New Uses for Mobile Pervasive Games – Lessons Learned for CSCW Systems to Support Collaboration in Vast Work Sites

New uses for mobile pervasive games – Lessons learned for CSCW systems to support collaboration in vast work sites by Matthew Chalmers and Oskar Juhlin, paper for the workshop about gaming at European CSCW in September 2005.

This papers discusses how the new means for spatial annotation and location awareness could possibly improve individual work, collaboration as well as learning. It focuses on how pervasive games research platforms is of benefit for specific mobile work (like infrastructure management on roads, in factories, airports, electric power lines) for the study on complex issues of coordination, learning and articulation of work, and also the contextualised social interaction that ubicomp technology can afford. The aim is to maintain a balance between the grounded experience of real settings and the open-ended potential for technical functionality.

There are similarities between many pervasive games and mobile work in vast settings since both have locations as resource and as topic, and more general issues to draw on with regard to how a large unfamiliar space becomes a place that one has experience of; that one understands in a social and practical way, and can interact in.

These games do not just support the use of locations as resource in mobile game play, but also establish collaboration on finding and marking locations, and building up experience and understanding of those locations fit into a larger picture of social and technological interaction.

We see strong and useful parallels with the situation of workers who create their work within organisational rules but also within their wider technical, social and environmental setting.

Relation to my thesis: I plan to use pervasive games like CatchBob! as a platform for my research. Such papers on bridging games with CSCW and ubicomp legitimate my approach.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Context

Dourish, P. 2004. What we talk about when we talk about context. Personal Ubiquitous Comput. 8, 1 (Feb. 2004), 19-30

The goal of this paper is to explore the technical and social perspective in terms of context. Dourish shifts the attention of context from “a set of descriptive features of seetings” to “practices – forms of engagement with those settings”:

We assigned a central role to the meanings that people find in the world and the meanings of their actions there in terms of the consequences and interpretations of those actions for themselves and for others.

Therefore…

the focus of the design is not simply “how can people get their work done,” but “how can people create their own meanings and uses for the system in use”;

Context plays a central role in ubiquitous computing, because now that computation is moved “off the desktop”, then we need to keep track of where it has gone. However the use of context vary:

Ecoded or dynamic context
Encoded: Systems encode context along with information so that is can later be used as retrieval cue.
Dynamic: Use context dynamically to tailor the behavior of the system or its response patterns of use.

Interactive system design often rigidly fails to respond to the setting in which action unfolds; by incorporating context, system designers have hoped to make their system more responsive to the different social settings in which they might be used.

Situated action and improvisation
Based on Shuman’s notion of “situated actions”, computer systems should respond to the settings within they are used (citing Abowd in The Human Experience, Ubicomp‘s effort informed by a situation action also emphasize improvisational behavior and would not required, or anticipate, the user to follow a predefined script).

However the social and technical ideas often sit uneasily together:

Ubiquitous computing systems may be more responsive, and yet they seem to fail to address the sociological critique. Turning social observation into technical design seems to be problematic.

Positivist and phenomenological reasoning
Seek to reduce social phenomena to essences or simplified models that capture underlying patterns. It is a quantitative or mathematical perspective (engineering approach).

In particular, the idea that context consists of a set of features of the environment surrounding generic activities, and that these features can be encoded and made available to a software system alongside an encoding of the activity itself, is a common assumption in many systems. It is inherent in the notion that our systems will “capture,” “represent,” or “model” context – the normal and appropriate concerns of positivist design.

Phenomenological theories
Subjective (social facts are emergent properties of interactions) and qualitative in orientation.

… engineering approaches – including those that tend to dominate discourse about ubiquitous computing – inherit from a positivist tradition, while many approaches to social analysis relevant to HCI design – including the ethnomethodological position practiced by Suchman and cited by Weiser – are heir to a phenomenological legacy.

