Pervasive Computing, space and infrastructures

Dourish, P. and Bell, G. (2007): The Infrastructure of Experience and the Experience of Infrastructure: Meaning and Structure in Everyday Encounters with Space, Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design. This paper interestingly explores the implications of computing getting off the desktop to the everyday world and how researchers are forced to "understand something of the spaces into which it moves, and the practical and cultural logics by which those spaces are organized". The authors made the point that space is rarely examined in computer system design, they only quote the examples of a spatial feature "separation" as a way to keep computational objects from each others (files kept in filespaces, the notion of workspace, etc.). Unlike this instrumental model of space, they rather consider spaces as populated and inhabited infrastructures. What this means is that spaces have a meaning to people in terms of the relationships to practical actions and interpretations. For instance, the presence and the activity of others can direct attention or guide movements. They quote diverse examples about this literature I had to explore in my PhD work.

It's very dense and hugely interesting so I will quote only the conclusion which efficiently describes the implications for pervasive computing:

"1) space is organized not just physically but culturally; cultural understandings provide a frame for encountering space as meaningful and coherent, and for relating it to human activities. Technological infrastructures are, inherently, given social and cultural interpretations and meanings; they render the spaces that they occupy ones that can be distinguished and categorized and understood through the same processes of collective categorization and classification that operate in other domains of social activity. Technological infrastructures and services, then, need to be understood as operating in this context.

architecture is all about boundaries and transitions and their intersection with human and social practice. (...) Everyday spaces are not simply spaces for working or meeting, but spaces for waiting, for reading, for loitering, for watching, for loving, for remembering, and more (McCullough, 2003.) The rhetoric of seamlessness is often opposed to the inherently fragmented nature of social and cultural encounters with spaces; we need to be able to understand how pervasive computing might support rather than erase these distinctions.

new technologies inherently cause people to re-encounter spaces. This isn’t a question of mediation, but rather one of simultaneous layering. One fascinating aspect of the move from the systems we built on the wired internet to those that we experience through wireless and mobile networks is that we are creating not a virtual but a thoroughly physical infrastructure, and we need to think about it as one that is interwoven with the existing physical structure of space (Dourish, 2001). The rhetoric of pervasive computing is one that traditionally ignores the ways in which that computing experience must be implemented on top of, and experience in and through, an existing landscape. (...) The spaces into which new technologies are deployed are not stable, not uniform, and not given. Technology can destabilize and transform these interactions, but will only every be one part of the mix."

Why do I blog this? because the paper gives a good overview of how pervasive computing relates to space and place issues (one of the research aspects I am interested in with regards to the user experience of these technologies). What I find relevant is here is the way these conclusions challenge existing developments and current discourse about such technologies.

There is a lot to draw here, for instance the way they question seamlessness is a recurring topic lately and I find it very important. Lots of people and organizations build things based on this assumption that the world is seamless and then they failed miserably.

Application-led research

The 2005 UbiApp Workshop: What Makes Good Application-Led Research? by Richard Sharp and Kasim Rehman, IEEE pervasive computing, Vol. 4, No. 3, July–Sept. 2005 The paper is a summary of a workshop that happened in 2005 at the Ubicomp conference. It deals with the concept of "application-led" research: projects that aim at designing, implementing, deploying and evaluating applications using an interdisciplinary approach (computer sciences, social sciences, ethnography, HCI). And it's motivated by current world's problems. This corresponds to the distinction made by Järvinen about social sciences: "Researches stressing utility of innovations" versus "Researches stressing what is reality" (understanding a behavior in psychology for instance). These 2 categories are of course different form the technology-led research which is interested in developing applications for a pure technical perspective. The point if this workshop was to discuss what are the criteria to judge this type of research.

A consensus people reached at this workshop was that "the ubiquitous computing community to be effective, it must engage in a combination of technology-led and application-led research". What is interesting is the discussion about whether a demonstrator or "proof of concept" is relevant:

"The problem, very often, is that there is no actual concept to be proven. Either the concept has already been proven viable (there really is no need to prove again that we can build a context-aware tour guide), is never in any doubt (we know we can build location-based services) or is not actually proved by the demonstrator (Nigel Davis)"

Some excerpts I found interesting for my research practice, they are rant-oriented but quite true:

"Attendees generally felt that too many ubiquitous computing projects focus on applications addressing trivial problems (turning lights on and off remotely, finding others with similar interests at conferences, and so on) (...) ubiquitous computing researchers often enjoy “relatively problem-free lives.” So, we should be keen to look beyond our own experiences when choosing application domains. For example, what opportunities exist to address problems in war zones or refugee camps? (...) ubiquitous computing researchers often reimplement applications from scratch, rather than sharing code and building on each other’s work. regard much of this implementation work as research. (PlaceLab is a good exception) (...) Researchers commonly evaluate ubiquitous computing applications solely in the context of small lab-scale user studies. (...) applications are often evaluated only against themselves (for example, “our participants said that they found this application useful”"

Why do I blog this? it's always interesting to read or hear about this sort of discussion in research. I have to admit that I have encountered lots of the problems described here, and as a researcher I sometimes do these mistakes (for instance in CatchBob it would have been good to run a longitudinal evaluation and less a field experiment, but it's a matter of time...). Also, it seems that human beings have a good tendency to reinvent the wheel (e.g. recreating new systems that do the same as others). This does not mean that nothing can be done and the paper concludes with 4 relevant propositions: choose problems and applications carefully, share technical infrastructures, evaluate applications in realistic settings and perform comparative evaluations.

