3GSM Gatherings

Informal Mobile Sunday Barcelona (setup by Stuart Mudie) and the 3GSM Gathering of the Mobilitst (organized by Rudy de Waele and Gotomedia) was the opportunity to meet practitioners and observers of the mobile industry including:

Markus Angermeier, accessibility expert, creative director design for Aperto‘s, consultant for Plazes (mobile phone demo and brainstorming on proximity-based scenarios), and the german Bundeswehr, initiator of the web 2.0 mindmap, and self-proclaimed Beetles world’s biggest fan.

Russell Buckley from MobHappy, discussion on going beyond preaching the converted on LBS issues and why the message and clues fail to be understood in a techno-push world.

Alex Kummerman, Clickmobile, LBS and social software enthusiast. Interesting concept on providing an location-based social network management platform. I would find this an interesting supporting tool for informal, elastic communities, thriving on spontaneity that deal with mobility beyond an area or city level. A scenario involved the members of a sport team fan club. Alex mentioned the research of Michel Simatic on multiplayer mobile games and the technical constraints.

Oliver Starr from MobileCrunch who ranted on ubiquitous computing and how it does not work even if the technology is available. His luggage was loaded on a flight to Milano instead of BCN and he had to jump on that plane for security reasons (a luggage cannot flight without his passenger). Unfortunately in the transfer in Milano, his language did not follow him and stayed in Italy. Great object as first class citizen and malfunction of tracking technologies story.

Josep Ganyet, well-traveled teacher at the UPF, focus on usability testing. Talk about Don Norman’s emotional design, the spanish male multi-tasking and BCN in general. He flickered the cocktail.

Jaakko Villa, CEO of idean research. A few words about their user experience research methodologies…

David Mery, Symbian “evangelist” (a company that obviously needs one…), discussion on Symbian’s recent efforts to support its developers community and Symbian’s plan to open to the lower-end smartphone market. No words about David’s past as suspected terrorist.

Relation to my thesis: Exchanging with people from the industry, on their playground is a healthy exercise. Oliver Starr’s story supports my claim on the utopia about ubicomp spread by the perfect “I want to track and keep control of my luggage” scenarios while the real-world in which dealing with exceptions is the rule and where heterogeneity emerges from complex physical, economical, and human constrains. 3GSM carries this seamless picture of a mobile and connected world. I still find ironic that people talking about the wireless world get stuck in the real world constraints: Russell Beattie’s Dial up… Wow, it still works and Stuart Mudie’s For the past five days, I’ve been living in the future – the mobile future.

Lessons from Clumsy Automation

Woods, D. D. (1997). Human-centered software agents: Lessons from clumsy automation. In J. Flanagan, T. Huang, P. Jones, & S. Kasif, S. (Eds.), Human centered systems: Information, interactivity, and intelligence (pp. 288–293). Washington, DC: National Science Foundation.

This paper is about the operational complexity, difficulty and new challenges generated by automated systems that are not human and practice-centered. These kind of systems become a burden instead of assisting us to reduce our the user’s work and information.

The data shows that “strong, silent, difficult to direct automation is not a team player” (Woods, 1996)

Automation surprises begin with miscommunication and misassessments between the automation and users which lead to a gap between the user’s understanding of what the automated systems are set up to do, what they are doing, and what they are going to do.

Some of these systems are perceived as black boxes that do not provide some level of visibility of agent activities, some level of management. On the other hand, too much data and complete flexibility overwhelm users.

The key to research on human-centered software agents is to find levels and types of feedback and coordination that support team play between machine subordinates and human supervisor that helps the human user achieve their goals in context.

Reference to read:
Norman, D.A. (1990). The ‘problem’ of automation: Inappropriate feedback and interaction, not ‘over-automation.‘ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, B 327:585–593.

The papers gives a list of references in other domains like the medecine, aviation, electronic troubleshooting.

Relation to my thesis: Ubiquitous environments must become team players and go beyond the techno-push vision of “if we build them, the benefits will come”. Our research already shows that automated location awareness created some sort of inertia in terms of communication and strategy planning. Ubicomp systems should have some level of manageability, “seamfullness” and visibility (the visible disappearing computer?). My interest on uncertainty is tightly related to the “user surprise” described:

Automation surprises begin with miscommunication and misassessments between the automation and users which lead to a gap between the user’s understanding of what the automated systems are set up to do, what they are doing, and what they are going to do.

Implications for Design

Dourish, P. 2006. Implications for Design. Proc. ACM Conf. Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI 2006 (Montreal, Canada).

Often ethnography is seen as an approach to field investigation that can generate requirements for systems developments. Dourish suggests that “implication for design” may not be the best metric for evaluation and may fail to capture the value of ethnographic investigations.

The term “ethnography,” indeed, is often used as shorthand for investigations that are, to some extent, in situ, qualitative, or open-ended. Similarly, the term is often used to encompass particular formulations of qualitative research methods such as Contextual Inquiry (Beyer, H. and Holtzblatt, K. 1997. Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems. Morgan Kaufman.).

This view of ethnography as purely methodological and instrumental supports the idea that “implications for design” are the sole output of ethnographic investigation.

and argues this way

In this way, the domain of technology and the domain of everyday experience cannot be separated from each other; they are mutually constitutive. The role of ethnography, then, cannot be to mediate between these two domains, because ethnography does not accept their conceptual separation in the first place.

What I have tried to argue here is that a bullet list of design implications formulated by an ethnographer is not the most effective or appropriate method. Ethnography provides insight into the organization of social settings, but its goal is not simply to save the reader a trip; rather, it provides models for thinking about those settings and the work that goes on there.

More than the discussion on ethnology I got really interested on the discussion of the social-techical gap introduced by Ackerman, M. 2000. The Intellectual Challenge of CSCW: The Gap Between Social Requirements and Technical Feasibility. Human-Computer Interaction, 15, 179-203. and how people adapt to technologies.

Ackerman critiques the intuition that people adopt and adapt technologies because the technologies are poorly designed, and that better designed technologies would obviate the need for such adaptation and appropriation.

Certainly, though, what it does is to refigure “users” not as passive recipients of predefined technologies but as actors who collectively create the circumstances, contexts, and consequences of technology use. HCI research has, of course, long had an interest in aspects of the ways in which people might configure, adapt, and customize technologies

Reference to read:
Ackerman, M. 2000. The Intellectual Challenge of CSCW: The Gap Between Social Requirements and Technical Feasibility. Human-Computer Interaction, 15, 179-203.

Relation to my thesis: I am trying to understand in what ways ethnology can be applied (or not!) in my research and how I can make the output of my thesis go beyond a bullet list of implication for design of ubicomp environements. I discovered Ackermann’s vision of people adapting to technologies and that technologies can be badly designed in order to be adapted and then appropriated. This goes in the direction I see the relation between technology and people. Imperfect, non-flat, anti-seemless technology can be good for appropriation. The positive sides of imperfect technology.

3GSM World Congress…

… has started.

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.