Posted: October 5th, 2009 | No Comments »
This week, I head to Paris for a gig at La Cantine on the theme “La Terre vue du Web“. I will team-up with Denise Pumain to discuss the ways information, communication and location-aware technologies change our relation with the space. This event is part of a conference series on interdisciplinary approaches to the Web.
Later this month, Lift lab will run a workshop in Barcelona “Hands on Barcelona’s Informational Membrane” that aims at exploring the implications and opportunities of the presence of the informational membrane hovering over Barcelona. The list of participants is already utterly promising.
Finally, I will mingle with tourism professionals and experts at the First International Conference on the Measurement and Economic Analysis of Regional Tourism in San Sebastian, presenting new instruments for measuring and modelling tourism flows and other types of innovation in the tourism enterprise. After the 9th International Forum on Tourism Statistics at OECD, I am thrilled to once again participate to a conference sponsored by the UNWTO with practitioners and people who perform studies on the field.
Back on the road again
Why do I blog this: Thriving from the rich diversity of contiguous domains, languages and perspectives.
Posted: March 30th, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Relation to my thesis: I now ditched the argumentation on messiness, but keep enjoying observing and recording moments of sliding friction. In that sense, this week’s T5 meltdown is fascinating to follow the design, (political, physical, economical) constraints and technological failures that make this £4 billion project collapse and reconstruct the path of events/decisions that lead to this moment of messiness. Later it will be interesting to see how the overall issues get fixed and how passenger adapted and got around the failures. But that should be the content of another thesis.
Alternatively, this photo describes metaphorically the state of my current work on my thesis.
Posted: March 8th, 2008 | No Comments »
Now that the Internet becomes ubiquitous in space, it might affect its availability in time.
Posted: February 12th, 2008 | No Comments »
The objective to metamorphose the LIFT conference from its grassroot and “groups of friends” origins to become a perfectly ran organizations has been widely achieved. While building a professional profit-generating event, the organizers did not forget about the keys to their previous success: openness (no VIP treatments, nor reserved areas), rely on the community (I only heard positive feedbacks from the workshops and the open stages delivered their pleasant surprises), commercial free, and magic formula of mixing the right amount of entrepreneurs, researchers, designers, artists, journalists and activists.
I attended the conference digitally naked with a pen and pieces of papers as instruments to record notes and thoughts and the archived videos to support my memory:
Bruce Sterling launched the conference in the role of a near-future futurist. Predicting the future is about moral boosting. The main reason people prosper is because they are willing to get out of the bed. Showing up is 90% of the job.
His talk focused on how we can deal (i.e. analyze the driving forces and get on with our own life) with a phenomenon we are certain to be confronted in 2008. He exemplified a foresight method (“you cannot predict the future but you can describe it“) with a recent black swan, the wedding of model Carla Bruni with french president Nicolas Sarkozy . An event that defines the character of our time (especially in Europe). An event that, if we do not have the proper analytical tools, we will be overwhelmed, confused and sicken by it. However, If you we understand the driving forces that guide what is going on we will be able to anticipate the developments. “Like an american who learns the rules of soccer, you probably still won’t like it very much, but you will understand why it matters to people, you’ll be able to put into a useful perceptive and get on with you own life.”
Paul Dourish (video) how we can understand what ethnography can teach us (talk in the following up of his implication for design paper). We miss disciplinary power relationships: ethnographers might regularly be asked what implication for design are, whereas it is not possible to ask a computer scientist the impact of his/her work to social theories. The relevance of classical ethnography in the context of mobility, presence and absence. Symbolism of to define mobility different from the technological perspective (location, coordinates) and the ethnographic perspective (dispora, nomad, asylum). There are different ways to represent space that is not about the cartographic representation (aboriginal vs western, history of the place, identify, different account of space). Particularly relevant to my current project with the senseable city lab (reveal the digital traces) and my taxi driver study (the impact of satnav system on mobility and practices)
Genevieve Bell talked about the armed race of digital deception (quoting James Katz), for every device that aims to tell the truth such as GPS there is a service available to deceive (e.g. alabi service). Technology changes faster than people do (culture, practice). How do we act in social practice with the act of lying or withholding information, the notion of white lies and good lies. Lie is about negating the real, but not about negating the truth (Peter Stiegnitz). Playful act through the rules of the world (how we choose to present ourselves, depending on the knowledge of the lookers). With secrets, we keep safe from what we choose to withhold. With lies, we shape our own realities .”Twitter is making an art out of the form of confabulation“. Particularly relevant to my work on people’s disclosure of location information in Flickr and the granularity they use (attaching a coarse-grained location information can be considered as a good lie). It also touches my taxi driver study as Genevieve points out in the very end of the talk: what do we do if technologies also start to lie such as satnav systems giving a bad direction?
