In April of next year, I will attend in Boston the AAG meeting and participate to a session on “Situating Sat Nav: Questioning the TomTom Effect“. Organized by Chris Perkins and Martin Dodge, it aims to address the social effects, cultural meanings and political economy of in-car satellite navigation. I will be in the middle of a spectacular line-up:

Session One

Amy Propen: The Use of Sat Nav Systems: An Empowering Cultural Practice or Portentous of a Lost Geographical Imagination?
Don Cooke: The TomTom Effect: Industry Point of View
Allan Brimicombe and Chao Li: Sat Nav: Rising theft of a geo-engineered must-have.
Tristan Thielmann: Navigation becomes travel scouting: The augmented space of car navigation systems
Caren Kaplan: Precision Targets: Consumer Subjects, Militarization, and the Politics of Location.

Session Two

Fabien Girardin: The co-evolution of taxi drivers and their in-car navigation systems
Georg Gartner: Restrictions in mental representations of the world as a result of relying upon navigation systems
Jonathan Raper: The mistakes that satnavs make (and what they don’t know)
Alexander Klippel: Can we afford to provide cognitively inadequate wayfinding assistance?
Discussant: David M Mark

The abstract of my paper entitled “The co-evolution of taxi drivers and their in-car navigation systems” goes as follow:

In the recent years, the massive use of in-car navigation systems has symbolized the emergence of location-based services for wayfinding. This market success creates the opportunity to learn from a real-world use of present location-aware systems in order to inform the design of future applications. In that context, we are using an ethnomethodological approach to study the different ways taxi drivers rely on their navigation system. First, this work focuses on describing how location technologies impacted the wayfinding practices and similarly how the practice influences the appropriation of navigation systems. This co-evolution starts from the acquisition and setup of a navigation system to mastering the system shortcomings and limitations. Second, we study the criteria that steer a driver in selecting among the different modes of a navigation system and the other artifacts and tools (e.g. maps, street directories, landmarks) he or she uses for location awareness and wayfinding. Moreover, we are analyzing the role of context in this dynamic. That is where and when a driver accesses location information from the system, the external supports and the surrounding environment. We are currently collecting data from 20 semi-structured interviews each augmented by in-car observations of 1-hour ride. The study concentrates on the taxi drivers of the city of Barcelona, Spain. This community forms a massive population of early adopters of in-car navigation systems with a strong past practice of relying on mobile technologies and maps to support their work.

Relation to my thesis: I can’t imagine a better set of people to receive feedback on my taxi driver study.

An upcoming issue of Built Environment will feature combine insights from social and technical disciplines to highlight opportunities of how mobility systems can be shaped so that they are not only technically efficient but also socially accepted and used. As suggested by its title “Sustainable Socio-Technical Mobility Systems” the approach of urban sustainability does not solely tackle technical nor an exclusively social problem, but rather a co-evolutionary dynamics in urban socio-technical ensembles. For example, employees working in a building with no shower are understandably reluctant to cycle to work. In short, the built environment and social mobility practices are inherently intertwined and constitute a system of mutually shaping parts.

The issue is edited by Ralf G. Brand, the author of Synchronizing Science and Technology with Human Behaviour in 2005.

The CFP goes as follow:

Many scholars, in particular those in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), argue for interdisciplinary collaboration to develop not only a better grasp of socio-technical systems but also to devise more effective policy advise on how to make such systems more sustainable. However, it has not yet become standard practice for STS scholars to expose themselves to the engineering details of, say, more sustainable mobility systems.

Conversely, it seems fair to state that engineers typically do not systematically seek advice from social scientists – or only in an “end-of-pipe” fashion to advertise resource efficient products to public, corporate or private consumers. The Fourth Dubrovnik Conference on Sustainable Development of Energy, Water and Environment Systems is trying to provide a venue where a more truly interdisciplinary dialogue about sustainable development – in particular about sustainable transport – can take place.

Its conceptual starting point is the acknowledgement of sustainable development as a complex, multi-criteria challenge requiring interdisciplinary collaboration. Papers exploring “engineering, social, and environment aspects” of sustainable transport are therefore invited as contributions to the emerging field of sustainability science. The special session on a socio-technical understanding of transport systems will be a platform for such cross-fertilisation and mutual refreshment. Its contributions will offer insights from recent STS research about the hybrid constitution of sustainable transport systems and the systemic interweavement of their social and technical elements. Papers are also invited about concrete tools to put these insights to action, like Co-evolution audit, Strategic Niche Management (SNM), Constructive Technology Assessment (CTA), Co-Evolutionary Sociotechnical Scenario Method (CEST-method).

