Encouraging uses of location-aware systems

Reading (again and again) articles about location-awareness for a journal paper I am writing, I ran across “The Carrot Approach: Encouraging use of location systems” by Kieran Mansley, Alastair R. Beresford and David Scott which I found quite interesting. The paper addresses the lack of understanding about why location-aware applications can be useful and what factors can motivate people to use them, through a case study of AT&T’s Bat system.

The use of Bat they’re interested in here is the one of the person-locator application or of context-aware paging. As they describe, the system is quite efficient as an indoor positioning provider. Accuracy and coverage are excellent but they noticed a “lack of genuinely useful applications and a strategy for their deployment“. they developed a classification of the intended users of the location system (in their case, the staff and students within the lab) with the aim of targeting applications at the needs of specific social groups. Using the prisoner’s dilemma approach, they show which ones are relevant.

What they found is that:

“We model the utility to an individual of an application by the formula Utility = AU2 + B where U is the number of participating users and A and B are constants. AU2 is the Metcalfe-effect and B the single-user payoff. Applications fall into one of three categories: Type I : those useful to isolated individuals (high B); Type II: those useful to small subgroups (high A, small set of users U ); and Type III: those only useful when the whole lab participates (high A, whole lab U ). Many traditional applications (e.g. the “person-locator”) are Type III applications; most of the applications we present here are either Type I or Type II.
(…)
We analysed the recent decline in Active Bat usage from a game-theoretic standpoint and argued that many existing location-aware Type III applications have fallen into disuse as a consequence of the well-known Prisoners’ Dilemma. We described how this trap could be avoided if Type I or Type II applications are provided which are of immediate use to individuals and small social groups. Furthermore, increased overall participation has an overwhelmingly positive effect as users of the location system receive a community benefit from increased take-up, both from being able to locate colleagues more reliably and from increased privacy. We claim this principle justifies the existence of applications that have no intrinsically useful purpose (such as games).“

Why do I blog this? quite relevant for current writings and talks about location-awareness in mobile social computing. The game-theory approach is original and brings interesting arguments to the table.

What’s interesting IMO wrt to person-locator is this notion of

“from a game-theoretic standpoint, this application may be modelled by a multi-player prisoners’ dilemma. In real-life each person chooses whether to wear their bat or not whereas in the prisoners’ dilemma each prisoner chooses whether to co-operate with the authorities or not. Both wearing a Bat and co-operating have an associated (small) cost. If everyone co-operates (i.e. everyone wears their Bats) then the whole group receives a benefit. However, from the point of view of an individual it is always better not to co-operate (i.e. not wear their Bat) while secretly hoping that everyone else does; this is said to be the dominant strategy. It does not matter how great the benefit (i.e. the size of the coverage area) is; if all the players are rational then no-one co-operates and no-one wears their Bats. Therefore coverage area and applications like the “person-locator” cannot explain the difference in uptake between the LCE and AT&T. “

Mansley, K., Beresford, A.R. & Scott, D. (2004). The Carrot Approach: Encouraging use of location systems. In Proceedings of Ubiquitous Computing: 6th International Conference, Nottingham, UK, September 7-10, 2004, pp. 366-383.

Implications for Design: responsibilities and framing

In “Responsibilities and Implications: Further Thoughts on Ethnography and Design continues to elaborate on the use of ethnography in human-computer interaction and the “implications for design” issues he addressed at CHI2006 (see my notes here).

In the CHI paper, he argued how the use of ethnographic investigation in HCI is often partial since it underestimated, misstated, or misconstrued the goals and mechanisms of ethnographic investigation. Which is problematic since researchers aims a deriving “implication for design” from these investigations. The DUX paper continues on that topic to show how ethnography is relevant but not in the bullet-point “short term requirements” way some use to think about. As he says, “the valuable material lies elsewhere” or “beyond the laundry list“, which is described through 2 case studies about emotion and mobility.

Then what should be these implications for design (voluntarily skipping the examples, see the paper pls)?

“The implications for design, though, are not of the “requirements capture” variety. They set constraints upon design, certainly, but not in terms of operationalizable parameters or specific design space
guidance. What they tend to do, in fact, is open up the design space rather than close it down, talking more to
the role of design and of technology than to its shape.
(…)
A second observation about the implications is that they are derived not from the empirical aspects of ethnographic work but from its analytic aspects. That is, the ethnographic engagement is not one that figures people as potential users of technology, and looks to uncover facts about them that might be useful to technologists (or to marketers). Instead, ethnographic engagements with topics, people, and fieldsites are used to understand phenomena of importance to design, and the implications arise out of the analysis of these materials.
(…)
the theoretical contributions that the studies provide have a considerably longer shelf life, and a relevance that
transcends particular technological moments.

