Why studying ubicomp applications?

What to expect from studies about ubiquitous computing applications is a topic I dealt with the other day in my presentation. Reading "Control, Deception, and Communication: Evaluating the Deployment of a Location-Enhanced Messaging Service" by Iachello et al., 2005, I found this very interesting quote:

"the results of our study required us to step back and reconsider our assumptions, which were based on our own common sense considerations and a straightforward interpretation of Weiser’s idea of calm technology"

Why do I blog this? although the studies we're carrying out in HCI lab are often about "evaluating" prototypes, I find important to have another goal on the agenda: reconsidering assumptions, criticizing normative vision of the future, and also investigating the social/cognitive/spatial effects of technologies that pervade the environment.

My talk at the seminar in Marseille

Here (.pdf) are the slides I used this morning in my talk at the Villes2.0 seminar.

This talk was about showing which kind of topics I find interesting in my work about the relationships between technologies and space/place (as a researcher in human-computer interaction). Roughly speaking it's: understanding of socio-cognitive effects of technologies, visualizations of technology usage in space, explicitation of invisible phenomenon, hybridization of space, etc.

Then I narrowed down the focus on the CatchBob! project to show the need to adopt new methods in order to conduct meaningful studies about location-based applications beyond lab experiments. As a matter of fact, for the audience, describing the use of ethnographical techniques and other mixed methodologies (qualitative - quantitative) as we did in the project was new. Presenting some results form CatchBob! allowed me to describe how it helped and how we dealt with the complexity of field experiments.

My point in the conclusion was to show that the sort of study like CatchBob or other ethnographical (or mixed methods) investigation of ubicomp technologies was useful to explore the situatedness, particularities, detailed problems of innovation. The underlying point here is that all this enable to criticize normative visions of the future that lots of people take for granted (seamless mobile social software, intelligent fridge, etc.) due to various reasons (pop culture...).

Seminar Villes2.0 in Marseille

Today was in Marseille (France) for a multi-disciplinary seminar about "urban research" and IT that gathered social scientists, companies (transportation systems) and managers form the public sector (city council, region, the "State", funding bodies) led by french think tank FING. Discussions were mostly about how to work together, how each of us experienced it and what are the role of the partners. I haven't really taken notes, rather some thoughts that I was interested in.

The assumptions The assumption here was to if the purpose is to develop urban innovation (develop applications, systems... invent the future of urban services somehow), it's not possible to do it alone but there's a need to act as a group. So if a research project about developing certain systems want to be efficient, it should involve all these people. In addition, there is also a need to be accepted. For instance people from a city council dismiss research about certain ubiquitous computing applications because the project did not involve "urban" people: "Did you work with transportation companies? Did you have a partnership with citizen's association? No hmmm okay so your project is interesting but far from reality".

Incentive to work with each others? That said, the problem is that all the potential actors (researchers, city councils, engineers, designers, funders, etc) have different ways to apprehend reality and are evaluated differently. Alain D'Iribarne for example mentioned that researchers need to publish, politician to be (re-)elected and companies to have ROI or to have a proper time-to-market R&D (as wanted by the french state who gives tax rebate). What happen is that in the last 20 years these criteria have been strengthened and led each group of actor to follow their own path. This is clearly what I feel as a research in which the only incentive I have to work with some companies is curiosity to work on specific situations/problems (and funding of course). What is left after this categorization is that some people act as bricoleurs and try to do research that fit with companies or city councils' interests... but they have their own academic niche or stop doing what is thought as "pure" academic research.

Classic debate All of this lead to the classic debate about the role of researchers in our modern societies: who should pick up the research topics? why funding that? A public company complained about the fact that they haven't found any interesting new theories that would change the way they act as a transportation structure in the last 20 years (as opposed as the person said, to "big science" who can sinking their teeth into big physics theories...) I don't know if this is a fact or an opinion (I'm prudent but IMHO it's an opinion) but it shows that there is certainly a problem here.

Of course, companies (public or private) brought to the table the fact that they need a more finalized research both about the content (research questions) and the method ("we don't want 120 pages report"). There is indeed a growing need to have researchers working with company people and implement their ideas, "not just throw them in the air".

