Methods for observing and understanding the digital cityscape

Just attended a session about urban computing. The first paper was interesting to me because of its focus on methods: Instrumenting the city: developing methods for observing and understanding the digital cityscape by Eamonn O’Neill, Vassilis Kostakos, Tim Kindberg, Ava Fatah gen. Schiek, Alan Penn, Danaë Stanton Fraser and Tim Jones.

The point of the paper was to develop methods to investigate urban computing. To do so, the authors proposed to understand urban computing as system (its physical and digital forms and their relationships with people's behavior in the city). There is a need for methods: observing, recording, modeling, analyzing. Their point was to use the space syntax methodology and digitally augment them. They then presented how they "combined scanning for discoverable Bluetooth devices with two such methods, gatecounts and static snapshots".

A Bluetooth gate with a Bluetooth scanner placed on the inside of a window:

Why do I blog this? I found pertinent to combine Bluetooth scanning and conventional observational techniques. It helped them to get interesting patters of usage (gate crossing in this case); they presented very meaningfull visualizations showing both patterns of copresence and timeline view: visualization of location. It basically shows how people behave there (who appeared where):

Quali-Quanti discussions at Ubicomp

Here at Ubicomp 2006, there was a very pertinent discussion yesterday (instead of having a talk that everybody was awaiting: "No more SMS from Jesus? Ubicomp, religion and techno-spiritual practices" by Genevieve Bell) about methodologies to study mobile technologies (by Beki Grinter and Ken Anderson). First, one of the remark was about the inherent problems of ethnographic studies to study artifacts that go everywhere (and even more likely to be used in toilets, as opposed to food).

But the most interesting part (to me) was the discussion about the bridge between qualitative and quantitative methods. Yahoo/UC Berkeley's Marc Davis advocated for a new "computational social science" that would use mixed-methods (quali-quanti), aka "the new social science of the 21st century". His point was that we have access to an incredible quantity of data (ranging from interview to logged actions) that would allow us to gain information about different layers: from micro scale cognitive insights to large group processes (social groups, national issues...).

Unlike Anne which states that "quantitative methods are still being trotted out to save qualitative methods from their perceived inadequacies, a.k.a. "Real Science To The Rescue!"", I haven't felt that. Given the fact that the conversant were largely qualitative-data oriented, he tried to summarize the advantages of bridging both qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis:

• Large datasets can enable us to know who to talk to (who to interview, or with whom to deepen the study with ethnographic methods): who are representatives (or not) in the groups
• It can allow to reveal unconscious behavior (that users cannot state)
• A nice avenue of research they're pushing forward in his team is to compute visualizations (based on quantitative data) and then get back to the users to discuss with them. This is exactly what I am doing with CatchBob! visualizations of coordination as well as presenting the players a replay of their activity. This provides a basis for the discussion about "what they did" and "why they did it" (with of course some different "epistemological levels").
• Qualitative analysis can also allow to redesign the sensors and the logged information that would be better suitable/more interesting.

He said that we're going "From what to why" to "From why to what"

Jeff Axup, as a follow-up, explained how different methods can be apply to different moment in the conception and that it's an iterative process: quanti can help provide focus for quali, then it allows to discover new dimensions in which quantitative methods could be applied.

(See also Joe McCarthy's thoughts)

Why do I blog this? because I am right in the middle of this discussion. In my study of how people use location-awareness in the pervasive game CatchBob! I encountered the same issues. What is curious however, is that the discussion stayed at the data level and did not address the theoretical assumptions from all those methods.

RhNav: Rhizome Navigation visualizations

Walter Rafelsberger is working on pertinent visualizations that he called RhNav (which stands for Rhizome Navigation). It's actually a visualization application framework meant for "building Navigation Interfaces based on Attention Data and User Behavior Analysis" (online demo here):

RhNav - Rhizome Navigation provides 3D navigation interfaces to explore and manipulate various data sources like access logs from web servers, aggregated attention data, file systems or databases.

Why do I blog this? it gives some relevant ideas for my visualizations of catchbob coordination between players.

