Posted: February 12th, 2008 | 1 Comment »
It has finally arrived! After months of fun labor, Nicolas and I released Sliding Friction: The Harmonious Jungle of Contemporary Cities (pdf). This pamphlet assembles photos and annotations we took here and there along our dérive through the many cities we lived in and visited. Sliding Friction is an attempt to showcase the curious aspects of contemporary urban spaces. Through 15 topics and 4 themes we focus our lenses on the sparkles generated by the many frictions between ideas, practices and infrastructures that populate cities. We hope to provide some raw food for thoughts to consider the city of the future. Do we want to mitigate, or even eliminate these frictions?
Sliding Friction: The Harmonious Jungle of Contemporary Cities (pdf)
Nicolas Nova and Fabien Girardin
in Walabab editions, Designed by Bread and Butter, Preface by Bruce Sterling, Postface by Julian Bleecker.
Posted: February 12th, 2008 | No Comments »
With my recent affiliation the distributed cluster of researchers that form the Near Future Laboratory think/make-tank (part of the Liftlab group), Julian Bleecker provided me with one of his Flavonoid. A Flavonoid is a little device that’s used to capture physical movements and translate them into digital data.
Literally and practically — it is a device. It records physical movement using a three-axis accelerometer, sum-of-squares calculations. These calculations are time-stamped and churned through a simple algorithm to accumulate the readings over time, and record them at set intervals. The settings are easily modified through a terminal interface that allows you to see the data, adjust recording intervals and thresholds, calibrate the device, set the time and date, and a bunch of other diagnostic and configuration sorts of things.
Relation to my thesis: Playing with an additional source of digital trace.
Posted: February 12th, 2008 | No Comments »
The objective to metamorphose the LIFT conference from its grassroot and “groups of friends” origins to become a perfectly ran organizations has been widely achieved. While building a professional profit-generating event, the organizers did not forget about the keys to their previous success: openness (no VIP treatments, nor reserved areas), rely on the community (I only heard positive feedbacks from the workshops and the open stages delivered their pleasant surprises), commercial free, and magic formula of mixing the right amount of entrepreneurs, researchers, designers, artists, journalists and activists.
I attended the conference digitally naked with a pen and pieces of papers as instruments to record notes and thoughts and the archived videos to support my memory:
Bruce Sterling launched the conference in the role of a near-future futurist. Predicting the future is about moral boosting. The main reason people prosper is because they are willing to get out of the bed. Showing up is 90% of the job.
His talk focused on how we can deal (i.e. analyze the driving forces and get on with our own life) with a phenomenon we are certain to be confronted in 2008. He exemplified a foresight method (“you cannot predict the future but you can describe it“) with a recent black swan, the wedding of model Carla Bruni with french president Nicolas Sarkozy . An event that defines the character of our time (especially in Europe). An event that, if we do not have the proper analytical tools, we will be overwhelmed, confused and sicken by it. However, If you we understand the driving forces that guide what is going on we will be able to anticipate the developments. “Like an american who learns the rules of soccer, you probably still won’t like it very much, but you will understand why it matters to people, you’ll be able to put into a useful perceptive and get on with you own life.”
Paul Dourish (video) how we can understand what ethnography can teach us (talk in the following up of his implication for design paper). We miss disciplinary power relationships: ethnographers might regularly be asked what implication for design are, whereas it is not possible to ask a computer scientist the impact of his/her work to social theories. The relevance of classical ethnography in the context of mobility, presence and absence. Symbolism of to define mobility different from the technological perspective (location, coordinates) and the ethnographic perspective (dispora, nomad, asylum). There are different ways to represent space that is not about the cartographic representation (aboriginal vs western, history of the place, identify, different account of space). Particularly relevant to my current project with the senseable city lab (reveal the digital traces) and my taxi driver study (the impact of satnav system on mobility and practices)
Genevieve Bell talked about the armed race of digital deception (quoting James Katz), for every device that aims to tell the truth such as GPS there is a service available to deceive (e.g. alabi service). Technology changes faster than people do (culture, practice). How do we act in social practice with the act of lying or withholding information, the notion of white lies and good lies. Lie is about negating the real, but not about negating the truth (Peter Stiegnitz). Playful act through the rules of the world (how we choose to present ourselves, depending on the knowledge of the lookers). With secrets, we keep safe from what we choose to withhold. With lies, we shape our own realities .”Twitter is making an art out of the form of confabulation“. Particularly relevant to my work on people’s disclosure of location information in Flickr and the granularity they use (attaching a coarse-grained location information can be considered as a good lie). It also touches my taxi driver study as Genevieve points out in the very end of the talk: what do we do if technologies also start to lie such as satnav systems giving a bad direction?
