In Getting Out of the City: Meaning and Structure in Everyday Encounters with Space , Bell and Dourish addresses the different layering of infrastructures in any urban environments: it’s physical (topologies), historical and cultural. On top of that, ubiquitous computing adds new infrastructural layers. This is made apparent by activities such as wandering around to find a Wifi or cell phone signal, or locate Mecca through mobile services.

The central argument of this short workshop paper lies in what follows:

“spaces have structure and meaning for us in terms of our relationship to a variety of infrastructures of action and interpretation.
(…)
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. Cross-cultural explorations of urban experience can draw attention to these issues.
(…)
architecture is all about boundaries and transitions and their intersection with human and social practice. (…) We need to think architecturally about the mobile and wireless technologies that we develop and deploy, the human side of infrastructures.
(…)
new technologies inherently cause people to re-encounter spaces. This isn’t a question of mediation, but rather one of simultaneous layering. (…) 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.
(…)
there is already a complex interaction between space, infrastructure, culture, and experience. 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 ever be one part of the mix.“

Why do I blog this? although very short, this article summarizes the main points about urban computing issues. They do set the trends that they will develop in further papers and it’s relevant to see the main highlights here with concrete call for research actions. I am personnaly very intrigued by “the human side of infrastructures” and the hybridation of these spaces.

Bell, G. and Dourish, P. 2004. Getting Out of the City: Meaning and Structure in Everyday Encounters with Space. Workshop on Ubiquitous Computing on the Urban Frontier (Ubicomp 2004, Nottingham, UK.)

Knitting as a the 21st way to hack the city. A phenomenon I documented here (see also Metropolis here and there).

Gentle and sweet. Seen last week-end in Paris near Gare du Nord.

Artifacts of the Presence Era is a project form 2003 by Fernanda Viégas, Ethan Perry and Ethan Howe that proposed to visualize accumulated layers of data in an intriguing way. A camera and a microphone captured the myriad of images and sounds produced during an exhibition in the ICA gallery. The system allowed to visualize them “as a growing, organic landscape that serves as a historical record“.

“Like its natural counterpart, this process reveals long-term patterns (the rhythm of night and day, periods of great activity or empty silence), while retaining occasionally serendipitous, but often mundane, samples of the passage of life. The project visualized the accumulating layers of data and allowed visitors to navigate the captured images and ambient sounds, peeking back into the history of the gallery.
(…)
In trying to convey a sense of historical buildup over time, it made sense to 15 look at natural examples of accretion for inspiration. The geological layers in sedimentary rocks and their function as record keepers provided us with such an example”“

Why do I blog this? I am more interested in the metaphor employed here than in the project itself. As Dan Saffer described it in his thesis, DATA IS GEOLOGY. Moving from through the system engage participants in the “excavation” of the traces left by others in the physical space. Being interested in spatial and activity traces and their role in social navigation, I quite like the metaphor. Some food for thoughts regarding chronotopic visualizations.

In his paper “Beyond the ‘dazzling light’: from dreams of transcendence to the ‘remediation’ of urban life“, Stephen Graham interestingly proposes six starting points in analyzing the remediation of urban life, aimed at new media research:

“

1. Stress continuities with discontinuities: new media maintain many intimate connections with old media, technologies, practices and infrastructures and spaces
2. The need for a ‘spatial turn’: urban places as dominant hubs of new media activity: new media research needs to engage much more powerfully with the complex intra-urban and inter-urban geographies that so starkly define the production, consumption and use of its subject artefacts, technologies and practices.
3. Excavating the material bases of new media: needs to excavate the often invisible and hidden material systems that bring the supposedly ‘virtual’ domains and worlds of new media into existence.
4. Centre on contingency: generalizations about new media and cities, and the invocation of deterministic metaphors such as the ubiquitous ‘impact’, is hazardous to say the least (…) a wide range of relations are likely to exist between new media and urban structures, forms, landscapes, experiences and the cultural particularities of different urban spaces and times.
5. Banalization and the ‘production of the ordinary’: new media have stopped being ‘new’ in the sense that they have already ‘produced the ordinary’ (…) This process of banalization is nothing new.
6. Address the growing invisibility of sociotechnical power: be acutely conscious of the growing invisibility of sociotechnical power in contemporary societies.