Is it a cop-out to say that what these studies provide is a new framing for the questions rather than a specific set of design guidelines? Hardly.

In addition, his discussion about the responsibilities is also important:

“The engagement between ethnography and design must be just that – an engagement. Ethnography and
ethnographic results are part of that engagement.
(…)
I’d argue that it is no more the ethnographer’s responsibility to speak to design within the context of each specific publication than it is the designer’s responsibility to speak likewise to ethnography. Rather, the responsibility for ethnographically grounded design results is a collective one.

Why do I blog this? This is a topic Paul Dourish will address at LIFT08 in Geneva. Beyond that, this article echoes a lot with both reviews I received from academic papers (criticisms towards implications for design that are too broad and not short term requirements) and what can be observed from designers’ practices at the Media and Design Lab I joined 6 months ago.

Closer to my own research, I like the way he frames this notion of implication; and indeed ethnography can bring more than sort term recommendations as it can uncover motivations for action, needs and deeper human rationale. In my research about location-awareness, we explored the differences between self-disclosure of one’s location and automatic positioning; in this case, the crux issue was not to oppose the two sort of interfaces but rather, to show how each of them was different and had different implications in terms of human motivations (for example, self-disclosure of one’s location is linked to communication intentionality).

Dourish, P. 2007. Responsibilities and Implications: Further Thoughts on Ethnography and Design. Proc. ACM Conf. Designing for the User Experience DUX 2007

Wrestling with what the [mobile phone] platform actually is

Reading the notes taken from Raph Koster’s thoughts at MIT’s Futures of Entertainment 2: Mobile Media, I ran across this:

“what’s kind of fascinating is seeing the wrestling with what the platform [mobile phone] actually is. (..) Broadcast? Input device? Truly interactive? Synchronous or asynchronous? (…) TV could have been far more interactive from an early stage, but it drifted into broadcast. The Internet could have been more about broadcast, but instead its DNA pushed it in a different direction. The reasons aren’t solely technological, I don’t think; some of it is network effects, some of it is about what businesses succeed early on.
(…)
Which makes me think that probably as we think of things like immersive gaming in the real world, ARGs, massively multiplayer geotagged environments, and virtual worlds on the phone, there may be a dedicated device that does it better. Most of these other examples have been of migrating capabilities to the devices. But the interesting stuff that will be the true core use of the devices will be the things that arise from the device — and it will be at its best when the other stuff isn’t there to serve as a distraction, in the way that the best GPSes don’t try to also be TVs but instead try to enhance the experience of geolocation.“

Why do I blog this? in a sense, he summarized one of the main mobile application/location-based services question: “what is the platform”.

Presentation at CISCO

Yesterday I visited one of the European Tech Center of Cisco to give a presentation about location-awareness and mobile social computing. Slides from my presentations can be found here (pdf, 10.5Mb). It’s actually a reshuffled version of my Geoware deck. Thanks Jérome for this opportunity!

Although I do this presentation over and over again, I am always surprised by the discussion that follows. The fact that the context is often different trigger new questions about that topic. Some examples of what we discussed:

“Is “location” really important? Is it really about location? presence?
Should it be combined with other information collected through sensors?
How to create an added value sufficient enough to remove the privacy barrier?
To reach a critical mass of users, aren’t GPS devices company more advanced? Given that there is a less big variety of GPS devices (as opposed to phones) can they be considered as platform? For example could TomTom buddies be relevant? What about personal navigation assistant for pedestrians?
Social software and location-awareness: can we use geolocation to refine social graphs?“

In the evening, I gave the same presentation at the Institut de Santé au Travail (thanks Yves!) where a totally different audience received the talk and discuss the implications rather from the ergonomic/human factor viewpoint.

From Locative Information to Urban Knowledge

(via) In, “From Locative Information to Urban Knowledge” (see in the the conference pre-proceedings), Viktor Bedö addresses a question very close to my research interests: How does information generated and shared through locative media and mobile communication technologies turn into knowledge?.

