Extracted from “Designing and Conducting Ethnographic Research (Ethnographer’s Toolkit , Vol 1)” (LeCompte Margaret Diane):

“Components of Data Collection Matrix
1. Which research question are to be asked
2. Which data will answer those questions
3. Where, and from whom, those data can be obtained
4. In what form the data will be collected
5. Who will be responsible for collecting, analyzing, and writing up the data
6. When each stage of data collection, analysis and report writing will begin and end
7. How, by whom, and to whom results will be disseminated“

The authors recommend to go through these questions and then work out 2 tables:
1) table 1: What do I need to know? Why do I need to know this? What kind of data will answer the question? Where can I find the data? Whom do I contact for access? Timelines for acquisition
2) Table 2: Research Questions / Process Data and Outcome Measures / Sources of Data

Why do I blog this? being in the midst of starting new projects… it’s always good to get back to basic references about where to start when you have pending research questions.

Rogue Signals by Zachary O. Toups, Andruid Kerne, Daniel Caruso, Erin Devoy, Ross Graeber, Kyle Overby seems to be close to the CatchBob project in the sense that the deployment of a location-based game is used to address psychological questions. Some might refer to this as “serious gaming”:

“a location-aware game designed to study the effects of information scarcity and tight communication channels on teams engaged in distributed cooperative activity. Our goal is to promote team cognition through serious gaming.
(…)
It is a platform for experimentation on team dynamics in situations where critical information is scarce and distributed among participants who must communicate through restricted channels. A human team, consisting of a coordinator and a group of harvesters competes against a group of autonomous agents. The game design intentionally constrains the level of information made available to the harvesters, which makes the success of the team dependent on human-to-human communication between the coordinator and the harvesters. The goal is to promote and explore processes of team communication and cognition. Applications include emergency response, as well as social networking and entertainment. “

Some information about it in Rogue Signals: A location aware game for studying the social effects of information bottlenecks, Proc Ubicomp Extended, Sept 2005: Tokyo.
Why do I blog this? this “Locative Gaming for Team Cognition (LoGTCog)” initiative is spot on the research we carried out with CatchBob! to study the implications of supporting mutual location-awareness on mobile coordination. This makes me think that there would still be room to pursue my work in that domain, maybe not with CatchBob! but with another platform. A question that is of interest and that I haven’t addressed in my dissertation is to what extent the spatial environment shape the activity (individually? collectively?).

The Mediamatic workshop about digital/physical hybridization that I attend next week is a great opportunity to start reshuffling my research interests. It’s been one month that I started working at the Media and Design Lab at EPFL, starting new projects is a slow process (especially when you don’t take vacations right after a phd dissertation) but things are starting to be more clear. My work there is focused on the user experience of gaming; this is very broad given that it encompasses a lot of systems (on-line gaming, gestural interfaces, etc.) but it seems that the projects that emerged can be framed under the “hybridization of the digital and the physical”. I won’t enter into the details of these nascent projects but the idea is to look at the new user experience created by the merging of multiple environments that you have in pervasive gaming or location-based games. In a sense, it’s about using games as a platform to study new interactions. In addition, this connects to my previous work (Phd dissertation here) in the sense that I am interested in multi-user interactions and awareness process: how what people do together in a hybridized world is influenced by specific technologies? how certain design affect collaborative interactions?

My morning read was a smart way to think about some umbrella framework about this hybridization topic:
Crabtree, A. and Rodden, T. (2007): “Hybrid ecologies: understanding interaction in emerging digital-physical environments“, to appear in the journal Personal and Ubiquitous Computing.

In this paper, the authors pave the way for the investigation of “hybrid ecologies”, i.e. a new class of digital ecology that merge multiple environ- ments, physical and digital, together. They provide a starting point about how to analyze cooperative interactions in these environments by highlighting fundamental features of interaction with them: the fragmented nature of interaction, how people articulate collaborative work and seamful representations. They exemplify this using ethnographical vignette form the “Uncle Roy with you” pervasive game.

