In his CHI2008 paper called “Measuring trust in wi-fi hotspots“, Tim Kindberg and colleagues investigate people’s decisions to access unfamiliar Wi-Fi hotspots. To do so, they relied on a field experiment approach (’in the wild’).

They wanted to test two hypotheses about the presence within the Wi-Fi hotspot’s introductory web pages
of highly salient photographs that represented or did not represent the user’s current location:

“Specifically, it was first hypothesised that an image representing the location would increase the likelihood of the user trusting the website enough to supply personal information in the form
of his or her mobile phone number, when compared to the same website displaying an image of a location that did not represent the user’s current location. By including an image of the location as a salient evidential cue – a locative cue – of the Wi-Fi service, we hypothesized that uncertainty about the source of the service would be reduced through ‘anchoring’ the service to the venue where it was deployed. “

They deployed a a spoof Wi-Fi hotspot developed for public use, exposing users attempting to connect to the hotspot to a degree of apparent risk. They provided a pretext for entering their mobile phone numbers in order to connect to the ‘service’ (See more about the methodology in the paper). The results are the following:

“The results tend to support the anti-locative hypothesis: that those exposed to an anti-locative cue are less likely to trust the service than those exposed to an a-locative cue.
(…)
The results of this experiment have implications for the design of situated services such as Wi-Fi. Designers need (a) to protect consumers from mistakenly trusting spoofed services, and (b) to avoid distrust as a barrier to use of legitimate services.“

Why do I blog this? This is a sort of typical “urban computing” interaction. It’s interesting to see that decisions to access an unfamiliar Wi-Fi hotspot can be affected by location-relevant images on the WiFi connection page.

One of the domain I have been interested in the last few months is mobile on-line multi-player games. Having done research in pervasive/location-based games and knowing that this path was still a sort of “ubiquitous computing proximal future” for various reasons, I started exploring less advanced projects such as mobile multi-player on-line worlds/games such as Mini Friday or TibiaME. Although I was silent about it, this was one of the project I work on at the Media and Design Lab.

Both the game and the mobile industry are also quiet about this vector, but even old news show that this field start getting some attention. There are indeed various opportunities in this area, depending on various axes/design choices:

• Be synchronous like Tibia ME or the upcoming DofusPocket (Ankama - Kalmeo) or asynchronous (turn-based game) like Armada Kingdoms (by Bloomsix)
• Stand-alone virtual worlds such as Mini Friday (from Sulake, who also runs Habbo Hotel) or cross-platforms such as The Violet Sector.
• Offering of a complete game/social experience or only a subset: for instance it can be very well tbe the “mobile companion” to computer-based MMO like Ragnarok Mobile Mage or this mobile service called Level Up Mobile that allows to manage your account (balance inquiry, password, lock/unlock), get news and guild message exchange. A bit similar to what Rupture or Magelo are doing except that it would be a mobile version.

There’s a lot that can be done in that last area, as described in the gamasutra news.

“There are also social networking opportunities in World of Warcraft that could be done on mobile. Text and voice chat are obvious candidates for mobile, allowing players to keep in touch with their guilds when they are away from their computers. Also, things like browseable profiles and screenshot albums could be easily implemented. RSS-like news feeds by mobile could provide players with info on who leveled up or who joined a guild. Players might enjoy rating content that could be viewed on mobile such as rating quests or avatar appearance. Once the technology improves, Youtube style videos of World of Warcraft activities could appear on mobile. “It’s the perfect activity for mobile because it can take up as much or as little of the player’s time as desired,” Roy said.“

That said, this wide spectrum of opportunity is not the only solution why I am interested in that. Being a user experience researcher, my focus is on how people use certain technologies (such as urban technologies, location-based services, games). Mobile on-line multi-user games interest me because I see them as interesting platform to study the hybridization of the digital and the physical, especially in contexts such as contemporary cities. Where do people play these games? How do that influence what they’re doing after/before/during playing them? The whole interlinkages between the digital activities+context and the physical activities+context was the purpose of my work as EPFL last year. This is another vector than the one we’re exploring with Julian since physicality, geolocation and motion is not taken account. In this case, I am interested in pure raw mobile applications deployed on phones that are available on the market.