“

Why do I blog this? my favorite is certainly the 3rd one and I personally think that there is a very interesting vector or research along these lines. Surely something from the near future laboratory.

Closely related to my earlier post about the evolution of space in multi-user environments, Richard Bartle commented about a paper he wrote on that topic.

The author’s starting point is that there is less discussion about virtual worlds ARE than WHY people play them, and he claims that VW are places. He basically describes the evolution from text-based MUDs, to 2 1/2D (with isometric or first-person viewpoints) and 3D MMORPGs.

His paper revolves around the display format of virtual worlds, a characteristic Jake Song did not address in his speech at LIFT Seoul:

“Given, then, that virtual worlds should endeavour to approximate reality for their everyday workings, how can this be implemented? The real is at a distinct advantage over the virtual in that it works entirely in parallel. It can ray-trace every photon in the universe simultaneously, whereas even the best of today’s home computers have a hard time rendering a few shadows in real time. Virtual worlds therefore have to cut corners. As it happens, they have developed three ways to do this, which correspond to the three main display formats:
(…)
Contiguous Locations: Textual worlds represent space as a set of interlinked nodes. Each node represents an atomic location (commonly called a room), which generally conceptualises the smallest meaningful space into which a player’s character can fit. (…) A map for a textual world therefore consists of a network of rooms connected by a set of arrows that correspond to movement commands (…) the arrows on the map need not be bi-directional (…) nodes need not represent rooms of the same size (…) A location can link to itself
(…)
Tessellated Locations:r ender the world graphically as an array of tiles. The major advantages over a network of nodes in this respect are the constant scale and the implicit connection between the squares. (…) Using an isometric approach, height could now be shown; this meant that hills and mountains no longer had to be suggested by a change in a square’s background texture (…) introduce a degree of nodality back into the system. (…) Access was gained through particular wsquares flagged as being coincident. As an example, if on the main map you walked onto a square containing a staircase leading upwards, that would teleport you to a submap for the floor “above” where you were;
(…)
Continuous Locations: a location is instead a mere point in a 3D co-ordinate system (…) In a true 3D world, the representation finally goes from contiguous to continuous. Strictly speaking, however, because computers store information using discrete bits, even their “real numbers” are not actually continuous; nevertheless, the level of granularity is so fine that to players it feels continuous.“

Why do I blog this? material for a paper about cross-media studies of location-awareness interface in a MUD, 3D space and pervasive gaming. The elements discussed by Bartle are interesting wrt the literature review about the evolution of space.

Bartle, R. (2007). Making Places. In Borries, Friedrich, Walz, Steffen P., Brinkmann, Ulrich, and Matthias Bottger (eds.), Space Time Play. Games, Architecture, and Urbanism. BirkhÔø?user: Basel / Berlin / Boston.

These podotactiles, found on the subway platform in Lyon, France (metro station “Jean Jaurès” direction Charpennes) look quite funny, as if they had been stuck and removed:

As the color shows, they have been removed over time (one can see the mark of previous podotactiles) but what if this could mean something in Braille One step towards more use of proprioception as a sense to navigate the city (an often overlooked one for sure, not by skateboader though)!

Toying with Facebook apps this week-end, I ran across the “where I’ve been” application; the one that allows you to store the countries you have visited. Here’s a screenshot of the world map:

What’s interesting is the level of granularity the map depicts: as one can see, every nations are represented (well almost, islands such as Mauritius are not) but it’s funny to not that North America (USA+Canada) have a finer-grained representation given that states and province are showed.

Although I am not surprised by that, especially when you consider the audience of FB (mostly North America) as well as who designed it, this sort of depiction is interesting. It definitely shows a sort of spectrum that goes from a “precise/fine grained” end (NA) to a “imprecise/unknown” end (with countries not represented as well as no differentiation of big countries). A bit culture centric, this map would be very interesting to discuss with people from local culture. Of course, I know it’s not the biggest feature in FB (and the same comments can be done on other web apps) but that’s curious noting.

