Workshop about spatial technologies at UpFing06

Currently a Université de Printemps de la FING 06, which is a big gig organized by la FING, a french think tank working on innovation and IT. The venue is quite nice, an old catholic mansion:

The reason why I am here is because I have to take care of a workshop here about spatial technologies, in the broad sense (locative media, location-based services, place-based annotations platforms...). The event is in french.

Here are the slides of my presentation (in french, pdf, 3.8Mb). I actually described the following issues: - when we look at the terms we use when we talk about spatial tech, it's very diverse (ranging from geowanking to locative media, geotagging or buddy-finder). Sometimes, it's about practices, sometimes about technologies, sometimes services... - we will focus on a specific subpractice: place annotation - what is interesting is that the usages regarding that practice seem to be diverse but this is does not take a diachronic perspective (the fact that people annotated space a LONG time ago), nor the size of the target group of user (% of tech-savvy persons? % of total population). - some of the most interesting examples will be presented (yellow arrow, flickr notes, stamps...) - and I will describe why this is important in terms of socio-cognitive processes: the fact that space affords specific interaction, shape people's behavior and agency. People leave traces in space and then decode them as cues for acting.

I will put some more notes later about people's intervention, the subgroup activity and the conclusion.

Technorati Tags: location-based games, upfing, upfing06

Students and location-based services in context

Barkhuus, Louise and Paul Dourish, "Everyday Encounters with Context-Aware Computing in a Campus Environment". In Proceedings of UbiComp 2004, Nottingham, UK, 2004. The paper is an empirical investigation of the use of a ubiquitous computing system blending mobile and location-based technologies to create augmented experiences for university students (i.e. the Active Campus system, developed and deployed at UC San Diego). The focus is on how the technology fits into broader social contexts of student life and the classroom experience. This is not an evaluation of specific technologies, they rather deploy a technological setting to reflect upon some broader patterns of technology use (that would eventually lead to implications for designs), taking an institutional approach (influences of adoption and analyze the emergent practices from an institutional view point). This point is important since it allows to have a broader discussion of the technological impacts.

The conclusion is quite interesting:

Where students, on the surface, seem like the perfect probes for new technology, their inherent social structures and high level of nomadicity creates a tension between their desired use and actual possibility for use. From the perspective of research, many settled practices and infrastructures within the campus environment are inhibiting not only the adoption of new technology but also the foundation for testing new technologies. Only by looking beyond the technologies themselves, towards the broader institutional arrangements within which they are embedded, can we begin to understand the premises for deployment of ubiquitous technology.

And of course, there are some important elements that are connected to my research about the usage of location-awareness of others in collaborative settings.

Separately from the problems of mobility, we can also ask, how and when does location manifest itself as a practical problem for students? Location-based services developed in other settings point to a range of ways in which ubiquitous computing technologies can help people resolve location-based problems - the most common being finding resources, navigating in unfamiliar environments, and locating people.

As we have noted, students’ experience is primarily nomadic, and since their activities and concerns are driven as much by the demands of social interaction as by their studies, we had anticipated that services such as the people finder would be of value, helping them to locate each other as they moved around a campus environment. However, further examination showed that, in fact, location rarely manifests itself for them, practically.

This is also something we discussed here at the lab, and eventually lead to some tough issues regarding a location-based annotation project we had. There was not really a need to design those virtual post-its in the context of the school.

I also find this relevant to my work:

Because of the regularity of their schedules, the students, then, tend to find themselves in the same part of the campus at specific times in the week. Similarly, their friends live equally ordered lives, with locations determined by class schedules, and our respondents seemed as familiar with aspects of their friend’s schedules as with their own. Mutually-understood schedules, then, provide them with the basis for coordination.

A result like this is connected to the framework of coordination I used (Clark's theory of coordination). Among all the coordination "devices" people rely on, conventions or mutually acknowledged agreement like common schedule are a common way to infer other's activity (and hence whereabouts).

Finally, the last part is about the fact that "There being no home base, students have no expectation of being able to find each other in fixed places; instead, class schedules become a primary orienting mechanism around which location is determined and coordination is achieved". It reminds me a paper I saw a month ago at COOP2006 called "On a Mission Without a Home Base: Conceptualizing Nomadicity in Student Group. Work" by C. Bogdan, C. Rossitto, M. Normark, P. Jorge (Adler) and K. Severinson. The paper also addresses that issue.

Catchbob second run of experiment

Today I started the second run of experiment using CatchBob for my PhD research. The purpose this time are threefold. First and foremost, the new experiment are meant to refine the model I described about how people coordinate in mobile settings (using Herbert Clark's framework of coordination, I described which kind of information are used/exchanged during a mobile and collaborative activity, and how those information are mutually acknowledged by the group).

Second, for the Mutual Modeling project which is funding my activities, I will use this run as a testbed to investigate new research methods to better grasp how people model others' intents, knowledge and belief during play. For that matter, I will go further in the use of "self-confrontation" qualitative techniques, meaning that - right after the game ended - I will confront one player to a replay of one of her/his partner and ask him/her to described what the character did. Then I will ask this player what happened. This would eventually allow me to better understand the (reconstructed) mental model of the activity. We have a very simple replay tool that allows to show traces of the activity (such as people's paths and map annotation see picture from an old version below). It's much simpler than the one Paul Tennent is working on, but quite functional to my needs.

