Yesterday I had a meeting with Dominique Foray, a professor at EPFL who will participate in one of the LIFT07 panel about the “user-centered economy”. His perspective is about innovation management and the economics of creation. At a certain point, I realized that the term “user” he was employing was slightly different than its usage in my research field (HCI/CSCW/cognitive sciences with a strong spin on user studies of technology).

Then today I ran across this research project by Alex Wilkia about this very issue:

My research project is an ethnography of interaction designers and related innovation actors embedded in a multinational microprocessor manufacturer who models users, assembles interactivity and thereby guides product design and development processes as well as informing the long-term strategic thinking of the organisation. The aim is to examine in detail the discourse and practices in which multiple user representations facilitate user-centred design (UCD) and innovation practices in relation to technological development.
(…)
To map empirically the diverse uses of the ‘user’ within a research environment and development programmes that employ or are engaged with UCD practices and outcomes.

Why do I blog this? boundary objects like the term “user” are very important, especially when dealing with innovation and design, which encompasses a very large area of fields and interests.

“Deltron 3030″ (Deltron 3030)

Was just listening to Deltron 3030 Virus… and I ran across those lyrics:

a virus
To bring dire straits to your environment
Crush your corporations with a mild touch
Trash your whole computer system and revert you to papyrus
(…)
Society thinks thier safe when
Bingo! harddrive crashes from the rendering
Alot of hackers tryed virus’s before
Vaporize your text like so much white out
I want it where a file replication is a chore
Lights out shut down the entire whitehouse
I dont want just a bug that could be corrected
Im erecting immaculate design
Break the nation down section by section
Even to the greatest minds its impossible to find

According to O’reilly radar, there’s a plan from Ericsson to find cellphone coverage holes in the New York City area by deploying modem-sized sensors in cabs that will report back signal strength and clarity. I liked this part of the interview:

Ericsson chose cabs because they are always on the road and they cover most of the city. They’ve used other methods in the past. “Our favorite vehicle is the taxicab because of the randomness in its circulation,” said Niklas Kylvag, Ericsson’s manager of fleet services. But, he added, “We have used trains, trucks, buses, delivery vehicles, limousines, pretty much anything that is moving and has electricity in it. I have myself done testing in the Swiss Alps with this on my back at a ski resort.”

Why do I blog this? it’s interesting IMO to see how the discovery of seams in techological infrastructures is now rooted in possible end-users’ behaviors.

People who are into “duct tape” (like me) must have a look at this history of tape published by Ambidextrous (by Jonathan Edelman). It provides a very curious timeline that starts from “Earthenware pots mended with an adhesive substance made from the sap of trees” to Johnson and Johnson or 3M inventions. Fish-based glue as well as many patents issued for glues using fish, animal bones, milk, rubber, and starch are presented.

It’s hard to imagine a world without tape. It mends our precious keepsakes, holds parts together as a quick repair, keeps our wounds together—and sometimes saves lives. The film industry is a virtual slave to tape: gaffer’s tape, paper tape, camera tape. Supposedly Socrates used an animal hide with some kind of sap to repair a hole in his home. We at least know that before tape, there was glue, fabric, paper, animal skins, and string; when tape came on the scene, everything changed. This timeline puts into perspective how tape has changed the very nature of adhesion and, along with it, designers’ manipulation of the world.

Why do I blog this? duct tape is a very intriguing innovation. As a user experience researcher, duct tape always makes me wonder about how people tune, tinker, craft, modify artifacts. It’s not only an indicator of situations that should or have been tuned but also a a superb example of a way to let people create “stuff” (see this book:“Tape: An Excursion Through the World of Adhesive Tapes” by Kerstin Finger)

Sincerely, look at your environment, try to find where people leave duct tape.

Today I gave a presentation about the “Internet of Things” at a foresight meeting in Geneva.
I spoke after Lara Srivastava from the ITU who described the ITU’s vision about that topic. In my talk, I tried to show an alternative vision, as propelled by artists or researchers. My point was to show through various projects how the Internet of Things can be described: locative media as first incarnation, visualizations of networked communication and above all blogjects.

Notes from Sami Coll’s presentation about a sociological perspective on the Internet of Things:

- nowadays, we leave lots of traces (fidelity cards, credit card transactions, cell phone usage…)
- sometimes it’s possible to access to these traces (it’s even possible in Switzerland with supermarket cards)
- use of traces: marketing, digital marketing, amazon’s propositions… list pirates/terrorists, fight against social abusers
- “savoir c’est pouvoir” (”knowing, it’s exerting power”)

two faces of the same coin:
- convenient technologies
- “technologies of surveillance”: leave traces in the daily experience of users, produce very valuable information. this secondary function is not always conscious to the users.

paradox: we’ve never give a so important value to individualism (technologies aim at making people free) BUT the individuals have never been tracked that way… production of a new type of knowledge about people.
this paradox is very important with regards to consumption practices: liberty but it’s also the place in which we produced the most important amount of information.

traditionally, people are very reluctant towards the State (the price to pay so that it can guarantee different things?)

laws (the point in Switzerland = data belongs to whom they concern)
transparency and access to the owner
right to ask their suppression
and people have the responsibility to protect oneself