So, to some extent, as in the CatchBob project, I find interesting to employ mobile social games as platform to explore broader issues, especially the ones related to mobile user experience and what are the relationships between contemporary cities and these games. More about this topic later.

In “Technology paternalism – wider implications of ubiquitous computing”, S. Spiekermann and F. Pallas deal with how people can maintain control in environments that are supposed to be totally automated. They coined the term “technology paternalism” to describe the situation where “people may be subdued to machines’ autonomous actions“. They take the example of car that beeps when you don’t fasten your seatblet and show how such situations meet the same criteria as the one that define paternalism:

“ the definition of Technology Paternalism extends the general notion of paternalism with respect to two aspects: one is that actions are being taken autonomously by machines. The other one is that by their coded rules, machines can become ‘absolute’ forces and therefore may not be overrulable any more.“

And discuss that in conjunction with Weiser’s notion of calm computing:

“If machines are controlled, then they are not calm any more. There is a clear disaccord between the concept of disappearing technologies and the attempt to remain in control. Control premises attention and visibility whilst Ubicomp environments are designed to be invisible and seamlessly adaptive. Can this dissonance really ever be resolved? “

And of course there is a part about who’s responsible of technology paternalism:

“Of course, this power does not lie in the hands of technology itself. Technology only follows rules implemented into it. Therefore, the question arises: who WILL be the real patrons behind Technology Paternalism if it were to become a reality? Who will decide about the rules, the ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’ of every-day actions?
(…)
three groups as the potential patrons behind Technology Paternalism: engineers and marketers of Ubicomp technologies as well as regulators influencing application design. “

Why do I blog this? Some relevant issues regarding the notion of control in ubicomp. The authors finally come up with a series of recommendations. The one that strikes me as fundamental is the following: “there should be a general possibility to overrule ‘decisions’ made by technology and any exceptions from this should be considered very carefully“. The notion of exception is a crux issue that is often diminished by lots of engineers I talked to wrt to autonomous technologies such as “intelligent fridges” or location-based services. Exceptions breaks patterns and habits tracked by sensors, disrupt machine learning algorithm and are eventually impediments to prediction-based system that would send emergency messages to 911 because granny did not open her fridge for 2 weeks (because she unexpectedly decided to visit her grandson).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Random street encounter tonight in Geneva:

A manual for a flat-screen LCD television, obviously tossed out in a trash. Made me think about the value of manuals from technological devices. It can also be a manual on one the 3 languages (+english) of Switzerland. We have often get 3 of 4 manuals for each technological good that we buy.

Although it’s a fake power plug (for an ad), it’s often desperately needed for certain people on the street. Seen in Paris yesterday. Another sign of the need for certain (outdoor) infratructure

How touch interface can age… and get dirty over time. Seen in Paris yesterday, it’s actually an old video rental booth down the street of the 11th arrondissement.

Why do I blog this? just find intriguing the role of aging (and dust!) in the design of interfaces (and then: interactions). Sometimes other services need to be put in place (like new kind of maintenance… that would clean the interface or keep it usable).

To access the underground:

To recharge your card/pass:

(Seen in Paris last week)

Why do I blog this? I just wanted to point the size and color of the contact area (coherence and homogeneity). This big violet circle is intriguing and as you can see on the second picture there is a sort of “tail” maybe to facilitate the passing of the card/pass when moving. The tail allow the user not to stop to validate his/her card.

[Last year, I wrote a paper for a workshop at a human-computer interaction conference about the user experience of video games, actually it briefly presents the work I am doing with game companies. The paper was not accepted and I thought it would be pertinent to leave it online anyway]

Introduction
Video game companies have now integrated the need to deploy user-centered design and evaluation methods to enhance players experiences. This has led them to hire cognitive psychology researchers, human-computer interface specialists, develop in-house usability labs or subcontract tests and research to companies or academic labs. Although, very often, methods has been directly translated form classic HCI and usability, this game experience analysis started to gain weights through publications. This situation acknowledges the importance of setting a proper method for user-centered game design, as opposed to the one applied for “productivity applications” or web services. The Microsoft Game User Research Group for example has been very productive on that line of research (see for example [5]) with detailed methods such as usability tests, Rapid Iterative Test and Evaluation [4] or consumer playtests [1]. Usability test is definitely the most common method currently given its relevance to identify interfaces flaws as well as factors that lower the fun to play through behavioral analysis.

