Using crossed self-confrontation to analyse intersubjectivity in a collaborative pervasive game

I am currently in the process of thinking about new field experiments using our pervasive game (CatchBob!). What I am interested in, is to improve my understanding of the intersubjective experience: how players infer others' activities and intents (what is called Mutual Modeling). For that matter, I am using qualitative methods, very common in the french culture of "ergonomie" or "psychologie ergonomique" known as self-confrontation. There is a good description of self-confrontation in the paper "Methodologies for evaluating the affective experience of a mediated interaction" by Cahour et al. (2005):

The general idea of self-confrontation is to provide a subject with traces of his/her activity (more frequently audio or video recording, but also writings, schemas, annotations,…) in order to collect verbal descriptions of what was going on by putting him/her in the context of the past setting. In the same time external traces enables the analyst to control the correspondence between the verbal report produced by the subject (first person data) and the traces of the activity being observed (third person data). We also use some techniques of the explicitation interview when stopping the video and asking the subjects about what they lived (affectively, cognitively, bodily) during the sequence watched.

I already used this method in the first field experiment we completed. Now, in order to move forward, there is another interesting add-on called "crossed self-confrontation" (developed by Yves Clot) which is very well described by Philippe De Leener in his paper "Self-analysis of professional activity as a tool for personal and organisational change":

The two workers who have experienced self-confrontation review the picture of their own activity but now through the eyes of their fellow-worker. The first worker comments on the activity of the second and vice versa. Again a dialogical activity is initiated about the activity, but this time the players principally confront their experiences. The discussions and exchanges of points of view about the same activity give them an opportunity to re-examine their respective real-life activity and to reveal what is not necessarily self-obvious. So workers, be they researchers or developers, are in a better position to talk about what they have actually lived or about what they actually live when working in a participatory way.

Why do I blog this? I want to apply this crossed self-confrontation method to our next CatchBob! experiment. This means that after playing the game, I will conduct an interview with one of the player, showing him/her traces of the gaming activity (with our replay tool) of a partner (so that player B puts players A's socks for instance). Then I'll do the interview of this player (player A in my example) so that I could cross the descriptions.

The benefit I am expecting is to get an insightful description of the activity, on which I could rely on to examine the player's intersubjectivity.

Hunaja: user study of a mobile social software

Three years ago, while scanning the literature+web about a PhD topic about location-awareness, I stumbled across Hunaja, avery pertinent mobile social software developed by some good finnish folk at Aula. I remember at that time being briefly in contact with Jyri.

Hunaja is an RFID access control system that enables users to remotely check who is logged in at a physical location by using the Web or a mobile phone. Hunaja was developed in 2001-2002 by Aula Cooperative, which is a non-profit organization based in Helsinki, Finland. In addition to controlling the doors of the Aula space, Hunaja has three unique features:

• Linkage to Aula's weblog - enabling online members to remotely see who is logged in at Aula's physical space
• SMS access - enabling members to check who's there with their mobile phones
• A speech synthesizer at the door - enabling online members to send greeting messages. The messages are announced by a computer voice when the recipient logs inat Aula's door

For three months (May-July, 2002), Aula issued a trial set of 50 RFID tags to its members. Of those 50 members, 9 members were selected for this user study. All of the participants were in the 20-35 year-old age group, and their use of the system was followed and recorded for two weeks during the month of July.

What is of particular interest for me is the fact that they conducted a very relevant user study. It was a focus group consisted of 9 people between the ages of 20-35, whose usage patterns were followed for two weeks in July, 2002.

was interested by the reason why people are scouting moves: Entertainment / Time-saving / Spying / Romance / Avoidance / Professional interests / Recruitment. Here is an extract I found relevant to my work:

For the observers, Hunaja provided three media of ”browsing” other people: Web, SMS, and the Aula space. Hunaja worked as a personal intelligence system that enabled the users to optimize their actions (scout useful next steps) and build a strategy for personal postitioning in the network.