Historical elements of CSCW

The Context of CSCW by Liam J. Bannon and John A. Hughes is an interesting report that gives some contextual and historical elements of the research field I am doing my PhD work: Computer Supported Cooperative Work Some excerpts I found pertinent with regards to what I experiences:

The term CSCW was coined by the computer scientists Irene Greif of MIT (now at Lotus) and Paul Cashman of Digital in the early eighties. (...) There is still no commonly accepted definition of CSCW (Wilson, 1991). Indeed, whether CSCW can be viewed as a new field of research in its own right has been questioned by some. Bannon et al. (1988) noted how CSCW might be viewed as simply an "umbrella term" that allowed people from a variety of different disciplines, with partially overlapping concerns, to come together and discuss issues, without any common ground as to the concept of CSCW, other than the very loose idea that it was somehow about the use of computers to support activities of people working together.

... a field made up of very different people:

Within the field of CSCW, loosely construed, a number of different groupings have been discerned by commentators. Howard (1988) coined the term "strict constructionists" to describe those in the field focused on the development of computer systems to support group work, who tend to use themselves as objects of analysis in the provision of support tools. These people, mainly implementers, are interested in building tools - widgets, and they see the area of CSCW as a possible leverage point for creating novel applications. Most of these people equate the CSCW field with Groupware, as they focus on new software applications.

Howard (1988) has labelled those who make up the remainder of the CSCW field, the larger part, as "loose constructionists," a heterogeneous collection of people, some of whom are drawn to the area by their dissatisfaction with current uses of technology to support work processes, others because they see in this area a chance for communities who traditionally have not had a voice in the design of computer systems to have one.

The authors then describe different shifts which have informed the rise of CSCW: new information systems practice (less about automation, more about sociality), the search for new software application markets, the organisational environment (need for better ways of organising and co-ordinating work activitie), news technological developments (better "connectivity" of computer systems), people's expectations (more flexible and tailorable user interfaces), the requirement of ecological validity in HCI.

Why do I blog this? because it gives context to my research, to see where I sit (studying the cognitive coupling between users and the system).

Challenges of context-awareness

Via Mike Blackstock: Too Much Information ACM Queue vol. 4, no. 6 - July/August 2006 by Jim Christensen, Jeremy Sussman, Stephen Levy, William E. Bennett, Tracee Vetting Wolf, Wendy A. Kellogg, IBM Research. The article tackles context-awareness and its key challenges, with two examples of application (in new communication services that include the convergence of VoIP and traditional information technology). It starts by presenting the purpose of context-awareness and its relative difficulties:

"While the dream of intelligent devices has been alive for some time in the computer science community, it has not yet had a profound effect on the applications and services we use to get our jobs done. Why not? The simple answer is because it is hard to do well - or even well enough. The gap between what technology can "understand" as context and how people understand context is significant. Indeed, some critics have asserted that context-aware computing makes a fundamental error in trying to remove the human from the control loop in creating intelligent autonomous devices.2 A different tactic is to capture context but render its results unto humans to decide what actions to take"

The it presents the two applications ("The first, called Grapevine, helps a person communicate with another individual using an aggregated and filtered set of contextual information. The second, the IBM Rendezvous Service, helps people meet and talk on the telephone") and then draws some conclusions about their use. Here are some excerpts of the results I found pertinent to what I am doing:

A substantial semantic gap exists between the information that low-level sensors and programs can detect and the high-level ability and willingness of a person to communicate with someone else. What computer scientists commonly call context often has more to do with technology than with work situations, people, or frames of mind. While low-level information is useful, it is only a rough indicator of a user's social context. Such ambiguity can be socially useful; nevertheless, care must be taken in presenting and labeling sensor data in the interface. (...) Working out the problems and promise of context-aware applications and services depends on a complex interplay in a moving landscape of technical, organizational, social, and cultural factors. These include what is technically feasible in terms of the kinds of contextual information available; what is practically feasible in terms of assumptions that can be made about the distribution and nature of devices, bandwidth, and cost; what is possible within the constraints of our imaginations; and what will be perceived by users as valuable, as well as socially and culturally appropriate. For this reason, experience with deploying real applications and services at a realistic scale is essential.

Why do I blog this? because it clarifies the gap between context-awareness promises and current practices.

