4 about Invisible Computing: Novel Interfaces to Digital Environments organized by two ex-bosses (Pierre Dillenbourg and Jeffrey Huang). There’s going to be three interesting talks about this topic:

“Programmable Reality by Ivan Poupyrev (Sony CSL, interaction Lab, Tokyo): What would happen when we will be able to computationally control physical matter?

The Myth of Touch by Chia Shen (Harvard University): Are multi-touch tabletop interfaces as intuitive as they seem in YouTube demonstrations? Do we perceive better by touching? How do users really perform on a touch surface?

Labours of Love in the Digital Home of the Future by Richard harper (Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK): What will homes of the future be? Will they offer all sorts of automation that will let the occupants be lazy and indolent? Will this make for contentment? We think that automation will have a place in the home of the future, but our concern is not with proving the individual with machines that take over their every labour: we think contentment at home will also be delivered through allowing people to invest in labours of love. These can take many forms and can be supported in various new ways.“

Why do I blog this? I am especially interested in the last speaker as I follow his work about ethnography and design, as well as his interest in automation. On a different note, it’s intriguing to see this faculty finally having an event about human-computer interaction.