mapenvelop is a project by beste miray dogan that I like a lot: the inner walls of the envelope are blanketed by a Google map that indicates where the sender’s address is. As described by the designer “post it from the exact place”.

Why do I blog this an interesting low-tech approach to adding locational information to a message. A sort of locational information that adds subtlety in communication given that a map can be perceived as “richer” than a written address. It would be even more intriguing to have such envelopes for places you visit… you would buy a map of barcelona and pinpoint where you wrote the letter… so that your contact can be aware of where you thought about them. Surely something that is possible with digital communication through location-aware devices but that is even more curious on paper.

Two persons in the same place, as represented on the Foursquare interface. A depiction of co-presence mediated by technology.

Co-presence, as described by Zhao can refer to the sense of being together with other people in a remote or a shared virtual environment. To refer back to Goffman, it’s a form of human co-location in which individuals become “accessible, available, and subject to one another“.

The advent of location-based services lead to a new class of situation where people can b both physically copresent (what Zhao calls “Corporeal Copresence”) and located in electronic proximity (what Zhao calls “Corporeal Telecopresence”). Which is what happens with the Foursquare interface. The categories are then not mutually exclusive.

Why do I blog this? curiosity about what this kind of constraints can lead to, in terms of location-based services in a physically co-present context.

Making an “Earth sandwich” is a curious practice found in Generation A by Douglas Coupland which was originally proposed by Ze Frank:

“I’d taken a slice of boring white bread from its bakery bag and had slapped it onto a small patch of yellow sandy dirt. I was standing up to photograph the slice of bread using my mobile phone. Why would you have been doing this? I hear you wonder. Excellent question. I was making an “Earth sandwich.” What is an Earth sandwich? Fair enough. It’s when you use online maps to locate the exact opposite place on the planet from you, and then hook up with someone close to that place. Then, after you mathematically figure out exact opposite GPS coordinates to within a thumbnail’s radius, you put a slice of bread on that spot, then connect via cellphone and simultaneously snap photos: two slices of bread with a planet between them. It’s an Internet thing. You make the sandwich, you post it, and maybe someone somewhere will see it, and once they’ve seen it, you’ve created art. Bingo.

Why do I blog this? this sort of ludic practice automatically found its way to my list of locative-technologies-repurposed-for-other-aims. Perhaps some sort of new and extreme ritual from the 21st Century (definitely the kind of ideas that Coupland document/describe/invent). Let’s wait for the iPhone app, I am pretty sure someone out there would be willing to develop it.

Such idea sounds weird but I am convinced there would be some curious possibilities in interaction design, a sort of long-distance location-awareness if you want. Much of the focus in human-computer interaction research and product development revolves around the notion that location-awareness makes sense at the urban level (or national). The granularity is generally low, A gets a message that B is nearby (neighborhood/in town) and acts accordingly.

However, the Earth sandwich practice/meme is interesting from the long-distance viewpoint. Are there situations (casual or professional) where it’s pertinent to know where others are? Should the granularity be different than current mobile social software? I guess so although I don’t really know a precise use case. Maybe diaspora and families spread across the globe may be curious about it.

“ Digital Cityscapes: Merging Digital and Urban Playspaces ” a book edited by Adriana de Souza e Silva and Daniel Sutko that deal with location-based games and urban informatics:

“The convergence of smartphones, GPS, the Internet, and social networks has given rise to a playful, educational, and social media known as location-based and hybrid reality games. The essays in this book investigate this new phenomenon and provide a broad overview of the emerging field of location-aware mobile games, highlighting critical, social scientific, and design approaches to these types of games, and drawing attention to the social and cultural implications of mobile technologies in contemporary society. With a comprehensive approach that includes theory, design, and education, this edited volume is one of the first scholarly works to engage the emerging area of multi-user location-based mobile games and hybrid reality games.“

The book features a chapter called “Framing the Issues for the Design of Location-Based Games
” written by Fabien and myself (at the time I was still at the Media and Design Lab at EPFL). It basically describes an
overview of the three main design issues we tackled in CatchBob!: the role played by physical features (physical world structure, staircases, etc), the importance of the technological infrastructure (namely, WiFi) and finally the user experience of mutual location-awareness.

Why do I blog this? this is the final paper about the CatchBob! project which occupied Fabien and I from 2004. A big part of the project was about the socio-cognitive influence of mutual location-awareness (which has been done when we were at CRAFT but the one described in this chapter has benefited from my stay at the Media and Design Lab. The discussion we had at the time (2007-2008) were more geared towards architecture and design and certainly shaped some ideas that we discuss.

