Social network analysis of soccer map on the game field

Working on visualization of small groups coordination (playing a pervasive game), I ran across this network analysis and soccer webpage. I already blogged about it, but there seems to be new developement such as the mapping of the social network on the game field:

Why do I blog this? I am heading in another direction since my visualizations are less related to social network, and I removed the game field, I only kept the distance between players as an indicator. Anyway, what is interesting in this sort of soccer viz is the kind of question it allows to answer. In this case, it is mostly about Who was on the receiving end of the most passes? Who controlled Rapid’s play? Which players were involved in the most combination pass plays? Who played together with whom and who didn’t? and so on.

Representing alternative paths on a timeline

Thanks J*B for pointing me on this awesome timeline of timelines. One of the timelines that struck me was the chart by Charles Renouvier's that depicts "the theoretical relationship between the actual course of history and possible alternative paths":

Why do I blog this? I am working on a chapter of my dissertation about visualizing coordination over time. This is an interesting example of how to express divergence in timelines.

Mobile LBS failures to meet expectations

Via Fabien: Mobile LBS Market by C. Desiniotis, J. G. Markoulidakis from Vodafone, and J-Fr Gaillet from NAVTEQ. The paper describes the mobile market of location-based applications (as opposed to web-based LBS for instance). Overall, it interestingly describes a more down-to-earth vision of the present situation:

mobile LBS were widely predicted to be the most promising “killer applications” in wireless communications. Today, most of these expectations are still not met and a significant delay in the market forecast has incurred. (...) Some of the most important reasons responsible for this turn are summarized as follows: Poor tracking performance. Current deployed techniques only allow a few hundred meters to a few kilometers accuracy. For the time of writing, very few handsets with advanced location capabilities (e.g. A-GPS) are available in the market while they are offered at high prices. Inherent customer perception issues. Privacy concerns arise as users are uncomfortable of feeling being watched. Security and location-aware phobia (both consumer and operator) prevent the users from adopting LBS as their usual habits. Low throughput mobile networks. The unavailability of high capacity networks (that would enable the transfer of multimedia content) is also considered a preventive factor for the wide adoption of LBS. The 3G networks launch and commercial availability was delayed. Further to this, only recently WLAN have started to take up and provide Internet services to crowded hot spots. Significant investment required. The initial investment and the high deployment costs (in terms of network equipment and marketing campaigns) imposed to MNOs and service providers did not justify the LBS development and market launch (at most markets). User adoption requires time. Taking as example other successful services, the market should be well educated in order to adopt a new service concept. Therefore, the initial low take-up phase of LBS was unavoidable. Not well defined business models. Taking into account that the emerging LBS introduced new service concepts, the business rules that would govern the value chain were not clearly defined among the business entities. This caused confusion in the involved players discouraging thus new initiatives. Unfriendly User Interfaces. Inherent difficulties of mobile devices e.g. for entering queries and displaying results (images, 3D maps, etc.).

Why do I blog this? because it lists very pertinent factors regarding problems about the mobile LBS adoption. I am mostly interested in the "Unfriendly User Interfaces" and I think the authors are maybe a bit too usability-centered and forget that LBS suffer from more holistic "user experience" problems: the failure to be deployed in correspondence with people's context and practices. And I surely believe that 3D maps won't help in the short run.

The forecast described are also intriguing expectations (based on a survey: “LBS 2006 Temperature Meter”, LBS Insight Industry Survey, Berg Insight, April 2006): I am not a fan at all of survey (especially in this case: we don't have any ideas about how it has been conducted) but it's like a barometer that gives the zeitgeist of the industry. Even though I find it pretty okay for the navigation and fleet tracking, I am curious about what is behind the figures for the location-based entertainment/games or information services. So far it was mostly prototypes with a low user adoption.

Having mobile presence or not?