Finally, this is also useful for Fabien, since most of the post-game questionnaire concerns how people reacted to technical flaws/discrepancies/uncertainties, whether they manage to compensate using different strategies.

Why do I blog this? well it's a milestone...

Blogject Presentation at Reboot 8

At noon, Julian (aka "bleecks") and I gave our talk at Reboot 8. The title was "Networked objects and the new renaissance of things" in which we elaborated on the blogject concept (describing its main characteristics such as geospatial traces, history and agency) and of course highlighted what is stake and why this would be important. Here is the teaser:

The Internet of Things is the underpinnings for a new kind of digital, networked ecology in which objects become collaborators in helping us shape our individual social practices towards the goal of creating a more livable, habitable and sustainable world. "Blogjects" — or objects that blog — captures the potential of networked Things to inform us, create visualizations, represent to us aspects of our world that were previously illegible or only accessible by specialist. In the era of Blogjects, knowing how even our routine social practices reflect upon our tenancy can have radical potential for impactful, worldly change. Nowadays, the duality between social beings and instrumental inert objects is suspicious. In this epoch, a renaissance in which imbroglios of networks, sensors and social beings are knit together, everyone and everything must cooperate to mitigate against world-wide catastrophic system failure.

Slides can be found here (pdf, 4.5Mb), but it's mostly pictures and no text.

So, maybe there needs to be more room is to explain why this blogject concept is important (and why we're running this workshop serie about that). Here are few reasons we discussed (these are notes discussed by Julian and I in the plane):

We're now moving from Web 2.0 to the so-called Internet of Things (some would talk about the "web of things"). And if Web 2.0 was a place where social beings can aspire to 1st class citizenry, what happens in digitally networked world in which objects can also participate in the creation of meaning? Should they be passive, pure instrumentalities, as objects have been sense Descartes? Or should we consider ways to integrate them to help us make meaning, and meaning beyond just that dictated by conventional, rational business efficiency practices? We should definitely care about networked objects because of the possibilities for a potentially richer mechanism for knitting together human & non-human social networks in impactful, world-changing ways.

In addition, this related to a multidisciplinary trend: Objects and context matter for human activities: cognition (Situated Cognition, Distributed Cognition, Vygotsky), Sociology (Latour's ANT: objects are actors), ubiquitous computing (desktop > "smart" objects): it's about human and social agency, computation also lays in Artifacts.

Moreover, information brought by blogjects can be meant to raise awareness about some phenomenon we should be concerned of: what happen when a society get an accurate mirror of its own activities and production (Anne would wonder about why do we always have to raise awareness about bad or missing phenomenon). It also brings more transparency in human practices which may eventually leads to a "renaissance" of public concerns about human activities?

This would then impact industrial design and marketing: production reshaped by a tremendous new amount of information related to the usage of the objects produced: fed back into marketing+production. There's going to be tough issues to think about (privacy, control on data). The question is then "How an object that has the capactiy to report on itself modifies communication/relationships between companies and individuals?" since blogjects could be seen as communication channels between customers and companies. How do you/we design to accomodate two often times antagonistic practices? How would people design objects that customers can keep trusting about: if something can blog about you, your are concerned by who is reading that? who has access to that RSS feed and what goes into it? Therefore, ethical concerns are very important to take into account.

(more to come)

Why do I blog this? It was a very good exercice for us to do that, right after the second workshop; and lots of relevant people were there to comment on that. We tried to show there's an increasing concern about Things and stuff and possible connections for instance with Ulla-Maaria Mutanen's Thinglink or Bruce Sterling's spimes.

When location information undermines navigation

Does Location Come for Free?The Effects of Navigation Aids on Location Learning by Carl Gutwin and Diana Anton; Technical report HCI-TR-06-03.

Navigation aids such as bookmarks, target prediction, or history mechanisms help users find desired objects in visual workspaces. They work by highlighting objects that may be important, and they can improve performance in spaces where the territory is not well known. However, by making navigation easier, they may also hinder acquisition of a mental map of the space, reducing navigation performance when the navigation aid is not available. We carried out a study to determine the effects of three different types of navigation aids on spatial location learning. We found that after training with a navigation aid, there was no reduction in performance when the aid was removed. Even with training interfaces that made the task significantly easier, people learned the locations as well as those who had no aid at all in training. These results suggest that designers can use navigation aids to assist inexperienced users, without compromising the eventual acquisition of a spatial map.

Why do I blog this? this is interesting to my research since I also encounters similar results: by providing different location information, there was some undermining results concerning, not navigation, but collaborative partners' navigation memory. And this, with a very different setting since it was pervasive computing.

