I have been playing around trying to sketch a literature map of my research. Here is the current high-level status.
If I ever need to theorize more my framework, I still keep situated action, embodied interaction and distributed cognition in the drawer.
Jan Chipchase has post on a remote control to operate the toilet with peace-of-mind-security coverage placed next to the toilet interface. So when house guests are wanting to flush and aren’t familiar with these interfaces it is no surpise that the ‘wrong’ button is pressed and an alarm sounds, and the security company sends out a uniformed emergency response team. There is of course many wrong approaches in this future-perfect-connected world situation. Yet, it reminded me of the thoughts of Adam Greenfield on the the blue toilet of death highlighting the coexistence of systems surrounding us and their nonlinear interactions and the affective dimensions of system failure (advocating for “graceful degradation”).
And still nobody was talking about the nonlinear interactions of network systems in one space all operating at once – it’s as if none of the people who were designing them had, not so much thought, but felt what it would be like to sit in the middle of a room where you’ve got fifteen different technical interfaces around you, and you’re responding to all of them at once, and they’re all responding to you at once.
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But I’m not sure how many people in academic ubicomp have really marinated themselves in a consideration of the experiential and affective dimensions of system failure. I’m not sure to what degree people have ever simply sat and imagined what it will feel like when systems like these surround us…and break down, as technical systems often do. They may have thought about the specific system at hand, but as a gestalt? I haven’t heard that many people raising the issue.
These kind of problems are exemplified by Fabio Sergio and his story with motion sensors in a bathroom and considerations on reactive system as well as by Mark Meagher on automatic doors and how the funtionality of the door are invisible and no attempts are made to communicate to the user.
I enjoy observing people (and myself) waving my hands in front of a tap or to an automatic doors. Doors in swiss train are particularly prone to the situations described by Mark. Their opening is often slow, maybe due to the overuse of the sensors or most probably to their bad calibration. Some train have sensor on the floor (opening when you step in). It is not unusual to see people jumping or hardly stepping in front of the doors. Other trains have their sensors in the top and bottom of the door. I noticed that even some train directors do it and some people refusing the automation and manually forcing the door to open. I am wondering if there is ever been a study a user-centered study to calibrate the swiss train automatic doors to lower the user confusion.
Geberit’s eyes, motion sensor in a bathroom
Relation to my thesis: My work highlights to problem of integrating technological limitations (such as system not being able to coexists) and human factors in real-world environments. I already mentioned it in Peaceful Cohabitation and Scalability in Ubicomp. I am exploring how to support user activities top of errors and system-generated uncertainty. In the context of interaction, I guess it is not only important for interfaces to reveal their functionalities and states, but also to think in terms of granularity (for example to calibrate thee automatic doors) as express by Mike Kuniavsky.
Ed Parsons posted a short report of the couple of days he spent at Reuters, as part of their excellent Innovation Programme. He mentions the increasing interest for Reuters to deliver location and consumer focused information but as with many things maybe it will take at least three or four attempts for location based services to reach the mainstream. The challenges to deliver appropriate LBS (e.g. data availability, privacy concerns, standards). However, Reuter’s interest show the intention to innovate in the long term in this space.
Relation to my thesis: In the past, location information where given by official or central entities. The bottom up generation of geolocated information raises not only the problem of lack of standards but also on the granularity (or generalization) and the subjectivity of the location attached to the information. Similar challenges faced by GeoCommons for example, that companies such as Urban Mapping try to tackle.
Anthony Steed now provides an online demonstration video of his experimental piece of software for investigating GPS satellite availability. This work on GPS satellite visualization was part of his Mobile HCI 2004 paper on Supporting Mobile Applications with Real-Time Visualisation of GPS Availability
Relation to my thesis: An example to reveal the seams of a positioning system.
Presentation of my research on “Uncertainty in Location-Aware Systems” (40MB) at today’s internal mini-workshop.
Relation to my thesis: I am now considering selecting my first sub-question “how certain (cf. taxonomy) do positional and tracking systems have to be in order to be useful and acceptable?” as my main research question. It really fits with my past experiences and with my current interest in the granularity of user experiences in ubicomp (as well as in the accuracy of geotagged images in Flickr).
I blanked on a basic question about the potential applications of my research and started talking about how garbage collectors could profit from it (referring to the Liaison project and my very own thoughts in urban computing) . I am afraid it did not match the audience on that one, but it feels good to get off the beaten tracks (e.g the usual emergency management, fleet and assets tracking) when it comes to location-aware systems.
In the workshop, a talk on the quality of service in networks, made me recall the paper User-perceived Quality of Service in Wireless Data Networks and how I could actually apply the same approach of user-perceived quality in my research.
There is a philosophical level to my research that highlights the mismatches between our needs, expectations and behaviors towards technologies. It relates to Jose Rojas‘ (University of Glasgow) questioning the techno-push in ubicomp and how cultures have a different set of beliefs, goals, aims towards technology.