Different rhythms A side topic was also the importance of time. It has been said that railways or metro are build for a certain amount of time (100 years for railways, 40-50 years for metro), given the investment. One of the attendant was concerned about how to articulate this with technologies that change every 2-3 years. How to predict that you may need to build infrastructure (like metro tunnel and station) that are big enough to be modified with new technologies? Where can you put electrical infrastructures, GSM and Wifi boxes in a 100 years-old metro station when it's impossible to add any new artifacts because it's so packed that fear to fall on the railways?

What did I learn? Of course this debate about what research should be is a bit cliché but we really have to deal with it. I can feel it in my own professional work: how to balance the need to have multi/inter/trans-disciplinary work required by ubiquitous computing and the current system? That is to say, more pragmatically, how to survive as a researcher who need to publish but might break the "rules" of publication by adopting new methods, concepts, paradigms, etc.?

Further out, this leads me to think that there is a strong need for certain stakeholders (city coucils, regions, public companies, private companies) to conduct projects at the crossroads of research and consulting. Hence a need, perhaps, of new structure closer to think tanks than consultancies. This definitely resonates with all the shell I belong to (simpliquity, near future laboratory, liftlabs).

Accuracy versus Deployment of location-sensing technologies

A very relevant map that shows the diversity of location-sensing technologies.

"Each box’s horizontal span shows the range of accuracies the technology covers; the bottom boundary represents current deployment, while the top boundary shows predicted deployment over the next several years"

Taken from Hazas, M., Scott, J., and Krumm, J. Location-aware computing comes of age. IEEE Computer 37, 2 (2004), 95–97

Why do I blog this? some good material for a paper I am writing about location-awareness.

Thoughts after the lab retreat

Today was the lab retreat day, a sort-of get-together moment in which we discussed the lab strategy, on-going research projects + pending projects. Given that I work here for one month, it was a good introduction for me to the lab mission as well as what people are doing there. The Media and Design lab's focus, broadly speaking, is the reinvention of space because of digitalization. Being part of both a computer science (Human-Computer Interaction) and architecture department makes it very multi-disciplinary. The research staff is indeed composed of researchers with interdisciplinary backgrounds, including architecture, robotics, electric engineering, information visualization, cognitive science, organizational behavior, psychology, and mathematics.

The lab examines the possibilities of merging physical and digital environments, by designing, making, prototyping and testing radically new technologies, such as interactive artifacts, mobile interfaces, and augmented architectural/urban spaces.

Some of the challenges we discussed: - The lab is about DESIGN+STUDY, with also a "meta" interest in methodologies (how to design, how to study what has been designed). - building and making is "a glue" for the team and also to bridge the gap between architecture and computer sciences. - architecture/design is beyond problem solving, it's about finding new problems - terminology issues like the fact that we artificially discriminate the "physical" and "digital" environments (and avoid to use the term "virtual" which is conflicting and often evocative of 3D worlds) - the lab is a platform for research and learning

Each of us discussed why we joined the lab and what do we want to get out from it, that was really interesting to see the diversity of opinions. As for me, my point was to be immersed in a design/architecture environment to learn about the culture (how they see space and place for example) and the processes (how to design, how they communicate, talk and produce things about projects). My point was indeed to confront my expertise (user experience research / psychology / HCI) to design/architecture concepts and methods to eventually enrich us accordingly.

Describing a framework, but why?

Currently writing a paper about a framework for "mutual location-awareness" (i.e. the representation of significant others' whereabouts through specific interfaces), I felt the need to reading back some papers about needs of having a "framework". Reading some HCI literature is a good way to find some ideas about that; the excerpt I quote afterwards are not general theories about framework but examples of justification that are used for awareness and context-awareness in CSCW. First, most of the papers that present a framework starts by describing the extreme open-ness of the field and the inherent need to have a clearer picture: "no clear overall picture of awareness has yet emerged from the X community", "Considering the broadness of the term Y, it is difficult for any single research effort to engage the term as a whole", "As we shall detail, there are a growing number of X Systems and a diversity of approaches".