Location-awareness of others, also expressed as a way to afford "mobile presence" has been supported by various interfaces. I did an tentative review in my phd dissertation with some categories of the types of interfaces and metaphors that are used to do so. The coming of applications such as Jaiku, Twitter (not to mention Dodgeball, Loopt or Wayn...) are examples of such. While I am interested in this and acknowledge that some systems are better and more interesting than others (Jaiku being my favorite for its very simple interface and the way location is captured/displayed), some people expressed criticisms over them. For instance, Janne Jalkanen says that:

There's just not enough benefit in telling everyone where I are and what I am doing so that I would actively use it. I don't mind the presence on the IM networks, because that's a necessity of those networks - you can't connect unless people are online - but mobile presence is useless, because everyone is online all the time anyway. And wasn't the whole point of cell phones that you would be no longer tied to a particular place or time or situation: you can call anyone anyplace anytime (barring some social conventions against calling people in the night)? However, I know there are tightly knit groups which love these kinds of applications, because they are living 24/7 closely anyway. But I am not sure I even want to know where my friends are. I think it would just make me bitter to know that they are out partying, traveling or otherwise enjoying themselves...

On his side, Niko Nyman have other concerns:

These services suffer from Metcalfe’s Law. They’re only useful if your contacts are using them as well. (...) the effort-to-benefit ratio is not good. I could see there being a benefit of knowing whether a friend of mine is available for interruption, or seeing where my friends are going on a Saturday night. But this assumes that a friend posts updates 24/7 about what he’s doing and where, yet I need that information for maybe one hour a week, possibly less. Realizing this, the 24/7 posting just seems like too much effort.

Then there’s that aspect of just keeping tabs on my friends’ updates “for fun and entertainment”. It could be just me, but watching what others are doing, described in three words, sounds like the world’s most boring reality show.

Why do I blog this? even though I don't necessarily agree with those comments (for example "mobile presence is useless, because everyone is online all the time anyway"), they are relevant viewpoints to discuss the importance of location-awareness.

About AI and HCI.

Grudin, J. (2006). Timelines: Turing maturing: the separation of artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction, interactions, Volume 13, Number 5 (2006), Pages 54-57. This paper addresses an interesting topic to me, the connections between artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction, two fields that belongs to Computer Science. It tackles the problem of why HCI has not been closer to AI. The article goes through the different steps of AI history and describes some issues related to that.

AI's focus on future possibilities has relied heavily on government funding. CHI, focused on applications that are or could be in widespread use, has received support primarily from industry. This results in different priorities, methods, and assessment criteria. (...) With appropriately modest goals, machine learning is contributing to interaction design, often by focusing on specific user behaviors. Working AI applications strengthen the tie to HCI by requiring acceptable interfaces. Still, not many researchers contribute to both CHI and IUI, much less to CHI and mainstream AI venues. But AI researchers are acquiring basic HCI skills and HCI researchers employ AI techniques. Shared understanding may be indispensable for the next generation of researchers and system builders.

Why do I blog this? the article describes how AI and CHI are intertwined. This was of interest to me because my background is in cognitive sciences (psychology, lingusitics, AI, neuroscience) and I followed AI for a while. I have to admit that I left this aside in a past few years, rather focusing a lot on user experience research (I turned myself to ethnography and social sciences). I now feel the gap between the HCI I am interested in and AI issues.

Journal paper published

My first journal paper has been published: Collaboration in a multi-user game: impacts of an awareness tool on mutual modeling by N. Nova, T. Wehrle, J. Goslin, Y. Bourquin and P. Dillenbourg, Multimedia Tools and Applications (2006).

This paper presents an experimental research that focuses on collaboration in a multi-player game. The aim of the project is to study the cognitive impacts of awareness tools, i.e., artifacts that allow users of a collaborative system to be aware of what is going on in the joint virtual environment. The focus is on finding an effect on performance as well as on the representation an individual builds of what his partner knows, plans and intends to do (i.e., mutual modeling). We find that using awareness tools has a significant effect by improving task performance. However, the players who were provided with this tool did not show any improvement of their mutual modeling. Further analysis on contrasted groups revealed that there was an effect of the awareness tool on mutual modeling for players who spent a large amount of time using the tool.

Why do I blog this? this is the first brick of my phd research: investigating how location-awareness impact collaboration in a 3D computer game. It's good to have finally this paper published.

Terra Nova Symposium

There will be a State of Play/Terra Nova Symposium on December 1-2 in NYC. It seems to be of great interest to my research (even though writing my phd dissertation will prevent me from any trip overseas). I would be tremendously interested by:

2:15 p.m. – 3:45 p.m. Methodologies and Metrics As with any interdisciplinary field, the nature of the study of virtual worlds is intimately connected to the nature of the methodology used to study the worlds. Qualitative and quantitative methodologies of various stripes all have their role here, but what role? Ethnographies, case studies, historiographies and related methods allow us to detect and understand certain types of behavior. Empirical and quantitative methods are good at creating generalized insights about behavior, but comparatively lousy in generating insights of how and why and with what meaning. In this workshop we will explore when certain methods are better than others, whether these methods are inconsistent, and what we need to understand about methodologies of virtual world research in order to do interesting work.