On a different note, although the chapter and the book are about games, there is a lot to draw out of this specific domain. Urban informatics as a whole could benefit from the elements discussed there.

Julian Bleecker and myself are putting a final touch to a pamphlet entitled “A synchronicity: design fictions for asynchronous urban computing” in the Situated Technologies series. Here’s the blurb:

“Over the last five years the urban computing field has increasingly emphasized a so-called “real-time, database-enabled city.” Geospatial tracking, location-based services, and visualizations of urban activity tend to focus on the present and the ephemeral. There seems to be a conspicuous “arms” race towards more instantaneity and more temporal proximity between events, people, and places. In Situated Technologies Pamphlets 5, Julian Bleecker and Nicolas Nova invert this common perspective on data-enabled experiences and speculate on the existence of an “asynchronous” city, a place where the database, the wireless signal, the rfid tag, and the geospatial datum are not necessarily the guiding principles of the urban computing dream.“

Due for September 2009. A sort of updated version of near future laboratory thinking that builds upon various projects, discussions (and partly going beyond material from my french book). Stay tuned.

Travelling very often in different european cities, I am always curious about Easyjet place recommendation to observe what sort of advices they bring to the table and how they renew their propositions over time.

One of the feature that interest me is the “Escape” part, the quick description of how to go out of the city you just landed and what sort of magical things you can discover in the surroundings. I generally look at various cities (Paris, Lyon, Geneva, Lisbon, Milan, etc.) and am sometimes struck by the granularity of the “escape” range. Sometimes, most of the time I should say, the recommendation is to visit something nearby. The term “nearby” or “vicinity” is not stated, yet it’s the basic assumption of the “escape paragraph”. Like you’re in Paris and one recommend you a quick hop to Eurodisney, not my thing but it’s fair enough, it’s quite close in termes of mileage (kilometers for the metric readers).

However, there are sometimes exceptions. In the example shown form a recent Easyjet trip, the description of the city of Lyon is filled with “escape” notes about the possibility to visit Camargue. Surely a nice place that I explore from time to time, but definitely not perceived as “nearby” from the continental europe standpoint… given that you must at least drive 3 hours from Lyon to get there.

Why do I blog this? This is definitely no big deal but it strikes me as revealing to what extent representations of “nearby escape” can be perceived. There is clearly here a gap between the writer’s mental model and reader’s representations. Of course, there is not just one type of reader and it may matter to escape from Lyon and go to Camargue. What is at stake here, and it’s a must-have question for location-based services designers, is the notion of spatial granularity which needs to be taken care of. Let me reformulate it here: if you want to provide people (”consumers”) with location-based information about what is relevant in the vicinity, how can you make sure what is hidden behind the term “in the vicinity” or “nearby”?

A subtle cue on the pavement that indicate that you should press “2″ on the audio-guide. An interesting location-based service which do not necessitate a GPS or any other positioning technology. In this case, it relies on people’s curiosity and will to spot this sort of red dot on the pavement.

Why do I blog this? apart from the general aesthetic of the cue, it’s interesting to contrast this sort of approach and a positioning technique. What are the pluses and minuses? What are the conditions under which it would be better to let people spot such cues (and hence be more active)?

My french book about locative media and location-based services (FYP Editions) has just been released. It’s an overview of the field, that starts from the technical standpoint and go through various questions: what are they for, why the common scenarios (buddy-finder, spatial annotation, location-based coupons) have troubles being adopted, what to expect in the future as well as the space/time/social implications.

Update: my editor tells me that the rights to publish the books can be discussed with him (through contact (at) fypeditions (dot) com)

At the Lift offices, we now print (yes, on paper) different pieces of personal informatics such as our Dopplr sheets of trips. As we are often in and out our physical offices, collocated colleagues and friends who swing by can access this a sort location-awareness board that is both accessible on the web (if connected to us through Dopplr) and on our office door. Information about our perambulations when traveling to different locations for field trips, vacations, conference visits, client meetings and stuff are then made accessible through two modalities: being connected through the interwebs AND coming physically to our offices (in addition, it also necessitates to know where our offices are located, which is not obvious).

What’s next? perhaps a colleague will start adding post-it notes or drawing graffitis on the paper sheets, that would be an interesting.

Why do I blog this? Quite rough and paper-based, this example makes me think about the ways one can rethink non-computer based practices by adding rationale coming from software/web services design. The unbook is another example of such idea as it corresponds to the idea of re-injecting ideas from the digital sphere (e.g. the release early/often trope, the community-based model). As a matter of fact, translating ideas from the digital to the physical is perhaps not always interesting as it may embeds logics and underlying hypotheses that can be irrelevant (I wouldn’t be that interested in translating productivity software/widget out of my laptop) but there could be curious and original design endeavor.