Account from the Metaverse Summit

News.com has a great account of the Metaverse Summit, which was about how video game design, geospatial engineering, high-tech research, software development, social networking, telecommunications would reshape the virtual world (or the overlap between the physical and the real world). The outcome they highlight is that "agreement about the metaverse of 2016 was hard to find", which is of course interesting to me. Here are some trends they discuss:

"I thought we were going to focus a bit more on virtual worlds because when I hear the term metaverse, I hear 3D virtual worlds. And we ended up talking about virtual worlds as well as augmented reality, which to me is kind of separate technology in its vision," Moore said [PARC] (...) One of the questions asked most frequently throughout the event was whether an overriding metaverse of 2016 will be commercially owned or open source. There was little agreement about that, but it was clear that the companies seen as most likely to provide the tools for a single metaverse upon which many 3D, social applications could be built are Microsoft and Google.

In part, Google was seen as more likely because of its development of Google Earth and its recent purchase of the maker of the 3D modeling software, Sketchup. (...) In addition, there was a general consensus that--as mobile devices become more sophisticated--the 3D Web would become much more the province of such devices and far less of the kinds of desktop or laptop computers we know today.

A public document that would wrap up this will be published by the end of the summer. Why do I blog this? I am interested (from my research perspective) about how technology reshape spatial practices.

Meeting with PhD advisor

Today I had a meeting with my PhD advisor about the thesis outline - which is actually more than that since we discussed the research rationale (le fil rouge of the dissertation) as well as the expected contribution. As Chris Johnson puts it, the work should be articulated around three dimensions: a contribution to a field of research (in my case the effects of location awareness on collaboration which is an investigation of the behavioral issues related to this technology), a proper grounding in experimental techniques (the description of the field experiments I conducted and my concern about taking advantage of both qualitative and quantitative data; even though it's quantitative dominant) and finally a contribution to the design and implementation of interactive systems (which would be made through guidelines, recommendation and why not a method to analyze mobile collaboration).

The diss will hence address all of these issues with regards to location-awareness and collaborative processes such as group performance, comunication, mutual modeling, negotiation of a group strategy. For that matter, I will present the results from Spaceminers (virtual world on the left below) and those from CatchBob! (pervasive game, on the right below). This would eventually lead me to a discussion of the benefits and drawbacks of location-awareness in both a virtual world and a pervasive environment.

Paper presentation at COOP2006

Today, I presented my PhD research at COOP2006. It as called "The Underwhelming Effects of Location-Awareness of Others on Collaboration in a Pervasive Game" (Nicolas NOVA, Fabien GIRARDIN, Gaëlle MOLINARI and Pierre DILLENBOURG).

Abstract. In this paper we seek to empirically study the use of location-awareness of others in the context of mobile collaboration. We report on a field experiment carried out using a pervasive game we developed called CatchBob!. Using both quantitative and qualitative data, we show the underwhelming effects of automating location-awareness. Our results indeed shows that automating this process does not necessarily improve the task performance and that it can be detrimental to socio-cognitive processes involved in collaboration such as communication or the modeling of partners’ intents. The paper concludes with some potential impacts for location-based application practitioners.

Keywords: location-awareness, socio-cognitive processes, pervasive game, cscw, field experiment.

This paper can be downloaded here. Some interesting comments had been made about new possible conditions to be tested (having one player who has the location-awareness tool and not the two others; having a crossed repartition of the subjects for example). Of course, I still have some people who are unhappy by the fact that I controlled my sample, having only people who know each others and who know the campus but that's life... I understand that they don't like experimental research but hey... Some have pointed out the fact that the study shows how communication is important and how it's very different from broadcasting information. There was also a good discussion about the neverending debate concerning "awareness": is it knowledge? information? is it about being conscious of a phenomenon or just being aware of it (even though the word "awareness" is based on the english word, sometimes it's not taken as such by some scholars). Finally, I was encouraged to keep looking at the qualitative data, in terms of coordination information, which is actually what I am heading towards in the next month.

COOP2006 Keynote by Michael Buckland

At COOP2006, Michael Buckland gave a very insightful keynote talk about the notion of "documents" and indexicality, regarding their retrieval capabilities. The discussion was around the fact that all documents are artifacts, but are all artifacts documents? He describes how documents pervade society: used in various contexts (educators, scientists, publicists, religion... lawyers and courts), people use documents as more than a just inert artifact. For instance, scientists use documents (articles, offprints) as the archive of achievement and for personal status; or educators use documents (textbooks, instructional materials) to teach, to empower and to diminish teachers. I also like this example: governments use documents to exercise social control: "to travel the passport is more powerful than I am; I could have send my passport here but then I won't be able to come over".

Then he highlighted the phenomenological, semiotic perspective of "documents" by referring to Suzanne Briet (1951): "[a document is] any concrete or symbolic indexical sign preserved or recorded towards the ends of representing, of reconstituting or of proving a physical or intellectual phenomenon". For example, an antelope becomes a document when somebody captures it and brought it at a museum and write an article/shoot a documentary about it, those are secondary documents. He additionally took the example of "a dead bird library": it is meant to be used by students and reseachers: dead birds are documents. It is more convenient and characteristics than a picture or a living bird. It's a document because it is a meaningful sign. You can never say that something could never be a document

There is hence a document - perceived and a document - expressed (code, language) (mode of expression: language, image, sound) (technology). The problem is when we're looking for documents: the indexing and searching problem; the problem is that each specialist express things differently: individuals from different communities need different help. In this context search engine are rather "machine a sélectionner" (selecting machines) than "search engine" so there should be different mapping: - between searcher's words and indexing systems terms - between author's words and indexing terminology - between search query and document metadata

To be efficiently selected, collections of documents need indexing, and here there are some interesting characteristics about that: - indexing is forward looking: indexing is done for a future purpose, so you're imagining the purpose of the group for which you wanted to be useful - indexing is backward looking: "about X" refers to the past discussion / dialog / description what is now named X. - indexing is inscribed in a point of time: time continues so all indexing is necessarily obsolescent. - mention (useing this word) is not meaning (having this sense) - and it's worse because language evolves differently not only in time but in different social groups: cow/sheep becomes beef/mouton in english when you move from the peasant world to the bourgeois world (from english to french).

