Been interviewed recently by Alfons Cornella and Doris Obermair for spanish website Infonomia, the conversation is here. A short excerpt where I make my point (about the near future of urban computing) that the important thing is less about technology than human needs:

“¿Cuál es el futuro en este campo?
Si hablamos de las ciudades del futuro, no debemos pensar en tecnología, sino en las necesidades humanas, en lo que la gente quiere en lugares específicos. ¿Quieren circular mejor, conocer a gente que comparte sus mismos intereses, o, por otro lado, simplemente quieren que se les deje en paz y estar inaccesibles? Se trata de ciudades basadas en los deseos de la gente, más que de ciudades donde la tecnología se lanza sin más y la gente no entiende lo que está pasando.“

Lots of signs on that picture taken in Geneva. Different meanings, some are official (street number), some aren’t (graffitis); some are about navigation (street number), some about making explicit invisible phenomenon (the purple rainbow shows the availability of the wifi signal), some are easy-to-grasp (”COOL”), some are impossible to parse. The weirdest is certainly the black-scotch tape on the right.

“Everyday Engineering: What Engineers See” is a nice little booklet by Andrew Burroughs from IDEO. A bit in the same vein of “Thoughtless Acts?: Observations on Intuitive Design” by Jane Fulton Suri, is about all these small things and details that I sometimes blog about: observations about the world, the complexity of assemblage, failures, cracks, misuses, etc. All these small details matter as they tell us about “the thought process behind designed things”.

Compared to Thoughtless Acts, that book is more about the way to see the world in the engineer’s eyes but it’s definitely of interest for anyone interested in design or user experience research.

In addition, this collection of pictures is an invitation to be more “inquisitive” about our environments. As I sometimes try to do with picture I annotate here, the point is rather to ask questions concerning why things are like this or that. And as the author says, it allows to become “better observers”:

“Perhaps we discover a point of failure that is completely counterintuitive, as when corrosion aggressively attacks the most protected part of a steel beam. And we can also see success, when things do go as planned and the end product proves to be a match for everything that is thrown at it. Regardless of whether we find inspiration or not, we owe it to ourselves and those around us to become better observers. Our environment is brimming over with information that can help us with our basic ability to navigate a course. The better we are able to refine our actions and our thoughts based on seeing what has gone before, the fewer mistakes we will make“

The need to put a “bell” arrow sticker to indicate the button position.

Technology as a life-saver? enabler?
Seen in Geneva few months ago

Younghee’s post about surveillance techniques tackle a very important issues wrt to digital traces:

“How would people drop out of, or at least minimize their digital traces and minimize contributing to create others’? We are probably not expecting stickers and badges showing “this person does NOT have cameras” or “this person will NOT use cameras”. One of the memorable Ubicomp conference talks was on the interesting concept of creating capture-resistant environment, preventing camera phones to take photos by overexposing photos attempted in the region covered by this technology. While I am sure there are certain types of places this technology would be very useful, I do have my doubts if there would ever be any technology successfully controlling people’s digital behaviors.“

Why do I blog this? that topic is interesting because it also connects with a phenomenon Genevieve Bell described at LIFT08: the “arms race of digital deception”: for every device that claims to purport to tell the truth (e.g. GPS), there is another service that allows to lie, deceit or create alibi (which is actually coming from James Katz).

So there could be two sorts of behavior:
- using tools to minimize digital traces (Younghee’s argument)
- using tools to create counter-traces (Bell’s argument)

Wandering around Verone last week made me think of various things and the picture below reminded me of Thesis 75 in “Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing”.

“About all that we can properly ask for is that our technology be designed in such a way that it is conservative of face: that ubiquitous systems must not act in such a manner as would unduly embarrass or humiliate users, or expose them to ridicule or social opprobrium, in the course of normal operations
(…)
But we are not talking about doing away with shame. The issue at hand is preventing ubiquitous computing systems from presenting our actions to one another in too perfect a fidelity - in too high resolution, as it were - and therefore keeping us from maintaining the beneficial illusions that allow us to live as a community.“

Artifacts from the past like those scale on the street (rarely seen now, or they’re often here for ages) is intriguing for that matter.

Recently stumbled on whrrl.com, which is yet another place-based recommender/annotation system that runs on mobile phones. The tagline is “Share real-world adventures and discover places, events, and people through the chronicles of others”.

Why do I blog this? As lots of similar system (mobile/social software actually), the difficulty lies in bootstrapping the process, or how to have a user-based large enough so that “something happened” out there. For that matter, the FAQ is interesting as it describes to the users how things can be eased:

“But what if I don’t have any friends in Whrrl yet?

First off, invite some! Whrrl is all about tapping into your friends’ knowledge about the real world and sharing your own with them.

But let’s just say for the moment that you don’t yet have any friends in Whrrl. Try this: find a couple of places you love. While you are contributing your own reviews for those places, look at others who have reviewed them and share your opinions. Then become a fan of these folks. Suddenly, everything they review is at your fingertips—now you can see interesting places they like displayed right on your map. You’ll also be able to filter based on the reviews of people you became a fan of.“

Sometimes, transparency is so well achieved that you have to put a sign that something transparent is really there. In the example above, the glass is so transparent that a sign has to be put indicating the presence of “glass” (in french, it says “Beware! Glass”).

Why do I blog this? This example is interesting because it’s the same problem faced by digital services in contemporary cities. It’s also an intriguing design issue, to balance transparency and visibility is a bit tricky and sometimes external factors could help: in this case the presence of dirt/dust will inevitably lead to the removal of the sign.

iBand is a curious Nintendo DS+iphone band:

Check the YouTube video too.
Why do I blog this? although it is very basic, I found the minimalism appealing (small instrument, small band, minimal tunes). And I love Elektroplankton. Somehow related to device art.