Tom Taylor (video) how to use social network to inflect behaviors in the context of sustainable development. He advocated for the use of positive peer/social pressure. The positive approach goes through the engagement of individuals in groups via social softwares and let people expose their behaviors. In the future we will be able to capturing data from different sources (such as Nike+) and expose them where you do not expect it (Measure, visualize and expose in a social graph). As using a Wattson to monitor the electricity consumption in a house. Tom stated that exposing actions can have a massive effect on the way people behave. In the light of the recent works on persuasive computing, this still needs to be proven (specifically how to make that happen). This work reflects well the intention of WikiCity, its feedback loop, and the use of digital traces for social navigation. An aspect to study would be analyse the spiral of: influencing behaviors that influence the data that influence behaviors the influence the data…
I had a pleasant discussion with Rafi Haladjian on creating innovation and services from the technological constraints. In his career he created success from constraints in the network administration for the Minitel (the importance was not about creating a density of traffic, but by spreading of the day so that line would always be used), the Internet (bet on the physicality of server hosting, the unique link that is not virtual and therefore fragile) and the internet of things (play and take advantage of the positive aspect of immature technologies).
Still to come… the foresight session with Scott Smith, Bill Cockayne and Francesco Cara.
We collected very valuable content from picking up the brains of the 70+ participants of our workshop Ubiquitous computing: visions, failures and new interaction rituals. The feedbacks were rather positive: Mark Meagher, Hannes Gassert, Michele Perras, Vincenzo Pallotta, and Tom Hume.
Group activity at the workshop
Posted: February 12th, 2008 | No Comments »
Back from Florence, where I presented to the local officials and the press (comunicato di stampa – video of the President of the Province of Florence introducing the press conference), an in-progress report of the Tracing the Visitor’s Eye project (slides for the 1-hour press conference). Feedbacks have been rather positive. Interestingly, some journalists linked this work to stories that have been in the local news lately. Could the results presented help move the David statue or better understand the impact of the implementation of low-cost (new Ryanair routes to Pisa sold to travelers as if they were flying to Florence). A relevant point raised during the day was that these data could not only help the understanding of tourist movements in Florence, but also compare with the competing cities in a national (competition with Venezia and Pisa) and global levels (how are tourists of Florence different from the other cities?). In that context, future effort will aim at defining the profiles of Flickr users and matching their different behaviors in the top 20 tourist cities.
The perks of this project: 24 hours in Florence.
In the media:
Relation to my thesis: Slightly leaving the pure aademic tracks, it is a peculiar exercise confront research to people that finance it (*sigh* the quest of the relevance…). More than presenting results, the message I intended to communicate was about the seriousness and potentials of people-generated location information and digital traces (partially inspired by Bruno Latour).
Posted: February 4th, 2008 | No Comments »
Martin Dodge has put together a rough and ready web page to summarise research on code/space he conducts in collaboration with Rob Kitchin.
Code/Space research is examining the new spatialities and new modes of (spatial) governance and empowerment enabled by the development and adoption of software through an exploration of the dyadic relationship between software and space; how the production of space is increasingly reliant on code, and code is written to produce space. In so doing, we are developing a set of conceptual tools for identifying and understanding these relationships, illustrating our arguments through rich, contemporary empirical material relating to different spatial spheres and everyday activities (travel, home, work, consumption). The principal concepts we detail are transduction and automated management. Through the concept of transduction we theorise space and spatialities as ontogenetic in nature, as constantly in a state of becoming. Software, through its technicity – its ability to do work in the world – transduces space; enables space to unfold in multifarious ways. We formulate the concept of automated management to think through the various ways that new software systems survey, capture and process information about people and things in automatic ways and make judgements algorithmically without human scrutiny.