Historically, as the authors describe, these “hybrid ecologies” correspond to a shift from media spaces (that LINK physical spaces through digital medium), mixed reality environments (that fuse physical and digital environments), ubiquitous computing (that embeds the digital into physical environments) to hybridization (that merges multiple environments physical and digital).

The main lessons from the ethnographic study they carried out are described as follows:

“The development of new computing environments gives rise to new forms of collaboration, not only in terms of how people engage in everyday activities together but also in terms of how they articulate collaboration means that a degree of interactional (including communicative) asymmetry is built into collaboration in hybrid ecologies. (…) Hybrid ecologies rely on the articulation of ‘fragments of embodied virtuality’ or fragmented interaction. (… interaction is distributed across distinct ecologies
(…)
In hybrid ecologies collaboration is distinctively concerned with the articulation of fragmented interaction. By fragmented
interaction we mean that collaboration in hybrid ecologies is mediated by different mechanisms of interaction, which are differentially distributed among participants. (…) There is nothing inherently new about fragmented interaction, then, it inhabits collaboration everywhere as we switch between digital and physical media in course of our everyday activities. What is new, however, is the way in which collaboration is provided for in hybrid ecologies, through the interweaving of hybrid networks and hybrid models of space, and how mechanisms of interaction are articulated in hybrid ecologies.
(…)
fragmented interaction is articulated in two fun-damental ways in hybrid ecologies:
- Through the exercise of ordinary interactional competences.
- Through the use of digital representations of action
and collaboration in real and virtual environments. “

Why this paper is important for my research? because it gives an overview of some of the topics that might be interesting too look at so that researchers can “unpack the nature of cooperative interaction in hybrid ecologies“:

“We propose articulation work, fragmented interaction and seamful representation as core topics (…)
Furthermore, understanding how novel interaction mechanisms are articulated across multiple physical and digital ecologies is essential to understanding the collaborative character of emerging physical-digital environments and, thereby, of inform-
ing design.
(…)
The uncovering of articulation work enables developers to determine what may and may not be automated and what may or may not left to human skill and judgement. (…) Understanding interaction in hybrid ecologies will consist, then, of understanding such things as how awareness and coordination ‘get done’“

To put it shortly:

“Fundamentally, understanding cooperative interaction in hybrid ecologies requires us to unpack the fragmented character of interaction, which will consist of uncovering the ordinary interactional competences that users exploit to make differentially distributed mechanisms of interaction work and the distributed practices that articu-
late seamful representations and provide for awareness and coordination.“

Why do I blog this? this definitely gives some framework to a current project I am working on right now.

Enjoyed reading the critique of Thinking by cases, or: how to put social sciences back the right way up. by Jean-Claude Passeron and Jacques Revel (eds.), Penser par cas, 2005, written by Philippe Lacour.

This french book is about “case-thinking”/”case-based reasoning” and sciences, or “the central problem of the humanities: how does one generalize when starting from the description of singular configurations?“. The point of the book is to bring together contributions from researchers coming from various discplines “in an effort to endow the “cases” of human sciences with a renewed dignity, in a continuation of the weberian epistemological tradition“.

The authors show how “case thinking” proceeds “through the exploration and the deepening of a singularity accessible to observation” to get a description, an explanation, an interpretation or an evaluation to extract out of it an argumentation of a more general scope, and whose conclusions can be used again”. They point out that case making is a matter of occurrence and singularity: a case is not an example.