The other day, looking at toys in a kid store, I ran across this robotic horse and my attention was instantly attracted by the missing left ear:

Why do I blog this? My interest towards the user experience of broken artifacts. This poor robotic pet has lost an important body part. But important for whom? Obviously it would not really change the robot itself (I don’t think there was any noise sensor in there) but what does that mean for the robot “user” (I put it into brackets because it’s difficult to define a stereotypical “user”). It made me think of the uncanny valley (as defined in Wikipedia: the emotional response of humans to robots and other non-human entities). How uncanny is uncanny? Would it repel kids? Would they find it curious? What would be the discourse around this?

Is it possible to take advantage of defunct parts of artifacts? Can design take this into account? I was wondering if there could be a sort of long-term design perspective in which you create objects with intended malfunctions (to foster specific user behavior).

Via Michael Keferl @CScout Japan, this Lap Around Japan Pedometer is a more complex version of a pedometer: the device counts your steps and also map out your virtual trip around the coast of Japan.

As described by CScout:

“The tiny (14×42×78mm) pedometer counts the total distance around Japan from the starting point you enter. As you make your way through the 18,880 km journey (11,731 miles), you can zoom in and get information about 1,258 local sights, history, and products. Kind of like a Wikipedometer for city walkers. the whole point is to be able to “travel around Japan” by commuting to work, a task that would take you about fifty years at a single kilometer per day. The concept itself is admirable, and is done in collaboration with the Japan Walking Association to encourage exercise.“

Why do I blog this? I’ve always found pedometer curious as entry point but often limited in its usage of the output data. In that case, although the service is really simple (and the output as well), it’s a bit more complex. It definitely shows a trend towards more complex visual representations of movement.

“there must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street. The building on a street equipped to handle strangers and to insure the safety of both residents and strangers, must be oriented to the street. They cannot turn they backs or blank sides on it and leave it blind.“

Jane Jacobs - (”The Death and Life of Great American Cities“)

Human eyeballs, fake eyes or digital camera?

Why do I blog this? I enjoy that quote from Jane Jacobs and I think about it each time I see eyes painted or tagged as graffitis on the Street of contemporary cities. Especially when I see these eyes in places where the number of pedestrians is quite limited (like the one depicted here found in Brussels). It’s as if someone had painted these eyes to remind us that you, as a lonesome pedestrian, are not alone and that you’re watched. But not watched by what Jacobs describes, rather by distant and unknown eyes (in a Panopticon way). An interesting sign about this is that sometimes these “sprayed” eyes are represented with a Illuminati-like logo (as if there were a conspiracy against *you*):

The good thing when having a conference in France is that I had time to wander around and dig up some of the weird things that you can find on the streets. This time, it was the following road sign:

This was part of a project called bopano organized by french design clique Kanardo (also see their blog). 105 fake road signs as been designed by 47 artists (in 2005 or so) and attached to streetside poles. The one I have found has been designed by NYC-based artist evaq.

Why do I blog this? In the same vein of this lovely heart shaped streetlight, this sort of stuff is interesting in terms of city arrangements; new sorts of things that can be announced in places where you wouldn’t think about. To some extent, this shows street re-appropriation; how would that be if people were asked to design their own street signs?

In “How do Design and Evaluation Interrelate in HCI Research?“, Wania et al. investigates the relationship between two communities in human-computer interaction: those who focus on designing for usability and the ones who evaluate usability. Their goal was to discover how design and evaluation are related through an analysis of the citations in the HCI literature over a fourteen-year period in a database of over ten million documents (and bibliographic cocitation analysis).

The result of their analysis allowed them to get this co-citation map:

Some interesting remarks from the paper:

“There are authors who draw attention to the fact that design and evaluation go hand in hand. But even some of those who do draw connections between design and evaluation seem to spend most of the time talking about them separately and then spend a short time talking about both design and evaluation together.
(…)
two orthogonal dimensions and these were discussed above. One, vertically, shows high involvement with end
users (at the top) and low involvement (at the bottom). The second dimension, running horizontally, shows a strong focus on theory development (on the left) and a strong focus on system building (on the right)
(…)
While this analysis is clear about who is at the center, we must speculate about why this particular set of authors is at the center. (…) We believe that the central theme that ties these five authors together is a focus on the context of use of systems. Suchman’s situated action and Hutchin’s cognition in the wild have a clear focus on context. Fischer’s seeding-evolution-reseeding model of system development bases design decisions on studies of systems in their context of use.
(…)
There are distinct clusters here, but there are not clusters consisting only of design methods and others consisting only of evaluation methods. Rather, each of the seven clusters contains examples of both design and evaluation methods. What, then, is the glue that holds each cluster together? (…) To some extent, there is some mapping of problems to approaches, but it seems that the ties are weak.
(…)
The next hot research area will be the one in the center of the HCI map. (…) We predict, therefore, that the next hot topic in HCI will be a focus on understanding design and evaluation in the context of use.“

Why do I blog this? it’s interesting to read this sort of article to get an overview of a field. Of course it’s a pity this only concern academic work (and not other interaction design actors) but only the academic system would allow such analysis based on publications and co-citations.

Wania, C.E., Atwood, M.E. and McCain, K.W. (2006): How do design and evaluation interrelate in HCI research?. In: Proceedings of DIS06: Designing Interactive Systems: Processes, Practices, Methods, & Techniques 2006. pp. 90-98.