Panelists: Nic Ducheneaut (PARC); Thomas Malaby (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee); Dmitri Williams (University of Illinois).

Why do I blog this? because I am doing game research, especially about user experiences matters 8using both quant and qual methodologies).

Mining electronic footprints

A very interesting piece in Science by John Bohannon called "Tracking People's Electronic Footprints" describes how "Digital records, faster computers, and a growing tool kit of mathematical models are now giving social scientists a boost in analytical power" for social sciences:

The mobile phone data set was one of a variety of new collections on display at the meeting--many of them based on the captured digital signatures of human interactions such as communication, travel, voting, and shopping. (...) Having data for individuals in an entire society allows questions to be asked that "traditional social scientists simply could not address." (...) For example: Are suicides contagious? (...) Others, such as Onnela, are studying the architecture of social webs. (...) Whether laws governing social groups can be found is an open question. But many social scientists are optimistic that such sets of real-world data will lead the way, and they are hungrily eyeing new sources (see sidebar on p. 915). "Great science can potentially come out of these efforts," says James Moody, a sociologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. But he and others agree that it will take more than "just mining the data" to learn what drives social phenomena. What's needed is an exponential boost in the power of social science theory and analysis. And this, says Granovetter, "is a very tall order."

Why do I blog this? because this IMO an important trend in social sciences, there is a lot to draw here but as I emphasized in bold, mining is only part of the job. And this reminds me, Marc Davis' discussion at Ubicomp, in which he was explaining how such quant methods could allow researchers to spot the right samples to study with qualitative studies. Besides, the article is full of pertinent examples ("evolving map of the flow of money", "Social scientists studying the collective behavior of terrorist").

Some would also be interested to know that "potential social science gold mine" Google will be more willing to allow scientific collaboration:

But although some computer-based companies such as Microsoft have eagerly embraced scientific collaboration, Google so far has not. "Google has a reputation … for being very negative to letting researchers in," says Richard Swedberg, a sociologist at Cornell University. This could soon change, a Google spokesperson has told Science.

HCI: the gap between research and practice

Parush, A. (2006): Bridge the gap: Toward a common ground: practice and research in HCI, interactionsVolume 13, Number 6 (2006), Pages 61-62.

This article addresses an important question: the one of the linkage between the study of behavioral, social, organizational, and other phenomena associated with interactive computing systems and design, evaluation, and/or implementation of such systems:

Imagine you are a practitioner asked to examine an application. If you find it ineffective, you'll need to propose what needs to be redesigned in the user interface to improve its effectiveness. You are then faced with the question of why it is ineffective. In other words, you have a question that requires relevant research findings that can inform you of why or why not things work in your application. Such understanding can drive better design decisions. (...) The ability to utilize and benefit from any of the research types depends on how a practitioner defines his practical problem as a research question. The abstraction of the question on different levels can lead one to search and find potentially beneficial research that can be applied in the practical arena.

In this context, the author defines research as "any systematic endeavor to find an answer to a practical or theoretical question" and he distinguished 4 tiers in HCI research: usability, comparison, guidelines and theory. These dimensions differs according to the "level of focus" ("ange from addressing questions focusing on a specific product, to comparing between products, to searching and examining guidelines for a family of products, through to general questions on behavioral, social, organizational, and other phenomena") and "extent of generalization". Depending on the research questions, various methodologies can be applied (and sometimes there is no need to further generalizations).

Research questions hence range from "Does this product work for the user?" to "Why does it work?". This relates to Jarvinen's taxonomy of research (that I blogged here) Why do I blog this? because that's a very recurrent problem in my field. My stance on this is to say that research (for instance the one I do for my phd work) aimed at giving insights to designers and providing concepts and tools to analyze existing systems.

User's perceptions of visual and arphid tags

User Perceptions on Mobile Interaction with Visual and RFID Tags by Sara Belt (University of Oulu, Finland), Dan Greenblatt, Jonna Häkkilä (Nokia Multimedia, Finland), Kaj Mäkelä (Nokia Research Center, Finland). This paper has been presented at the workshop "Mobile Interaction with the Real World (MIRW 2006)" at Mobile HCI 2006 in Espoo, Finland.