Why do I blog this? Although the whole article, as well as the book is a rather theoretical rehabilitation of the notion of “case”, there are some pertinent elements to draw from it. When it comes to design, the notion of a singular case is important: the mere existence of a case do imply that it might need to be taken into account. Cahour et al. describes an example (sorry no time to translate the french):

“Par exemple, si l’on montre que le sujet décrit avoir vécu des émotions fortes dont on ne perçoit pas de manifestations dans les données observables, alors il devient nécessaire de prendre en considération le fait que les données essentielles pour comprendre une part des interactions peuvent être non observables, et qu’il est possible de les découvrir par des techniques « en première personne », soit du point de vue du sujet (Gouju et al., 2003). Cette conclusion ne relèverait pas des statistiques ou probabilités, mais du savoir que les faits évoqués sont correctement établis. On ne pourra dire si c’est toujours le cas, ou quel type de population ne rend pas manifeste leurs émotions ; néanmoins, ce que l’on aura établi est qu’il est possible, avec le consentement de sujets avertis, d’avoir accès � certaines de leurs émotions qui sont socialement imperceptibles.“

Working on a presentation about user-generated content and video-games, I found interesting how Jef’s talk addressed the different levels of granularity when thinking about “open design”.

Depending on the interactivity given to the end-user, this white paper from Think Studio discriminates:

“- Passive consumption: The user is getting products or services with no real interaction and no real choice. He or she has to take whatever is available.
- Self Service: The user is given the ability to choose between various products or services.
- DIY: Do It Yourself: The user starts getting involved in the value chain.
- Co-design: The user starts adding value by customizing the product and therefore defining his or her needs himself (as opposed to buying a product defined by the product management team).
- Co-creation: The user is involved in the design of the product or service itself.“

Why do I blog this? Player-generated content is an interesting issue for the video-game industry. Although I could not make it to the GDC, Amy Jo Kim’s slides are quite revealing for that matter.

What the categories above show is that there is a different granularity of participation that could be turned into game mechanics. It would be good to discriminate them in a more comprehensive or applicable way.

On a different note, I am quite skeptical of the “content” term in “user generated content” because it implies that what is created by people is strictly content, which is wrong. Imagine that people can also produce rules, algorithms, problems. For example, designing a Counterstrike level is not just a matter of producing content, it’s also creating a problem that people will be engaged in, with specific constraints (okay my example is maybe wrong because in this case the problem created is a by-product of the level designed).

The picture is taken from Dave Gray’s drawings made at LIFT07, it shows Sampo Karjalainen from Sulake (Habbo Hotel) who was talking about this topic.

Today at the urban sociology department, the “Penser l’espace“, Jef Huang (LDM) gave a talk about “Electronic urbanism: future of space and role of authorship”. It’s very close to his talk at LIFT06. Raw notes below:

Even though the title is “electronism urbanism”, Jef’s work rather focused on smaller dimension such as architecture or virtual worlds but it might lead to electronic urbanism at some point. The premises of his research is a strong belief that the massive proliferation of communication networks and devices will change some of our most basic social activities (work, learn, shop). This shift has economic drivers and there are several dying species coming from the industrial ages. Amazon as an epitome of the shift form the physical to the virtual.

So what will happen in 5-10years? will we still need physical space?
Yes, and there are examples of new forms of space which are twofold: one the one hand, mega fulflillment center: huge new building with distribution centers, back-end of Amazon google data center, underground server farms. ON the other end, some are also the front-end, new typologies such as the yahoo! store, the google store, m*zone (samsung chain of physical store: a virtual company creating space so that clients can meet each others), information kiosks

What is interesting is that when these buildings choose their sites, there are new rules: access to highways, topographies, there is a new invisible layer that comes on top of the landscape, for instance, the map of fiber routes in NYC, that affects housing prices (because people want to have accesses). This affects the morphologies of future cities

the phenomenon:
learn: classroom - e-learning environment
work: office - virtual office
shop: physical retail store - virtual shop
play: playground - game environment
…
But it’s an “either-or” phenomenon, there is nothing in between, Jef’s work is about studying what can be in-between. To what extent could virtual activities have a physical component? TO what extent can physical architecture/elements (furnitures) act as an interface between emerging virtual worlds and physical realities.