I would have have found curious some sort of user-generated map representations. For example, something such as the fool’s world map:

Read “The Virtual” by Rob Shields this week-end. In 230 pages or so, Shields interestingly debunks the notion “virtual” that pervades the discourse about technologies. Although, the book is made of 9 chapters, it’s definitely the first three chapters that I found the most interesting. He basically starts by discussing how ‘the virtual’ became a metaphor that moved from the digital domain to being an organizing idea for companies and government policies, with, as a corollary, unrealistic and exaggerated expectations that technologies will solve social problems. Getting back to earlier instances of ‘the virtual’ (”If cyberspace is a consensual hallucination in the words of the novelist who coined the term, William Gibson, then cave paintings might well count so“), Shields shows how virtual space has a long history in the form of rituals and in the built form of architectural fantasies such as trompe-l’oeil simulations. Today’s definition of the virtual, as well as its interconnection to digital hardware and software can be considered as a new form.

Some excerpts of these first chapters that I found important:

“The virtual is often contrasted with the ‘real’ in commonsensical language by many writers who have not paused to examine the implications of the terms they are using (…) we routinely deploy the word ‘virtual’ as a place-holder for important forms of reality which are not tangible but are essential and necessary to our survival.
(…)
the ‘virtual’ is imagined as a ’space’ between participants, a computer-generated common ground which is neither actual in its location or coordinates nor is it merely a conceptual abstraction, for it may be experienced ‘as if’ lived or given purposes (…) Virtual spaces are indexical, in the sense that they are interstitial moments.“

I voluntarily skipped the part about disambiguating the terms ‘virtual’, ‘actual’, ‘real’, leaving that to another post. This is then followed by a description of ‘digital virtualities’, a summary of the existing systems and their cultural underpinnings (how they are influenced by cyberpunk novels, heterosexual visions of sex, mechanical dinosaurs, euclidean geometry to ease users’ adoption

Why do I blog this? the whole book is very insightful but it’s certainly these first chapters that I found the most relevant to my research. Being interested in digital space, I tend to avoid employing the term “virtual” because I find it too fuzzy and confusing. Most of the time, ‘virtual’ is used instead of ‘digital’ or ‘3D’ and I find it quite limited. Shields’ discussion is of considerable important to put things in context about this issue.

The quote that I emphasized in bold above is also very important to me considering how digital space is explicitly referred to as a “common ground” in some research about CSCW (computer-supported collaborative work).

In their paper called “Emplacing Experience“, the authors compare aspects of space and place in physical and digital gameworlds. They describe different characteristics that show the specificity of digital places:

“Players, through the agency of their avatar, may expend considerable time traveling to the location for a quest.
(…)
RPG game design has a conspicuous propensity to afford and then discard the notions of place that compel the player in gameplay. (…) players may visit such places only once in gameplay to realize the experience. After performing a quest the place might as well cease to exist, having little further role in gameplay.
(…)
Although often rendered in attractive detail, the space between the places where the gameplay activities occur is, for all intents and purposes, empty.
(…)
Computational resources are often diverted from peripheral details of a place or by rendering environmental assets “just-in-time”.
(…)
Gameworlds and other Virtual Environments (VEs) contain far fewer cues than the physical world and therefore tend to fall into the category of being unfamiliar, particularly when first encountered.
(…)
a quality of an interaction that allows sense to be made only in a specific spatial, temporal or social context. Such indexicality is used frequently, subtly and without much ado in the physical world. In gameworlds, indexicality is often overt and even clumsy, such as NPCs providing information at set locations. “

Why do I blog this? material needed to write an article about the evolution of mutual location-awareness interfaces over time, in MUDs, 3D games and pervasive gaming. The elements described here are useful to document how the environments (game spaces) are different.

Browning, D. Stanley, S., Fryer, M. & Bidwell, N.J (2006). Emplacing experience. Joint International Conference on CyberGames & Interactive Entertainment, Perth 2007 Published in ACM Digital library

Adam Greenfield’s talk at Pic Nic was entitled “The City is Here for You to Use: Urban Form and Experience in the Age of Ambient Informatics. His presentation is basically about the implications of ubiquitous computing on the form and experience of the city.

