In the follow-up of the Cyclist Dynamics in Barcelona hack, I met a couple of people related to the deployment of Bicing (community bicycle program in Barcelona). I mention deployment and not maintenance or enhancement because, to my surprise, very little (euphemism) is done to understand how the system is actually used and how its users appropriate it. I am wondering if this come from the background of many urban planners who are in fact architects. It seems that in this domain, there is no strong practice in evaluating what has been done. This shortcoming is obvious when observing the success and failures of Bicing. I apprehend of an urban future enhanced by technologies in the sole hands of architects.

Observing the daily functioning of Bicing, with its “artificial” balance of bike from one station to another, fixing station, users waiting in front of a full station, and a station temporarily out of order.

The spatio-temporal visualization of the system status [video]

Relation to my thesis: thinking on the design for appropriation of technologies and how we can take advantage of the digital traces left by people interacting with technologies to reveal and act upon the imperfections of the systems.

In Augmenting amusement rides with telemetry, the authors present a system that uses wireless telemetry to enhance the experience of fairground and theme park amusement rides. The appealing aspect of this work consists in capturing data of people experience and subsequently visualizing it back to the audience and experts in medical monitoring, psychology and ride design. The analysis and visualization of these records provide five main possibilities to enhance the user experience:

1. enabling designers to understand at precisely which moments riders feel the most thrill and also how different people react to different rides, supporting the more systematic design of more thrilling rides.
2. design future rides that directly adapt to individual riders’ preferences or past history, for example tuning their movements in response to telemetry data, providing a more personalized riding experience than is currently possible.
3. enabling amusement rides to be reliably rated for the experience they deliver.
4. extending the spectator experience to include ‘tele-riding’ through a more immersive presentation of the telemetry data.
5. producing richer souvenirs

Walker, B., Schnädelbach, H., Egglestone, S. R., Clark, A., Orbach, T., Wright, M., Ng, K. H., French, A., Rodden, T., and Benford, S. (2007). Augmenting amusement rides with telemetry. In ACE ’07: Proceedings of the international conference on Advances in computer entertainment technology, pages 115–122, New York, NY, USA. ACM.

Via Nicolas’ From telemetry in trace park to the usage of urban (digital) traces.

Relation to my thesis: This is a very nice example of leveraging digital footprints (e.g. telemetric data) to enhance the user experience. The possibilities reflect well some of the thoughts on “feedback loop” or “control loop” discussed previously and on social navigation suggested in Leveraging Urban Digital Footprints with Social Navigation and Seamful Design. How can this successful approach be transplanted from a theme park into the city to enhance the residant/tourist experience?

As part of the Workshop on Volunteered Geographic Information late last year, John Krumm presented a position paper on Exploiting Users’ Map Annotations. In the project, he exploits Live Search Maps’ “Collections” to assess the prominence of existing landmarks and to find new landmarks that should be added to the map. More interestingly, he first mentions the use of this type of data to “determine which landmarks to show at different zoom levels, as a way to describe more obscure locations in terms of prominent ones (e.g. 0.5 kilometers east of Pike Place), and as a way to pick landmarks to give driving directions“. This very similar to part of my work on Tracing the Visitor’s Eye that I presented last year at Ubicomp. Second he talk about an “algorithm for finding new landmarks from collections. In brief, this proceeds by first making geographic clusters of pushpins, extracting all possible one-, two-, and three-word phrases from the associated text, and processing these phrases to find which ones are mentioned frequently in the cluster (e.g. “Space Needle”), but not very often outside the cluster.” I have been developing a similar approach for my project on Florence to reveal the major POI of the city and define their “area of attraction”.

