Expected generalist book about Ubicomp

I am looking forward to read Everyware : The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing by Adam Greenfield (released in february 2006). Judging from I've read on the author's blog/website, there seems to be compelling concepts like ubicomp as "information processing dissolving in behavior":

Some of what you'll find inside is a discussion of what we mean when we say "ubiquitous computing," including my definition of the field, at its most robust, as "information processing dissolving in behavior"; whether it's truly an immediate concern or a "hundred-year problem"; what different sorts of everyware might emerge in differing cultures; and, of course, an extended exploration of the social and ethical implications of this most insinuative of technologies.

Everyware is pitched to the smart generalist

I think the ubicomp field is still emerging and this book might be one of the first to be generalist and that will tackle this topic with the user focus. I hope it will address issues like people mental model about things (not only computers but artifacts) + the notion of affordance in context, the difference between mental model about things and computer, technical uncertainties and how people cope with them (which is an incredible issue in our research about location-based services), emergent usage of ubicomp technologies and so forth.

Studying Technology Use in Hybrid in Hybrid and Undisciplined Place

There is currently an compelling event in Tokyo: FIELDWORK UNTETHERED: STUDYING TECHNOLOGY USE IN HYBRID AND UNDISCIPLINED PLACES (I put the emphasis on a sentence I like):

This two-day workshop will explore and document methdological frameworks and innovation in the study of portable ICTs outside of the home and workplace. A select international group of experts in the social study of mobile and portable information and communication technologies will be convened for two days of presentations, discussion and fieldwork experimentation. Researchers will be equipped with GPS enabled 3G videophones and a moblogging system in order to document their trial. Results will be published in the form of a collection of methodological essays, (...) In social research of mobility and portable technologies, we are transitioning from an experimental stage to a stage where we can develop robust methodological frameworks and standards.

Organizers are usual suspects in the field, very relevant people with regards to the topic of the workshop: Ken Anderson (Intel Research), Jan Chipchase (Nokia), Mizuko (Mimi) Ito (Keio University and University of Southern California), Steve Love (Brunel University), Daisuke Okabe (Keio University), Mark Perry (Brunel University.

Why do I blog this? the methodologies discussed there will be of interest for our work about studying the usage of location-based technologies in urban/field settings. I am looking forward to read the results. Jan Chipcase gives some hints about the workshop on this blogpost.

Fragmentation of attention in mobile interaction

An interesting paper I perused recently: The fragmentation of attention in mobile interaction, and what to do with it by Antti Oulasvirta, interactions, Volume 12 , Issue 6  November + December 2005, pp. 16 - 18. Some excerpts:

Our goal has been first to understand how serious this "multitasking craziness" , or fragmentation of attention as we see it, is, and also to explore some possibilities to counter this unwanted phenomenon. (...) we conducted a field experiment to investigate the seriousness and extent of fragmentation. (...) In mobile situations, continuous attention to the mobile device fragmented to bursts of just four to eight seconds (...), and attention to the mobile device had to be interrupted several attention shifts, by glancing the environment up to eight times during a page loading

What's interesting is this:

Interestingly, we observed several strategies that users adopted to compensate for this unwanted situation. In general, the simple strategies can be described as strategic withdrawals of resources from less important tasks (e.g., slowing down walking, or postponing and refusing tasks). More sophisticated strategies were enabled by users' preknowledge of the particular situation. For example, when a metro leaves from the station, travelers "preprogram" themselves to what is to be expected; in this case to the announcement of the destination station. After this calibration, only brief sampling is required to observe that the task is proceeding normally.

Then they came up with potential solutions:

Some design tactics to fight mobile multitasking craziness.(...) At the very least, our results should convince designers to put effort to: • shorten interaction units (down to less than five seconds). • automatize or eliminate tasks. • Offload tasks to unused resources, support execution of tasks in different modalities. • Provide modality-targeted feedback for long system response times. • Support brief monitoring of changes. • Support temporal control and orchestration. • Provide unsanctioned delaying of responses. • Provide cues for anticipation of upcoming events and schedules. • Support user's understanding of tasks' upcoming demands.