Of course the example above is flawed given that the Dopplr webpage is not really meant to be printed on paper and stuck on a wall; it’s definitely a trick but uh it can be a good start. And it leads me to think about what would be a good asynchronous and paper-based location-aware device? shareable with friends? with a certain level of errors about my future whereabouts?

The GPS navigation system in the bus that goes from Lisbon airport to the city center is an interesting device. Located in the front and at the middle of the bus, it allows customers to see where they are on a very basic map of the surroundings (a classical GPS map actually) along with a list of stops.

Of course, the most intriguing case occurs when the GPS signal is lost because 1) the street is too narrow (canyon effect), 2) the bus was under a piece of architecture that prevent the capture of GPS signal (”Lost satellite reception” as the error message says).

Why do I blog this? observing various use of location-based services when visiting new places. What is interesting here IMO:

• The shallow interface of this GPS display. The map itself is highly limited as shown by the crude representation of blocks. So far, the information printed there (apart from the list of bus stops) is mostly targeted at a driver (who would need to look for information about the street he/she has to take) and not at the passengers.
• For “users” there is the possibilities of a collective practice around the maps. There should be some intriguing field studies to be conducted around this artifact, especially to understand people discussions (tourists/locals, people knowledgeable/not with this technology).

This example draws the question of how to design a GPS-enabled navigation device for bus passengers that would offer a meaningful interface for different target groups (likely to be in this bus that goes to the airport). That said, I believe in the potential of such devices, there could be interesting services developed for single-users and groups

When “computerized dispatched” becomes a selling point for cab customers. See last week in San Francisco.

Do you really wanna know the underlying process that made this cab approaching you (phone calls, location-based services, etc.)? Or will you be more confident that this cab company is efficient because of the computerized dispatching? Or less confident?

(Pictures of space-time trails in CatchBob!, nothing really related to the paper below, just found it illustrative of this digital trail notion)

Perusing “Where Were We: Communities for Sharing Space-Time Trails” by Scott Counts and Marc Smith, I was interested by this notion of “space-time trails”.

Constituted by the movement of people in space indeed forms an interesting social object. Space-time trails incorporate both a collection of spatial positions with relationships to one another along with sensor and community-based annotations (photographs, video, environmental sensor data, physiological attributes, community-based content such as tags and comments). According to the authors:

“We argue that space-time trails, or routes, include an intentionality on the part of the user that contains more information than a collection of points. A route has a start and finish, as well as properties like time, distance, speed, directional orientation, numbers of stops, and so on. When browsing, retracing, mining, recommending, and searching, these collective and relational attributes can be leveraged for a significantly richer end-user experience than could a collection of points.
(…)
The sum of these changes could be considered to be a kind of “pervasive inscription revolution”, an era in which practices of inscription explode to include almost all human actions and interactions. The signs of the expansion of inscription are visible in the behavior patterns seen in many online services.“

Why do I blog this? interested in how “routes” and “trails” becomes social documents enriched with other forms of information (beyond synchronous/real-time location-awareness). Some interesting new practices can emerge out of this and lots of issues regarding privacy are about to be discussed.

The distinction between “space” and “place” is commonly discussed in recent academic work in ubiquitous computing/HCI by researchers such as Paul Dourish. In a seminal paper form 1996, Harrison and Dourish express that “space is the opportunity; place is the understood reality.” They raised the social construction of space by exploring how human actions are structured by the spatial organization of our environment. Unfortunately, as Dourish pointed out in his 2006 paper, this discussion lead to a misunderstanding: some people tended to exaggerate the distinction between spatial and social components.

Interestingly enough, reading Assia Kraan’s paper “To Act in Public through Geo-Annotation shared location“, I ran across this interesting paragraph:

“ It is important to make a distinction between space and plek. Anglo-Saxon theoreticians talk about space and place. The Dutch word plek (plural plekken) will be used here because the alternative ‘place’ does not express its meaning adequately. ‘Place’ is used, for instance, to refer to the physical space of a settlement, while plek refers to the meaning that a physical space has for somebody. A plek can be described as a complex ensemble of physical characteristics, cultural experiences, history and personal logic. Geographers target the navigational characteristics of plekken, but the computer scientists Paul Dourish and Steve Harrison emphasize an aesthetic quality. They recognize the function of plekken in a creative appropriation of the world and describe plekken as ‘developed sets of behaviour, rooted in our capacity to creatively appropriate aspects of the world, to organize them, and to use them for our own purposes’“

Why do I blog this? ruminating about different words and their cultural meaning is relevant here as it can express underlying dimensions.

