Workshop in Torino

Last tuesday I was in Torino, Italy for the “I Realize” conference organized by TOPIX (Torino Piemontre Internet eXchange). Participating as a workshop facilitator, I was told to focus on how people will move and interact in the city of tomorrow. We worked on identifying unsolved problems, suggesting possible (technological?) solutions. The day after the workshop, I presented a quick overview of the results that others such as Bruce Sterling commented during the panel. Annotated slides can be found here. The workshop was based on a quick field exploration in the morning, during which participants were told to collect some material about people practices and needs. The afternoon as devoted to material analysis and discussion of design issues and solutions.

Thanks Leonardo for the invitation!

Hidden protection

An interesting example of a car carpet repurposed to hide a locker at the door of an urban garden in Torino.

City quantification devices

The presence of scales in public space has always intrigued me. Such a quantification device is generally private but there are different occurrences of public appearances. The picture above in Torino depict street scales that people can use (and pay for) to know their weight, which is definitely a personal use, although it takes place in a public space. There is clearly a cultural thing to have this sort of artifact in the urban environment and I don’t really know the whole picture here. It seems curious though.

The one below, taken from a lift in an hotel in Paris shows the scale of the group: it’s a group indicator that is meant to prevent the elevator to break down if the weight is too important. I can’t help thinking about the awkward situation that may happen if the scale warns people that there are too much people in the lift. Will the negotiation process be fluid or will it lead to unexpected arguments. As usual with devices that make things explicit, I foresee surprises.

Why do I blog this? yet another example of quantification devices employed in our material world. The practices at stake here are important to document and compare to the whole discourse about how measuring our movements/activities can lead to original representations and services (will individual weight be a parameter in some sort of scary identification process? will we have elevator services based on group weight? how weird?).

The use of these measurement devices in public space is certainly an interesting locus of interest for people who want to explore what happens when “things that were implicit becomes explicit”… which is also what happens with ubiquitous computing as Adam Greenfield put it in his “Everyware” book:

“Everyware surfaces and makes explicit information that has always been latent in our lives, and this will frequently be incommensurate with social or psychological comfort“

Reading “The Caryatids” by Bruce Sterling

Just finished reading “The Caryatids” by Bruce Sterling. This inspiring book is built around the history of the four Mihajlovic sisters, who are surviving clones of a biopiracy lab. Spread in different countries (Balkans, California and the Gobi desert in China), each of them represent a different “camp” (Acquis, Dispensation, China and crazy individual) with different values and approaches to see the world. All of this is wrapped in en eco-disaster twist that is a bit reminiscent of Sterling’s other novels (“Holy Fire or “Distraction”). Both a fun and deep read.

The novel is an insightful extrapolation of our present: the description of the faction (through each character in the 3 chapters) is a good example of how todays trends could evolve in the mid-term. We have networked-participative-ecofriendly Acquis, futile-wired-greedy Dispensation and Nation-State China who all have their own approaches to see the world. After Distraction and its “Moderators versus Regulators” factions, Sterling keeps exploring social and political differences of the near future. Like a foresight research report with a 3-scenarios structure, the book offer different visions of how tackling today’s world problems can be achieved through differently. Of course, these 3 responses correspond to existing forces at play nowadays.

This “3 responses” structure makes me think that futures think-tanks and foresight research group can take this novel as a great example of how they could craft engaging deliverables. The “futures/foresight” angle is important anyway and Sterling drops bits of wisdom here and there that will definitely echo with futurists’ approaches:

“the sea had no ‘real’ blue and the camp was no ‘real’ camp. There as a mélange of potent forces best described as ‘futurity’. They were futuring here, and the future was a process, not a destination.” (p13)

“it was an old trick, but often a good one. Most trend-spotters using the net looked for raising new items that were gaining public credibility. But you could learn useful things in a hurry if you searched for precisely the opposite. News that should have public credibility, but didn’t.” (p118)

“Futurism is prediction. We all know that’s impossible. But history is retrodiction, and that’s impossible too. Se we have to paper over these black holes with sheer imagination.” (p295)

Besides, one of the character (Little Mary Montalban, that looks IMO to some sort of “little miss sunshine”) even described herself as a Black Swan.

Beyond these general elements, The Caryatids is an excellent platform where Sterling brings a context and some carefully-crafted poetry of technological devices and social trends. By describing the crossing of these elements, the novel shows various implications about what our society (researchers, designers, policy-makers, entrepreneurs) are doing right now on our planet.

