Fast Prototyping the Long Here with the Big Now

There is an unwritten rule when fast prototyping that says that “one should know when to stop”. It is executed making up a deadline, fixing a scope and sticking to them. Last week’s Lift Conference marked the end of a fast prototyped pet project that contributed to this year’s theme “connected people” with an interactive map of Geneva from its social network activity.

The result highlights photogenic areas (e.g. lakefront, old town, parks) and events (Geneva Motor Show, Geneva Festival) based on the analysis of 3070 photos georeferenced by 1237 Flickr users over a full year. These persistent longitudinal measures (see Adam Greenfield’s description of the Long Here) are overlaid with the location of the most checked-in places in Foursquare within the week of the Lift Conference (see Adam Greenfield’s description of the Big Now). This (almost) immediate checkin-in trend acted as invitations to explore or rediscover Geneva.

This work is now archived (see Geneva From its Social Network Activities) and the milestones documented in Flickr.

Through data analysis and visualization techniques, we produced an interactive map of the city, revealing photogenic areas (e.g. the lakefront) with public places (e.g. Bains des Pâquis, Parc des Bastion) and events (e.g. Geneva Motor Show, Geneva Festival, and of course Lift at CICG) people like to share online. Screenshot of Friday May 7, 2010, at the end of the Lift conference that took place at CICG in Geneva.
During the conference, I was asked a several times for the reasons and the technicalities behind the development of this prototype.

My approach to fast prototyping looks further than building preliminary models or patterns later applicable to full-scale developments. Instead, I integrate fast prototyping to my hybrid research process in which the exploration equals the value of the result. Indeed, prior to any result, the prototype helps support the reasons of the investigation and build arguments of its significance. More concretely, if I ever had to legitimize this work, here are a few details on the “why” and how” I have developed this visualization:

Prototyping to learn new skills and techniques
A first reason to prototype is to learn something, particularly in the development of new skills and techniques. In favorable fast prototyping conditions there is a dose of freedom that do not constraint to particular technologies. In this project, I explored what I believed where the best techniques to build each element of the data visualization. In details:

Data collection:
I integrated my pre-existing Java module to connect to the Flick API with the flickrj library. The Foursquare data were regulatory collected with a simple Python scripts that used the Python Library for the Foursquare API.

Data management and analysis:
A banal MySQL database fed data to R, a statistical software that no one never masters enough. In addition to my current set of scripts, I particularly toyed with the ggplot2 plotting system to work on the heatmap (see ggplot2: Quick Heatmap Plotting). I also thoroughly browsed the R Spatial Projects with to find attractive graphic solutions, but ended up using filled.contour because it was producing the most detailed results. As part of my idea to reveal Foursquare territories, I employed the tripack package to produce Voronoï “maps”. I abandoned this exploration after two iterations, as the maps and concepts were too hard to understand (see below)

A tentative map of Foursquare “territories” in Geneva, using a Voronoï diagram produced with R (slightly skewed?) using the location of the most active places (more than 10 checkins not produced by the mayor).

Data interoperability:
The use of multiple technologies and programming languages forces the definition of XML Schemas to exchange data (when not using plain CSV files). Here I had to build my own schema as I am still looking for a proper schema for spatio-temporal data interoperability.

Data visualization:
This was the opportunity to get more familiar with the limits of the Flex graphics package, in comparison to what could have been done in Processing, particularly with the integration of a map. In this project, I was looking for an alternative to ModestMap (that I employ in other mapping projects) for a maximum freedom with different types of overlays. I toyed with the open source flex component HeatMap with time missing to produce a compelling solution. As a result, and for or simplicity reasons I ended up producing the Flickr heatmap with R.

Prototyping to surface problems
A part of the learning process is to understand the limits of a particular approach. As any user-generated content, the Foursquare dataset is particularly challenging because it contains inconsistencies that request manual data polishing, problematic when the solution must scale. The Foursquare API limit is another problem that can prevent from scaling-up from Geneva to another urban area with richer public activities. The workaround for this prototype was to solely analyze the 200 most active non-private “places”.