It describes a study of user perceptions on mobile interaction with visual and RFID tags, which seems to be a dismissed topic in HCI. The methodology is straightforward:

The study consisted of interviews, which were carried out in the city center of Oulu, Finland, in June 2006... held on a pedestrian mall next to a busy shopping area at the city center. Participants were chosen from those present on the street, to achieve a balance of male and female, with ages ranging from teenager to middle aged (50+) (...) During the interview, each participant was shown two posters, one employing an RFID tag and one a visual tag. Participants were first asked about their familiarity with a particular tag technology, and then given a brief easy-to-understand explanation of how the tag works (though they were not told how to interact with it). The participant was asked what kind of information they would expect to receive from the tag, and then given a properly-equipped mobile phone andemonstrate how they would interact with the tag,The study included 26 participants (11 female, 15 male). All study participants happened to own a mobile phone.

The paper summarizes the results, I am was interested by some of them:

it was found that the used tag technologies were generally unknown to the participants (...) RFID tags were known from security tags on clothing or compact discs. Despite of visual recognition of the tag, they were not aware of their usage in the current context. In general the participants were receptive and enthusiastic towards the presented information acquisition methods and came up with suggestions for novel applications. (...) It was apparent from the interviews that the participants had developed a diverse range of mental models governing what kind of information the tags could store, and how that information could be transferred to their mobile phone. For the visual tag, once it was established that it was just ink printed on the surface of the paper, most users deduced that you need to use the camera to access the information. Some users suggested that they actually needed to take a picture of the visual tag, while others just pointed the camera at the tag and waited for it to register automatically.

RFID tag: Given its decreased visibility (i.e. hidden behind the paper), and more advanced technology, it makes sense that the appropriate interaction technique with the RFID tags proved slightly more elusive for participants. When asked how they would interact with the RFID tag, responses included utilizing text messaging,the visual tags because they were cheaper to use and caused less waste. (...) One issue that people were unclear on is the distinction between the content of the tag and how the phone will actually utilize that content. When asked what information the tag may contain, many users correctly guessed it would contain band-related information, and some suggested specifically that the tag may contain an mp3 file. One user even asked how much data the RFID tag can hold. although the tag itself does not need to be visible.

Why do I blog this? this kind of study is very pertinent in the sense that it shows how potential users of this technology (puzzled by new usage such as this poster thing) can be perceived. When technology is situated and pervasive, the assumptions about how things work are more and more complex and diverse. Misconceptions are always interesting to look at and observe. This makes me think about the "naive/folk psychology": "the set of background assumptions, socially-conditioned prejudices and convictions that are implicit in our everyday descriptions of others' behavior and in our ascriptions of their mental states" (Wikipedia's definition). Designing pervasive computing applications may benefit from having a look at such naive psychology and how people attribute meaning/behavior/functionalities to these new technologies.

Jan Chipchase interview

Convivio has a very smart interview of Jan Chipchase (did by Fabio Sergio). Some excerpts I found interesting and pertinent regarding my work in human-centered design:

One of my assumptions during interviews as well as more ad-hoc conversations is that everyone has something interesting to say you just need to figure out what it is. More often than not the listener enters a conversation assuming the opposite, doesn’t take the time to properly hear what’s actually being said, or quite simply the listener doesn’t have the skills or cultural context to appreciate the subtleties of what is communicated. Everyone can reflect on their life experiences but that most people don’t choose to, and only a few choose to do so in a public forum. The issue is not whether we are ‘always on’, but what we are always on to. What is it that is noticed? How much time is spent in absorbing, or in reflection, or in applying what is learned? (...) One of the assumptions of contextual design processes is that two weeks, two days or even two hours spent in the context of whatever or whomever we are researching is better than none. (...) The perception of those “immersed experiences” also plays a role when it comes to communicating the research results. Its one thing to say that you conducted qualitative research in a 3rd tier city in northern China, it’s another to show the richness of that context through a video of an interview conducted in a two room family apartment. (...) Generally I prefer to go in the field with a specific interest area, for example Mobile TV or illiterate contact management, clear topics that can be researched and delivered. During the project-planning phase I try to ensure methodologies that allow us to collect data on related issues and I always leave enough time to scout new topics. The role of research is to explore the boundaries of what’s out there. It’s typical for some research to continue existing trajectories whilst others are at more of a tangent to current practices. (...) If there is frustration in the way research is enterpreted then much of the blame falls on the researcher: not taking the time to understand the design needs of the research team; an inability to clearly communicating ideas, and not making the effort to re-package research results to arising needs. (...) In deciding what methods to use we always start with the participants and their need to be comfortable with the research process. Given that we want to collect data from pretty much every context where the phone is used from when people get up to when they go to bed, and techniques such as wallet mapping can expose very sensitive data.