Examples of observer behavior: A male user intends to meet a female user without wanting that person to know that he is looking for her A user does not want to meet a specific person and uses Hunaja to avoid meeting that person in Aula A user browses Aula member cards to recruit suitable people for a project For the observed, Hunaja provided a method to ”be noticed”. Motives linked to this included the desire to make new contacts, showing commitment to developing the user community, personal branding, and career-building.

Some users were motivated by the desire to belong to a close-knit group. Stephanie, the 29-year old French graduate student, for instance, had become a Hunaja user because she had a strong desire to establish herself in communities of like-minded people in Helsinki. She placed strong symbolic value on the RFID tag as a token of group membership. For her, appearing on Hunaja was a prerequisite for group membership, and she took care to establish herself as an active user in the eyes of others. In a similar vein, Lisa, a 26-year old manager at an e-learning company, used the term “addiction” to describe her relationship to Hunaja. In the interview she said: “I thought, do people thing that if I don’t show up on Hunaja or visit the weblog at least once a week, will they think that I want to keep up some kind of super privacy and that I’m fed up with Aula or something.” She felt a strong obligation to use Hunaja so as to “not give the wrong impression” of ignorance and passivity. Such instances describe situations where use of the technology becomes a prerequisite for group membership. You have to use the system in order to”exist” in the community. This may be a strong driver for adoption of future mass-market technologies geared for “small worlds” like Aula.

Why do I blog this? because my phd research work is about how location awareness of others impacts social and cognitive processes.

Interaction Analysis in a Pervasive Game

After a good research meeting today about my PhD agenda, we discussed one of the application of the coordination model that emerged from the first CatchBob experiment. One of the interesting problem would be to use it to inform/help the game interaction analysis. Given that the model focuses on the exchange of coordination information over time (with a peculiar emphasis on location-awareness information), it might be a good way to describe a grammar of players' act of communications, their content, pragmatics as well as the way they are mutually recognized by the players among a group (with of course a time dimension: how this evolved over time). For that matter, there is a very good literature review document about it:

Dimitracopoulou, A., Mones, A, Dimitriadis, Y., Morch, A., Ludvigsen, S., Harrer, A., et al. (2005). State of the Art on Interaction Analysis: “Interaction Analysis Indicators”. Deliverable from the Interaction & Collaboration Analysis’ supporting Teachers & Students’ Self-regulation (ICALT) project.

In the context of CSCW, Interaction analysis has different purposes, one of them is to help researchers to "collect data and analyse interactions afterwards in order to understand interaction or collaborative processes". (p.5)

The data extracted from the activity (that involves or not the usage of a certain technology) are then processed as follows:

Based on these interaction data, the application of ‘data processing methods’ could produce a number of “interaction analysis ‘indicators’’. These indicators constitute variables that describe ‘something’ related to:

• the mode, the process or the ‘quality’ of the considered ‘cognitive system’ activity;
• the features or the quality of the interaction product;
• the mode or the quality of the collaboration, when acting in the frame of a social context forming via the technology based learning environment.

Now, how this is related to CatchBob? According to Harrer et al. (2004), "Interaction" can be defined as a certain kind of action that affect (or may affect) the collaboration between different agents. I am particularly interested in a specific kind of interactions: the exchange of coordination information during mobile collaboration; and CatchBob is one of example of such a context.

I have two kinds of data that are usable for that matter: logfiles and coding of players' annotation (done with two ontologies I defined: pragmatics and content + maybe another one related to the definition of a specific coordination event). Note that this coding is done by hand.

To allow an automatic interaction analysis based on those data, I need to define a specific data-structure that would describe the catchbob game with specific interactions over time. A tree-based data structure would fit to my needs. And, of course, it will be drawn upon my model of coordination.

I haven't mentionned that this kind of data structure will allow me to apply specific visual treatments, for example to have visualization or statistics about each game or to compare different games so that I can get insights about the quality of collaboration.

Some quantitative research inscriptions

It's actually some quantitatives indexes from CatchBob! Don't worry, there are also plenty of qualitative data, but it's less digital.