This connects to Ludig Wittgenstein who showed the value of dialects and contexts: - language games: meaning is constituted through activity / language usage (different contexts) - language regions: language games differ in different language zones (different dialects) This is related to the fact that meaning is dynamic: language is disambiguated within contexts and specialized dialects.

Why do I blog this? even though this might seem very abstract and high-level at first glance, this kind of account is very important while working on collaborative applications because it shows how context and communities play an important role in the creation of a common body of knowledge (regarding information retrieval of course) and therefore to perform collaborative activities (like having a proper document collection in a community of practices or within a company for example). This of course connects to our Mutual Modeling project at the lab.

Crossmedia Game Epidemic Menace

Report about the Crossmedia Game Epidemic Menace by Jan Ohlenburg, Irma Lindt , and Uta Pankoke-Babatz is one of the PerGames 2006 paper. It describes an interesting pervasive game called "the Crossmedia Game Epidemic Menace", developed within the EU-funded IPerG project. It has already been presented at CHI2006 (see here) but the report goes into other details in terms of evaluations of the project. They used field observations done by four observers who constantly followed the players.

The evaluation was mainly based on detailed field observations. Four observers were constantly following the players, writing down their observations with respect to player-environment, player-devices, player-to-player and player-gamemaster interaction. Observers indicated time and location for each notice. Observations were combined with player feedback discussions and questionnaires. During the play test we got results with respects to the game story and game concept, the social play, the suitability of devices, and the technical aspects and game orchestration experiences. In the following we will briefly outline some of the results.

Players liked the two play-modes: stationary play in the team room and mobile play outdoors on the campus. We observed that collaboration across media and play modes worked well. Surprisingly, the speed of movement was rather high in both play modes. The speed of movement was suitable as a means to indicate high player immersion. Players easily understood the meaning and use of devices. However, it turned out that players preferred to play in pairs of two in both play modes, and that device specific roles emerged. The players liked communication and collaboration within their team and competition with the opposite team.

Why do I blog this? I like the usage of different gaming devices (running for example on mobile phones, stationary displays, mobile Augmented Reality) to engage people in a playful experience. A different set of research question arise when you have this sort of game design: how would giving different tool lead to specific roles attributions? How would this impact individual actions? group interactions? communication and actions asymmetry among teams? As you see, I am really interested in the collaborative user experience afforded by the gameplay and the artefacts. This sort of platform is then very relevant to CSCW research as we do in our projects. This kind of approach is described by Chalmers and Juhlin in "New uses for mobile pervasive games - Lessons learned for CSCW systems to support collaboration in vast work sites ".

Notes from Paul Dourish presentation at CHI

I ran across this very insightful notes about Paul Dourish paper presentation at CHI2006 (the one that critiques the "implications for design" in ethnographical studies in HCI). I blogged the paper few months ago and was looking forward reading what people could say about it.Here is what interest me a lot:

Relationship between technology and practice: the common view is that ethnography will uncover problems that design can fix. This assumes that the world is problematic and can be fixed by (technological) design. A better approach would to have a broader view of practice, including how technology is put to use (and adopted, adapted, repurposed, and appropriated), how people create new circumstances and consequences of technology use, and how technologies take on social meaning. To formulate practice as "deficient" or "needing to be fixed" presupposes a lot, and also puts design outside of the domain of the ethnographer (...) the absence of implications for design shouldn't disqualify an ethnography -- they're a poor metric for evaluating ethnographic work.

This also connects to the discussion I had last week with Liz Goodman from Intel: valuing conversations between ethnographers and designers.

One of the proposed use of ethnography is indeed to understand how people themselves produce design ideas (a la De Certeau). This is nicely exemplified by the research done by the Nokia design people in this paper: Chipchase, J., Persson, P., Aarras, M., Piippo, P., & Yamamoto, T. (2005). Mobile Essentials: Field Study and Concepting. Presented at DUX 2005, Fort Mason, San Francisco, CA, November 3-5, 2005. Retrieved May 1, 2006.

Genevieve Bell from Intel also tackles this issue in her work; her take is that ethnography is more than finding users' requirements, it could help understanding the cultural assumptions that underlies people's activities (at work, at home...) to refine the design space.

Why do I blog this? I like this stance, the fact that ethnographical studies does not have to be systematically coupled with design, and also that situations, issues or problems that would found, should or can not be necessarily solve with technology. I definitely don't like to see technology as the systematic world's problems solutions.

Related: more about this issue is addressed by technotaste.

