Cell phone booster/repeater solution seems to be a trendy path lately, as shown by this NYT article which presents devices such as femtocell to extend mobile phone service coverage indoors, especially where access would otherwise be limited or unavailable.

What I find interesting here is less the technology than the reasons why these solutions are brought forward (or at least the one mentioned/promoted by companies designing these solutions). Excerpt from the article:

““Because more and more people are not taking landline telephones anymore, adding a signal booster is becoming much more popular,” said Richard Holtz, president of Infinisys in Daytona Beach, Fla. His firm plans the placement of cellular boosters in high-rise buildings, dorms and offices.

“People are expecting perfect coverage everywhere,” Mr. Holtz said, pointing out that being indoors or outdoors can make a big difference in call quality.
(…)
Many things get in the way of wireless signals. Trees and intervening buildings can degrade the signal from the cell tower, while brick walls and wallboard supports can block them completely. Sometimes many obstacles will conspire to create a “dead zone” of dropped and missed calls.
(…)
Of course, boosters require you to shell out your own money to improve a service you are already paying for. Pestering your carrier to upgrade its network is a cheaper — but slower — approach.”

Why do I blog this? I’d be curious to know more about the real expectations of people but the seamless coverage might be a need. In our field studies, it’s generally the case that people ASSUME wireless coverage (or perfect positioning through LBS) but then realize there are some discrepancies. It’s then interesting to see both human and technical solutions to this problem. Technical solutions are boosters and repeaters described in this article whereas human solutions are behavioral adjustments (like sending an SMS instead of calling when you only have 2 bars on the signal reception display).

Glenn Derene in Popular Mechanics address the reasons why it took so long for Microsoft Surface to be “finally here”:

“Microsoft’s initial plan was to put a very limited number of Surface machines in stores and hotels with demonstration software just to show what the thing could do. But now AT&T has come along and leapfrogged over that demo mode to Surface on a larger scale—and in a much more useful way.
(…)
What struck me at the time was that the hardest part of the project seemed to be complete (…) All that was really left was for partners to design software customizing the Surface platform to their businesses. But that part of the equation seems to have taken forever.
(…)
What’s ironic is that Microsoft has traditionally been a software company (Surface is one of the few pieces of hardware it actually makes), and it has all the necessary programming talent to build generic templates for Surface
(…)
it seems that Microsoft is more interested in launching what could be a breakthrough product solely with image-conscious partners who want to use the Surface as an attention-grabbing, brand-building device
(…)
this particular delay was probably more a result of the bureaucracy of complex business partnerships than of any defects in the design and engineering of Surface itself. But the end result is the same: Those of us who get excited about new technologies feel disappointed, and maybe even a bit embarrassed, for our own initial enthusiasm.“

Why do I blog this? The article interestingly illustrated the gap between the glamorous projected at first by a technological innovation such as Microsoft Surface and where we stand one year after (” a classic example of how a lot of hoopla followed by a long delay can drain much of the excitement out of a technological innovation“). Especially when examined in the context of other interactive surface projects (also mentioned in the PM article). That’s of course a common situation in the tech industry.

It’s often when reading obscure and never translated european writers that I find the most intriguing ideas, especially when it comes to foresight and innovation. The book “Les sens de la Technique” by Victor Scardigli is no exception to this; the title is a sort of pun since “sens” in french means both “meaning” and “direction”. Thus you can read the title as “The Meaning of Technique” or “Where Technique is heading”, which reveals the ambivalence of technical innovation. What’s intriguing here is that the author, for once, do not distinguish “techniques” and “technologies”, rather taking techniques as a whole that encompass vaccines or ICTs.

Above all, the book is above the gap between the expectations our societies put into innovation AND the weak consequences of the first change we can notice. After inventions and R&D processes, innovation is expected by some (especially the inventors) to diffuse in society and “impact it” (for best or for worse). Different rationales are at stake here since engineers or biologists expect Sciences to serve Progress, the reciprocal adaption of human beings and techniques and hence measure the “social impact” of their invention. On the other hands, social scientists often more convinced by the prominence of human causalities are more skeptical and think that new techniques are only tools to modify the course of time based on their own objectives.