Prototyping to convey a message
A tangible and concrete example is a sure medium to communicate an investigation and its intentions. In this prototype, I want to first further emphasize the presence of spatial data from the use of social networks, that, when analyzed, can describe an city or a space. Second, these data have a temporal dimensions (historical for Flickr and immediate for Foursquare) as described by Adam Greenfield in The Long Here and the Big Now (see his talk at Lift). Third, beyond mapping data and the beauty of maps, I want to move the investigation to the development of quantifiable indicators that contribute to qualify a city, its spaces and its events (think of a form of Geodesign). The photogenic index that analyses the activity of photographers for an area and event is example in that direction. Finally, the imperfection of the results also highlight the limiting scope of the quantitative data analysis (see The “Quants”, their Normalizations and their Abstractions).

Prototyping to collect feedback
A prototype – even at an early stage – acts as an invitation to discuss opinions and criticize a concept. I apply an iterative process to fast prototyping that involves an increasing amount of pairs of eyes at each loop. The key is to make the object of development just good enough to understand and attract people, but never too polished in order to keep the options open. This iterative process with constant feedback helps each actor’s discourse to develop and helps frame further investigation. In this project, I received the first feedback on the graphic design of a spatio-temporal visualization that I serve for other projects.

Why do I blog this: I tried to provide answers the questions on the purpose of prototyping for Lift 10. Allocating time for fast prototyping is part of my research practice. It feed the development of other (more internal) projects that often involves more constraints and a limiting scope. I also recommend these rules to building prototypes written by Tristan Ferne.

The Co-Evolution of Taxi Drivers and their In-Car Navigation Systems

The last article dispatched from my PhD thesis has been accepted for publication in the journal Pervasive and Mobile Computing. The slow academic process to diffuse research results – this study was performed in 2007-2008 – has at least the merit to force authors in looking back into their methods and procedures. Now in 2010, inspired by Nicolas’ Field Research for Design and others, I probably would perform the qualitative data collection and analysis differently. Nevertheless, I still believe this work delivers some relevant insights on people appropriation of location-based systems.

The co-evolution of taxi drivers and their in-car navigation systems (pre-copy-editing pdf)

Abstract. The recent market success of in-car navigation systems creates the opportunity to investigate the appropriation of location-aware systems outside laboratory settings. Through ethnographical lenses, we study how this technology changed the practice of a massive community of its early adopters, the taxi drivers of Barcelona (Spain) and, specifically, their exploitation of pervasive geoinformation. The results show co-evolution: taxi drivers adapt to their in-car navigation systems and adapt them to their needs; in particular, there are evidences of an alteration of the learning processes and of technology appropriation to reduce stress rather than to improve efficiency. We argue that these findings can inform the design of next generation location-based services.

The interplay between a sat-nav and a city guide. Barcelona, June 2008.

Why do I blog this: Last article of my PhD thesis to be accepted. In this study I particularly learned how to a) design a qualitative data collection procedure and b) analyze and interpret the notes, videos and photos.

At the My Map is Not Your Map Workshop

Today I participated to the My Map is Not Your Map Workshop at Arteleku in hype and laid-back San Sebastian. The workshop gathers an enriching mix of artists, designers, academics, engineers. My 45min talk “New maps and practices of hybrid spaces” aimed at describing the new types of maps of hybrid spaces, their utility and their integration into practices from tourism and urban studies to the wayfinding practice of taxi drivers. Comparing to traditional maps, I stressed the increasing value of the 4th dimension (time) in the dynamic and interactive representation of hybrid spaces now available, taking the occasion to provoke the audience with the notions of “real-time awareness” and “end of the ephemeral”. Indeed, not only these new maps alter our immediate apprehensions of the space we feel, live and work in, they also serve as means to communicate evidences and measurements, critical to evaluate space management strategies and policies. These approaches could alter the practices that relate to physical character of the world and human activities. However, part of the evolution of these new practices, we should consider their implications in forms of trade-offs and amputations.

The audience reacted to the notion of “imperfect mirror to reality” (information granularity, spatial uncertainty, seamful design), I believe capturing quite well the limitations of the kind of work I develop. I like to use these practical aspects, around the notion of oligopticon to balance any rhetoric that portrays the “perfect surveillance system”.