That said, most of the methods deployed by the industry seem to rely heavily on quantitative and experimental paradigms inherited from the cognitive sciences tradition in human-computer interaction (see [2]). Studies are often conducted in corporate laboratory settings in which myriads of players come visit and spend hours playing new products. Survey, ratings, logfile analysis, brief interviews (and sometimes experimental studies) are employed to apprehend users’ experiences and implications for game or level designers are fed back into game development processes.

While these approaches proves to be fruitful (as reported by the aforementioned papers which describe some case studies), this situation only accounts for a limited portion of what HCI and user-centered design could bring to table in terms of game user research. Too often, the “almost-clinical” laboratory usability test is deployed without any further thoughts regarding how players might experience the product “in the wild”. For example, this kind of studies does not take into account how the activity of gaming is organized, and how the physical and social context can be important to support playful activities.

What we propose is to step back for a while and consider a complementary approach to gain a more holistic view of how a game product is experienced. To do so, we will describe two examples from our research carried out in partnership with a game studio.

Examples from field studies

Our first example depicted on Figure 1 shows the console of an informant: a Nintendo DS with a post-it that says “Flea market on Saturday” and an exclamation mark. The player of “Animal Crossing” indeed left this as a reminder that two days ahead, there would be a flea market in the digital environment. This is important in the context of that game because it will allow him to sell digital items to non-playable characters in the game.

This post-it is only an example among numerous uses of external resources to complement or help the gameplay. Player-created maps of digital environments xeroxed and exchanged in schools in the nineties is another example of such behavior. Magazines, books and digital environment maps are also prominent examples of that phenomenon, which eventually leads to business opportunities. Some video game editors indeed start publishing material (books, maps, cards) and try to connect it to the game design (by allowing secret game challenges through elements disseminated in comics for example).

Figure 2 shows another example that highlights the social character of play. This group of Japanese kids is participating the game experience, although there is only one child holding a portable console. The picture represented here is only one example of collective play along many that we encountered, both in mobile of fixed settings. They indicate that playing a video-game is much more than holding an input controller since participants (rather than “The Player”) have different roles ranging from giving advices, scanning the digital environment to find cues, discussing previous encounters with NPCs or controlling the game character.

Another intriguing results from a study about Animal Crossing on the Nintendo DS has revealed that some players share the game and the portable console with others. An adult described how he played with his kid asynchronously: he hides messages and objects in certain places and his son locates them, displace them and eventually hide others. The result of this is the creation of a circular form of game-play that emerged from the players’ shared practice of a single console.

Conclusion

Although this looks very basic and obvious, these three examples correspond to two ways to frame cognition and problem solving: “Distributed Cognition” [3] and “Situated Action” [6]. While the former stresses that cognition is distributed the objects, individuals, and tools in our environment, Situated Action emphasizes the interrelationship between problem solving and its context of performance, mostly social. The important lesson here is that problem solving, such as interacting with a video-game is not confined to the individual but is both influenced and permitted by external factors such as other partners (playing or not as we have seen) or artifacts such as paper, pens, post-its, guidebooks, etc. Whereas usability testing relates to more individual model of cognition, Situated Action or Distributed Cognition imply that exploring and describing the context of play is of crux importance to fully grasp the user experience of games. Employing ethnographic methodologies, as proposed by these two Cognitive Sciences frameworks, can fulfill such goal by focusing on a qualitative examination of human behavior. It is however important to highlight the fact that investigating how, where and with whom people play is not meant to replace more conventional test. Rather, one can see this as a complement to understand phenomenon such as the discontinuity of gaming or the use of external resources while playing.