Relation to my thesis: The co-evolution mentioned in this issue focuses on the mutual shaping processes between all kinds of urban artefacts (road networks, buildings, street furniture, etc.) and social practices (shopping routines, perceptions of safety, commuting patterns, etc.). Now, new urban technologies (GPS, wireless networks, Near-field communication) also support mobility systems and impact the social practices and vice-versa. The analysis of this process should certainly inspire from previous work in urbanism and sustainable architecture. Finally, I particularly enjoy that the editor calls for the analysis of both failed and successful projects conducted under the flag of sustainability. It is particularly rare in research to considure failure as an outcome as already mentioned by Nicolas in Dark data to be set free.

In his presentation at Open Plan in 2005, Bill Gaver implicitly mentioned a few concepts I am currently focused on. First he presented the The Urban Pollution Monitoring Project that provides some sort of feedback loop to residents in providing resources to reason themselves about fluctuating pollution in the city space. The system providing information about the content, but also about the infrastructure providing the content (i.e. a sort of seamful design). Then he highlighted the notion of “over time” with a project by Richard’s Swinford’s use of GPS traces and their use of satellites to carve out the boundaries of the physical space. It shows that the model of the phisical world can be created in a bottom-up fashion (implicit digital traces) and reflect reflect “over time” of individual’s knowledge on the local space. In other words, there is a connection between the system produced and the places they inhabit that grows and can can be appreciated over time for instance in a game or to support social navigation. The data of this spatio-temporal use come from the technologies themselves or the experience of the people using them. OpenStreetMap (evolution in London and Great Britain), courier activity and cabspotting are clear examples of the former.

Realising the extensions of man by llistening to the user: model the neighborhood in 3D by using GPS and the satelites. The model gains in accuracy with the use of the system. Source: Richard’s Swinford. I guess it uses the same kind of data at the Anthony Steed’s GPS Availability Visualization.

Later in his talk, Bill mentioned Ben Hooker and Shona Kitchen project called Edge Town done in 2004 that aimed designing interfaces with the flows of electronic data that run through our cities so that “they can be experienced as an enriching complement to other, more ‘earthly’ phenomena”. I was fascinated by then (and still am) by their Sensor park aimed to be situated in tumultuous landscapes, such as directly underneath the airport’s final approach flight paths. The structure of the sensor park provides support for a host of screen-based and electromechanical displays, which offer numerical representations of the data collected from the sensors. This type of information would be provided to Edge Town resident and experienced for their week-end recreation.

Sensor park in the Edge Town project

Relation to my thesis: Tagging with concept names a 2-years old message… I got to know Bill Gaver from his Ambiguity as Resource for Design.

Today I gave a talk to my research group on the current state of my investigation. The presentation covered the topic of my DEA work, the early results of Tracing the visitor’s eye project and their implication for a field experiment taking advantage of digital footprints to support social navigation and seamful design. One personal goal of this presentation was to prepare my DEA defense in November and next week’s presentation of Understanding of tourist dynamics from explicitly disclosed location information at the 4th International Symposium on LBS & TeleCartography.

Towards Reducing the Social-Technical Gap in Location-Aware Computing (PDF)

Relation to my thesis: Trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together. The overall argumentation still lacks of coherence. I will need to make some choices and get rid of some themes to explore others profoundly. Most of all, my research questions are now outdated. I need to refine them. More on that later.

So Nicolas opened a pandora box by mentioning in Chronotopic visualizations: representing traces of people in spatial environments that the collection and representation of traces left by people in space through technologies is gaining momentum in location-based computing. In the past, this type of research aimed at understanding mobility and travel behaviors or predicting them (e.g. John Krumm’s work on “Predestination”). However, the collection of mobility data is time consuming and requests non-negligible efforts in setting-up and deploying surveys infrastructures. The costs and privacy issues prevented such studies to move beyond the scope of transportation research (see Jean Wolf’s Applications of New Technologies in Travel Surveys for a survey). Now, the accessibility to affordable wireless sensors and the emergence of the geospatial web are generating new types of “digital footprints” left by people in space though technologies. My Tracing the Visitor’s Eye project is one example among many. For instance, Danyel Fisher developed Hotmap to visualize where in the world people look at when they use Windows Live Maps (see Imaging the City workshop and Fisher’s Hotmap looking at Geographic Attention.

