Olars is an electronic interactive toy inspired by Karl Sims’ evolved virtual creatures. Having thousands of varieties in movement and behaviour by attaching different geometrical limbs, modifying the angle of these, twisting the body itself, and by adjusting the deflection of the motorised joints, results in both familiar and strange motion patterns.

Designers see the world not simply as it is, but rather as it could be. In this perspective, the world is a laboratory to explore the contingency of the existing and the thinking in options. Imaginations of the contra factual are a key source for the creation of alternative political, technological, social, or economic constellations of artefacts, interfaces, signs, actors, and spaces. At the same time, strategies of materialization are pivotal to shift the boundary between the fictional and the real and to finally bring possible new realities into being. The conference addresses the questions of how fictions are designed and how the multiplicity of possible new futures is negotiated and realized.

Design Fiction, Negotiating Futures October 28-30, 2010.

Beautiful new exploratory game for the Nintendo DS, that uses the front-facing camera and face tracking to calculate a perspective that renders like a window on a new world.

DSi「立体かくし絵　アッタコレダ. Via BERG

Below are some clippings of bits that seem particularly insightful:

It puts own embodiment at risk. And whomsoever can mitigate that risk while providing reward will probably do well. I believe that organizations such as Apple and Google see this and are pursuing not merely real-time, or hyper-local or crowd-sourced apps but ownership of the “view”.

...

Everybody wants a part of the lens of reality, the zero-click base layer beneath the beneath. As Gene Becker puts it “The World is the Platform”. And an ecosystem is starting to emerge.

...

Suddenly game developers are arguing with GIS experts and having to unify their very different ways of describing mirror worlds.

...

[I]nterfaces move from being heavy and solid with big heavy buttons and knobs and rotary dials to becoming liquid and effortless like the dynamic UI of the iPhone to becoming like air itself.

...

By making hidden things visible, and visible things cheap, it will make other things possible that we don’t entirely realize yet.

...

There will be user interface interaction issues. What will be the conventions for hand-swipes, grabs, drags, pulls and other operations to manipulate objects in our field of view.

...

[AR] is not simply “memory” – it isn’t just a mnemonic that helps bring understanding closer to the surface of consciousness. Clearly we are surrounded by our own memories, signage, advertising, radio, friends voices and an already rich complicated teeming natural landscape loaded with signifiers and cues. But it is another bridge between personal lived experience and the experience of others. It seems to lower costs of knowing, and it seems to provide stronger subjective filters.

...

Augmented Reality seems to at least offer the possibility that we can punch some holes in the boxes. It seems to offer a bridge between structure and chaos rather than just structure.

via Telling stories with interfaces « Snarkmarket.

On that afternoon we didn’t have a printer handy for making the AR marks, so we took to drafting them by hand, stencilling them off the screen with a pencil and inking them in. This hand-crafted process led to all sorts of interesting connections between the possibilities of craft and digital information.

We had lots of ideas about printing the markers on clothes, painting them on nails, glazing them into ceramics, etc. We confused ARtoolkit by drawing markers in perspective, and tried to get recursive objects by using screen based markers and video feedback.

Now as it turns out there is an entire research programme dedicated to looking at just this topic. Variable Environment is a research programme involving partners like ECAL and EPFL. The great thing is that they are blogging the entire exploratory (they call it ‘sketch’) phase and curating the results online. The work is multi-disciplinary and involves architects, visual designers, computer scientists, interaction designers, etc. Check out the simple AR ready products, sample applications and mixed reality tests with various patterns.

This seems to be part of a shift in the research community, to publishing ongoing and exploratory work online (championed by the likes of Nicolas Nova and Anne Galloway). Very inspirational.

Underneath the desk I have stuck a grid of RFID tags, and on the top surface, the same grid of post-it notes. With the standard Nokia Service Discovery application it is possible to call people, send pre-defined SMSes or load URLs by touching the phone to each post-it on the desk. On the post-its themselves I have hand-written the function, message and the recipient. This is somewhat like a cross between a phone-book, to-do list and temporary diary, with notes, scribbles and tea stains alongside names.

Initial ideas were to spraypaint or silkscreen some of the touch icons to the desk surface, and I may well do that at some point. But for quick prototyping it made sense to use address labels or post-it notes that can be stuck, re-positioned and layered with hand-written notes.

This is an initial step in thinking about the use of RFID and mobile phones, a way of thinking through making. In many ways it is proving to be more inconvenient than the small screen (particularly with the occasionally unreliable firmware on this particular cover, I can’t speak for the production version). But it has highlighted some really interesting issues.

First of all it has brought to the forefront the importance of implicit habits. Initially, it took a real effort to think about the action of using the table as an interface: I would reach for the phone and press names to make a call, instead of placing it on the desk. But for some functions, such as sending an SMS, it has become more habitual.

SMSes have become more like ‘pings’ when very little effort is made to send them. At the same time they are more physically tangible: I rest the phone in a certain position on the desk and wait for it to complete an action. The most useful functions have been “I’m here” or “I’m leaving” messages to close friends.

I have had to consider the ‘negative space’ where the mobile must rest without any action. This space has potential be used for context information; a corner of the table could make my phone silent, another corner could change my presence online. Here it would be interesting to refer to Jan Chipchase’s ideas around centres of gravity and points of reflection, it’s these points that could be most directly mapped to behaviour. I’m thinking about other objects and spaces that might be appropriate for this, and perhaps around the idea of thoughtless acts.

If this was a space without wireless internet, I could also imagine this working very well for URLs: quick access to google searches, local services or number lookups, which is usually very tricky on a small screen. Here it would be interesting to think about how the mobile is used in non-connected places, such as the traditional Norwegian Hytte [pdf].

This process also raised a larger issue around the move towards tangible or physical information, which also implies a move towards the social. As I was making the layout of my address book and associated functions, I realised that maybe these things shouldn’t be explicit, visible, social objects. The arrangement of people within the grid makes personal sense; the placement is a personal preference and maps in certain ways to frequency and type of contact. But I wonder how it appears to other people when this pattern is exposed. Will people be offended by my layout? What if I don’t include a rarely called contact? Are there numbers I want to keep secret, hidden behind acronyms in the ‘Names’ menu?

It will be interesting to see how this plays out and changes over time, particularly in the reaction of others. I’ll post more about the use of NFC in other personal contexts in the near future.

The making of…

The desk is made from 20 mm birch ply, surfaced in Linoleum. I stuck a single RFID to the underside, in the place that felt most natural. A 10 cm grid was worked out from that point, and the RFIDs were stuck in that grid, and the same worked out on top. If I were to re-build the desk with this project in mind, the tags should probably be layered close to the surface, between the ply and Linoleum. This would make them slightly more responsive to touch by giving them a larger read/write distance.

Rewriteable 512 bit, Philips MiFare UL stickers.

10 cm grid of tags on the underside of the desk.

Blank post-it notes on the surface, with the same grid.

More photos at Flickr.

Overall the interaction between phone and RFID tags has been good. The reader/writer is on the base of the phone, at the bottom. This seems a little awkward to use at first, but slowly becomes natural. When I have given it to others, their immediate reaction is to point the top of the phone to the tag, and nothing happens. There follows a few moments of explaining as the intricacies of RFID and looking at the phone, with it’s Nokia ‘fingerprint’ icon. As phones increasingly become replacements for ‘contactless cards’, it seems likely that this interaction will become more habitual and natural.

Once the ‘service discovery’ application is running, the read time from tags is really quick. The sharp vibrations and flashing lights add to a solid feeling of interacting with something, both in the haptic and visual senses. This should turn out to be a great platform for embodied interaction with information and function.

The ability to read and write to tags makes it potentially adaptive as a platform wider than just advertising or ticketing. As an interaction designer I feel quite enabled by this technology: the three basic functions (making phonecalls, going to URLs, or sending SMSs) are enough to start thinking about tangible interactions without having to go and program any Java midlets or server-side applications.

I’m really happy that Nokia is putting this technology into a ‘low-end’ phone rather than pushing it out in a ‘smartphone’ range. This is where there is potential for wider usage and mass-market applications, especially around gaming and content discovery.

Improvements

I had some problems launching the ‘service discovery’ application. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t and it’s difficult to tell why this is. It would be great to be able to place the phone on the table, knowing that it will respond to a tag, but it was just a little too unreliable to do that without checking to see that it had responded. The version I have still says it’s a prototype, so this may well be sorted out by the released version.

Overall there is a lack of integration between the service discovery application and the rest of the system: Contacts, SMS archive and service bookmarks etc. At the moment we need to enter the application to write and manage tags, or to give a ‘shortcut’ to another phone, but it seems that, as with bluetooth and IR, this should be part of the contextual menus that appear under ‘Options’ within each area of the phone. There are also some infuriating prompts that appear when interacting with URL, more details below.

Details

The phone opens the ‘service discovery’ application whenever it detects a compatible RFID tag near the base of the phone (when the keypad lock is off). This part is a bit obscure: sometimes it doesn’t ‘wake up’ for a tag, and the application needs to be loaded before it will read properly. Once the application is open (about 2-3 seconds) the read time of the tags seems instantaneous.

The shortcuts menu gives access to shortcuts. Confusingly, this is different from ‘bookmarks’ and the ‘names’ list on the phone, although names can be searched from within the application. I think tighter integration with the OS is called for.

Shortcuts can be added, edited, deleted, etc. in the same way as contacts. They can be ‘Given’ to another phone or ‘Written’ to a tag.

There are three kinds of shortcuts: Call, URL or SMS. ‘Call’ will create a call to a pre-defined number, ‘URL’ will load a pre-defined URL, and ‘SMS’ will send a pre-defined SMS to a particular number. This part of the application has the most room for innovative extensions: we should be able to set the state of the phone, change profiles, change themes, download graphics, etc. This can be achieved by loading URLs, but URLs and mobiles don’t mix, so why should we be presented with them, when there could be a more usable layer inbetween? There could also be preferences for prompts: at the moment each action has to be confirmed with a yes or a no, but in some secure environments it would be nice to be able to have a function launched without the extra button push.

If a tag contains no data, then we are notified and placed back on the main screen (as happened when I tried to write to my Oyster card).

If the tag is writeable we are asked which shortcut to write to the tag.

When we touch a tag with a shortcut on it, a prompt appears asking for confirmation. This is a level of UI to prevent mistakes, and a certain level of security, but it also reduces the overall usability of the system. With URL launching, there are two stages of confirmation, which is infuriating. There needs to be some other mode of confirmation, and the ‘service discovery’ app needs to somehow be deeper in the system to avoid these double button presses.

Lastly, there is a log of actions. Useful to see if the application has been reading something in your bag or wallet, without you knowing…

I’m interested in the visual link between information and physical things. How do we represent an object that has digital function, information or history beyond it’s physical form? What are the visual clues for this interaction? We shouldn’t rely on a kind of mystery meat navigation (the scourge of the web-design world) where we have to touch everything to find out it’s meaning.

This work doesn’t attempt to be a definitive system for marking physical things, it is an exploratory process to find out how digital/physical interactions might work. It uncovers interesting directions while the technology is still largely out of the hands of everyday users.

Reference to existing work

Click for larger version.

The inspiration for this is in the marking of public space and existing iconography for interactions with objects: push buttons on pedestrian crossings, contactless cards, signage and instructional diagrams.