After “Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing” Adam is now zooming on a more specific aspect of ubicomp: its influence on the urban environment. Inspired by Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander or Bernard Rurdofsky, he drawn our attention to their “generosity” about the life on the street and the recent changes exemplified by this quote from Alexander: “For centuries, the street provided city dwellers with usable public space right outside their houses. Now, in a number of subtle ways, the modern city has made streets which are for “going through,” not for “staying in.“. Through various examples, Adam showed how “we killed the street” due to cars, traffic, overplanning, the “repeating module of doom” (succession of franchises) leading to what Augé calls “non-places” and Rem Koolhas refers to as “junkspace”. The city then becomes “stealthy, slippery, crusty, prickly and jittery” through defensible space elements such as the following one I spotted in Amsterdam last week:

This situation leads to various forms of “withdrawal syndromes”: ipod usage, mobile phone/blackberry digging… and the city is less “a negotiation machine between humans“. In sum, “we lost something” and instead of lamenting (”nostalgia is for suckers”), Adam highlights the challenge: to rediscover the city of Jacobs, Rudofsky and Alexander in a way that is organic to our own age. This means that ubiquitous computing can be a candidate for that matter.

He then presented how ubiquitous computing (everyware) is already affecting cities. Information processing, sensors start showing up in new places at different scale. At the body level, he cited the Nike+ipod example, at the urban level, some dynamic signs allow people to be aware of bus schedule or use contact-cards, leading to more agency in infrastructures. This enable new model of interaction and “information processing dissolving in behavior“. The upside of this might be that people can get information about cities and their pattern of use, visualized in new ways (Stamen Design’s cabspotting, crime and real estate mapping, map of cities with WiFi hotspot)… and that information can be made available locally on demand in a way that people can act upon. Would ubicomp turn cities in more efficient and sustainable places? Possibly this is meant to allow better choices and entirely new behavior might emerge, will we get a participatory urbanism? a “genuine read/write urbanism” as he mentioned?

How will it affect urban forms? Adam showed some instances of how information as output at the building envelope: living glass modified by CO2 or the Blur Building by Diller-Scofidio (from swiss expo02). Ambient information becomes addressable, scriptable and/or query-able objects such as in the Chaos Computer Club Blinkenlights project.

(Picture courtesy of Diller-Scofidio)

One of the downside he presented concerned how this can lead to new inscriptions of class. He showed a DVD rental booth in NYC that allows cash to rent DVD but needs a credit card to access it. Another problem concerns the over-legibility of things: when there is too much explicitness and not enough ambiguity on plausible deniability, when everything is made public, what happens? maybe we do not want all our friends to know where we are, of course there are special case but not all the time.

Wegzeit is a project by Dietmar Offenhuber that I found interesting:

“Wegzeit is a project about Los Angeles and how it is transformed when brought to relative space. Asking someone in L.A. about the distance between two locations usually prompts a response in minutes. It seems paradoxical that people rely on subjective parameters for their spatial decisions in a city with a largely regular, cartesian layout. But especially here, where the influences of physical space are leveled by this regularity, the importance of subjective, relative spaces become visible more strongly.
The project consists of six dynamic virtual environments that propose models of how to visualize three-dimensional relative spaces. They deal with certain properties and effects caused by the nature of relative space such as the asymmetry of temporal distances.
(…)
in this example all the streets are represented by “rubberbands” between their intersections. temporal distance can now be introduced as force or rest length of the rubberband, and thus deforming the whole system. the topology of space is preserved this way, the result is a global, balanced view of the temporal space.“

Why do I blog this? I found intriguing this way of representing “temporal distance”, the visualization of space/time issues. Curious phenomenon to be reflected to city dwellers.

Reading the newsletter of the french consulting group Chronos, I ran across a term used by Bruno Marzloff that I found intriguing: the concept of “chronotope” defined in Wikipedia as:

“The Russian philologist and literary philosopher M.M. Bakhtin used the term chronotope to designate the spatio-temporal matrix which governs the base condition of all narratives and other linguistic acts. The term itself can be literally translated as “time-space” (…) the chronotope is ‘a unit of analysis for studying language according to the ratio and characteristics of the temporal and spatial categories represented in that language’. Specific chronotopes are said to correspond to particular genres, or relatively stable ways of speaking, which themselves represent particular worldviews or ideologies. To this extent, a chronotope is both a cognitive concept and a narrative feature of language.“

It seems that this concept if more about narrative and literature analysis but I found it quite relevant when thinking about the evolution of location-based services. Five years ago, location-based services was all about “annotating places” or having “location-based buddy-finder”, a more distinctive line of research is now gaining more and more weight: the collection and representation of traces left by people in space through technologies. Will be word “chronotope” be pertinent to refer to these visualizations?