John Krumm is the guest editor of an upcoming special issue of the IEEE Pervasive Computing Magazine on Pervasive User-Generated Content. The CFP introduces the theme as follow:

Pervasively situated people and things can generate content otherwise unobtainable. Small contributions aggregated from a large number of individuals add up to richly minable supply of information and also make the data more credible and reliable. Sometimes the data is generated explicitly, like event reviews, store ratings, and incident reports. Other times, the data comes from analysis of normal behavior, like aggregating traffic speeds from regular drivers. Often people provide the data, like networked games designed to extract everyday knowledge. In other instances, objects like paper currency or ocean-borne, spilled toys are tracked as they move around naturally. The resulting content sometimes comes from sophisticated processing, like inferring driving preferences from observed trips. In other instances, processing is minimal, like text messages displayed publicly in Times Square. In all cases, a critical link is a network that connects the pervasively distributed data sources to a central repository.

In the context of my BCN taxi driver study, I have been reading some of the word done by Silvia Elaluf-Calderwood on the organizational ability of London Black Cabs with mobile and wireless technologies. The study was conducted as part of the research network for Mobile Interaction & Pervasive Social Devices that support research on socially situated technologies, the socio-technical aspects of mobile working and on the mutual adaptation of work practices and mobile and wireless technologies.

Silvia performed a longitudinal ethnographic study with empirical data provided by qualitative interviews with 35 Black Cab drivers and 14 hours of videotaped observation of driver behavior to highlight some issues of the relationships between the drivers practices and the supporting mobile technology. She focused on the observations of the different socio-technical arrangements the taxi drivers work with:

• Traditional: The Knowledge + mobile phone to keep in touch with family and friends
• Dispatched Radio Taxi: radio call system + electronic booking system + mobile phone
• Automatic Customer-Driver Connection: Real-time GPS location system + satnav + mobile phone

From the interviews she was able to define the main factors that influence to encounter work: physical location, awareness, time, strategic planning, situational acts, planned acts, human factors, role of the technology, emerging practices and chance to succeed. Then she compared each arrangement in the light of these factors. In concordance with my study, she points out that the most interesting technological opportunities may be thwarted by practical barriers such as problems with support of individual taxi work (not coordination) through GPS systems when these assume the driver relinquish control entirely and simply follow directions when these are far from perfect or:

With Arrangement C, in which the driver relies on his mobile phone to obtain work – besides street hails – the ubiquity is wider. Drivers get accustomed to longer runs on specific routes to maximize the number of passengers transported. However passengers sometimes take the first cab that is closer to them and the driver loses his ride. During the interviews drivers in Arrangement B were reported to say that this uncertainty is the main reason they felt discouraged from trying Arrangement C.

Related to my analysis, she also mentions the feeling of relaxation that the technology brings (when the destination is known and pressure of constatly searching for new passengers is reduced by greater trust place in the computer system) but also the distraction it brings to their driving (multiple-tasking, they liked the fact that the system turns off to black screen after two minutes idle) and the accuracy of the GPS system used (billing and payment, outages, when it needs repair it means unplanned time of the road).

In my study, I first analyze under socio-technical lenses how everyday cab driver adapt their working practices depending upon the integration of location-aware technology (co-evolution). However unlike Silivia’s work that focuses on the organization to capture customers, I reveal the implication of acquiring at satnav system on the wayfinding strategies and knowledge acquisition. At a second step, I study the role of context in influence the access of location information (granularity). In that part of the work, I can inspire form Silvia’s list of factors that influence the cab drivers work. Moreover, I should explore the impact of the relation with Suchman’s situated action theory (locations and opportunity determine the action): “Idiosyncrasy, improvisation and knowledge are all useful tools when choices between planned and situation acts are complex” (Suchman, 1987)” and maybe establish a link with the accuracy/uncertainty/granularity of the location information.

Finally, Silvia makes reference to the conflict between using location-aware technology and gaining skills and knowledge of the environment:

Drivers express the introduction of GPS systems as a way of making their “skilled” job an unskilled one; anyone with a GPS could do their job
[…]
The more the driver relies on the system to locate jobs, the less he or she relies on their in-depth knowledge of where they need to position themselves to maximise income.