Some visualization ideas

I am still struggling to find ideas of visualizations to represent the exchange of coordination information between players of CatchBob! (see here for a more complete description). As I said earlier, what I am interested in is to depict a chronological account of collaborative processes drawing on system logfiles (and the researcher’s analysis in the form of messages categorizations, this packed in a XML file). Some of the viz I found that might fit are chronological account. For instance, I what Fabien did for an informative art project (it shows user’s activities on a portal over time. This synthetic representation is one my favorite.):

Furthermore, I am more and more curious about using music score-like representations because it nicely shows the chronological view (under the form of a staff) with possible multi occurences of events performed by players that could be represented as note symbols.

But, it's maybe good to go further into the deconstruction since there will be connections between events performed by players (represented as note symbols), something new might emerge as represented in the following picture (from Sylvano Bussoti, used in Milles Plateaux by G. Deleuze and F. Guattari)

Or also, from musician at McGill University:

What is pertinent in thes example is Bussoti's idea of musical graphical notation, "a form of music notation which refers to the use of non-traditional symbols and text to convey information about the performance of a piece of music".

H-C Steiner's Solitude is even more interesting for my purposes:

(more about graphical musical notations: Cage, J. and Knowles, A. (1973) Notations. Reprint Services Corp. ISBN 0-685-14864-5)

Some go even further by removing the idea of staff (hence the chronological order) and plotting the information, which can also fit with my needs (a triangle would then represent the 3 players):

betwixt: technology and transitional space

betwixt: technology and transitional space is a workshop organized by Arianna Bassoli, Johanna Brewer and Karen Martin at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, University of California, Irvine on September 16, 2006. It's a follow up of the Why wait? workshop. The workshop tackles the notion of "transitional spaces" (sidewalks, highways, lifts, buses, tunnels, stairwells, bike paths, parking lots, lobbies, airports, waiting rooms, train stations, and drive-thrus) with regards to design questions such as "How can we begin to design technologies that recognize the richness of these transitional spaces?" or "Why aren't these places valued in their own right?".

What I am interested in is this idea of "traces":

Traces of Change - What physical traces of the different uses of a transitional space can we see? - Which of these uses have been embraced and legitimized, and how? - Which of these traces last the longest, and which are erased quickly? - What determines the duration of these traces?

Why do I blog this? I am more and more interested by the use of geospatial traces (in the broad sense) and how it can shape user experience in various contexts (potential projects here for the future).

Workshop about Mobile Multiplayer Games at CSCW 2006

Mobile Multiplayer Games: Designs, Studies and Reflections a workshop at ACM CSCW 2006 by Matthew Chalmers and Steve Benford:

A number of researchers have used mobile multiplayer games either as a topic of study in itself or as a vehicle for more general investigations in computing, collaboration and information. Set within the context of increasing commercial significance of both games in general and mobile games in particular, this research has used the energy and ingenuity of players to test interfaces, infrastructure and design concepts, and to drive new technological developments. Commercial games are appearing that take advantage of commodity mobile phones’ burgeoning capabilities for interaction, awareness and collaboration. In-depth studies of mobile multiplayer games are also beginning to appear in greater numbers, and growing experience of design and use opens up new possibilities for conceptual work on the mixture of media, people and environments that constitute such games. This workshop’s aim is a broad view of this young research area, spanning and connecting system design, user studies and theoretical reflections.

Why do I blog this? this right on spot of what we do; I don't know whether it qualifies to be called "serious game" (i.e. using a game in another purpose than just entertainment) but that's how I used a pervasive game to deepen the understanding of socio-cognitive processes at stake in collaboration. Don't know whether I would have time (and $$ to go there) to write a position paper about that :(

Location awareness and rendezvousing

Dearman, D., Hawkey, K. and Inkpen, K.M. Rendezvousing with location-aware devices: Enhancing social coordination. Interacting with Computers 17, 5 (2005), 542-566. A very interesting paper directly connected to my current research about the influence of location-awareness on collaboration. It examines how location awareness impacts social coordination when rendezvousing.