Why do I blog this? lots of insightful tips and insights there for people like me who are doing user experience research. There are also good practical issues (default accommodation is often a multi-national hotel chain?) ;)

Location-based applications, failures and a second wave of applications to be expected

Discussing with some friends lately about location-based applications, I tried to sort out my ideas about that. Anne for instance asked how what I meant by the fact that LBS failed (which I mentioned in my interview of Regine). My take on this could be exemplified by this project that Fabien sent me. This system supposedly use GPS with weather info and social networking system on Honda cars:

Honda car drivers in Japan will be able to receive in real time (updates every 10mn) the EXACT weather info at their present location or at their destination, thru the InterNavi Premium Club (InterNavi Weather). If you don’t weather conditions at your current location are useful on a GPS, you may find interesting to know the roads or districts that are flooded, or cut-off by the snow. The system can also tell you that. An exclamation mark on the map tells you there is a problem in a particular area.

Honda also offers a real SNS (Social Networking Service) which allows InterNavi Premium Club subscribers to provide some information about a precise location. For example, if you’ve had a bad experience in a restaurant (the food made you sick), you can mark the place on your GPS and let the other users know the tacos at the local Taco Bell gave you the runs

Obviously such an application combine different bricks such as GPS positioning, weather information flow and social network capabilities. In terms of location-based service, it also employs primitives elements like place-based annotations (the omnipresent rate the restaurant example), receiving location-based information (weather...). This leaves me kind of speechless in terms of the potential of LBS. I mean, ok navigation and related information are the most successful service regarding LBS. But it's just an individual service; when it comes to multi-user LBS applications, the large majority of systems that has been designed failed: there were not big acceptance by the users/markets.

Of course there were nice prototypes like place-based annotation systems (with diverse instantiations such as GeoNotes, Yellow Arrow, Urban Tapestries, Tejp... mobile or not... textual or not), buddy-finder applications (Dodgeball...), cool games (Uncle Roy... Mogi Mogi...). Of course there will big buy-outs like Dodgeball acquired by Google.

But so far, we haven't seen any big success over time. So on one side it's a failure but on the other side, I noticed in workshops and focus groups with people not from the field (and hence potential users) that these ideas of place-based annotations, buddy finders (or even shoes-googling) are now very common and seen as "great/awesome/expected" projects everybody would like to have and use. And this, even though studies (from the academia or companies) showed the contrary. So on the marketing side, these LBS ideas seems to be quite successful: those applications are well anchored in people's mind.

Consequently, there would be a story to write about "how LBS failed as a technology-driven product but how it was a success in the dissemination of such applications in people's mind"

Now, as a more positive note, it occurs to me that some more interesting ideas are starting to appear and a "second wave" of LBS is to be expected. For instance, Jaiku is more compelling to me because it's less disruptive. When you look at the user's activity: the information (about other's presence) is available and that's it, like moods/taglines in IM system. From the user's point of view, it's very different than what we have so far and what the designers promoted is more an idea of "rich presence" than a "yo cool I can now which of my friends are around"... Why do I blog this? I just finished writing my dissertation chapter about mutual location-awareness applications and how they are used. This made me think about some critical elements about them,

CatchBob visualization using Proce55ing

I started playing with processing today, a easy-to use open source programming language and environment targeted a people who want to program images. This language seems to offer an simple platform that can be used to visualize my CatchBob logfiles. The logfiles store all the players' interaction with some annotations the researcher (hmm myself) made about what information they exchanged. As I explained previously, I'd like to visualize the exchange of “coordination devices” among players: the mutually recognized information that would enables the teammates to choose the right actions to perform so that the common goal might be reached.