The author then addresses how techniques and their usage evolve over time, for which he describes 3 phases in his “diffusion model” using a raft of interesting examples that I won’t describe here:

1. Phase 1: The “time of prophecy and fantasy” (enthusiastic or terrifying) where revolutions are predicted and technique is “inserted socially” (right after invention and R&D). It’s mostly the time of positivists and the moment where imaginary symbols are constituted. The less objective fact you have, the more imaginary you get, so irrational thoughts are important here. Prophecies (or social actors who promote them) attempt to create a connection between 3 elements: the new technical object, human desire and expectations/fear of the time being. This leads to imaginary representations that you can find in the discourse of companies promoting the innovation, surveys or advertising/media messages. For Scardigli, there are of course constant imaginary issues: power on constraints (liberty of slavery), knowledge, fear of death, social justice, social bounds, economical wealth and global solidarity. There is therefore a discourse around the hopes and fears linked to these issues which are recurring in history. What happen is that fantasy, scientific knowledge and actions are intertwined and even the weakest signal is turned into an excessive hope or fear. Prophecies become necessities and then self-justificated.
2. Phase 2: The “delusion phase” that suggest how the expected technological revolution does not lead to a social revolution. Positivists’ prominence is obscured by skeptical voices who raise the gap between forecasts and realizations/effects. They also reveal how “techniques” themselves are not sufficient to change “society”. To some extent, observers realize that science only make progress… in science. It’s of course the time where “users/people” enter the scene and begin employing the technique. These small actors transform, invent new uses, hack or tweak the innovation. This appropriation and reinvention of daily life leads to a third phase.
3. Phase 3: “the side-effect phase”: 30 or 40 years after, the real diffusion of the technique is effective and some social and more long term consequences appear but often different from the one expected at first (new social form, new forms of cultures or human activities). He cites an example of a sort of bulletin-board system in the 80s in French that was expected to revive surburbian communities. What happened is that technology vanished (the state program was stopped) but it allowed people to gather, meet and create “mediating” organizations that survived. In the end, the collective imaginary of progress from the 1st phase is articulated with the strategy of actors who promote the innovation. Social change appear as a side-effect of the technical innovation, not because of it. The introduction of the innovation acts as a “analyser” revealing problems, social dynamic, aspirations, needs and above all as an alibi for new forms of sociality. And at the end of the road, it’s end-users themselves who give sense to techniques by integrating to their daily life/culture.

Also Scardigli raises the importance of the socio-cultural context of innovation, who often fail without it. He exemplify this with a description of “mediating” persons who are social actors who can promote technologies and make people understand how it will be of interest for their purposes/life. In addition, there is of course a compromise between the Ideal of the project and the economic/user realism. If what happen in the 3rd phase is different than what was expected in the first one, it’s because big actors (States, companies) are struggling with each others with different visions BUT also because small actors (users!) modify, change, tweak or slow down the unfolding of these innovation.

Finally, in his conclusion, he discusses some lessons about progress and innovation:

• Human beings build their own history, sometimes by designing new techniques but often with other means (e.g. organizational). And it’s not these techniques that will change or social and daily life.
• These innovation effort are always carried out over and over, as a sort of Sisyphean curse because new techniques have to articulate both Science (who likes to “discover”) and social demand for a better world. Unfortunately, harmonious encounters between both is very rare and needs and innovation are scarcely matching. Technical inventions are always the fruit of a culture and inventors, engineers or users all share the will to have a better world so they try, like Sisyphe.
• Social appropriation is always slower than technical innovation. 5-10 years are needed to go from the fantasy phase to find a niche of users. 10 or 20 years are then needed so that the innovation is entirely appropriated in daily life.

Jan Borcher’s “ode to TomTom” in the last issue of ACM interactions addresses issues that are relevant to my interest in the user experience of location-based applications.

First about usability issues of TomTom:

“City or street names are listed so close below each other that you keep selecting wrong ones—Fitts’ law at work. I also got a furious call when my sweetheart first tried using it: Köln (Cologne) wasn’t in the city list. It turned out TomTom had left out German umlauts from their onscreen keyboards (…) Oh, and turning it on is a nightmare. Pressing the tiny, half-sunken power button briefly is happily ignored, but keep pressing it a couple times at the wrong moment and it won’t turn on at all.“

Second, about weird features:

“ Feature development doesn’t stop at its sweet spot. Beyond the idea of providing reliable, easy-to-use directions, TomTom has since added an MP3 player, live updates through the wireless network, connections to “Buddies” (the use of which has escaped me so far), cooperative street updates, photo slide shows (I’m not kidding), and a stream of other features. Some of these are actually useful, but the original TomTom was the sweet spot“

… which he relies on to discuss the latest phase of product development which is a “baroque” step that “obeys the terrible law of feature creep”. The new feature, instead of having a user value, make life more complex… and eventually makes it difficult to use the device in its first and intended use.
Why do I blog this? Some interesting discussion about product development and evolution towards complexity (most definitely due to forces that aim at renewing products very often).