This draws heavily on the substantial body of images of visual marking in public space. One of the key findings of this research was that visibility and placement of stickers in public space is an essential part of their use. Current research in ubicomp and ‘locative media’ is not addressing these visibility issues.

There is also a growing collection of existing iconography in contactless payment systems, with a number of interesting graphic treatments in a technology-led, vernacular form. In Japan there are also instances of touch-based interactions being represented by characters, colours and iconography that are abstracted from the action itself.

I have also had great discussions with Ulla-Maaria Mutanen and Jyri Engestr�m who have been doing interesting work with thinglinks and the intricate weaving of RFID into craft products.

Development

Sketching and development revealed five initial directions: circles, wireless, card-based, mobile-based and arrows (see the poster for more details). The icons range from being generic (abstracted circles or arrows to indicate function) to specific (mobile phones or cards touching tags).

Arrows might be suitable for specific functions or actions in combinations with other illustrative material. Icons with mobile phones or cards might be helpful in situations where basic usability for a wide range of users is required. Although the ‘wireless’ icons are often found in current card readers, they do not successfully indicate the touch-based interactions inherent in the technology, and may be confused with WiFi or Bluetooth. The circular icons work at the highest level, and might be most suitable for generic labelling.

For further investigation I have selected a simple circle, surrounded by an ‘aura’ described by a dashed line. I think this successfully communicates the near field nature of the technology, while describing that the physical object contains something beyond its physical form.

In most current NFC implementations, such as the 3220 from Nokia and many iMode phones, the RFID reader is in the bottom of the phone. This means that the area of ‘activation’ is obscured in many cases by the phone and hand. The circular iconography allows for a space to be marked as ‘active’ by the size of the circle, and we might see it used to mark areas rather than points. Usability may improve when these icons are around the same size as the phone, rather than being a specific point to touch.

Work in progress

This is early days for this technology, and this is work-in-progress. There is more to be done in looking at specific applications, finding suitable uses and extending the language to cover other functions and content.

Until now I have been concerned with generic iconography for a digitally augmented object. But this should develop into a richer language, as the applications for this type of interaction become more specific, and related to the types of objects and information being used. For example it would be interesting to find a graphic treatment that could be applied to a Pokemon sticker offering power-ups as well as a bus stop offering timetable downloads.

I’m also interested in the physical placement of these icons. How large or visible should they be? Are there places that should not be ‘active’? And how will this fit with the natural, centres of gravity of the mobile phone in public and private space.

I’ll expand on these things in a few upcoming projects that explore touch-based interactions in personal spaces.

Feel free to use and modify the icons, I would be very interested to see how they can be applied and extended.

Visual references

Oyster Card, Transport for London.
eNFC, Inside Contactless.
Paypass, Mastercard.
ExpressPay, American Express.
FeliCa, Sony.
MiFare, various vendors.
Suica, JR, East Japan Railway Company.
RFID Field Force Solutions, Nokia.
NFC shell for 3220, Nokia.
ERG Transit Systems payment, Dubai.
Various generic contactless vendors.
Contactless payment symbol, Mastercard.
Open Here, Paul Mijksenaar, Piet Westendorp, Thames and Hudson, 1999.
Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud, Harper, 1994

The pseudo-analogue interface of the iPod clickwheel doesn’t cut it. It can be difficult to control when accessing huge alphabetically ordered lists, and the acceleration or inertia of the view can be really frustrating. The combinations of interactions: clicking into deeper lists, scrolling, clicking deeper, turn into long and tortuous experiences if you are engaged in any simultaneous activity. Plus its difficult to use through clothing, or with gloves.

Music and language

My first thought was something Jack and I discussed a long time ago, using a phone keypad to type the first few letters of a artist, album or genre and seeing the results in real-time, much like iTunes does on a desktop. I find myself using this a lot in iTunes rather than browsing lists.

Predictive text input would be very effective here, when limited to the dictionary of your own music library. (I wonder if QIX search would do this for a music library on a mobile?)

Maybe now is the time to look at this as we see mobile phone music convergence.

Since scrolling is inevitable to some degree, even within fine search results, what about using simple movement or tilt to control the search results? One of the problems with using movement for input is context: when is movement intended? And when is movement the result of walking or a bump in the road?

One solution could be a “squeeze and shake” quasi-mode: squeezing the device puts it into a receptive state.

Another could be more reliance on the 3 axes of tilt, which are less sensitive to larger movements of walking or transport.

Gestures

I’m not sure about gestural interfaces, most of the prototypes I have seen are difficult to learn, and require a certain level of performativity that I’m not sure everyone wants to be doing in public space. But having accelerometers inside these devices should, and would, allow for the hacking together other personal, adaptive gestural interfaces that would perhaps access higher level functions of the device.

One gesture I think could be simple and effective would be covering the ear to switch tracks. To try this out we could add a light or capacitive touch sensor to each earbud.

With this I think we would have trouble with interference from other objects, like resting the head against a wall. But there’s something nicely personal and intimate about putting the hand next to the ear, as if to listen more intently.

More knobs

Things that are truly analogue, like volume and time, should be mapped to analogue controls. I think one of the greatest unexplored areas in digital music is real-time audio-scrubbing, currently not well supported on any device, probably because of technical constraints. But scrubbing through an entire album, with a directly mapped input, would be a great way of finding the track you wanted.

Research projects like the DJammer are starting to look at this, specifically for DJs. But since music is inherently time-based there is more work to be done here for everyday players and devices. Let’s skip the interaction design habits we’ve learnt from the CD era and go back to vinyl :)

Evolution of the display

Where displays are required, I hope we can be free of small, fuzzy, low-contrast LCDs. With new displays being printable on paper, textiles and other surfaces there’s the possibility of improving the usability, readability and “glanceability” of the display.

We are beginning to see signs of this with this OLED display on this Sony Network Walkman where the display is under the surface of the product material, without a separate “glass” area.

For the white surface of an iPod, the high-contrast, paper-like surfaces of technologies like e-ink would make great, highly readable displays.

Prototyping

So I really need to get prototyping with accelerometers and display technologies, to understand simple movement and gesture in navigating music libraries. There are other questions to answer: I’m wondering if using movement to scroll through search results would create the appearance of a large screen space, through the lens of a small screen. As with bumptunes, I think many more opportunities will emerge as we make these things.

More reading

Designing for Shuffling
Thoughts on the iPod Shuffle
Bumptunes
Audioclouds/gestural interaction
Sound objects
DJammer
On the body
Runster

(Based on Dourish, see reading recommendations, below)

Each successive development in computer history has made greater use of human skills:

• electrical: required a thorough understanding of electrical design
• symbolic: required a thorough understanding of the manipulation of abstract languages
• textual: text dialogue with the computer: set the standards of interaction we still we live with today

• graphic: graphical dialogue with the computer, using our spatial skills, pattern recognition, and motion memory with a mouse and keyboard

  We have become stuck in this last model.

  Interaction with computers has remained largely the same: desk, screen, input devices, etc. Even entirely new fields like mobile and iTV have followed these interaction patterns.

  Definitions:

• Tangible: physical: having substance or material existence; perceptible to the senses

• Social: human and collaborative abilities, or ‘software that’s better because there’s people there’ (Definition from Matt Jones and Matt Webb)

  Examples

  Dourish notes in the first few chapters of his book that as interaction with computers moves out into the world, it becomes part of our social world too. The social and the tangible are intricately linked as part of “being in the world”.

  What follows are examples of products or services we can use or buy right now. I’m specifically interested in the ways that these theories of ubiquitous computing and tangible interaction are moving out into the world, and the way that we can see the trends in currently available products.

  I’m aware that there are also terrifically interesting things happening in research (eg the Tangible Media Group) but right now I’m interested in the emergent things that start to happen effects of millions of people using things (like Flickr, weblogs, Nintendo DS, and mobile social software).

  Social trends on the web

  On the web the current trend is building simple platforms that support complex social/human behaviour

• Weblogs, newsreaders and RSS: simple platform that has changed the way the web works, and supported simple social interaction (the basic building blocks of dialogue, or conversation)
• Flickr: a simple platform for media/photo sharing: turned into a thriving community: works well with the web by allowing syndicated photos, bases the social network on top of a defined funciton

• Others include del.icio.us, world of warcraft, etc.

  Social mobile computing

  On mobile platforms most of the exciting stuff is happening around presence, context and location

• Familiar strangers: stores a list of all the phones that you have been near in places that you inhabit, and then visualises the space around you according to who you have met before. More mobile social software

• Mogi: location based game, but most interestingly supports different contexts of use: both at home in front of a big screen, and out on a small mobile screen.

  Social games

  Interesting that games are moving away from pure immersive 3D worlds, and starting to devote equal attention to their situated, social context

• Nintendo DS: PictoChat, local wireless networks that can be adapted for gameplay or communication (picture chatting included as standard)
• Sissyfight: very simple social game structure, encourages human behaviour, insults
• Habbohotel: simple interaction structures, (and fantastic attention to detail in iconic representations) support human desires. Now a very large company, in over 12 countries, based on the sales of virtual furniture

• Singstar: entirely social game, about breaking social barriers and mutual humiliation: realtime analysis/visualisation of your voice actually makes you sing worse!

  Tangible games

• Eyetoy: Brings the viewer into the screen, creates a performative and social space, and allows communication via PS2
• Dance Dance Revolution: taking the television into physical space
• Nokia wave-messaging: puts information back into space, and creates social and performative opportunities (Photo thanks to Matt Webb)

• Yellow Arrow: puts digital information into city space, gives us a glimpse of the way that we might have more interaction with situated information in the future

  There are also very interesting aspects of gender in all of this: this move towards the social implies a move towards the type of games/play that is seen more often in girls.

  Recommended reading

  Where the Action Is, Paul Dourish (Read the first 3 chapters for a great introduction)

  Digital Ground, Malcolm McCullough (Exploring the relationship between architectural and digital spaces)

  Physical Computing, O�Sullivan, Igoe (Practical book on making physical computing devices)

  Smart Mobs, Howard Rheingold (Exploring wider social aspects of mobile technology)

  The Humane Interface, Jef Raskin (Covers screen based interaction, but has the best discussion on ‘modes’ of any book)

  Mind Hacks, Matt Webb and Tom Stafford (Looks at our interaction with the world from the perspective of neuroscience, great introduction to ‘affordances’)

  ]]> http://www.elasticspace.com/2005/03/tangible-and-social-interaction/feed 3 http://www.elasticspace.com/2005/02/sound-objects http://www.elasticspace.com/2005/02/sound-objects#comments Fri, 25 Feb 2005 22:28:07 +0000 Timo http://www.elasticspace.com/2005/02/sound-objects These are some of my notes from his lecture, and our discussion over lunch.

  The aim of the Soundobject research is to liberate interaction design from visual dominance, to free up our eyes, and to do what small displays don’t do well.

  Reasons for focusing on sound:

  • Sound is currently under-utilised in interaction design
  • Vision is overloaded and our auditory senses are seldom engaged
  • In the world we are used to hearing a lot
  • Adding sound to existing, optimised visual interfaces does not add much to usability

    Sound is very good at attracting our attention, so we have alarms and notification systems that successfully use sound in communication and interaction. We talked about using ‘caller groups’ on mobile phones where people in an address book can be assigned different ringtones, and how effective it was in changing our relationship with our phones. In fact it’s possible to sleep through unimportant calls: our brains are processing and evaluating sound while we sleep.