Methodology for public pervasive computing

Public Pervasive Computing: Making the Invisible Visible by Jesper Kjeldskov, Aalborg University and Jeni Paay, IEEE Computer, Vol. 39, No. 9. (2006), pp. 60-65. Through the presentation of a project called "Just-for-Us" (a mobile web service that aims at adapting content to the user's physical and social context), the paper shows how the urban environment inspire researchers to explore the intersections between physical,social,and digital domains. The interesting point here is that it shows how system developers and HCI designers try to obtain a fundamental understanding of a physical space and how it impacts the social interactions taking place there prior to sketch any ideas about technologies. Achieving such a goal is often done by looking at architecural theorists such as Kevin Lynch or Christopher Alexander (maybe the most well-cited in computer sciences, it would be good to know why).

Their methodology is very intriguing:

"our aim was closer to Lynch and Alexander’s original purpose—analyzing and understanding a physical space, from the level of a city precinct down to each individually designed element—but in this case to inform digital rather than physical design. Guided by their analytical techniques, we systematically mapped Federation Square’s physical and informational properties. Several field visits resulted in a collection of 250 digital photos annotated with written observations of the relationship between architectural elements and the environment, as well as about interactions among people inhabiting the space. Using rapid ethnography content analysis and affinity diagramming, we extracted from the photographic data and notes a concise set of descriptive features for the overall city precincts as well as specific architectural elements. We then created a Lynchian map of Federation Square (...) To complement the architectural field study, we therefore studied three established social groups, each consisting of three young locals, during typical outings at Federation Square. An interviewer first talked with each group for 20 minutes about their socializing experiences and preferences and then, accompanied by a cameraman, followed the group to an area within Federation Square where they had arranged to spend some time together. Throughout the filmed visit, the group verbalized their actions as they moved around the space and responded to questions from the interviewer."

It enabled them to reveal four "disctricts" and found "detailed architectural features" that foster, challenge or hinder social interactions. Moreover, the "sociological field study" showed how people rely on cues embedded in the environment (landmarks, focal points...), how they determine what to do by relying on others' behavior and their experience.

Why do I blog this? Rather than the system produced, I was interested in how this was used: "These field studies generated insights that inspired us to create a computing system to facilitate new types of social interaction in urban settings", which is described in the system architecture as well as the user interface.

Jane McGonigal's vision for a new generation of network games

From Information Week about her Etech talk:

"The "ubiquitous games," or "alternate reality games," are part of an overall change in how technology is being evaluated. In the next five years, the criteria used for evaluating personal technology will shift from things like cost and features. Instead, people will evaluate technology based on whether it improves their quality of life and happiness, she said. (...) Ubiquitous games are designed to be integrated with real life, and improve quality of life, McGonigal said. They're designed to "intervene against the widespread public alienation and lack of engagement in the complex world of everyday life.""

Some examples:

"Two years ago, in a game called the Ministry of Reshelving. McGonigal asked people to reshelve copies of 1984 in bookstores and libraries, removing it from the fiction section and putting it into the current affairs, military history, or some other section that was, she said, more appropriate. The call went out on the Web, and the activities were recorded on the Flickr photo-sharing service. (...) Tombstone Holdem Poker. A Web site instructs players how to read tombstones as if they were playing cards. The last year in the date of death is the card value -- for example, 1945 is a 5. The shape of the tombstone determines the suit: A pointy-topped tombstone is a spade, rounded is a heart, flat is a diamond, and cross is clubs. Surprisingly, this turned out to be popular among government agencies charged with maintaining historical cemeteries, which are often unused, and therefore in constant jeopardy of being shut down by cost-cutting governments"

HCI in science-fiction

(via Mr. Hand), this compelling paper about Human Computer Interaction in Science Fiction Movies by Michael Schmitz have made my day. It essentially surveys different kinds of interaction designs in sci-fi movies ("Neuro technology", Identification, Speech recognition, Intelligent assistants / Avatars, Displays / Other I/O technologies) and show how they relate to existing technologies. Go read the paper to look at the examples (with pictures); What I found interesting here boils down to the implications, basically about the "key factors that determine or influence the design of HCI in movies":

"The probably most important aspect is the availability of special effects technologies - including the budget of a production to use those. (...) Current trends in IT research and products have of course as well an impact on the movie, since this will probably be the director’s background where his ideas will evolve from (...) the importance of the interaction technique or the device itself for the movie as a whole. The technology could be totally unimportant or play an important role for the plot (so called “plot device”), but most of the times technology is found inbetween and has to support the overall authenticity of the vision of a future world. (...) only more recent movies show attempts to design their HCI more carefully. (...) Others try to adapt technologies that were already available and improve them, but concepts of HCI research are normally not addressed. (...) The main reason might be that HCI is still a relatively young research area and slowly becoming more popular during the past decade. Another reason could also be that human centred, pervasive or ubiquitous computing could look very inconspicuous, whereas high-tech in movies should preferably appear more spectacular. "

(Picture from "Johnny Mnemonic")

Why do I blog this? because the intertwining relationships between HCI/ubicomp and sci-fi is of tremendous interest. The normative proximal future seems to be "a tendency towards conversational speech as an interface and 3 dimensional displays that work without head-mounted device". In the end, this might account for the fascination from the audience to think that the future really lays in this sort of stuff.

Also fascinating is the bolded quote in the blockquote above: the importance of spectacular interfaces in movies. How does this translate to design? Is is really a important criteria? (think about the discreet sms and the spectacular AIBO arf maybe I am a party pooper).