Dourish reconsiders context not as a representational problem but as an interactional problem and assumes an alternative view on context:

• Contextuality is a relation property that holds between objects or activities
• The scope of contextual features is defined dynamically
• Context is an occasioned property, relevant to particular settings
• Context arises from the activity (no separation of context and content)

He suggest that ubiquitous computing helps supporting the context that should not be predefined. A system should be able to display aspects of its own context – its activities and the resources around which the activity is organized and adapt to them. The “gulf of interpretation” (the difficulty of interpretation the system’s state as a response to the user’s command is one of HCI’s major problem.

On a side note, Dourish mentions the differrent terms used to describe the integration of computer technology with the everyday physical world: ubiquitous computing (Weiser, 1991), context-aware computing (Dey et al., 2001), pervasive computing (Ark and Selker, 1999), embodied interaction (Dourish, 2001), and more. A subject already covered in Disambiguating the Terminology around Ubiquitous Computing.

Relation to my thesis: I am also trying to bridge the technical and social perspectives and try to find ways to improve the missmatches. Context is hard to grasp and if not done properly leads to the gulf of interpretation. Current workarounds are about systems being adaptive and displaying their context (which lead to to other issues on the user’s mental load). Dourish focuses on “how can people create their own meaning and uses for the system in use” instead of the very engineering vision of “how can people get their work done”. My thesis should have this first approach (designing technlogies, but also chaning technologies that we design)

We can support the emergence and use of these structures, but we cannot separate them, analytically or technically, from the circumstances and occasions of their production.

Walking Away from the Desktop Computer: Distributed Collaboration and Mobility in a Product Design Team

Bellotti, V. and Bly, S. 1996. Walking away from the desktop computer: distributed collaboration and mobility in a product design team. In Proceedings of the 1996 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (Boston, Massachusetts, United States, November 16 – 20, 1996). M. S. Ackerman, Ed. CSCW ’96. ACM Press, New York, NY, 209-218

In this field study, the authors aimed to learn how collaboration was and was not supported by current technology and to seek opportunities for design innovations. It was found that work involved a lot of local mobility (instead of long distance, car, public transportation). While local mobility sets up challenges for technology to support individual work, it is even more significant for collaboration. However mobility supporting local communication and mutual awareness, makes it harder for distributed team member not only to locate remote colleague but to stay in touch more generally (lack of awareness).

Lack of awareness means lack of the context and familiarity necessary for the essential, lightweight interactions and communication which are key to collaboration.

The authors suggest two design goals to support mobility

• To replicate for remote colleague some of the opportunities for building awareness and for informal communication and coordination that local mobility enables.
• To reduce the penalties for distributed colleagues of trying to communicate, collaborate and coordinate with others who are away from their desks.

Relation to my thesis: The term of “local mobility” is key because I am interested in instantaneous synchronous ubicomp environments supporting collaborations. That is to support real-time tasks when awareness and communication are synchronous. Not when ubiquitous applications are envisioned as workflow systems that can be accessed from work, home and 3rd places (like Making Sharing Pervasive: Ubiquitous computing for share not taking).

Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between People, Bits and Atoms

Ishii, Hiroshi, Brygg Ullmer. “Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between People, Bits and Atoms.”, Proceedings of CHI 97. ACM. March, 1997.

The goal of Tangible Bits is to bridge the gaps between both the virtual and the physical environments, as well as the foreground and background of human activities. The intention is to rejoin the richness of the physical world in HCI by making information (bits) tangible.

Relation to my thesis: Hiroshi Ishii represents one big trend in ubicomp. His vision is not about making “computers” ubiquitous per se, but by integrating them more into physical and tangible forms (bridging the gap between the worlds of bits and atomes.).

Bruce Sterling on Spimes

Last week Bruce Sterling’s talk at LIFT06 was extremely inspiring. Sterling went beyond the beyond of his role of obligatory novelist at a technical conference. Nicolas did a full transcript of the talk. The video is also available.