CHI2006 Workshop on Mobile Social Software

I spent the end of the afternoon reading the whole set of papers from the future CHI2006 Workshop on Mobile Social Software. They're all available (which is great, I wish other papers from other worshops could be on-line too). Organized by Scott Counts, Henri ter Hofte, and Ian Smith, this workshop "workshop seeks to address these and other key issues around the proliferation of social software on mobile devices. Additionally, the workshop focuses on research tools and approaches for studying these questions, projected future directions for social software on mobile devices, and the role of related technologies, such as hardware and communication protocols. Workshop position papers cover a wide range of topics, from privacy issues to study methodologies to novel social presence mechanisms."

Overall, the papers are dealing with:

• the balance between awareness information (location, availability, profile...) and privacy
• the balance between automatic capture of context and an explicit disclosure by the users
• the use of social-software applications and their relevance for users in various groups (sportspeople, patient communities...)
• how these applications might be used to share different content (music, digital photography)

Among others, and related to my research I found interesting:

• Affective Speech for Social Communication: Implementation Challenges in Text-to-Speech for Short Messages by Alia Amin: I am intrigued by this finding

  "Currently, short messages (e.g. SMS/MMS) are only available in visual form. However, in certain situations, users may like to have these messages presented in audio form. (...) Evaluation of this alternative presentation reveals that, for emotion recognition, it was easier to interpret emotion messages generated from affective synthetic speech."

• REXplorer: A Pervasive Spell-Casting Game for Tourists as Social Software by Rafael Ballagas, Steffen P. Walz and Jan Borchers. It's an interesting pervasive game designed to enhance the tourist experience in the medieval city of Regensburg. The game offers good perspectives and pertinent situations.
• “That doesn’t tell me what I want!” by David Dearman is perhaps the closer to my interests. Dearman is studying location disclosure in mobile communication. He seems to be interested by this to design more efficient applications:

  "For disclosure applications to be useful and eventually prevalent they need to respect the privacy of their users when disclosing their location, ensuring no information or detail is revealed beyond what they are comfortable disclosing. Inversely, if the information disclosed is not appropriate to the task the requester is attempting to accomplish then they will not use the application."

  This is explicitly an act of "mutual modeling" that aims at supporting coordination between agents (a topic I address in my research).

• In Visibility Within Mediated Networks: An Exploration of Contextual Factors by Catherine Dwyer and Starr Roxanne Hiltz, I appreciated the reference to Catherine Cramton's work: it's basically the premise of their work: designing applications which aim at increasing mutual knowledge between electronically connected collaborators. This topic is of great importance in the CSCW community.
• Exploiting Social Environment to Increase Cellphone Awareness by Ashraf Khalil and Kay Connelly offers a pertinent approach:

  "a collaborative approach to minimizing inappropriate cellphone interruptions. The approach uses Bluetooth technology to discover and communicate with the surrounding cell phones in order to read their notification profiles. The profile of the majority is assumed to be the most suitable setting for the current social environment. Cellphones running the collaborative service can automatically update their profile according to the majority profile or at least alert the user to do so. (...) For instance if a user in a meeting has forgotten to turn his cell phone ringer off, his cell phone can contact other cell phones in the same room and learn that most of them have their ringer off. Consequently, the cell phone can safely assume that it should also have its ringer off, and when the meeting is over the cell phone can return to its default state (ringer on) without the user having to take action. (...) we envision many other interaction paradigms between users and the surrounding environments that could benefit from such approach. For example, cell phones may carry their users’ preferences for room temperature, and smart places could customize the room temperature according to the majority’s preference."

Why do I blog this? even though I am more concerned by how location awareness features of this sort of tool might modify collaboration, the topic addressed here are interesting and sometimes related to what we do with catchbob.