"Evaluations" in CHI

From Mice to Men – 24 years of Evaluation in CHI by Louise Barkhuus and Jennifer A. Rode, alt.chi 2007. The paper reports a comprehensive analysis of how practitioners and academics have employed evaluation in CHI through the past 24 years: what are the roles of evaluation? how it evolved? what type of subjects had been used? Concerning the evolution, it's good to read it in conjunction of The Evolution of Evaluation by Joseph Kaye and Phoebe Sengers: both shows how things evolve from experimental psychology then usability to more ethnographic methodologies. Some of the findings/conclusions:

"By taking a closer look at the number of subjects used in quantitative and qualitative evaluation respectively, we find an interesting trend. The median number of subjects in the quantitative empirical studies has decreased over time, and the median number of subjects in qualitative studies seems to have increased (...) Many traditional psychology experiments often use students as their main population. (...) Not surprisingly, HCI research followed suit. (...) Now that computers are more widespread and many applications are targeting a diverse set of people, students have too much computer savvy to be representative of the entire spectrum of novice to expert users. Moreover, them being in an educational setting and used to learning new things makes them unusual in terms of ability to learn. (...) many studies failed to use a gender-balanced sample. (...) The diversity of evaluation methods also comes into play with the decrease in papers presenting evaluation methods themselves. (...) the proportion of CHI work that discusses the role of evaluation is very small, which makes us question whether evaluation is in fact responding dynamically to the radical changes in technological innovation. (...) A positive trend that we observed was a recent increase in qualitative evaluation studies, studies often taking place over longer time and using multiple sets of inquiry methods. This is a trend that illustrates how evaluation is not just a validation tool. It provides us with indications of user appropriation and contextual fitting of the technology in question. (...) Ethnographies, for example, can provide insight into situated technology use and a social setting"

Why do I blog this? I like this kind of articles, they give an interesting overview of the research field, pointing at important elements (student-computer interactions, bad gender balance). Besides, given that I am doing "evaluation" research, it's important to understand the evolutions and how they are tackled or considered.

Physical space / Virtual space

Büscher, M., P. Mogensen and D. Shapiro (2001). Spaces of Practice. In Jarke, M., Rogers, Y. and Schmidt, K. (eds), Proc. ECSCW 2001: The Seventh European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Bonn, 16-20 September, Amsterdam: Kluwer Academic Press, pp. 139-158. Using a case study, the paper interestingly discusses why mimicking physical workspaces in digital environments is naive and inadequate.

"straightforward reproduction is not even the most appropriate ambition for a digital environment. This is in part because the physical environment has constraints that it may not be helpful to reproduce, and in part because the digital environment may be given different and helpful capacities that the physical environment cannot match."

Some example the authors gives relates to - the three-dimensional arrangement and manipulation of material in space is constrained by things such as gravity (" Documents etc. can only be placed on horizontal surfaces, or pinned to surfaces in other planes") and this is not always helpful. - elements from the environments cannot fall conveniently fall at hand - the material available have a both an ephemeral (" easily created and easily changed or destroyed") and persistent character ("things ‘stay where they are put’"). This can have advantages and drawbacks ("The result of this combination of ephemerality and persistence can easily be just a clutter in which materials are neither in a meaningful arrangement nor ‘in their proper place’).

So what the authors proposes is to build upon these problems to create new kinds of digital workspaces that also take advantages of sociality:

" sometimes with a ‘minimal’ form of digital workspace, which users need never move beyond if they do not wish to; sometimes by reintroducing emulated physical properties such as gravity, stickiness, momentum and friction; sometimes through new behaviours for objects such as returning to a default position, or animation; and sometimes through extended properties that can be given to digital spaces, such as parallel universes, folding and tunnelling."

Why do I blog this? working on a presentation about SL, virtual worlds and the importance of spatial metaphors. The paper gives some very relevant elements about this topic; to put it shortly the argument can also be read as "the 3D metaphor is good for certain things, bad for others". People interested in this can listen to the interview of Raph Koster by Adam Reuters (at South by Southwest Interactive festival)

"A theory of wondering why"

Attribution theory is a subdomain of social psychology that looks at how people explain social behavior. It's quite interesting and I had to deal with it in my PhD research but it might be pertinent to look at how it can be applied to nonhumans (i.e. objects). Let's look for instance at the "theory of wondering why". I am quoting Bertram Malle and Joshua Knobe (this paper):

"We propose that at least three conditions must be satisfied for people to wonder why an event occurred:

Awareness. For people to wonder why an event occurred, they must first be aware of the event (i.e., notice, observe, or think about it). Lack of awareness can be due either to limited epistemic access (e.g., people rarely know the thoughts and feelings of others) or to limited attention (e.g., people rarely pay attention to their own gestures).

Nonunderstanding. Once people are aware of an event, they wonder why it occurred only if they think that they do not already have an explanation. They must be in a state of nonunderstanding (also referred to as a "knowledge gap". Note that the condition of nonunderstanding is a subjective one--for people to wonder why, they must believe they lack an explanation (even if in fact they do have one). Likewise, if people believe they have an explanation (even if in fact they do not), they will not wonder why.

Relevance. Once people are aware of an event and think they do not understand why it occurred, they may or may not care about their own lack of understanding. They will care about it, and be motivated to wonder why, if their state of nonunderstanding challenges a current or enduring goal, in particular the need for control and prediction, for self- integrity, or for conceptual coherence."

Why do I blog this? gathering thoughts about how people project meaning on artifacts and interactions.