These assertion leads researchers to express their concerns towards a "void" or a "lack a firm foundation"" that has consequences:

"Most importantly, this void means that groupware designers have little principled information available to them about how to support awareness in other domains and new systems. Faced with a blank slate for each new application, designers must reinvent awareness from their own experience of what it is, how it works, and how it is used in the task at hand."(Gutwin and Greenberg, 2002)

As expressed by Jones et al. (2004), a framework would enable to clarify the "design space":

"in particular, there is no agreed-upon conceptual framework for describing the design space. Without such a framework, it is difficult to characterize precisely what different systems have in common, let alone to explore systematically the range of possible designs. A framework can identify key challenges and suggest important research opportunities. "

So it's about: (1) organizing the design space (list features, show choices to be made), (2) showing how important certain tasks can be supported, (3) suggesting ways in which key topics can be addressed, (4) enable to explore unexplored research areas. The point is then - as described by Gutwin and Greenberg (2002) - to have " a descriptive theory of awareness for the purpose of aiding groupware design":

""The framework provides designers with a structure to organize thinking about awareness support, a vocabulary for analysing collaborative activity and for comparing solutions, and a set of starting points for more specific design work. We do not give prescriptive rules and guidelines, however, since each groupware application will have to operate within particular awareness requirements dictated by the task and the group situation.""

Now, regarding how to achieve such a goal, building framework is about giving sense to the existing: "We synthesize and organize existing research on Y, and extend this work through a conceptual framework" as claimed by Gutwin and Greenberg (2002) using observations and insights of other developers, employing theories (psychologists, linguists, ethnographers, etc.), carrying out observational studies, developing technologies and applications.

Distributed cognition assumptions

In Distributed Cognition: A Methdological Note, cognitive scientist David Kirsh describes six assumptions that "guides his own research":

"1. We act locally and are closely coupled to our local environment (two entities that reciprocally interact) 2. We externalize thought and intention to harness external sources of cognitive power 3. Economic metrics have a place in evaluating distributed systems, but they must be complemented with studies of computational complexity, descriptive complexity and new metrics yet to be defined. 4. The best metrics apply at many levels of analysis, from the system level where our concern is with the goodness of a system's design to the level of individual artifacts, where our concern is with the goodness of the design of the artifacts individuals interact with. 5. Coordination is the glue of distributed cognition and it occurs at all levels of analysis 6. History matters"

Why do I blog this? because the work of David Kirsh is very interesting to me, this assumptions are a kind of summary of his work. Each of them are well described in the paper and are supported by methodologies (or methodological tricks) that are useful for a researcher.

Vocabulary of dual ecologies

Kuzuoka, H., Kosaka, J., Yamazaki, K., Suga, Y., Yamazaki, A., Luff, P. & Heath, C. (2004). Mediating Dual Ecologies, Proceedings of CSCW 2004, Chicago, 8th – 10th November 477-486. In this article about using robots as a communication medium/surrogate device to convey information between people located in different places, there is a pertinent discussion about "dual ecologies. Some excerpts:

"When people communicate via video-mediated communication systems, however, the relationship between space, gesture, and speech can become fragmented and gestures become relatively ineffective. For example, an individual may try to point to an object that is physically located within the remote environment by gesturing at their screen. The remote participant, however, is unable to connect the gesture as it appears on their monitor with the actual object in their environment and may not be able to make sense of what is being referred to (...) the use of a remote-controlled robot as a device to support communication involves two distinct ecologies: an ecology at the remote (instructor's) site and an ecology at the operator's (robot) site. "

Why do I blog this? I am less interested in the robotic aspects and how it supports mediated communication than in the vocabulary employed here about "dual ecologies" (very well connected to the discourse about "hybrid ecologies"), proximate/distal activities (ecology of the remote/ecology of the operator). This is of interest for my new project about the hybridized spaces. There does not seem to be a clear consensus on terms and how to express this different spaces that are fusing/merging.