Along with Fabrice Hong, we did some prototypes using the replay tool he designed, but I also wanted to give a try with another tool and Processing seemed to be the perfect candidate to have more appealing viz. My first attempt is quite simple and depicts how 3 players exchanged messages during the 3 phases of the game; squares represent messages, links between square show occurences of dialogues.

Why do I blog this? I am trying tools, let's see if it's easy to use them, Processins seems to have easy XML import (my annotated logs are in XML).

NordiCHI Workshop highlights (day 1)

A kind of super-quick synthesis of the main highlights from our workshop at NordiCHI "Near Field Interactions the user-centered internet of things". This is not the final report and it only reflects what I found relevant with regards to my research practices.

Timo started by introducing the aim of the workshop. His point was to start with some examples of the industry view of the Internet of Things (arphid-like supplly chain management...) and stating that we would like to address the other side of the coin: from the user's viewpoint, how would this look like? He then listed some possible examples of such approach: blogjects, spimes, everyware or spychips. Actually, near-field interactions (now allowed by NFC technology) could be a way to meet this end: it brings new way to interact with technology raising important questions about near-fieldness and touch. Timo then quoted applications such as Thinglink (ulla-maaria mutanen), NFC presence (janne jalkanen), hovering, cookies (katherine albrecht), "pick, drag and drop" or spyware (people avoiding to be tracked by puttin copper lines in the pockets of their jeans). With this characteristics (near-fieldness and touch), and those technologies, the interface semantics might change leading to new way to bridge first and second life (physical/virtual environments). These tropes could create new affordances and the workshop was meant to explore that.

After each others' introduction, we had a 5-minute madness presentation (everybody presented his or her work in 5 minutes). This was followed by talks by some presenters; we actually picked up 5 persons with different research angles so that we could address various perspectives. All presenters deserved to be quoted for their work but I would only describe 3-4 highlights:

Chris Heathcote described how NFC is about what is here (near-field interaction) and he wondered about what happen when you're not here... how would I access to "my things far away"? what would be "actions on my things far away"? He presented some examples like Smart2Go which allowed to get an helicopter view starting from one's location to see what is around. The same goes with time: NFC is about the present but how can I access past interactions? Another concerns he had was that "a touch is a touch" so it's discrete but can we record other touch so that we make something out of it? (To which Timo added that he read how the Nintendo Wii will log every user interactions in the internal calendar). Actually, Chris listed the design decisions they made at Nokia when describing the NFC standard specifications.

Ben Cerveny explained how people won't understand these new affordances easily: or only if they are drawn to it step by step. That's what he explored in his recent work, by learning how people interact with objects and presenting clues of how interaction might takes places so that people know how to interact with them.

Ulla-Maaria talked about how to create "social affordances" for material objects (According to Gibson, affordances = material properties of an object that indicate the possibilities of interaction with it). So how could affordances could be socially constructed and shared? She is interested in how to do that but not in a pre-determined way, rather as a user-generated manner. Her point was that it would pertinent to add objects with a new property: personal relation to the object. For instance, it could be about tagging an objects "I made it/I own it/I like it/I want it...", so that it accumulates and it is hence organized around shared motives. Matt Biddulph then exemplified what a middleware for such a system would work.

Also with an interest about bottom-up approach, Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino focused on how to design for sustainability: how to do more with less. To her, personalization could be a solution for users to engage with high-tech devices and not trashing them two months after buying them. She showed how the "positive history" an user have with an object could be of interest: "I want to keep that things because I made it and it reflects my positive history with it": the design trop here = beyond product obsolescence, you keep an hold on it: use positive history to create precious objects. Some argued that we may not allow back-ups in that context (so that an object is really dead once data are lost). Alexandra also mentioned the concept of "Agathonic design": designing objects so that they improve over time.

Why do I blog this? these are just quick issues that has been raised on the first day of the workshop. Others things have been mentioned and we will describe them later on in the write-up.

Research as material for design

I was struck this morning by two parts of blogposts written by Anne Galloway. First on the Touch's project blog for which Anne now collaborate:

I’m a social researcher working at the intersections of technology, space and culture. (...) When Timo and I first started talking about the project, I was working through some ideas about the relationship between design and social science, and more specifically, about how social and cultural research could serve as materials for design. When I was offered the opportunity to put some of this thinking into practice, I simply couldn’t refuse!

