Unubiquitous Mode

Via P&V, Marko Ahtisaari is the Director of Design Strategy at Nokia gave an interview to the Danish Design Centre. The main lines I take from this interview are that Nokia works on:

• “elegant” simplicity to hide the ever-growing complexity of hybrid product that mobile devices are now becoming. It is a major design challenge
• Bringing the sense of off and online. There is a need to retreat from the “always connected” mode. Designing a sometimes-off experience for an always-on world. How we tune out, and then tune back in?

I find funny that there we certainly be a need of an “unubiquitous mode” in the ubiquitous environments we are trying to create.

The Uses of a Geo-localized Mobile Game in Japan

“Seing” one another onscreen and the construction of social order in mobile-based augmented public space by Christian Licoppe and Yoriko Inada, Learning in the Mobile Age Conference (Hungarian Academy of Sciences, April 28–30, 2005).

In this paper (that follows this one) the authors present a case study about the use of Mogi-Mogi, a geo-localized mobile game in Japan. They analize how “seing” one another onscreen and geographical closeness it entails become a pretext to start text-messaging exchanges and face-to-face meeting.

Mogi-Mogi is indeed the first advanced, somehow popular (around 1000 users) geo-localized game that could provide a glimpse of what the experience of living in a mobile-based augmented urban public space might be like. It is a great example on how context-sensitive mobile service closely binds technical protocols to social ones, especially those governing interactions in the public sphere.

Confirming mutual proximity
Onscreen encounters make the mobile screen a new type of public space, one of mutual visibility and mediated co-presence, accessible to all players. It was observed the first turn of text-message interaction is an invitation to confirm the mutual proximity:

The opening of the interaction by an adjacent pair oriented towards enunciation and confirmation of the participants’ mutual proximity is a conventional mechanism of openness characteristics of interactions in the geo-localized public space of Mogi.

Publicizing spatial position
The analysis shows that players reflexively oriented themselves towards publicizing their spatial position in order to develop specific formats of conversational openness. They cooporerated to align or desalign incorporated “situation” and screen “situations”.

Polite inattention
I enjoy the definition of “polite inattention”: strangers acknowledging each other presence without engaging into an interaction.

Uncertainty
On the side, this papers mentions a couple the technological pitfalls that influence the experience:

• The rapidity of these connections with the game server is critical as regards to the acceptability of the game. At certain times the connection time ranged from 30 seconds to one minute, which was experience as a real problem by players
• In explaining the “invitation to confirm the mutual proximity”, the authors mention “It can be mobilized again during use of the device in the form of a background of shared expectations concerning the more or less robust way in which the screen representations relate to a real location and can simultaneously be visible to other connected players”

The Challenges User-Aware Platform Technologies

In his keynote at the Fall 2005 Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, Justin Rattner, Intel senior fellow and director of the Corporate Technology Group, outlined long-term research to make “user-aware” platform technologies that could be used to build systems that intuitively respond to people and their ever-changing needs.

Rattner mentioned that:

the current problem is that electronic products have almost no way of knowing how they are being used, who is using them, or what the user wants to accomplish without that person directing their every move. This leads to frustration because of what people have to do just to use and manage their technology.

This kind of statements are of course sweat music to my hears and perfectly match my interests in the management of uncertainty in pervasive environment. It is an incredible challenge to envision electronic products to be capable of adapting to the way people around the world use them. “Out of clutter find simplicity” as Einstein would say.

In his Ethical Guidelines for Ubicomp Adam Greenfield mentions the same challenges but in more user-centered terms:

If ubicomp applications are rushed to market and allowed to appear as have so many technological artifacts in the last thirty years – i.e. without compassionate attention to the needs and abilities of all sorts of human users, without many painstaking rounds of iterative testing and improvement in realistic settings – then they will present those users with a truly unprecedented level of badness.

Global Pet Finder

Via MobHappy. GlobalPetFinder is a GPS collar that enables you to track your missing dog via cell phone, PDA or computer. The moment Fido trots across the invisible line, a text message pops up on your cell phone.

Varied method of tagging and tracking animals have been used over the years in the while and in farms, like Micro-GPS to track pigeons and study their navigation or GPS Tracking of Cattle on Pasture. It is interesting to notice the slow intrusion of technology into pets’ daily life. We are now used to tag them with micro-ships and track them. There is now the technological potential to transform pets into blogjects and make them belong to the Internet of Things. Your pet would have the ability to talk about its day when you return home.

I couldn’t help posting it also on the new Petistic, a collective blog about user-centered pet gear.

Location is Not Enough

Nicolas went to the Wireless and Mobile Technologies in Education Conference 2005 in Tokushima, Japan to present our full paper for the IEEE International Workshop on Wireless and Mobile Technologies in Education :

Nova, N., Girardin, F. & Dillenbourg, P.: ‘Location is not enough!’: an Empirical Study of Location-Awareness in Mobile Collaboration (pdf). Full paper for IEEE International Workshop on Wireless and Mobile Technologies in Education, Tokushima, Japan.

Abstract:

There is an ever growing number of mobile learning applications based on location-awareness, However, there is still a lack of information concerning how it might impact socio-cognitive processes involved in collaboration. This is what the following empirical study aimed to address. We used a mobile and collaborative game, running on Tablet PCs, to test two conditions. In one experimental condition, groups could see the positions of each member; while in the other location-awareness was not provided. All users could use the Tablet PC to communicate through annotations. We found no differences between the two conditions with regard to the task performance. Neither were there any differences in terms of cognitive workload. However, players without the location-awareness indications had a better representation of their partners’ paths. They wrote more messages and better explicated their strategies. The paper concludes with remarks about how this can be taken into account by mobile learning practitioners.