Digital encounters and its characteristics

No time to read and write stuff lately with this mediamatic workshop but presentations here are very insightful. I manage to dig some papers by Avah Fatah gen. schiek who talked yesterday and was particularly interested in one entitled "Exploring Digital Encounters in the City". The paper is about how to study and support technologically different encounters in an urban environment. The authors are interested in digital and non-digital encounters (I would prefer the term "mediated" and not as an opposition between digital/not-digital) defining them as "an ephemeral form of communication and interaction augmented by technology".

The most interesting part for my work is the one about "consciousness of communication and intention of interaction:

"In our analysis, rather than draw boundaries that specify what is or is not a digital encounter, we chose to provide a map that explores human consciousness and intention orthogonally. These are considered in instances where one party communicates/interacts with another party. Note that this can involve any combination of human or device (...) Our map takes the very simplistic form of Table 1, where at any given instant a human can be conscious or unconscious of the communications taking place, and can carry out interactions intentionally or unintentionally (...) conscious-intentional encounters are the ones that a person initiates, for example seeing a friend on the street and shouting to get their attention. (...) Conscious-unintentional encounters are situations where a person is aware of the communication taking place but does not intentionally interact. Examples of this are when a person is talked to on the street, or is the recipient of a Bluetooth message in a café. "

They also add "synchronicity and duration" as other characteristics to explore. Why do I blog this? even though the distinction they make is more rhetorical than supported by psychological facts (there is a whole literature about these topics), I find it very relevant in the context of urban ubicomp of today. These concepts of consciousness or intentions of interaction are spot on on stuff we are discussing with Julian about offline gaming. The granularity of mediation is certainly of importance here.

Components of Data Collection Matrix

Extracted from "Designing and Conducting Ethnographic Research (Ethnographer's Toolkit , Vol 1)" (LeCompte Margaret Diane):

"Components of Data Collection Matrix 1. Which research question are to be asked 2. Which data will answer those questions 3. Where, and from whom, those data can be obtained 4. In what form the data will be collected 5. Who will be responsible for collecting, analyzing, and writing up the data 6. When each stage of data collection, analysis and report writing will begin and end 7. How, by whom, and to whom results will be disseminated"

The authors recommend to go through these questions and then work out 2 tables: 1) table 1: What do I need to know? Why do I need to know this? What kind of data will answer the question? Where can I find the data? Whom do I contact for access? Timelines for acquisition 2) Table 2: Research Questions / Process Data and Outcome Measures / Sources of Data

Why do I blog this? being in the midst of starting new projects... it's always good to get back to basic references about where to start when you have pending research questions.

"Locative Gaming for Team Cognition (LoGTCog)

Rogue Signals by Zachary O. Toups, Andruid Kerne, Daniel Caruso, Erin Devoy, Ross Graeber, Kyle Overby seems to be close to the CatchBob project in the sense that the deployment of a location-based game is used to address psychological questions. Some might refer to this as "serious gaming":

"a location-aware game designed to study the effects of information scarcity and tight communication channels on teams engaged in distributed cooperative activity. Our goal is to promote team cognition through serious gaming. (...) It is a platform for experimentation on team dynamics in situations where critical information is scarce and distributed among participants who must communicate through restricted channels. A human team, consisting of a coordinator and a group of harvesters competes against a group of autonomous agents. The game design intentionally constrains the level of information made available to the harvesters, which makes the success of the team dependent on human-to-human communication between the coordinator and the harvesters. The goal is to promote and explore processes of team communication and cognition. Applications include emergency response, as well as social networking and entertainment. "

Some information about it in Rogue Signals: A location aware game for studying the social effects of information bottlenecks, Proc Ubicomp Extended, Sept 2005: Tokyo. Why do I blog this? this "Locative Gaming for Team Cognition (LoGTCog)" initiative is spot on the research we carried out with CatchBob! to study the implications of supporting mutual location-awareness on mobile coordination. This makes me think that there would still be room to pursue my work in that domain, maybe not with CatchBob! but with another platform. A question that is of interest and that I haven't addressed in my dissertation is to what extent the spatial environment shape the activity (individually? collectively?).