Thanks to José Luis Pajares for the invitation!

Digital Cityscapes: Merging Digital and Urban Playspaces

The book Digital Cityscapes: Merging Digital and Urban Playspaces has been released recently. The description goes as follows:

The convergence of smartphones, GPS, the Internet, and social networks has given rise to a playful, educational, and social media known as location-based and hybrid reality games. The essays in this book investigate this new phenomenon and provide a broad overview of the emerging field of location-aware mobile games, highlighting critical, social scientific, and design approaches to these types of games, and drawing attention to the social and cultural implications of mobile technologies in contemporary society. With a comprehensive approach that includes theory, design, and education, this edited volume is one of the first scholarly works to engage the emerging area of multi-user location-based mobile games and hybrid reality games.

It features a chapter I co-authored with Nicolas discussing the issues for the design of Location-Based Games based on our experience with CatchBob!. We give an overview of the three main design issues our results supported: the role played by physical features, the importance of the technological infrastructure and finally the user experience of location-awareness of others.

Why do I blog this: After Space Time Play, it is clear that studying ubiquitous games has consequences for many other areas of contemporary research and daily experience.

Talk at Arteleku

In the talk “Considerations on the recorded, quantified, communicated and apprised self” given at the workshop Information Kinetics: Egoviz, I present my experiences in working with the increasing amount of stored (and circulating) information about people, and their local environments. I intended to draw a few considerations to provoke and encourage the participants who have been developing some pretty exciting projects that explored the visualisation of the relationship between the individual and the environment. With a few examples, I highlighted the fact that current visualizations are used to engage the discussions rather than solving issues. Going beyond revealing the invisible is the next step that must include imperfection as an ingredient embedded in the solution. This imperfect mirror to reality challenges the rhetoric that describes the development of information kinetics as element of an emerging panopticon. Instead, I discussed the notion of the oligopticons that are “partially intelligent, temporarily competent and locally complete. The slides with notes are online.

Engaged with the near future of egooviz at Arteleku

Why do I blog this: It is always extremely stimulating to confront my work in an art center. I was particularly surprised by the maturity of the rhetoric participants use to describe their work. Some non-technologists now master Processing and its capabilities. Those are tangible signs of the emergence of groups of data scientists/artists with multidisciplinary practises and overlapping roles. Thanks to Kepa for the inviation!

At DHUB Session on New Landscapes – Architecture Beyond Leisur

Last week, I participated to a Design Hub Barcelona (DHUB) session on “New Landscapes – Architecture Beyond Leisure. In my talk “people + technology + space“, I briefly presented the works, in relation to tourism, developed at UPF and MIT and featured at the Tourism. Spaces of fiction exhibition (i.e. Los Ojos del Mundo, Real-time Rome and WikiCity Rome). This exhibition focuses on tourism from planning, projection and design angles. The presence of an engineer+researcher was rather at odds with a parterre of architects and practitioners of the physical space. I am glad the curators Mario Ballesteros and Irene Hwang took the risk of exposing my different perspective coming from the study of hybrid cities. It got me to further grasp the degree of misunderstandings and differences of practices within the multiple actors that now touch the design of the public space (be it physical, hybrid or digital). The presentation I have seen had a very elaborated discourse on shaping the space for tourists and urban dwellers, but I expressed my doubts on the capacity of the current practitioners to engage in a design process that actually focus on people (for the sake of doing things right and to learn, see The end of temelessness). In contrast, architect Julien de Smedt described the work I presented as merely useless. A judgment I certainly understand coming from a practice that barely integrates the tourist as a human and discards the hybrid as part of the space.

A mix of old bricks and fresh bits announcing the DHUB session.

Thanks to Carlos Ipser, Mario Ballesteros and Irene Hwang for the invitation!