This week, Tthere is an interesting article in The Economist about the limits of leapfrogging. As you may know, this term refers to technologies that allow to skip another tech generation (for instance cell phone allow to skip the introduction of huge landline infrastrucures). Based on a recent report from the World Bank, the article describes the limits and the pre-conditions needed to have leapfrogging. It shows how the spread of new technologies often depends on the availability of older ones:

“Alas, the mobile phone turns out to be rather unusual. Its very nature makes it an especially good leapfrogger: it works using radio, so there is no need to rely on physical infrastructure such as roads and phone wires; base-stations can be powered using their own generators in places where there is no electrical grid; and you do not have to be literate to use a phone, which is handy if your country’s education system is in a mess. There are some other examples of leapfrog technologies that can promote development—moving straight to local, small-scale electricity generation based on solar panels or biomass, for example, rather than building a centralised power-transmission grid—but there may not be very many.
(…)
it is the presence of a solid foundation of intermediate technology that determines whether the latest technologies become widely diffused. (…) The World Bank’s researchers looked at 28 examples of new technologies that achieved a market penetration of at least 5% in the developed world, and found that 23 of them went on to manage a penetration of over 50%. Once early adopters latch onto something new and useful, in other words, the rest of the population can quickly follow. The researchers then considered 67 new technologies that had achieved a 5% penetration in the developing world, and found that only six of them went on to reach 50%. That suggests that although new technologies are often adopted by a small minority of people in poor countries, they then fail to achieve widespread diffusion, so their benefits do not become more generally available.
(…)
The World Bank concludes that a country’s capacity to absorb and benefit from new technology depends on the availability of more basic forms of infrastructure. This has clear implications for development policy (…) Most of the time, to go high-tech, you need to have gone medium-tech first.“

Why do I blog this? interesting article in terms of innovationm change and implications for foresight.

A quote by Georges Perec is a good way to start off the year:

“What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. We live, true, we breathe, true; we walk, we open doors, we go down staircases, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed in order to sleep. How? Why? Where? When? Why?

Describe your street. Describe another street. Compare.

Make an inventory of you pockets, of your bag. Ask yourself about the provenance, the use, what will become of each of the objects you take out.

Question your tea spoons.

What is there under your wallpaper?

How many movements does it take to dial a phone number?

Why don’t you find cigarettes in grocery stores? Why not?

It matters little to me that these questions should be fragmentary, barely indicative of a method, at most of a project. It matters a lot to me that they should seem trivial and futile: that’s exactly what makes them just as essential, if not more so, as all the other questions by which we’ve tried in vain to lay hold on our truth.“

(Georges Perec, The Infra-Ordinary, 1973)
Why do I blog this? I think this words are a good agenda for now, they nicely show the sort of attitude towards techniques and technologies one can have “to rediscover something of the astonishment that Jules Verne or his readers may have felt faced with an apparatus capable of reproducing and transporting sounds”. And as he said “Nothing strikes you. You don’t know how to see.” Why is this important, maybe first to highlight how the mundane is intriguing. Beyond the descriptive level, it’s also curious wrt to innovation and design as it allows to ask question and possibly to nurture near future worlds.

As the Shadok say: “Better to pump even if nothing happens than to risk something worse happening by not pumping”.

Why do I blog this? The Shadok was a french animated TV series from the late 60s that involved rough and stupid bird-like characters. One of the most curious aspect of this species is their absurd, useless and endless pumping. Surely invisible to non-francophone people, the series was a very weird mise-en-scène of various situations, with a whole world/vocablary/history/etc (see on youtube).

What is interesting here is the fact that this series set some standards in french’s behavior towards progress, innovation or the passage of time. Quotes and mottos coming form the Shadoks are very commonly used in technological developments and projects as programmers, designers engineers often refer to them to criticize design. It’s almost invisible to people who do not know them but a bit pervasive in the culture.