One of the elements about this is open design: the involvement of the user in the design process, that can be trace back form Duchamps (Rotating Glass Plates, 1930) or Oulipo (raymond queneau 100,000,000,000,000 poems combinatorial poetics, 1961). Back to urbanism, a question is then “is open architecture desirable in architecture or urban design?” The problem: “a camel is a horse designed by a committee” (I miss some elements here)

Another question is “what is the role of the designer in an open design piece?” The common misconception is that not, the designer’s role is not less important. Only the design is not longer in the final form but the rules of the game have to be designed. What is needed for design of openness: basic rules, algorithm, speed of interaction, consent, transparency of authorship.

The new design paradigm: from designing forms and artifacts to designing rules and parameters for forms and artifacts to emerge.

Read in “Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing” (Adam Greenfield):

“The infrastructure supporting the user’s experience is deeply heterogeneous, and, at least in contemporary, real-world systems, frequently enough held together by the digital equivalent of duct tape and chewing gum. (…) any attempt to provide the user with a continuous experience must somehow paper over these circumstances“

This discussion of flaws about seamlessness in technological development is of considerable importance. Beyond Gilles Deleuze notion of “espace strié” (striated space), the assumption in ubicomp that infrastructure are and will be seamless often leave aside failing infrastructures, the accumulation of different norms, the tweaking people do on tech and stuff like that. The picture has been taken in Nice, France and shows how a traffic light has been fixed with duct tape so that the wiring does not fall apart (and eventually not get wet by possible rain or trashed by some wandering moron).

Dispelling Design as the ‘Black Art’ of CHI , Wolf TV, Rode JA, Sussman J, Kellogg WA, Proceedings of CHI 2006.

The paper interestingly tackle the issue of “creative design” and differentiate it from the notion of “design” as propelled by HCI researchers. The authors’ main claim is that the typical usage of design in HCI is “at best limiting and at worst flawed“. The first part of the paper describes what design is not: it’s not a formal model, there is a different use of prototyping (”not about punctuating the design process with the rigor of evaluation but rather about presenting the design with opportunities to analyze her work. Analysis here refers to not to user studies or formal evaluation, but to the collaborative and introspective processes of designers“). All the statements and claim of the authors are based on existing literature as well as a case study they present.

What was interesting to me is the excerpts that follows about how creative design build knowledge that is different from the one that emerged from scientific practice:

“Creative design constitutes a ‘praxis’ (i.e., rational action and reflection on decisions within the context of design activity) in pursuit of what we have called design rigor.
(…)
Design praxis is comprised of the following professional qualities, which overlap with each other and are necessarily entwined, contributing to an overall design culture: 1) a non-linear process of intent and discovery, 2) design judgment, which is informed by a combination of knowledge, reflection, practice and action, 3) of artifacts, and 4) the design critique (‘crit’).“

The article goes further by giving some hints about to move forward:

“To create a thriving professional practice of design within the CHI community, we need to address a number of factors. First, when discussing design, we must account for the strong relationship between intention, activity as inquiry, and judgment.

Second, ensuring design rigor requires organizational support. Projects must be set up with design as a core competency with trained designers on hand to fulfill that role

Third, we need to develop more innovative practices to facilitate shared understanding among members of multidisciplinary teams.“

Why do I blog this? I am often intrigued by this discussion about the word “design” tat seems to refer to lots of things (almost as much as the word “research”). Misunderstandings are one thing but how to define design is also important IMO, especially given the context of my work. It would also be interesting to have this discussion with the different “design fields” I have discussion with (game designers, industrial designers, architects).

Coming from a cognitive sciences and HCI background, this is of tremendous importance not to reiterate the mistakes of the past about how research can fuel design.

Finally, this notion of design as a “black art” is of curious and seems also to be opaque even for designers, look at this for example.

Most of the attention in this domain has started from the research in Augmented Reality in the late nineties, leading to lots of prototypes allowing user to access digital textual or audio information that “augment” physical artifacts and places by showing additional information, hidden objects or navigation helps (Feiner, 2002). Most of the times, this information is received on eyeglasses, helmet displays or headsets if there is an audio output. Lots of projects in this field have put the emphasis on designing compelling visualizations such as 3D models to provided people with a tangible way to manipulate complex information. As of 2005, this technology is even available on cell phones that allow to visualize virtual elements on top of the physical space, thanks to computer programs that use the digital cameras. In the case of Augmented Reality, the locus of the output is the very same of the one of the input, that is to say, digital elements appear on top of the corresponding physical elements that triggers their creation. This is why researchers speak of an “overlay of information”.