Research about "hybrid ecologies"

The Mediamatic workshop about digital/physical hybridization that I attend next week is a great opportunity to start reshuffling my research interests. It's been one month that I started working at the Media and Design Lab at EPFL, starting new projects is a slow process (especially when you don't take vacations right after a phd dissertation) but things are starting to be more clear. My work there is focused on the user experience of gaming; this is very broad given that it encompasses a lot of systems (on-line gaming, gestural interfaces, etc.) but it seems that the projects that emerged can be framed under the "hybridization of the digital and the physical". I won't enter into the details of these nascent projects but the idea is to look at the new user experience created by the merging of multiple environments that you have in pervasive gaming or location-based games. In a sense, it's about using games as a platform to study new interactions. In addition, this connects to my previous work (Phd dissertation here) in the sense that I am interested in multi-user interactions and awareness process: how what people do together in a hybridized world is influenced by specific technologies? how certain design affect collaborative interactions? (Picture by myself, overview of my desk)

My morning read was a smart way to think about some umbrella framework about this hybridization topic: Crabtree, A. and Rodden, T. (2007): "Hybrid ecologies: understanding interaction in emerging digital-physical environments", to appear in the journal Personal and Ubiquitous Computing.

In this paper, the authors pave the way for the investigation of "hybrid ecologies", i.e. a new class of digital ecology that merge multiple environ- ments, physical and digital, together. They provide a starting point about how to analyze cooperative interactions in these environments by highlighting fundamental features of interaction with them: the fragmented nature of interaction, how people articulate collaborative work and seamful representations. They exemplify this using ethnographical vignette form the "Uncle Roy with you" pervasive game.

Historically, as the authors describe, these "hybrid ecologies" correspond to a shift from media spaces (that LINK physical spaces through digital medium), mixed reality environments (that fuse physical and digital environments), ubiquitous computing (that embeds the digital into physical environments) to hybridization (that merges multiple environments physical and digital).

The main lessons from the ethnographic study they carried out are described as follows:

"The development of new computing environments gives rise to new forms of collaboration, not only in terms of how people engage in everyday activities together but also in terms of how they articulate collaboration means that a degree of interactional (including communicative) asymmetry is built into collaboration in hybrid ecologies. (...) Hybrid ecologies rely on the articulation of ‘fragments of embodied virtuality’ or fragmented interaction. (... interaction is distributed across distinct ecologies (...) In hybrid ecologies collaboration is distinctively concerned with the articulation of fragmented interaction. By fragmented interaction we mean that collaboration in hybrid ecologies is mediated by different mechanisms of interaction, which are differentially distributed among participants. (...) There is nothing inherently new about fragmented interaction, then, it inhabits collaboration everywhere as we switch between digital and physical media in course of our everyday activities. What is new, however, is the way in which collaboration is provided for in hybrid ecologies, through the interweaving of hybrid networks and hybrid models of space, and how mechanisms of interaction are articulated in hybrid ecologies. (...) fragmented interaction is articulated in two fun-damental ways in hybrid ecologies: - Through the exercise of ordinary interactional competences. - Through the use of digital representations of action and collaboration in real and virtual environments. "

Why this paper is important for my research? because it gives an overview of some of the topics that might be interesting too look at so that researchers can "unpack the nature of cooperative interaction in hybrid ecologies":

"We propose articulation work, fragmented interaction and seamful representation as core topics (...) Furthermore, understanding how novel interaction mechanisms are articulated across multiple physical and digital ecologies is essential to understanding the collaborative character of emerging physical-digital environments and, thereby, of inform- ing design. (...) The uncovering of articulation work enables developers to determine what may and may not be automated and what may or may not left to human skill and judgement. (...) Understanding interaction in hybrid ecologies will consist, then, of understanding such things as how awareness and coordination ‘get done’"

To put it shortly:

"Fundamentally, understanding cooperative interaction in hybrid ecologies requires us to unpack the fragmented character of interaction, which will consist of uncovering the ordinary interactional competences that users exploit to make differentially distributed mechanisms of interaction work and the distributed practices that articu- late seamful representations and provide for awareness and coordination."