Julian Bleecker on WMMNA

There is a very dense and relevant interview of Julian Bleecker on WMMNA. The range of topics described there is amazing, some excerpts I like and can be taken as "seed content" of the near future laboratory:

"If the project of the digital age is to make everything that we have in "1st life" available in 2nd life, then I think we're on the wrong path. Laminating 1st life and 2nd life isn't about creating digital analogs. It's about elevating human experience in simple and profound ways. (...) Finding compelling ways to make 1st life legible and meaningful in 2nd life is probably one of the most fascinating, provocative experiments of the digital networked era. (...) to find experimental vectors that move towards a set of experiences and provocations that link 1st life and 2nd life so that there is a kind of effortless divide, so that it is possible to occupy both simultaneously. Not by having a connected phone so that you're wandering down a gorgeous, baroque alley in Vienna while staring at your mobile screen, trying to get Google Maps to figure out where you are — I imagine something much more translucent and less literal. (...) The kinds of experiments that will help us imagine and create a more habitable, playful world are far more provocative than what anyone trying to make their quarterly numbers will offer. These experiments must question conventional assumptions, find ways to encourage and appreciate whimsy, and recognize that pragmatism got us the world we have now. (...) The kinds of experiments I do are ones that tell stories about worlds that may be, or world's I wouldn't mind occupying myself, or cautionary stories about possible near futures that make me nervous."

And this leads Julian to describe a current project we have (Julian and I):

"turn critters — specifically, in this case, a pet dog — into interaction partners in digital worlds. We're imagining what a near-future would be like if the partners with whom we interacted were the other occupants of our world, such as pets. We're making a dog toy for a friend's one-eyed dog that will manipulate the actions of a Dwarf in World of Warcraft. So there you would have a somewhat playful provocation — pets playing in World of Warcraft. The experiment is less about actually creating a pet playable version of that very complex online game — we don't suppose for a minute that a dog can play World of Warcraft in the sense of pursuing the goals of the game or comprehending the through-line. But certainly a dog can control a WoW character to the same degree that they can control and manipulate a favorite rag-doll chew toy. This is a test balloon, floated to begin imagining-through-construction a context of participation between pets and humans in the new networked age."

Why do I blog this? well this not surprising I totally agree with Julian's criticisms and discourse about the hybridation of material/digital environment, 2nd lives and stuff like that; this is essentially things we discussed and we feel as important to push further. The pet dog in World of Warcraft is one of these experiments that might timely lead to presentations (and eventually a report). But, what is important before is maybe to make it more articulate, so let's wait a bit.

Infrastructures: appropriation, empowerment and reflection

Infrastructures and Their Discontents: Implications for Ubicomp by Scott D. Mainwaring, Michele F. Chang, and Ken Anderson, Ubicomp 2004, pp.418-432. The paper is an interesting demonstration of how infrastructures often taken for granted by "users" draws important questions, practices and problems that can be useful to reflect on in ubiquitous computing design.

"To approach the study of infrastructure from an ethnographic perspective, we conducted an exploratory field study of people for whom infrastructure had become visible due to some form of active engagement (rejecting, augmenting, or caretaking). From considering together individuals as disparate as homeschoolers, gated community dwellers, and voluntary simplicity advocates, a number of challenges and opportunities for ubicomp emerged in terms of appropriation, empowerment, and reflection. (...) seeks to understand how an infrastructure is perceived and conceived, emotionally understood, and interacted with from the first-person perspective of its users"

So, what emerged? I tried to summarize the main point and what it means for ubicomp:

"Appropriable infrastructures: Consumers use the infrastructure, but they don’t own it – they cannot appropriate it. (...) Using the infrastructure can sometimes involve actually inhabiting it (...) Ubicomp is often understood in terms of habitable infrastructures, be they smart homes, or urban districts overlaid by location-based services. (...) Purveyors of such ubicomp environments would be wise to market them in terms of life-style and identity, leveraging the allure of being able to plug into completely designed system and magically transform one-self, or at least reinforce desired aspects of one’s identity. (...) Empowering infrastructures: Ubicomp infrastructures have the potential to be similarly powerful, amplifying human capabilities through integrating many mechanisms of sensing, inferencing, and communicating. (...) Reliance on infrastructure, however, creates its own problems and concerns. Our study of discontents illustrates how empowerment in some dimensions can lead to at least perceived disempowerment in others. (...) The challenge, then, as we see it, is for ubicomp systems that seek not to automate or even augment/amplify human skills but to exercise and celebrate them, to encourage active engagement, and provide resources to individuals and communities for continuous change and exercise. Reflective infrastructures: Connecting to an infrastructure often brings with it the risk of noise. This noise may be in the form of nuisance, as when the infrastructure delivers the unwanted along with the wanted (...) calm ubicomp – even calm, secure, reliable, univocal ubicomp -- may not be sufficient, at least not in a context of concerns over temptation and self-doubt in one’s self-control."

Why do I blog this? There are very pertinent ideas here, needs more reflection about how to deepen different investigation regarding space, infrastructures and people's behavior. Also, I highlighted the part about non automating because it rings a bell with conclusion of my research and quite fit with the vision of design I try to propel.

The user experience of infrastructures

(picture taken in Lyon few weeks ago; in english: "eau" is water, and "gaz" is gas)

"ubiquitous computing technologies are ones through which people encounter and come to understand infrastructures. As Star notes, infrastructure is “sunk into” other technological systems and systems of practice. Mainwaring et al have noted that infrastructure may itself be a site for negotiating social roles or for marking social categories, but our concern here is more the ways in which infrastructure manifests itself as an aspect of experience. The presence or absence of infrastructure, or differences in its availability, becomes one of the ways in which spaces are understood and navigated. At conferences or in airports, the seats next to power outlets are in high demand, and in a wide range of settings, the strength of a cellular telephone signal becomes an important aspect of how space is assessed and used. As we develop new technologies that rely on physical but invisible infrastructures, we create new ways of understanding the structure of space"

Williams, A., Kabisch, E., and Dourish, P. (2005). From Interaction to Participation: Configuring Space through Embodied Interaction. In proceedings of the International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp 2005) (Tokyo, Japan, September 11-14), 287-304

On a different note, what about the visibility of infrastructures, how to make flows more explicit? (this is rather a not for myself).

