It seems that these times are quite active with different announcements. As usual, some projects stay below the radar for a while and pop up here and there. Of course, some are bigger than others. Aside from the Lift conference, Laurent Haug, Fabien Girardin and myself created Lift lab, an independent research agency that helps companies and institutions understand, foresee and prepare for changes triggered by technological and social evolutions. We now have what people use to call a “home page“. The services we propose range from exploratory field studies to foresight research, applications prototyping and event-building. We are active in domains such as Web/internet services, video games, mobile and location-based services, urban informatics and robotics/networked objects.

For the record, our logo is made by our friend from our friends from Bread and Butter (with the great Akkurat typeface) and the web design by Maja Denzer.

Some events where I’ll be speaking at or be involved in as an organizer. Perhaps an opportunity to meet up some readers, I generally do not publicize this but some of you asked me to keep them posted.

Next wednesday (October 21st), I’ll be the keynote speaker at the Swiss E-Tourism Forum in Sierre (Switzerland). My talk will be entitled “the near future of tourism services based on digital traces” (yes, I’ve been asked to give the talk in English, this is Switzerland) and this is the outline:

“Digital objects used by tourists such as mobile phones and cameras leaves a large amount of traces. The phone can indeed be geolocated through cell-phone antennas or GPS and digital cameras take pictures that people can upload on web sharing platforms such as Flickr. All of this enables new application that allow counting tourists or providing them with new sorts of services. Based on existing experiments, the presentation will describe how the tourism industry can benefit from these digital traces to obtain new representations of tourists activities and to build up new services based on them.“

Then I’ll go to Barcelona and join Fabien for the Lift @ Citilab workshop called “Hands on Barcelona’s Informational Membrane” where a great bunch of people will tackle the increasing presence of the informational membrane hovering over Barcelona, exploring the implications (trade-offs, opportunities and concerns) and understanding how it affects the way citizens feel and live their city.

Three weeks ahead, on November 9th, I will organize a lift @ lift offices seminar (quite a name uh) at our offices about the “new digital landscape”. We still have room for people and the event will be in french.

On November 26-27th, I’ll be in Paris (along with Julian, Adam, Jean-Louis, Frédéric and Daniel) for the the new industrial world forum 2009 at the Pompidou museum. I’ve been parachuted in a session about “new industrial objects”, which sounds pretty good. The point of my speech would be to analyze a bunch of networked objects and highlight what how the Internet of Things features certain preconceptions about users. It’s a research project I’ve been working over the summer.

Back to Paris on December 2nd for a workshop at Bell-Labs/Alcatel-Lucent.

December 4th will be devoted to the big workshop day we (lift) co-organize with Council (Rob van Kranenburg) and tinker.it. I’ll be posting more information about this later on.

Paris again in January 2010 for a lecture about locative media at the EHESS for a seminar about transdiciplinarity organized by Antonio Casilli.

And finally (phew), I’ll be at Interaction10 in Savannah to give a talk called “From Observing Failures to Provoking Them”.

A quick update on Lift09, the conference is taking shape. It’s 6 weeks ahead, a good list of people registered already and the program is completed (apart from the sustainable evening event) and we are looking forward to have the whole bunch of speakers who will talk about the implications of technologies in society.

Also, for those who want to attend the Lift conference, there’s only one day left before the end of the early bird pricing. And there is still room in the open program with workshops, short speeches and discussions.

Looking forward to it! Lot of work till then anyway.

Today was my last day at Media and Design Lab and consequently at EPFL. So, I leave academia and… here’s the whole story.

It’s been 5 years that most of my time was spent there (although other ventures such as simpliquity, LIFT and the near future laboratory also took me some time) doing a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction and a post-doc in a design/architecture lab working on various projects. So not it’s time to reflect a bit abut the next step (as Julian did lately).