Special issue of Psychnology about Mobile Media

The Psychnology journal (an online research journal) is going to have a special issue on Mobile media and communication – reconfiguring human experience and social practices? (edited by Ilkka Arminen):

Mobile media have already become an essential aspect of everyday life. They alter existing communication patterns, enable new kinds of contacts between people, and yet remain embedded in prevailing social relations and practices. Mobile communication has said to have created “timeless time” and freedom from place. This new social and communicative development has been characterized revolutionary. Still, the usages of mobile technologies are solidly anchored on local circumstances and prevailing forms of life. Also not all mobile technologies have proven successful. The adoption of mobile media has been in many respects much slower than anticipated. Is there a contradiction between revolutionary technological potential of mobile media and embodied, habitual human experiences? This special issue addresses the potentially tense relationship between the development of mobile technologies and mundane experience.

Possible topics include:

Reinvention of mobile media.

Limits of mobile technologies.

Mobile technologies and local realities.

Mobile technologies and new forms of social interaction.

Mobile technologies and social networks.

Submissions are accepted of any length, discipline and format provided their scientific relevance and accuracy. They should be sent in electronic form to both: articles(at)psychnology.org, and Ilkka.Arminen(at)uta.fi no later than October, 30 2006. Inclusion of color pictures, videos and sound files is welcome.

Why do I blog this? again this is indirectly connected to my research about how new technologies reshape social/cultural/cognitive practices.

Meeting at the IFTF

I had lunch today with my friend Alex Pang at the Institute For the Future in Palo Alto. The discussion was around the Internet of Things, spimes and blogjects. Starting by discussing Bruce Sterling's Shaping Things, we were thinking about the fact that as Sterling says there is no smartness in the objects; the smartness better resides in the was those objects and networks help us to make better choices; especially with regards to specific actions or meeting people. Wired and connected objects may indeed help choosing what tools can be used to consume less energy, sharing certain types of objects with others that would be trackable is also of interest (and is actually a topic discusses in one of the story Bruce Sterling wrote in "Visionary in Residence"): a kind of community hammer or driller for instance.

Alex and I also discussed some potential ideas about the blogjects serie of workshop I am organizing along with Julian. Additionaly, Jason tester updated me on their pervasive gaming projects that is a very relevant synthesis about context-aware games. This project interestingly started first by looking at the history of video games from the POV of users and then continued as an overview of the pergames directions.

Alex finally encouraged me to go deeper in the Science Technology and Society world, which is quite a good idea.

Yesterday's meeting

Yesterday was a quite super active day in the bay area with a serie of meeting at PARC and a dinner with friends in SF. Located in Palo Alto, PARC is a subsidiary of Xerox Corporation, conducts pioneering interdisciplinary research in the physical, computational, and social sciences.

It first started with a meeting with Elizabeth Churchill and Les Nelson to whom I presented my PhD research and get some more insights about they're up to. Some comments from Elizabeth:

It seems that the automatic location-awareness tool in catchbob could be problematic because there is no context around it. Since the users in this experimental condition did not exchange lots of messages (mostly only about their proximity to the object via signal strength indications), there is a lack of a social context that could be helpful to interprete the locational data. As opposed to the players in the "with the location-awareness" who better discussed the strategy and then had a context to help them doing inferences about the others' location (they indicated through map annotations).

She pointed me at this kind of overtrust on technology (the location-awareness tool): since it's an available information, they pay attention to it.

An additional remark concerns the fact that coordination information liek this location-awareness is more than coordination: it's establishing a common ground of the situation, by wrapping up these information into a strategy context.

She encouraged me to ask players some questions about the way they experienced collaboration: did you feel like you were wandering alone? or being part of a team? so that I can evaluated the level of involvement in a social context.

Les asked me whether there could be a kinf of optimal strategy index that would be helpful to measure the spatial behavior.

I then had a meeting with Nicolas Ducheneaut who explained me how he ended up there doing research about multi-user applications (and how PARC works in terms of project management). One of Nicolas' project is the super neat project about World of Warcraft called "Play On". He showed me some of the ongoing things they are doing, mainly the "social dashboard" they patented. They actually isolated important factors in terms of guild management in WoW (such as guild size...), those who are important so that players keep enjoying the game and then developed some services and tools that would be helpful for that matter (for game community managers!): for instance seeing the evolution of certain parameters, the fact that some high-value players left a guild, the desagregation of guilds, the isolation of rotten classes... I told him that I would be very interested in seeing this also feeded back to the players (and not only the guild manager), like in our virtual mirror project at the lab (giving the group an image of itself to modify the way they collaborate). Thus, they're basically focusing on improving the social aspects of the game (so that players keep playing!) through certain kinds of services. Of course, this is of interests to game editors (even though the content and the gameplay are still tremendously an important feature, there should be also an emphasis on those social aspects; and those tools they develop are helfpul).

He also worked on an relevant project about "social tv" that might be interesting for private research projects.

Regarding my PhD research, he made some insightfuls comments and connections with others' work:

It started to make him think at Aoki, P. M.; Woodruff, A. Making space for stories: ambiguity in the design of personal communication systems. ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2005); 2005 April 2-7; Portland, OR. NY: ACM; 2005; 181-190.

