My Lift07 Doggy Bag

LIFT’07 is long over, yet it is not tool late to write down what I brought back home from my stay in Geneva in February.

Lift conference room. Courtesy of Jan Chipchase.

First I gathered inspiring feedback from my talk. In a pastiche of Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Thinks, I discussed my perception of how sensor technologies (not necessarily ubicomp types) are currently embedded in our lives. My intention was to suggest that new technologies, no matter how “smart” they become, will not wipe out the evidences of difficulties and constraints of their integration in the real-world. Adam Greenfield’s wake up call on the adoption problem of everyware (video) naturally reinforce these thoughts. However, I humbly take a different perspective than Adam. My observation of passengers break dancing in front of automatic doors in swiss train clearly contrast with Adam’s admiration of ballet performed by women using octopus in the hong-kong transit system. Naoto Fukasawa would describe this graceful and elegant transaction as the inspiring “design desolving in behavior“. In fact, there is one specific assumptions/observations upon which I do not necessarily agree with Adam. First, he is fairly confident that robust ubicomp is around the corner with the deployment of IPv6 and ulra-wide band networks. I find hard to believe that a technology such as WiMAX will prevail and deliver robustness in a foreseeable future. In contrary, it might just add a ston to the current Tower of Babel of technology. There are many types of constraints that prevent designer from applying the key guidelines (i.e. facilitating inadvertence, awareness of engagement and unwillingness to engage) Adam suggests. Responsibility of appropriated does not uniquely hold in designers’ hands, because they must work on top of unstable infrastructures, incompatible standards or limited time for quality assurance. In that line of thought, I only can thank Adam for recommending me Edward Tenner’s book Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences. I am really glad I finally put my hand on a study of the history of science that exemplify how technological fixes often create bigger problems than the ones they were meant to solve in the first place. It of course reminds me of Paul Virilio’s compelling work on the accident as diagnostic of technology. His masterpiece being most probably L’ accident originel prior to anything else. A small stretch from that, Nicolas pointed to me Steven Casey’s work on technology and design-induced human error. In The Atomic Chef: And Other True Tales of Design, Technology, and Human Error, he comments how technological failures result from the incompatibilities between the way things are designed and the way people actually perceive, think, and act. In my research work on location-aware application, I refer this mismatch, as a social-technical gap (inspired by Ackerman). In that issue, Nicolas recently digged the paper Infrastructures: appropriation, empowerment and reflection that describes how an infrastructure is perceived and conceived, emotionally understood, and interacted with from the first-person perspective of its users. This makes me think of to the concepts of adaptive design and layers, that is giving them the opportunity to users to “slip between layers” of a system/infrastructure.

I could catch up with Nathan Eagle‘s talk that I had partially missed in February. Nathan’s work is extremely relevant to my current experiment of collecting and analyzing spatio-temporal traces. In the second part of his presentation, Nathan discussed his reality mining experiment on inferring social network structure using mobile phone data. His study reveals that it is possible with a fair amount of precision to figure out types of relationships, infer the topology of the social network and understand how groups of people interact. However, so far, the analysis is somehow limited to visualizations.

Less related to my research focus, but equally captivating, I really enjoyed Julian Bleeker’s suggestions on knitting together 1st Life and 2nd Life in a meaningful, habitable and playful fashion; Jan Chipchase sharing his experience of performing field research on illiteracy and technologies; Daniela Cerqui questioning the techno-optimistic values of our western society; Frédéric Kaplan for proposing the notion of “chili computing” and Daniel Kaplan for summarizing all the above, and provoking the audience to rethink our assumption our transparency.

It was a real pleasure to finally meet Scott Smith and ride a train with Jan Chipchase discussing the Japanese addressing system.

Nicolas, Mauro, Sergio, and Adam wrote their own notes and impressions on LIFT07.