Easter encounter with a chair

“Take me, sit on me, love me”

Using historical research in HCI/Ubicomp

“Historical Analysis: Using the Past to Design the Future” by Wyche, Sengers and Grinter is an article about how the discipline of history similarly can contribute to research about human-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing.

The authors takes the example of a specific context, domestic environments, to show that history can go beyond inspiring “new form factors and styles such as retro” by providing “strategies that, like anthropology, unpack the culture of the home and, like art-inspired design, defamiliarize the home“.

The process is described as the following:

“ First, we analysed historical texts to identify major themes in the development of technologies (often automation) for the activities under investigation, in our case housework. Second, we gained a broader understanding of the existing technological design space through the search of patents. Third, we developed a personal sense of the changing nature of housework through examination of primary sources from popular culture. Finally, as part of broader fieldwork we gathered oral histories from older people, using a designed, material artefact that reflected the popular history of housework to stimulate memories and reflections.“

And here’s how they saw a contribution:

“It was effective in helping us understand the subtle changes that have resulted with the introduction of new domestic technologies and in opening new space for design. Although the historical texts already revealed themes pertinent to ubicomp design (i.e. labor-saving debate and technology’s gendered character), by drawing on popular texts, patents, and interviews with elders as well, we learned things that could not easily be gleaned from texts alones.
(…)
With current interest in restoring felt experience as central to design, we believe that historical analysis is an important source for becoming aware of sensual aspects of experiences that have become lost but could be addressed in new forms of technology design.
(…)
In addition to revealing how felt qualities are altered with the introduction of new technologies, another benefit of our historically grounded approach is its potential to inspire radically novel design concepts. A collection of speculative design proposals resulted from our process [see 30 and 36 for details]. Like ethnography, history forces designers to become more aware of their preconceptions about a topic.“

Why do I blog this? Working on the history of game controller, I am currently putting together a list of references about the role of history and
historically informed approaches in (interaction) design research. This paper gives some interesting pointers about it.

The slow evolution of AI in video-games

Co-creation workshop with Nokia Research during Lift 11

During Lift 11 in Geneva, researchers from Nokia Research Center Lausanne organized a co-creation workshop with a small group of conference participants.

The session focused on understanding how the contextual insights of users could contribute to the evolution of the mobile user experience:

“With the increase in popularity of smart phones as well as mobile Internet services, the pace of change in the mobile industry will be rapid in the coming years. One of the driving forces behind development is an increased understanding of the needs of mobile users, brought about by aggregation of big data sets pertaining to mobile usage and the contextual behavior of consumers. Such insights are expected to lead to the emergence of context aware services, wherein the user interface as well as the content displayed to the user is highly personalized and tailored to the given context of use.“

In the light of the above, the goal of the present workshop was to define how contextual insights of mobile users, especially across the physical and social layers, could contribute to the evolution of the mobile user experience. In order to achieve this goal, the workshop focused on two sub topics:

1. The kinds of insights that big data sets focusing on mobile usage and behaviour might lead to.
2. A list of potential mobile services that could benefit from these data.

We recently completed a report [PDF, 6.93 Mb] of the workshop results containing a catalogue of the concepts that emerged during the session.

“Journals of Negative Results”

A recent trend in academic sciences consist in the publication of “negative results”. This is based on the idea that scientific articles published in traditional journals frequently provide insufficient evidence regarding negative data. More specifically, the point is to give a voice to negative results, experimental failures or results with low statistical significant. Some examples:

Journal of Interesting Negative Results in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning
As described on their website:

“The journal will bring to the fore research in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning that uncovers interesting negative results.
(…)
Insofar as both our research areas focus on theories “proven” via empirical methods, we are sure to encounter ideas that fail at the experimental stage for unexpected, and often interesting, reasons. Much can be learned by analysing why some ideas, while intuitive and plausible, do not work. The importance of counter-examples for disproving conjectures is already well known. Negative results may point to interesting and important open problems. Knowing directions that lead to dead-ends in research can help others avoid replicating paths that take them nowhere. This might accelerate progress or even break through walls!“

Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine
As described on their website:

“Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine is an open access, peer-reviewed, online journal that promotes a discussion of unexpected, controversial, provocative and/or negative results in the context of current tenets.