Then he pointed me on another paper: Dabbish L. & Kraut R. (2004) Controlling interruptions: Awareness displays and social motivation for coordination, in: Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW'04), New York: ACM Press, 182-191

I'll explore these papers in the near future.

For him, the information about others' whereabouts in space can ruduce the richness of the mental map people build of space by just focusing on a certain kind of information (conveyed by the location-awareness tool) and not the others (cf Kevin Lynch, image of the city, p45): players who had the "follower" role maybe had a poor representation, whereas the "explorer" had a richer image of space. I am wondering whether I can apprehend this sort of things with the data I have (given that participants knew the campus). Maybe some studies about ethology or animal behavior in space could be valuable for that mattter.

The final round at PARC was with Victoria Bellotti, to whom I also described my PhD research. Here are some comments she made:

Did the explorers were more successful in terms of performance? did they make more spatial modeling mistakes?

She was concerned by the location accuracy + lag and thought that 15meters would be a problem for this sort of task (not to mention the variability of this accuracy in different places due to the hotspots repartition). In her opinion, people were perhaps relying too much on the location-awareness tool: if the accuracy is 15 meters and if there is a 3 seconds lag, users might be misleaded. I would answer that for our task, and givent the EPFL campus, the 15meters accuracy is not that much of a problem, since it's approximately the size of roomsm and it discriminated different zones with different boundaries (and no line of sight).

She thinks that indeed, more communication can lead to more grounding of the situation, which would be why the richness of communication in the no awareness tool condition had positive on the mutual modeling index.

Also, I have to be careful when referring to the condition "without AT" because it's not really without but without explicit AT because they can dialogue but indeed it's not a awareness tool strictly speaking.

Of course, she pointed me at the dangers of this sort of field experiment study, arguing that results are bound to the system and the context I tested (which I am definitely aware of). Results are then bound to the system configuration: location accuracy, area size, number of users... The nature of the task is also important too, it puts demands and constraints arbitrarily on the context, And she's then wondering how far these results could be generalized.

I am deeply aware of all these comments (right from the beginning of the project actually, when choosing a more quantitative methodology but mixed with qualitative data). And my point is simple: my study is rather here to counterbalance the frenziness and overemphasis of location-awareness technologies. IMO It's rather here to ponder the engineerical madness around those applications that are oooh so neat like the intelligent fridge (!).

Thanks all for these inputs, they're invaluable for the evolution of the PhD project.

I finally had lunch in SF with my finnish friends Jyri Engeström and Ulla-Maaria Mutanen who nicely introduced me to Elizabeth Goodman and Mike Kuniavsky. The discussion was there around various topic but mainly about bottom-up innovation and independent structures a la Squid Labs and others. Europe is especially in the need of this kind of places/structure with crazy folks doing project. Ulla-Maaria was referring to crafting stuff but to me, even peopel doing user experience or more abstract research matter to. These structures (or non-structures) are act as the Research and Development of tomorrow's services, product and memes.

Liz also talked about how the relationship between engineers and interaction designers/user experience specialists should be more a conversation about users' context than just getting a set of requirements.

I was interested by Mike's perspective on user experience of pervasive computing , which is what is going to address in his next book.

Research meeting with Paul Dourish

Had a good meeting for lunch today with Paul Dourish at UC Irvine, chatting about my PhD research and on-going projects here and there. It seems that he's back on writing about space and place, which is very relevant to what I do. Some raw notes from what he said about my research:

• he acknowledged my concerns about articulating both quantitative and qualitative data (but seems to me very inerested in my qualitative analyses)
• do we really need to model other's positions (in the game + ...): that's actually something we discuss with the dispositional versus situational Mutual Modeling.
• He's interested in the following question: to what extent the technology provides a medium for people to develop a meaning of others' actions. In my context, this is related with how people interpret others' paths.
• Would it be possible to dig my qualitative data to go deeper into Mutual Modeling of location, MM towards the goal and MM of strategy? For him, there should be more emphasis on qualitative data, like ethnographical analyses to understand how people discuss, understand and use other's paths/locations
• the visualization thing made him think about chalmers' students work (maybe I should more articulate this with what I want to do with the viz?)
• He asked why choosing the path distance as a performance index: it's meant to foster more strategy discussion among players (+ prevent them from running and possibly break the tablet pcs)

He also encouraged me to submit a poster to ubicomp, I may write something about the asynchronous awareness tool, let's see.

Thoughts around korea food

Interesting chat yesterday at the korean restaurant in Koreatown with Julian Bleecker, Adam Greenfield and Raphael Grignani. Raphael's working at Nokia Design (previously with the ever watchful Jan Chipchase), he briefly explained us what they basically do with their ethnographic studies (finding behavioral patterns and then trying to make them match with the company's technology roadmap). I am particularly fascinated by the second part of the process (after the conduction of field studies, be it ethnographic or more experimental as in my phd research); that's a topic I am trying to work on for my research and foresight work: what can be transfered? how? what would be a good design process (in the case the research outcome are design-oriented)? how this would help strategy people (in the case the research outcome are strategy-oriented)? Don't know whether they can communicate about it but I guess there's a lot to think about here. The discussion also addressed the often emptiness of conferences presentation, which I sometime tend to share event as an academic.