Why do I blog this? the paper is a clever summary of how a field experiment in the domain of mobile computing usage can be useful to set guidelines for mobile application designers.

Mizuko Ito on cell phone applications

I think I missed this interview of Mizuko Ito in Red Herring released on October 10th. Dr. Ito is a cultural anthropologist from University of Southern California/Keio University (Tokyo) who studies how the next generation uses new media (her publication can be downloaded on here blog). Here is her point:

Ms. Ito says older generations have a lot to learn from how the rising generation is taking up these new technologies—sometimes adults don’t recognize that young people are developing innovative uses for technologies. “I see my work as an anthropologist as identifying and describing what these natives of the digital world are doing, in ways which are informative to people who may not have grown up in that environment, as well as to people trying to develop those kinds of technologies,” she says.

Her work also involves interesting ideas about some questions I already tackled here: mobile devices and their potential uses (playing games, watching videos), as well as the doubts I raised:

the question is portable media devices, and to what degree people want them integrated. The camera’s been integrated, and video is on its way, but slower. But the big issue is content delivery beyond ring tones and wallpaper, like television, short films, novels, and music. It’s the ‘Will it replace the iPod?’ question. I’m not sure yet. We’re not even at the point where we can easily download television or video, and people are not used to television and video outside of homes, for the most part. (...) I see the content side mainly supported by devices like Game Boys, trading card games, and other kinds of portable media kids carry around with them. That may change. But when you see things like the PSP, you can imagine that device turning easily into a video device as well as a gaming device, and some sort of communications device. The mobile phone is not really in the space yet. It’s been mostly small-screen games rather than networked location-based gaming that is taking advantage of the fact that the game has left the desktop

Why do I blog this?I agree with her: mobile phone games are small-screen applications, and the location-based/pervasive games are still R&D or art performance project. But as she says "it's not in the spacer yet".

From MUDs to MMORPG

A lively debate has emerged in gameblog terra nova this week about the reinvention of the online game community research from MUD/MOO to current MMORPG. The article in Terra Nova offers a very clever summary of what has changed from MUD to MMORPG, here are some excerpts extracted from the post by Timothy Burke and the commenters):

Some old issues have become completely new in their implications:

• simply for reasons of scale: secondary markets are obviously something radically different in current virtual worlds than they might have been
• there are genuinely new issues--if nothing else, the perceptual and psychological issues posed by 3-D graphical engines in virtual worlds as compared to text-based or isomorphic designs.
• one of the biggest things to have changed is [internet] penetration. (...) Adoption of whatever phenomenon by many millions of people has got to change the characteristics and nature of that space. It certainly did in the case of both the Web and the stock market. (stated by Mark Wallace)
• Instancing is a major new trend that was never really explored in the text mud days. There has always been talk about "embedded experiences" but the idea of literally replicating single-player to limited multiplayer games wasn't one that had currency (stated by Raph)
• What happened to intermud protocol? (stated by Raph)
• computers now are more than 100x faster than they were in the mid-90s when I started on this; that has had significant impact on the kinds of things that virtual worlds can represent. (stated by Mike Sellers)

Why do I blog this? To me this topic is strikingly interesting since I am currently working on a research project about the creation and evolution of online games communities (for an R&D privately funded). Last week, I collected plenty of research about this topic in MUDs/MOO (which I use to play with few years ago) and I took for granted the fact that the studies made into the MUD field already tackled elements that would be of interests in MMORPG. I am actually in the process of selecting what would be new to study, drawing on these elements.

Asychronous location awareness in CatchBob!

This morning I tuned the new interface we're testing in CatchBob: an asychronous location awareness tool, that is to say an indication of the past position of each partner in the game. At the moment, it's a bit too thin but the point was to tune the range: we will display the last 40 positions of the partner (and a trail to connect them) as represented below:

Showing the last 20 dots was a bit too short:

Input Management in Map-Based Interfaces

Cohen, P. R., McGee, D. R., & Clow, J. (2000, April 29-May 4). The efficiency of multimodal interaction for a map-based task. Paper presented at the Applied Natural Language Processing Conference (ANLP'00), Seattle, WA.

