The near future laboratory (Fabien Girardin and Julian Bleecker and myself) organize a workshop during LIFT08 about the failures of ubiquitous computing.

The workshop is called “Ubiquitous computing: visions, failures and new interaction rituals“:

“We propose to look backward and discusses why we have not reached what has been described in the last 5 years of ubiquitous computing. How might we criticize assumptions and build upon existing models and approaches to design in this context? Can we learn from the discrepancy between the utopia of ubicomp and its deployed reality?

The purpose is to generate debate about the design and integration of ubiquitous systems based on case studies proposed from workshop participants. Moreover, we want to open up a debate around the future of those systems as well as the adoption by a large user base.

The session will start by a short presentation by participants who will each have to describe in 2-3 minutes a ubiquitous computing system that failed and give reasons or causes for that.
…“

Why do I blog this? LIFT is always an enjoyable moments for workshops, let’s see what emerge out of that one.

After the 3-handled tap, here is a four-handled one (Encountered in Paraty, Brazil):

4 handles segregated in 2 positions: one at a regular level and one for giants (for people who “are standing on shoulders of giants”?). However, the 2 above do not work. Any clue?

Having spent a little bit of time lately in the Rio de Janeiro area in Brazil, I have been impressed by the quantity of people using Push-To-Talk on their cell phones. A good way to emulate walkie-talkie feature, I’ve seen mostly used by workers (delivery and taxi people) as well as teenagers. It generally provide users with an open channel of communication.

There isn’t so many user studies about PTT but the work by Allison Woodruff seems quite relevant for that matter. In Media Affordances of a Mobile Push-To-Talk Communication Service, Woodruff and Aoki report how teenagers use PTT in the US, describing 3 “interaction styles”:

“

1. Focused conversation is aligned with the phenomenon of sustained turn-taking and is exemplified by the communicative activity we termed substantive conversation.
2. Bursty conversation, characterized by short turn sequences separated by lapses in talk, is aligned with reduced interactional commitment and is exemplified by chit-chat and micro-coordination (and to a lesser degree, by instances of play and extended remote presence).
3. Intermittent conversation, characterized by long response delays between individual turns, is aligned with reduced accountability and divided attention and is exemplified by many instances of play and extended remote presence.

“

In “How push-to-talk makes talk less pushy (a paper presented at the 2003 international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work), the researchers showed how PTT lowered interactional commitment (”For example, participants did not feel they needed to reply immediately when someone spoke to them via the cellular radio (contrast this with a telephone conversation, in which people generally feel they must respond promptly when someone speaks to them)“).

Why do I blog this? some notes about technology usage while in Brazil. I find very interesting the possibilities and the usage of such open channel. It’s also curious to see that in Europe PTT is not that employed by teenagers.

Going through the EPIC 2007 proceedings, I ran across this interesting paper entitled “Ethnography as Design Provocation” by Jacob Buur and Larisa Sitorus. The paper starts off my explaining how the use of ethnography in technology development has been limited to data collection, which led to isolate the researchers from design (which is R.J. Anderson’s point) and a limit to the way practice and technology can evolve together (Paul Dourish’s point). The authors advocate for another approach in which ethnography can “provoke new perspectives in a design organisation”.

They describe this stance through case studies of “design encounters” (i.e. workshops) showing how ethnography could be “shared material”, “embodied in design” and a way to frame “user engagement”. The conclusion they draw are also interesting:

“ Firstly, to engage the potential of ethnography to provoke organisations to rethink their understandings of problems and solutions, the textual form may not be adequate. Neither are insight bullet points, as they submit to the logics of rational argumentation that hardly provokes questioning and engagement. Instead, we find it paramount to develop ways of engaging the organisation in sense-making through the use of visual and physical ethnographic material.

Secondly, the ethnographic theory building, though crucial to design, cannot progress independently of the prevailing conceptions of (work) practices ‘out there’ in the organisations – and these may not become clear to us until we confront the organisation with our material. Better sooner than later.