Everyware: book review

I already presented some thoughts about "Everyware : The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing" by Adam Greenfield in this blog but here's a more detailed review. Overall, the book is an extremely complete overview of what is ubiquitous computing / pervasive computing / ambient computing / xxx. The terminology for this new computing paradigm is so diverse that the author coined the term "Everyware". The discussion about the terminology is still lively and I won't enter too much in the debate here because hmm I tend to agree on both sides.

What I appreciate in this book is the author's stance: taking the user experience hat allows Greenfield to go was beyond a simple catalogue of neat applications. This is not the propos here. More importantly, I really like the conclusion: "it's one of the many things in my life that I cannot conceive of being improved by an overlay of ubiquitous information technology. (...) I know enough about how informatics system are built and brought to market to be very skeptical about its chances of bringing wholesale improvements to the quality of my life (...) I have a hard time buying into the notion that such ubiquitous computing interventions in the world can be had without significant cost". Of course, it's Adam's (and also mine) work to study the user experience and HCI concerns so this conclusion (and the fact that I like it) are quite logical, but there is certainly more reason to acknowledge them. Unfortunately, there is currently little studies about pervasive computing usage. That is also what Adam says: advocating for more user experience concerns and studies using social sciences in ubicomp, I cannot say more that this is exactly what we are trying to do with CatchBob!: trying to explore and understand how certain features of pervasive computing (it's scientific research, we cannot tackle all the topics at the same time) may affect social and cognitive processes. My work is directed towards understanding how location-awareness impacts group collaboration by exploring how knowing others' whereabouts affects small group communication, construction of a shared understanding of the team, strategy negotiation, coordination as well as inferring other's intents. Fabien is using Catchbob to study the problem of users' uncertainty.

The thesis 18 is also interesting ("in many circumstances, we can't really conceive of the human being engaging everyware as a "user""). That's indeed a problem we're facing when discussing about blogjects with Julian.

I already discussed the thesis 43 (“Everyware produces a wide-belt of circumstances where human agency, judgement and will are progressively supplanted by compliance with external, frequently algorithmically-applied standards and norms“.) but the thesis 35 is also of relative importance with regards to my work: "Everyware surfaces and makes explicit information that has always been latent in our lives, and this will frequently be incommensurate with social or psychological comfort". In my work about how people benefit (or not) from having automatical information about other's location in space, this the case: sometimes the information is not needed and brings people on wrong inferences or miscoordination. Automatically sending parterns' location led people to less focus on other parameters.

Back to the book, what is good is to have a global perspective here; the section about what is driving the emergence of everyware is important for that matter: pervasice computing is latent and arriving due to some reasons ranging from techno-push companies to its existence in our imagination (inherently driven by a certain kind of culture).

Moreover, I am still wondering about the tinkering potential of everyware. Adam says in p163 that "everyware is not going to be something simply vended to a passive audience by the likes of Intel and Samsung: what tools such as Ning tells us is that there will be millions of homebrew designers/makers developing their own modules...". There are mixed signals about this. On one hand, there are lots of tinkerers that use Ning, hack roomba robots or Nabatag but my fear is that those pervasive computing platforms are not open enough. IMO the most interesting, lively and open platform is the Web (and the Internet to a lesser extent), and I don't know whether a similar phenomenon would happen to pervasive computing (even though the web/forums/blogs/IM... allows better visibility and then the forming of community of practices).

I also liked the criticisms towards certain projects like the neverending variation around the "web-on-the-wall" or the intelligent fridge that - even when I saw them in action - I always found dead boring, tech-driven and not situated in user's practices. Besides, concepts like "the messy inexacitude of the everyday" are neat. The concluding guidelines are important and it's obviously a commitment to user experience specialists and researchers to do something.

Now for the critics, I would say that it could have been included in a wider overview using the NBIC framework (Nanotechnology Biotechhnology Information technology and Cognitive sciences) but it might had been detrimental to the reader's comprehension. So it's not too much of a problem.

However, I feel like the book lacks of graphics. It's not that I wanted picture to see what's behind everyware technology (I know that and I don't care, and I guess it's been on purpose so that the neophyte reader more focus on what is at stake than how it may look like) but for some theses and arguments, it would have been could to have graphics. Not scientific things but only few picture to clarify some points or to make arguments and theses more visual.

Finally, I miss the art dimension: if user experience and HCI are still lagging behind technology and engineering to address the usage of ubicomp, this is definitely not the case of art: interactive art gracefully tackles lots of issues in the world of pervasive computing. Of course, it's not scientific research, nor concrete arguments towards the comprehension of massive usage of pervasive computing but it brings lots of important concerns that Adam's address (on topic ranging from new user interface capabilities to the social impacts of those applications).

Also, speaking about convergence I'd be interested in thinking about how robots would fit into this everyware picture. I tend to think that not-anthropomorphical/pet robots are more interesting as ubicomp objects, and I am wondering about the convergence between robots and pervasive tech, which is IMO very latent.

I am playing the party pooper here, the book is a great achievement and a must-read for ubicomp novices. I have comments or connection for every pages so I will stop here. Let's talk about it directly on thursday Adam.