In fact, my contextual inquiries somehow revealed quite the opposite. First, a navigation system was a mean to gain knowledge on the city (novice drivers have the tendency to leave it on passive mode to learn the street names). As a proof, after installation, the system tends to be used less and less by cab drivers. Second, the few mistakes a satnav system can make challenges the trust novice cab drivers put in the location technology. In fact, they have a tendency to use the street directory and paper maps for the dense urban area (or areas where they have points of reference). Experience drivers mention their feelings that now even freshly arrived cheap labor could do their job (as mentioned by Silvia). The reality proved to be more complicated than that. A satnav system does only do a part of the taxi driver’s job.

Sources:
Elaluf-Calderwoodand, S. and Sørensen, C. (2006). Organizational Agility with Mobile ICT? The Case of London Black Cab Work. Butterworth-Heinemann.

Elaluf-Calderwood, S. and Sørensen, C. (2008). 420 Years of Mobility: ICT Enabled Mobile Interdependencies in London Hackney Cab Work, Mobile Work/Technology.

LIFT season is almost here with its flourishing workshop proposals. With Near Future Laboratory compadres Nicolas Nova and Julian Bleecker, we organize a session on ubiquitous computing and its discontent. The teaser goes as follow:

The integration of information processing into everyday objects and our environments, often referred to as “Ubiquitous Computing” has been fueled by strong visions such as Weiser’s ‘Calm Computing’ paradigm or Philips’ ‘Ambient Intelligence’. Nevertheless, the ever-increasing number of smart houses, intelligent assistants or mobile location-based applications find niches but has not yet lead to their adoptions by quotidian users. As stated by researchers such as Bell and Dourish, these visions might mislead us into an infinitely postponed proximate future that eventually distracts our attention to what is currently being used and its effects.
[…]
The purpose is to generate debate about the design and integration of ubiquitous systems based on case studies proposed from workshop participants. Moreover, we want to open up a debate around the future of those systems as well as the adoption by a large user base.

[Full text]

Relation to my thesis: a collaborative follow-up from last year’s monologue at LIFT.

Late last year, a position paper I submitted to the Urban Mixed Reality workshop at CHI’08 was only accepted as a poster presentation. In this paper, we propose that digital footprints present an opportunity to the residents and tourists the ability to look down on the city and view the activities and their consequences. When this information is fed back to the community, it can inform the decision-making and change the behaviors through social navigation. However, the design of a social navigation service should take into consideration the lack of accuracy in space and time of digital footprints. Apparently, the unique reviewer who rejected the paper understood that we propose the use of digital footprints to support people in navigating (orientation/path/aims) in the city.

So I thought that instead of flying overseas to present a poster, it might be more relevant to leave this position paper online with its reviews, open for discussion and thoughts to the reader of this blog. Considering the encouraging comments of the second reviewer, I will most probably recycle it for future publications.

Leveraging urban digital footprints with social navigation and seamful design
Girardin, F., Nova, N., Dal Fiore, F., Ratti, C., Blat, J.

Abstract. The widespread deployment of mobile and wireless technologies increases the amount of recorded interactions between humans and the urban environment. The accumulation of these digital footprints provides new opportunities to reveal human behaviors in space. Beyond their utility to improve the quantity and quality of mobility data already available to urban planners and local authorities, this information can be returned to residents and visitors to enhance their perception of the space and inform their discussions and decision making. In this paper, we argue that digital footprints, when properly revealed, can act as social navigation cues to support the exploration of the city.