    One fascinating thing that I hadn’t considered is that sound is our fastest sense: it has an extremely high temporal resolution (ten times faster than vision), so for instance our ears can hear pulses at a much higher rate than our eyes can watch a flashing light.

    Disadvantages of sound objects

    Sound is not good for continuous representation because we cannot shut out sound in the way we can divert our visual attention. It’s also not good for absolute display: pitch, loudness and timbre are relative to most people, even people that have absolute pitch can be affected by contextual sounds. And context is a big issue: loud or quiet environments affect the way that sound must be used in interfaces: libraries and airplanes for example.

    There are also big problems with spatial representation in sound, techniques that mimic the position of sound based on binaural differences are inaccessible by about a fifth of the population. This perception of space in sound is also intricately linked with the position and movement of the head. Some Google searches on spatial representation of sound. See also Psychophysical Scaling of Sonification Mappings [pdf]

    Cartoonification

    ‘Filling a bottle with water’ is a sound that could work as part of an interface, representing actions such as downloading, uploading or in replacement of progress bars. The sound can be abstracted into a ‘cartoonification’ that works more effectively: the abstraction separates simulated sounds from everyday sounds.

    Mikael cites inspiration from foley artists working on film sound design, that are experienced in emphasising and simplifying sound actions, and in creating dynamic sound environments, especially in animation.

    A side effect of this ‘cartoonification’ is that sounds can be generated in simpler ways: reducing processing and memory overhead in mobile devices. In fact all of the soundobject experiments rely on parametric sound synthesis using PureData: generated on the fly rather than using sampled sound files, resulting in small, fast, adaptive interface environments (sound files and the PD files used to generate the sounds can be found at the Soundobject site).

    One exciting and pragmatic idea that Mikael mentioned was simulating ‘peas in a tin’ to hear how much battery is left in a mobile device. Something that seems quite possible, reduced to mere software, with the accelerometer in the Nokia 3220. Imagine one ‘pea’ rattling about, instead of one ‘bar’ on a visual display…

    Research conclusions

    The most advanced prototype of a working sound interface was a box that responded to touch, and had invisible soft-buttons on it’s surface that could only be heard through sound. The synthesised sounds responded to the movement of the fingertips across a large touchpad like device (I think it was a tactex device). These soft-buttons used a simplified sound model that synthesised impact, friction and deformation. See Human-Computer Interaction Design based on Interactive Sonification [pdf]

    The testing involved asking users to feel and hear their way around a number of different patterns of soft-buttons, and to draw the objects they found. See these slides for some of the results.

    The conclusions were that users were almost as good at using sound interfaces as with normal soft-button interfaces and that auditory displays are certainly a viable option for ubiquitous, especially wearable, computing.

    More reading

    Soundobject
    Gesture Controlled Audio Systems
    ICAD

    ]]> http://www.elasticspace.com/2005/02/sound-objects/feed 2 http://www.elasticspace.com/2005/02/touch-interface-photos http://www.elasticspace.com/2005/02/touch-interface-photos#comments Fri, 25 Feb 2005 09:00:36 +0000 Timo http://www.elasticspace.com/2005/02/photos-of-touch-based-interfaces In the way that Victor Lombardi is collecting images of cardreaders, I am beginning to collect images of touch-based interfaces like the Oyster card and other 'touchable' interfaces on public transport. If you want to contribute, tag your photos with 'touchinterface'.]]> In the way that Victor Lombardi is collecting images of cardreaders, I am beginning to collect images of touch-based interfaces like the Oyster card and other 'touchable' interfaces on public transport. If you want to contribute, tag your photos with 'touchinterface'.]]> http://www.elasticspace.com/2005/02/touch-interface-photos/feed 1 http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/11/spatial-memory-design-engaged http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/11/spatial-memory-design-engaged#comments Mon, 15 Nov 2004 13:13:00 +0000 Timo http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/11/spatial-memory-design-engaged my presentation [pdf] and presentation notes from Design Engaged 2004. Lots of pretty pictures of stickers, tags, flyposting and such. I will chip in with Dan, Adam, Matt, Molly and Fabio to say that this has been the conference highlight of the year.]]> Notes on two related projects:

    1. Time that land forgot

    • A project in collaboration with Even Westvang
    • Made in 10 days at the Icelandic locative media workshop, summer 2004
    • Had the intention of making photo archives and gps trails more useful/expressive
    • Looked at patterns in my photography: 5 months, 8000 photos, visualised them by date / time of day. Fantastic resource for me: late night parties, early morning flights, holidays and the effect of midnight sun is visible.
    • Looking now to make it useful as part of more pragmatic interface, to try other approaches less about the abstracted visualisation
    • prototype
    • info, details, research and source code
    • time visualisation

      2. Marking in urban public space

      I’ve also been mapping stickering, stencilling and flyposting: walking around with the camera+gps and photographing examples of marking (not painted graffiti).

      

      This research looks at the marking of public space by investigating the physical annotation of the city: stickering, stencilling, tagging and flyposting. It attempts to find patterns in this marking practice, looking at visibility, techniques, process, location, content and audience. It proposes ways in which this marking could be a layer between the physical city and digital spatial annotation.

      Some attributes of sticker design

    • Visibility: contrast, monochromatic, patterns, bold shapes, repetition
    • Patina: history, time, decay, degredation, relevance, filtering, social effects
    • Physicality: residue of physical objects: interesting because these could easily contain digital info
    • Adaptation and layout: layout is usually respectful, innovative use of dtp and photocopiers, adaptive use of sticker patina to make new messages on top of old

      

      Layers of information build on top of each other, as with graffiti, stickers show their age through fading and patina, flyposters become unstuck, torn and covered in fresh material. Viewed from a distance the patina is evident, new work tends to respect old, and even commercial flyposting respects existing graffiti work.

      

      Techniques vary from strapping zip-ties through cardboard and around lampposts for large posters, to simple hand-written notes stapled to trees, and short-run printed stickers. One of the most fascinating and interactive techniques is the poster offering strips of tear-off information. These are widely used, even in remote areas.

      

      Initial findings show that stickers don’t relate to local space, that they are less about specific locations than about finding popular locations, “cool neighbourhoods” or just ensuring repeat exposure. This is opposite to my expectations, and perhaps sheds some light on current success/failure of spatial annotation projects.

      I am particularly interested in the urban environment as an interface to information and an interaction layer for functionality, using our spatial and navigational senses to access local and situated information.

      There is concern that in a dense spatially annotated city we might have an overload of information, what about filtering and fore-grounding of relevant, important information? Given that current technologies have very short ranges (10-30mm), we might be able to use our existing spatial skills to navigate overlapping information. We could shift some of the burden of information retrieval from information architecture to physical space.

      I finished by showing this animation by Kriss Salmanis, a young Latvian artist. Amazing re-mediation of urban space through stencilling, animation and photography. (“Un ar reizi naks tas bridis” roughly translates as “And in time the moment will come”.

      Footnotes/references

      Graffiti Archaeology, Cassidy Curtis
      otherthings.com/grafarc

      Street Memes, collaborative project
      streetmemes.com

      Spatial annotation projects list
      elasticspace.com/2004/06/spatial-annotation

      Nokia RFID kit for 5140
      nokia.com/nokia/0,,55739,00.html

      Spotcodes, High Energy Magic
      highenergymagic.com/spotcode

      ?Mystery Meat navigation?, Vincent Flanders
      fixingyourwebsite.com/mysterymeat.html

      RDF as barcodes, Chris Heathcote
      undergroundlondon.com/antimega/archives/2004_02.html

      Implementation: spatial literature
      nickm.com/implementation

      Yellow Arrow
      yellowarrow.org

      ]]> http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/11/spatial-memory-design-engaged/feed 0 http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/11/design-engaged http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/11/design-engaged#comments Sat, 13 Nov 2004 09:37:00 +0000 Timo http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/11/design-engaged all sat around a table in Amsterdam, at Design Engaged 2004. There are lots of photos going up to Flickr, and here are my notes.]]> Ben Cerveny
      • The growth of the soil
      • How do we comprehend complexity
      • How do we build structures around complex information
      • Accreting meta-data: GPS data, descriptive information

        Decomposition

        Break down of material as it hits the soil

      • Soup, tags, condensed and distilled meta objects

        Self organisation

        sorting mechanisms, affinity browsers, related, filtering, emergent relationships, interrelationships

        How do we conceive a metaphor for building these processes? A structure that is meaningful for the users.

        Application design: movement through states of application: to tending to a flow of processes

        Tending to meta-data is a growth process

        DLA diffusion limited aggregation, natural process model

      • The relationships between metadata can be visualised as this * Should model metadata using plant models: plant models have existed for eons, basic structures for material

        Rules for expression

        L-systems growth, mimics biological rulesets

        Map rule-sets in metadata onto L-systems, affinity rules

      • Branching tree structures could be used to make metadata more useful

        Roots and Feeds

        RSS feeds, a root system, aggregator has roots, to the surface of a newsreader

        Structural information

        After applying rules of expression (algorithms, l-systems) we could see differences in the way that the plant has evolved

      • A “botany” of these different structures: smaller, larger clusters, structures.

        Cultivation as culture

        From a user perspective the idea of cultivation: users can actually affect change: can breed your own searches, using searches generationally, using own adapted metaphors for new contexts

        Mix and match mechanisms or instruments (specific rule-sets) move expressions and apply them to different rule-sets

        Don’t have to understand genetics, but we have found use for plants for generations

      • User doesn’t need to know mechanisms, just ability to make changes and view outcomes

        Tending the garden

        Incredible complexity, incredible diversity

        Not intimidated by the complexity of the garden

      • Present similar tools to tend to data

        Discussion

        Casey Reas: organic information design

        Thinkmap, physical simulation systems

        Mitchell Resnick: Turtles Termites, Traffic Jams

      • Matt J: Does it rely on visual metaphors: how do we get people to cultivate rather than consume?

        Thomas Van Der Wal

        Synching feeling

        Everything fit in our brain

        then libraries

        then digital bits

        then putting everything in one place

        Our information on our pdas, cellphones, somewhere

        The dream is that we have accurate information at our disposal when we need it

        Personal info-cloud

        Local info-cloud: should it be located?

        External info-cloud: things you don’t know about

        How do users use information?

        Device versus network?

        Our networked space, that exists out in space

        Usable: syncing between two devices: calendar, address book, to do list

        Dodgy: documents, media maps, web-based info, multiple devices

        Personal version control: different devices have different versions

      • Personal categorisation:

        Standard metadata for personal info-cloud

        content description

        creator

        privacy

        context

        use type (eg)

        instruction: destroy, revise in 6 months

        object type:

      • categories: not a structured system, but hackable flat data

        Actual solutions

        Spotlight (Apple Tiger)

      • MIT Project Oxygen

        Possible/partial solutions

        Script aggregation by metadata tag

        Publish to private/public location in RSS

        Rsynk and CVS

        Groove (Windows)

      • Quicksilver (Mac)

        Adam Greenfield

        All watched over by machines of loving grace

        Some ethical guidelines for user experience in ubiquitous computing environments

        Ubicomp is coming: IPV6 6.5×10 to the 23 addresses for every square metre on the planet

        Moving from describing to prescribing

        Technological artefacts are too dismissive of people

      • Someone to watch over me: attractive as well as scary

        Default to harmlessness

        must ensure user’s physical psychic and financial safety

        must go well beyond graceful degredation

      • faults must result in safety

        Be self disclosing

        Contain provisions for immediate, transparent querying of ownership, use, capabilities, etc.