Relation to my thesis: The emergence of new forms to experience space through technologies have sparked research in a number of different disciplines, including sociology, computer science, interaction design, urban planning, and in the case of Code/Space, geography. The concept of automated management seem closely related to the WikiCity‘s real time control systems.
Posted: February 4th, 2008 | No Comments »
I am off to the LIFT conference where we will exchange, among many other things, on the visions and failure of ubicomp, on anthropology and technologies (with Genevieve Bell, Pau Dourish, and Younghee Jung), on foresight (with Scott Smith, Bill Cockayne and Francesco Cara), and on the internet of things, robotics, pets and entertainment (Rafi Haladjian and Bruno Bonnell),
Kick-off on Thursday with a 30′ state of the technological world address by Bruce Sterling.
Posted: February 4th, 2008 | No Comments »
This semester I will passively observe two complementary courses on urban computing. At NYU, Adam Greenfield and Kevin Slavin teach Urban Computing focus on the observations and literature on co-evolution of urban architectonic (i.e. the physical city), the metropolitan experience (psychological, emotional and affective dimensions of the city) and ambient informatics.
We will be building the city up from an array of primitives – physical patterns or archetypal situations – asking what set of functions each has served over time, how people have used and understood them over the history of human settlement, and what happens to each of them when computation saturates the urban environment at every scale. We want to consider them both in isolation, and in their interaction; our intent is to privilege neither the virtual nor the actual, being much more interested in how these two conditions inform, interpenetrate and condition one another.
The reading list is available.
On a more applied level, MIT colleagues Carlo Ratti and Assaf Biderman organize an Ambient Informatics workshop that takes the technological aspects of the real-time city as pivot of thoughts. It will It focuses on developing concepts and applications for enhancing our experience of the built environment using real-time information and pervasive computing
Our experience of our cities, homes, and social interactions is changing profoundly as technology becomes distributed throughout the built environment. Seamless integration of real-time information about events, resources, and personal experience within physical spaces opens the door for key applications in urban planning, resource management, emergency response and much more. It can also strengthen our perception of the built environment as a place for social inclusion and collaboration. The workshop will meet once a week and include an organized visit to Scotland and/ or Copenhagen.
Flyer of this semester’s SENSEable City Workshop on Ambient Informatics
Posted: February 4th, 2008 | No Comments »
My visit of the Mixed Reality Laboratory at the University of Nottingham, allowed be to exchange with some of the finest researchers active on the edges of CSCW and ubicomp including: Steve Benford (we discussed the potential uses of “trails” to reveal the “wrong” behaviors, replay is often a request of participants of pervasive experiences, but also the challenges to raise the credibility of HCI research in the industry), Martin Flintham (developing and deploying pervasive experiences), Leif Oppermann (uncertainty visualization and tools to develop pervasive experiences), Holger Schnädelbach (evaluation in architecture and hybrid worlds, presentation of cospaces), Stefan Egglestone (feedback look with bio sensors, stress sensing, see telemetry in theme parcs), and Adriano Galati (delay tolerant ad-hoc networks).
In the effort to build more coherence in my research focus, I took the opportunity to present my work and try to highlight and test the key evidences that emerged from my first studies. In the discussion after my talk, Leif Oppermann and Chris Greenhalgh suggested that, in the light of the outcomes of CatchBob! I should have a closer look on how people who atomize the georeferencing of their photos. Do they follow the same practice as in CatchBob! (i.e. become more passive in disclosing the location information, do they “annotate”/communicate less as well?
Posted: January 31st, 2008 | No Comments »
Stumbled across an essay of Bruno Latour entitled “Beware your imagination leaves digital traces” published in Times Higher Literary Supplement, 6th April 2007 in which he describes the massive consequences for social sciences to get access to digital traces:
The situation is entirely different with the digitalisation of the entertainment industry: characters leave behind a range of data. In other words, the scale to draw is not one going from the virtual to the real, but a scale of increasing traceability. The stunning innovation is that every click of every move of every avatar in every game may be gathered in a data bank and submitted to a second-degree data-mining operation.