BUT this responsibility depends upon the sociocultural categories
and even when it’s perceived this potential of surveillance is not seen as dangerous (”I don’t have anything to hide so there is no problem” as Sami’s studies showed)
and very individualist approach

however…a fact should be acknowledged: modern societies need surveillance
surveillance started in 18th century: how to maintain a social order with the demographic explosion (mad people, criminals… prisons…)
then in 19-20th century: industrial revolution: surveillance of factories, workers… to optimize production
20-21th century: new problem = we produce more than we consume, then a necessity to exert control on people so that they consume more (ad…growth).
surveillance now concerns everyone of us

our daily life in the Internet of things?
less “spaces” that are not under control
we will leave more traces in places that will be more intimate
it will allow to optimize our life (maximize the profit, minimize losses)

do we really need all those technologies and produce all those information to be more free?
from what should we be more free?
isn’t it a way to create a new type of individuals?

Then Olivier Liechti presented some more concrete elements, using great examples such as the life of cows and RFID usage. What attracted me in his presentation was this:

RFID exists for 50 years so why do everyone talk about it nowadays?
- standardization (legal obligation + commercial reasons such as Wal Mart asked its suppliers to use them
- higher/increasing volume
- interoperability
- new applications and technologies (sensor networks…)
- their cost went down
- globalization (use this information in all steps of the supply chain

As an avid city explorer, I am always amazed at the items people trash; loitering and trashing practices is of tremendous interest to me. I am impressed by trash bags, dirty piles of garbages, plastic bags with shredded paper… there’s a lot to learn from a culture based on that (I won’t enter too much into ethnographical issues related to that). And of course this is something that I document, with pictures mostly.

Anyway, the other day I stumbled across this very common landscape depicted in the following picture (seen in Madrid, Spain). “Common” is a sad and pragmatic word to express the fact that in occidental cities I visited I often encountered trashed consumer electronic.

And then… I saw those two guys with trolleys, they were carrying some electric wires and trashed machines left on the street. They’re the ones who collect the stuff out of the street but mmhmm they don’t wear any city badges or superb uniforms that would make kids want to be like them in the near future. The reason why is that those person collected electronic devices and steel for recycling and selling some pieces on the black market. This is absolutely not uncommmon and I have seen similar behavior in Geneva (where I live).

And at the same time, I was reading Mike Davis’ “Dead Cities: And Other Tales”, there is one of the chapter about black economy and immigrants in LA that struck me as very close to those pictures:

“The Sisyphean task of Eduardo and Miguel is to smash up everything in order to salvage a few components that will be set to England for the recovery of their gold content. Being a computer breaker is a monotonous $5.25-an-hour job in the Black economy (…) Miguel is about to deliver a massive blow to the VDT of a Macintosh when I ask him why he came to Los Angeles. His hammer hesitates for a second, then he smiles and answers, “Because I wanted to work in your high-technology economy.”“

Why do I blog this? this perfectly describes what happen in our world filled with tech devices, there are practices related to them that are unexpected and can have considerable consequences (in terms of ecology, health, economy…)

People interested in buying weird domain name for website might be interested in list of pseudowords and nonwords. For the record, a pseudoword is “a unit of speech or text that appears to be an actual word in a certain language (at least superficially), while in fact it is not part of the lexicon. Within linguistics, a pseudoword is defined specifically as respecting the phonotactic restrictions of a language” (according to the Wikipedia). Nonwords go beyond pseudowords “in that they are not pronounceable and by their spelling, which could not be the spelling of a real word.

For instance, this list of nonwords:

STIPTSE / ZOORPTH / WOLV / FUIKTZ / GNOEPTZ / THEWMTS / DRASPCE / TIERTSE / NOORTHS / THOINNS /GHRALPS / QUIGHV / GHEABD / SPUIDS / DERPHES / THUIXTS / VOORDTH

And uh, these concepts are not useless (or for domain names), they’re used in experimental psychology (as described here).
Why do I blog this? I had to explain that concept lately to a friend (my background is in psychology, I have to deal with this stuff for a while before shifting to HCI research).

Last saturday, I had my weekly share of city flanerie (with a digicam) in Lyon, France. I stumbled across weird stuff. Among others, there was this poster:

It says:

My brain is too intelligent for me
Auction!
Sell brain:
- good setting
- 15/3 full
- accessories not included
- slightly overheating
Price: 3 francs 6 sous

Why do I blog this? few centuries ago, people wanted to sell their soul to the devil. Now that the epoch is more geared towards efficiency and the computer-as-a-metaphor-for-the-brain, it’s processing power in the form of a brain that some folks ironically wants to sell. Each epoch has its own emphasis on body parts/functions…

In the last issue of Nature, David Eagleman wrote a good paper about “death switches”. According to Wikipedia, a death switch is:

“an automated program by which a computer regularly probes a subscriber. The subscriber is required to make a response — consisting of logging with a secret password — to prove that she is still alive. When the subscriber fails to make a response for a certain amount of time, the program assumes she is dead and emails out pre-scripted messages to her pre-defined recipients.”