Why do I blog this? this definitely gives some framework to a current project I am working on right now.

Thinking by case

Enjoyed reading the critique of Thinking by cases, or: how to put social sciences back the right way up. by Jean-Claude Passeron and Jacques Revel (eds.), Penser par cas, 2005, written by Philippe Lacour. This french book is about "case-thinking"/"case-based reasoning" and sciences, or "the central problem of the humanities: how does one generalize when starting from the description of singular configurations?". The point of the book is to bring together contributions from researchers coming from various discplines "in an effort to endow the “cases” of human sciences with a renewed dignity, in a continuation of the weberian epistemological tradition".

The authors show how "case thinking" proceeds “through the exploration and the deepening of a singularity accessible to observation” to get a description, an explanation, an interpretation or an evaluation to extract out of it an argumentation of a more general scope, and whose conclusions can be used again”. They point out that case making is a matter of occurrence and singularity: a case is not an example.

Why do I blog this? Although the whole article, as well as the book is a rather theoretical rehabilitation of the notion of "case", there are some pertinent elements to draw from it. When it comes to design, the notion of a singular case is important: the mere existence of a case do imply that it might need to be taken into account. Cahour et al. describes an example (sorry no time to translate the french):

"Par exemple, si l’on montre que le sujet décrit avoir vécu des émotions fortes dont on ne perçoit pas de manifestations dans les données observables, alors il devient nécessaire de prendre en considération le fait que les données essentielles pour comprendre une part des interactions peuvent être non observables, et qu’il est possible de les découvrir par des techniques « en première personne », soit du point de vue du sujet (Gouju et al., 2003). Cette conclusion ne relèverait pas des statistiques ou probabilités, mais du savoir que les faits évoqués sont correctement établis. On ne pourra dire si c’est toujours le cas, ou quel type de population ne rend pas manifeste leurs émotions ; néanmoins, ce que l’on aura établi est qu’il est possible, avec le consentement de sujets avertis, d’avoir accès à certaines de leurs émotions qui sont socialement imperceptibles."

Different levels of interactivity in user-generated content

Working on a presentation about user-generated content and video-games, I found interesting how Jef's talk addressed the different levels of granularity when thinking about "open design". Depending on the interactivity given to the end-user, this white paper from Think Studio discriminates:

"- Passive consumption: The user is getting products or services with no real interaction and no real choice. He or she has to take whatever is available. - Self Service: The user is given the ability to choose between various products or services. - DIY: Do It Yourself: The user starts getting involved in the value chain. - Co-design: The user starts adding value by customizing the product and therefore defining his or her needs himself (as opposed to buying a product defined by the product management team). - Co-creation: The user is involved in the design of the product or service itself."

Why do I blog this? Player-generated content is an interesting issue for the video-game industry. Although I could not make it to the GDC, Amy Jo Kim's slides are quite revealing for that matter.

What the categories above show is that there is a different granularity of participation that could be turned into game mechanics. It would be good to discriminate them in a more comprehensive or applicable way.

On a different note, I am quite skeptical of the "content" term in "user generated content" because it implies that what is created by people is strictly content, which is wrong. Imagine that people can also produce rules, algorithms, problems. For example, designing a Counterstrike level is not just a matter of producing content, it's also creating a problem that people will be engaged in, with specific constraints (okay my example is maybe wrong because in this case the problem created is a by-product of the level designed).

The picture is taken from Dave Gray's drawings made at LIFT07, it shows Sampo Karjalainen from Sulake (Habbo Hotel) who was talking about this topic.

Electronic urbanism and open design

Today at the urban sociology department, the "Penser l'espace", Jef Huang (LDM) gave a talk about "Electronic urbanism: future of space and role of authorship". It's very close to his talk at LIFT06. Raw notes below: Even though the title is "electronism urbanism", Jef's work rather focused on smaller dimension such as architecture or virtual worlds but it might lead to electronic urbanism at some point. The premises of his research is a strong belief that the massive proliferation of communication networks and devices will change some of our most basic social activities (work, learn, shop). This shift has economic drivers and there are several dying species coming from the industrial ages. Amazon as an epitome of the shift form the physical to the virtual.