Second, in her blog, about a talk she'll sooner give:

my objective wasn't to suggest abstract guidelines for the development of new technologies, but rather to articulate and explore specific arenas on-the-ground in which intervention and action are possible and productive

Why do I blog his? since I am interested in how research can inform/enrich/help/... design, I appreciated how Anne describes what she wants to do in those projects. That's also what my work aims at, even though my perspective is less about cultural anthropology and more related to psychology (situated , social and cognitive). The words she's using ("material", "articulate and explore specific arenas on-the-ground in which intervention and action are possible and productive") are compelling to me.

Navigation Assistance and Spatial Learning

Münzer, S. (2005): Navigation Assistance Can Prevent Spatial LearningPoster presented at the X. European Workshop on Imagery and Cognition (EWIC), St. Andrews, Scotland, Juni 2005. A very interesting research poster that shows the results of a study about pedestrian navigation assistance. It examines the consequences of navigation assistance for the acquisition of route and survey knowledge. 64 participants took a guided tour in a Zoo, each had a PDA, they were divided in 4 experimental conditions: with auditory cues ("turn left"), with auditory cues and context, with visual cues on the PDA (the path) or a fragmentary map of the zoo. Subjects were asked to respond the correct direction given a picture of an inter- section.

Route memory performancewas good in the experimental conditions in which navigation assistance was used (about 75 % -80 % correct). Route memory performance was nearly perfect in the map-based wayfinding condition. (...) navigation assistance can result in learning. In particular, navigation assistance users learned virtually nothing about the spatial configuration of the real environment, in contrast to map users. Neither modality of direction-giving (auditory vs. visual) nor presentation of the spatial context. (...) Everyday wayfinding activities as practiced by efficient map users may come close to this, while navigation assistance users as well as less skilled map users may mainly acquire route knowledge. For many users active guidance for the mental spatial transformations from allocentric to egocentric perspectives and vice versa would be desired in order to enhance spatial orientation knowledge. It is a challenge for intelligent human-computer interaction design to stimulate and support user‘s active spatial learning.

Why do I blog this? studying navigation assistance and its influence on some cognitive processes is interesting and slightly related to my research.

Traditions in HCI

Kuutti, K. Activity theory as a potential framework for Human-Computer Interaction research. (in Nardi, Bonnie A. ed.), Context and Consciousness: Activity Theory and Human-Computer Interaction. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1996, 17-44. Even though this paper is a bit old, I found interesting the part that discussed the "debate against the use of information processing psychology as the foundation of HCI":

Both the object and methods of the "mainstream" research has been questioned. Critics would like to add to the research object the users and their work tasks in real life. Methodologically the "Cartesian" ideal of cognitive science - continuing the use of experimental apparatus of laboratory-oriented classical psychology borrowed from natural sciences - has been seen unable to penetrate the human side of the interface. So now, in the midst of 1990s we have both the established, cognitive science - based "orthodoxy" and the emerging, although diverse "opposition".

And this gave rise to different traditions:

Thus we have three broad "traditions" in HCI research: the "technical" one, having roots already in the old "knob-and-dial" ergonomics, concentrating human perceptive abilities and motor skills and corresponding features of technical devices, the "conceptual" one that has formed the information processing psychology-based mainstream of HCI research, and the emerging new one searching new frameworks and theories in order to deal with the complexity.

Then the author describes how Activity Theory could enable to widen the spectrum and would be suitable as a pertinent underlying theory in CSCW. Why do I blog this? currently working on the theoretical chapter of my dissertation, I am trying to describe my framework which sits in between cogsci and broader theories (tough!).

A conceptual framework for location-based and mobile social applications

Jones, Q., Grandhi, S., Terveen, L., and Whittaker, S., (2004) "People-To-People-to-Geographical-Places: The P3 Framework for Location-Based Community Systems". Journal of Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 13 (4), pp. 249-282. The article describes an interesting conceptual framework of mobile social and location-based applications (already blogged somewhere here but I wanted to keep track of the whole model). Some excerpts:

Our proposal of P3-Systems – people-to-people-to-geographic-place – characterizes the class of systems as essentially community systems (people-to-people) that are tightly organized around and utilize the notion of geographic place. (...) The first dimension distinguishes People-Centered techniques from Place-Centered techniques.People-Centered techniques use location information to support interpersonal awareness, enable informal communication, and identify previously unknown affinities between users. Place-Centered techniques link virtual spaces to physical locations, using social information to aid place-based navigation and decision making. Both People-Centered and Place-Centered techniques can be subdivided, each along a different dimension. Some People-Centered techniques use absolute user locations, while others use relative location or proximity between users. The difference here is between applications that tell users where their buddies are and those that only tell users which buddies are close by. (...) The final dimension is an extension of the standard CSCW distinction between synchronous and asynchronous interaction.