One of the easiest aspect to get, if you’re following ubiquitous computing and networked objects, consists in the discussion of everyware and what Sterling refers to as the “Sensorweb”:

“the sensorweb was a single instrument, small pieces loosely joined into one huge environmental telescope. The sensorweb measured and archived changes in the island’s status. Temperature, humidity, sunlight. Flights of pollen, flights of insects, the migrations of birds and fish” (p10)

“now the island was an aspect of the web” (p11)

“your everyware touches everything that we do here” (p33), “cover the world with scanner and sensors” (p78)

The vision the reader is presented here is not just descriptive since the most interesting aspect of the sensorweb discussion concern its implications. As shown on the picture above (p72), there is a relevant differentiation between “sensory analysis” versus “sensory control”. The two correspond to different approaches to a problem at stake today with the advent of networked sensors and the possibility of collecting information from mobile devices and the web.
The current debate (today, not in the novel) is basic: (1) We have traces that are available today (generated by the use of mobile devices, picture upload on the web) and that will be easier to collect tomorrow (brain activity, heartbeats), (2) some people think it can be an opportunity for social sciences renewal, others fear that it can lead to greater control. Which actually corresponds, in the novel, to this pertinent quote by a cloned chinese state warrior who paraphrase Gilles Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control“:

“The worst threats among those state running dogs are provocative figures who foment new relationships emerging from the long-standing interplay of social and urban control experiments practices by the state elite against the colonized posturban peoples. Through continually linking sensors, databases, defensive and security architectures, and through the scanning of bodies, these running nodes export the state’s architecture of control” (p257)

“Diseases were everywhere, while surveillance was everyware, Everyware crushed diseases, subtly, comprehensively, remorselessly” (p211)

Moreover, Sterling reminds us that the situation is not so simple and that “blackspots” are part of the solutions:

“a hole in a sensorweb was called a blackspot. The laws of physics declared that there were always blackspots in the world. Computer science could assume perfectly smooth connections, but the Earth had hills and valleys and earthquakes and giant volcanoes. The sky had lightning storms, and even the sun had sunspots. Wireless connections were not magic fogs. Real-worl wireless connections were waves, particles, bits: real things in real places.
So, If you didn’t want to be seen, or heard, or known in a world of ubiquitous sensorwebs, there were options. You could find a blackspot. Or created blackspot. Some blaskspots were made by organized crime or official corruption. Other blackspots just grew in their natural blackness.” (p161)

If you read Human-Computer Interaction, you’ll recognize here the discussion around the messiness of the physical environment, seams and seamful design described by Bell and Dourish or Fabien Girardin). Which is exemplified by the part about augmented reality that is criticized by one the character as “pasting fantasies onto the island” and flawed because there is “a design conflict between strict geolocative accuracy and an augment that everyday viewers might willingly pay to see“. To put in shortly, the augmented layer is not well adjusted to the physical environment and the digital part “appears to be hovering” over the material layer.

As a side remark, I would highlight the fact that this argument about the inherent messiness of the physical world is one of the trickiest to convey to a certain class of people who always think that “eventually XXX will be taken care of” (replace XXX by “phone connectivity” or “GPS coverage). One of the concluding remark in the novel is not so optimistic though:

“Those ubiquitous systems, what they used to call the ‘mediation’, the ‘sensorwebs’. (…) Those technologies advanced so far that they vanished. The language operating systems, frameworks of interaction, the eyeball-lasting laser-colored neural helmets… all that stuff is more primitive than steam engines now. I mean, you can tell how a steam engine works by just looking at it, but a complex, distributed, ubiquitous system? There’s no way to maintain that! That all became ubijunk! Those cutting-edge systems are gone like sandcastles. A rising tide of major transformations threw them up on the shore, and then the whole sea rose and they are beyond retrieval” p295

There is of course more in the novel. The two last points I was intrigued about are finally:

• Participation and reputation-based social systems are in the background, a bit less than in Distraction (with the reputation servers process). The Acquis faction is based on “glory rating” and they use “an architecture of participation” to promote people at other ranks.
• The whole fun around “correlation engines”n which are “an amazing new business tool (…) that never fails to hit on correlations of major interest“

Why do I blog this? this is a quick and rough transcript of the notes I’ve taken when reading the book. I enjoyed the whole thing and it’s interesting to put the novel in perspective with the author’s musings, warnings and speeches. As usual, there is a lot to draw from Sterling’s novel, and I tried to make some connections here in the 30′ I allowed myself to write in this blogpost.