However, the digital-physical convergence does not imply that this locus is always the same. Advances in location-based applications also make it possible to receive digital information on portable devices such as PDA or cell phones (Benford, 2005). In these cases, the digital information is generally not overlayed on a representation of the physical environment but rather as a textual or audio message. Another difference lays in the event that trigger the exchange of such as message. In augmented reality, it is generally the recognition of a certain visual marker allows to replace it on the display by a computer generated graphic. In the case of location-based applications, the information is sent to the users when he or she is located in a specific place, in the vicinity of a certain person or close to an artifact.

Why do I blog this? I was gathering some examples for upcoming talks.

Some vocabulary definitely of interest to describe the Internet of Things:

“linkage, hybridization, merging, fusion, linkage, interconnection, binding, assemblage, amalgam, amalgamation, blend, blending, coadunation, coalescence, coalition, commingling, commixture, compound, immixture, integration, intermixture, junction, merger, merging, mixture, smelting, synthesis, unification, union, uniting, welding, assimilation, alliance, interfusion, soup, salmagundi“

Why do I blog this? working on a paper about digital-physical convergence as well as material for the Hybrid World Lab workshop on this very topic, I was looking for material and concepts to express the different angles. Some are very odd (”soup”, “commixture”, “salmagundi”) or even disturbing (”immixture”) but might be useful to describe certain aspects.

Some excerpts of an interview of Jaiku’s co-founder Jyri Engeström in 606tech deals with very relevant aspects about the intricate relationship between technologies and the pragmatic of communication:

“We believe that online social behavior as a whole is moving towards groups who are in a state of constant connectedness. This means shorter, more frequent, more personal updates that assume the recipients already know a lot about the sender and context of the message. The amount of communication increases but it contains less noise because we know more about the context of our peers. For example, in trials of the early research prototype of Jaiku Mobile, the amount of missed calls between the users dropped by about 15 percentage points, because on Jaiku the caller can see when the recipient is busy already before they try to reach them.“

Why do I blog this? what is of interest to me here is what I bolded in the excerpt: the assumption that this kind of awareness application is meaningful and relevant for people who already know about the sender. In terms of pragmatics, the reason for that is because the Jaikus themselves can be seen as “coordination devices” that adds up to the current past experiences and knowledge people have about their peers. What is even more important is that these coordination devices are not automatically captured and sent to the others, they’re really sent on purpose (this then eventually raises their value).

Dourish, P. and Bell, G. (2007): The Infrastructure of Experience and the Experience of Infrastructure: Meaning and Structure in Everyday Encounters with Space, Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design.

This paper interestingly explores the implications of computing getting off the desktop to the everyday world and how researchers are forced to “understand something of the spaces into which it moves, and the practical and cultural logics by which those spaces are organized“. The authors made the point that space is rarely examined in computer system design, they only quote the examples of a spatial feature “separation” as a way to keep computational objects from each others (files kept in filespaces, the notion of workspace, etc.). Unlike this instrumental model of space, they rather consider spaces as populated and inhabited infrastructures. What this means is that spaces have a meaning to people in terms of the relationships to practical actions and interpretations. For instance, the presence and the activity of others can direct attention or guide movements. They quote diverse examples about this literature I had to explore in my PhD work.