This paper compares the efficiency of using a standard direct-manipulation graphical user interface (GUI) with that of using the QuickSet pen/voice multimodal interface for supporting a military task. In this task, a user places military units and control measures (e.g., various types of lines, obstacles, objectives) on a map. Four military personnel designed and entered their own simulation scenarios via both interfaces. Analyses revealed that the multimodal interface led to an average 3.5-fold speed improvement in the average entity creation time, including all error handling. The mean time to repair errors also was 4.3 times faster when interacting multimodally. Finally, all subjects reported a strong preference for multimodal interaction. These results indicate a substantial efficiency advantage for multimodal over GUI-based interaction during map-based tasks.

Why do I blog this? This paper seems to be a good reference about multimodal input GUI. In CatchBob! we use map-based interface and only one modality but it might change with a structured interface that would help users top communicate, through predefined strategy messages.

CatchBob milestone

In CatchBob!, the messages which deals with strategy could discriminated with the following characteristics:- content: Bob's position, Bob's approximate location (area), the proper triangle configuration, advice/order abotu spatial behavior, a meeting point and network problems. - the adressees: A,B,C,B+C,A+B+C - temporal aspects: at which moment in the process a message is relevant - temporal evolution: refinement/modification of a message - coordination strategy: manifest/explicit agreement/convention (Clark's typology)

The point is to have a structured interface which will graphically represents those messages and help players to communicate these information. I will then run a new experiment with this new interface and logged information about the usage of such an interface (nb of clicks on each button and when) will allow me to check the validity of my model (the coordination strategies in mobile collaboration).

Todo list

Short reminder for ongoing projects:

• Run new CatchBob experiment with asynchronous awareness tool
• Sketch the new structured interface to allow players to write predescribed strategy messages
• Complete paper for COOP2006
• Sketch the outline of a potential journal paper about location awareness
• Write down research plan for the project about on-line communities creation and evolution, take World of Warcraft as the platform to be studied.
• Finish the literature review for the european project
• Check the final details of the Lift conference to be organized in Geneva in 2006

This week's job: paper for COOP2006

I am currently writing a paper for COOP 2006, not because it's in south of france but rather because it seems relevant with what I do:

The conference aims at bringing together researchers who contribute to the analysis and design of cooperative systems and their integration in organizational settings. The challenge of the conference is to advance on :

• Understanding and modeling of collaborative work which is mediated by technical artefacts;
• Design methodologies for cooperative work analysis and cooperative systems design ;
• New technologies supporting cooperation;
• Concepts and socio-technical solutions for the application of cooperative systems.

Our contribution will be geared towards the influence of new technologies (mobile Computing, ubiquitous computing, etc.) on cooperation, exemplified with our CatchBob! experiment. I will explain how strategies to achieve the catchbob game are influenced by the presence of the location awareness tool.

Understanding public spaces: exploring methods

Convivio Workshop on Understanding public spaces: exploring methods, Limerick, Ireland, 1 & 2 December 2005

The Interaction Design Centre, University of Limerick is organizing a two days workshop to discuss methods of studying and understanding public places with focus on outdoor public places such as urban squares, parks, markets, central business districts, libraries, airports, railway/bus stations etc. The Workshop is being sponsored by CONVIVIO, The Network for People Centered Interactive Design. (...) While the objectives of studying public space are different, we wish to examine the different approaches being used to study public spaces across different disciplines. The workshop aims to bring people from various disciplines (e.g. architects, urban planners, sociologists, artists etc) to discuss different approaches being employed for studying public spaces. (...) Presentations will be followed by group discussions focusing on methods presented. This two days workshop will be limited to 15-20 participants to provide ample opportunity for formal and informal discussions. (...) Please e-mail your abstracts to parag.deshpande@ul.ie Submission Deadline: November 7th 2005. Notification of Acceptance: November 14th 2005. Organising Committee: Prof. Liam Bannon, Luigina Ciolfi, Parag Deshpande

The usability of MMORPG

Pertinent study about MMORPG usability: The Usability of Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games: Designing for New Users by Steve Cornett for CHI 2004

This study examines the usability challenges faced by new players of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), one of the fastest-growing segments of the video game industry. Played in completely online worlds, these games allow players to communicate with one another, form groups and communities, and compete in a variety of fantasy environments. Nineteen subjects participated in an exploratory usability study of four games, three MMORPGs and a similar single-player game used for comparison. Results reveal that many people not usually considered as potential players of these games may be interested in them, but a wide variety of usability issues present serious problems for players inexperienced with the genre. Based on an analysis of the usability data and player feedback, specific recommendations are made to improve the experience of these games for new players. These results further demonstrate the applicability and importance of usability testing to video games.