        Seamlessness is optional

        Analogue of broadcast station identification or military IFF

      • Web derived model for user-consent: cannot carry over to ubicomp, would be too intrusive to have to approve each and every disclosure of information in four space

        Be conservative of face

        ubiquitous systems are always already social systems: they must not unnecessarily embarras, himiliate or shame

        Goes beyond formal information-privacy concerns

      • Prospect of being nakedly accountable to an inseen omipresent network

        Be conservative of time

        Must not introduce undue complications into ordinary operations

        Adult, competent users understand adequately what they want, shouldn’t introduce barriers

      • Potential conflict with principle 1

        Be deniable

        Should be able to opt-out, anytime, anywhere, any process

        Critically: the ability to say no, without sacrificing anything but the ability to use whatever usage

      • The “safe word” concept may find an application here

        Discussion

        Fabio: what about gossip

        Chris: surely there’s human responsibility

        Tom C: Social control includes humiliation and embarrasment

      • Molly: systems for shaming: can be institutionalised and applied in problem places: difference between smart and smartass. Haven’t got good enough at modelling situations in order to get this right.

        Stefan Smagula

        Teaching and writing about interaction design

        Mike Kuniavsky

        Writing about ubicomp, society and social

        Material products areform from social values

        Products affect how we think

        The pattern is “a recognition of the complexity, unpredictability, confusion of the world”

        The framework of thought of the last 600 years is coming to an end

        “by dividing the world into smaller pieces, ways can be found to explain it”: this method is waning

        Communication and transportation has been the key driver of this change

        Shown people (designers?) how complex life is

        Most people don’t know what to do about this complexity

        At the end of the prescriptive rationalist vision of the world

        It is our job as designers to recognise these ideas: “design is a projection of people’s ideals onto product”

        Past the confusion of postmodernism: the complexity hasn’t been branded yet, hasn’t been given a core set of ideas

        Book: Human built world

        The complexity of the world is an uncomfortably bright light, people turn away: designers can make it manageable

      • Go to the light of compexity!

        Discussion

        Adam: are we up against biological limits: are we wired to deal with things in a linear way? Yes: physiological limits: 7 +-2.

        Ben: we conceive as a subtractive process: a mental scene out of an excess of input: we have a body of linear tools to process. There is a realisation that we are non-linear systems: technology is becoming us, and the other way around.

        Matt: we can learn complexity way more than we realise: tests show that we subconsciously learn complexity beyond language and rational thought

        Magical thinking is not wrong: all our models are wrong

      • Tom C: Looking at people as shearing layers of perception and cognition

        Remon Tijssen

        Behaviours, tactility and graphics

      • Tensionfield between playfulness and functionality

        David Erwin

        The funnel

      • Serial, parallel and optional interfaces

        Peter Boersma

        Transactional interfaces

        ezGov uses IBMs RUP

        RUP is weak in user-experience

      • Added StUX, definitions of deliverables for user experience

        Dan Hill

        Self centred design

        Not selfish design

        Background: adaptive design, design as social process, inspiration from vernacular architecture, hackability, allowing and encouraging people to make technology what they want to be

        Inspiration from trip to US

        Assumption that UCD is generally a good thing

        The focus on usability has distracted people: it has become an end in itself

        UCD manifests itself in usability, at the expense of usefulness

        Cultural and social products: massive variation of use across the globe

        Products most innovative at BBC/music: audioscrobbler/lastFM: intense meaning in the patterns it generates. More innovative than iTunes music store. Steam: setting reminders for radio stations: hacked third party product, BBC is trying to support this innovation.

        This innovation is coming from non-designers

        Veen: Amateurised design: the most interesting design on the web: Shirky: Situated software

        Always consider a thing in it’s next larger context: Eliel Saarinen: useful piece of design process. Chair, room, house, city.

        A lot of information about the self, coming out of these systems

        Audioscrobbler: looking at ones music, bookmarks, photos, lunches, weblog posts, gps co-ordinates: how does this affect habits?

        Pace of development: what can be done on the web.

        Self-knowledge and enlightenment: how does it affect one’s life

      • The practice and focus of design is moving towards behaviour

        Limitations

        This is early adopter activity, this is geeky, high barrier to entry, it requires code to make these things. It’s self limiting: only certain kind of people can make these products.

        Scaleability problems: resilience: lack of reliability of iterative development, when will we be at the stage when we can rely on things working?

        BBC, radio broadcasting needs to be resilient: public service

        Database design and scaleability: Flickr doesn’t need to be normalised

        Common appeal of these things is self-limiting: too much systems level thinking.

        Moving into a space where products are social, and can have social meaning, and thus be socially harmful

        People’s assumption and experiences are based on context

        Need to be more rigourous about understanding social patterns

        audioscrobbler is not good at classical music

        Designers and researchers need better understanding of each other

        Designers are at their most useful when they are enabling adaptive design

        Using ethnography within a design process, look at long-term ethnographic process: hooking it into the rapid prototyping of the adaptive design world

        There is the value of sociology here. Ethno-methodology, Heidegger

        Book: Where the action is, Dourish.

        Social systems work well when there is accountability

        Building things where this also builds an account of the building

        Place and space: place being about social structures

        Embodiment: Appropriating products, building social meanings into products

        Accountability: part of the action is a documentation of the action (Dourish). Is ‘view source’ accountability?

      • Book: Presentation of self: Irvine Goffman

        Matt Webb

        Neuroscience and interaction design

        This is really mostly psychology

        Game: remembering animals

        Light comes from top left

        Easier to react in the direction that things approach you from

        Dialogue boxes, work with natural directions

        We follow human eye direction, not robot eye direction, pulling a lever is faster when eyes point in that direction

        We respond the same to arrows as we do to gaze

        All that neuroscience has done is to confirm what we know from psychology

        3 types of object, animate, inanimate and tool

        3 zones: graspable, peripersonal The schema of the body is extended by the held tools

        Our body space is quite mutable: space on a screen becomes the space represented by the body, anything which moves as part of your hand becomes part of your grasp, there’s an amount of time that this takes to understand this, learning process and experience

        Grasping has as much primacy as a cup itself: so “sit down” or “chair” are equivalent in the brain

        If we see or say grasping, or looking at coffee cup shows

      • “What to do with too much information is the great riddle of our time” a* Mapping observed phenomena to the science of jetstreams, same thing will happen to neuroscience.

        John Poisson

        The stretch time conundrum

        Sony is a huge force: vaunted to villified in three short decades

        Loss of brand value: products are not meeting user expectations

        Sony founders have changed, directions have changed

        One of the problem is in the fact that it’s japanese: basic simple cultural processes

        Hikaru dorodango: process refinement as creative expression: successively sculpting and crafting mud balls into spheres

        3 interconnected languages are undocumentably mixed

        Languages are connected to neurological development: learning japanese at an early age increases the threshold of tolerance of the pain of complexity: Kanji pain begets user pain.

        At first thought that it was a problem of language, but then realised this increased tolerance of complexity pain.

        Sony “iPod killer” is a user-experience nightmare, but for japanese it’s not too complex

        There’s an overall acceptance of complexity in Japan

        Pattern based learning: origami: 48 steps of process, more complex than interfaces

        Stretch time: at 3o’clock on the Sony campus everyone stops, music plays and everyone is encouraged to stretch.

      • Process is good: start with rice cookers and end up with transistors: releasing lots of stuff and then seeing what works. But there are a lot more misses than hits at the moment

        Sanjay Khanna

        Kurt Vonnegut in “Cold Turkey”

      • Mike: intended effects are insignificant compared with the emergent effects, just noise compared to the overall outcomes

        Niels Wolf

        Intro to JXTA

        Works on every network device

        Allows control over your data, sharing, peer to peer backup

        Implemented in many languages: including python

        Assigned a unique number, which works across IP, bluetooth, mobile rendezvous, etc.

      • Everybody becomes a server if no other can be found

        Molly Wright Steenson

        All hail the vast comforting suburb of the soul

        Lots of research into garden cities

        Worried that the future is going to be boring

        Closing off some avenues for development by focusing on urban environments

      • What are the constraints that define a suburb?

        Jack Schulze

        Mapping and looking

      • Lots of cool stuff: no notes.

        Matthew Ward

        Questioning the commodification of space

      • We are social, spatial, temporal beings

        What were the conditions for the rise of these spatial technologies

        2001 descrambling of GPS

        FCC policy to make sure 911 callers can be located

        Ubiquity of mobile phones

        If we don’t move away from the “where’s my nearest pizza” we are going to get really bored really soon

        Differential space: socio-spatial differences are emphasised and celebrated

        Iain Borden: Skateboarding

      • “social space is a social product.” “Our task now is to construct everyday life, to produce it, consciously to create it, boredom is pregnant with desires, frustrated desires” Lefebvre.

        Chris Heathcote

        Nuts and bolts, how to use location

        Location is co-ordinates

        Location is names and titles

        Location is also near Matt Webb, or near my iBook: relative position might be more useful way of thinking

        Physical augmentation: using, abusing, changing where they live

        Visual design: Buddy finder on mobile phones: spatially false, chart junk

        Context awareness is really hard:

        What happens when you get rid of the maps?

      • Lots more cool stuff that I didn’t take notes on…

        Matt Jones

        Nokia: Insight and foresight

        A hard problem: “Ubicomp is hard, understanding people, context and the world is hard, getting computers to handle everyday situations is hard, and expectations are set way too high.” Gene Becker, Fredshouse.net

        Next-gen mobile: big screens, more whizzy features, but we still have the same old messy world

        A modest start: being in the world instead of in front of the screen

        3220: 5140: power up covers with new capabilities

        3220: LED displays with accelerometers and thus motion capture

        Where the action is: This ignores 99% of our daily lives

        dance dance revolution and eyetoy: new world

        5140: first RFID reader phone

        New ways of using mobiles with touch based tech

        easy and concrete access to services and repeat functions

        transfer of digital items between devices as simple as a gesture of giving

        in the future also fast and convenient local payment and ticketing: fast, easy way of getting settings and services

        When you count all the steps to make simple actions are about 100 actions: to find settings, set up the human modem thing

        Touch actions are potentially two orders of complexity less: into 1 action

        LAunched active cover with NFC: near field communication: philips, sony, visa, samsung: nfcforum.org

        Pairing things up, putting things together (how is this different from BT? passive chips)

        Prototype things!

        NFC is a touch based RFID technology

        Putting the information into the tag: can contain more than an ID

        Close mapping to physical objects: Dourish

        NFC active objects will have mixed spirit world of objects having magic behind them: permitted moves for games, origins of objects, spime like stuff,

        One to one mapping: multiple digital meanings on objects

        it’s not a one-way world: these things are re-writeable: secular isn’t the dominant way of thinking

        Now that we can give objects spirit world, semiotic, actions

        Into fetish objects: auspicious computing, unique wooden balls (minority report)

        Friendster: a game of how many connections. Turning into an info-fetish physical game

        – phones are precious, tags are not

        – throwaway, data detritus, spime spume

        + programmatic product life-cycle

        + audit trails for trash

        + automation of recycling

        Techno-optimism

      • WWF: sustainability at the speed of light

        Long now, (Stewart Brand)

        Fashion

        Commerce

        Infrastructure

        Governance

        Culture

        Nature

      • Sometimes technology can disrupt these layers

        Fabio Sergio

        From collision to convergence

        How I learned to stop worrying and watch tv on my mobile phone

        2001: who the hell would want to watch tv on a mobile?