Sterling on Independent Research

Bruce Sterling's "Visionary in Residence : Stories" include an intriguing novel called Ivory Tower, which has already been published in Nature in April 2005 for a special issue about "What does the next half-century have in store?".

It addresses a topic I am very interested in: independent research. Some quotes:

We were ten thousands physicists entirely self-educated by Internet (...) In the new world of open access, ultrawide broadband, and gigantic storage bank, physics is just sort of sitting there (...) we demanded state support to publish for our research efforts (just like real scientists do), but alas, the bureaucrats wouldn't give us the time of the day.

So to find time for our kind of science, we had to dump a few shibboleths. For instance, we never bother to "publish" - we just post our findings on weblogs, and if that gets a lot of links, hey, we're the Most Frequently Cited. Tenure? Who needs that? Never heard of it! Doctorates, degrees, defending a thesis? Don't know, don't need 'em, can't even be bothered. (...) You're one in a million, pal - but in a world of ten billion people, there's ten thousand of us. We immediately started swapping everything we knew on collaborative weblogs. (...) we established our Autodidacts' Academy... we also had unlimited processing power, bandwidth, search engines, social software and open-source everything.

Why do I blog this? This is not the current situation but the tools Sterling describes (which we already have) reshape the research practices. Researchers begin to use blogs, tagging (conotea), wiki; benefits from bandwidth + large processing power. The weblog ranking system is very close to the peer-review process (less formal, more emergent and messy). What we currently lack is the critical mass. I am not sure whether the blog or another platform might be a relevant format for publishing research but there is something interesting here.

BESIDES, some people are working in that direction. Olivier reports that this paper (which form is really far from the old-school scientific paper format because of its open-source-ness maybe) features for instance a reference to a blogpost. Is blogging good for the career? also asks Alex Pang

Meaningful whereabouts/locative information while googleing your shoes

Reading Everyware and thinking about Bruce Sterling's talk at LIFT06 and ETECH, I was mumbling about the idea of googling objects to know where they are. What Bruce was saying:

“I have an Internet-of-Things with a search engine of things. So I no longer hunt anxiously for my missing shoes in the morning. I just Google them. As long as machines can crunch the complexities, their interfaces make my relationship to objects feel much simpler and more immediate. I am at ease in materiality in a way that people never were before.”

What I am interested in is how such a system tells the PROPER "locative assertion" (that is to say the name of the referred place). In the example above, my shoes can be "under my bed", "on the third shelves under a pile of old rubbishes in my parent's garage" and sometimes the scale is a lot bigger if you want the system to tell you that you threw your car keys in the pacific ocean.

From my perspective the challenge is to give "the users" a relevant indication of the whereabouts: sometimes it's the name of a room, sometimes it's geographical coordinates...

Of course, there is an interesting roundup/special case, especially when it comes to objects as described in "“Where Are the Christmas Decorations?”: A Memory Assistant for Storage Locations" by Lewis Creary, Michael VanHilst from HP Labs. The paper describes a storage location memory assistant that saves and retrieves information about the locations of stored objects in and around the user's house. Something that would do:

User: Where are the Christmas decorations? PDA: They're in the leftmost medium-sized white box under the wood table in the garage.

But of course, you would have to tell the system where the object is, which is not that convenient, especially when you LOOSE TRACK of things.

Every extension is more than an amputation

Reading "Everyware : The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing" by Adam Greenfield, I am trying to articulate the different "theses" with what I do in my research. One of the most relevant connection is the "Thesis 43" (p148): "Everyware produces a wide-belt of circumstances where human agency, judgement and will are progressively supplanted by compliance with external, frequently algorithmically-applied standards and norms". In this thesis, Adam exemplifies this by a quote by Marshall McLuhan I had also been amazed by: "every extension is [also] an amputation" (Understanding the Media, 1969).

This is exactly one of the conclusion of my PhD research that addresses collaboration in a pervasive game (which can be consider as a first step into an "everyware" world). In the context of my research, I found that automating location awareness information of others can be detrimental to how a small group behave (regarding the division of labor among them, the way they communicate, negotiate and infer others' intents). This is better described in a paper called The Underwhelming Effects of Automatic Location-Awareness on Collaboration in a Pervasive Game.

My point is that giving automatically information about others' location in space can undermine group collaboration. This had been showed by a field experiment we conducted last year. We compared different groups: some had this automatical awareness information and some had not. Groups with the automatical positions of others had a less rich collaboration: they less discussed, less negotiated the strategy, rather sticked to the plan they decided before the game and did not recall their partners' paths very efficiently.

It goes actually even further: I would say that here "every extension is more than an amputation". The user gain the spatial positions of others but loose some important value of letting people express this information by themselves. This is bound to the misconception that automatically sending my position is the same as letting me sending a message to my buddies about it: in the former it's sending and information whereas in the latter it's sending an information AND an intention that I sent something relevant to my addressee.

Why do I blog this? I am glad to see how concrete user experience of pervasive computing can be articulated with higher levels thoughts described by Adam in his book. It shows how a "user experience" angle is needed to better understand what is at stake when we are talking about "everyware". That's what we need in this academic CSCW project.