People interested in locative media and ubicomp in the Brussel area (or in Europe!) might be willing to attends NewBraveWorld:

“An “Internet-of-Things” is under construction with technologies for unique digital identification (RFID), geolocation (GPS), embedded computing (ubiquitous or pervasive computing) and mobile networking (e.g. wifi, wimax, umts/3g). Places and objects become linked to digital media which can be everywhere people are.

Our digital life and social interactions are going to happen through tangible augmented objects and our physical environment will become the playground of new social and artistic behaviors, interventions, actions both in data and media spaces.

“New Brave World” proposes 4 workshops exploring the roles of artists, designers, media makers and creative scientists/developers in this context of the merge of digital and physical spaces.“

The third workshop will be held on June 4-8 2008 produced by iMal with the support of the Flanders Audiovisual Fund. With the participation of Talkoo (Electronic Interventions in Urban Context) and the ubiquitous David Cuartielles:

“The Talkoo workshop intends to bring the practice of Electronic Interventionism teaming up with a community spirit for the realization of pieces to be set in the urban environment of the city center of Brussels. After a series of practical exercises with an introduction to Arduino, participants will look into the methods for carrying out interventions with electronic elements in urban locations. Divided into groups, participants will be the creators of electronic machines that will invade the city, provoking situations and stirring sensations in its inhabitants.“

Date: from 4 to 8 June 2008
Fee: 100 EUR
Maximum Participants: 15
Location: iMAL, Brussels

Detailled description and Registration Form here

In an IEEE article called “Location-Based Services: Back to the Future“, Paolo Bellavista, Axel Küpper, and Sumi Helal gives an interesting overview of the technical issues regarding location-based services. They take an intriguing viewpoint: projecting themselves in 2012 and backasting to discuss “What Was Wrong with First-Generation Location-Based Services?” (i.e. LBS of today).

Starting with a brief history of how LBS evolved from Enhance 911 in the US to the explosion of projects which started around 2005. They then discuss this evolution of time, giving some hints about what they think the 2008-2012 axis can be:

The evolution they envision is made of 4 major changes:

“From reactive to proactive: Proactive LBSs, instead, are automatically initiated when a predefined event occurs—for example, if the user or a target (another designated person) approaches or leaves a certain point of interest or another target. Proactive LBSs demand much less user attention and interaction.
(…)
From self- to cross-referencing: Self-referencing LBSs are services in which the user and target coincide, while cross-referencing LBSs exploit the target location for service-provisioning of another user, thus requiring stronger privacy protection.
(…)
From single- to multitarget (the number of targets participating in an LBS session): In multitarget LBSs, the focus is more on interrelating the positions of several targets among each other.
(…)
From content-to application-oriented: the delivery of such dynamic applications is impromptu. In contrast to content-oriented LBSs, application-oriented LBSs provide a more powerful and richer interaction model, with autonomic installation and removal of dynamically needed components.“

Why do I blog this? although I don’t necessarily agree with all the points here, the articles gives an overview of the technical issues regarding LBS lately. Another comment I had after reading the paper is that all of this looks very cryptic from a UX POV.

GENEVE*accessible by Antoni Abad is an intriguing project launched by the city of Geneva in partnership with the Handicap Architecture Urbanisme (HAU) association, with the purpose of making travelling easier for the disabled.

The project is simple: disabled phone are handed out GPS-enabled mobile telephones so that they can take pictures of every obstacle they come across in Geneva. By means of multimedia messages they create a map of the accessibility of the city on the internet. The resulting work will be presented at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, within a series of related live events: the “Créateurs Singuliers” week (27th May-1rst June).

Here’s an example of the on-going map with a typology of different obstacles (stairs, entrance, etc.):

Why do I blog this? documenting interesting local projects around here. I like the bottom-up approach of the initative.