In extension to my previous Heat Map of Barcelona Geotagged Images, I extracted the granularity level used on 4100 geotagged images of Barcelona. Heat maps are on way to find patterns of usage of the granularity feature. I still need to separate manual with automatic geotagging by retrieving the GPS data contained in the EXIF tags.
In a “mining urban activity” perspective I planl to use images timestamps to start to generate the “traces” left by the visitor’s eye.
Levels of granularity used on 4100 images
City view with granularity levels of 8 (region/city level), 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 16 (street level)
Old city level, with granularities 14, 15 and 16
Wireless reliability is a still a key selling factor in the US, as highlighted by Verizon’s Can you Hear me Now? campaign.
Source: Elena777
Relation to my thesis: This ad struck me this Fall in the US. Patchy coverage and unreliable networks require attention to wireless mechanisms in their context of use.
Notes on Seams, Seamfulness and Seamlessness (How designers can help users to exploit shortcomings of technology) taken by Antti Oulasvirta (User Experience Research Group, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology) at the Seamfulness Workshop on 17th of august 2004, at TeliaSonera Haninge. Antti summurizes the Seamful Design as an endeavour not to make everything seamful, but to aim for “seamless interaction but seamful technology“. This calls for solving the following problems:
Antti’s talk on SeamfulSystems: What are they and how can we design them? contains several very interesting thoughts and references (everyday life types of seams, Seamfulnessin 8 current approaches to ubicomp HCI, seams are part of the context, designing seamful systems is ultimately a UCD problem).
I really enjoy the physical example he uses to describe a “beautiful seam”.
A beautiful seam. Construction site at the Doge’s Palace in Venice is hidden behind a sheet that depicts how the building is going to look like after the construction is ready. With a little effort, an ugly seam (construction sites tend to be noisy, unsightly, and block pedestrians and cars) is turned into a one that can inspire passers-by to think and share opinions about how the palace is going to look like.
Relation to my thesis: My work aims at informing location-aware systems designers on ways to manage shortcomings of ubiquitous technologies. Unintentionally, my 3 sub-heuristics target the 3 points of the seamful design program in the context of location-aware systems as mentioned in my research plan:
Understanding which seams are important
the degree of positioning accuracy being appropriate to the task or activity at hand. In consequence, according to the activities supported by our location-aware system, how certain (accurate) do positional and tracking systems have to be in
order to be useful and acceptable?
Presenting seams to users
There is no comprehensive understanding of the parameters that influence successful uncertainty visualization. There is a need for a more systematic approach to understand the usability of uncertainty representation methods and interactive interfaces for using those representations. With our scope of ubiquitous computing we will investigate the visualization of spatial uncertainty in a real-time location-aware system.
Designing interaction with seams:
What is the balance between implicit and explicit forms of human interaction with a location-aware system. Therefore, according to the activities supported by our location-aware system, we can investigate interaction dynamics to communication uncertainty, and nurture usefulness of the system.
Finally, as inprired by Antti’s presentation, I would like to find more failed prototypes that could have benefited from an appropriate management of the technological shortcomings.
At a talk given today at TECFA on Video Games meet Ubiquitous Computing: The Collective Simulation of a Human Being, Alexander Repenning shortly mentioned Mobility Agents. The Mobility Agents system provides multimodal prompts to a traveler on handheld devices helping with the recognition of the “right” bus, for instance. At the same time, it communicates to a caregiver the location of the traveler and trip status.
An article describes the findings at several levels. At a technical level, it outlines pragmatic issues including display issues, GPS reliability and networking latency arising from using handheld devices in the field. At a cognitive level, it describes the need to customize information to address different degrees and combinations of cognitive disabilities. At a user interface level, it describes the use of different mission status interface approaches ranging from 3D real-time visualizations to SMS and instant messaging-based text interfaces.
Repenning, A. and Ioannidou, A. 2006. Mobility agents: guiding and tracking public transportation users. In Proceedings of the Working Conference on Advanced Visual interfaces (Venezia, Italy, May 23 – 26, 2006). AVI ’06. ACM Press, New York, NY, 127-134.
Relation to my thesis: Excellent reference on a urban-scale use of a location-aware system highlighting both the technical and user interface approaches and issues. In some aspects, this research project made me think of GPS System to Raise the Confidence in the Ability to Travel.
I am using Flickr to investigate the granularity of the position the users attach to their images in relation to where they have been taken. Here an example based on 5543 retrieved images with the tag “barcelona” and granularity 16 (i.e. street level. World level is 1, country is ~3, region ~6, city ~11, and street ~16).
Related to Granularities of User Experience in Ubicomp.
Relation to my thesis: Pet project in the 1-2am shift. Actually, exploring the different levels of location granularity used in the Flickr community could become an example that show where location accuracy is used in a urban space. Next steps, using the descriptions/tags of the images and exploiting GeoIQ.