Thirdly, to move collaboration beyond requirements talk among the design team, organisation and participants, needs well-crafted ethnographic material to frame the encounters to focus on fundamental issues and perceptions.“

Why do I blog this? interesting reflections about methodologies, a good follow-up to this other post.

Spotted last week in Lausanne:

Phone directories without any public phone booths. The last remnants of a technological past where phone in public spaces were in booths. The directories there are updated though. It’s no longer of a phone booth but a “directory spot”.

Russell Beale use the term “slanty design” in a short article he wrote for Communications of the ACM recently.

“Slanty design is the term I’ve given to design that purposely reduces aspects of functionality or usability (…) Slanty design incorporates the broader message, making it difficult for users to do unwanted things, as well as easy to do wanted things. Designers need to design for user non-goals—the things users do not want to do or should not be able to do even if they want to. If usability is about making it easy for users to do what they must do, then we need to have anti-usability as well, making it difficult for them to do the things we may not want them to do. So slanty design reflects two subtly different characteristics: that we need to design for broader goals than individual users may identify, and that we need to incorporate anti-usability, as well as usability, into our systems.
(…)
Slanty designs result from five key design steps:
- Identify user goals;
- Identify user non-goals—the things users don’t want to be able to do easily (such as deleting all their files);
- Identify wider goals being pursued by other stakeholders, including where they conflict with individual goals;
- Follow a user-centered design process to create a system with high usability for user goals and high anti-usability for user non-goals; and
- Resolve the conflicts between wider issues and individual goals, and where the wider issues win out ensure that the design meets these needs.
“

Why do I blog this? I find interesting this notion of “anti-usability” though cueing and preventing people form doing certain interactions.

Beale, R. (2007). Viewpoint: Slanty design, Communications of the ACM, 50 (1), pp. 21-24.

So what if the Kärcher puzzi 400K was a video game interface?

Beyond traditional stick/cross paradigm, what about weird buttons/signs. As a design exercise, I would really enjoy seeing what one can do out of such interface. Take this as a design brief.

Why do I blog this? ideas for a course about design and foresight.

An interesting read in the SF Gate: this article about the decline of PC in Japan by Hiroko Tabuchi. Some excerpts I found pertinent:

“The PC’s role in Japanese homes is diminishing, as its once-awesome monopoly on processing power is encroached by gadgets such as smart phones that act like pocket-size computers, advanced Internet-connected game consoles, and digital video recorders with terabytes of memory.
(…)
Japan’s PC market is already shrinking, leading analysts to wonder whether Japan will become the first major market to see a decline in personal computer use some 25 years after it revolutionized household electronics — and whether this could be the picture of things to come in other countries.
(…)
The industry is responding in two other ways: reminding detractors that computers are still essential in linking the digital universe and releasing several laptops priced below $300 this holiday shopping season. (…) Recent desktop PCs look more like audiovisual equipment — or even colorful art objects — than computers. Sony Corp.’s desktop computers have folded up to become clocks, and its latest version even hangs on the wall.“

The author explains that by two reasons. On the one hand the fact that PC have less added value than other devices: a bigger TV is more obviously relevant as a nice output system, a mobile phone allows mobile consumption. On the other hand, it’s because “50 percent of Japanese send e-mail and browse the Internet from their mobile phones”. A third reason is also that japanese do not really work at home.

Why do I blog this? lots of relevant stuff there, but one should be careful to draw parallels between japan and other countries. The mobile phone usage (and infrastructure) is SO different that the situation is not comparable.

Anyway, I also find interesting this idea that PC (as motors in the past) are now folded up in other devices (clocks, displays)… as if computation was meant to go “in the background”, the added value lying in the services provided by the devices, not the machine itself.