        2003: using mobile to watch big brother from the car

        consultants: timeliness, context sensitivity, self-expression, immediacy, relevance

        People rely on their connected devices to fill-in interstitial time slots

        Armed with this notion outlets aquired content and chopped it into 3-5 minute videos

        The end result is too much navigation and not enough content, undermines the concept of “snacking”. The navigation has become the experience

        Navigation is not bad per-se, the web is arguably built on it

        Flow: where the consumer is completely engaged with interaction

        Mobile content experiences happen in contexts that basically negate the ability to focus

        How do you access video: at the moment through a browser

        Big Brother: lessons learnt

        Always on-ness: there is aways something new happening: marshall mcluhan meets orwell

        Something might happen at any time

        Action can be just a video call away

        Easy to get into the flow of what’s happening

        Cut to measure: as little or as long as you want

        Conversation-based: you can keep hearing when you can’t watch: don’t need to look at the screen

        Why should the browser and media player be two different applications? should probably be one.

        People need context medium content, probably in this order

        The handset should be a remote control: as much as possible make navigation resident on teh device

        Content should be snackish: but should be grouped

      • The experience should be around the on/off switch

        Timo Arnall

      • Presentation and notes

        Sunday discussion

      • Brief: design a ticket machine that also allows city navigation and takes care of tourists and busy commuters equally, that doesn’t have a screen
      • Alternative brief: A permanent tag large enough to contain digital info, that could be unobtrusively attached to anything in public space
      • Mechanisms for friendly denial

        I’m lost: design a physical pathway which

        includes the idea of signs to explain features of teh environment to the unmediated

        which could serve as a compensation or apology for people denied in the ubiquitous sense

        which was distinctively local and amsterdamish

        includes infrastructure

      • poetics and emotional enhancements required

        Overheard somewhere at the bar: anthropology/ethnography is this year’s library science: another new/old juxtaposition. Not that I agree.

        ]]> http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/11/design-engaged/feed 0 http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/09/physical-computing http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/09/physical-computing#comments Sun, 26 Sep 2004 12:46:00 +0000 Timo http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/09/physical-computing Making sense, a physical computing workshop at Atelier Nord took place from 22 – 25 September 2004. Have a look at my images at Flickr.]]> The workshop was organised by Erich Berger (of 7 Mile Boots fame) who brought in Helen Evans & Heiko Hansen of HeHe to give context and direction to the technical process.

        

        My intention was to avoid the screen for the duration of the workshop, to concentrate on simple interactions between sensors and outputs entirely independent of a desktop computer. But I ended up staring at microprocessor programming languages like PBasic and JAL while making lots of LEDs blink.

        

        A lot of it brought back memories of school; circuit diagrams, resistance calculations, it was great to refresh the memory. We spent a lot of time translating circuit diagrams onto breadboards, and programming both PIC and Basic Stamp microprocessors.

        Erich is now setting up a Physcomp lab at Atelier Nord to support art/design projects in Oslo, maybe alongside some regular meetings (entitled Atelier Nerd :). There are many projects that I would like to pursue, this should be a great resource.

        ]]> http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/09/physical-computing/feed 0 http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/06/social-filtering http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/06/social-filtering#comments Mon, 28 Jun 2004 01:46:00 +0000 Timo http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/06/social-filtering Yayhooray re-launched with new features and functions, and what looks like a rich environment for writing, browsing and discussion. As far as I know it’s the first forum built to use the buddy list as a form of content filtering: to increase the signal to noise ratio in the content.

        Here’s a bit of Yayhooray history:

        Built by skinnyCorp in 2001 as an experiment in online community. Along with o8 it soaked up some of the users from Dreamless, the ‘design forum’ that reached critical mass and became its own worst enemy at the end of 2000.

        Originally it was built to manage itself through a levels system; allowing users to earn administration responsibilities (similar to implicit moderation systems employed by other forums like metafilter). It worked well at a small scale but led to cliques forming around the early adopter’s own social networks.

        The levels system evolved into a points system, allowing anyone to award points to anyone, on a limited (one a day, one person a week) basis, similar to karma systems adopted at slashdot and kuro5hin. This briefly led to multiple account scams, and ended up in the ‘point orgy’ where ‘points were swapped rather than STDs’.

        In the end, both systems were abused, subverted and widely discussed, often taking over from normal discussions and swamping the site with controversy. Many regulars left to other places, some seeing closed, invite only communities (like humhum) as the only option left for humane, creative discussion.

        Yayhooray, in this latest version, is setting itself up to deal with these problems by globally filtering the content through a buddy system, rather than explicitly administering the content and user reputations. This applies to the entire site including the categorised discussions, blogging interface, links database, buddy lists and search.

        

        The most obvious feature is a meter on the left hand side, which allows 4 different filtering settings:

        • you and only you
        • you and your buddies
        • you, your buddies, and their buddies
        • every user on Yay Hooray!

          This applies a filter to the entire site, including user lists and search, which took me a little by suprise. The site is effectively meshing off into small, interlinked communities of interest, based on individual social networks and collaborative filtering.

          In my case, buddies are mostly people that I have met, talked to, or seen invest time into making things: initiating photographic threads, dealing with social issues, administering creative collaborations, giving good design critique…

          Logging in now (using ‘you, your buddies, and their buddies’) I see a small subset of the overall forum, focused on these parts of the discussion. Given that the filter is so prominent and usable, it is also possible to jump out into the chaos of the full site.

          There is also a useful, if somewhat harsh, system that censors posts and links based on a list of people that you class as ‘enemies’! Being based on proper XHTML, CSS and DOM technologies means that censored posts are easily toggled on and off.

          On the downside there will most likely be confusion and clashes when different groups that don’t mesh with each other, but have completely different experiences of the place, come together in a single thread. There will also be more repetition, or double posts of content gets repeated amongst different groups that are out of sync by virtue of the filters.

          To fully appreciate this you need to invest time in it, and to build up a network of trusted buddies. YH can be hyperactive and annoying, it must be difficult for a new user to become engaged. The filters are perhaps most useful for long-time users looking for relief from ‘worst enemy’ problems.

          Because it has become an adaptive social platform, and has the potential to be subverted and shaped into many different kinds of system, I will reserve judgement for now, and make a new report soon.

          ]]> http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/06/social-filtering/feed 0 http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/06/outside-in http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/06/outside-in#comments Tue, 15 Jun 2004 17:46:00 +0000 Timo http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/06/outside-in Outside In at Röda Sten.]]> Outside In is a forum for involving new voices, media and practices in a discourse about the use and design of public space. It took place from 14 – 15 June 2004.

          Roda Sten is amazing, below a suspension bridge, with huge concrete creations. Really windy, but calm inside the lecture space. Here are my notes and a few pictures.

          
          
          
          
          
          
          
          
          
          
          

          Day 1

          Session 2: Hacking the streets (I missed the 1st workshop)

          Space Hijackers

          • Putting memories in spaces: spaces arent the same after having been disrupted. after ‘reclaim the streets’ or a ‘circle line party’ you can’t see the space in the same way.
          • Distinction between public and private. What is it?
          • Public space doesn’t exist anymore.
          • Ken’s new city hall is half private half public (private investment was involved in the building, so protests cannot happen outside)
          • Do we need institutions in order to do events, is that the only way to do it legally?
          • What’s stopping people from doing these things is not necessarily capitalism, but the fear of looking like a pillock: self-regulation is a big factor. Can spark things to let down inhibitions or shackles. Uses example of the scooter, became a kids toy and then it wasn’t cool anymore.
          • What’s the connection between anarchism and these spontaneous events. Emergent order is interesting, so much control over actions, and the ways people move through the city. How does this relate to anarchy? Is this anarchy?

            Zevs

          • The city is a workshop: not just walls to tag
          • Shadows of urban furniture: really good
          • Visual kidknapping: Lavazza woman gets cut out of the frame
          • Big poster with bleeding eyes
          • Uses a high pressure water jet to clean the city, but also write at the same time.
          • Digs at the notion of authorship, a site where people find work on the streets
          • The work is anonymous, but there is the projection of authorial control behind it, its individual and definitely authored
          • Would be interesting to explore more about Graffiti authorship: how do public artists want to be recognised?
          • Managing the mystique around the work and the author.
          • Difference between author/instigator
          • Interview
          • Visual kidknapping

            3D bombing: Akim

          • Polystyrene models, matched to fit specific city spaces
          • City of names: what if the writers are the ones who build the houses?

            Day 2

            Session 3: Network experience

            Jonah Brucker Cohen

          • Wants to deconstruct network context
          • Context: physical and social situation in which computation sits
          • How does the network affect the output and experience
          • Companies are claiming ownership of space because of signal
          strength: strengthening signals to drown out free competion
          • WiFihog: saps out all wifi bandwidth
          • LAN party versus Flash Mob
          • Simpletext: collaborative sms image searching on large screens
          • re-mapping and changing the context of interfaces: what about
          shifting consequences: changing the input/output relationship.
          • Simpletext project: assigns an image search to inputted text
          messages, and displays via jitter/max on a large screen.
          • Steven Levy quote on hackers

            Katherine Moriwaki

          • Altering space by altering the body
          • character of a space
          • remnants of things, people, individuals
          • put magnets on wrists and fingers and bodies to reveal the proximity of electronic devices: unexpected connections to other people and lampposts. Nice.

            Data Climates: Pedro Sep�lveda Sandoval

          • Living in a scanscape city
          • electronic space, synthetic city
          • Congestion charge as walled city, in electronic space
          • London: highest density of cctv in the world
          • will we decide to travel to areas based on the quality of electronic space
          • A new architectural language for electronic space
          • Houses without windows, just cameras. Can start to control life inside. Can also choose to use the weather channel as windows
          • Pay a fee for personal surveillance: ask them to watch you all the way to the supermarket.
          • The city of Yokohama was brought down by the coming of age party for 40,000 teenagers: the networks were overloaded with messages, because the teenagers didn’t want to talk face to face.
          • Palm trees as cell towers (seen in south africa)
          • Looked at a community in Hackney that were campaigning to not have a cell phone tower.
          • Designed a house for them that would shield them from the signals, but they would have to give up cell phone connectivity. Designed it so that windows would open and close based on calls being made, or would give them 10 minute windows in which to make calls every 2 hours.
          • Digital shelter: stand inside the line

            Round up

          • These presentations all use the strategy of showing ‘hypothetical products’ that are really non-products. They are doing this, rather than providing platforms or design methodologies, or distributing resources and infrastructures for people to design their own systems. I understand the need for designers as visionaries, but this could be made more valuable and useful.
          • specialists in electronic space could be similar to lighting design specialists in the ‘70s. Will grow into a general field of understanding.
          • Platforms and inftrastructure for technology is beyond architects, but understanding of the use and consequences is really important.

            Session 4

            Jocko Weyland

          • Skateboarding as adaptive design: difference between skate parks and the street, skate parks become designed over time to mimic certain aspects of streets, but also according to innate, human skaters needs. A combination of factors go into making a good skateboarding space: free, alcohol, quality, location.