One of the reasons why this approach can be valuable is that results drawn from ethnographic research of gaming can be relevant to find unarticulated opportunities. For example, by explicitly requiring the use of external resource or the possibility to have challenges designed for multiple players as shown in the Animal Crossing example we described.

In the end, what this article stressed is that playing video-games is a broad experience which can be influenced by lots of factors that could be documented. And this material is worthwhile to design a more holistic vision of a product.

References

[1] Davis, J., Steury, K., & Pagulayan, R. A survey method for assessing perceptions of a game: The consumer playtest in game design. Game Studies: the International Journal of Computer Game Research, 5(1) (2005).
[2] Fulton, B. (2002). Beyond Psychological Theory: Getting Data that Improve Games. Game Developer’s Conference 2002 Proceedings, San Jose CA, March 2002. Available at: http://www.gamasutra.com/gdc2002/features/fulton/fulton_01.htm
[3] Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the Wild, MIT Press.
[4] Medlock, M. C., Wixon, D., Terrano, M., Romero, R., Fulton, B. (2002). Using the RITE Method to improve products: a definition and a case study. Usability Professionals Association, Orlando FL July (2002). Available at: http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/c/c/5cc406a0-0f87-4b94-bf80-dbc707db4fe1/mgsut_MWTRF02.doc.doc
[5] Pagulayan, R. J., Keeker, K., Wixon, D., Romero, R., & Fuller, T. User-centered design in games. In J. Jacko and A. Sears (Eds.), Handbook for Human-Computer Interaction in Interactive Systems, pp.883-906. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates (2002).
[6] Suchman, L.A. (1987). Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge Press.

[Now it’s also interesting to add a short note about WHY the paper has not been accepted The first reviewer was unhappy by the fact that many ethnographies of game-playing have been published. Although this is entirely true in academia, it’s definitely not the case in the industry (where ethnography is seldom employed in playtests). And my mistake may have been that I frame the paper in an game industry perspective, using the literature about gaming usability. The second reviewer wanted a more extensive description of a field study and less a scratch-the-surface approach that I adopted. My problem of course is that it’s always difficult to describe results more deeply because most of the data are confidential… This is why I stayed at a general level]

In the last few weeks, there has been an interesting discussion on the the anthrodesign Yahoo! group concerning “Integration of ethnography in R&D“. It basically addressed the link between ethnography and “action” (e.g. implementation) in a client-vendor research relationship, a somewhat controversial issue. The discussion started with how “actionable” ethnography results should be and the problem with that term (”“something that will allow me to do my job based on what you’ve told me)”.

There are some very good points there, especially about:
- what does ethnography means for R&D (”needs to be there from the beginning to frame the problem AND at the end to inform the marketing“, “moving from finding to insight. Cameras find stuff. People produce insights. Insights are actionable. They give us design principles that guide creativity and can test what we create. (…) All of this informs our research planning, “Making research “actionable,” to me, means providing specific direction for transforming whatever social context you’ve been studying“, “people need to make choices/decisions, whether they be creative or strategic, and they look to the research to help them do that. This can mean inspiring new choices that they weren’t aware of, or (commonly) deciding between options that they are already aware of but can’t decide or agree on.“)
- the questions to be asked: “how do projects get managed and recommendations get communicated here? Via presentation, text doc, what doc size etc? Which audiences - there are usually multiple. How many versions should I expect to create, over time, for which audiences? Who’s my partner-in-crime internally who’ll deliver the message with me? Should they take the lead in comms, or should I? Which people can I talk with? How can I assess the accuracy of these people’s perceptions and rapidly put together a basic org map and understanding of this org’s dynamics, before I commit to doing a project that’s not positioned for success? “.
- Some indeed distates the word “actionable” as it forces people to take results and “do something”, whatever that is. The point for one of the discussant is about rumination: t seem rather unseemly to me to simply take participants’ interactions with me and then “do something,” instead of reflecting, ruminating, and turning back to the participants for validation.

(I haven’t really put people’s name next to the quote since I was not sure about how public they wanted these statements to be revealed; it’s a mailing list).