The journal invites scientists and physicians to submit work that illustrates how commonly used methods and techniques are unsuitable for studying a particular phenomenon. Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine strongly promotes and invites the publication of clinical trials that fall short of demonstrating an improvement over current treatments. The aim of the journal is to provide scientists and physicians with responsible and balanced information in order to improve experimental designs and clinical decisions.“

Journal of Pharmaceutical Negative Results
As described on their website:

“Journal of Pharmaceutical Negative Results is a peer reviewed journal developed to publish original, innovative and novel research articles resulting in negative results. This peer-reviewed scientific journal publishes theoretical and empirical papers that reports the negative findings and research failures in pharmaceutical field.“

Journal of Negative Results in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
As described on their website:

“The primary intention of Journal of Negative Results is to provide an online-medium for the publication of peer-reviewed, sound scientific work in ecology and evolutionary biology that may otherwise remain unknown. In recent years, the trend has been to publish only studies with ‘significant’ results and to ignore studies that seem uneventful. This may lead to a biased, perhaps untrue, representation of what exists in nature. By counter-balancing such selective reporting, JNR aims to expand the capacity for formulating generalizations. The work to be published in JNR will include studies that 1) test novel or established hypotheses/theories that yield negative or dissenting results, or 2) replicate work published previously (in either cognate or different systems). Short notes on studies in which the data are biologically interesting but lack statistical power are also welcome.“

Why do I blog this? Writing the conclusion of my book about technological failures lead me to discuss the importance of documentation. I highlighted (bold) the variety of purposes, which are sometimes different from one journal to another.

Besides, the title of the papers are utterly fascinating. See for yourself: “Failure of calcium gluconate internal gelation for prolonging drug release from alginate-chitosan-based ocular insert of atenolol”, “Influence of some hydrophilic polymers on dissolution characteristics of furosemide through solid dispersion: An unsatisfied attempt for immediate release formulation”, “Some commonly observed statistical errors in clinical trials published in Indian Medical Journals”.

Both French and Swiss systems

There’s this part of the airport in Geneva that has this fascinating setting. Several remarks:

• You have traces of both French and Swiss systems: two separate phone booths (Swisscom and France Telecom), two separate mailboxes (French and Swiss Posts), two different fire extinguishers
• You have both phones and mailboxes because it’s a joint airport between the two countries. But this is from the French part of the airport.
• As usual with French enclaves in foreign countries, the institutions do not seem to care much about their devices… as attested by the fact that you have an old mailbox model… and the previous logo of France Telecom.

Location-based services updates

Few examples of location-based services that I ran across recently.

Bluebrain reactive music based on location
As described on The Next Web:

“We had this idea of having the music progress and change based on a person’s location. We decided to release an album that’s also an app with whole melodic phrases that change based on a listener’s location. (…) The most difficult part of making this new album wasn’t the app but writing the actual music,” explains Holladay, “It’s difficult to know what all the variables will be and making sure they all work on a musical level. (…) We spent a lot of time on The Mall in different areas and created zones in parts of the mall for each particular piece. Then we’d write music based on that area in different sections.“

Creepy:

“an application that allows you to gather geolocation related information about users from social networking platforms and image hosting services. The information is presented in a map inside the application where all the retrieved data is shown accompanied with relevant information (i.e. what was posted from that specific location) to provide context to the presentation.“

Street Pass (Nintendo 3DS)

StreetPass is a curious feature in the new Nintendo 3DS that allows multiple devices to connect with each other when in a certain range and exchange data. As described here:

“StreetPass Quest begins with your Mii trapped in a tower. To escape, you must use Miis you have collected via StreetPass and battle increasingly powerful enemies in turn-based combat. If you haven’t collected any Miis then you’re able to purchase a cat in armour to act as a substitute. You purchase this cat with two game coins, which have been previously detailed. The cat has two attack options: sword and magic.
(…)
The goal of StreetPass Puzzle is to construct a 3D puzzle. But to complete this puzzle you need to collect pieces by interacting with other folks via StreetPass. The more people you interact with, the more puzzle pieces you gain until you can finally complete the puzzle.“

Why do I blog this? just keeping track of recent and interesting developments in the field of location-based applications.