The slides of his presentation are here (pdf)

My Research Landscape

I used CmapTools to represent the fields and topics related to my research. It is a first draft of my research landscape. It is only very high level and I plan to add leaves (sub-domains, perspectives, key articles, …) to the most relevant topics. It lacks of depth on the CSCW side, but I have here to work on it.

Understanding Situated Social Interactions in Public Places

Understanding Situated Social Interactions in Public Places, Jeni Paay and Jesper Kjeldskov. In this paper, the others talk about the understanding of the user’s context, situated interactions, and the interplay between the two required to design contex-aware mobile information systems supporting sociality. They present a conceptual framework of situated social interactions in public and illustrate this framework with mobile context-aware prototypes.

The challenge for context-aware systems is to take into consideration the user’s physical and social context in a way that makes sense and is useful. There is a need to better understand the user’s physical and social context, their situated social interactions, the role of human activity within the built environment and the interplay between context and user actions.

Dourish and Situated Interactions
Recent research approaches into context-aware computing have focused on recurrent patterns of everyday life and the relation between interactions of people and technology and the social settings in which these interactions take place. Dourish regards context as a central concept in social analyses of interaction and says that social and cultural factors affect how the user makes decisions about actions and interprets a system. He regards the operational situation of context-aware technology as “varied” with context being particular to each occasion of activity or action, requiring mobile and ubiquitous systems to be more responsive to the different social settings in which they might be used. Better modeling of people in context is the best way towards more human-centred design of mobile and pervasive computing systems.

Design Ideas Emerging from their Framework

• Suggesting system based on context, past and shared experiences
• Indexing direction for way finding to familiar places
• Representing current activities within close proximity: interesting idea to allow a certain level of interaction between the group and others, either by proximity or by watching. One way is to represent current activities of others within close proximity.
• Supporting meeting up by communication about places, activities and time

The focus of the evaluation is not as much on the usability of the design but rather on the usefulness of the underlying design ideas above.

Instincts, Emotions et Irrationnel

Les décisions se prennent très vite, avec une première phase d’analyse et de réflexion limitée. Les nouvelles technologies de l’information ont tendance à éliminer des intermédiaires. La décision finale repose maintenant beaucoup plus sur la deuxième phase, le moment où les instincts, les habitudes et les émotions deviennent très importantes. Il y a églement une érosion de la confiance entre les organisations et le public. De ce fait, la ou l’on attend surgire le rationel de la société de l’informtion, surgit en fait l’irrationnel.

Moleskine Transfer

A few notes from my Moleskine after a month at UPF.

Layers raising uncertainty
There is uncertainty that raises because of bad design and not technical failure. The example of Savanah’s interface that clearly lack of consistency while it could be easy to make the experience smooth (in locking the users together with the same view in moment of intense collaboration). I must stay aware and be able to detect when uncertainty actually comes from bad design.

Task and interface
Since the interface slightly changes from the two conditions in CatchBob! does it mean that the task changes?

Systemics
For some reasons I have been talk about uncertainty in systemic problems. I have already thought about using systemic approaches to describe the complexity of pervasive environment and the uncertainty to users. It is a field to investigate, even though it might lead to complete high-level “bs”.

Mid-term perspectives/goal
- I need to find and make my framework to describe the phenomenon of uncertainty.
- Find the level of the framwork, from high-level “trust and technologies” relationships to the applied “what is the impact of what technology”
- Lack of abstract, what I would like to understand and a few questions that should give me a bigger picture, think from the outside
- Investigate the interface – behavior relation

Possible investigations
- The impact of technical limitations and failures in the task performance in CatchBob!
- Synchronous map annotations in mobile applications
- Strategy and uncertainty in CatchBob!
- Revealing uncertainty (seamless design) and impact on the cognitive load
- Find the variable for trust and the impact of these variable on the user

Navizon

Navizon proclaims itself a peer-to-peer wireless positioning solution. Technically it is not P2P, but hey… buzzwords are their to be misused, aren’t they? Anyway, it is therefor a positioning solution that mixes GPS, WiFi and cellular signals. Like Skyhook, it relies its users to fill their location database with radio beacons data. They rightly target GPS geeks and gadget fans. However, I am not sure if we share the same meanings for “Always” and “almost anywhere” when they claim:

Navizon users ALWAYS have access to accurate positioning information in urban areas they can navigate almost anywhere using a WiFi or Cellular Pocket PC and the Navizon Wireless Positioning System (Software Only GPS)

Anyway who cares, since it is for über-geeks anyway. Scenarios of Navizon usage include the usual “Finding the closest…” and “People tracker…”. They even offer videos in which the Benny Hill Show music fits perfectly.

• Craving for Tacos: the desperate search for Taco Bell’s find food
• Buddy Tracker: Whether you want to make sure your daughter gets to school safely (Wow!) or see where you friends are gathering so that you can join them

Even with a compelling Taco Bell video is still believe that local search is not relevant for finding basic things in a known area. Plus, today I got asked for the “closest McDonnald’s” by a stranger and could give a clear answer for free. So much for fast ways people have to search for fast food restaurant in unknown locations.

Navizon system and interfaces for the Buddy tracker