Why do I blog this? great points to keep in mind when working with non-academics. The tension between “actionable” and “rumination” is very intriguing and is sometimes difficult to explain to people (aka potential clients).

Tried to gather my notes from the User Experience session from LIFT08. When I started on the program back in spring 2007, this topic was really the one where I had not doubts about its relevance to the LIFT community and I had already in mind the 3 speakers I wanted to have for that. Younghee Jung (Nokia) Genevieve Bell (Intel) and Paul Dourish (University of California Irvine) appeared to me as a great match and surely because I am reading/following what these researchers are doing.

Younghee Jung, a user experience researcher from Nokia started off the session by describing a sort of “competition” to design mobile phone with 3 communities living in shanty towns in Mumba, Rio and Accra. People were indeed invited to design their ideal mobile technology. Youghee interestingly presented some of ideas and stories they gathered and how they are used to complement other ethnographic research methods are discussed. The process was very similar in the 3 different places: people received an A3 document with the participant description and some left space to draw the desired phone design. These drawings have been employed by Nokia local teams to discuss phone design with the competition participants. What was interesting there was that such process is meant to uncover specific needs of certain target-groups. Lots of the examples she presented shows how the phone is expected to be able to adapt to the environment as well as local culture issues (such as noise, refugee dispersion, etc.). As last year with Jan Chipchase’s presentation, that one was very insightful in terms of how ethnographical methods can be fruitful for design research. Of course, the trickiest part lies in what comes next and how these elements can be fed back into Nokia’s design process, something that is always less known and discussed.

The next presenter was Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist who works for Intel Research in Portland, USA. In her own words, her job is “to know what people do with technology and why they care in a larger sense”. The multi-site research she and her team conduct is meant to yield different sorts of results but she insisted on the fact that technology change faster than people and that although it is easy to believe that technology change all of us, the thing people care about and the thing people practice in their daily life transform far more slowly. Things that persists over time are;

“The desire for social connection (ie: family, kith and kin and community)
The desire for meta-meaning making and participation (ie: spirituality, religion)
Creative acts, and gifting (ie: making, sharing, creating experiences/objects/content etc)
A good story (ie: a point of view, edited perspective, a channel)
Keeping secrets & telling lies“

And it’s precisely that last point that is the starting point of the talk. She quoted three data points about this topic: (1) 45 % of UK mobile phone owners admitted to having lied about their whereabouts by text message (2006 survey) (2) Cornell University study showed that 100% of US online daters lie about either their height or weight (3) James Katz says we are entering an “arms race of digital deception”. And for every device that claims to purport to tell the truth (e.g. GPS), there is another service that allows to lie, deceit or create alibi. Her next argument about this was that there is a big gap between our cultural ideals (lie are bad things, secrets are seen as being good, as they allow to maintain trust) and our cultural practices (we tell lies all the time, 6-200 a day). And new ICTs manifest themselves in a very complicated space where there are already tensions between cultural ideas and practices (which are played out differently in different countries). But what are the relationships between technologies like the Internet and lies/secrets? Lies about location, context, intent, identity (physical appearance, aspirations, demographics, status and standing) are all possible, sometimes even required, on the internet (and through ICTS). For example there is a surprising % of MySpace users over 100 (because MySpace restricts access to 14 years and up) so the process of participation itself is a lie!
Are ICTs (and applications and services) succeeding in part because they facilitate our lying ways? or because lies/secrets are necessary to keep us ‘safe’? Israeli researchers find that online deception appears to be an enjoyable activity and guilt, fear, shame are largely absent (as opposed to face 2 face situations). Therefore, technologies may celebrate secrets and lies: see for example secret sharing websites (such as that one) and social networking sites (including twitter) make some forms of confabulation into art. She noted how this reveal the re-emergence of the social lie of the 18-19th century.
Technologies also enable to uncover deception through cell-phone tracking technology, use of video & camera phones, lie-detection algorithms (on email/SMS: the longer the message, the bigger the lie), alibi services that create whole back stories (plus receipts, photos, notes…). She also interestingly quoted a korean kid tracked by her parents through GPS: “I feel sorry for my peers who don’t have a GPS tracker because means that they my parents love my more!”: an inversion of what people imagine about surveillance, a sort of cultural reconfiguration.
In sum, she presented arguments to show how tensions between cultural practices and cultural ideals persist around lies and secrets; and how the ideas of secrets & lies offer new ways to think about privacy and security.