[Full paper - 104KB]

Reviewer 1 (reject):
The paper discussed ideas on how to make patterns of mobility and flow based on digital footprints available to tourists and residents. The discussion is based on two concepts – ‘social navigation’ and ‘seamful design’. I miss a reflection on previous studies on supporting people’s orientations/paths/aims when moving in a city through giving them visual information. This is a quite complex endeavor and it is not sufficient to provide a ‘vision’ without thorough grounding. For example, I don’t underdstand the usefulness of ‘seams’ (uncertainty of data, lack of timeliness, etc.) for people. You may want to read Bill Gaver’s paper on ‘Ambiguity as a resource for design’.

Reviewer 2 (accept):
The paper argues for the use of digital footprints as social navigation cues for the exploration of the city. Digital footprints are space and time referenced data that are produced by the increased amount of recorded interactions between humans and the urban environment. The paper presents an approach meant to leverage this kind of mobility data to support awareness of the overall dynamics of an urban space and affect the discussion and decision-making of residents and visitors in that space. Challenges inherent to the rendering of spatio-temporal data in mobile and urban environments are addressed by adopting a “seamful design” approach revealing the imperfection of the sensed data.

The contribution of the paper to an overall framework for the social use of mobility data is timely and likely to raise discussion. Suggestions for improvement: the authors may want to better explain the idea of “cultural views of mobility” and provide more examples on the kind of data that could be used and how their visualization would inform people’s behaviour in the urban space.

A few events I would love to attend in early 2008, but I unfortunately won’t be able to…

The Mobile City conference
Is it still useful or even possible to talk about the city as being only physical? Or about the digital world as purely ‘virtual’ (in the sense of ‘not real’ oimmaterial)? The physical city and the spaces of digital technologies merge into a new “hybrid space”. Hybrid spaces are shaped by the social processes that concurrently take place in digital and physical spaces. What is the influence of these developments on the ideas we have of time, space and place, citizenship and identity?

4th and 5th seminars in the ESRC Research Seminar Series: Rethinking the Urban Experience: the Sensory Production of Place
Seminar on the sensory awareness of urban infrastructure. This seminar will ask questions about the infrastructure that supports urban society. Topics may include sensory experiences of public transport networks, olfactory responses to waste and its disposal, public toilet provision in urban areas. Additionally, the role of hidden infrastructures such as CCTV and underground infrastructures such as utilities networks will be considered in this seminar.

EPFL Choros group “Penser l’espace” seminar with a focus on the “critique de la raison cartographique” and the multiple perspectives to think about space.
Quelles habitudes de pensée sont charriées lorsqu’on cartographie ? Quelles sont les implications de la réduction cartographique de la complexité de l’espace ? De quelle façon peut-on contrôler le passage des données à la carte ou le passage de la pensée à la carte ? Comment cartographier de l’espace contemporain – ce « space of flows » et hyperurbanisé - où la mobilité et la digitalité sont les caractéristiques fondamentales ? Quelles sont les implications du passage de la carte sur papier à la carte sur écran ? Le GPS et Google Earth transforment-ils notre rapport à la carte, et, partant, notre rapport à l’espace ?

Pervasive Persuasive Technology and Environmental Sustainability workshop at Pervasive 2008
The key theme of this workshop around environmental sustainability will be addressed threefold: 1. Providing people with environmental data and educational information, 2. Pervasiveness can easily turn invasive. It has already caused negative consequences in biological settings. 3. digital divide between humans and the environment (e.g. Can the process of ‘blogging sensor data’ (sensorbase.org) assist us in becoming more aware of the needs of nature? How can we avoid the downsides?