"Hybrid World Lab" workshop

People interested in the hybridation between the material world and digital representations (virtual environments? second lives?) might check the Mediamatic workshop called Hybrid World Lab. The event is scheduled for May 7-11 in Amsterdam.

Mediamatic organizes a new workshop in which the participants develop prototypes for hybrid world media applications. Where the virtual world and the physical world used to be quite separated realms of reality, they are quickly becoming two faces of the same hybrid coin. This workshop investigates the increasingly intimate fusion of digital and physical space from the perspective of a media maker.

Some of the topics that will be investigated in this workshop are: Cultural application and impact of RFID technology, internet-of-things. Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) and ambient intelligence: services and applications that use chips embedded in household appliances and in public space. Locative media tools, car navigation systems, GPS tools, location sensitive mobile phones. The web as interface to the physical world: geotagging and mashupswith Google Maps & Google Earth. Games in hybrid space.

(Picture Fused Space - SKOR - Wachtmeister 2)

Why do I blog this? I am going to be a trainer/lecturer at that workshop, along with Timo and Matt Adams. Right on spot on some current near future laboratory explorations! It's going to be a good opportunity to gather some thoughts and work on them with people. People interested can have a lookhere and register there.

Field research values

Some elements that struck me as very pertinent in Jan Chipchase's slides (from a presentation called "Always-On: An Introduction to Design Research for Everyware" delivered at Ideo, Palo Alto, 5th March, 2007). The elements that interest me are the ones that concern the transfer from field research to design, a recurrent topic in my work.

"Where's the value?

Best case: inform and inspire the design process about what (and what not) to design, supported by rich, relevant real world examples, challenge given assumptions, guide strategy, spot weak signals, and generally raise awareness across the company on a particular topic. Generate IP.

However the data inherently doesn’t have value... unless we are constantly re-evaluating the information that people need. The value comes from the conversations that happen day, weeks, months or years after the research has taken place. How do you design a study so that data from that study can be accessed long after the study, and the team members have left? The value comes from this continuous re-evaluation of what we know.

Your report is just another piece of data that people need to consider. People are smart – give them the ammunition to be smarter. Your deliverables compete with: their assumptions, reports from other sources, pre-conceptions about your research methods. Pick holes in your own research results, and give clients the ammunition to make an informed choice.

Start by delivering what people expect you to deliver. Then figure out the value added - the stuff that happens around the edges of what you’re looking at."

Why do I blog this? some good elements to think about and definitely food for thoughts for current projects.

Habits of thoughts

The last chapter of "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" by Jane Jacobs offers a very thorough and pertinent description of what the author calls "habits of thoughts" for complex problem solving. In the context of this book about urban environment, Jacobs starts by describing "the kind of problem a city is", explaining that cities pose the same kind of problems than life sciences and that the "tactics to understanding both are similar". She then provides the reader with 3 propositions (I removed every reference to cities on purpose):

1) To think about processes: (...) objects can have radically different effects, depending upon the circumstances and contexts in which they exist (...) once one thinks about city process, it follows that one must think of catalysts of these processes, and this too is of the essence (...) these processes can be understood by anybody (...) 2) To work inductively, reasoning from particulars to the general, rather than the reverse: (...) inductive reasoning is just as important for identifying, understanding and constructively using the forces and processes that are relevant (...) too complex to be routine (...) always made up of interactions among unique combinations of particulars and there is no substitute for knowing the particulars

3) To seek for "unaverage" city clues involving very small quantities, which reveal the way larger and more "average" quantities are operating: (...) statistics almost tell nothing about how the quantities are working in systems or organized complexity. (...) To learn how things are working, we need pinpoint clues (...) The "unaverage" can be physical, economic, cultural, social (...) "unaverage" quantities are also important as analytical means - they are often the early announcers of the way various large quantities are behaving or failing to behave, in combination with each other.

Why do I blog this? thinking about qualitative aspects of research, this description resonates with diverse methodologies I use; it's definitely close to user experience analysis, as well as critical foresight methods.

My notes from Geoware2007

Yesterday, I attended Geoware 2007, some of my notes (not on every talks but quick highlights of the day).

Ed Parsons gave a good overview of what is meant by "Geoware", using the term "neogeography": when geography meets web2.0 and rocket science tech becomes everyday. To him, the most important changes in the last couple of years is the fact that big organizations (Yahoo, Google...) licensed information and made them available for free to the users (through a specific business model). Ed's point is that "location" could serve as a contextual filter for information stored in databases. A cardinal rule of geographer is "Everything happens somewhere": that shows the importance of geography. To Ed, the best services won't be about allowing a person to ask where he/she is but rather to offer a service based on where the person is: location is not an add-on, it's too difficult to query a map on a cell phone when biking in a city, there is a need to have another model: location should be implicit, less explicit. Porn adopted it already: see the website that propose you people in the vicinity! He also cited an example of a cell phone he'd like to have that would offer him choices depending on the context: for instance if he is stuck in a traffic jam on his way to the airport, he'd like to have a 2 options choice like "delay plane" and "call XX".

Lukas-Christian Fischer (Plazes) also offered few hints about their strategy. For them, presence is a powerful factor, an answer to establish a contact (prior to communication). It comes down to who did what where, who has done what where and who will be doing stuff where. The 3 functions of Plazes he described are (1) coordination (meeting up with real people), (2) collection (identity from where you've been), (3) exploration (finding new corners of the world). Plazes takes location as a social object, this statement has been interestingly thrown out by Sean Treadway and it quite reminds me of Jyri Engestrom's work (and after a quick chat with them, they referred to jyri...). Besides, they decribed how Plazes is the largest database of hot-spots. What I find good about Plazes (and also about Jaiku) is that the user is in control and that the system convey intentionality (that's the sort of things I discuss in my talk).