It’s very dense and hugely interesting so I will quote only the conclusion which efficiently describes the implications for pervasive computing:

“1) space is organized not just physically but culturally; cultural understandings provide a frame for encountering space as meaningful and coherent, and for relating it to human activities. Technological infrastructures are, inherently, given social and cultural interpretations and meanings; they render the spaces that they occupy ones that can be distinguished and categorized and understood through the same processes of collective categorization and classification that operate in other domains of social activity. Technological infrastructures and services, then, need to be understood as operating in this context.

architecture is all about boundaries and transitions and their intersection with human and social practice. (…) Everyday spaces are not simply spaces for working or meeting, but spaces for waiting, for reading, for loitering, for watching, for loving, for remembering, and more (McCullough, 2003.) The rhetoric of seamlessness is often opposed to the inherently fragmented nature of social and cultural encounters with spaces; we need to be able to understand how pervasive computing might support rather than erase these distinctions.

new technologies inherently cause people to re-encounter spaces. This isn’t a question of mediation, but rather one of simultaneous layering. One fascinating aspect of the move from the systems we built on the wired internet to those that we experience through wireless and mobile networks is that we are creating not a virtual but a thoroughly physical infrastructure, and we need to think about it as one that is interwoven with the existing physical structure of space (Dourish, 2001). The rhetoric of pervasive computing is one that traditionally ignores the ways in which that computing experience must be implemented on top of, and experience in and through, an existing landscape.
(…)
The spaces into which new technologies are deployed are not stable, not uniform, and not given. Technology can destabilize and transform these interactions, but will only every be one part of the mix.“

Why do I blog this? because the paper gives a good overview of how pervasive computing relates to space and place issues (one of the research aspects I am interested in with regards to the user experience of these technologies). What I find relevant is here is the way these conclusions challenge existing developments and current discourse about such technologies.

There is a lot to draw here, for instance the way they question seamlessness is a recurring topic lately and I find it very important. Lots of people and organizations build things based on this assumption that the world is seamless and then they failed miserably.

The 2005 UbiApp Workshop: What Makes Good Application-Led Research? by Richard Sharp and Kasim Rehman, IEEE pervasive computing, Vol. 4, No. 3, July–Sept. 2005

The paper is a summary of a workshop that happened in 2005 at the Ubicomp conference. It deals with the concept of “application-led” research: projects that aim at designing, implementing, deploying and evaluating applications using an interdisciplinary approach (computer sciences, social sciences, ethnography, HCI). And it’s motivated by current world’s problems. This corresponds to the distinction made by Järvinen about social sciences: “Researches stressing utility of innovations” versus “Researches stressing what is reality” (understanding a behavior in psychology for instance). These 2 categories are of course different form the technology-led research which is interested in developing applications for a pure technical perspective. The point if this workshop was to discuss what are the criteria to judge this type of research.

A consensus people reached at this workshop was that “the ubiquitous computing community to be effective, it must engage in a combination of technology-led and application-led research“. What is interesting is the discussion about whether a demonstrator or “proof of concept” is relevant:

“The problem, very often, is that there is no actual concept to be proven. Either the concept has already been proven viable (there really is no need to prove again that we can build a context-aware tour guide), is never in any doubt (we know we can build location-based services) or is not actually proved by the demonstrator (Nigel Davis)“

Some excerpts I found interesting for my research practice, they are rant-oriented but quite true:

“Attendees generally felt that too many ubiquitous computing projects focus on applications addressing trivial problems (turning lights on and off remotely, finding others with similar interests at conferences, and so on)
(…)
ubiquitous computing researchers often enjoy “relatively problem-free lives.” So, we should be keen to look beyond our own experiences when choosing application domains. For example, what opportunities exist to address problems in war zones or refugee camps?
(…)
ubiquitous computing researchers often reimplement applications from scratch, rather than sharing code and building on each other’s work. regard much of this implementation work as research. (PlaceLab is a good exception)
(…)
Researchers commonly evaluate ubiquitous computing applications solely in the context of small lab-scale user studies. (…) applications are often evaluated only against themselves (for example, “our participants said that they found this application useful”“

Why do I blog this? it’s always interesting to read or hear about this sort of discussion in research. I have to admit that I have encountered lots of the problems described here, and as a researcher I sometimes do these mistakes (for instance in CatchBob it would have been good to run a longitudinal evaluation and less a field experiment, but it’s a matter of time…). Also, it seems that human beings have a good tendency to reinvent the wheel (e.g. recreating new systems that do the same as others). This does not mean that nothing can be done and the paper concludes with 4 relevant propositions: choose problems and applications carefully, share technical infrastructures, evaluate applications in realistic settings and perform comparative evaluations.

