The CommonsCensus Map Project

The CommonCensus Map Project redraws the map of the United States based on a survey questions, to reveal the boundaries people themselves feel (i.e. sphere of influence), as opposed to the official state and county boundaries.

The national maps shows the response to the question “On the level of North America as a whole, what major city do you feel has the most cultural and economic influence on your area overall?”

Regional maps show the response to the question “Please choose the name of the local community that you feel is the natural cultural and economic center within your local area.”

Local maps show the response to the question “What do you consider to be your local community?”

Relation to my thesis: People do not always follow the official boundaries to refer to areas. A local neighborood might reveal very fuzzy and fluctuating edges depending on a context. This is what Ian White highlights in User-centered approach on geodata by saying “In practice, a neighbor is defined with average centroid based on population density and then a radial curve is drawn. This barely represents reality in many cases and in the context of use many time useless”.

Due to the low amount of data, the areas of the map are still highly inaccurate and subject to change. It is an example of bottom-up generated information uncertainty.

Mapping Economic Activity

The G-Econ project maps the world’s economic activity on a one-degree grid (i.e. 1-degree longitude by 1-degree latitude resolution). It includes 27,500 terrestrial observations of “gross cell product” in 1990. The basic metric is the regional equivalent of gross domestic product. Gross cell product (GCP) is measured at a 1-degree longitude by 1-degree latitude resolution at a global scale. Animations for the entire globe are available, as are maps of individual countries and data sets. Via The Map Room.

Reminds me of Richard Florida’s The World is Spiky

Update: The G-Econ dataset can also be analyzed with the InfoScope. The 27’079 geographical cells about economic data can be compared with other important demographic and geophysical data such as climate, physical attributes, and population indicators.

Carepool Lanes and Inflatable Dolls

A discussion with Nicolas and Laurent on inflatable simulated targets in the form of tanks/aircrafts, reminded me of the inflatable dolls used in California to drive in carpool lanes. Answer.com reports on this life-hack:

When HOV lanes were first introduced in California in the 1970s, some drivers would place an inflatable doll in the passenger seat in an attempt to fool regulators. This was soon outlawed, but the practice persists. In the UK, for example, in 2005 a camera that was claimed to distinguish mannequins or dolls from humans was being tested on the Forth Road Bridge in an effort to thwart cheaters.

The ruses to drive alone in carpool lanes include:

• Applying make-up to a wig stand and affixing it to clothing stuffed with newspapers (then strapping the finished product into the passenger seat with a seatbelt)
• Store mannequins, blow-up dolls, kickboxing dummies, cardboard cut-outs, and even balloons (with faces drawn on them in marking pen).
• Buckling the passenger-side seat belt and pretending to talk to someone reclining in that seat.
• Covering an empty infant seat with a blanket or placing a doll in it.
• Taping a styrofoam wig stand to the passenger headrest and topping it with a blonde wig.
• Strapping the family pooch into the passenger seat.

Source

Relation to my thesis: getting into the LIFT mood. The Cyclops employed to detect “fake passengers” is also an interesting example of having to build a system to compensate the people’s abuse of automation. The new system was seen as vital in monitoring traffic when new electronic tollbooths come online, which would further encourage cheating as they allow for variable rates depending on how many passengers are in the car.

Even Insight Research doesn’t Always Tell the Truth

Extracted from an inspiring talk “Lipstick on a pig” given by Clive Grinyer at the European Market Research Event.

London Heathrow Airport Terminal 5 forecast that future travellers would be older. Research into older travellers showed they often go into the toilet, so many new toilets were planned.

However, deeper investigation discovered they were going into the toilets….to hear the announcements. It was the only place they could find where they could clearly hear the flight calls! So now the airport is putting new audio areas where you can clearly hear your flight call….

Relations to my thesis: A nice example of the limitations and (sometimes) subjective analysis in user studies. Then it highlights a very interesting adaptation of some people in a very complex and high-tech infrastructure such as an airport.

Visualizing the Amount of Flickr Geottaged Images By Location

Browsing the Flickr visualization clusters, I stumbled on 2 hacks to visualize on Google Earth the amount of pictures geotagged by locations.