So what will happen in 5-10years? will we still need physical space? Yes, and there are examples of new forms of space which are twofold: one the one hand, mega fulflillment center: huge new building with distribution centers, back-end of Amazon google data center, underground server farms. ON the other end, some are also the front-end, new typologies such as the yahoo! store, the google store, m*zone (samsung chain of physical store: a virtual company creating space so that clients can meet each others), information kiosks

What is interesting is that when these buildings choose their sites, there are new rules: access to highways, topographies, there is a new invisible layer that comes on top of the landscape, for instance, the map of fiber routes in NYC, that affects housing prices (because people want to have accesses). This affects the morphologies of future cities

the phenomenon: learn: classroom - e-learning environment work: office - virtual office shop: physical retail store - virtual shop play: playground - game environment ... But it's an "either-or" phenomenon, there is nothing in between, Jef's work is about studying what can be in-between. To what extent could virtual activities have a physical component? TO what extent can physical architecture/elements (furnitures) act as an interface between emerging virtual worlds and physical realities.

One of the elements about this is open design: the involvement of the user in the design process, that can be trace back form Duchamps (Rotating Glass Plates, 1930) or Oulipo (raymond queneau 100,000,000,000,000 poems combinatorial poetics, 1961). Back to urbanism, a question is then "is open architecture desirable in architecture or urban design?" The problem: "a camel is a horse designed by a committee" (I miss some elements here)

Another question is "what is the role of the designer in an open design piece?" The common misconception is that not, the designer's role is not less important. Only the design is not longer in the final form but the rules of the game have to be designed. What is needed for design of openness: basic rules, algorithm, speed of interaction, consent, transparency of authorship.

The new design paradigm: from designing forms and artifacts to designing rules and parameters for forms and artifacts to emerge.

Seamlessness and duct tape

Read in "Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing" (Adam Greenfield):

"The infrastructure supporting the user's experience is deeply heterogeneous, and, at least in contemporary, real-world systems, frequently enough held together by the digital equivalent of duct tape and chewing gum. (...) any attempt to provide the user with a continuous experience must somehow paper over these circumstances"

This discussion of flaws about seamlessness in technological development is of considerable importance. Beyond Gilles Deleuze notion of "espace strié" (striated space), the assumption in ubicomp that infrastructure are and will be seamless often leave aside failing infrastructures, the accumulation of different norms, the tweaking people do on tech and stuff like that. The picture has been taken in Nice, France and shows how a traffic light has been fixed with duct tape so that the wiring does not fall apart (and eventually not get wet by possible rain or trashed by some wandering moron).

Creative design and human-computer interaction

Dispelling Design as the ‘Black Art’ of CHI , Wolf TV, Rode JA, Sussman J, Kellogg WA, Proceedings of CHI 2006. The paper interestingly tackle the issue of "creative design" and differentiate it from the notion of "design" as propelled by HCI researchers. The authors' main claim is that the typical usage of design in HCI is "at best limiting and at worst flawed". The first part of the paper describes what design is not: it's not a formal model, there is a different use of prototyping ("not about punctuating the design process with the rigor of evaluation but rather about presenting the design with opportunities to analyze her work. Analysis here refers to not to user studies or formal evaluation, but to the collaborative and introspective processes of designers"). All the statements and claim of the authors are based on existing literature as well as a case study they present.

What was interesting to me is the excerpts that follows about how creative design build knowledge that is different from the one that emerged from scientific practice:

"Creative design constitutes a ‘praxis’ (i.e., rational action and reflection on decisions within the context of design activity) in pursuit of what we have called design rigor. (...) Design praxis is comprised of the following professional qualities, which overlap with each other and are necessarily entwined, contributing to an overall design culture: 1) a non-linear process of intent and discovery, 2) design judgment, which is informed by a combination of knowledge, reflection, practice and action, 3) of artifacts, and 4) the design critique (‘crit’)."

The article goes further by giving some hints about to move forward:

"To create a thriving professional practice of design within the CHI community, we need to address a number of factors. First, when discussing design, we must account for the strong relationship between intention, activity as inquiry, and judgment.