Pervasive gaming and everyday life

Interweaving Mobile Games with Everyday Life by Marek Bell, Matthew Chalmers, Louise Barkhuus, Malcolm Hall, Scott Sherwood, Paul Tennent, Barry Brown, Duncan Rowland, Steve Benford, Mauricio Capra, Alistair Hampshire. To appear in Proc. ACM CHI 2006, Montreal, 2006. An interesting evaluation of a location-based game, that has some good perspective related to higher-level concepts of pervasive gaming. I am less interested in the part about seamful design (less my area) than how a pervasive experience can be designed to interweave with patterns of everyday life. The authors adopted an ethnographic approach: interviews with each player, video clips of gameplay, a game diary that each player kept him/herself, and from system logs. Some excerpts:

relatively little has been reported about how location-based experiences actually vary with location or how a ubiquitous computing experience actually fits with other activities. This stands rather at odds with one ideal of ubiquitous computing, namely that it should be woven into the fabric of everyday life, to paraphrase Weiser’s Scientific American article. (...) In the main trial, four teams played in three different urban areas in the UK (...) A few players found that their initial enthusiasm for the game dropped as the week progressed, (...) To understand why, we focus on three key issues in detail: the fit of the game with patterns of everyday life, friendship and collaboration, and the impact of location. (...) we observed two general modes of play and several specific impacts on the patterns of everyday life. (...)The first mode was to change one’s patterns of everyday life by deliberately setting aside time for special, often relatively prolonged, game sessions, for example during the evening or weekends. (...) The second mode of play involved augmenting daily routines by interweaving the game with normal activities, most notably work and journeys, and consequently playing larger numbers of shorter turns (...) the game had some specific impacts on the patterns of their lives. The impact on work was a factor for many. Some gained an advantage by being able to play at work where WiFi was available, (...) Another notable feature was playing during journeys, especially to and from ‘town’ as part of the daily commute, to go shopping or to meet friends. (...) Several players also noted that playing the game in this way made them late for work, late getting home, or late for pre-arranged meetings depended on how much time the participants spent in the company of team–mates. (...) The game is most easily played walking around, but it was also played in cars, buses, trams and trains, and even when bicycling (...) Another major factor in weaving the game into everyday life concerned friendships and opportunities for collaboration. (...) However, one aspect of collaborative play that could be problematic was getting team-mates together in the first place. (...) Successfully interweaving the game with everyday life also involved managing interactions with non–players including family, partners, colleagues and strangers. (...) In a game like Feeding Yoshi, play happens differently in different locations. Location was a major factor, both in terms of the distribution of open and secure WiFi access points across each city, and also in terms of which places felt good to play in and which felt bad. (...) Players also learned to interpret urban environments in ways that would help them play the game, on the basis of their ongoing understanding of the game’s technical characteristics, players’ practices and the game’s wider context. Inherent in the design process was an interest in using the existing ubicomp infrastructure as a resource for design and use, in a seamful wayinterweaving of play with patterns of everyday life.

And a good snippet for Fabien's research:

Players also became aware of some technical features that we were only vaguely aware of ourselves. In one case, a player became aware—and angry about—the fact that his PDA’s 802.11 antenna had a significantly lower sensitivity than his team–mates’, even though they were using the same model of PDA.

Why do I blog this? even though it's not related to location-awareness (my research topic), the idea raised in this article are very interesting, with regards to the relation between game usage and real life considerations.

MASSIVE: The future of networked multiplayer games

MASSIVE: The future of networked multiplayer games is a conference to attend if you're around LA/Irvine on April 20th:

MASSIVE will engage 25 speakers and approximately 80 registrants from industry and academia in a dialog about the future design, technical and cultural challenges presented by massively multiplayer games, current and future research agendas from both industry and academia, and case studies and future models for industry academia collaboration.

And of course, Julian will talk about the most important question related to mobile gaming: "How can mobile games become more than just Tetris on a phone?".

HCI rant by Bill Buxton

Microsoft Researcher Bill Buxton has a good rant towards HCI in the last issue of Interfaces (the journal from the british HCI group): Buxton, William (2006). Who cares if you are dressed if you are alone? Interfaces, 66, Spring 2006, 5-6.