Back from La Ciudad Híbrida

Last week I participated to the workshop “La Ciudad Híbrida” organized in Sevilla by José Luis de Vicente. The first 2 days, we used different theoretical lenses and practical references to explore the many different aspects of the hybrid city. Juan Freire engaged us with proposals for a participatory urbanism with the design of open processes and bottom-up solutions (see De la ciudad híbrida al urbanismo P2P: democracia 2.0, gestión local participativa y crowdsourcing). José Luis de Vicente stepped back and led us through the history influenced by urban theorist, architects and artist that have paved the way to the hybrid city of the 21st century, the dynamic city (see Una historia de la ciudad de software: arquitecturas dinamicas y sistemas digitales urbanos). An argumentation completed by Juan Martín Prada who covered the rich field of location media with a philosophic spin (co-existance men-thinks, men-animals, men-deads, the urbanization of the real-time city (networked city) vs. desurbanization of the real-space; the “Here” being replaced by the permanant “Now”.

Before Juan Martin, I played the role of “data cowboy” with a 90min talk (in Spanish) that looked at the contemporary hybrid city through the lenses of my research work augmented by some offline observations. In this intervention entitled “People as sensors; people as actors” (slides with annotations, video), I look at the integration of ubiquitous technologies (and soft infrastructures) and how they afford us new flexibility in conducting our daily activities with simultaneously providing the means to study our activities in time and space.

The other part of the workshop was dedicated to more hands-on activities in which groups had to define, sketch and prototype a citizen-led system or process that take advantage of open/public urban data. With a majority young architects, the focus was first based on “infrastructure”, “mobility”, “space”, but then rapidly also evolved around social issues and even political touching the Critical Cartography approach and critique. There was a lot to learn from the languages employed by participants with different practices (architects, social scientist, biologist, artist).

Finally, Sevilla provided an excellent context to ponder the hybrid city of the present. In addition to its rich history of mixed cultures, architectures and art, engineering work and south-european clichés, the city offers the vestiges of the techno-utopian Expo ’92. The crumbling infrastructure at the Cartuja Island is source of fascinating sightseeing with an Ariane V on the loose and a monorail in advanced decomposition among other things. The theme for the Expo was “The Age of Discovery”. mmhmm.

Sevilla, a true hybrid city….

…with its real urban furnitures

Thanks José Luis for the invitation!

Mapping the World’s Photos

Related to my past project on Tracing the Visitor’s Eye and World’s Eyes, David Crandall and colleagues at Cornell have created global and city maps and identify popular snapping sites from photos uploaded on Flickr. They ran statistical analyses to identify the most important clusters of “”what the world is paying attention to”. Next they analysed the text tags added to photographs in those clusters, as well as key visual features from each image, to automatically find the world’s most interesting tourist sites. We find that visual and temporal features improve the ability to estimate the location of a photo, compared to using just textual features (slightly similar to IM2GPS: estimating geographic information from a single image). Their paper, Mapping the World’s Photos, recently presented at the WWW 2009 conference explains the process and results in more details.

Representative images for the top landmark in each of the top 20 European cities. All parts of the figure, including the representative images, textual labels, and even the map itself were produced automatically from our corpus of geo-tagged photos. Image courtesy of David Crandall. More on the project’s web page.
Relation to my thesis: Similar to my work, Crandall et al. I have used the spatial distribution of where people take photos to define a relation between the photos that are taken at popular places. I have used similar representations of spatio-temporal traces to illustrate my techniques and finding. However, my motivations has not been to improve photo management and organization applications (see also Mor Namaan’s work). Similar to Currid and Williams’ work on Mapping the Cultural Buzz, I employed georeferenced photos as a proxy to “qualify” the space (e.g. its attractiveness). But rather than mapping and qualifying a timeless space (Currid and Williams talk about “buzz-worthy” without referring to when), I particularly explore the temporal aspect of the data (see The End of Timelessness). For instance, in my work on the NYC Waterfalls, I studies the evolution of the density of georeferenced photos and the flows of photographers to provide evidences of the evolution of the attractiveness of the space (journal paper still in submission).