Augmenting amusement rides with telemetry is a paper about how wireless telemetry can be employed to enhance the experience of fairground and theme park. The idea is collect data (video, audio, heart-rate and acceleration) and stream them onto large public display through visualizations:

“The first (shown in Figure 12) presents the audience with a multipanel visualization of the data from the biometrical data monitor and the accelerometer. When using this visualization, video from the helmet camera is projected alongside on a separate screen, and audio is played over the Dana centre’s audio system. The purpose of this combination is to enable experts to talk the audience through some of the live data and the physiological experiences the participant is undergoing.
(…)
The second visualization presented to the audience is a non-expert visualization of the data
(…)
demonstrated how we can use telemetry to transform the act of riding an amusement ride into a theatrical event, extending the experience for riders while also enhancing its entertainment value for spectators.
“

Nevertheless, the most interesting part is in the conclusion about why these data are worthwile:

“First, such data may allow the detailed analysis of the riding experience, enabling designers to understand at precisely which moments riders feel the most thrill and also how different people react to different rides, supporting the more systematic design of more thrilling rides. A second possibility is to design future rides that directly adapt to individual riders’ preferences or past history, for example tuning their movements in response to telemetry data, providing a more personalized riding experience than is currently possible. Third, this kind of telemetry system could be used as a marketing tool by enabling amusement rides to be reliably rated for the experience they deliver. The fourth and final possibility concerns extending the spectator experience to include ‘tele-riding’ through a more immersive presentation of the telemetry data such as a through a 3D simulation that could even be experienced by remote friends and family at a distance over the Internet.“

Why do I blog this? my interest in people’s behavior in space and place makes me wondering about all the “traces” one could leave and how they can be used, why they’re relevant. This paper gives a good highlight about these reasons.

My interest is not in the theme park thing but rather in seeing the parallels between this experiment and the data generated in urban computing contexts. As I mentioned here, there are already different use of space/time representations of people in cities (make explicit phenomenon that are invisible, give users some feedback, create new services based on this information). So does this paper bring new elements to the table? In a sense yes, the last excerpt I quoted gives new type of usage for that matter. Let’s dig more the analogy between the city and a theme park.

Walker, B., Schnädelbach, H., Egglestone, S.R., Clark, A., Orbach, T., Wright, M., Ng, K.H., Rodden, T., Benford, S. and French, A., “Augmenting Amusement Rides with Telemetry”, In Proceedings of ACE 2007, Salzburg, Austria.

An RFID keyring attached to a watch. Usually serves to open doors. The owner told me that recently his watch ran out of energy, he kept wearing it because it was convenient to keep thr RFID keyring there.

The importance of the bracelet to hold other things than time. Appropriation and personalization of the watch

Definitely shows the interlinkage between physical artifact mediated by digitality.

Break pressure measurement, as seen in the subway in Paris.
Designed or not designed for the subway users?

Watching Jan Chipchase’s talk at Nokia Connection 2007 (see the podcast here), I tried to take some notes about the sort of questions Jan addresses related to the “material” he and his team collect:
- find the lessons about why people are doing x and y? what motivations and apply it to other contexts
- does results x and y apply to the consumption of digital content? or tangible media? mobile phone design?
- what is the digital equivalent to x and y phenomena?
- if you see that people use x and y objects (e.g. straps) what kind of services you can have with X and Y?
- challenge people’s opinions with baseline data
- yield not facts but informed opinions

Why do I blog this? quick notes after listening to a podcast, what inspires me most in Jan’s work is precisely how to go beyond the collection of “data” and what sort of questions one can address using them.

I love these street-machines that allow you to print your pictures. The best part for me is the INPUT system, look at that machine spotted yesterday in Renens, Switzerland:

2 interesting things:
- Such a great variety of input (I only miss the floppy disc reader). One can also wonder if there are other street machines which allows not only INPUT but also OUTPUT like… going to a vending machine with a USB key to download TV series, prOn, games, etc.
- Think about the motivations for people to actually go there and use it, instead of uploading the pics to a webserver and waiting them to be shipped. A truly urban computing node?

Recently started a new collection of cues about a near future laboratory vector, it’s callec space_time_watch and it’s about the user experience of time in various spaces: the usage and the tweaking of tools related to time (clocks, watches), the cultural issues regarding these artifacts, the cultural rituals about time, weird habits, watch and play/games, etc.

“Heaven is the anywhere, anytime office. Hell is the everywhere, everytime office”
Paul Saffo, 1993

(Seen in Geneva, in May 2007)