the CHI literature played no role in the development of what was perhaps the greatest contribution to improving people’s experience using computers. There was no CHI literature! (...) we were not wasting our time. No. We were doing hard and useful things. But they had far more to do with analysis, evaluation and engineering than with the design of new things. (...) One way that I would characterize this is to say that as a community we have been obsessed with learning how toget the design right rather than how toget the right design. (...) “Getting the design right” is largely what usability is about. And while ethnography helps inform “getting the right design”, it does not do it. Both ethnography and usability are important and worthy of respect, but they are not sufficient to do what needs to be done. Without either divine intervention or a competent designer, they will fail in doing so. (...) While the CHI community is fiddling around with our ethnography-usability dilemmas, Rome is burning, and has been doing so for years. If we believe the rhetoric about total user experience and value-based design, then perhaps we should spend a bit more time thinking about what makes products succeed, and how we can contribute to that, rather than how to get 10% better performance out of some menu. (...) may I point out that having not learned our lesson with the GUI, mobile computing (as manifest in the smart phone, for example), is following exactly the same track as the GUI towards self-destruction due to feature bloat.

Why do I blog this? some interesting and provocative thoughts about HCI are always useful to move forward, especially when you are in the process of writing a phd thesis that addresses some "implications for design" of field experiments.

PhD Annual Report

I just completed my PhD annual report. It basically compile what I did in the last 2 years and what's next.

Probable title of the thesis: Analyzing and Modeling the Use of Location Awareness in Mobile Collaboration

Thesis Director: Prof. Pierre Dillenbourg

Keywords: human-computer interaction (HCI), computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), pervasive computing, location awareness, location-based sevices, collaboration, coordination, awareness.

Abstract: This project addresses the use of a new class of applications in pervasive computing called location-based services; systems that take advantage of people’s physical location to provide users with various services such as location awareness of others during mobile collaboration. We focus on understanding how this feature modifies collaboration processes. For that matter, we designed a collaborative mobile environment in which we are testing how a location awareness tool impacts the group performance and interactions. Series of experiments are currently run on this platform. The expected outcome of this project is to have both concrete design guidelines and a formal model of how location awareness impacts mobile collaboration.

Paper in eMind about CatchBob!

Our paper "Getting Real with Ubiquitous Computing: the Impact of Discrepancies on Collaboration" (Giradin, F. and Nova, N.) has been published in the spanish HCI journal eMinds:

Ubiquitous computing is still a maturing field of investigation. The vision of the seamless integration of computers to people’s life has yet to happen, if it ever has to become a reality. Nowadays, most mobile, distributed systems and sensor technologies have their faults and limitations. Users of ubiquitous technologies often learn to avoid or rectify the systems failures. However, there is still a lack of quantitative information concerning how they impact the collaboration. Therefore, we propose to use a ‘field of experiment’ approach based on a pervasive game platform. Our aim is to rely on a mix of qualitative and quantitative evaluations to find out how uncertainties modified the collaborative processes.

It's actually Fabien's follow-up project of CatchBob, which is going to be his phd thesis topic!

Julian Bleecker's talk at eTech

Julian's talk at eTech 2006 is a highly-relevant-for-my-research-and-personal-interests gig. It was called Pervasive Electronic Games: Theory Objects For Social Play. (be careful: huge pdf). Check regine's note or liz goodman's write-up for more about it. Some of Julian's considerations as he summarized them:

• Games are theory objects that can reveal and shape human interaction rituals
• Games can be an approach to research as a way to understand and create new kinds of social practices
• Games can become ways to knit together, create and play with social formations
• Games are (also) about reworking our expectations about social behavior and conformity
• Games can be casual play
• Games do not have to emphasize complicated "cool", but ultimately illegible technologies
• Consider it a game design challenge to work below normative, existing technology "high-bars"
• Seamfulness — Matthew Chalmers, et. al.'s approach to confronting the pot-hole strewn mobile networks — is the design approach to consider creating pervasive networked experiences. The frustration induced by but one network failure is enough to sully even the most beautiful game.
• Get us to look at the “real” inhabited world in new ways
• New perspectives lead to new considerations as to what goes on in the world and how we can make the world more habitable and sustainable.

Why do I blog this? Julian's aim was to show that pervasive games can be seen as a way of creating, understanding and researching social interactions and the relationship between we and the worlds we inhabit. Which is obviously also an idea that I fully agree with, using a game like CatchBob is for me a way to take games as an alibi for studying social and even cognitive issues in terms of user experience, collaborative behavior, interaction design or information management.