Public Pervasive Computing: Making the Invisible Visible by Jesper Kjeldskov, Aalborg University and Jeni Paay, IEEE Computer, Vol. 39, No. 9. (2006), pp. 60-65.

Through the presentation of a project called “Just-for-Us” (a mobile web service that aims at adapting content to the user’s physical and social context), the paper shows how the urban environment inspire researchers to explore the intersections between physical,social,and digital domains. The interesting point here is that it shows how system developers and HCI designers try to obtain a fundamental understanding of a physical space and how it
impacts the social interactions taking place there prior to sketch any ideas about technologies. Achieving such a goal is often done by looking at architecural theorists such as Kevin Lynch or Christopher Alexander (maybe the most well-cited in computer sciences, it would be good to know why).

Their methodology is very intriguing:

“our aim was closer to Lynch and Alexander’s original purpose—analyzing and understanding a physical space, from the level of a city precinct down to each individually designed element—but in this case to inform digital rather than physical design. Guided by their analytical techniques, we systematically mapped Federation Square’s physical and informational properties. Several field visits resulted in a collection of 250 digital photos annotated with written observations of the relationship between architectural elements and the environment, as well as about interactions among people inhabiting the space. Using rapid ethnography content analysis and affinity diagramming, we extracted from the photographic data and notes a concise set of descriptive features for the overall city precincts as well as specific architectural elements. We then created a Lynchian map of Federation Square
(…)
To complement the architectural field study, we therefore studied three established social groups, each consisting of three young locals, during typical outings at Federation Square. An interviewer first talked with each group for 20 minutes about their socializing experiences and preferences and then, accompanied by a cameraman, followed the group to an area within Federation Square where they had arranged to spend some time together. Throughout the filmed visit, the group verbalized their actions as they moved around the space and responded to questions from the interviewer.“

It enabled them to reveal four “disctricts” and found “detailed architectural features” that foster, challenge or hinder social interactions. Moreover, the “sociological field study” showed how people rely on cues embedded in the environment (landmarks, focal points…), how they determine what to do by relying on others’ behavior and their experience.

Why do I blog this? Rather than the system produced, I was interested in how this was used: “These field studies generated insights that inspired us to create a computing system to facilitate new types of social interaction in urban settings“, which is described in the system architecture as well as the user interface.

From Information Week about her Etech talk:

“The “ubiquitous games,” or “alternate reality games,” are part of an overall change in how technology is being evaluated. In the next five years, the criteria used for evaluating personal technology will shift from things like cost and features. Instead, people will evaluate technology based on whether it improves their quality of life and happiness, she said.
(…)
Ubiquitous games are designed to be integrated with real life, and improve quality of life, McGonigal said. They’re designed to “intervene against the widespread public alienation and lack of engagement in the complex world of everyday life.”“

Some examples:

“Two years ago, in a game called the Ministry of Reshelving. McGonigal asked people to reshelve copies of 1984 in bookstores and libraries, removing it from the fiction section and putting it into the current affairs, military history, or some other section that was, she said, more appropriate. The call went out on the Web, and the activities were recorded on the Flickr photo-sharing service.
(…)
Tombstone Holdem Poker. A Web site instructs players how to read tombstones as if they were playing cards. The last year in the date of death is the card value — for example, 1945 is a 5. The shape of the tombstone determines the suit: A pointy-topped tombstone is a spade, rounded is a heart, flat is a diamond, and cross is clubs. Surprisingly, this turned out to be popular among government agencies charged with maintaining historical cemeteries, which are often unused, and therefore in constant jeopardy of being shut down by cost-cutting governments“