Jeremy Irish presented elements about geocaching ("mark a location and go find it"). From this simple point, things evolve to more complex situations such as: waymarking that allows to attach data to a point, build communities around unique and useful locations in the world, encourages participants to use GPS units to mark locations and take photos, locations are searchable by category. But, as he said, people want to make puzzle caches more interactive: WHEREiGO: free tools for creating media-rich GPS experiences, instead of marking a point, you create a zone in a region: real-world adventure game, tour guides. His point is to turn a point into an experience. His conclusion: "it's time to go outside and play".

Another great talk has been given by Carlo Ratti (MIT Senseable city). Carlo presented different projects they carry out at his lab (RealTime Rome, Mobile Landscape Graz, iSPOTs, iFIND and Wikicity). His lab's mission is rethinking in a creative way the interface between people, mobile technology and the city. He nicely referred to situationism (homo ludens!) by saying that what they keep from this area is the notion of "environment as flows and less built space". The project he mentioned are mostly based on how to represent cities using various traces (such as mobile phone calls). In the last one (wikicity), the point if get these data back to citizens (a sort of "feedback control system"), One of the project that is of interest to me is the AC Milan traces analysis:

"Information about the movement of soccer players on the field during a match can be useful for strategic and physiologic analysis, directed at improving the performance of the players and that of the team. The use of electronic sensing techniques – mostly computer vision – for automatically tracking the players has been an area of active research for many years. An optimum solution, however, has yet to be found. The problem is challenging from a technical point of view because the sensing area is large compared to the moving actors (players), the actors move fast and occlusion and congestion occur frequently."

Less related to my work and the stuff I like, there was a talk by Morten Kromann Larsen (TNS-Gallup) in which he explained how billboard companies (JCDecaux and Clearchannel) assess the exposure of people to commercial in the streets. The talk was a comparison between "GIS versus GPS": 1) GIS: people are contacted and interviewed by the phone and they have (at the same time) to go online to draw their daily path in the city on a map. It's basically a recollection based on people's memory. 2) GPS: people are given a GPS device they put in heir pocket while wandering around in the city (they only take 50 persons because the cost is higher). There is hence an automatic collection of the movement in space. Morten then showed slides depicting the results: when comparing the 2 methods, they found the same pattern of behavior: there is a 82% overlap. So they recommend the GIS method as a favored approach, since it's easier and less demanding from respondents. I am less interested by the purpose of the trials, but rather by what they guy was saying: how people are good to remember their path is space (especially when you have a person on the phone helping them with cues, landmarks, reminding them their activities...).

A quite good event and a superb organization. Good chat with lots of people!

Talk At Geoware

Here are the slides (3.32Mb) of my talk at Geoware called "The user experience of location-awareness", a very thoughtful event I've been invited to as a speaker by the Innovation Lab. Thanks Ander Morgensen, Christian Lausten and Peder Burgaard for the gig! The talk was basically a discussion about how multi-user location-aware applications have troubles reaching a more mature market. Starting from s-curves showing side-by-side the evolution of navigation systems (Garmin, TomTom) and location-aware apps, I described how the former are now well established and used by a large number of persons, whereas the latter still has trouble finding its market. The s-curves depicted different "waves" of locative systems, and stated how we're in a sorta disillusion phase (as represented on the Gartner Hype Cycle). This led me to show different quotes form trend reports that keeps postponing this ideal proximal future of powerful mososo.

Based on my phd research, talks and side experiences, my point was to show 6 problems that makes these applications developed by academic labs or start-ups failed: 1) Privacy issues 2) Lack of critical mass of users (cluster effect) 3) The belief in robust, seamless and perfect infrastructures 4) Bad user interfaces (on mobile devices, plus the fact that maps are difficult to read anyway) 5) Bad user experience (not conveying intentions, lack of granularity, mismatch between people's representation) 6) Bad integration in people's practices and context

Playing the party pooper so far, I tried to not dismiss location-awareness but rather bring 5 relevant avenues that we can take as opportunities (and not direct solutions to the problem cited before): 1) Assist, not automate: in terms of privacy what people do not like is the feeling to be seen without the ability to see (Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon) as Michel Foucault argued. BUT people are OK to disclose things when they can control what they see and when they can see others (the masquerade). 2) Seamful design (Matthew Chalmers): reveal the “seams” (limits, boundaries, uncertainties), provide opportunities to show the imperfections, can be used a trick to lie. 3) Beyond GIS information (Kevin Slavin): “Location is more than GIS information” 4) History matters: the asynchronous character of location-awareness have an added value and can be used to create conversations AFTER the events (comments). 5) Beyond humans: we can think about applications for other beings such as animals (blogging pigeons) or to create new connections between the physical environments AND the digital worlds

The picture shows the conference venue, ARoS, the Arhus Kunstmuseum.

Phd defended!

Slides from the defense (3.3Mb):

Everything went well, still have to include remarks and ideas in the dissertation, I'll post it later. It seems that I am a Doctor in Computer Sciences.