The last issue of The Economist ha a special report on mobile technologies and nomadism. The report features relevant articles but there was one that I don’t really agree with. For example, the one called “location, location, location” definitely overestimate the short term and is in contradiction with currenf facts (see the previous blogpost):

“Most obviously, this means that “the idea of being lost will be unheard of”, he says. More interestingly, it allows people to become “more immersed in the real world around them”.“

The most interesting part is certainly a short video on their website where they asked Jan Chipchase to self-document his nomadic life in Tokyo and Seattle, taking pictures and leaving phone messages.

More notes about this report later.

In-Car GPS Navigation: Engagement with and Disengagement from the Environment by Leshed, Velden, Rieger, Kot, & Sengers is a paper presented at CHI 2008 that deals with the relationship between GPS car navigation and how people interpret their environment or navigate through it. What’s interesting here is that they avoid technological determinism (technology as the external causation of change) and the traditional lament/pessimisn about technologies influence on social change.

Using an ethnographically-informed study with GPS users, the authors show that GPS disengages people from their surrounding environment, but also has the potential to open up novel ways to engage with it“. The issues of environmental engagement and disengagement are the following:

• Pre-navigation/Route Choice: ““Finding” the destination is thus modified from a relative spatial activity to correctly keying in the address“
• Route Following: GPS eliminate the attention to objects in the paths, some people less blindly than others.
• Orientation in Unfamiliar Areas: “ the GPS disconnects the drivers from the external environment, as they no longer need to find out where they are in order to avoid getting lost or for getting oriented when already lost. This issue is intensified when the GPS automatically and quietly recalculates a new route when its directions are not followed unintentionally (e.g. because of a mistake) or intentionally (e.g. because of road constructions and detours): the practice of re-orienting and consciously re-routing oneself is not necessary anymore. However, some informants reported that they do like to know where they are

Orientation in familiar areas: people do not want to have oral instructions, sometimes disagree with paths, use the gps “just for fun” or use it mark place they know.

• When driving: social Interactions around the GPS: with: “interaction with other passengers in the car has altered given in-car GPS units. With vocal directions from the GPS unit, a passenger who serves as a navigator in the car is no longer in need, and so the driver/navigator roles are modified“
• When driving, the GPS is often treated as an “active agent”, socially speaking: naming the device, talking to him.
• When driving, the interaction with the external environment and locals is also altered. For instance, the digital representation is not accurate enough so people have to look outside and see if their POI is here or it can allow to discover new elements (rivers or parks) on the way. And interaction with other people are less needed (to ask a direction).

Based on these results, the author provides some “high-level guidance rather than feature-centered design” ideas:

• “GPS instructions could refer to landmarks in aiding navigation.
• Highlight the ambiguity of GPS data (…) to minimize risks associated with over-trusting an automated device.
• Extend context-aware capabilities: distinctive usage of the GPS in familiar areas
• Support the car as a social place: Instead of secluding the passenger seated near the driver (…) we can engage them in the interaction with the GPS
  unit.”

Why do I blog this? great paper from lots of criteria (theoretical justification, nice exemplification of techno-social recombination, design implications). Moreover, the design implications are close to what we found in another location-based context: in the CatchBob experiment, while studying how WiFi positioning is employed by players (I’m currently writing a paper with Fabien about it). That paper is also interesting at it contradicts what that “location, location, location” article in the last Economist report state (the fact that we will never be lost or be more immersed in the physical world.

Leshed, G., Velden, T., Rieger, O., Kot, B., & Sengers, P. (2008). In-car GPS navigation: Engagement with and disengagement from the environment. Best Paper Award. To appear in Proceedings of CHI 2008, Florence, Italy.

Mobile map interactions during a rendezvous: exploring the implications of automation by Dearman, Inkpen and Truong is an interesting paper, to be published in Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, about automation and mutual location-awareness, a topic I dealt with in my PhD research.