The main result (put in bold in the abstract copied above) is interesting and should be taken into account in the design: usability is a factor in audience development. The article also describes the application of usability principles in the context of the gaming environment, something now more common today that few years back (thanks to Bill Fulton's work at MS, see for instance his very insightful article Beyond psychological theory: Getting data that improve games in Proc. Game Developers' Conference 2002).

Strategy messages model

Just wrote crazy annotations for modeling the use of strategy message during the various phases of CatchBob! The point of this is to define the main categories of messages and when they are used in the task process.

The next move is to design specifications for an 'intention-awareness' tool to would allow users to communicate explicitly strategic information. This will then be tested in a second experiment.

From MUD to MMORPG

It seems that the research agenda sketched out by Alan Schwartz in his "Comments On MUD Research" (Journal of Virtual Environments, Volume 1, Number 1) in 1997 still holds for MMORPG

• Psychological theories of group behavior, altruism, aggression, spatial representation, and attention. Attention may seen surprising, but consider that splitting attention between multiple streams of conversation and game-play is extremely common among MUD players. • Sociological theories of organizational structure, social norms, and exchanges. For example, it's common for experienced adventure-style MUD players to retrieve the items from a more novice player's corpse and return them to the novice. The same was likely done for the experienced player when s/he was a novice, and creates a system of exchange between players. • Organizational behavior work on training, management, leadership, satisfaction, turnover, job characteristics, and organizational citizenship. Under what conditions do MUD administrators "burn out"? What is player satisfaction -- and does it relate to the degree to which players have input on the MUD? • Political science. Aspects of many MUDs can be understood in terms of political structures, coalitions, and mechanisms of governance. • Sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, and pragmatics. The language MUD players use has already received some attention (see, for example, Carlstrom, 1994; Cherny, 1994, Serpentelli, 1992) • Anthropological theories of culture, ritual, and folklore. If the players of a MUD constitutes a subculture, with shared beliefs, understandings, rituals, etc., anthropology has much to offer. Clodius (1994) discusses the use of MUDs in ethnographic fieldwork. • Computer science work on distributed databases, graphical interfaces, virtual reality models, and client-server computing.

Why do I blog this? I am working on this question for a project about online communities.

IM names and personal messages displays

The other day, after reading (and writing about) Stowe Boyd's post about IM rules, I made a quick scanning of the HCI recent literature about IM and found this article: Broadcasting Information via Display Names in Instant Messaging by Stephanie Smale and Saul Greenberg (ACM Group 2005 Conference) It's a good study about why and how people display and change their names + other things in IM. Here are their research questions:

This study investigates how people use the display name feature in IM clients to broadcast information other than one’s name. We do this by capturing changes in each person’s display field as they appear in contact lists over time and over everyday use, by asking people to explain what these changes meant, and by counting, categorizing and analyzing these changes.

1. At what frequency do users change the information in their display field when using an IM client such as MSN Messenger? 2. What are the main communication categories that represent the information held by these display field changes? 3. What is the frequency distribution of these categories? 4. Are changes to the display name related to the demographics of age or sex?

Here are the main results:

1. results show that 58% of our 444 contacts (258 people) never changed the contents of the display field during the three week period. For the remaining 42% of contacts (186 people), we counted a total of 1968 display name changes, or an average of 11 display name changes per person over the three week period, or up to 4 times a week. (...) 2. the new information fell into seventeen different categories of communication supplied to others. Three themes encompass these categories: Identification (“who am I”?), Information About Self (“this is what is going on with me”) and Broadcast Message (“I am directing information to the community”). (...) 3. Younger users may change their display names more frequently than older users; sex does not make a difference.