2 encounters on friday afternoon made me wondering whether I should really pay attention to this topic:

Where the first picture is a book about studies concerning social representations of “electricity”, the second is about an exhibit about “what’s behind the electric power plug”

What I think about now when looking a these two elements is this quote from Michel de Certeau in ““The Practice of Everyday Life“:

“Many, often remarkable, works have sought to study the representations of a society, on the one hand, and its modes of behavior, on the other. Building on our knowledge of these social phenomena, it seems both possible and necessary to determine the use to which they are put by groups or individuals. For example, the analysis of the images broadcast by television (representation) and of the time spent watching television (behavior) should be complemented by a study of what the cultural consumer “makes” or “does” during this time and with these images. The same goes for the use of urban space, the products purchased in the supermarket, the stories and legends distributed by the newspapers, and so on.“

Why do I blog this? Electrical infrastructure and usage of electricity, an interesting topic for a cold sunday. The fact that I encountered these 2 elements on the same afternoon is definitely no coincidence, it’s definitely that I have an interest towards a such topic. Should dig it in the future. Why de Certeau here? because it might be a starting point.

A very interesting corollary to William Gibson’s assertion “the future is already there, it’s jut not evenly distributed” is discussed by Bill Buxton in “Sketching User Experiences:

“we should not count on any deus ex machina. We should not expect any magic bullets. It is highly unlikely that there will be any technology that we don’t know about today that will have a major impact on things over the next 10 to 20 years.
(…)
innovation is not primarily about alchemy. Rather than trying to make gold, it has far more to do with learning how to find it, mine it, refine it and then work it into something of value. If Gibson is right, then the innovator is likely best to trade in his or her alchemist’s chemistry set for some prospecting tools, and learn about geology, mining, smelting, design, goldsmithing, sales and marketing, so to speak.
(…)
it is generally not the underlying technology itself, but its deployment and associated value proposition that brings us suprise and delight, as well as generated wealth for those who executed well on their insights“

Why do I blog this? I like the analogy with geology and digging stuff about things to come.

We presented yesterday the current state of the program of LIFT08 in Geneva. As last year, we will have workshop on wednesday (Feb 6th) and talks/discussion on thursday/friday (Feb 7-8). We will announce other speakers soon, with some potential surprises.

Current tracks and speakers:

• Internet in society — With Jyri Engestrom (he just sold microblogging platform Jaiku to Google), Jonathan Cabiria (on virtual environments and social inclusions) and others
• User experience — With two tech anthropologists, Younghee Jung (Nokia, Tokyo) and Genevieve Bell (Intel, Seattle) and UCI researcher Paul Dourish.
• Stories — With serial entrepreneur Rafi Haladjian and others to be announced.
• A glimpse of Asia — With Marc Laperrouza, a specialist of new tech in China, Heewon Kim, a Korean researcher on teens and social networks, and others.
• New Frontiers — With "cyborg" Kevin Warwick, Henry Markram who’s trying to simulate the functioning of brain cells, and Holm Friebe talking about new forms of cooperation and collaborative work.
• Gaming — With Robin Hunicke (who worked on games for the Nintendo Wii) on gaming trends, and others.
• Web and entreprises — With David Sadigh and David Marcus on how the web is reshuffling work practices.
• Foresight — With future researchers Scott Smith (Changeist) and William Cockayne (Stanford) and Nokia designer Francesco Cara.

“What happened to the science-fiction future?” by Katherine Mangu-Ward is a very good piece from Reason. The article is about sci-fi futures that never happened, technological innovation and user’s pragmatism. Some excerpt I liked:

“Fanciful futurist visions can obscure all the neat stuff we’ve accumulated, once-wild innovations that are far cooler and more functional than jetpacks. (Microwave ovens, anyone?) They also make it easy to forget that the ultimate responsibility for choosing which technologies fill our lives lies with us, the ordinary consumers, more than any rocket scientists.
(…)
Small boys everywhere will always doodle Ferraris with wings when they’re bored in class, but the actual lived “future” is not something that leaps off an engineer’s drawing board or from a novelist’s visions. It emerges from complex, unpredictable interactions between visionary inspiration, technological limits, and consumers’ insistent pragmatism.
(…)
In another recent book, The Shock of the Old (Oxford University Press), the British historian David Edgerton posits that technological innovations don’t matter as much as we think they do. We tend to consider scientific and engineering breakthroughs themselves as the important thing, he says, when what really matters is how we fit them into our lives. Edgerton disparages our high hopes for each new innovation as “futurism,” a disease that led us to believe in a new world birthed by engineers, where electricity would be “too cheap to meter,”“

Why do I blog this I definitely like this topic, and working as a UX researcher in a tech school makes really buying the things that are described here. The article gives intriguing examples (skyscrapers, jetpacks, roads-that-must-roll and underwater dwellings) about techno-push futures that have troubles finding their way to users acceptance… and it’s not because there is a tech breakthrough that a product is there, acceptable, usable and successful. The last bit about the role of science-fiction is also interesting considering the recent books/short stories by Bruce Sterling or William Gibson:

“we—shouldn’t read science fiction to get a sneak peak at as-yet-unseen innovative technologies. Rather than as a blueprint for what should happen, we should read it to imagine the ways humanity will figure out how to use whatever shows up, or to tweak the impressive tech that’s already lying around.“

Also seen in the COEX Mall in Seoul, this “Nintendo DS Service Zone”:

Use power adapters (lock it while shopping), screen cleaners among other tools. This service, often provided for cell phone now extended to the NDS. Compared to Laurent’s experience of asking a screwdriver in a digital camera shop (in which employees said “no we cannot do that”), this sort of little booth/area to adjust your portable console is convenient and DYI.