The Visualization of photographer movement in Manhattan mapped by Crandall is particularly stiking:

To produce these figures, we plotted the geolocated coordinates of sequences of images taken by the same user, sorted by time, for which consecutive photos were no more than 30 minutes apart. Image courtesy of David Crandall

The End of Timelessness

Writing the conclusion of my dissertation, there is one implication of my research work that I still have not completely gotten my brain around. I will try to layout my thoughts here. I believe that one contribution of my work has been to reveal the new aspects of time with our relation to space through ubiquitous technologies. For instance, I have studied the co-evolution of a community of early adopters with their navigation system, the timely capture of travelers experiences, the potentials of spatio-temporal data shadows such as measuring the evolution of the attractiveness of the space. Each study shows that our relation with geoinformation (and by extension space) has been altered from our interactions with mobile and wireless technologies. The information is accessible and generated ubiquitously, augmenting our roles of sensors and actors of the space. This presence of what Adam Greenfield would refer to, in a more articulate manner, as the Big Now creates an utilitarian fascination to the real-time or the predictability as instantiated in my case study on “Detecting air travel in real time” from a mobile phone implicit interaction wireless networks (in submission). This fascination overshadows the end of our ephemeral relation with space potentially leading to a new version of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and the presence of the hard/soft infrastructure design that does not take it into account.

I call it the end of timelessness. The end of the ephemeral, or what Adam Greenfield would describe as the Long Here, is mainly exposed in my work on Tracing the Visitor’s Eye and related. The observations of the presence of the hard infrastructures that deny the Long Here took place around the NYC Waterfalls study and the novel opportunity to define of indicators of the evolution of attractiveness of the space. Similarly, the ubiquitous technologies of the present, fail to accommodate for the Long Here, the change in the city and the implication on the social practices. Wearing qualitative lenses with a taxi drivers in Barcelona, I could observe co-evolutive ballet with their navigation system and extract the implications of the soft infrastructure on the knowledge of the city.

The embedment of urban informatics into the urban fabrics makes the integration of the Long Here in integral part of the design of hard and soft infrastructures. I would argue that this kind of case studies sets stage to the end of the timelessness considerations of individuals interactions with urban infrastructures. A satellite navigation system does not perform the same service the first six months in the practices of a inexperienced taxi drivers compared to a user with 20 year of knowledge of the city. Moreover, they do not, over time, request the same granularity of geoinformation nor do they assess the quality of the information with the same experience of the technology and knowledge of the city. A different kind of “long here” evolution of the presence and practices of that can be analyzed through their interactions with soft infrastructures to assess the quality of the spatial settings. This longitudinal understanding of the evolution of the interaction can then be applied to the design of the urban informatics. For instance, we made sure that our mobile phone algorithm to detect air travel was not perfect, as our system takes advantage of false detections to keep the survey participants with a certain level of involvement.

The evolution of the people practices, interactions and frictions with the urban space can be compiled very informally as Nicolas and I compiled in Sliding Friction and related. This kind of approach helps highlighting the reality, its complex dynamics, its subtleties, and its situational particularities. My research work suggests the combinations of more formal data collection and analysis approaches. They took the form of quantitative (reality mining), qualitative (ethno-inspired), mixed research methods to a more active, utility-driven mode with design science research.

New use of Bowling Green, the oldest public park in New York City

Now these approaches strongly contrast with the practice of architecture and urban design that almost utterly ignore this notion of time. For instance, from my understanding, there exist limited methods to capture and evaluate the user experience and the use of the built space. That makes me wonder wether since Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn (video of the BBC TV series inspired by the book) any progress has been made to integrate the complexifying intertwinement of hard infrastructures, soft infrastructures and individual/social practices into their design practices. 15 years ago, Frank Duffy explained that “architects have been slow to join the evaluation bandwagon, It’s got somewhat trapped in the academic field, I am afraid“. When considering the hybrid space with real-time elements, asynchronous communications and its logging capabilities of soft infrastrcture, it seems that the human/social elements with their evolution and adaptability find little consideration when in competition with aesthetic.

A bench to relax or work or both? between an ATM and a defibrillator at the cramped part of Logan airport

In consequence, as Steward Brand explains, “More often than not, the pull to conduct evaluations has come from client organizations, not from the architects themselves” also suggesting to collect feedback from facility manager to grasp the dimensions of time and use into building. In contrast, in the digital world, there is a greater tradition of analysing breadcrums to improve the design of web sites. Of course, nowadays, who and where are the facility managers in hybrid spaces?