The Potential for Location-Aware Power Management by Harle and Hopper is an interesting paper presented at Ubicomp 2002 that explore the use of location-awareness to dynamically optimise the energy consumption of an office. It basically shows how capturing workers’ location can be helpful in a different domain than mobile social software or urban computing.

(Figure taken from the paper: positions recorded for a particular user over four hours on a particular day across three floors)

The paper does not really describe an application, instead it demonstrates how an analysis of workers’ location is relevant “to form a picture of how people work and what energy savings might reasonably be expected if we were able to prevent device ‘idling’“. The authors link the discussion about “energy sinks” and workers’ movement: is it possible to lower the power consumption of electrical devices when the users are not using them… by detecting whether the user is within range.

Of course, apart from the technological side, the main issue at stake in this kind of research vector is the following:

“we emphasise that any changes should not frustrate users. As an example, we informally asked a number of computer users in various commercial and non-commercial settings why they did not have their desktop machines automatically power down, suspend-to-disk, or go to sleep after a specified time. The majority cited the frustration of having to wait for the system to reach a usable state as a major contributing factor. We cannot afford, then, to assume that an aggressive power saving policy will necessarily lead to power savings since it may prove very unpopular and be circumvented. Instead workstations in the scheme discussed must be powered up and in a usable state before the user is physically upon them. “

Why do I blog this? home/office automation is an favorite topic of mine as it uncovers important issues regarding the loss of control from users. Of course, I find the use of location-awareness relevant in this sort of context and I am wondering about other way to deploy this sort of solution without frustrating users. The paper offers a good discussion concerning such issues.

Some random notes from Mobile Monday Amsterdam, where I was invited last monday (to give a talk about “what the hell happened to location-based games”). The event was more specifically about mobile gaming/entertainment:

• Jeroen Ellferich interestingly brought this intriguing question: would you differentiate an iphone from an ipodtouch? is a Nintendo DS a mobile game platform? what about eee pc?
• He also reported on the odd fact that the most downloaded games today are the same as 5 years ago: tetris, pacman, who want to be millionaire, monopoly here and now, bejeweled, showing how the field is not very innovative.
• To him, the dark side of the mobile industry have the following characteristics: flattening growth
  traditional developers and publishers on mobile in troubles, fragmentation and porting hell (450 phone models!), flawed vale chain and low rev shares, lack of innovation in past years
• BUT, he showed that there is some hope: iphone and android trigger mobile content revival, flat-free and connectivity become the norm, there is a business case for location-based games (!?), social networks and games are a “killer combo”, touchscreen, tilt, compass are opportunities too
• Kamar Shah, formerly at Nokia, described how users are far from the dream of having a simple mobile entertainment platform (as simple as we had on TV). He showed how people are tired because of fragmentation (operators, services, partners), experience is generally shit, it does not work, people pay twice… and unfortunately bad meme spread faster
• Kamar also mentionned that people want to watch stuff, tv, high def, replicate their experience on the mobile: it’s the platform and the content that will drive the revenue, not the hardware.
• His main point was that the consumer experience is based on 5 key elements: how to find, try, buy, manage and share:
  1. we should make content accessible (over the air, on device, off the portal, on the portal…), consumer choose afterwards and have different habits: “content is king, distribution is king kong”
  2. people need to be able to try: demo, free-trial (website, on the phone), engage consumers otherwise the top 3 games will still be tetris and pacman!
  3. you have to enable all payment and billing mechanisms (micropayments…)
  4. when you buy food, you put it in the fridge, where do you put mobile games? there’s a need of storage and manage in an easy place; apple does that really well: they have a marketplace where to go
  5. sharing content for free: it has to work, if you like sth, you’d like to pass it on, you should be able to send it via email, bluetooth…
• Redefining the consumer experience implies taking care of these 5 issues.
• He concluded that the financial crisis will have important consequences: people loose their job, can’t pay the rent, how will they find the money to buy games? what’s gonna happen? Kamar said that (1) people will have more time, (2) consumer demand will go down, people will learn what to do with what they have (the complexity of mobile phones), will educate themselves. It’s good for our industry, because it’s expensive for the industry to educate consumers. They will do it by themselves, (3) we will be able to take our technology right (and it takes time)

Thanks Yuri van Geest and Maarten Lens-FitzGerald for the invitation!