Why do I blog this? because it slightly fits with the review of location-awareness applications I did when writing the chapter about that in my dissertation. I find relevant the dimensions described here: people/place, synchronous/asynchronous, absolute/relative location. However, I would add fourth dimension: active/inactive: with some systems the users are automatically aware of others' whereabouts and with other application they have to be more active (sending their position or asking to get the others').

Space and Place 10 years after

Dourish, P. 2006. Re-Space-ing Place: Place and Space Ten Years On. Proc. ACM Conf. Computer-Supported Cooperative Work CSCW 2006 (Banff, Alberta). This paper is a follow-up of the "Re-Place-ing Space: The Roles of Place and Space in Collaborative Systems" by Steve Harrison and Paul Dourish that has been published 10 years ago. The first paper advocated for a distinction between “place” and “space” that might serve as a basis for the understanding settings of collaborative work:

One common reading of the relationship between space and place as articulated by Harrison and Dourish has been to see space as a natural fact – a collection of properties that define the essential reality of settings of action – and place as a social product, a set of understanding that come about only after spaces have been encountered by individuals and groups.

What is interesting is that Dourish re-visits this previous paper with a different light: the increasing importance of mobile and ubiquitous technologies reshuffles the questions related to space and place in a considerable way (much more than with previous virtual space). At the same time, virtual environment are still around (think of MMORPG). The paper is very dense and full of important insights, I grasped here only few items related to my research:

While the 1996 paper pointed to the importance of understanding place socially, similar arguments can be applied to space. Indeed, where the conventional reading of place and space in CSCW has suggested that “place” arises only out of (and therefore both consequently and subsequently to “space”), I would suggest instead that place comes first. Our experience of the world is not an experience of mathematically derived uniformity and connectedness; what we experience are places, heterogeneous locales with local meaning, different extents, and individual properties. Space is something we can encounter only afterwards (...) What this suggests, then, is that we need to understand, first, something of the relationship between spatiality and practice, and, second, how multiple spatialities might intersect. This is particularly the case when we think not about “virtual” settings but rather about the ways in which wireless and other technologies might cause people to re-encounter everyday space. Introducing technology into these settings does not simply create new opportunities for sociality (the creation of places); rather, it transforms the opportunities for understanding the structure of those settings (developing spatialities)

Why do I blog this? in this paper, Dourish puts more emphasis on "space" rather than "place" (what he actually did in the 1996 paper). What I find interesting here is the way he is arguing against simplistic interpretations that has been done on the first paper. The idea of multiple spatialities is also very important to me given the kind of intersections we're more and more experiencing. And I am wondering about developing spatialities that would emerge first from new technologies (like adding a wifi layer at cityscale, no mentions to seams and flaws) and second by the intersection of those layers (gsm, wifi, past traces of earlier tech...).

About presence in VR

Being There Together and the Future of Connected Presence by Ralph Schroeder, Presence, Vol. 15, No. 4, Pages 438-454, 2006. The paper is about presence in virtual environment, a very broad topic. But I am less interested in presence per se than in some of the elements that contribute to this experience; namely mutual awareness:

This paper proposes a model for the different modalities of connected presence whereby research on shared virtual environments can be integrated with research on other new media - and vice versa. (...) People are either immersed in the physical world or in the virtual world, stepping in and out of these constantly, and sometimes participating in several such worlds, limited only by the fact that sensory attention needs to be focused on a limited set of people and features of the environment, which makes multiple simultaneous channels (communicative multitasking) difficult. Increasing communication means that we are continuously connected to others who are aware of our presence and copresence to a greater or lesser extent. If we think of the multiple devices for connected presence that we use constantly throughout the day, it is possible to see that we need to manage our accessibility, mutual awareness and focus of attention continuously with different affordances (or constraints and possibilities) in different technologies for mediated interaction.

Why do I blog this? because it's quite related with the first project of my phd thesis.