Two examples of “would-be” chronotopic visualization that I find intriguing and relevant (among others):

Sashay (by Eric Paulos et al.):

“Sashay is a mobile phone application that leverages the fact that every fixed mobile phone cell tower transmits a unique ID that can be read within the phone’s software. As a user moves throughout an urban landscape this “cell ID” changes. Sashay keeps track of the temporal patterns, history, and adjacencies of these cell encounters to help it build a visualization of connected “places”. (…) The value of Sashay is not in helping you navigate or realize that you are in downtown Austin or at a park in Boston. It is meant to explicitly remove such labeling and leave only an intentionally skeletal sketch of a person’s personal patterns across a city, leaving the individual to wonder and construct their own narrative and meaning. The temptation to build a labeled map is so compelling to many researchers that we are reiterating and advocating the extraordinary value of keeping such visualizations free from literal place labelings.“

Real Time Rome by Senseable City

“Real Time Rome is the MIT SENSEable City Lab’s contribution to the 2006 Venice Biennale, directed by professor Richard Burdett. The project aggregated data from cell phones (obtained using Telecom Italia’s innovative Lochness platform), buses and taxis in Rome to better understand urban dynamics in real time. By revealing the pulse of the city, the project aims to show how technology can help individuals make more informed decisions about their environment. In the long run, will it be possible to reduce the inefficiencies of present day urban systems and open the way to a more sustainable urban future?“

Why do I blog this? what I find interesting here, more my researcher’s POV is the new affordance created by these type of information. It’s less about a direct use of space but rather the availability of traces that can be employed to represent city usage or life pattern at a meta level. What would be these new affordances? Of course, lots of emphasis has been put on social navigation (”navigation towards a cluster of people or navigation because other people have looked at something“) but how to go beyond that?
- make explicit phenomenon that are invisible (lots of projects are about pollution measures)
- use these data for urban planning and architecture, to understand “usage of city”. I am wondering about how this would benefit to that crowd (that’s why I am now working in an architecture lab). See for example Fabien’s project for that matter: he investigates spatio-temporal patterns of pictures uploaded on Flickr.
- give users some feedback about their activities, closing the control loop as in the Wikicity project (possibly to “empower users, make them in control of their environment”).
- create new services based on this information
- …

Reading Stamen’s work about cab spots with Eddie Elliott. They actually used the Cabspotting API to produce high-res long-term point maps of San Francisco with cab GPS lcoations. Part of the result description attracted my attention:

“downtown buildings are so high and close together that GPS signals can’t make it down to the ground with very much accuracy, bounce around off the glass and steel, and give “bad” results. Fair enough; downtown’s not so accurate. But what it means in terms of urban area chartings, where cabs tend to stay in very narrow street slots, is that you can use a visualization like this to tell immediately where the high buildings are by the degree of fuzziness in the map, and if you mapped the height of the buildings over this image, they’d probably overlap prety much one-to-one.
(…)
you and I live in a world where normal people can look at complex data visualizations of urban environments, notice anomalies in the display, go to the web to find information about where that place is, and then make pretty good guesses as to why the data is showing up the way it is. It needs smart people with some non-trivial technical knowhow to make these particular views on it possible, sure. But once that’s done, there’s a very quick path available to free information that can be used to reinforce, disprove, or generally poke at the way that the world is, and why it is that way, and it’s fluid and easy and you can start asking real questions very quickly.

I think this is a new thing.“

Why do I blog this? documenting new processes about the implications of urban visualizations when discussing in a bar with Fabien.

(cross-posted at Terra Nova)

Last month, I had the pleasure to co-organize a small event in Seoul about digital and physical space, and how technologies reshape them. One of the speaker, Jake Song gave an interesting talk about the evolution of “virtual space” in multi-player games. A South Korean programmer, regarded as one of the greatest game developers in Korea, Jake is one the of the creator of Lineage and is now CEO of XL Games.

He started by describing text MUDs (1978), in which 100 to 200 concurrent players wandered around virtual places in the form of interconnected rooms. He described to what extent today’s MMORPG inherits most of its design (chat, emote, social structure, etc) but more interestingly pointed out how MUD space was “not correct in 2D sense” using the following schema:

The next step corresponded to 2D MMORPG such as Lineage or Ultima Online, which involved 3000~5000 concurrent players per world. Due to the technical impossibility to have everyone in the same place, there are “parallel universes. As opposed to MUDs, space in geographically correct and as he showed with exampled, players approximately needed about 2 hours from end to end by walking. Through various examples, he showed how buildings are smaller than real world and the necessity to have fast transportation methods (horses, teleportation, etc.)