The paper is about information visualization and how an organic metaphor (elaborated by Ben Fry) can be pertinent to represent information generated and shared via mobile communication technologies such as spatial annotation systems. Let’s jump directly to the conclusion:

“What we can anticipate is that after reaching the critical volume (1), these community level patterns will have effects on the individual level: users will navigate using these patterns, make decisions based on these
patterns, and contribute to them by posting their own information. The pattern emerging on the dynamic urban maps become urban knowledge based on locative information. The primal representation of urban knowledge will be on the map, the method of identifying and interpreting the patterns is looking at the map. It is important to note that there are no cues when inspecting the emerging patterns on the map and there are no masters telling us what to see as we deal with a new instrument showing a new quality. The metaphor of organism/organisation in this case does not transfer meaning, in the, but a way of seeing, that helps ideintifying, discovering the patterns of locative urban knowledge.

(1) The use of spatial annotation and other location avare social software has not reached the critical volume therefore we can not even anticipate by now how many messages are going to constitute a coherent pattern. Will it be fifty, four hundred, or two thousand?“

Why do I blog this? this is very close to something I wrote lately (as well as this blogpost) although it was not uniquely focused on spatial annotation system. However, I am not sure about the “critical volume” described by the author: it’s definitely that a topic we discussed a lot with Fabien and Mauro. Will there really be a peak? How the success of certain applications could last over time?

Industrial design and ubiquitous computing

Are designers ready for ubiquitous computing?: a formative study is a very interesting short paper by Sara Ljungblad, Tobias Skog and Lalya Gaye that deals with the challenges industrial designers will face with ubiquitous technologies.

The paper report a workshop they ran with designers, in which they presented their ubicomp prototyping platform and collected people’s impressions. Although it’s hard to generalize, what is relevant here is to look at what they learn in this context:

“A Designer is not A Researcher: The designers tended to have a goal-oriented, problem-solving approach to the context-aware technology, rather than the more exploratory approach that is common in research. The idea of developing applications for already existing objects by augmenting them post-hoc was not considered very appealing.
(…)
We feel that there is a significant difference between researchers and product designers when approaching context-aware technology. The designers were interested, but viewed Smart-Its as a collection of sensors belonging to an end-product, rather than something that could be used as a material during the design process, to explore and learn about “smart” products. This suggests that these designers were only interested in a conceptual understanding of the technology, not a hands-on understanding of it. The question is whether such conceptual knowledge really is enough when designing “smart” products.“

Why do I blog this? because this sort of issues is very common and interesting to investigate. Of course this is very contextualized to their platform but there are interesting elements here.

Dark data to be set free

A very interesting article by Thomas Goetz in Wired entitled “Freeing the Dark Data of Failed Scientific Experiments“. It’s mostly about the publication bias: what is published in research paper is only results that are positive or which have dramatic outcomes. The other goes to the lab drawer but now some initiative aims at setting them free. What about the reasons to do so:

“For the past couple of years, there’s been much talk about open access (…) Liberating dark data takes this ethos one step further. It also makes many scientists deeply uncomfortable, because it calls for them to reveal their “failures.” But in this data-intensive age, those apparent dead ends could be more important than the breakthroughs. After all, some of today’s most compelling research efforts aren’t one-off studies that eke out statistically significant results, they’re meta-studies — studies of studies — that crunch data from dozens of sources.
(…)
advocating the release of dark data is one thing, but it’s quite another to actually collect it, juggling different formats and standards. And, of course, there’s the issue of storage.“

Why do I blog this? Great initiative and good material to do research! Hidden stuff is always intriguing anyway.

Beyond the data availability and the possibility to run meta studies, I am strongly interested in this sort of “dark” data, especially about things that failed. It’s IMO a topic spot on the near future laboratory edges: documenting the failures, behavior, issues, artifacts that failed. We’re currently considering a workshop about this in the field of ubicomp/the future of objects.

Criticizing Paul Virilio

In Panicsville: Paul Virilio and the Esthetic of Disaster, Nigel Thrift highlights the problematic tone of Virilio’s work on modernity (his book City of Panic in particular).

The author raises two issues:
- Virilio’s arguments are more jeremiads than an answer, which reminds me of Adam Greenfield statement that “nostalgia is for suckers” in his talk at PicNic 2007 (where he expressed that lamenting about the past of cities is not an answer).
- The phenomenology of despair described by Virilio is not very well rooted in social or cultural research, as if the only evidence he was relying on were newspapers and books from other authors.