This paper presents a field study investigating the use of mobile location-aware devices for rendezvous activities. Participants took part in one of three mobile device conditions (a mobile phone, a location-aware handheld, or both a mobile phone and a location-aware handheld) and completed three rendezvousing scenarios. The results reveal key differences in communication patterns between the mediums, as well as the potential strengths and limitations of location-aware devices for social coordination. (...) close observation of the behavioural and communication differences demonstrates that the technology available significantly altered how the participants’ managed their social coordination

Results about the functions of location-awareness were quite pertinent too (as in my case, they also found detrimental effects of it):

Having access to location-awareness information has obvious benefits. Users can make more informed decisions and have a stronger sense of ambient virtual co-presence. The participants in our study made extensive use of location-awareness information as a background communication channel to monitor their partner’s location (as well as their own) in an unobtrusive manner. (...) we observed instances where location-awareness information was extremely beneficial and other instances where it was detrimental. It was beneficial because participants could see their partner’s location and track their progress in an unobtrusive manner. This arguably provided the waiting partner with enough information to wait contently. However, when their partner appeared to be lost or not making progress, it was very disconcerting to the waiting partner because they did not have enough information to determine what the problem was. This uncertainty was strong enough in some cases to actually draw the waiting partner away from the rendezvous location.

Why do I blog this? this goes straight to my literature review.

About sequential data analysis

Fisher, C. and Sanderson, P. (1996): Exploratory Sequential Data Analysis: Exploring continuous observational data, ACM interactions, 3(2), pp. 25 - 34. The paper is an overview of the sequential data analysis that are available with an exploratory perspective. It's a very broad description but it gives some valuable hints. They refer to "Exploratory Sequential Data Analysis" with this "ESDA" acronym.

Analysis techniques that use sequential information include conversation analysis, interaction analysis, verbal and nonverbal protocol analysis, process tracing, cognitive task analysis, and discourse analysis. In addition, there are many powerful sequential data analysis techniques that deal with sequential information statistically, such as Markov analysis, lag sequential analysis, and grammatically based techniques. (...) all empirical ways of seeking answers to research or design questions; they all use systems, environmental, and behavioral data in which the ordering of events is preserved, and they all involve data exploration at critical points in analysis, especially the outset.

The paper then presents three broad traditions of observational research traditions (behavioral, cognitive and social) and discussed them:

In his work on design meetings, Tang [7] implicitly distinguished the behavioral, cognitive, and social traditions when justifying his choice of interaction analysis—a naturalistic social technique—over a formal experimental approach or a cognitive approach. He reasoned that factors influencing design were not known well enough to develop a fully controlled experiment, and that designers probably were not sufficiently aware of how they made design decisions to provide a valid verbal report. As this example shows, the best approach to use depends on the question being asked, the kind of data that have been collected, and the form of statement eventually required.

Why do I blog this? Even though it's a bit old, therd are some good references about seminal work (which was what I was looking for). More about that in Human-Computer Interaction, 9, 3 (1994) which was a special issue about that.

Mobile technologies and social coordination in urban environments

In the last issue of the Receiver, there is a paper by Lee Humphreys about mobile technologies and social coordination in urban environments which is of great interest to my research. Starting from Rich Ling & Birgitte Yttri's seminal work about that question (see the paper “Nobody sits at home and waits for the telephone to ring:” Micro and hyper-coordination through the use of the mobile telephone), she is investigating "how people use mobile phones within their social networks in the course of their everyday lives". What is interesting is that tit does not only described coordination patterns but "also the subtle communicative exchanges used in a complex mobile world (...) What do you communicate? How do you communicate? With whom do you communicate? ".

An efficient way to coordinate in her study was "mobile broacasting" (" Text messages can also be broadcast from one person to several or even many people.").

The mobile phone becomes a good tool for the exchange of duration information and coordinating the when of casual social interactions. (...) The where of coordination is also more complex than just a venue name or address. A venue name can suggest quite a bit of social information used by people in order to determine who will meet up. (...) Location is not just longitude and latitude or even a street address, but also includes important social information (...) the proximity of the venue is also an important determinant in who will show up (...) The who of coordination is also a complex negotiation of casual social interaction. One of the interesting elements of broadcasting is that users can see who is coordinating meeting up — to whom was the message sent. This visibility allows for the exchange of complex social information

She also discusses issues that needs to be negotiated such as freedom vs. constraint and social performance vs. social functionality, but this is less my focus. Why do I blog this? the research I am carrying out in my PhD is about how people use the location of others as a resources for coordination. Even though it's much more CSCW-oriented that Lee's work, there are some interesting lessons to draw from her work. I have to grab an academic paper about that.