Then, with 3D MMORPG like EverQuest, Lineage II or WoW, game space is designed for 2000~3000 concurrent players. Compared to 2D MMORPG, the number of concurrent players are reduced somewhat because server has to handle more complex 3D data. The game space generally corresponds to 20 × 20 km in size and transportation methods are needed more than ever (mounts, flying mounts, teleportation). Level design included place utility buildings for players to access conveniently. Shops, banks, etc can be placed far from each other to make players feel the city big, but it will make players inconvenient (” Down time means idle time such like staying in town, moving to other place, etc.“). The virtual environment is large enough to feel like the real world and is similar enough to use common sense to navigate.

He concluded with the challenges: the difficulty to have larger game world, the possibility to have user-generated content (to populate worlds), the difficulty to have “one big world” and the ever-growing inclusion of environmental change (weather changing accordingly with weather feeds), evolution over time (deformable terrain
destructible building, changing forest, buildings turned into ruins, etc.

So, down the road, the main issues are:

• geographical correctness: should the system looks and behave like a real-life equivalent (which somehwat connects to the work of Harry Drew).
• given that geographical correctness is now common, time and transportation is an issue: it takes time to go from A to B and transportation systems must be designed (teleportation, flying in Second Life).
• presence of concurrent players.
• presence of “places” with functional capabilities (communication, trading).

Although this may look obvious to many reader, this description if interesting from the research point of view (as well as to have the developers’ opinion). In my case, this is important for my research about how location-awareness interfaces can convey information about people’s whereabouts in digital spaces. Given the differences to represent space, there are some implications in the way location-awareness tools can be designed. More about this topic later.

Last week at PicNic, during the very interesting panel that I participated in, a question from the audience sparked some discussion among us. The attendee slightly complained about the fact that Fabien or myself were a bit too pessimistic about pervasive gaming. Our two presentations, although very different posited that ubiquitous/pervasive computing was difficult to achieve for infrastructure/technical reasons… which leads to user experience issues.

The discussion then shifted to “what’s the target of pervasive gaming?”, I answered that before thinking about a target, one should find the “settings” or context in which pervasive gaming can work. I don’t know remember how I phrased the following, so let’s see what Tom Hume transcribed it: “It’s a bit like laser games, requiring a place with a specific infrastructure. My fear is that it could be turned into theme parks. It might be designed for specific targets or niches“.

I tried to elaborate more what I have in mind and think that there are indeed different models of location-based games.

The first one is a bit too utopian: it’s thinking that technologies are seamless, hardware and software robust and that no problem occur. In that case, one can envision über-cool location-based networked games running on cell phones everywhere everytime. Although this seems unlikely, one can at least think about this possibility.

At the end of the spectrum, I mention the worse-case scenario: the “laser-game” model in which the game can only be played in a specific time and place. This is what happened in planned games or exhibits (see for example what Blast Theory did with Can You See Me Now?): in this case the game was played in various cities, controlled by the game designers. One can also think about fixed places, as with laser-games, in which horde of players would come and play.

A mid-point on this spectrum would be to have an approach to combine the two. And I quite like the skateboard metaphor for that matter. You can do skateboard freely in lots of places (streets, parking, etc.) and also go to skateparks. In the former, the infrastructure of the everyday environment constrain the skateboarding tricks whereas in the latter the skatepark design is meant to allow certain tricks. What is interesting as well is that in street skating, there is a pleasure associated in finding nice and relevant spots, whereas in skateparks, things are more under controlled.

So, to get back to the topic at hands here, what would be the equivalent if the skateboard practice with regards to pervasive gaming? I think it may corresponds to designing for both targets in minds: both the daily and everyday environment (with its constraints, problems, issues) and for the “laser-park” equivalent in which the control of certain parameters would allow to go beyond the daily environment. And what would be a good candidate (as a device) for that? What corresponds to the skateboard?

Picture taken in Lyon, last month.

Why do I blog this? quick thoughts to be re-used in the future.