Density of people “querying” Boston through Windows Live Maps. Courtesy of Danyel Fisher. Made with Hotmap

Now, as Nicolas questions, What types of affordances these new types of data/visualization create? First, they might be directed at professionals such as urban planners to build or refine their models, but also to any kind of industry that deploy services or infrastructures supporting mobility throughout a city. For instance, it might inform on the installation of Municipal Wi-Fi. A second line of investigation aims at feedback information back to the people in order to creating a control or feedback loop (i.e. a “mirror to ourselves”). This approach makes use of social navigation (”navigation towards a cluster of people or navigation because other people have looked at something“) to help individuals make more informed decisions about their environment. A few weeks ago in Rome, the MIT SENSEable City Lab closed the feedback loop as a first example of their Wikicity project. They aggregated various types data and visually mapped the density and movement of people, buses, taxis in real time throughout the whole of the Eternal City. “By revealing the pulse of the city, the project aimed to show how technology can provide the inhabitants with a better idea of their own city and can help adjust their behavior accordingly. In the context of the web, Mor Naaman translates the feedback loop into a “social media cycle” (see the slides of his presentation this week at Yahoo! Research Barcelona: How Flickr Helps us Make Sense of the World).

Crowds gathered outside Rome’s Museum of the High Middle Ages on September 8, 2007, to view a real-time display of population movement during the city’s Notte Bianca festival. (Courtesy of MIT’s SENSEable City Laboratory). In the media: ‘Wiki City Rome’ to draw a map like no other, City life on the screen, Wikis, the Semantic Web head to the streets, Les cartographes du téléphone mobile

Last week at Picnic, Adam Greenfield gave a presentation “The City is Here for You to Use: Urban Form and Experience in the Age of Ambient Informatics” in which he discussed how everyware is already affecting cities. More specifically, he mentioned this new types of real-time information about cities and their pattern of use, visualized in new ways and that information can be made available locally on demand in a way that people can act upon.

Adam Greenfield at Picnic07 on visualizing the patterns of use of the city: Stamen Design’s cabspotting, crime and real estate mapping, map of cities with WiFi hotspot.

Current scenarios for the application of these real-time visualizations mainly aim at facilitating a quick search or decision making such as determining a jogging path that corresponds to a combined query, or pedestrians that may eventually turn to interactive maps to avoid the masses or catch a bus. Other scenarios that take advantage of the temporal and social aspects of the traces could emerge. Such as providing an interactive tourist map of Switzerland based on Flickr traces revealing Zermatt, Interlakend and Davos and obscuring the non-relevant geographical location. But then, what are the scenarios beyond that?

A map of Switzerland by tourists for tourists?

Scenarios based on digital footprints lefts by people in urban environments seem to rely on the structure (urban environment), the past/current usage (social, navigation, wayfinding) and the content (POI). An application should intersect these layers in a meaningful way. However, delivering a pure mirror of the reality might be hard to reach. In some cases a meaning emerges from incomplete data patched by data mining, filtering and visualization algorithms. Their choice impact the perception of the data, potentially bringing an objective angle of the content provider and modifying the behavior. This is when read/write urbanism flirts with captology (aka persuasive computing). In other words, do the traces or the algorithms used to treat them that influence the individuals/citizens? Moreover, as discussed this week with Infovis.net’s Juan Dünsteler, information visualization struggles between educating people in reading visualization and providing relevant metaphores. Therefore, the data presented and misunderstood can impact the decision making (Visualizing Geospatial Information Uncertainty: What We Know and What We Need to Know).

Relation to my thesis: A follow-up to Inferring Spatio-Temporal Activities in Urban Spaces, seeking inspiration for an upcoming infovis.net article and in preparation of a position paper for the Urban Mixed Realities: Technologies, Theories and Frontiers workshop.

The other day in Geneva I stumbled on this Obey Giant sticker placed in a public bathroom. Obey Giant is a street art campaign and an experiment in phenomenology by artist Shepard Fairey. Its sole purpose is to make people question their surroundings. Even though it might not designed to question ubicomp, the experiment is extremely relevant to the discourse on seams and invisibility created by technologies. Funnily, a couple of days before in Schipol I spotted a sign highlighting the every use of the infrastructure was recorded.

The infrastructure senses you: street art campaign (left), real-world case (right).

Relation to my thesis: Linking Andre the Giant to seamful design.

Last Friday at the Picnic conference, I participated to a panel on the The Near Future of Pervasive Media Experiences Bob Barker’d by Julian Bleecker. In my talk The design of everyday pervasive things, I discussed my observations on the deployment of the ubicomp of the present and then provided some thoughts on how it can affect the design of the “near future pervasive media experiences”. These observations are inspired by Donald Norman’s brilliant The design of everyday things. I translated the approach to critique and highlight the current issues in deploying pervasive, sensor-based environments.

