Recap of Lift seminar @ Imaginove

Yesterday evening, I co-organized a Lift seminar in Lyon, in partnership with Imaginove, a cluster of digital content companies. Located in a an old flour mill, the seminar was about new forms of video game play with a specific focus on Transmedia and Location-Based Games.

To deal with this, I invited two bright contributors: David Calvo who is Creative Director from French video game studio Ankama (as well as a fine writer, comic-book author) and Mathieu Castelli from C4M, who was also the founder of Newt Games, the now defunct company which was a pioneer in location-based games in Japan.

David started with a presentation in which he descried in personal vision of what the “Transmedia” domain consists in. He basically debunked the fuss around this term by showing how this term is now used as a buzzword. According to him, adopting a “transmedia” perspective corresponds to the following approach:

• Building a “world model” with its own background and constraints (because design emerges out of constraints)
• Nurture this world model by elements coming from users, but not in an explicit “user-generated content way” in which you would ask people to contribute: it’s rather about having ears on the ground and observing Anakama players in game conventions, looking at forums, comments on websites, the way people name objects and gods in the game, etc….
• Instantiate these insights into characters, book chapters, magazine articles, game mechanics, background changes…

In sum, it’s a sort of implicit user-generated content harvesting that can be turned into game material for Dofus or Wakfu (and all the books, manga, magazines and on-line platforms about them).

In the second presentation, Mathieu told us the story of Mogi, a mobile service in which which the game play somehow evolves and progresses via a player’s location. Developed 7 years ago for the japanese market by a French company, Mogi was one the few commercial products that reach the market. Mathieu highlighted the difficult evolution of such games and recapped some issues they encountered such as: the fairly low number of phone with GPS (at the time and now), the difficulty to test game mechanics (because you need to go on the field), the need to have a critical mass of players, etc. which are very close to what I described in my book about locative media.

Mathieu concluded his presentation by showing Playground, a new initiative that aims at providing LBS designers with a point and click platforms to implement and test their own games. This “playground” system would be tool set for the creation of what they can “Real World games” and grow the community of developers.

Gestural interaction when reading

Observing how people read on displays is a fascinating endeavor. One of the interesting interaction mode with on-line media I noticed recently concern the gestures people make when reading. Lots of folks have focused on how people would touch or gesture to interact with information as an INPUT. But less attention is paid to the OUTPUT and how certain gesture may occur.

The example below shows an interesting trick I noticed (and now use) when sat in the train in Switzerland. Some people (at least this is what the guy told me) are so overwhelmed by animated advertisements that they put their hand on top of it. In doing so, the guy reported not being “attacked by those constant moving crap” that prevented him to quietly focus on his perusal.

Calm computing to some extent.

Why do I blog this? collecting gestures with electronic content linked with new forms of interaction. This guy’s insight could be a good starting point to explore other kinds of gestures linked with new media consumption.

Tangible interaction frameworks

Two interesting frameworks I often use in design research about tangible/gestural interfaces:

The first by Benford et al. (2003) is focused on three components: “Movements of interfaces can be analysed in terms of whether they are sensible, sensable and desirable. Sensible movements are those that users naturally perform; sensable are those that can be measured by a computer; and desirable movements are those that are required by a given application.“. Their framework is based on these 3 components and they show how “ how a systematic comparison of sensible, sensable and desirable movements, especially with regard to how they do not precisely overlap, can reveal potential problems with an interface and also inspire new features“:

Source: Benford, S., H. Schnadelbach, B. Koleva, B., Gaver, A. Schmidt, A., Boucher, A., Steed, R. Anastasi, C. Greenhalgh, T. Rodden and H. Gellersen (2003). “Sensible, sensable and desirable: a framework for designing physical interface, Technical Report Equator-03-003, Equator.

The second is by Bellotti et al. (2002) and it proposed 5 “questions posing human-computer communication challenges for interaction design”. Each of these issues can provide “the beginnings for a systematic approach to the design of interactive systems“:

Source: Bellotti, V., Back, M., Edwards, W.K., Grinter, R.E., Henderson, A., and Lopes, C. Making sense of sensing systems: five questions for designers and researchers. In CHI, 2002, 415–422.

Why do I blog this? Preparing my interaction design course led me to these paper. Might prove handy to discuss framework (roles, interests, limits) in the context of gestural interfaces such as the one depicted at the beginning of this blogpost. As usual with theoretical insights like this, there are pluses and minuses, but I often find them relevant to systematically approach new kinds of interactions.