Space, cognition, interaction 3: person and artifacts relationships

This is the third blogpost of a serie that concerns my thoughts about the topic “Space, cognition, interaction” that I address in my dissertation . Step 3 is about the person and artifacts relationships (see step 1 and step 2). Another topic the literature about spatiality addresses is the relationship between people and artifacts located in the vicinity of the participants of a social interaction. Indeed, when a speaker talks about an object to his hearer, they are involved in a collaborative process termed referential communication (Krauss and Weinheimer, 1966). As a matter of fact, the practice of pointing, looking, touching or gesturing to indicate a nearby object mentioned in conversation is essential to human conversation; it is called deictic reference. This spatial knowledge can be used for mutual spatial orientation. Schober (1993) points out that it is easier to build mutual orientations toward a physical space (versus a shared conceptual perspective) because the addressee’s point of view is more easily identified in the physical world. There has been very little research focusing on referential communication in virtual space. Computer approach, like “What You See Is What I See” has been designed in order to support this process but studies show that such tools are not as powerful as deictic hand gestures (Newlands et al., 2002). The authors found fewer deictic acts in computer-mediated interaction; a possible reason for that can be the lack of adequate tools. Researchers, for example, attested that it is actually more difficult to see where avatars are pointing in a 3D virtual environment compared to the real world (Fraser et al., 2000). Consequently, if we think about the role of mutual location-awareness (MLA), knowing the location of others can allow one to make sense of deictic acts and promote referential communication. By projecting oneself to the known partner’s location, one can infer meaning from the deictic references.

Moreover, how the spatial environment is used in abstract cognition is a fundamental issue addressed in cognitive psychology (Kirsh and Maglio, 1994; Kirsh, 1995). These authors explain to what extent space between objects and people is used as a resource in problem solving. According to them, actions like pointing, writing things down, manipulating artifacts or arranging the positions and orientations of nearly objects are examples of how people encode the state of a process or simplify perception. Studies in virtual environments have shown similar results concerning the use of tools in space (Biocca et al., 2001). Biocca explores how people organized virtual tools in an augmented environment. Users had to repair a piece of equipment in a virtual environment. The way they used virtual tools showed patterns of simplifying perception and object manipulation (for instance by placing reference material like clipboard well within the visual field on their right). MLA should then be seen as another set of resources to augment cognitive processes such as memorization or problem solving.

What is also interesting with regard to human activity is the notion of social navigation (Dourish and Chalmers, 1994), which refers to situations in which a user’s navigation through an information space is guided and structured by the activities of others within that space. Social navigation can be defined as “navigation towards a cluster of people or navigation because other people have looked at something” (Munro et al., 1999, p. 3). This refers to the notion of “social space” inferred from the traces left in the environment (virtual orphysical) by people’s activity. As a matter of fact, we all leave signals insocial space that can be decoded by others as traces of a previous use: fingerprints, crowds, footsteps, graffiti, annotations and so on. From these cues, other persons can infer powerful things: others were here, this was popular, where can I find something, and so forth. This process takes place in both virtual and physical settings through recommender/voting systems or collaborative filtering. The most known example of such filtering is the Amazon’s recommendation system, which gives us pointers on books that may interest us based on others’ previous purchases.

References:

Biocca, F., Tang, A., Lamas, D., Gregg, J., Gai, P., & Brady, R. (2001): How do users organize virtual tools around their body in immersive virtual and augmented reality environments? Technical Report: Media Interface and Network Design Laboratories, East Lansing, MI.

Dourish, P. & Chalmers, M., (1994): Running Out of Space: Models of Information Navigation. In Proceedings of (HCI'94): Human Computer Interaction, Glasgow. New York: ACM Press.

Fraser, M., T. Glover, I. Vaghi, S. Benford, C. Greenhalgh, J. Hindmarsh and C. Heath (2000): Revealing the Realities of Collaborative Virtual Reality. Collaborative Virtual Environments. In Proceedings of Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVE 2000), San Francisco, CA, New York: ACM, pp. 29-37.

Kirsh, D., & Maglio, P. (1994). On distinguish between epistemic from pragmatic action. Cognitive Science, 18, 513-549.

Kirsh, D. (1995). The Intelligent Use of Space. Artificial Intelligence, 73(1-2), 31-68.

Krauss, R. M., & Weinheimer, S. (1966). Concurrent feedback, confirmation, and the encoding of referents in verbal communication. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4(3), 343-346.

Munro, A.J., Höök, K., & Benyon, D. (1999). Footprints in the Snow. In A. Munro, K. Höök and D. Benyon (Eds.) Social Navigation of Information Space (pp.1-14). London: Springer.

Newlands, A., Anderson, A., Thomson, A., & Dickson N. (2002). Using Speech Related Gestures to Aid Referential Communication in Face-to-face and Computer-Supported Collaborative Work. In Proceedings of the First congress of the International Society for Gesture Studies, University of Texas at Austin, June 5 - 8, 2002.

Schober, M. F. (1993). Spatial perspective-taking in conversation. Cognition, 47, 1-24.

Space, cognition, interaction 2: Person to person relationship in space

This is the second blogpost of a serie that concerns my thoughts about the topic “Space, cognition, interaction” that I address in my dissertation . Step 2 is about the person to person relationship in space (see step 1). A large amount of research about how spatiality shapes one’s behavior focused on co-present settings since it is the most recurrent situation of our lives. The best-known example of how space structures social interaction is proxemics: the distance between people is indeed a marker that expresses the kind of interaction that occurs, and reveals the social relationships between the interactants (Hall, 1966). Depending on the distance, Hall proposed four kinds of spheres (intimate, personal, social and public) that each affords different types of interactions. His point was also to show how theses interactions are culturally dependent and how distance constrains the types of interactions that are likely to occur. The perception of the “others” in space thus communicates to participants as well as to observers, the nature of the relationships between the interactants and their activity. Studies of 3D worlds show that proxemics are maintained in virtual environments (Jeffrey and Mark, 1998; Krikorian et al. 2000). These authors found that, even in virtual worlds, a certain social distance is kept between participants’ avatars. They noticed how spatial invasions produced anxiety-arousing behavior (like verbal responses, discomfort and overt signs of stress) with attempts to re-establish a preferred physical distance similar to the distance obverted in the physical world.