New IEEE Pervasive Computing issue

The july-september issue of IEEE Pervasive Computing Journal is full of pertinent content to my research. Ranging from the "build what you use" introduction to "Real-World Ubicomp Deployments: Lessons Learned", "Practical Lessons from Place Lab", "Real-World Challenges of Pervasive Computing" among others. I can't wait getting this new release. Here's the editor's conclusion:

First, the real proof of a successful trial deployment is when the users continue to work with a system after the trial is officially over. Second, it’s important to deploy your trial system for your own use, and “use what you build” to understand the user feedback. Finally, the key to a successful deployment is to make your users feel smarter than they were before it began.

Criticism towards mutual knowledge theories

Arnseth A.C., Ludvigsen S., Mørch A., Wasson B. (2004). Managing Intersubjectivity in Distributed Collaboration. PsychNology Journal, 2(2), 189 – 204. The paper describes a very interesting criticism of a specific approach to the study of technologically mediated social interaction. The critique is about the notion of "share knowledge" (mostly Clark’s (1996) notion of grounding):

According to Clark (1996) grounding is the process through which shared knowledge is established in interaction. This process is dependent on the participant’s prior beliefs, their previous knowledge, and the material artifacts that are available in any communicative encounter. The main assumption in the studies by Baker et al. (1999) and Dillenbourg & Traum (1999), is that different technological tools provide different constraints and affordances for the grounding process. (...) According to such a view, communication is conceived as a process of coordinating knowledge that the participants already possess. However, the efforts involved in arriving at a shared interpretation might require a reorganization of the knowledge that an individual brings to the situation. Nevertheless, social interaction is mainly the site where participants’ mental states are articulated and coordinated. However, the main problem with such an analytical practice from a situated perspective, is that it implies a disregard for the participants’ interpretative work (Ludvigsen & Mørch, 2003). Moreover, the management of intersubjectivity is treated as independent of the situation in which it occurs, the activity in which participants are engaged and the goals that they are trying to achieve.

In another paper "Making Sense of Shared Knowledge", Hans Christian Arnseth and Ivar Solheim also give other critiques:

Our main criticism of Clark and Brennan’s model is that it retains a communication-as-transfer-between-minds view of language. Secondly that it treats intentions and goals as pre-existing psychological entities that are later somehow formulated in language.

Why do I blog this? using Clark's theory as a framework for my research, I am curious of the critiscm towards it. However, I rather used his theory of coordination (coordination devices/keys) than the whole shared knowledge issue.

Interaction Analysis research foci

Reading again methodological paper is a good way to learn. That's what I did with B. Jordan and A. Henderson. Interaction Analysis: Foundations and Practice, The Journal of the Learning Sciences, Volume 4, Number 1, pages 39-103, 1995. This paper is a seminal article about this specific research method:

Interaction Analysis as we describe it here is an interdisciplinary method for the empirical investigation of the interaction of human beings with each other and with objects in their environment. It investigates human activities such as talk, nonverbal interaction, and the use of artifacts and technologies, identifying routine practices and problems and the resources for their solution

The whole thing is awesome but the part that interested me most is about the "foci for analysis", meaning the ways of looking data:

The structure of events: In the course of analysis, smaller units of coherent interaction within events are identified... such easily identifiable behavioral units "ethnographic chunks." Identifying ethnographic chunks is a possible first step towards analysis and may often overlap with content logging... Events of any duration are always segmented in some way. Frequently, there are "official" beginnings and endings....They have an internal structure that is recognized and maintained by participants... spatial orientation serves as a means of negotiating transitions from one segment to a next... Analytically, transitions from one segment of an event to another are often indicated by shifts in activity, heralded by changes in personnel, movement of participants in space, or the introduction and manipulation of new objects (...) The temporal organization of activity: (...) Interaction Analysis examines the temporal organization of moment-to-moment, real-time interaction... In a given environment, when there is a string of "same" activities, questions that arise include: In what sense are the repetitive segments identical? How much variability is allowed before a sequence is no longer "the same" and becomes something else for participants? How is such segmentation achieved? (...) Turn Taking: an Interaction-Analytic turn-taking system has to take into account more than talk: it encompasses the whole range of behaviors through which people can "take a turn," that is, participate in an interactional exchange system. Not only "turns at talk" must be considered, but also "turns with bodies" and "turns with artifacts." (...) Participation structures: the extent to which co-present individuals share a common task orientation and attentional focus. Mutual availability and alignment become visible in "participation frameworks (...) Trouble and Repair: the occurrence of "trouble" in a particular activity sphere (...) we need to take into account not only the verbal aspects of repair, but also the ways in which participants draw on their bodily, artifactual, spatial and social resources to mend infractions of projected sequences. (...) The Spatial Organization of Activity: many variations are possible and different social groups have developed particular ways of being in each others' presence (...) Artifacts and Documents: One of our central interests lies in understanding what kinds of activities and interactions particular material objects engender and support and how these change as different artifacts and technologies are introduced. (...) it is important to track where people's eyes are, when and how gaze moves between objects, from persons to objects, and back again, sustaining or shifting the focus of attention as the salience of particular objects or displays changes.

Why do I blog this? I may use interaction analysis technique to better understand how players interpreted mutual location-awareness in a virtual reality game and in a pervasive game (namely catchbob). In my case, the interesting thing is to look at certain of the issues mentioned previously with regards to how knowing partners' location in space is used, interpreted and mean.

IFTF report about context-aware gaming

The Institute For The Future recently released a report about context-aware gaming, as part of their Technology Horizons program (which aims at a understanding technology and societal forces to identify and evaluate discontinuities and innovations in the next 3 to 10 years). It's called "All the World's a Game: The Future of Context-Aware Gaming" and the executive summary is on-line here.

This report defines context-aware gaming, describes the technological enablers for it, presents four future scenarios for what context-aware gaming might look like in coming decade and insights for those futures, and suggests opportunities that will emerge for organizations. A context-aware game uses physical and digital information about the current status of the player to shape how the game is played. The integration of physical and digital context moves the experience beyond what we've come to expect of games played in either the digital or physical worlds alone. While the contextual elements of today's context-aware games cover a fairly broad spectrum-from location to heart rate and other people's ideas-there are some fundamental similarities among games that integrate elements of the physical and digital world, all pointing to a new era of gaming that builds on the rich spaces and interactions of daily life. This shift will offer new channels for communication and marketing, build valuable skills in future workers, and pose challenges and opportunities for products, services, and brands when anything can and likely will be part of a game.

CSCW workshop about mobile multiplayer games

A workshop at CSCW 2006 that seems appealing to my research:

W3: Mobile Multiplayer Games: Designs, Studies and Reflections Back to Top

Matthew Chalmers, University of Glasgow Steve Benford, University of Nottingham

A number of researchers have used mobile multiplayer games either as a topic of study in itself or as a vehicle for more general investigations in computing, collaboration and information. Set within the context of increasing commercial significance of both games in general and mobile games in particular, this research has used the energy and ingenuity of players to test interfaces, infrastructure and design concepts, and to drive new technological developments. Commercial games are appearing that take advantage of commodity mobile phones’ burgeoning capabilities for interaction, awareness and collaboration. In-depth studies of mobile multiplayer games are also beginning to appear in greater numbers, and growing experience of design and use opens up new possibilities for conceptual work on the mixture of media, people and environments that constitute such games. This workshop’s aim is a broad view of this young research area, spanning and connecting system design, user studies and theoretical reflections.

Why do I blog this? because that's right on sport of what I doing: using video-games to inform CSCW research questions.

Posters for Ubicomp 2006

Good news, my poster “Investigating How Automatic Disclosure of Partners’ Location Influences Mobile Coordination” (Nova, N., Girardin, F., Dillenbourg, P.) has been accepted for Ubicomp 2006 in Orange County, CA. Fabien's poster too “Towards Design Strategies to Deal with Spatial Uncertainty in Location-Aware Systems” (Girardin, F., Nova, N., Blat, J.) .