The figure below shows the different categories they gathered (extracted from the paper):

Another relevant point is that this phenomenon lead to an interface change on MSN:

Some of these capabilities are only now being supplied by a few major IM vendors. For example, the new version of MSN Messenger (v. 7.0), released shortly after our study was performed), includes a dedicated space for adding and editing a personal message.

Why do I blog this? this phenomenon always amazed me (because I tended to do it few years ago and also from an tech observer), so I was pleased to see a study about it. Moreover, it's connected to research projects we conducted in the past at the university of geneva about awareness and communication (The authors also expands their discussion to a 'a community bar' that could display personal messages with presence items, a very greenbergesque topic).

Fives rules of IM

Stowe Boyd sketched an interesting set of cardinal rules about IM uses:

The social aspects of real time life will swamp any specific technology's impacts. I believe in tools, but effective application requires changes in behavior. For example, effective use of IM in groups means people must adopt the five cardinal rules of IM which I tend to agree with:

• Turn on your IM client, and leave it on. (The Turn It On rule).
• Change your IM state as your state changes. (The Coffee Break rule.)
• It is not impolite to ping people. (The Knock-Knock rule.)
• It is not impolite to ignore people. (The I'm Busy rule.)
• Try IM first. (The IM First rule.)

Moreover, a good paper about it is The Character, Functions, and Styles of Instant Messaging in the Workplace By Ellen Isaacs, Alan Walendowski, Steve Whittaker, Diane J. Schiano & Candace Kamm:

Current perceptions of Instant Messaging (IM) use are based primarily on self-report studies. We logged thousands of (mostly) workplace IM conversations and evaluated their conversational characteristics and functions. Contrary to prior research, we found that the primary use of workplace IM was for complex work discussions. Only 28% of conversations were simple, single-purpose interactions and only 31% were about scheduling or coordination. Moreover, people rarely switched from IM to another medium when the conversation got complex. We found evidence of two distinct styles of use. Heavy IM users and frequent IM partners mainly used it to work together: to discuss a broad range of topics via many fast-paced interactions per day, each with many short turns and much threading and multitasking. Light users and infrequent pairs mainly used IM to coordinate: for scheduling, via fewer conversations per day that were shorter, slower-paced with less threading and multitasking.

Why do I blog this? this is not my research but since I am an active IM users, it's sometimes interesting to see how people reflect on IM practices.

Ubiquitous computing in the city, evaluation

A smart paper about empirical study of ubiquitous computing: It's a jungle out there:Â practical considerations for evaluation in the city by Melanie Kellar, Derek Reilly, Kirstie Hawkey, Malcolm Rodgers, Bonnie MacKay, David Dearman, Vicki Ha, W. Joseph MacInnes*, Michael Nunes, Karen Parker, Tara Whalen, Kori M. Inkpen (tons of writers!):

An essential aspect of mobile and ubiquitous computing research is evaluation within the expected usage context, including environment. When that environment is an urban center, it can be dynamic, expansive, and unpredictable. Methodologies that focus on genuine use in the environment can uncover valuable insights, although they may also limit measurement and control. In this paper, we present our experiences applying traditional experimental techniques for field research in two separate projects set in urban environments. We argue that although traditional methods may be difficult to apply in cities, the challenges are surmountable, and this kind of field research can be a crucial component of evaluation.

Why do I blog this? Though short, this paper is very relevant with what we do here at the lab (+future company). The paper gives two nice field studies the authors conducted and then elaborate on the issues they had to face (collecting data, bias, noises...). The 'observation in context' is now more and more integrated which is a good point. What is also clever here is the fact that they reflect on one of the experiment failure, and report on what they learnt from this. The conclusion is somehow close to what we got from CatchBob! (translated from a campus environment in our case)

We have reflected upon our experiences applying standard field research techniques when evaluating technology in an urban context. Dynamic and unpredictable, urban environments seriously challenge experimental observation and control. Yet, as our experiences demonstrate, there are also tremendous insights to be gained.