(picture courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photograph Division, FSA-OWI Collection taken as an example of how people will maintain differing degrees of distance depending on the social setting and their cultural backgrounds)

Proximity has also proved to improve various processes like conversation initiation. Communication is easier in physical settings than in mediated contexts. The physical environment increases the frequency of meetings, the likelihood of chance encounters and therefore community membership and group awareness thanks to informal conversations triggered by repeated encounters (Kraut et al., 2002). Furthermore, distance between people has an important influence on friendship formation, persuasion and perceived expertise (Latané, 1981). Latane shows that people are more likely to deceive, be less persuaded by and initially cooperate less with someone they believe to be distant.

References:

Hall, E.T. (1966). The Hidden Dimension: Man’s Use of Space in Public and Private. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.

Jeffrey, P., & Mark, G. (1998). Constructing Social Spaces in Virtual Environments: A Study of Navigation and Interaction. In K. Höök, A. Munro, D. Benyon, (Eds.) Personalized and Social Navigation in Information Space, March 16-17, 1998, Stockholm (SICS Technical Report T98:02) 1998) , Stockholm: Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS), pp. 24-38.

Krikorian, D.H., Lee, J.S., Makana Chock T., & Harms, C. (2000). Isn't That Spatial?: Distance and Communication in a 2-D Virtual Environment. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 5(4).

Kraut, R. E., Fussell, S. R., Brennan, S. E., & Siegel, J. (2002). Understanding effects of proximity on collaboration: Implications for technologies to support remote collaborative work. In P. Hinds & S. Kiesler (Eds.) Distributed Work (pp.137-162), Cambridge: MA: MIT Press.

Latané, B. (1981). The psychology of social impact. American Psychologist, 36(4), 343-356.

Space, cognition, interaction 1: space/place

This is the first blogpost of a serie that concerns my thoughts about the topic "Space, cognition, interaction" that I address in my dissertation. This issue has been tackled by various disciplines ranging from environmental psychology to sociology, architecture and human-computer interaction when technology is involved. This blogpost serie summarizes some important notions and results arising from these fields. In each of the post I try to describe how this is important to the the object of my research: the location awareness of others. Step 1 is about the differentiation between "space" and "place". A recurrent discussion concerning spatiality targets the differences between the concepts of “space” and “place”. Harrison and Dourish (1996) indeed advocated for talking about place rather than space. They claim that even though we are located in space, people act in places. This difference opposes space defined as a range of x and y coordinates or latitude/longitude to the naming of places such as “home” or “café”. By building up a history of experiences, space becomes a “place” with a significance and utility; a place affords a certain type of activity because it provides the cues that frame participants’ behavior. For instance, a virtual room labeled as “bar” or “office” will trigger different interactions. In a sense, it is the group’s understanding of how the space should be used that transform it into a place. Space is turned into place by including the social meanings of action, the cultural norms as well as the group’s cultural understanding of the objects and the participants located in a given space. However, as Dourish recently claimed, this distinction is currently of particular interest since technologies pervade the spatial environment (Dourish, 2006). This inevitably leads to the intersection of multiple spatialities or the overlay of different “virtual places” in one space. Thus, location-awareness of others also relates to how people make sense of a specific location: depending on the way the location of others is described, it could lead to different inferences. For example, knowing that a friend is at the “library” (place) frames the possible inferences about what the friend might be doing there.

Additionally, partitioning activities is another social function supported by spatiality (Harrison and Dourish, 1996). For example, in a hospital, corridors are meant to be walked in to go to waiting rooms where people wait before meeting doctors who operatein operating rooms. Research concerning virtual places also claims that a virtual room can define a particular domain of interaction (Benford et al. 1993). Chat rooms, for example, are used to support different tasks in collaborative learning: a room for teleconferences and a room for class meetings (Haynes, 1998). Different tasks correspond to virtual locations: a room for meetings related to a project, office rooms related to brainstorm, public spaces related to shopping and so on. Fitzpatrick et al. (1996) found that structuring the workspace into different areas enables to switch between tasks, augments group awareness and provides a sense of place to the users as in the physical world. Since work partitioning can be supported by space, knowing others’ whereabouts is an efficient way to make inferences about the division of labor in a group. Once we know that a person is in a particular place, we can infer that he or she is doing something (as we saw in the distinction space/place) and how this may contribute to the joint activity.

References: Benford, S.D., Bullock, A.N., Cook, N.L., Harvey, P., Ingram, R.J., & Lee, O. (1993). From Rooms to Cyberspace: Models of Interaction in Large Virtual Computer Spaces. Interacting With Computers, 5(2), 217-237.

Dourish, P. (2006). Re-Space-ing Place: Place and Space Ten Years On. In Proceedings of CSCW’2006: ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (pp.299-308), Banff, Alberta.

Fitzpatrick, G., Kaplan, S. M. Mansfield, T. (1996). Physical spaces, virtual places and social worlds: A study of work in the virtual.. In Q. Jones, and C. Halverson, (Eds.) Proceedings of CSCW'96: ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (pp.334-343), Boston, MA.

Harrison, S., & Dourish, P. (1996). Re-Place-ing Space: The Roles of Place and Space in Collaborative Systems. In Q. Jones, and C. Halverson, (Eds) Proceedings of CSCW'96: ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (pp.67-76), Cambridge MA, ACM Press.

Haynes, C. (1998). Help ! There’s a MOO in This Class. In C. Haynes, and J.R. Holmevik, (Ed.s) High Wired: On the Design, Use, and Theory of Educational Moos (pp.161-176). Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.