Second, ensuring design rigor requires organizational support. Projects must be set up with design as a core competency with trained designers on hand to fulfill that role

Third, we need to develop more innovative practices to facilitate shared understanding among members of multidisciplinary teams."

Why do I blog this? I am often intrigued by this discussion about the word "design" tat seems to refer to lots of things (almost as much as the word "research"). Misunderstandings are one thing but how to define design is also important IMO, especially given the context of my work. It would also be interesting to have this discussion with the different "design fields" I have discussion with (game designers, industrial designers, architects).

Coming from a cognitive sciences and HCI background, this is of tremendous importance not to reiterate the mistakes of the past about how research can fuel design.

Finally, this notion of design as a "black art" is of curious and seems also to be opaque even for designers, look at this for example.

Some examples of hybridization

Most of the attention in this domain has started from the research in Augmented Reality in the late nineties, leading to lots of prototypes allowing user to access digital textual or audio information that “augment” physical artifacts and places by showing additional information, hidden objects or navigation helps (Feiner, 2002). Most of the times, this information is received on eyeglasses, helmet displays or headsets if there is an audio output. Lots of projects in this field have put the emphasis on designing compelling visualizations such as 3D models to provided people with a tangible way to manipulate complex information. As of 2005, this technology is even available on cell phones that allow to visualize virtual elements on top of the physical space, thanks to computer programs that use the digital cameras. In the case of Augmented Reality, the locus of the output is the very same of the one of the input, that is to say, digital elements appear on top of the corresponding physical elements that triggers their creation. This is why researchers speak of an “overlay of information”. However, the digital-physical convergence does not imply that this locus is always the same. Advances in location-based applications also make it possible to receive digital information on portable devices such as PDA or cell phones (Benford, 2005). In these cases, the digital information is generally not overlayed on a representation of the physical environment but rather as a textual or audio message. Another difference lays in the event that trigger the exchange of such as message. In augmented reality, it is generally the recognition of a certain visual marker allows to replace it on the display by a computer generated graphic. In the case of location-based applications, the information is sent to the users when he or she is located in a specific place, in the vicinity of a certain person or close to an artifact.

Why do I blog this? I was gathering some examples for upcoming talks.

Vocabulary of hybridity

Some vocabulary definitely of interest to describe the Internet of Things:

"linkage, hybridization, merging, fusion, linkage, interconnection, binding, assemblage, amalgam, amalgamation, blend, blending, coadunation, coalescence, coalition, commingling, commixture, compound, immixture, integration, intermixture, junction, merger, merging, mixture, smelting, synthesis, unification, union, uniting, welding, assimilation, alliance, interfusion, soup, salmagundi"

Why do I blog this? working on a paper about digital-physical convergence as well as material for the Hybrid World Lab workshop on this very topic, I was looking for material and concepts to express the different angles. Some are very odd ("soup", "commixture", "salmagundi") or even disturbing ("immixture") but might be useful to describe certain aspects.

About Jaiku and intentional communication

Some excerpts of an interview of Jaiku's co-founder Jyri Engeström in 606tech deals with very relevant aspects about the intricate relationship between technologies and the pragmatic of communication:

"We believe that online social behavior as a whole is moving towards groups who are in a state of constant connectedness. This means shorter, more frequent, more personal updates that assume the recipients already know a lot about the sender and context of the message. The amount of communication increases but it contains less noise because we know more about the context of our peers. For example, in trials of the early research prototype of Jaiku Mobile, the amount of missed calls between the users dropped by about 15 percentage points, because on Jaiku the caller can see when the recipient is busy already before they try to reach them."

Why do I blog this? what is of interest to me here is what I bolded in the excerpt: the assumption that this kind of awareness application is meaningful and relevant for people who already know about the sender. In terms of pragmatics, the reason for that is because the Jaikus themselves can be seen as "coordination devices" that adds up to the current past experiences and knowledge people have about their peers. What is even more important is that these coordination devices are not automatically captured and sent to the others, they're really sent on purpose (this then eventually raises their value).