I really like the issue he raised, they're all starting point in the future of pervasive games that would go beyond collaborative hunt, collective gathering or objects or buddyfinder tools.

Studying Location-Based Reminders on Mobile Phones

Place-Its: A Study of Location-Based Reminders on Mobile Phones by Timothy Sohn, Kevin A. Li1, Gunny Lee, Ian Smith, James Scott, and William G. Griswold, Ubicomp 2005. Some excerpts:

Context-awareness can improve the usefulness of automated reminders. However, context-aware reminder applications have yet to be evaluated throughout a person’s daily life. Mobile phones provide a potentially convenient and truly ubiquitous platform for the detection of personal context such as location, as well as the delivery of reminders. (...) This simple application, with the mobile phone as a platform, permitted the integration of location-based reminders into peoples’ daily practice. (...) an exploratory user study of Place-Its performed with ten participants, over a two-week period in Winter 2005.(...) We conducted our study in three steps, a pre-study questionnaire, a two week long deployment, and post-study interview. (...) We provided each participant with a Nokia 6600 to use during the study.

Conclusions are quite interesting:

Our findings from a two-week deployment of Place-Its help validate that location-based reminders can be useful even with coarse location-sensing capabilities. Notably, location was widely used as a cue for other contextual information that can be hard for any system to detect. On the whole, it appears that the convenience and ubiquity of location-sensing provided by mobile phones outweighs some of their current weaknesses as a sensing platform. This bodes well for the use of mobiles phones as a personal ubiquitous computing platform.

Our study revealed unexpected uses of location-aware reminders. We found that Place-It notes were often used for creating motivational reminders to perform activities that would vary in priority over time. This is similar to using post-it notes in highly visible areas for motivation. The locations for motivational reminders were often set at frequently visited places, such as ‘home’. We also found that a majority of the uses for Place-Its involved communicating with people through a variety of media (e.g. email, phone). Communication is typically not tied to specific locations, implying that location is being used as a cue for other kinds of situational context.

Why do I blog this? because, in my research, I am interested in how location information are disrupting group processes, such as communication.

Report from the Blogject Workshop at LIFT06

On February 1st, a day before the LIFT06 conference, a workshop about 'Blogjects and the new ecology of things' has been held in Geneva. The purpose of this event was to discuss usage scenarios of Blogjects, the design issues they raises as well as their significance in various contexts. The description of the scenarios helped us refining what would be the Blogjects features and capabilities. This report (.pdf, 18.6Mb) summarizes all the topic we discussed by presenting the main characteristics of Blogjects and four potential scenarios elaborated by the groups formed during the workshop.

As the Internet pervades more physical space and more social space it is likely that objects in the world will become able to connect to the network and participate in the web by disseminating and receiving data communications. As "things" participate within the Internet and once the Internet soaks through physical, geographic space a differentiated kind of Internet may arise. The Internet of Things sets up a different set of relations to social practice (we will be "in" a pervasive network) and a different set of relations to space (the Internet will be co-occupied by both social beings and things.) This shift generates new possibilities for integrating networked things into the Internet. This workshop addresses this shift by considering its characteristics in relation to an existing, prevalent set of practices and technologies currently in existence variously referred to as "the social web" and "Web 2.0." We then proceeded into four groups to conduct design scenarios in order to further explicate our understanding of a world in which things are connected, networked participants within a pervasive, wireless, mobile Internet. We conclude that there is a significant opportunity for designing compelling usage scenarios for such a near-future Internet of Things world and recommend a follow on, intensive, multi-day workshop/retreat to continue contributing to this important topic.

Feel free to spread it, make any comment, reblog it!

Video-Game auto-maps

Via Wikipedia:

Automap is an abbreviation for "automatic mapping" a navigational aid featured in many video-games. It shows a limited top-down map view of the game world that is centered on the player's character and is updated in real-time as the character moves around. Automaps usually display traversible terrain, allies, enemies, and important locations. Some team-oriented multi-player games allow players to draw temporary lines and markings on the automap for others to see.