Slides with notes - 1.7MB

From Wired for Speech: How Voice Activates and Advances the Human-Computer Relationship by Clifford Nass and Scott Brave:

p. 155: The word of technology is inspired by the desire to do “better and better”. There has long been a tendency to define better in terms of a technology’s distance between its objective performance and the objective characteristics of the physical and social world that it models. The definition has led to the development of a set of principles that urge marketers to deploy the most advanced technology that are available at a given time. This strategy, which is blind to the physiology of users, has led to the creation of less usable systems in the name of “improvement”. […] Although interface builders should certainly cheer for each technological advance, mindful manifestation demands that, to paraphrase Alexander Pope, the proper judges of interfaces be users.

Nass and Brave provide warnings on the design principles that consider the “best” interfaces as the ones that are as “accurate” and “realistic” as possible. Indeed, frequently accuracy burdens people. For instance, the physical world is often less convenient to navigate than is its abstracted counterpart. They quote Henri Matisse who taught use that “Exactitude is not truth“: Sometimes a less accurate mirroring of the world can in fact be more effective.

In addition, the risk for using the most advanced technology is that the contrast highlights failure:

Consider users who encounter an interface in which one dimension is clearly superior to the other. Initially, they may simply feel uncomfortable at the incongruity. In a (potentially unconscious) search to resolve the discomfort, they realize that these two technological creations are very different in that one is high in quality while the other is low in quality. Having a clear category for contrast (quality), the brain accentuates the difference and labels on very low quality and one very high quality.
If human psychology were simple, this accentuation should not be important: very hight quality and very low quality should balance each other out in the same way that high and low would. Unfortunately, two cognitive biases prevent this from happening. First, negative experiences are more arousing, memorable, and noticeable thant the best part, leading to more negative overall judgments. Second, poor quality in a interface generally leads to unpredictability, which, especially in a task-oriented situation, is very worrisome. These biases lead to overly harsh judgments of interfaces of mixed quality.

Relation to my thesis: These thoughts (based on Nass and Brave’s experiments) go in the direction of my current work with the analysis of accuracy used to geo-reference photos in Flickr. One goal is to provide arguments for location-aware systems designers to reject the obsession with veridicality in all aspects of an interface because this goal is impossible in the near term and lead to high levels of user distress and failure.

The recently published “Space Time Play” edited by Friedrich von Borries, Steffen P. Walz, Matthias Böttger explores the architectural history of computer games and the future of ludic space. The book covers describes the development of new typologies of space spaces that are emerging from the superimposition of the physical and the virtual and with 180 articles tries to answer the main question: “What are the parameters of these new spaces? To what practices and functional specifications do they give rise? What design strategies will come into operation because of them?”. It is devided in five levels:

1. Spatiotemporal history of the architecture of digital games: what spatial qualities and characteristics arise from computer games and what implications these could have for contemporary architecture
2. The ludic constructions of digital metropolises: the representation of the city in games and the city as metaphor for the virtual spatialization of social relations.
3. Ubiquitous games: What happens when the spaces and social interactions of computer games are superimposed over physical space?
4. Games as tools for design and planning processes: demonstrate how the ludic conquest of real and imagined gamespace becomes an instrument for the design of space-time
5. Critical reflection upon the cultural relevance of games today and in the future: Which gamespaces are desirable and which are not?

Relation to my thesis: Nicolas and I proudly contributed to this book with a small piece on the augmentation of Guy Debord’s “Dérive” with computational means. I am particularly interested in its 4th level, that is how pervasive games can be used as alibi to become instruments for the design of the city.

In the latest IEEE Pervasive Computing issue, Ezra Goldman builds on his work on the effects of ubiquitous wireless internet on locational usage to deliver his thoughts on the Role of Space in a Networked World. He mentions the confusion between mobility versus connectivity by arguing that we are likely as mobile today as we ever were. What’s different is that we’re more accessible and connected when we move around (quote from Mobile Communication and Society). This increased demands and expectations from others make us feel we need to be more connected. In consequence, it is our social relations and work duties that are becoming mobile as opposed to our physical body. Moreover, instead of making use freer, this makes us depend more on the physical spaces with a particular coupling of hardware, software, and infrastructure that enable us to stay connected. In a place were we can’t connect, we might feel a sense of uncertainty and isolation.

Relation to my thesis: Mobile and wireless technologies freed us from physical location but made us more dependent on the infrastructure that enable us to stay connected. Ezra poses the question as “are we gaining control and flexibility or becoming dependent on our own creations?”. In other words “Does ubiquitous Wi-Fi present an expansion of human habits or habitat for our technological devices”.