<a href="Daniel Catt

Beau Gunderson

Relation to my thesis: Similar projects as my Tracing the visitor’s eye and Granularity Level Used to Geotag Images exploratory experiments

The Technological Tower of Babel

Still in the theme of around messy and heterogeneous vision of ubicomp, a new graphic from Eboy paints the way technologies are playing out, forming some sort of technolological Tower of Babel.

via LUCI’s group

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Comparing AI's Failures with Ubicomp's Visions

There seems to be a growing trend to critique the calm and seamless vision of ubiquitous computing aiming to the “fantasy of the perfect” (referring to Lucy Suchman’s Human-Machine Reconfigurations). Matthew Chalmers pioneered with his notion of seamful design, slightly inspired by Weiser. Recently Genevieve Bell and Paul Dourish suggested that ubicomp is messy and seamlessness is a misleading vision. From my own experience, those points of view are a thin minority in a still extremely techno-utopian-driven research field. In contrary, it seems that designers acknowledge more the messiness of the everyday life. For example, in a post on reconfiguring the old future, Ben Kraal mentions that:

seamful design of ubicomp systems not only recognises the impossibility of a completely seamless, invisible, ubicomp infrastructure but embraces the messiness of everyday life.

He also points to the recent thoughts of Larry Irons who compares the failure of AI with the promises of ubicomp.

I was reminded of the many promises that artificial intelligence made for expert systems in the 1980s as he describes how the designers of context-aware, ubiquitous computing think they can make it work. [...] Having machines act in a sociable manner are credible after all the fiascos and shortfalls of the past 30 years. [...] The challenge is AI-hard. Yet, a fair reading would probably characterize it as AI-impossible.

I particularly enjoy Larry’s answer on a question about the politics of ubiquitous computing and how we should question first the hype around seamless interface as being the default objective:

Good question, but it won’t find a reasonable answer as long as designers are unwilling to ask the obvious questions about claims made by those who hype the need for a seamless interface to ubiquitous computing environments. You can only meaningfully address the question about the politics of ubiquitous computing ethics when a seamful interface is considered the default design objective. In my mind, this is why Greenfield is correct to insist that seamlessness must be the optional mode in such applications

Relation to my thesis: As mentioned earlier, I am really glad to see more thoughts on the perspective of ubicomp as being inherently messy. The comparison with the failures of AI is rather relevant for research aiming at a calm and seamless future. This is related to the “are we there yet” question around the definition of ubicomp and my e-minds paper Getting real with ubiquitous computing: the impact of discrepancies on collaboration which was my first (immature) attempt to highlight the limitation of the seamless vision around ubicomp. My “disturbed city” flickr set is also an abstract attempt to reveal the messiness of the urban life from which I do not perceive ubicomp as a solution. My possible talk at LIFT on Embracing the real world’s messiness, will be the opportunity to reflect on all this.

This also makes me think about the discussion between Brenda Laurel and Bruce Sterling about the design for pleasure and technological fairies (design for illusion, for magic) that happened at Ubicomp 2006.

Reactable Concert at Sala Castellò in Barcelona

Reactable concert featuring Sergi Jordá, Günter Geiger, Martin Kaltenbrunner, Marcos Alonso. The reactable, is a state-of-the-art multi-user electro-acoustic music instrument with a tabletop tangible user interface developed by the Music Technology Group within the Audiovisual Institute at the Pompeu Fabra University.

The same day, I was watching Jeff Han’s presentation on his touch-driven computer screen at TED.

Catching the Bus: Studying People and Practice at Intel

In a talk given at the UCI Laboratory for Ubiquitous Computing and Interaction the anthropologist Ken Anderson (manager of People and Practices Research at Intel) discusses Intel’s work at understanding mobility and spatiality in urban and transnational settings. A podcast is available.

Relation to my thesis: Relevant thoughts and stories around individuals, collectiveness and productivity in mobile settings (bus, train, tube), sporadic creation of little “we”‘s… and a nice quote: “the rubbish is your future” referring to people building homes over garbage. It made me think of cities like San Francisco that is partially build over rubbish. It is also interesting to hear an anthropologist reflecting on the past of the field and thinking about how ubiquitous technologies provided by western corporations can be a new form of colonialism.

Model of my Research Focus

The current model of my research in which I integrate the user-generated location information and a split between a split between the physical, measured, virtual and social spaces (inspired by Managing Multiples Spaces) theoretically influencing the emergence of uncertainty. The social space still needs further development.