Some excerpts that I found interesting:

“Almost everything he says about the modern city would have to be seriously qualified or reconstructed or just plain retracted. (…) there is a veritable legion of careful empirical studies of information technology that very often show the polar opposite of what Virilio would have us believe. (…) each time he goes round the park, he exaggerates and this exaggeration is not just of the “well, this is an illustration of a general trend and should not be expected to play out equally everywhere,” or of the “well, take this as a warning of how things could become,” or of the “well, it won’t come to pass exactly like this but near to it” variety. It is systematic. And such systematic exaggeration is of more than mild concern. “

The sort of myth Thrift debunks here are for example:

“a common rule in this literature is “the more virtual the more real” (Woolgar 2002), that is, the
introduction of new “virtual” technologies can actually stimulate more of the corresponding “real” activity.
(…)
The idea that increasing speed somehow has causality is an urban myth so deeply engrained in Western individuals’ idea of themselves and how they are that it is probably not dislodgeable – but that doesn’t mean that philosophers have to power it up.“

Why do I blog this? Having read (and enjoyed) some books written by Paul Virilio, I was interested in these critiques. They actually echo my feelings about that author. Somehow, I have the same impression with all the books I have read in the same vein (mostly from french sociologist/thinkers/philosophers) such as Jacques Ellul, they are inspiring, they point to interesting issues but they’re often exaggerating or hyperbolic (“forcer le trait“). And generally, it’s because of the distance between the author and what happens down there. This is sometimes atrocious, when you read books from thinkers speculating about web2.0, television or video games and you definitely know that those persons are not using these technologies (some still call radio “TSF”, the word employed 50 years ago in France).

Thrift, N. (2005). Panicsville: Paul Virilio and the Esthetic of Disaster, Cultural Politics, 1(3). 337-348.

Cognitive mapping of various means of communication in 1996

In The social representation of telecommunications, Leopoldina Fortunati and Anna Maria Manganelli explore “common knowledge of telecommunications”. In a sense, they try to reconstruct how technologies of information and communication “have been metabolised in the system of social thought, and the way in which they have been integrated conceptually.

Using Moscovici’s frame of reference (social representations), they analyze data gathered from telephone survey carried out in 1996. Interviewees were asked to freely associate two terms with certain cue words: ‘telecommunications’, ‘fax’, ‘television’, ‘telephone’, ‘computer’, ‘mobile phone’, ‘radio’, ‘video-recorder’, ‘stereo’ and ‘newspapers’. Cluster analysis allowed them to represent the similarities between the communicative technologies (represented by the cue-words) through a dendrogram of similarities:

The authors conclude that:

“In conclusion, the analysis of the similarity between means of communication shows that in 1996 there already existed a scission between the real telecommunication technologies, that is, ‘fax, telephone, mobile phone and computer’, and technologies which were not telecommunication, such as mass media or means of reproduction of sounds and images. The first were based on technologies that carried circular communication, the second on uni-directional communication technologies. Furthermore, in the first cluster (not telecommunication), we must note the clear distinction between technologies that reproduce sounds and images and those that carry information. The position of the ‘radio’, assimilated as it was to ‘stereo’, was yet a further indication that this medium was experienced essentially as music.

From this first analysis what emerged is that the profiles of the different forms of telecommunication and the division and cooperation among them were reflected with clarity and precision in common knowledge.“

Why do I blog this? I was looking for reference about representation of technologies an ran across this paper; found the methodology quite intriguing (there are lots of other results to check). What I found pertinent is the idea of having a a detailed description of the cognitive integration of the various means of communication. How would that be perceived now? with new forms of communication? with so-called “digital natives”?

Fortunati, L. & Manganelli, A.M. (2007).The social representation of telecommunications. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, pp. 1617-4909.

P&U computing: Special issue about movement-based interaction

The last issue of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing is devoted to movement-based interaction. The 7 papers address what is referred to by a plethora of terms such as “physical interaction, embodied interaction, graspable interfaces, tangible interfaces, embodied interfaces, physical computing and interactive spaces”.

As the editors put it:

“We start the issue with three papers that present lessons learned and perspectives gained from the design and evaluation of a number of concepts, prototypes and applications, all using a range of movements and tracking technologies to enable interaction. (…) These three papers should move the discipline forward by providing other researchers and practitioners with frameworks to bounce ideas against and concepts to describe and understand movement-based interaction.
(…)
We also selected four papers that we hope will further the understanding of movement-based interaction through their theoretical and methodological contributions by explicating different/new theoretical approaches and understandings, and extending the methods available to designers in this area.“

Why do I blog this? material for current work about tangible interface in gaming contexts. More about this later, as soon as have time to go through them.