I am sure that this accumulation of traces has enormous effects for the entertainment industry, for specialists in marketing, advertising, intelligence, police and so on, but another consequence is worth pointing out. The precise forces that mould our subjectivities and the precise characters that furnish our imaginations are all open to inquiries by the social sciences. It is as if the inner workings of private worlds have been pried open because their inputs and outputs have become thoroughly traceable.
[...]
The ancient divide between the social on the one hand and the psychological on the other was largely an artefact of an asymmetry between the traceability of various types of carriers: what Proust’s narrator was doing with his heroes, no one could say, thus it was said to be private and left to psychology; what Proust earned from his book was calculable, and thus was made part of the social or the economic sphere. But today the data bank of Amazon.com has simultaneous access to my most subtle preferences as well as to my Visa card. As soon as I purchase on the web, I erase the difference between the social, the economic and the psychological, just because of the range of traces I leave behind.
[...]
Dozens of tools and crawlers can now absorb this vast amount of data and represent it again through maps of various shapes and colours so that a “rumour” or a “fad” becomes almost as precisely described as a “piece of news”, “information”, or even a “scientific fact”.
[...]
The consequences for the social sciences will be enormous: they can finally have access to masses of data that are of the same order of magnitude as that of their older sisters, the natural sciences. But my view is that “social” has probably become as obsolete as “natural”: what is common to both is a sort of new epidemiology that was anticipated, a century ago, by the sociologist Gabriel Tarde and that has now, at last, the empirical means of its scientific ambition.
Relation to my thesis: Bruno Latour mentions the emergence of digital traces coming from the “virtual world” (sticking with the descriptions of second world and amazon’s social navigation). I would add that some of these traces are intrinsically important because they are general through the interaction with digital means within a physical context.
Posted: January 27th, 2008 | No Comments »
Last Wednesday, I gave a 20min brownbag talk at the giCentre at the City University in London. The presentation was divided in several parts. First, I define the shortcomings in location-aware computing and their consequences that generate a socio-technical gap. I continued by highlighted that the problems do not necessarily lay in the immaturity of technologies, but also in the failure to match people’s own perception of space (granularity, multiple-spaces). Then I detailed the evidences of this gap from my studies and observations of the appropriation of location-aware applications (CatchBob! and Satnav in Taxi). That lead me to describe an approach that leverages digital traces to tailor location information and define user’s the area of attention and their perception of area of influence of points of interest. In that context, I described the Tracing the visitor’s eye project and briefly introduced the context of future experiments (WikiCity and the Wireless City). The slides are online (5.5MB).
The presentation generated lively exchanges with Jonathan Raper, Jason Dykes, Aidan Slingsby, David Mountain, Jo Wood that benefited me to frame of my thesis. Besides arguing on the potential of volunteer generated information (VGI), the discussion centered on the influence of the presentation of location information on the behavior of people (the difference in the communication in CatchBob! (passivity), multiplicity of the sources of information and location-information trunking for taxi drivers) and these behaviors influence the data (feedback loop in WikiCity, geotagging in Flickr). I was in fact advised to focus on how the co-evoluation between location-aware systems and their user’s practices/behaviors (data influencing the behaviors influencing the data).
Relation to my thesis: This week’s trip in the UK is about testing my ideas and approaches with a verity of experts from different fields (I got the pleasure to meet UCL’s Jon Reades to discuss urban planning and urban computing). I must admit that it is a truly rewarding experience to pick the brains of geographers, geovisualization experts and social scientists and have them criticize my work. Presenting and arguing on the current state of my research work should help me create a “meme” and that everybody starts to believe my “story”. Many people have now advised me to get back to my different experiments and (re)define what there is to study for each of them. Categories or research thems and specific question should help me focus on 1 specific aspect and help me find the gaps in “my story” (e.g. thesis).