I enjoy that he does not describe spimes (a world I would call the Internet of Things 4.0) as a utopian system. However, I think the structure of his world of spimes is not different than today’s world. We already deal with legacy issues and protocratic problems like objects will work and other not. His quote:

Objects will work and other not, state of the art means break down next month, cutting edge will mean broken down last week”

can be put in present tense. Those are recurrent issues (heterogeneity of systems, quality assurance) and it is our recurrent way to deal with them (by moving to the next “thing”).

If fact, what the wrangler/protocrat Sterling describes might just be a pragmatic vision of ubicomp. “Smart-anything” objects?… NO! It is not stable, it is not universal! It is not ubiquitous! It is not computational! but it can be adopted because the interface makes my relationship to objects much simpler and more convenient.

Relation to my thesis: Inspiring non-utopian, sci-fi vision of ubicomp based on simple and convenient relationship with objects. Crunching the complexity of data is left to Google…

Software Infrastructure and Design Challenges for Ubiquitous Computing Applications

Banavar, G. and Bernstein, A. 2002. Software infrastructure and design challenges for ubiquitous computing applications. Commun. ACM 45, 12 (Dec. 2002), 92-96.

This article identifies the important application design and software infrastructure challenges that must be address by the ubicomp research community. Like a paper I wrote last year on “getting real with the utopia around ubiquitous computing”, the authors mention that we are still far from Weiser’s vision.

Key characteristics of ubiquitous applications are:

Task Dynamism
Adaptation to the dynamism of the users’ environments and the resulting uncertainty. Sometimes, application won’t make the proper inferences. Therefore the user might actively reconfigure the system to adapt to the new task settings. Applications will have to be able to explain what they inferred and learned from their right and wrong inferences.

Device Heterogeneity and Resource Constraints
Hardware and software often lack of heterogeneity and devices have physical constraints. Those limitations influence the development of applications and their capabilities.

Computing in a Social Environment
Privacy issues

Research challenges are:

Semantic Modeling
Use of ontologies to describe users’ task environments, as well as their goals, to enable reasoning about a user’s needs and therefore to adapt to changes. It is a challenge to develop (and agree!) on a high-level model language to express the complex nature of ontologies.

Building the Software Infrastructure
The application must determine the user’s context, must provide reasonable functionalities with bad connectivity, must recover from failover, and must be scalable.

Developing and Configuring Applications
There is a need of a shift in the developers’ mindset while building pervasive application. There is a need to describe on a high-level the task a user needs to perform. The challenge is to be able to specify the interaction logic at an “intent-level” and the application’s requirements on data and computation.

Validating the User Experience
The utility of some computing advancements cannot be evaluated without performing significant user studies and in some cases, widely deploying it. Consequently, the development of effective methods for testing and evaluating the usage scenarios enabled by pervasive applications is an important area that needs more attention from researchers.

Relation to my thesis: The authors acknowledge that both applications and users must adapt in real-world ubiquitous environments. Because of inevitable sense of uncertainty, application should give a sense of situation awareness. In my thesis, I try to give the same pragmatic view on current challenges, being physical and “organizational”. The several “clouds of connectivity” over us, raises the bigger issues around heterogeneity of hardware and software (including agreeing on semantic modeling). Heterogeneity might be a bigger challenge than some of the physical issues of devices. To be widely and rapidly successful, ubiquitous environments should be based on the homogeneous Minitel standards and protocols (top-down government). Other huge challenge I see is, of course to grasp the user’s context and then scaling.

The authors do not cover other social impacts other than privacy. Very little about appropriation. The Relevance of Social Issues in Ubiquitous Computing Environments has more on that subject.

I never really thought on the way it changes the engineers perspection. But it seems that there is a need to be able to describe a system on its interaction with the user.

My thesis completely fits in the “validating the user experience” category and an output might to provide tools to describe tasks and system-user interaction integrating the limitations of the environment. Helping the change the engineers perception of ubicomp development might be a high-level outcome. Field-based quasi-experiments advised by the author to capture the rich nature of the usage environments make me feel that CatchBob! (and its children) as a good research platform.