            Swoon

          • New to NY: wanted to work outside gallery space, was inspired by collage of city streets. Not from a graffiti background, being a female, can do certain things outside the norms of graffiti.
          • Changes billboards during the day, looks official.
          • Open democratic visual space
          • a visual direct democracy…
          • Cuba used to have street art as a means of free expression, but outlawed by dictatorship
          • Makes lightboxes with imagined cities, and mounts on the reverse side of construction site walls, with peepholes ‘peer here’
          • Interesting mix of opportunism and ‘designed intervention’
          • Sometimes driven purely by visual interest.

            Michael Rakowitz

          • Mike Davis: Public is phantom
          • Bedouin as a model of sustainable nomadic communities
          • Homeless use waste air from air conditioning (airvac exhaust ports) to stay warm and dry
          • Homeless have receded to the peripheral vision of the public. Want to see and be seen.
          • Seeing is important for living nomadically in the city.
          • Started to map the heat and the power of the exhaust fans in the city. Found a high one at MIT plasma lab.
          • Re-routed smell from from a bakery to an art gallery, to subvert a ‘high art’ re-appropriation of space

            Workshop ‘Loop City’

          • Dietmar Offenhuber & Sara Hodges
          • Showed Rybczynski’s film New Book using 9 frames: a good way of mapping space in the city. Starts off and the viewer is not sure if each frame is occurring synchronously, or in the same space, but a bus passes between all of the frames and the spatial link is made immediately. There is also a point where a plane flies overhead and all the actors look up: showing time synchronicity too.

            Looking at the city

          • as a set of repeated actions
          • as a playground: situationists
          • as a balance of social as well as physical architectures
          ]]> http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/06/outside-in/feed 0 http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/06/mobile-social-software http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/06/mobile-social-software#comments Sun, 06 Jun 2004 22:28:00 +0000 Timo http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/06/mobile-social-software Jabberwocky / Familiar Strangers

          This research project explores our often ignored yet real relationships with Familiar Strangers. We describe several experiments and studies that lead to a design for a personal, body-worn, wireless device that extends the Familiar Stranger relationship while respecting the delicate, yet important, constraints of our feelings and relationships with strangers in pubic places.

          Encounter bubbles

          A visualization tool based on Mobster that enables users to explore their social encounters in new ways. Designed to be an open framework on which locative (meaning location-based) networking applications can be built.

          TraceEncounters

          A social network tracking and visualization project. The project distributes a set of small stickpins, each of which uses limited-rage infrared data exchange to remember every other pin that it encounters. When pin wearers come to a central location to view the accreting network, they see a thousand circles on a plasma display panel, each representing a pin.

          Fluidtime

          The first of these services is aimed at public transport users in Turin. While on the move, travellers can find dynamic information on mobile screen-based devices while at home or at the office, people can find the same information on physical display units. The other service is a personalised and flexible scheduling system to help Interaction-Ivrea students organise shared laundry facilities; mobile and stationary tools give them constant updates about the progress of their laundry cycle.

          Mobster

          Affords the social creation and excavation of proximity history. At its core is a simple question: Who was near who when? Software on users’ mobile devices (laptops, cell phones, PDAs) monitors the presence of nearby devices (Wi-Fi hotspots, cell towers, Bluetooth devices), from which Mobster infers historical proximity models. We call these sociospatial histories.

          WiFi Bedouin

          Expanding the possible meaning and metaphors about access, proximity, wireless and WiFi. This access point is not the web without wires. Instead, it is its own web, an apparatus that forces one to reconsider and question notions of virtuality, materiality, displacement, proximity and community.

          Tuna

          A mobile wireless application that allows users to share their music locally through handheld devices.

          Jukola

          An interactive MP3 Jukebox device designed to allow a group of people in a public space to democratically choose the music being played. A public display is used to nominate songs which are subsequently voted on by people in the bar using networked wireless handheld devices.

          Mamjam

          One of the first location-based instant messaging platform for mobile phones. Asks the user to input location, and then creates links to others in the same space. (Case study here)

          Dodgeball

          Tell us where you are and we’ll tell you who and what is around you. We’ll ping your friends with your whereabouts, let you know when friends-of-friends are within 10 blocks, allow you to broadcast content to anyone within 10 blocks of you or blast messages to your groups of friends.

          BEDD

          A Bluetooth-enabled mobile social medium that allows people to meet, interact and communicate.

          BuzZone

          Using Bluetooth-enabled laptops and PDAs to find new contacts, communicate over small distances, and share information related to their business.

          TxtMob

          A service that lets you quickly and easily share txt messages with friends, comrades, and total strangers. The format is similar to an email b-board system. You can sign up to send and receive messages from various groups, which are organized around a range of different topics.

          IcyPole

          Uses Bluetooth to detect the proximity of other devices and determine whether there is a match between users� entertainment profiles. The application can be used as a platform for personal area network music discovery, file exchange and/or sampling, as well as for social networking based on similar entertainment interests.

          Peepsnation

          Enables users to connect with others with a similar interest that meet your filter criteria using user-definable groups tied to a specific location.

          Proxidating

          Using bluetooth technology, ProxiDating allows you to meet people with common interests.

          Plazes

          Plazes is a web service offering information on people and places based on your location. It enables you to tag your location and announce it to your friends or the world. You can find other Plazes in your vicinity or see where your friends are at the moment. It also allows you to see other people you do not know yet at the same Place.

          Plink mobile

          A ‘people search engine’ and social networking application. You can search for friends, see who they know and who knows them, find people with shared interests. Can use an SMS interface in the UK.

          Saw you

          Saw-You allows u 2 chat 2 people who go to the same social venues you do on your mobile phone. U don’t see their number and they don’t see yours.

          Mobule serendipity

          An application for mobile phones that can instigate interactions between you and people you don’t know. A profile, along with your mobile phone provide a connection a community of people around you.

          Who at

          Lets you find dates and friends anywhere, anytime. Tell WhoAt where you are and we tell you who’s nearby – all from your mobile phone, PDA, or PC.

          Hocman

          We have performed an ethnographic study that reveals the importance of social interaction, and especially traffic encounters, for the enjoyment of biking. We summarized these findings into a set of design requirements for a service supporting mobile interaction among motorcyclists.

          ImaHima

          The Japanese expression for “are you free now?”. A mobile, location-integrated, community and instant messaging service allowing users to share their current personal status (location, activity, mood) publicly and privately with their buddies and send picture and instant messages to them.

          Socialight

          A location-aware mobile social networking platform that allows people to connect with their friends and friends of friends in new, expressive ways.

          Socializer

          A distributed, peer-to-peer platform that connects a person to people and services in the same location. An open, extensible platform. New features can be developed and propagated by an open-source community running on wired as well as wireless networks.

          Aware

          A flexible platform that operates a spatio-temporal moblog (mobile log) allowing collective contribution and distribution of media. Considering scalable systems, comprehensive and inclusive models for participation, the project has focused upon how to communicate context-awareness, mobile experience, and its narrative potential.

          Meetup

          A technology platform and global network of local venues that helps people self-organize local group gatherings on the same day everywhere.

          Modus

          Music in a venue should reflect the taste of the people in that space, not the owner of the jukebox or the people working behind the bar. What if a jukebox allowed people to add their own music or could help you remember what was played at a particular time? What if the box was aware of who was in the room and could queue up your favorite songs as you walked through the door?

          Traces of fire

          Transmitters, embedded in cigarette lighters deliberately lost in carefully chosen pubs, illuminate the social relationships underlying daily habits of travel, entertainment and (nicotine) gifting.

          Ashphalt games

          An Internet-enhanced street game in which players stage and document small interventions or “stunts” on the street corners of New York in order to claim turf on a virtual map of the city. The game is an experiment in collectively reimagining commonplace views of New York. By providing an online counterpart to the urban environment, it allows players to share their visions of the city with others.

          Crowd surfer

          Enables a user to surf for other Bluetooth devices and get in contact with them, primarily designed for a campus environment.

          Pocket rendezvous

          A web server for the Pocket PC that advertises itself to other Pocket PCs in the neighbourhood wirelessly using ad-hoc WiFi networks and Rendezvous.

          Meetingpoint

          A contact/messaging application using Bluetooth wireless technology. Runs on Smartphones/PDA or PC and helps people to meet in mobile situations.

          Activematch

          Enables users to find their ‘ideal partner’ on the spot (unity of time and venue). Works in any GPRS network and on all mobile phones with Symbian OS and Nokia’s Series 60 platform.

          Urban Plexus

          Cell phone software that enables Members to communicate with others, blog, chat in forums, file share, publish events, locate others, buy & sell, geo-tag locations and play games.

          nTag (Research)

          An event communications system using wearable computers that improve networking among event participants while streamlining event management.

          Playtxt

          A mobile location based friendship and flirting network. Built with a mobile messaging engine, it offers full web integration and dating, flirting and friends networking capabilities, including six degrees of seperation, all mobile enabled.

          Mtone

          A social networking multi-user game “Cell Phone” is based on the popular Chinese movie of the same name. This comedy movie was directed by one of China’s best known directors, Feng Xiaogang. Customers play this multi-combining romance and SMS and MMS.

          Tagtext

          Download pictures, wallpapers, screensavers and avatars to use for Bluejacking.

          Bluetooth against Bush

          Uses bluetooth enabled devices (mobile phones, PDA’s, laptop computers) to create moments of ad-hoc solidarity for people opposed to George W. Bush.

          Wavemarket

          A suite that can turn a mobile phone user into an on-location broadcaster. You can add information and commentary about restaurant reviews to safety tips. You can find a buddy, or track a truck, inspect a neighborhood for real estate or child safety. It’s good for both social and business and it puts the power of blogging technology into the hands of the masses.

          ]]> http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/06/mobile-social-software/feed 0 http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/06/spatial-annotation http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/06/spatial-annotation#comments Wed, 02 Jun 2004 18:52:05 +0000 Timo http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/06/spatial-annotation physcomp, interactionfield and aware for inspiration.]]>

          Image from Yellow Arrow project.

          Murmure

          An archival audio project that has collected stories set in specific locations throughout Vancouver’s Chinatown. At each of these locations, a murmur sign marks the availability of a story with a telephone number and location code. By using a mobile phone, people can listen to the story of that place while engaging in the full physical experience of being there. Some stories suggest that the listener walk around, following a certain path through a place, while others allow a person to wander with both their feet and their gaze.

          Area Code

          Invites you to collect and reflect upon your immediate environment, and enables new forms of engagement and information exchange between person and place. Areacode aims to inspire comments about the affect of urban regeneration in the city.

          Yellow Arrow

          A physical sticker allows people to mark places of interest, then tell a story about it using a photographic record.

          Grafedia

          Grafedia is hyperlinked text, written by hand onto physical surfaces and linking to rich media content – images, video, sound files, and so forth. It can be written anywhere – on walls, in the streets, or in bathroom stalls. Grafedia can also be written in letters or postcards, on the body as tattoos, or anywhere you feel like putting it. Viewers “click” on these grafedia hyperlinks with their cell phones by sending a message addressed to the word + ”@grafedia.net” to get the content behind the link.

          The Blue Plaque project

          Collect all of the plaques in London, and then to put the people and events they commemorate in context – with their time, their contemporaries, and location.

          Implementation

          Implementation begins as sheets of stickers, with a different text on each sticker. We will distribute these sheets to individuals, both personally and via post. Instructions, asking people to peel the stickers off and place them in an area viewable by the public, will accompany the sheets.

          Talking street

          Using everyday technologies, like your own cell phone, Talking Street offers new ways to explore a destination. It’s having an ultra-savvy resident show you around—a guide who can reveal what a place is really like, and how it got that way.