So, I am leaving academia and there are different reasons for that. The first thing to say is that I am not sure that I want to play the tricks of the academic game which are both about location (”in Europe is usually “you go to certain US universities for 3-X years and find another position somewhere to eventually try to get back”), publication competition and of course specialty/discipline. I guess it’s here that I was a bit frustrated lately. Being a bit interdisciplinary, I don’t know where to sit now: my original background was in cognitive sciences (psychology) and I did a master in Human-Computer Interaction in a psychology department (University of Geneva), and then a PhD in HCI in a Computer Science department (EPFL). My last job (research assistant in a design/architecture lab) also reflect my interest in design research. And in addition, over the course of my studies, I have been interested in having conversations with companies/think tank which turned me into a consultant and a conference organizer for LIFT. This combination of activities and interests have led me to look various overlapping domains (user experience, design research, foresight research, cognitive psychology, anthropology and ethnography, human-computer interaction, usability, etc.) and of course different methods, paradigms, authors, POV.

Looking at these another domains and methods have no doubt changed my practice and modified my interests. The sort of research I was doing 5 five years ago was mostly experimental and quant studies to address psychological implications of technologies. Starting from theoretical models, the point was to test hypothesis (H0 versus Hn), compute inferential statistics, analyse the results, see what they mean wrt to theories and at the end of the day reflect on what this means for engineers or design practitioners (the criticized “implications for design“). Very much cognitive psychology-inspired HCI. I don’t really do that anymore and my research practice has been changed due to different factors:

• Having worked with video game designers in the last 7 years, I learnt how looking or building “implications for design” is different than doing cognitive psychology. I felt that their needs were less about building theories and laws about behavior but more situated account of how their technologies or environment were used, understood, appropriated. Learning more about ethnography and qualitative research was very fruitful for that matter. Of course, this does not dismiss more quant-inferential research but it seemed to me that qual+quant descriptive research was the thing they need at first.
• On the theoretical side, I was also interested in less hardcore cognitive science theories, more alternative accounts of how people make decision, do things together and use/create artifacts. Theories like Situated Action, Distributed Cognition was interesting for that matter although I don’t agree with everything here. But it surely changes the way I want to conduct research.
• Having done research in ubicomp where it’s impossible to carry out studies in a controlled environment (which is the pre-requisite to run experiments), I had to go for more qualitative methods.
• …

Thus, having experienced that (and sometimes tried to make some bridges between different methods or theories), I started to doubt about where I was sitting, what sort of research tradition I’d like to adopt (top-down inferential cognitive psychology? bottom-up descriptive situated ethnomethodology?). And of course, once you’re doubting… you start raising issues or questions that does not appeal to reviewers or researchers from certain tradition. Eventually, I found it hard to get back to ultra narrow-minded cognitive stuff and interdisciplinarity is sometimes recommended however not really rewarded. And i became fed up reading papers in which people don’t know anything about a certain literature/methods/ideas because it’s “out of their field”.

So… this situation led me to to question what I was interested in: circulation of knowledge, innovation, user experience of techniques/technologies, foresight and future research can be relevant keyword in that context. Which can be defined by two vectors:

1. “User experience research”: I know that sounds not very academic and rather practitioner oriented but I find it covers a lot of the issues I like to investigate through field/user studies. It’s about understanding the implications of certain technologies, how they are appropriated, used, deployed, understood, etc. a a micro/meso level (not the whole society level) from a descriptive perspective that can inspire design.
2. “Foresight”: doing scanning, building scenarios, describing alternative futures based on weak signal spotting. This is definitely less academic and more about diffusion of innovation but I am convinced the material gathered in (1) can be useful for this and help defining scenarios for the future. In general, foresight research rather operate at higher level (more macro, with data coming from sociology) but my point is that all these levels can be combined.

What I am interested in, oftentimes, it the cross-pollination between different worlds, making analogies between different domains and drawing issues/solutions/problems/insights form them to enrich the problem at stake. Mapping the overview, defining the problem space, finding opportunities by using various sources: meeting people, having conversations, reading academic papers, annotating books, conducting user research (from usability test to ethnographical studies), taking weird pictures or writing about all of this. This is why I am interested in foresight research since it’s rather about this sort of macro perspective than the more narrow POV of scientific research.