Living in the future

In Receiver #14, James Katz wrote an interesting article entitled “The future of a futuristic device” where he describes why lots of people perceive the mobile phone to be a futurist tool, and what they might want in their phones. An interesting part of the paper deals with how early adopters say that having the most advanced mobile phone technology makes them feel like they are living in the future:

“This “living in the future” sense has both intrinsic and extrinsic attractions. In terms of intrinsic attraction, having futuristic devices suggests that the users have more insight and power than those left behind in the past. They are in several senses visitors who are experiencing today what others can only experience later. In terms
of extrinsic attraction, future-oriented users can avail themselves of distinctive pleasures and conveniences. If knowledge is power, then the users of futuristic devices appear to have the knowledge to command resources and deal with various contingencies. In essence, this bestows power: they know what other people’s future will be like.“

Why do I blog this? what the future is can definitely be seen as a social construct. Perhaps some good material here for some of a student I am working with on the role of imagination in design.

Subtle signage in different context

In a subway station in Paris (each colors and number correspond to a metro line), in the countryside in South-Burgundy below:

Why do I blog this? it’s always intriguing to compare the various ways signage can be subtly integrated in the environment.

EPFL IC research day

At the Information and Communication faculty research day at EPFL which is about “Invisible Computing: Novel Interfaces to Digital Environments”. Two bits from the presentations caught my eyes.

In her presentation entitled “The myth of touch”, Chia Shen from Harvard University dealt with 3 wrong ideas about touch-based interfaces. She started by reminding us how people want touch because they have the impression that it’s better for engaging users (and that it helps to “remember” and collaborate). She then moved to the description of 3 myths in this context:

• “Myth #1: touch is natural: The reality is not that simple. Actually, touch is natural up to 3 UI-less gestures: zoom in/out, pan/scroll, tap. For some applications, the mouse may be better and there is an entire user culture built around this vocabulary
• Myth #2: multi-touch = multi-user. As stated by Bill Buxton: “now not only can my eye see the pixels, but the pixels can see my finger”, there is for example a problem with 2 fingers… whose fingers? if you don’t know whose finger are there? how to zoom, select? pan?
• Myth #3: touch is intuitive: it’s really the data that is intuitive, if it’s not, you become an interpreter for the interface (…) a large proportion of our cognitive system is devoted to interpreting sensory information from body parts with the most sensory receptors such as our fingertips (…) visual sensory input overwhelms audio and tactile in the human brain.”

It’s always interesting when technology researcher bring out and explore their own myth, what is taken for granted and why they’re wrong. I wish the speaker had spent longer time in this issue to dig more into details. The “natural” bit is interesting at it echoes with some elements I discuss: it connects to the fact that what is natural is socially constructed and shifts over time.

The third presenter, Richard Harper (from Microsoft Research) used the example of “smart home” design to describe his perspective on innovation and design process. Some hints about he started with echoed with what I discuss in my courses:

“ it doesn’t matter where you start but it matters to make assumptions… you need to start with the right assumptions

users do not know what is the future HOWEVER, the future is visible in your behaviors, the future lays here in the present, in weird behavior, the things we do that are actually special evocative and rich. We have aspirations and hope to make our life a success, we can learn from that for innovation, to bring out new ideas“

He then used his exploration of the complexity of home experience to demonstrate this process, finishing with different technological projects to support his claims. Some of the point he made about people’s experience at home were quite interesting:

“People want to make distinctions, when they make a home, they make it different form work, they make their home different from everyone else. But it isn’t easy, it’s full of contradictions: people want to close the door on the world outside but they still want contact with that world (call their friend…). Furthermore, when they make their homes special, they cannot be so special that visitors don’t feel at home.

when someone gets home, sits down and switches on the TV they are switching themselves off, but they have to work at doing nothing (housework, kids asking things, give love to partner). There is so much to do and so little time to do nothing.

And the occupants themselves make for contradictions: some tidy home up, some make a mess, some set up homes, other leave home…

do designers have to be smart to understand a smart home? yes, but it’s not the technology that requires them to be smart. Don’t assume that there is an integrated model of the user (one that fits all) but it doesn’t mean that there can’t be innovation“

Why do I blog this? some highly intriguing elements there, I find quite interesting to see how this can push a little bit the envelope at EPFL where it’s uncommon to have this sort of approach (unfortunately technologies are often the starting point).

Ceiling signage

In general, ceilings are not so common place to put signage on. Which is why I found interesting to encounter this sign “L’Europe” (the name of this plazza in Lausanne) placed on the surface that is under the bridge where people walk to the subway station.