The paper describes two studies where people engaged in a rendezvous task employ location-awareness features. The authors address the role of automation in that context, to investigate its efficiency with regards to the use of the display space and the amount of manual interaction that can be reduced.

Here’s a summary of the results:

“Location awareness can help facilitate a rendezvous of two or more persons. To further enhance the rendezvous experience, we conducted two complementary field studies to identify what information in a location-aware map application is important to rendezvous individuals (study 1) and to explore the use of autofocus, our automation technique to reduce user interactions with the rendezvous application while still providing relevant information to assist users with their navigation task (study 2). Overall, our results highlight the importance of maintaining the visibility of the user’s location in relation to that of their partner(s) and rendezvous location. Additionally, we show that automation is useful in the context of a rendezvous application, but that the considerations are significantly more nuanced than originally conceived. We discuss unique instances when and why the automation process broke-down or did not perform as required by users. The results of this work demonstrate the potential for automation in a location-aware rendezvous application and identify important design considerations for future work in this area.“

Also the conclusion offers very relevant insights:

“Our results suggest that the visibility of key landmarks can help facilitate navigations. Prominent landmarks could be flagged by the system, or users could define custom landmarks as focus locations. Additionally, we need to consider the importance of landmarks, buildings and structures surrounding our focus area because of their importance for how we navigate. Rather than positioning the map such that a structure is only partially visible on the screen, the automation could identify the outline of the structure and position the map so it is completely visible”.

Why do I blog this? I am not surprised by the conclusion (and the discussion about the nuance of automation) since… it often leads to similar issues. Moreover, the insights provided in the conclusion are interesting form a design point of view (see more in the paper)

A recent EPFL Technical report I wrote with Fabien Girardin and Pierre Dillenbourg: A Descriptive Framework to Design for Mutual Location-Awareness in Ubiquitous Computing.

“The following paper provides developers, designers and researchers of location-aware applications with a descriptive framework of applications that convey Mutual Location-Awareness. These applications rely on ubiquitous computing systems to inform people on the whereabouts of significant others. The framework describes this as a 3 steps process made of a capturing, retrieval and delivery phase. For each of these phases, it presents the implications for the users in terms of interpretations of the information. Such framework is intended to both set the design space and research questions to be answered in the field of social location-aware applications.“

The paper actually gives an overview of the main issues regarding location-based services, and more specifically multi-user location-aware applications/mobile social software.

A location-based annotation that indicates when water overflowed that street in paris. Interesting marker of the past (from 1910) that aims at reminding a different state of the environment. That’s the sort of Holy Grail for mobile phone service developers… who try to promote a digital equivalent to this. Where are we in 2008 wrt to this sort of system?

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).

The last issue of Communications of the ACM featured an article about location-based services that deals with user perceptions of location-tracking and location-awareness services. Some excerpts I find interesting here:

First, about the slow adoption of these technologies:

“Generally, the slow adoption of LBS has been explained primarily by three causes. First, the implementation of more accurate localization techniques (such as E-OTD, U-TDOA, or A-GPS) through providers has taken longer and has been more costly than expected. Second, the few available LBS applications display long response times, often too long for users to handle. And third, users are concerned about privacy issues that are an inevitable side effect of LBS. “

I found interesting the framing in the article in terms of “humans” and “non-humans” although it’s not referring to Latour’s work: “one of the entities, whether human or non-human, is always the object of LBS, that is, it is the entity about which location information is recorded“. The authors also make the distinction between location-aware systems and location-tracking services:

“Location-tracking services provide information about a user’s whereabouts to entities other than the user, while location-aware services supply the user (the information requester) with personal location data. In the case of location-aware services, the location-information- causing entity is the recipient, whereas for location-tracking services, an external third party requests and receives location information about another entity. A car navigation system is a location-aware service. Here, location information is provided to the requester (the driver) who, in return, receives real-time navigational services. Other examples of location-aware services include location-sensitive billing (paying while passing toll stations), and location-specific store advertisements sent to a consumer’s mobile phone when the person is in proximity.“

In their lab experiments, the authors found that people found location-tracking capabilities more useful than location-aware services.
Why do I blog this? the situation concerning LBS seems to be the same as time unfold, the same questions as the one discussed in the last 5 years are still unsolved (privacy is and will always be a problem. Things discussed in this paper echoes a lot with my ETech 2008 presentation.