Eagleman has several good points about that: he describes some curious practices related to death switches:

It soon became appreciated that death switches provided a good opportunity to say goodbye electronically. Instead of sending out passwords, people began programming their computers to send e-mails to their friends announcing their own death. “It appears I’m dead now,” the e-mails began. “I’ll take this as an opportunity to tell you things I’ve always wanted to express…”

Soon enough, people realized they could program messages to be delivered on dates in the future: “Happy 87th birthday. It’s been 22 years since my death. I hope your life is proceeding the way you want it to.”

With time, people began to push death switches further. Instead of confessing their death in the e-mails, they pretended they were not dead. Using auto-responder algorithms that cleverly analysed incoming messages, a death switch could generate apologetic excuses to turn down invitations, to send congratulations on a life event, and to claim to be looking forward to a chance to see them again sometime soon.

And his point is that there is hence an existingafterlife:
So an afterlife does not exist for us, per se, but instead an afterlife exists for that which exists between us. When an alien civilization eventually bumps into Earth, it will immediately be able to understand what humans were about, because what will remain is the network of relationships: who loved whom, who competed, who cheated, who laughed together about road trips and holiday dinners. Each person’s ties to bosses, brothers, lovers are written in the electronic communiqués. The death switches simulate the society so completely that the entire social network is reconstructable. The planet’s memories survive in zeros and ones.

Why do I blog this? this is a nice example of how tech services can be tinkered in intriguing ways. As the author says “a good-spirited revolution against the grave’s silence”

Russian website fishki offers very intriguing examples of “détournement” (i.e. tinkering/hacks/DIY bricolage) that I found irresistible. Some instances:

Why do I blog this? some material to keep it handy up my sleeve, jut in case Michel de Certeau’s concepts comes up in the conversation (creativity of people).

Writing the chapter of my PhD dissertation about Mutual Location-Awareness, I inevitably ran across RADAR (Radio Detection And Ranging) metaphors, which is one of the most prominent model to show people and object’s position in space.

It seems that the first radar is from 1934 in France:

The patent is very intriguing.

An article in news.com about Disney designers highlight the fact that “Designers and animators should learn more about the real world before sitting down to create a fake one”.

“Instead of uniting with words, we unite with the objects we’re seeing,” Rohde said of both kinds of virtual world creators. (…) To prepare for the design of the Expedition Everest thrill ride, Rohde took a team of designers and scientists to study the Himalayan region. In addition to examining the animal species and plants, the teams went from village to village in the surrounding areas and talked to Tibetan and Nepalese people.

Rohde stressed that pen and paper can be as important as modern graphics technology as a way to achieve authenticity. In the past, he said, technological constraints were constructive in some ways because they forced people to be both creative and collaborative, as in elaborate medieval theater. Now we have increased our ability to create and for individuals to have the power to do small things really well on their own, but we are losing the ability to do big things together, he said.

Why do I blog this? summer read.

One of my favorite design/foresignt/scouting company Experientia recently produced an insightful report about the latest trends in electronic toys and games. It’s called “Play Today” (pdf, 4.7 mb, 71 pages) and is definitely a must-read for people like me in the game-research/industry. It’s written by Myriel Milicevic with editors Jan-Christoph Zoels and Mark Vanderbeeken, both Experientia partners).

They present examples of board games, controller toys, electronic friends, educative missions and DYI worlds, location-based games, game activism and romantic encounter.

What is important to me is the underlying rhetoric behind that:
1) due to recent and expected technological advances, boundaries between the game and toy industry is going to fade, then some joint projects, complementarities will be possible
2) the game paradigm per se is more than the individual/system interaction and can be used for different purposes (learning, encounters, urban discoveries…)

Would this be enough to address the slumping sales problem?

Why do I blog this? What I really like in this report, and it’s one the approach I am always mentioning when I do seminar about game/toy trends, is the convergence between different industries/domaine: game companies (editors and development studio) and toy company. That is why I like the fact that the report address this issue with no boundary between video games, game controllers, electronic toys and so fort. As they say, it’s about “mixing media, mixing worlds”.

This is also interesting from the cultural anthropology viewpoint and it makes me think about the work of Mizuko Ito: see for instance her paper about kids participation in new media: a tremendously lively ecology of “media culture” is nascent, based on some media convergence (video games, trading cards in her case), personalization and remix as well as hypersociality of exchange. This Experientia report is really about this new ecology of play which as less distinct boundaries than previously thought.

Technorati Tags: experientia

It is now possible to detect who is eating what by analyzing the sound of mastication. Researchers from the Wearable Group at ETHZ (Zürich) developed an automatic dietary monitoring system and demonstrated that sound from the user’s mouth can be used to detect that he/she is eating. As described in this paper:

The paper also shows how different kinds of food can be recognized by analyzing chewing sounds. The sounds are acquired with a microphone located inside the ear canal. This is an unobtrusive location widely accepted in other applications (hearing aids, headsets). To validate our method we present experimental results containing 3500 seconds of chewing data from four sub jects on four different food types typically found in a meal. Up to 99% accuracy is achieved on eating recognition and between 80% to 100% on food type classification.