The complex relationship between people and domestic appliances

Reading the last issue of “Design and Culture that Basile pointed to me few weeks ago, I ran across this paper yesterday that deals with “homemaking”. Working on a small projects about networked objects in the home context, it’s quite relevant:

Crewe, L. (2009). The Screen and the Drum: on Form, Function, Fit and Failure in Contemporary Home Consumption, Design and Culture, November Volume 1(3) pp. 307-328.

The aim of the paper is the following:

“this paper explores consumers’ connections to their domestic objects. Focusing on two particular objects (televisions and vacuum cleaners), the paper reflects upon why consumers desire particular domestic objects and how they assemble, arrange and use things in the home. It reveals how functionality is intimately infused with form, how design informs the consumption of everyday domestic objects and how both function and form can fail, deceive and trick.“

I found it interesting as it describes the complex relationships people have with their domestic appliances. Based on studying two specific artifacts (televisions and vacuum cleaners), the researchers explores 3 dimensions of this relationship: “the role of product branding, representation and design; the significance of consumer agency and desire; and the influence of commodity form and function in shaping home consumption“.

Here’s a summary of their conclusion:

“commodity meanings are mobile and diffuse; they are configured, inscribed and appropriated by consumers through placement and use and not just at the point of production.
(…)
commodities require emotional, sensory or performative investments by consumers in order that their value be realized. Brand value needs to be retrieved, or excavated through consumer practice – quite literally brought alive by consumers. (…) this is important as it suggests that the material qualities of objects may take on a far greater significance than those who produced them could possibly have envisaged.
(…)
what emerged from the research was how some of the most ubiquitous and ordinary domestic objects were those with the most interesting stories to tell. The important point here is that the normative assumptions one might hold about the aesthetic and technical conventions imputed to everyday objects are largely just that – scripts, projections, imaginings and conventions that are rarely, if ever, evident in practice.“

The paper is full of interesting examples such as:

“Another focus group participant – Laura, the vacuum owner who had just left her husband – revealed her intentional destruction of an unwanted vacuum cleaner in order that she could purchase a Dyson. Such sabotage is clearly willful and goes beyond the mere incompetence of users who fail to read operating and maintenance manuals. Laura cut the cord of her old Electrolux, thereby disabling it.
(…)
One participant discusses how he uses an old conventional vacuum cleaner in the student house he rents out as a mechanism to ensure that his tenants vacuum the house once a week. Here we see how the traditional bagged vacuum cleaner serves a particular purpose that would be impossible with a Dyson. As their landlord, Henry prohibits the students from emptying the vacuum cleaner bag: he visits the house once a week and changes the bag (…) The vacuum bag thus becomes an instrument of surveillance at-a-distance, a tool for the external management of approved cleaning practices and a weapon of financial punishment where necessary.“

Why do I blog this? Both the theoretical aspects and the concrete examples drawn from the field are important. In the context of the consulting project I am working on, it enables to broaden the scope of the very notion of networked objects.

Digital plumbing and the deployment of Ubicomp at home

(A broken interface that would certainly need a digital plumber, seen in Amsterdam)

An interesting article about the deployment of ubicomp at home: Tolmie, P., Crabtree, A., Egglestone, S., Humble, J, Greenhalgh, C. and Rodden, T. (2009) Digital Plumbing: The Mundane Work of Deploying UbiComp in the Home Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 10.

The article contrasts the vision of “invisible computing” by Mark Weiser to the concrete deployment of such technologies at home. It focuses on what the author calls “digital plumbing, i.e. the mundane work involved in installing ubiquitous computing in real homes”. Based on an ethnographic study, it covers the work of installation, the competences involved on the part of users, the practical troubles they encounter, and the demands that real world settings place on the enterprise which create these systems. What is interesting here is that Ubicomp is here described as “an explicit intervention into everyday life“.

(Some wiring installation recently encountered)

Some excerpts I found interesting about the challenges of deploying new technologies in existing home environments:

“Digital plumbing is indispensable to the migration of research technologies out of the lab into real homes. It is a largely ignored area of work however (…) the study has revealed four major areas where the development of support for digital plumbing might be considered:

• The deployment of research technologies in real homes requires a great deal of preparatory work. This includes planning what is to be installed and where in cooperation with household members, and understanding existing technological arrangements that new devices and components will be integrated with. The development of methods and tools that enable the digital plumber to map these may be of considerable use to the work of planning.
• In order to install planned arrangements the digital plumber needs to assemble the right tools and parts for the job. This includes configuring and testing the necessary hardware and assembling the software that will definitely be required and that which will possibly be required. The development of online solutions, including extensive archives of software versions, drivers, updates, patches, etc., and which permit reuse, may be of considerable utility to the work of assembly.
• No matter how well planned an installation is, contingencies inevitably arise. Online archives may go some way to address them, though troubleshooting and faultfinding rely on technical competences that extend beyond the particular technologies being installed. The development of online resources, including FAQs, knowledge databases, and even remote fault diagnosis, may be of considerable benefit in the effort to manage the contingencies of installation.
• Installation occurs over time and often involves more than one digital plumber, whether working consecutively or one after the other. Tracking and managing the changes made by particular digital plumbers therefore becomes a matter of some importance. The development of a ‘record of works’ that detail changes and their implications may provide useful support for coordination and awareness amongst digital plumbers.“

Why do I blog this? Although these results echo with existing research about other installation work (from conventional plumbing to fitted kitchens, as pointed out by the authors), this article highlight interesting specificities. Quite handy for a current client project about networked objects in the context of the home environment.

Crowd dynamics determined by more than physical constraints

A long time ago, while still doing a bachelor degree in biology, animal cognition was a pet project of mine. Ants and bees or ethology methods were highly intriguing and paved my way towards more technology-oriented studies of behavior. I still keep an eye on this field and the following paper from one of the lab I followed recently caught my attention (via):

Moussaïd M, Perozo N, Garnier S, Helbing D, Theraulaz G (2010) The Walking Behaviour of Pedestrian Social Groups and Its Impact on Crowd Dynamics. PLoS ONE 5(4).

(Pedestrian flows in Toulouse, France as observed in this study)

Some excerpts I’ve found interesting (my emphasis):

“Human crowd motion is mainly driven by self-organized processes based on local interactions among pedestrians. While most studies of crowd behaviour consider only interactions among isolated individuals, it turns out that up to 70% of people in a crowd are actually moving in groups, such as friends, couples, or families walking together. These groups constitute medium-scale aggregated structures and their impact on crowd dynamics is still largely unknown. In this work, we analyze the motion of approximately 1500 pedestrian groups under natural condition, and show that social interactions among group members generate typical group walking patterns that influence crowd dynamics. At low density, group members tend to walk side by side, forming a line perpendicular to the walking direction. (…) when crowd density increases, the group organization results from a trade-off between walking faster and facilitating social exchange.“

Why do I blog this? what is interesting in this work is that the crowd dynamic model should take into account the presence of people who put more emphasis on social activities than on movement efficiency. It basically shows that pedestrian flows are complex and not determined by physical constraints induced by other pedestrians and the environment, but also significantly by on less utilitarian reasons (communicative, social interactions among individuals). This result is perhaps taken for granted in the social sciences but it’s curious to observe it with this kind of modelling work.

Manual check-in versus automatic positioning

The picture above shows the difference between asking where someone is with an SMS and getting this information automatically with a location-based software such as Aka-Aki. This was a big debate few years ago. A more recent debate concerns the manual check-in versus automatic positioning with mobile social software.

The whole argument about manual check-in on platforms such as Foursquare versus automatic positioning (on Google latitude for instance) is fascinating to me. While some pundits criticize the idea of letting people manually check-in, various empirical studies shows why automation can be problematic. It’s crazy how some people get grumpy and think that self-declarating one’s location is old-school and passé. Some examples below of academic work about this issue. Of course it’s not directly about current applications such as Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt or Latitude but it certainly gives some perspective.

Vihavainen, S., Oulasvirta, A., Sarvas, R. “I Can’t Lie Anymore” – The Implications of Location Automation for Mobile Social Applications. Proceedings of MobiQuitous 2009, IEEE Press.

The paper examines a sample of users of Jaiku, a social networking, micro-blogging and lifestreaming service bought by Google three years ago. Using this platform, the researchers investigated the appropriation of this service that automates disclosure and diffusion of location information. Here are some excerpts I found relevant in Vihavainen’s paper:

“Human factors research has shown that automation is a mixed blessing. It changes the role of the human in the loop with effects on understanding, errors, control, skill, vigilance, and ultimately trust and usefulness. We raise the issue that many current mobile applications involve mechanisms that surreptitiously collect and propagate location information among users and we provide results from the first systematic real world study of the matter.
(…)
The results reveal both “classic” human factors problems with the automation’s logic and novel issues related to the fact that location automation at times compromised their control of social situations. (…) The results convey that unsuitable automated features can preclude use in a group. While one group found automated features useful, and another was indifferent toward it, the third group stopped using the application almost entirely. (…) These differences highlight the importance of needs, activities, and structures of the intended user groups as factors for acceptance of automation.“