Both are connected to the Catchbob project. The first one is a mixed-method analysis of socio-cognitive processes deployed in mobile coordination, and the influence of automatic disclosure of partners' location on them. The second is an account of the lessons learned and insights about how players reacted to technological uncertainties in the game.

In my paper, utomatic location awareness had detrimental effect on players' communication and strategy negotiation. But the game performance was not affected. One of the reviewer interestingly pointed me on this. I actually mention the fact that the location awareness of others can undermine collaboration.

The main comment I have on this work is the conclusion that automatic location awareness had detrimental effect on communication. That's interesting---isn't the objective of awareness technology exactly that of reducing the amount of explicit communcation? Why is it detrimental? Did participants perform more poorley in the game? Did they bond socially less? Did they incur in more misunderstandings? Please, specify.

Perhaps I should better discuss this issue, that already popped up here and there; participants did not perform more poorly but the coordination effectiveness was not the same.

Jaiku: real-time presence/location awareness on a mobile phone

Today's release in the world of presence/location-based mobile applications: Jaiku. It's basically a phone book that displays the real-time presence and location of your contacts.

We invented the term ‘rich presence’ to describe the many relevant things a phone knows about you. Rich presence on Jaiku includes an IM-style away line, your phone profile (ring volume, vibrate), location (country, city/region, neigborhood), Bluetooth devices around, upcoming calendar events, and the duration how long your phone has been idle.

You can view your contacts’ rich presence on jaiku.com, and once you have signed up, you can download a free client application for Nokia Series 60 Second Edition phones. We’ve also created some badges that let you display your rich presence on your blog.

Why do I blog this? because it's done by finnish friend Jyri Engestrom and his colleagues and also because it's quite relevant to my research about how mutual-location awareness impact group collaboration, from a socio-cognitive point of view. I am really intrigued by trying it out (mmh still have to find a nokia series 60 from their list) + seeing the potential connections with what I've studied.

Good Job Jyri!

Some references for the PhD dissertation

Some resources I used:

I organized the resources I want to use to build my theoretical framework, which would be mostly about coordination in joint activities:

- Big picture = "socially distributed cognitive system": Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the wild. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.

- Big picture = importance of context in cognition. Suchman, L. (1987). Plans and Situated Actions. Cambridge University Press

- of course there are some other references about framework like Activity Theory, Situated Cognition but I mainly focus on the one quoted above

- Big picture = computing trends + awareness: Dourish, P. (2005). Where The Action Is? The Foundations of Embodied Interaction. MIT Press: Cambridge.

- More specific references about mutual intelligibility/mutual awareness/common ground/coordination

Clark, H. (1996) Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Clark, H. H., & Brennan, S. E. (1991). Grounding in communication. In L. B. Resnick, R. M. Levine, & S. D. Teasley (Eds.). Perspectives on socially shared cognition (pp. 127-149). Washington, DC: APA.

Grice, H. P. 1975. "Logic and conversation." In Cole, P. and Morgan 1975 41–58.

Malone, T.W. / Crowston, K. (1994). The Interdisciplinary Study of Coordination. ACM Computing Surveys, Vol. 26 (1), pp. 87-119.

Smith, N. (1982) Mutual Knowledge, Academic Press.

Sperber, D. and Wilson, D. 1986/95: Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.

Salembier, P. & Zouinar, M. (2004) Intelligibilité mutuelle et contexte partagé. Inspirations conceptuelles et réductions technologiques, @CTIVITES, n°2, Vol. 1

(among others) (more later about awareness)

tabulaTouch

tabulaTouch, an interactive table project by Stefano Baraldi carried out at Natural Interaction. Slightly similar to Jeff Han's work, it's mostly because this kind of interface is trendy lately; so it's another occurence of such concept.

tabulaTouch can sense multiple points of contact on surfaces of different shape and size, where gestures can be recognized and become expressive actions.The first case of study has beel tabulaMaps, an application for the collaborative management of digital maps that features the intuitive roto-translation approach; we are planning to integrate it with GIS products.

We are also researching interesting media-handling templates that will bring the platform in public spaces, as well as ad-hoc environments, while iO Agency is engineering the hardware.

There is also a video on YouTube