Inaugural Research Institute for the Science of Socio-Technical Systems
A science of socio-technical systems is emerging from research in the fields of HCI, social computing, social informatics, CSCW, sociology of computing, and other domains. The Consortium for the Science of Socio-Technical Systems (CSST) is a new organization devoted to advancing research on socio-technical systems. A primary goal of the institute is to build a new cohort of faculty and graduate students who are interested in research on the design and interplay of technology and humans at the level of individuals, groups, organizations, and larger communities.

ifgi Spring School 2008
Two weeks of short block courses with innovative topics in GI such as: geospatio-temporal information: issues in representation and reasoning, usability and user-centred systems, location-aware systems, information visualization & presentation, and research methods

I have been on the field collecting more observations and interviews on the adoption of GPS by taxi drivers in Barcelona. On one hand I am interested in the co-evolution process and the modifications of the practices, on the other hand I focus on the context of use of the technology (other artifacts/tools, influence of landmarks, type of location information used (how, where, when, granularity). Here are a few notes that will need to be interpreted further. I collected data from a unbalance population of either find very experienced (15+ years: seniors) taxi drivers or novice in the practice (2- years: juniors). It has been harder to anybody in between. At least, it revealed dissimulates in the appropriation of the technology between the “seniors” and “juniors”.

Uniformity in the wild
First of all, there is a concenus that GPS an unbeatable tool when it come to reaching a specific destination in a village and leaving it (link to previous post). It is a strong reason to acquire a sat-nav system. But it is not really to be more productive and hence earn more, rather than feeling more serene (i.e. tranquility was the word). Some mention that it does not only tranquilize them but also their clients (”they know I cannot cheat them with it”, “it reassures them that I go to the proper destination”). When it comes to seniors, they now know that they have a “companion” (some refereed to their car with an affectionate “she” and their sat-nav with a “he”) can take them anywhere and avoid these moment when they had to search endlessly browsing the street directories of the suburbs of Barcelona, asking their colleagues via radio or mobile phone. One mentioned me that “the fear of getting lost with a client I felt in my stomach now disappeared”. Another was relieved that he did not have to use his radio to ask colleagues about particular location informations and wayfinding (even though many taxi drivers are extreme social animals). Currently the radio is uniquely used to get dispatching orders and professional questions (e.g. asking on special rates for some destinations). To get out of the unfamiliar environment, the driver would be either very cautious in the path taken to enter the area (”I am a very good observer”) or use their GPS with destination Barcelona. In their exit strategy, their reach their bookmark of saved destinations are hit “home”, “Barcelona, any street”, or “Barcelona center”.

Disparities in the urban space
However, when it comes to the context of the city, practices differ and the “Guia” comes into play. The “Guia” is a dense book of all the streets and POI in Barcelona. Experienced drivers have been using it all their professional lives and have partially learned the city with it. Another big part of the knowledge drivers acquire come from the clients themselves. They know all the tricks and secrets official books and commercial systems can’t tell. As the experience drivers contain most of the knowledge of the city in memory they rarely return to the Guia. In fact, they prefer using their sat-nav and hit the Guia only as fail-over (e.g. when the system does not contain a street number or lacks of information). Even after 20 years of experience, one drivers still perceived accessing the Guia as a demanding task. Compare to that, hitting the screen of his Tom-Tom was a pure pleasure. This process of accessing correct information is executed differently by the juniors I interviewed. First, they had mixed feelings about their experience with their GPS (”It is like my mobile phone, sometimes it does not work well”, “it is a potential problem”) in terms of quality of services and precision of the information. They very early reached the limits of the systems and the inaccuracy (erroneous information) of the system directly impacted the quality of their service (mostly because they had to deeply rely on it in the beginning). In consequence, they embraced the use of the “Guia” which is “more accurate and complete” (particularly when it comes to POI). In the city, they learned not to completely rely on their sat-nav (because it is hard for them to judge if the information is erroneous or not) and first open the “Guia” prior to enter an address. One told me that he learned to interpret the system and its errors. When a conflict emerges between his sat-nav and his “knowledge” he starts to “improvise” (in his own terms). Depending on the circumstances he would either switch it off or ignore it for a while.