What does that mean for the next? Simply that I will have, from now on, 2 affiliations: being a consultant/conference organizer at LIFTlab and a researcher at the Near Future Laboratory. In the end, it’s about being involved in a “think-tank” stance: smaller, more flexible, less about ivory-tower and silos. That said I will still have one foot in academia through teaching HCI and user experience research in different institutions; and I am still working on academic publications.

We are currently in the process of defining the services we will provide ranging from providing strategic review of projects, writing foresight research report, conducting user studies, organizing workshops (or participating in workshops), lecturing, teaching and organizing conferences. And my focus will remain in my areas of expertise are: urban and mobile computing, networked objects and tangible interfaces. Any interest in collaborating? Need someone like me for a specific gig? feel free to ping me.

In the meantime, thanks Jef and all the LDM team for this fruitful year!

Currently in Brussels where I gave a talk yesterday at iMal, a center for digital cultures and technology. The presentation entitled “Device art as a resource for interaction design and media art” was about the fading boundaries between interaction design, new media art and academic research. As a matter of fact, the hybridization of digital and physical environments (through locative media, urban displays, augmented reality or mobile games) is explored by a large variety of people and institutions. It’s not only engineers and academic researchers but also artists and designers. The talk looked at why the projects from the new media art/interaction design/device art are relevant and what they tell about the design of future technological artifacts.

Slides can be found on here (.pdf, 20Mb):

In a sense, this presentation emerged from the sort of things that appear on this blog, a mix of pasta (academic or R&D stuff coming from the research world) and vinegar (weirder projects coming form the design/new media art world). It was then about why vinegar is important for pasta. The presentation went through 7 reasons why projects form artists and designers are important, especially for academic researchers and engineers:

“ (1) avantgarde: as they can announce things to come (new practices, new artifacts)
(2) challenge existing practices (for example by highlight new interaction partners beyond the classical and canonical “human computer interaction”: blogjects, animal-controlled video games)
(3) criticize the state of the world by making explicit invisible/implicit phenomena or certain aspects that are hidden (like pollution mapped on cityscape)
(4) address issues in novel way that are not possible in academia or in private R&D: by using fakes, humor or non-utilitarian perspectices.
(5) “breaching experiment”: When trying to predict or design the future of technologies, you can’t just rely on what exist today… you want “disruptions” as the literature about innovation states. So technologies developed in new media art / device art contexts are often DISRUPTIVE platforms that allow to investigate what changes.
(6) arts+design do better to convey desire and emotions (and less mechanistic vision of humans who do not always want automation in their lives for example)
(7) the design process: something is investigated in the construction of hypothetical artifacts, the design process itself is important and bring lessons. A totally different approach than engineering and academic research.“

Thanks Yves Bernard for the invitation.

(maybe a personal blogpost to keep track of current things I’m involved in)

• Writing (and meeting people from a telco or) a research project in 2008 about the user experience of mobile gaming.
• Meetings with lots of people in Paris: j*b to chat about our current projects (bravo pour la thèse), Bruno Marzloff to discuss about possible collaborations (which starts with a short text I am currently writing), Pascal Salembier to talk about our current research project/positions as well as his recommendations for a young researcher like me (he advises me to write a book about space/location-awareness/mobility/collaboration), Rafi Haladjian to discuss Violet’s project, his talk at LIFT and possible collaborations, and the FING people because it’s good to hang out there.
• A talk at the Cité des Sciences for the Rencontre des Cyberbases, an event organized by the big french bank Caisse des Dépots. It’s basically their annual seminar where all their teams have workshops and seminars about technological issues. My talk was one of the three keynotes; speaking after the director of this initiative and a member of the European Commission, I presented what is Ubiquitous Computing are some critical elements about it (mostly the talk I’ve given here). Thanks Sophie Bernay, Isadora Verderesi and Charlotte Ullman for the invitation.
• Get back home and headed for the third workshop of the in-betweeness series at the Waag Society in Amsterdam. Somehow related to urban computing, space/place and design, these workshops focuses on places that do not fall into the classic categories (home, café, work) and can be difficult to define: public waiting lines, transitional spaces, toilets, etc. The point of these workshops is to look at how people behave in these places or how things are designed to understand the implications for the design of future technologies. Organized by Karen Martin, Arianna Bassoli, Johanna Brewer, Valentina Nisi and Martine Posthuma de Boer. Enjoyed the informal+ethographical spin+discussion at this workshop. The field trip dimension of the workshop was very pertinent as well as the discussion of what each group collected, what they mean in terms of behavioral traits, social issues, and design implications.
• Preparing a talk I will give tonight at the University of Geneva about location-awareness and social computing to students from a master in IT. Possibly material for future talk at research centers for two big IT companies
• attend an event in Geneva about FON: the Geneva city council to sign a convention with FON to consolidate the small existing wireless network available in some key locations of the city. Discussed last month with Jean-Bernard Magescas about this.
• writing research papers on my PhD dissertation, the first review from a journal paper came and have two other papers in the process
• write a chapter about new interaction partners (pets and pervasive gaming) for the near future laboratory book
• work on a survey/interview about mobile gaming.
• work on some presentations about web2.0 implications for the video game industry or cognitive sciences and gaming for a client and finish the slide for my talk about tangible interactions the European Game Design Conference