Some excerpts from an interview of Nathan Myhrvold (about his company Intellectual Ventures):

“What I decided to do was create the invention capital model. Making funding invention an investment. Imagine this. That there is an invention capital industry that raises billions of dollars a year to fund inventions, not startups. (…) we don’t create a company. We don’t ask for an idea. If you go to the venture capitalist, they expect you to come with an idea, a plan and a team. But if you go to them and say you don’t have an idea yet, they will say to come back when you have one
(…)
One of the things about my current business is that it will need to be ten years. We have a get rich slow scheme because it requires tremendous patience if you’re going to invest in really important research and invention. If you want to do really big stuff, you have to plan things that are some number of years away from reality. We plan for the closest something that is five years away from being a product. Some of that is pragmatic. Most of the engineers out there plan for the zero to three years range. That’s the nominal time. Obviously things slip and take longer than three years. Almost nobody works on stuff that is five years out. So if we work that way, it gives us a huge advantage. It lets us conceptualize things that are much more radical. The downside is that it may take you five years before anyone is interested.“

Why do I blog this? was trying to understand what Intellectual Ventures was doing after chatting about it with a friend. Intriguing company, curious model.

Reading “Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design” by Bill Buxton, I ran across this part that I found relevant:

“in order to design a tool, we must make our best efforts to understand the larger social and physical context within which it is intended to function. Hutchins refers to such situated activities as “in the wild” in order to distinguish their real-world embodiment from some abstract laboratory manifestation that is as idealized as it is un-realistic. I call this process that expressly takes these types of considerations into account “design for the wild”.
(…)
The only way to engineer the future tomorrow is to have lived in it yesterday

To adequately take the social and physical context into account in pursuing a design, we must experience some manifestation of it in those contexts (the wild) while still in the design cycle“

Why do I blog this? preparing some proposal I found this point very nicely expressed and may quote it. Buxton’s phrasing interestingly exemplifies this important point. Besides, I quite like the Gibsonesque “The future is already here but it’s just not evenly distributed” approach situated in time and mostly in the past.

Some of the bits I was interested in, featured in last week edition of The Economist’s technology quarterly:
Radio silence, about what happened to RIFD, once hailed as a breakthrough that would revolutionise logistics:

“ it was not surprising that RFID was widely regarded by many in technology as the “next big thing”. RFID was reassuringly coupled to the solid, real-world economy, rather than to dotcom intangibles such as “eyeballs” and “mindshare” (…) Despite such predictions, however, RFID has not lived up to expectations
(…)
What went wrong? Aside from the over-optimism common to many new technologies and the concerns of privacy activists, RFID did badly for two reasons. The first was that a veritable Babel of incompatible standards grew up.
(…)
And standards do not solve everything: RFID, like any other technology, is subject to the laws of physics. Metals and liquids can cause interference that prevents tags from being read properly in some situations.
(…)
It is not just technical concerns that have hindered the deployment of RFID. A more fundamental obstacle is the lack of a clear business case. “

Are you talking to me? is a short overview of where we stand regarding speech recognition applications. This excerpts stroke me as fascinating:

““People have a lot of negative perceptions of speech technology, because the speech systems deployed first were pretty bad,” says Mr Hong. Mr Castro agrees. “There’s a history of disappointment and failed expectations,” he says. When setting up his firm, he presented his idea to some venture capitalists. They were impressed by the technology but were put off by the term “voice recognition” which, like “artificial intelligence”, is associated with systems that have all too often failed to live up to their promises.“

Why do I blog this? as usual, the E is a very compelling resource that describe why promises haven’t been reached. It’s interesting to see the parallels between different innovation that are presented in the tech quarterly, the common thread about failures and expectations.
Besides, the article written by Bruno about Jan Chipchase and Stefana Broadbent is also very informative, describing some relevant cases about certain technologies are employed by beyond-occidental-white-users.