Yesterday I gave a talk at ETech 2008 entitled “Mobile Social Software from the inside out“, which was an updated version of my overview of the issues (and some solutions) regarding multi-user location-based applications. People interested in the slides can have a look at the annotated version I’ve put here (pdf, 14.5Mb). The reason why I gave an existing talk was that I’ve never presented that one in the US (only in European countries and South Korea) and was curious of the reactions.

Urban sensing: out of the woods is a paper by Dana Cuff, Mark Hansen, Jerry Kang that deals with embedded networked sensing that successfully shifted from the lab to the environment. Some excerpts I found interesting:

“urban sensing shifts focus and control away from the scientist at the center. We can anticipate new forms of science built from large-scale citizen-initiated data collection. Data will also be collected, then interpreted, in ad hoc ways by everyday citizens going about their daily lives.
(…)
There are at least two concerns: bad data processing and the “observer effect.” First, when amateurs collect data through cheap, unverified, uncalibrated sensors, the immediate fear is “junk data.” (…) Second, observation generally and surveillance specifically alters human behavior.
(…)
The data commons and citizen-initiated sensing will provide answers, pose new questions, and open new opportunities for public discourse.(…) urban sensing has the potential to generate a “data commons.” By this, we mean a data repository generated through decentralized collection, shared freely, and amenable to distributed sense-making not only for the pursuit of science but also advocacy, art, play, and politics.
(…)
Today’s exotic and disturbing data collection practices may appear banal 10 years hence. To the extent that privacy preferences are adaptive to the environment in this manner, we must be aware that today’s policy choices will have long-term path-dependent effects.“

Why do I blog this? some interesting issues regarding urban sensing. I am personally interested in how they can be used, how these networked objects can create new applications in the city of the near future. As I blogged the other day, is it useful for urban planners? architects? city dwellers? Can we design intriguing services or playful environment based on them?

Cuff, D., Hansen M., & Kang, J. (2008). Urban sensing: out of the woods. Communications of the ACM, 51(3), pp. 24-33.

Tom Coates announced the launching of a geo-service called Fire eagle.

3 ideas behind the scene that informed this project:
- we should build services that cam manifest everywhere the network touches - the back-end of ubicomp.
- in this new world we’re creating, the service should stay in a silo but they should play well with others.
- decouple the creation and use of data: one service to create data, another one to use them.

These 3 things are particularly important in the domain of location-based services
most of existing LBS are falling into one of these 2 categories: getting location / using location. Very restrictive. A better model: get location on one side and then other services for using location. But we can go past that: if any service in the world you inform any service.

Fire eagle: allows you to share your locations with other sites and services safely through a secure server. Fire Eagle keeps only the most recent piece of location information it has received. It helps you to share your location online as you want, control your data and privacy, easily build location services.

From the user perspective, very trivial, you go and set your location (text, GPS coordinates…) and you can connect with other applications such as Dopplr. And Dopplr can update your fireagle location depending on where you plan to be (the service provided by Dopplr)

Fire eagle is close to the idea of “Spimes”, object that represents themselves in space and time.

Participated in a panel yesterday as the Mobile City conference in Rotterdam. The event was great and fully packed with a nice program and audience. The conference was a multidisciplinary even about locative media/mobile technologies and their relation to the City.

The panel was about “Designing for Mobile Media & Urban Spaces: between Theory and Practice” and addressed challenges and opportunities of the field, as well as the link between theory and practice. Although my panel-colleagues were speaking at high level socio-politic theory, my point was to focus on issues regarding interaction design and spatial environment (not that I dismiss the privacy issues of locative media or the politics of ubicomp but it’s not my field).