The confirmation of the funnel
Confirming what I mentioned previously, the wayfinding practice takes place in 2 main stages. There is a separation difference between “ir” (to go) and “llegar” (to arrive) and the location information are different in each phase. First the driver has the knowledge of the area where to go or checks in the Guia to get a rough awareness of destination (one driver told me he would directly enter the address in his navigation system). This is done at any occasion at a traffic light or in dense traffic (if the driver knows he will have to go on the highway directly, he/she will check prior to leaving). It is only at the entrance of the area (e.g. a neighborood - it would be interesting to define it better) that the active mode of the sat-nav system starts by entering the full address (once again taking advantages of traffic lights and busy traffic).
Mobile phone
The mobile phone often available is seen as a social link to family and friends, and is very rarely used as a tool to support their work. One driver told me that he used it a few times to check if a table was available at a restaurant for clients (particularly foreigners). This is a service he gives as added value, but he “normally should not do it”.

Passive mode
As mentioned in a paper by Nick Forbes,there is a clear tendency to keep the system in passive mode at any time. It is done so mainly to keep track of the radars (seems to be more a priority for experienced drivers) and (for juniors) to keep an awareness of where they are (keep track of the proximate streets) and it was also very valuable to learn the city. On this point, an experienced driver explained me that younger drivers who use a navigation system do not gain knowledge of the city, because they follow the recommendations and “stop to think”. My contact with the younger generation proved somehow the opposite. They are eager to learn the city and the imperfection of their systems forced them to get knowledge from the “Guia” and from the clients.

Relation to my thesis: Working on The co-evolution of taxi drivers and their in-car navigation systems, I stereotyped a bit the practices based on my notes to reveal the main patterns. I keep 3 main tracks that are worth investigate more in details:
- different appropriation of the location-aware system depending on the overall knowledge and experience of the space. The shortcoming of GPS forced the younger generation to rely on the Guia, while the older generation has little use of the Guia now. This goes in the direction of understanding and supporting “mobilities” instead of mobility.
- a tool not to make more money, nor to improve the efficacy, but to tranquilize (”I can go everywhere”) and relax (e.g. passive mode to have a continuous awareness)
- funnel-type of access to location information (I will model the process, this is part of the understanding of granularity) with multiple sources (kwnoledge, sat-nav and Guia)

Last Friday, at the Salon ImmoTICs DomoTICs Agora in Sophia Antipolis, France, I was very fortunate to present some of my work in a slot between the french “paleanthropologist” Pascal Picq and the italian architect David Fisher and later the economist/thinker Michel Godet. My talk (in french) entitled “Révéler le pouls de la ville” was a duplicate of what I presented at Mobile Monday Barcelona, with a stronger emphasis on the implications of the use of “digital footprints” by urban planners, local authorities and designer of urban digital infrastructures such as location-based services. The slide are available online: Révéler le pouls de la ville.

Thanks to Dominique Thibault for the kind invitation.

Relation to my thesis: testing my ideas + practicing public speaking (it is definitively either in my mother tongue) + getting in touch with french academics who do not always communicate outside of the boundaries of the “hexagone”.

Last night, I participated to the Mobile Monday Barcelona event on Location-Based Services. My talk entitled “Mapping of City Dynamics” covered some innovative ways to use mobile and wireless technologies to sense the city and reveal its pulse (i.e. its activity in space and time). I also discussed their underlying concepts (real-time, history, feedback loop, implicit and explicit acts, experience of the city, consequences of our activities) and their implications in relation to the design of location-based services that raise. Finally, I exemplified these ideas by introducing the ongoing project lead at the SENSEable City lab, named WikiCity, that aims at offering an instrument for city inhabitants to base their actions and decisions upon in a better informed manner.

Thanks to Rudy and Carles for the invitation! (Flickr set of the event)

The slides with my notes are available: Mapping of city dynamics

Relation to my thesis: Pushing the ideas on urban computing and the design of LBS (granularity, areas of influence/relevance, uncertainty) and getting good contacts to understand the partitioners perspectives. and past experiences. I will do a similar talk on Friday at the ImmoTICs DomoTICs Agora event in Sophia Antipolis.