The lack of consideration of the human in current practices of the designer of the hard infrastructures is particularly striking with the traditional aseptic graphics and medium to communicate them. But the competences to learn from the evolution of the infrastructure do not only require interpretative methods for human and social dynamics, but also for technological/intrastructural counterparts. For instance, 4 years ago, the analysis the players space-time trails in our pervasive game CatchBob! with a custom made “replay tool” necessitated technical knowledge to extract the technological issues of the ubiquitious infrastructures and its evolution. I would not expect this to be otherwise nowadays. This to exemplify that the ability to understand and properly bend the hard infrastructure will naturally come from cross-disciplinary teams that consider time in their practice. For instance, software engineering has been evolving in its practice to check the quality assurance throughout the life of a software (see Software that makes software better). The techniques aim at preventing from the software to break without running it (statistic analysis tools) and also detect when it breaks (dynamic analysis tools).

Consequence of unproper blackbox testing… Maybe an error caused by a 64 bit floating point number relating to the outdoor temperature respect to the wind conditions converted to a 16 bit signed integer

Relation to my thesis: Extract some contribution of my PhD thesis (the end of timelessness) to consider their implications on the evaluation of the evolution of the relation between the hard, the soft and the human in hybrid environments. From my experience, a mix of methods are necessary to grasp a world of fast-moving technology. This methods go beyond the current limited approaches of practitioners of the built space, to the exception of Post-occupency evaluations that introduce the dimensions of time and use into building. On the other hand, the practices of practitioners of the soft and digital world are evolving to take time and evolution into consideration. Of course that should lead to an improvement in: reliability, life-cycle behavior, environmental impact and user acceptance.

My research work sets the stage for tools and techniques to reveal evolution or repetitions, with observations and measures of expectation, initial frustration and delight, adjustment, and long-term adaptivity. I examply some elements in my taxi drivers study, the application of metrics as in new york and the collection of evidences “sliding frictions”.

Contributions of Geoinformation and Geovisualization to the Concept of the Digital City

On Tuesday, my work was presented in two different venue, in Hamburg at the GeoViz workshop on the Contribution of Geovisualization to the concept of the Digital City (thanks to Ayman Moghnieh for replacing me at the last minute!) and in Barcelona at Globalgeo in a forum on geoinformation and participation for sustainability (slides of the presentation). I stayed in Barcelona to meet some of the founders of the Vespucci Initiative and understand how my work integrates into the current trends and challenges in of geographic information science. Besides the acknowledgment of volunteer-generated information, it is still a very techno-driven field, that starts with technological capabilities of to collect, process and visualize data and after a few years having conference session with the title “So what?”. No doubt that this is one what that innovation happens, but I am always fascinated by the GIS community quest of the details (e.g. the perfect 3d models of a city) without much human perspective on “how good is good enough” and “for whom and what for”. Current concerns are rather on better organize the existing geospatial data (following the EU Inspire Directive), migrate them to Internet-based environments, make them ready for spatial analysis and visualization. In relation to that, spatial data should be considered as a medium, not a message. So far the community has overlooked the maintenance of the medium, for instance in failing in archiving data (e.g. we lack of the digital data from 10 years while we still still have analog data). In addition, there is paradigm shift that drives spatial analysis to show what is happening, not what it is, implying the development of 4d spatial analysis and visualizations systems.

The move into this Next Generation Digital Earth goes through the embracement of bottom-up spatial data infrastructures. Michael Goodchild made an effort in comparing the differences in quality, trust, timeliness and risks of volunteer generated information vs. authoritative information. He particularly talked about the contrast in the quality of the top-down (authority) data where inaccuracies are guaranteed and the bottom-up (assertion) data that tend to be more accurate in popular places (e.g. similar to Wikipedia). Therefore, authorities information must be verified through a process that can be slow. On the other hand, asserted information are generated in timely manner and people are willing to accept the false positive they generate (an angle that I could have explored in CatchBob). Through several examples (e.g. fire management in Santa Barbara), Goodchild showed the necessity to consider both accurate top-down information mixed with timely volunteer generation information (e.g. such as in Zagat). My work in New York certainly goes into that direction.