We recently opened the registration for the LIFT08 Conference. The program is still taking shape, we will announce few things soon (especially the next graphic design ).

After two day of jetlagged visits and brainstorm with Laurent and Jaewoong Lee (Daum) about LIFT evening, I visited Korea University with Bruce Sterling and Jesmina Tesanovic. We both gave a talk at the Korean Business School there to MBA students, as part of their evening program.

My talk was about the current state of location-aware social software, the problems and possible opportunities, based on literature review, my PhD research and projects that I found pertinent. Slides have been adapted from a talk I already gave in Arhus few months ago.

Then Bruce gave a powerful lecture about the Estonian/russian storm worm.

Thanks Jean-Henry Morin for the impromptu invitation!

In Seoul for Lift evening, some talks in different institutions, meeting people and enjoying the city with our speakers.

Nice wiring, shot this afternoon.

We are looking for two postdoc positions (post-phd) at our lab: 1) Three year position on the development of interactive furniture that augments learning in small groups. One of the projects will be about tables that reflect group interactions . 2) Three year position on the development of learning technologies aimed at students who rarely sit on a chair: apprentices working most of the week in a company and going one day at school. These technologies have to be more integrate in their physical environment (context aware devices, ambient displays, …)

Contact: pierre dot dillenbourg at epfl dot ch

Buzztracker is an interesting news map (similar to newsmap or in the news). Instead of just putting the events (extracted from google news) in squares like in newsmap, it displays the news on a world map. Another great feature is the fact that events are threaded: connections between events and places are shown on the map, very simply.

These sort of map are more and more relevant with regard to the increasing amount of informaiton we are dealing with (or at least infojunkies are addicted to). I like when a limited parsing is done like featuring connections/patterns in buzztracker or the winners/losers in “in the news”.

Our position paper (.pdf) for the workshop (British HCI conference)Games and Social Network: analysis of multiplayer games has been accepted.

Analysis of a Location-Based Multi-Player Game by Nicolas Nova and Fabien Girardin

The growing number of location-based services fosters the creation of multiplayer games that take place in real settings and leaves open the question of how to analyze data generated along the game. We are interested in ubiquitous computing games in order to use it as a platform to study how people rely on spatial features in terms of collaborative interactions. The crux issue here is how to analyze the wide load of data generated by the game in an ubiquitous computing context. How should it be studied? What kinds of data may be captured and what sort of analysis should be conducted?

Que faire avec un blog � l’EPFL? Nous avons �crit un article court pour le Flash Informatique qui propose trois sc�narios d’utilisation (�tudiant, doctorant et enseignant).

In the context of the Kaleidoscope Conference about CSCL in Lausanne in October 2004, we are organizing a workshop about spatial positioning in mobile collaboration (description hereafter). It aims to study the relationships between space, collaborative problem solving and cognition in group. It will address basic research issues at the crossroads of human cognition and information technology.

If you are interested in participating, please send us an abstract (10-15 lines) of your research project by April 23rd.
(more…)

CRAFT XMAS Special Video ! (Quicktime)