My point was to describe one of the limit of current location-based services design: the fact that most of the time space (the material environment) is assumed to be uniform and homogeneous. Based on the work we did in the CatchBob! project (a location-based gamed developed to be played on our campus), as well as some other material, I described how this was not the case. The organizers asked us to bring 3 pictures to exemplify this. These 3 issues/pictures are not exhaustive of course.

My first point was about the roughness of the environment: the world have flaws, breakdown, accidents, things are being repaired or regulations make systems more complicated. And because of that, users of location-based applications are sometimes lost, frustrated or clueless about what is happening on their screen. In our tests, we had some users who felt lost on our campus (where they have been studied for 3 years!). So the environment is dynamic and conditions change (not to mention the weather that could influence the positioning accuracy or the topography).

(Picture courtesy of Patrick Jermann)

The second point concerned the heterogeneity of space. The picture shows the mapping of WiFi antennas or our campus. As one can see, they are not evenly distributed and since we used Wireless signals to compute people’s location in space, it was clear that the accuracy was different depending on the location in space (it was less accurate in the lower part). In addition, the heterogeneity of space is also caused by topographical limits: indoor/outdoor transitions for example.

(Picture courtesy of Fabien Girardin)

And finally, that picture shows three different traces of a passage in space using a GPS. Depending on the level considered, the accuracy of the positioning is way different (from dots to a straight line). Sometimes it’s not even continuous, so how can we design a service based on that?

Down the road, my point was to show through these 3 examples that there are limits to the continuity of the user experience. All the components of the locative media ecosystem are complex and they can either be taken as limits or as opportunities.

Thanks Michiel and Martijn for the invitation. I’ll try to put my (long) notes later on.

(via)Read in Information Week:

“At an 11-store chain of Papa John’s restaurants in north Alabama, location data is being pushed directly to customers. Using an online-tracking system developed by startup TrackMyPizza, customers can watch online as their deliveries move street by street toward their doors. Drivers carry GPS-enabled handsets that feed location data to a TrackMyPizza server. There, the data is coupled with the customer’s phone number, providing location updates every 15 seconds.
(…)
Sound like technology overkill, just to know your pizza hasn’t gone astray? Rival Domino’s thinks consumers want more such information about their orders, and it’s doing a national rollout of a Web system that shows buyers when their pizzas have been prepared, cooked, then sent out the door. But it doesn’t offer location once the pizza leaves the store.
(…)
At Papa John’s, pizza tracking is delivering business benefits in its first two months by getting more people ordering online–a 100% jump in online ordering since the rollout, says Tom Van Landingham, the franchise operating partner. Online orders save phone-answering time, and Web customers spend about $2 more per order, since they can see the whole menu. About 18% of all delivery customers in the last 60 days have gone on the Web site to track their pizza. Van Landingham expects to begin using the tracking system to improve productivity behind the scenes, by plotting more efficient delivery routes, for instance. The service is only 2 months old, so it still needs to prove it’s more than a novelty. But the chain proved it can be done.“

Why do I blog this? The perspective of having people at home riveted to their computers, following the movement of their pizza mapped digitally makes me giggle. It looks like a weird version of Pacman where you don’t have any control on your little character. Perhaps there is something cultural that I am missing or maybe it’s the novelty who made people following their pizza on-line.

So, at first glance, this looks awkward and I am really curious to see if there are some user experience researcher already doing work on this kind of service. Beyond people’s motivation to track an artifact that may be in their stomach one hour later, it would be interesting to understand more what are the expectations towards the pizza’s location, the sort of happenstance people fear about this or even the reactions they would have if the pizza wandered around instead of taking a straight line to the consumer’s house. To some extent, this is a PERFECT tool to conduct psychological experiments!