I am also interested in this reference they quote: McGrath, J. E. (1995). Methodology Matters: Doing Research in the Behavioral and Social Sciences. In S. Greenberg (Ed.), Human-Computer Interaction: Toward the Year 2000 (pp. 152-169).

Networked home usage

Riad pointed me on this paper: The Work to Make a Home Network Work by Rebecca E. Grinter, W. Keith Edwards, Mark W. Newman and Nicolas Ducheneaut at ECSCW 2005.

Recently, households have begun to adopt networking technologies to interconnect devices within the home. Yet little is known about the consequences for households of setting up and living with these complex networks, nor the impact of such technologies on the routines of the home. In this paper, we report findings from an empirical study of households containing complex networks of computer and audio/visual technologies. Our study finds that home networks require significant household effort not just to coordinate their use, but also their set up and maintenance. We also show how the coordination around networking has to be worked into the routines of the home and the householders.

Why do I blog this? I am not into 'house-of-the-future" research but it's intricately related to my projects about how people use location-awareness in the sense that automating too much processes thanks to technology (with location information in CatchBob or with home networked) might be detrimental for users. I believe that this is an important trend that shoudl be taken into account by designers (with user/activity-centered research).

Are location-based services boring?

A very relevant blogpost by Russell Buckley on Mobhappy adresses an important fact in the 'location-based services' world: there is little user-centered application that really worth it. Russell exemplifies this thanks to four services supported by BT:

• Child and elderly people tracking: founded on two basically wrong assumptions (in the distressing case of an abduction, the kidnapper doesn't know that the phone can be tracked. The first thing they do unfortunately, is dump or switch off the phone + the second assumption is that such services track the child. They don't. They track the phone) + Old people tracking? For the life of me, I can't see why the elderly might consent to be tracked or why others might want to track them
• Traffic and directions: can be useful, in extremis. But hardly exciting.
• Find my nearest things like ATM's, supermarkets and Petrol/Gas stations: Find my nearest apps have been around for a while now and frankly, there isn't much a demand for them
• Employee spying (actually they call it "tracking")

I also like his conclusion about BT's services:

So while it's laudable that BT are deploying LBS, they really need to go back to basics and ask why anyone would want to use any of these services, at least on more than an occasional basis. But coming up with answers to this, probably needs a type of creativity that would not typically be found working in a large corporate like BT.

Why do I blog this? I think that Russell raised here a crux issue: location-based services are way too much technology driven and 'feature oriented' as if engineers had struggled to find potential uses for a new feature that could be embedded on a cell phone. An interesting point here is the relation between the activity people and the spatial dimension. Location-based services allow users to get some context-awareness (i.e. take advantage of spatiality to trigger specific events or give contextual information) and to use space as help people in their task (navigation/wayfinding, matchmaking). But who needs that? ok wayfinging support or serendipituous meeting is intriguing but would it be used? I don't want to play the party pooper here but I am not sure it will work like this.

Anyway that does not mean that LBS are overflawed, useless and bound to disappear. I'd rather think that it can be targeted for:

• niche-markets for which space is important and, above all, meaningful: firefighters/emergency crew/army (who may need decentralized control obtained thanks to location-awareness of others), dispatchers/logistics (?)...
• games: a new way to create original challenges and/or interactions
• interactive art
• what else?!

NordiCHI in Oslo, fall 2006

NordiCHI Oslo, Norway, October 14-18, 2006.

The Fourth Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: "Changing Roles" NordiCHI is the main Nordic forum for human-computer interaction research. NordiCHI is the meeting place for researchers from academia and industry, designers, practitioners, educators and others from a broad range of traditions and communities. (...) Traditionally, Nordic perspectives on HCI emphasise topics such as: technology in use, integration of design and use, user participation in design, exploratory design activities, and inter-disciplinary approaches to HCI (...) The main theme for the conference is “Changing roles”. We currently see a reshaping of almost every aspect of society, which is caused by the forces of globalization and new technology. Do we need to change our roles as developers, researchers and designers? How can we maintain focus on the user in this ever changing environment? Will the role of HCI change?

Why do I blog this? let's consider a paper for this conference, I like the nordic approach to computing, the emphasis on context/usage is very relevant.