In Doom (quite possibly the game that popularized the term), the "Automap" is an item that looks like a flat-screen with green lines on it. Once picked up, the entire map of the level is divulged to the character, with red walls indicating places already seen and gray walls indicating places which the player has yet to explore. The game updates the map in real-time as you explore a level and allows you to play directly from the map screen, but unless you have the Automap item, monsters will not be displayed.

Why do I blog this? I am fascinated by players who video-game mapping freaks, either those who develops technologies to map the game environments or the one who draw them by hand.

Upcoming events this week-end

Tomorrow and sunday, I'll be at the Crystalpunk Workshop for Soft Architecture in the Netherlands. I am going to present the scenarios we discussed at the LIFT workshop about blogjects/. Here is a description of the event:

Between September and December 2005 the Crystalpunk Workshop for Soft Architecture brought together a large international group of people to think about what all this means for spatial design and experience. Looking back at what we learned some underlying threads emerged. From the beginning we had only a peripheral interest in the technology itself; we proved it’s donkey stuff of which the basics you can learn yourself for cheap and without teachers. But what had our real interest was what to do with it. A room that does things for you may sound like a good idea, at least to some, but what if locks you out of the control structure in your own room: the inability to switch off the lights, say. We are not interested in silly input-output control situations of the kind architects and product designers come up with, but in rich Yeatsian entities that have their own life independent of us.

Saturday 11 March 14.00- 18.00: BOT / AIML workshop by Mario Campanella.

Sunday 12 March 14.00-19.00: Presentations by: Mirjam Struppek / Z-25 /Adam Somlai-Fischer / Pablo Miranda Carranza / Nicolas Nova / Jelle Feringa

Thanks wil for the invitation! Slides will be online soon.

And next monday, I'll be at for a workshop about foreseeing “Digital Civilizations": how the future of the digital revolution might impact social, cultural, economic spheres. Thanks Daniel! See the previous work did by this organization in this report (.pdf file 1,5 Mb).

PC and mobile phones personalization

Blom, J. and Monk, A.F. (2003): Theory of Personalization of Appearance: Why Users Personalize Their PCs and Mobile Phones, Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 18, No. 3, Pages 193-228, Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 18, No. 3, Pages 193-228.

Abstract: Three linked qualitative studies were performed to investigate why people choose to personalize the appearance of their PCs and mobile phones and what effects personalization has on their subsequent perception of those devices. The 1st study involved 35 frequent Internet users in a 2-stage procedure. In the 1st phase they were taught to personalize a commercial Web portal and then a recommendation system, both of which they used in the subsequent few days. In the 2nd phase they were allocated to 1 of 7 discussion groups to talk about their experiences with these 2 applications. Transcripts of the discussion groups were coded using grounded theory analysis techniques to derive a theory of personalization of appearance that identifies (a) user-dependent, system-dependent, and contextual dispositions; and (b) cognitive, social, and emotional effects. The 2nd study concentrated on mobile phones and a different user group. Three groups of Finnish high school students discussed the personalization of their mobile phones. Transcripts of these discussions were coded using the categories derived from the 1st study and some small refinements were made to the theory in the light of what was said. Some additional categories were added; otherwise, the theory was supported. In addition, 3 independent coders, naive to the theory, analyzed the transcripts of 1 discussion group each. A high degree of agreement with the investigators' coding was demonstrated. In the 3rd study, a heterogeneous sample of 8 people who used the Internet for leisure purposes were visited in their homes. The degree to which they had personalized their PCs was found to be well predicted by the dispositions in the theory. Design implications of the theory are discussed.

GRRR I cannot get the pdf (registration required)

Research taxonomy by Jarvinen

In How to select an appropriate research method in ergonomic studies? by Jarvinen is very insightful paper describing research methods that could be valuable in my work about HCI/CSCW. The paper provides a taxonomy

the research approaches is first divided into two classes, one or both are then divided again into two subclasses etc. (...) Two classes are based on whether the research question refers to what is a (part of) reality or does it stress on utility of an innovation, usually an artefact (something made by human beings). (...) To analyze our research question we can apply our taxonomy (Figure 1) to the question above and find that the question concerns a research work, i.e. a part of reality. In the further more detailed analysis of our research question we find that term 'appropriate' refers to utility, and hence we can decide that our research question concerns either innovation building or innovation evaluation. We do not yet have anything to evaluate, but we must build it, in this case we must build some method, procedure or algorithm to select an appropriate research method.