Final speaker was Paul Dourish discussed the relationship between ethnography and design: not simply what we could learn from ethnography but how we might want, in a technological context, imagine the relationship between ethnographic work and design practices. There is indeed a 10-15 years interest in ethnography from design community and the question of how this work can teach us is not really addressed. 2 years ago, he criticized the “implications for design” sections in research reports to state how the presence or absence of this bullet point listed at the end of reports is not the best measures of the usefulness of ethnographic work. To Paul, there might be other kind of material that can be extracted and generative of design practice. There is something missed in this when you use ethnography to define what feature you may build or what you can get people to buy. The two large previous presentations have shown that it is richer. Ethnography is an analytical practice, not only a empirical one, not simply a way to gather data and it’s a way to know what matter to people and build a series of theoretical statements. He showed how we miss also a series of disciplinary power relationships: as there is the question to ethnographer about “what are the implications for design”, we should also have computer scientists standing and discuss what are the implications of their work for social sciences theories. Of course, he did not want to mean that ethnographic results are not relevant and tried to show some of the way we can pick upon the fact that classical ethnography are relevant, especially in the context of mobility… symbolic considerations about mobility, presence, absence.
What I found interesting here is that he presented an alternative way to link ethnographic practice to design practice, one that does look towards ethnography as a way to directly generate a series of implications for design or marketing data that tells me about the people how we’ll be able to see stuff to but rather the focus is on the analytic contribution ethnographic work mix: the frames, concepts, the way in which things are put together, the ways we focus on forms of life life rather than typical consumers.

Morning read in the train: “Toward a Geography of a World Without Maps: Lessons from Ptolemy and Postal Codes” by Michael R. Curry. In this paper, the author describes the implicit and widely accepted history of space:

“the world (and, indeed, the universe) was, once upon a time, seen as vast, too vast to be grasped in its entirety. While knowledge of the world was limited to knowledge of the local, the local was imagined as situated within this vastness. Through what might best be described as an evolutionary process, people gained an increasing knowledge of the local, of places, but began, too, to be able to situate those places within an increasingly comprehensible whole, which came to be called (but had always been) ‘‘space.’’ By the time of Ptolemy, a sophisticated—and familiar—geographical ontology had developed, wherein there was a hierarchy from place to region to space and wherein knowledge of places tended to be tinged with subjectivity, while that of space became increasingly amenable to more rigorous, mathematical understanding. On this view, the situation today, where geographic information systems, global positioning systems, remote surveillance systems, and related technologies are increasingly parts of everyday life, is continuous with that past, and is in a sense an expected step in that evolutionary process. “

And then shows us the flip side of the coin, describing how this is a “telic fantasy” using the postal code example:

“there are good reasons for believing that a more empirically grounded account of the relationship between the concepts of space and of place will indicate that that relationship has been, and remains, far more messy than on the ‘‘standard’’ account. (…) such an analysis will show that prior to the invention of written maps and lists, the means for the storage of information were far too feeble to underpin anything resembling the homogeneous and metrical idea of space that we find in, say, Ptolemy; ‘‘space’’ was, in fact, invented rather late in the day, in societies that offered the appropriate affordances.
(…)
People do not, on the whole, walk around with anything that could seriously be termed ‘‘maps’’ in their heads, and to attempt to resuscitate that idea by redefining maps as ‘‘sets of directions’’ (to take just one example) is to be dishonest.“

Why do I blog this? I am more and more interested in human geography and the way they deal with space and the individual as it is far more interesting than what has been done in psychology recently. Furthermore, there are important conclusions to be drawn for ubiquitous/urban computing as it describes people’s representation of space and place.

Curry, M. R. 2005: Toward a geography of a world without maps: lessons from Ptolemy and postal codes . Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95, 680-691

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.