Reference I should read:
Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication, Lucy Suchman. Cambridge University, 1987.

Book Vending Machines

I spotted a new book vending machine in BCN. Apparently it is a book distribution method only “popular” in latin countries. I like the futuristic “Here are all your books”.

Installed by Punto de Lectura in Line 3, Passeig de Gracia station.

Relation to my thesis: None… or almost none. It is an example of the reaction of the physical (distributed limited-choice bookstores) over the virtual (online unlimited-choice bookstores) and how the 2 might mix at some point.

The Relevance of Social Issues in Ubiquitous Computing Environments

Jessup, L. M. and Robey, D. 2002. The relevance of social issues in ubiquitous computing environments. Commun. ACM 45, 12 (Dec. 2002)

This papers illustrates how ubiquitous computing challenges individuals, teams and organizations to rethink their behaviors. Because of the new possibilities enabled by ubiquitous computing do not carry their own prescriptions, people must discover new behaviors on their own. The authors suggest the now obvious mix of old and new practices “virtual teams may need to employ older technologies, such as telephones, or even face-to-face meetings to complement their dependence on ubiquitous computing technologies”.

Relation to my thesis: The authors optimistically match new technologies with new opportunities for social actions, organizational forms and business models. All this is true, but they do not really take into account the way to carry pleasant user experience in the shift. Technologies are disruptive and people are most of the time left on their own. They build their own mental models and the goal for ubicomp practitioners is to avoid mismatches in ever growing complex environments. My research questions are related to one research issue the authors mention: How do work teams adopt and adapt ubiqutous compututing technologies?

Beyond the Computer Industry

Norman, D. A. 2002. Beyond the computer industry. Commun. ACM 45, 7 (Jul. 2002), 120

With computers becoming ubiquitous, the traditional computer business must be revisited with one main issue “ease of use”. In this short article, Norman explains the design trade off between simplicity in appearance and simplicity in use. Like Adam Greenfield (Ethical Guidelines for Ubicomp), Norman talks about the increasing risk of the ever-more present technology to be designed from deficient consideration of people, organizations, and cultures.

Relation to my thesis: I am interested on the challenges to integrate ubicomp technologies into people’s life. Recent projects like Philips’ Simplicity-Led Design seem to confuse simplicity in appearance and in use. I keep Norman in mind for his quote “It is time to make technology conform to the needs of people“. In ubicomp, this goal is very honorable, but utopian because of the complexity of the environments. Within human-centered development processes, technological constraints must be taken into consideration. Currently, sharing a part of this complexity to the user seems inevitable. In a discussion with the Ada (very controlled immersive interactive environment) project manager, he mentioned me that the system had many unwanted behaviors (which for him was great, but not for the visitors who were not expecting the unexpected).

Agent Modelling and Simulation Presentation

Yesterday, as part of a doctoral school course, I gave a short presentation on Agent-Based Modelling and Simulation. The talk was mainly focused on a brief theoretical background (differences ABM and conventional models, the methodological approach) example of ABM in social sciences (Schilling). I developed and simulated a basic model I called “coopetitive famers” (coopetition coming from the merge of cooperation and competition) as a heuristic approach to competitive environments with cooperative and individualistic farmers. It was a way to show patterns emerging from basic interaction rules (agent mainly interacting with the environment).

I was advised to have a look at “The Evolution of Cooperation” which discusses how cooperation can emerge in a world of self-seeking egoists when there is no central authority to police their actions.

Relation to my thesis: I worked on this to grasp the possibility to introduce ABM into my thesis as a methodology to get insights on users and groups behaviors in a mobile and ubiquitous environment. For example try to model their interaction rules in cases of zero/bad/avg/good positioning accuracy or latency. As a next step, I need to investigate on the way to integrated GIS into ABM.