          The intelligent street

          The intelligent street will enhance the experience of users in both locations by creating a gentle sonic playground that reflects the cultures of its users, entertain and act as a talking point. Users will be able to interract by sending SMS messages from their mobile phone. A display in each location and on the web will give optional information about how users are engaging.

          Neighbornode

          Group message boards on wireless nodes, placed in residential areas and open to the public. These nodes transmit signal for around 300 feet, so everyone within that range has access to the board and can read and post to it.

          TAG: Scripting Presence

          The inundation of consumer and mass media advertisements has eroded the presence of the individual within the city. In my thesis, I will explore how we can reclaim our physical landscape by reinserting the individual through visual representation into her/his urban environment. My intent is to create a momentary place to communicate messages of self-expression contributing to a network in which the next user can connect and experience.

          R-Click

          An area-information service from NTT DoCoMo incorporating mobile phones and a “wireless tag” device. A small, handheld RFID device will enable users to receive a wide variety of area information as they walk around the new metropolitan cultural complex of shops, restaurants, entertainment facilities, residences and hotels (Roppongi Hills).

          Public Play Spaces

          A platform for creative work exploring the playful, emotional and appropriate incorporation of technology into everyday public life. Drawing on our combined background in art, architecture, game and interaction design, the work focuses on developing both innovative design methods and experimental prototypes for social interventions in public space.

          Trailblazer

          A computer-mediated communication tool for supporting a virtual community. It attempts to integrate aspects of physical activity by community members in the real world into the virtual environment and to provide a structure for discourse around those activities.

          34 North 118 West

          Lets the user uncover samples of Los Angeles’s hidden history as s/he navigates through the multi-layered depths of downtown’s most poetic and surreal space. The result is a new kind of ‘scripted space’...

          InterUrban

          A user-driven experience that responds to participant’s amble through the city streets. Factors such as the distance traveled by the listener, time of day and proximity to fictive events, determine how the narrative unfolds.

          Hidden natures

          Location based narrative. Texts read by actors are the voices of the characters you hear as you walk through a space. A double headed arrow on the screen of your pocket computer (PDA) indicates the narrative direction – the future in one direction and the past another

          Greyworld: Telescapes

          Visitors discover a soundscape of messages left for them by both the artists and the public via voice and email. This interactive installation calls attention to how advances in cellular and wireless technologies contribute to the ubiquity of personal communications in public spaces, while illuminating the relationship between the built environment and the invisible networks that make these fleeting exchanges possible.

          Geoloqus

          Geoloq.us is a service that lets users leave behind memories, comments and digital artefacts in a physical location, for others to discover and enjoy. A cameraphone with a web browser is all you need to use geoloq.us; browse pictures from the place you�re at, comment a location or a picture and find out what�s nearby. Tag your items and surf those tags for similar items from other people in other places.

          GeoNotes

          Based on positioning technology, allows people to attach virtual notes to real world locations. When other people pass the location, they will be notified about the note and will be able to read it. GeoNotes allows mass-annotations with no or little restrictions on accessing others’ GeoNotes. It is also social in the way it incorporates social filtering techniques to sort out unwanted GeoNotes.

          GeoStickies

          An interactive public art project that enables us to make and access to collective of personal memory that could have been overlaid on to urban space. The project puts some “tags” of small events onto geographical fields so that the audience can feel correspondence between “Information space” and “Urban space”. The audience will find tiny electronic memorials for tiny events. But those are only visible or able to be experienced through mobile phones.

          GeoGraffiti

          To demonstrate the concept of waypoint sharing we have been developing a number of waypoint sharing applications. These applications access the waypoint lists for retrieval and storage of waypoint data and other accessory information, such as text, images, audio, video, or links to other information.

          Digital Graffiti

          The application allows mobile phone owners to send a message, similar to an SMS (Short Message Service), to a geographical point where it appears on the screens of other users passing through the defined location. Unlike an SMS, the message is not sent to a person but rather to a location, and can be received by a number of mobile phone users entering the defined radius.

          Ambient Wood

          An outdoor playful learning experience. Pervasive technologies are used to digitally augment a woodland in a contextually relevant way, enhancing the �usual� physical experience available to children exploring the outdoor world. Studies show this to be a highly engaging novel experience for learners, that effectively supports collaborative learning, as well as providing preliminary guidelines for designing different ways of delivering digital information for learning.

          Thingster

          Lets you publish information about places. You can use thingster to discover things in your own neighborhood that might be interesting to you – and you can use thingster to publish information about things that you find interesting. Thingster also provides signalling and discovery services for discovering other nearby folks with interests similar to your own.

          World-Wide Media eXchange

          The project explores possibilities with digital photographs and geographic location. The location where a photo was taken provides clues about its semantic context and offers an intuitive way to index it, even in a very large collection. The combination is powerful, but still not supported well by either the photo-software or camera-hardware industries.

          Mobile Media Metadata

          Leverages the spatio-temporal context and social community of media capture to infer media content.

          Altavistas

          An experimental project to explore how physical and electronic spaces can be designed in conjunction with each other to provide new kinds of experience in the city.

          mStory

          A mobile mapping and recording system built for the PocketPC platform. It integrates GPS tracking technology with a set of diary-like recording features. mStory assign a variety of attributes to recorded locations, including photos, audio recordings, narrative descriptions and icons.

          Katumuisti tositarinoita Helsingista [Street memories]

          Personal local stories for public listening using mobile phones & billboard notices.

          Interactive portrait of the Liberties

          An interactive digital narrative application providing multimedia content to individuals and to groups, which is relevant to them at a particular point in time and space.

          Section

          A database video project, currently under development, that examines the embedded syntax of our routes through the city and challenges the mediated experiences of the urban environment through methods of collecting, editing and compositing video.

          TRACE

          A memorial environmental sound installation that is site-specific to the network of hiking trails near the Burgess Shale fossil beds in Yoho National Park, British Columbia.

          Map Hub

          MapHub is a web-based, multi-user, group managed information storage system and map. Collecting information about people, places, events, and notes, can help to document unseen narratives and histories in public or private theme-based Hubs.

          Community Mapbuilder

          Offers a range of resources to help organizations get started with standards-based online mapping. The main initial focus is creating an open source framework to allow communities to jointly build geographic databases and share them over the web.

          Annotated multimedia Google map

          This how-to will show you how to make your own annotated Google map from your own GPS data. Plus, you�ll be able to tie in images and video to create an interactive multimedia map.

          City of memory

          A narrative map of New York City that allows visitors to create a collective memory by submitting stories. Visitors link stories together by theme, creating new “neighborhoods” of narrative that can be explored by others. Stories can be recommended, giving new visitors a sense of the narrative created by the populace.

          TeleTaxi

          A site-specific media art exhibition in a taxicab. The taxi is outfitted with an interactive touch screen that displays video, animations, music, and information triggered by an onboard GPS receiver which allows the displayed artwork to change depending on where the taxi is in the city.

          New York Songlines

          By relying on maps, signs and Manhattan’s perpendicular geography, New Yorkers have given up something important: a sense of place. If you can get from your starting place to your destination without knowing anything about the points in between, chances are you won’t pay much attention to them.

          Touch Tone Tours

          Delivers tour guides of popular landmarks, museums, attractions and the unusual to wireless devices. More info.

          Soundwalk

          Sound recordings as guides to specific locations. Available as audio for sale or as downloaded format from Audible or iTunes.

          Tag

          A street activity proposed for the site of Times Square, NYC. Employing mobile phone text messaging, it focuses on increasing personal contribution and interaction to the experience of this public space. Individuals will participate with one another as they tag designated areas or �nodes?? by displaying their inscription.

          Mogi

          A collecting game ‘item hunt’. The game provides a data-layer over the city of Tokyo. As you move through the city, if you check a map on your mobile phone screen, you’ll see nearby items you can pick up and nearby players you can meet or trade with.

          ASAP: another spatial annotation project

          Allows you to visualize your location on a map, use a GPS unit (I use a GPS-based GPS device) to mark your coordinates (or just navigate the map to find your location – especially useful in cavernous cities like Manhattan), annotate that location by titling it and giving it a description, optionally adding an icon or snapping a digital picture with the attached camera.

          Urban Tapestries

          A research project exploring social and cultural uses of the convergence of place and mobile technologies.

          HyConExplorer

          HyCon is a framework and infrastructure for context aware hypermedia systems developed primarily by the hypermedia group at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. The HyCon framework encompasses annotations, links, and guided tours associating locations and RFID- or Bluetooth-tagged objects with maps, Web pages, and collections of resources. The HyCon architecture extends upon earlier location based hypermedia systems by supporting authoring in the field and by providing access to browsing and searching information through a novel geo-based search (GBS) interface for the Web.

          Herecast

          Provides location-based services on a WiFi device. At its simplest level, it can tell you where you are. More advanced services can use your location to enhance information lookups, publish presence information and create games.

          Texting Glances

          This ambient “waiting” game establishes a symbiotic relationship between a transient audience, a waiting place, and a story engine that matches SMS inputs to image output. By incorporating culturally current messaging norms, the audience becomes an active collaborating author in a layered exploration of social familiarity and public space.

          Public alley 818

          Creating and performing artworks in a public alley in Boston, MA, with work selected by participants in the space and online.

          One block radius

          Psychogeographic survey of one block in New York, building a multi-layered portrait of a particular part of the city.

          Annotate space

          A project to develop experiential forms of journalism and nonfiction storytelling for use at specific locations. Stories are presented through text, images and audio files that participants can download from the Web to their handheld computers and take with them to the place of interest.

          Annotated Earth

          The goal of AnnotatedEarth is to create a user-driven community of quality location and spatial information, a infrastructure for accessing that information, and software that uses that information to provide location-aware information.

          Embedded Theatre

          A system for creating immersive narrative experiences where location is an actor. It is the result of an intensive research and design project addressing how interactive narrative can be successfully realized through mobile technology.

          Tag and Scan

          London-based locational application and service for mobile telephones. The technology allows users to “tag” a physical locations, placing them into meaningful context. Tags can be private or public. Other TagandScan users can scan their environment for public tags left by others. TagandScan essentially enables the community to annotate its physical features.

          Spotcode

          Each Spot is a circular symbol that holds data like a two dimensional bar code. Users of the latest camera phones point their phone at the Bango Spot circular symbol, click and the mobile site opens on their phone in a matter of seconds.

          PDPal

          A mapping application that transforms everyday activities and urban experiences into a dynamic city that you write. Engages the user through a visual transformation that is meant to highlight the way technologies that locate and orient are often static and without reference to the lively nature of urban cultural environments.

          AmbieSense

          Context-sensitive technology based on the use of context tags. These small electronic tags are a means of capturing and communicating information about the surroundings.

          Hypertag

          A commercial service allowing access to info and content on a mobile phone directly from objects like adverts and signs. It works by allowing infra-red mobile phones, and PDAs (e.g. Palm Pilots or Pocket PCs) to interact with a small electronic tag which is attached to the advert or sign.

          Pathalog

          Exploring the ability of a path-based publishing system, based upon GPS tracking technologies, to foster new relationships between communities of users and their environments.

          Waveblog / Wavemarket

          Three commercial platforms for location based services. You can add information and commentary about restaurant reviews to safety tips. Waveblog lets users upload blog-like information with geographic metadata.