S. Benford, W. Seagar, M. Flintham, R. Anastasi, D. Rowland, J. Humble, D. Stanton, J. Bowers, N. Tandavanitj, M. Adams, J.R. Farr, A. Oldroyd, and J. Sutton. “The error of our ways: The experience of self- reported position in a location-based game”. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing. (UbiComp 2004), Nottingham., pp. 70-87,

In this paper that is a bit older, the researchers studied how users of a collaborative location-based game employed self-reported positioning by manually reveal their positions to remote players by manipulating electronic maps. Results were the following:

“ It appears that remote participants are largely un- troubled by the relatively high positional error associated with self reports. Our analysis suggests that this may because mobile players declare themselves to be in plausible locations such as at common landmarks, ahead of themselves on their current trajectory (stating their intent) or behind themselves (confirming previously visited locations). These observations raise new requirements for the future development of automated positioning systems and also suggest that self- reported positioning may be a useful fallback when automated systems are un- available or too unreliable.“

Nova, N., Girardin, F., Molinari, G. & Dillenbourg, P. (2006): The Underwhelming Effects of Automatic Location-Awareness on Collaboration in a Pervasive Game, International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems (May 9-12, 2006, Carry-le-Rouet, Provence, France).

Finally, this is also an issue I addressed in my Phd research concerning the automation of location-awareness, I also address these problems with a different angle. We also used a collaboration location-based game (a quite common platform for running field studies at the time) and uncovered that automating a process such as location-awareness is not always fruitful. Letting people send their own position appears to be more efficient than broadcasting mere location information:

“To some extent, not giving location-awareness information can be a way to support collaboration more effectively; since players may communicate more and better explain their activity and intents. Self- disclosure can hence be more effective since users could express both information about their intents relevant for the task context and their location. They could also send it whenever they want to express either their current or past positions or the intended places they are heading to. Another interesting benefit of letting the users express their position is to give them the control of privacy issues, one of the major issue related to LBS usage. They have indeed the choice to disclose information about their whereabouts, which is of tremendous importance to avoid the users’ perception of privacy invasion.“

Mobile social software norms

An interesting news on the Foursquare newsblog is about the “cheater code”, i.e. a way to catch users who check in from their couches to steal mayorships. Interestingly, it seemed to be one of the most requested feature by people.

Of course, it’s not that easy to implement and the solution that has been chosen… lies in using the phone’s GPS (or another way to get the user’s location) “to try to verify this“. What I find interesting here is that the ambition is deliberately low (hence the “try”). The reasons why they do so are simply that it’s hard:

“ We are seeing some issues where people should be getting points / badges / mayors but they’re not. This could be because the GPS location your phone gave us was slightly off or because the address / pushpin where we located the venue wasn’t quite right.“

Another valuable bit reveals a lot about the usage/norms about what is considered acceptable:

“Also worth noting that we’re fine with pre-checkins and post-checkins… you know, the checkins you send *before* you’re at a place (“I’ll be there in 10 mins!”) and the checkins you send us *after* you leave when you realize you forgot to check-in while you were there. (Trust us, we do it too to fill out our history pages!) The only difference now is that to unlock foursquare rewards – mayors, points, badges, etc – those checkins needs to be sent from that place.“

Why do I blog this? I am fascinated by this kind of elicitation as it uncovers norms and behavioral issues that people put in place when using location-based services. Preparing a field study about the usage of this platform, I find interesting to take this into account.

RFID transitions

Istanbul’s public transport system features an interesting aspect regarding “touch interfaces”. Two validation solutions coexist in the form of:

1. AKBIL (deployed in 1995): an electronic transit pass made of a small stainless steel button (“1-Wire Interface”) on a plastic holder. Interestingly, from a UX perspective, two or more people can use the same Akbil. The company which provide the solution mentions that “
   the communication rate and product breadth of iButtons goes well beyond the simple memory products typically available with RFID. As for durability, the thin plastic of smart cards is no match for the strength of the stainless-steel-clad iButton“.
2. Istanbulkart (deployed in 2009): an RFID chip card that is slowly taking off (I have to admit that I haven’t seen anyone using it). In this case, the card is personal and enable to take five trips using a single ticket.

Why do I blog this? Transition moment between different technical solutions are always intriguing as both are still in use. The new interface is deployed and users will be encouraged to use it. In this case, given the fact that it’s an infrastructure, there’s a lot to be done (adding RFID readers here and there).

This transition leads to interfaces with several points of entries as shown on the picture above. The current vending machine still reflects the prevalence of the AKBIL: it’s funny to notice how the old AKBIL charging system is convenient (right below where you insert bank notes, which makes the interaction flows more easily).