Why do I blog this? because I feel like this expresses a nice framework about the research projects I am carrying out.

Meeting with Phd advisor (march 2006)

I presented the model of mobile collaboration I defined (derived from the CatchBob results as well as coordination theories) to my PhD advisor. It actually addresses the exchange of various kinds of interfaces to foster coordination among a mobile group of players. There are actually two tracks to validate the model described previously:

• A tool that would foster the exchange of coordination keys, to better support collaboration. In the form of a structured interface, this tool will suggest the exchange of certain kind of strategy messages (instead of automating which failed as we saw in the first experiment). The analysis of the interface usage will allow us to validate or refine the model by checking when specific keys are exchanged during over time.
• A formal description (in the form of a grammar) of coordination elements that would help the analysis of mobile collaboration. Using along with the replay tool, this grammar will help characterizing visually how users collaborated with regards to peculiar processes: coordination keys exchange, division of labor, duration of subtasks… The validation of the model will consist in using this grammar with the replay tool to the differences for groups who badly collaborated or for those who collaborated efficiently. We already know what are the “good” and “bad” collaborators (related to the task performance and various indexes), we will see whether the grammar fits into that picture. In the end, this grammar is meant to allow a better comprehension of collaborative processes in mobile teams.

The research process, visually speaking:

Wearable Computing (location-aware) for Aircraft Maintenance

Via Tom Nicolai's weblog (which is actually a "wearlog"), this Wearable Computing for Aircraft Maintenance, a concept for a combination of wearable computing and knowledge management with the goal to shorten the maintenance process in the aircraft industry. It's a kind of location-aware, wearable information system meant to facilitate the access to different sources of information a technician needs during the maintenance task:

The core of the wearable computer is a PDA. The device can be used like a usual PDA in the handheld mode or it can be stored in a holder for wearable operation. In the holder, the PDA connects to an HMD and automatically adapts its user interface to the changed modalities. By a wrist worn input device the user controls the wearable. The input device also contains a RFID scanner. The scanner will be used to identify areas in the aircraft. Subsequently the computer can display information and logbook entries associated to that area. The aircraft itself will be equipped with RFID tags and a server to store the part descriptions with references to the RFID tags. Data storage and knowledge management is not possible on the PDA directly. Thus, the PDA is designed as a client to a notebook computer carried in the toolbox of the technician.

Social proximity with bluetooth

T. Nicolai, N. Behrens, and E. Yoneki "Wireless Rope: An Experiment in Social Proximity Sensing with Bluetooth". IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom) – Demo, Pisa, Italy, March 2006. The article describes an application called "Wireless Rope", an application on Java enabled phones, which collects information of surrounding devices by Bluetooth. The authors study large scale Bluetooth scanning for proximity detection with consumer devices and its effects on group dynamics during the conference.

Like a real rope tying together mountaineers, the Wireless Rope gives the urban group immediate feedback (tactile or audio) when a member gets lost or approaches. Thus everybody can fully engage in the interaction with the environment, and cognitive resources for keeping track of the group are freed. The program also displays the current status of the rope (Fig. 1). At the same time, collected information kept in the devices are gathered at a central station via special tracking stations. Registered users can look at the connection map created by gathered information from phones via the web (Fig. 2).

Why do I blog this? I'd be happy to see the results from the experiments used with this tool:

We plan to evaluate the logged information afterwards to analyse the connection patterns, group formation and evolution, and social patterns including an evaluation of the usefulness of Bluetooth for this kind of proximity detection. The result from this experiment may provide the aid which highlights relations between objects, people, situations within the given space, a scientific conference envi- ronment. This could be extended to map urban inhabitants. Our future fabric of digital and wireless computing will influence, disrupt, expand and be integrated into the social patterns within our public urban landscape.

Especially with regards to certain question: how this application fits into people's practices? how do the users react to awareness of others?