Tom Taylor (video) how to use social network to inflect behaviors in the context of sustainable development. He advocated for the use of positive peer/social pressure. The positive approach goes through the engagement of individuals in groups via social softwares and let people expose their behaviors. In the future we will be able to capturing data from different sources (such as Nike+) and expose them where you do not expect it (Measure, visualize and expose in a social graph). As using a Wattson to monitor the electricity consumption in a house. Tom stated that exposing actions can have a massive effect on the way people behave. In the light of the recent works on persuasive computing, this still needs to be proven (specifically how to make that happen). This work reflects well the intention of WikiCity, its feedback loop, and the use of digital traces for social navigation. An aspect to study would be analyse the spiral of: influencing behaviors that influence the data that influence behaviors the influence the data…
I had a pleasant discussion with Rafi Haladjian on creating innovation and services from the technological constraints. In his career he created success from constraints in the network administration for the Minitel (the importance was not about creating a density of traffic, but by spreading of the day so that line would always be used), the Internet (bet on the physicality of server hosting, the unique link that is not virtual and therefore fragile) and the internet of things (play and take advantage of the positive aspect of immature technologies).
Still to come… the foresight session with Scott Smith, Bill Cockayne and Francesco Cara.
We collected very valuable content from picking up the brains of the 70+ participants of our workshop Ubiquitous computing: visions, failures and new interaction rituals. The feedbacks were rather positive: Mark Meagher, Hannes Gassert, Michele Perras, Vincenzo Pallotta, and Tom Hume.
Group activity at the workshop
Posted: February 12th, 2008 | No Comments »
Back from Florence, where I presented to the local officials and the press (comunicato di stampa – video of the President of the Province of Florence introducing the press conference), an in-progress report of the Tracing the Visitor’s Eye project (slides for the 1-hour press conference). Feedbacks have been rather positive. Interestingly, some journalists linked this work to stories that have been in the local news lately. Could the results presented help move the David statue or better understand the impact of the implementation of low-cost (new Ryanair routes to Pisa sold to travelers as if they were flying to Florence). A relevant point raised during the day was that these data could not only help the understanding of tourist movements in Florence, but also compare with the competing cities in a national (competition with Venezia and Pisa) and global levels (how are tourists of Florence different from the other cities?). In that context, future effort will aim at defining the profiles of Flickr users and matching their different behaviors in the top 20 tourist cities.
The perks of this project: 24 hours in Florence.
In the media:
Relation to my thesis: Slightly leaving the pure aademic tracks, it is a peculiar exercise confront research to people that finance it (*sigh* the quest of the relevance…). More than presenting results, the message I intended to communicate was about the seriousness and potentials of people-generated location information and digital traces (partially inspired by Bruno Latour).
Posted: February 4th, 2008 | No Comments »
I am off to the LIFT conference where we will exchange, among many other things, on the visions and failure of ubicomp, on anthropology and technologies (with Genevieve Bell, Pau Dourish, and Younghee Jung), on foresight (with Scott Smith, Bill Cockayne and Francesco Cara), and on the internet of things, robotics, pets and entertainment (Rafi Haladjian and Bruno Bonnell),
Kick-off on Thursday with a 30′ state of the technological world address by Bruce Sterling.
Posted: February 4th, 2008 | No Comments »
My visit of the Mixed Reality Laboratory at the University of Nottingham, allowed be to exchange with some of the finest researchers active on the edges of CSCW and ubicomp including: Steve Benford (we discussed the potential uses of “trails” to reveal the “wrong” behaviors, replay is often a request of participants of pervasive experiences, but also the challenges to raise the credibility of HCI research in the industry), Martin Flintham (developing and deploying pervasive experiences), Leif Oppermann (uncertainty visualization and tools to develop pervasive experiences), Holger Schnädelbach (evaluation in architecture and hybrid worlds, presentation of cospaces), Stefan Egglestone (feedback look with bio sensors, stress sensing, see telemetry in theme parcs), and Adriano Galati (delay tolerant ad-hoc networks).
In the effort to build more coherence in my research focus, I took the opportunity to present my work and try to highlight and test the key evidences that emerged from my first studies. In the discussion after my talk, Leif Oppermann and Chris Greenhalgh suggested that, in the light of the outcomes of CatchBob! I should have a closer look on how people who atomize the georeferencing of their photos. Do they follow the same practice as in CatchBob! (i.e. become more passive in disclosing the location information, do they “annotate”/communicate less as well?