          Rabble

          Rabble enables a new kind of self-expression that informs, entertains and connects people through the media they create. Create your channel and post location-based media – your favorite places, photos or an up-to-the-minute newsworthy event. It’s like putting virtual sticky notes on the world around you.

          Earthcomber

          Lets you connect with customers in a timely, efficient and positive way. By providing a direct match between a user’s favorite and something you offer, Earthcomber brings you to the customer’s attention. In multiple information screens, they can see what you offer and where you are on the map.

          Timespots

          Offers ‘location-based services’ on mobile devices (PocketPC/phones) enabling new uses of traditional travel and tourism services. We overcome current limitations (in reach of and access to information and services) by combining information and navigation services with communication services on one device.

          Websigns

          HP research labs. Using a handheld computer, cellular phone or other device, users can get information on the Web related to physical structures and objects in the immediate vicinity.

          Microsoft Aura

          The Advanced User Resource Annotation system (A.U.R.A.) is designed to provide the ability to access and author annotations on objects and places using machine readable tags. In our system, a user can associate text, threaded conversations, audio, images, video or other data with specific tags. Users can also review the tags and descriptions of the objects they have encountered and annotated in a custom web portal.

          Active Campus

          Community-oriented ubiquitous computing, exploring the problem and opportunity of sustaining community through mobile wireless technology. The two principal applications in operation are: ActiveCampus Explorer, which uses students’ locations to help engage them in campus life; and ActiveClass, a client-server application for enhancing participation in the classroom setting via small mobile wireless devices.

          Mobile Augmented Reality Systems

          Exploring the synergy of two promising fields of user interface research: Augmented reality, in which 3D displays are used to overlay a synthesized world on top of the real world, and mobile computing, in which increasingly small and inexpensive computing devices, linked by wireless networks, allow us to to use computing facilities while roaming the real world.

          Living Memory LiMe

          A network of augmented places within the local community which support the creation and meaningful distribution of informal content within that community. LiMe provides low-threshold interfaces in natural meeting and crossing points within that community, such as caf�s and bus stops.

          Location linked information

          LLI is similar to augmented reality systems which overlay digital information on top of the physical world. Whereas augmented reality systems typically concentrate on solving the user interface problem, LLI attempts to solve the data access and search infrastructure issues. In LLI users navigate the physical world with a variety of XML-speaking devices, discovering and leaving “handles” to information nuggets.

          MUD London

          A kind of collaborative mapping project. it consists of geographical models which are represented as RDF graphs. you can wander round them, like a MUD or MOO, with a bot interface which you can use to create and connect new places.

          Psychogeographical Markup Language

          A protocol that can be used to capture meaningful psychogeographical [meta]data about urban space. PML is a unified system of classification that lurks behind the psychogeogram: the diagrammatic representation of psychogeographically experienced space.

          Spatial Annotation with Locative Packets

          An attempt to fuse powerful concepts of existential declaration (I am here experiencing this!) with networked social communication media. By mixing together a set of terms about space, time, description, social relationship, and media, the locative packet project has described a unique ether over which one form of collaborative map can travel.

          Wooster Collective

          Huge archive of street artists work, techniques, interviews, and guides.

          Here I am only including projects that mark space, not mobile social software or dynamic gaming, smart-mobs, friend-finders or GPS drawing projects, although I have included a couple of spatial platforms, that aim to standardise the way we mark-up space.

          ]]> http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/06/spatial-annotation/feed 3 http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/05/public-markup http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/05/public-markup#comments Mon, 17 May 2004 00:15:00 +0000 Timo http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/05/public-markup This research looks at the marking of public space by investigating the physical annotation of the city: stickering, graffiti and billboards. It attempts to find patterns in this marking practice by looking at visibility, techniques, process, location, content and audience. It proposes ways in which this marking can be used as a layer between the physical city, and digital spatial annotation.]]> I have made a selection of research images over at Flickr, and more of the text and research will be online soon.
          ]]> http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/05/public-markup/feed 0 http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/04/creative-crossings http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/04/creative-crossings#comments Wed, 28 Apr 2004 16:41:00 +0000 Timo http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/04/creative-crossings m-cult, banff centre and arts council england to bring together practitioners from Britain, Canada and Finland to discuss participatory and creative applications for the development of mobile/located and cross-platform media. It was a research based event looking at practice in contemporary media arts.]]> Some of our ambitions were:
          • Investigate transformative use of space and place
          • Address gaps in infrastructure: access to standards, material frameworks and technology
          • Instigate a triangular network: tried and trusted network practice
          • Pursue research and practice, less engineering
          • Explore relationships between media, gaming, locative, mobile, visual media

            Anne Galloway has posted our collaborative summaries from the workshop and my full notes are here, until they can be put on the collective server.

            The discussion is continuing, and the next informal meeting of participants is happening at ISEA 2004.

            Some pictures

            ]]> http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/04/creative-crossings/feed 0 http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/04/urban-gps http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/04/urban-gps#comments Mon, 12 Apr 2004 11:38:00 +0000 Timo http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/04/urban-gps looking.]]> It’s possible to use the GPS Map 60c in an old Marimekko bag in a mobile phone pocket just small enough that the aerial sticks out. In this way it can be placed in windows of buses or cars without it sliding around, and I can walk around without looking like a geek or getting mugged.

            

            Problems

            In short, GPS doesn’t work well in dense urban environments like most European cities. This is from the perspective of a pedestrian confined to the pavements (sidewalks) and public transport. From a few experiences whilst being driven around, it seems to work well in a car, probably because of the clear sky area available in the middle of the road. Inclement weather and green trees also seem to be problematic.

            In these last few months, attempting to record a good quality database of tracks to geo-locate my photographs, I must have looked really odd. Face in device, stopping on street corners, stopping in the middle of street crossings and scrambling to grab the front seat of the bus. Discovering that GPS doesn’t just passively work is a great disappointment and my dataset is clouded with gaps and anomalies.

            Some other observations

            • Fast turns when using public transport or car result in wild deviations: re-aquiring satellites is the problem
            • Need a road that aligns with at least 4 satellites to get an acceptable track, anything else and the errors can accumulate
            • Glass buildings can result in ‘reflections’ of position, eg jumping to other locations due to reflected signals
            • I sit on the outside or front of buses: to get a wider expanse of sky area: I am constantly aware of sky cover
            • The relative position of satellites is beginning to have an effect on the side of the street that I walk on
            • Walking in the middle of the street: had a couple of near misses with cars – the moving map is just too engaging
            • I would like an explanation of the lost track calculations: this device seems to use the last-known bearing and velocity to guess new tracks when the signal fails. This is very unreliable and problematic as it fills the map with phantom trails
            • The track can be more useful over time than the (base) map: it shows my personal space and personal routes, I know where I have been and can use it to retrace routes or places. Popular routes build up in blackness and thickness. Home area becomes an abstract scatter plot of routes, but it’s very familiar
            • Stored waypoints are really useful for getting large, general bearings on location: zooming out and seeing a relationship to two known landmarks can be really useful in an unknown area

              

              

              

              ]]> http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/04/urban-gps/feed 0 http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/03/interaction-design http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/03/interaction-design#comments Thu, 18 Mar 2004 23:34:47 +0000 Timo http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/03/interaction-design Pink = highly recommended!
              

              Information Appliances and Beyond

              Eric Bergman ed. One of the best interaction design books to date. With case-studies on various design problems from Palm OS usability to Nokia contextual design issues. Just enough detail and anecdotes to get a good sense of design process.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              The Humane Interface

              Jef Raskin. An absolutely essential book for anyone developing an interactive product. Raskin explains some excellent ideas for usable interfaces that are better suited to large file systems and the internet.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              Designing Visual Interfaces

              Kevin Mullet, Darrell Sano. A useful book with plenty of visual examples on how to simplify and enhance desktop interfaces.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              Dust or Magic: Secrets of Successful Multimedia Design

              Bob Hughes. Somehow forgotten, this book gives a great overview for successfully designing rich multimedia interfaces.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              Reinventing the Wheel

              Jessica Helfand. Plotting the history and design of information wheels, those interactive tools that can tell you the cooking time of an egg to the blast radius of a nuclear bomb.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design

              Brenda Laurel ed. A collection of dated (early 80s) essays that begin to see interface as a design discipline. Complex and theoretical.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              Designing the User Interface

              Ben Shneiderman. Really thorough book, concentrating heavily on software interface design from a programming perspective.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              Bringing Design to Software

              Terry Winograd. A dialogue around the design process in software development.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              Plans and Situated Actions

              Lucy A. Suchman. A new approach to interaction design using new social science models.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              GUI Bloopers

              Jeff Johnson. A lighthearted book highlighting common interface mistakes.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              The Inmates Are Running the Asylum

              Alan Cooper. Really good ideas to solve common interface design issues. Cooper shows that the biggest problem in interaction design is that it is controlled by the developers and programmers, and advocates the need for interaction designers at every level of software production.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              Apple Human Interface Guidelines: The Apple Desktop Interface

              Apple Computer. The original guidelines for developing MacOS GUI interfaces. The version for MacOS X can be downloaded from apple.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              ]]> http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/03/interaction-design/feed 0 http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/03/adaptive-design http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/03/adaptive-design#comments Wed, 17 Mar 2004 12:18:57 +0000 Timo http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/03/adaptive-design Notes on the Synthesis of Form

              Christopher Alexander.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              The Nature of Order

              Christopher Alexander.
              amazon.com

              The Oregon Experiment

              Christopher Alexander.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              A Pattern Language

              Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              The Timeless Way of Building

              Christopher Alexander.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              How Buildings Learn

              Stewart Brand.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams

              Mitchel Resnick.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software

              Steven Johnson.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              The Tipping Point

              Malcolm Gladwell.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web

              David Weinberger.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution

              Howard Rheingold.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              The Death and Life of Great American Cities

              Jane Jacobs.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              Adventures in Modeling: Exploring Complex, Dynamic Systems with StarLogo

              Vanessa Colella, Eric Klopfer, Mitchel Resnick.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              A New Kind of Science

              Stephen Wolfram.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              The Control Revolution

              Andrew L. Shapiro.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              Society of Mind

              Marvin Minsky.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              The Electric Meme

              Robert Aunger.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet

              Sherry Turkle.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              The Virtual Community

              Howard Rheingold.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              Design for Community

              Derek M. Powazek.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              Community Building on the Web

              Amy Jo Kim.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              Online Communities

              Jenny Preece.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              ]]> http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/03/adaptive-design/feed 0 http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/03/design-for-television http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/03/design-for-television#comments Wed, 10 Mar 2004 12:16:11 +0000 Timo http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/03/design-for-television Typographer.org / David Earls has covered the basics of design for television in a clear and accessible way. I have been meaning to write up some guidelines specific to (interactive) television, here is a start.]]> David’s reference to 18 points as the minimum size equates to 18 pixels if you are coming from a web background.

              On some iTV projects I have pushed the type down to 16 pixels, but be very careful about colours and contrast, and enquire about the production path to air: if the work is going to be transferred via DV tape, squeezed through an old composite link, or online-edited with high compression, then you might want to leave type as large as possible.

              In some cases � such as using white text on a red background � you can add a very subtle black shadow to the type, which will help stop colour bleed and crawling effects. Even if you dislike drop-shadow effects, it will still look flat and lovely on a broadcast monitor.

              Safe areas need to be taken with a pinch of salt. The default safe areas in most editing and compositing software date from years ago before the widespread use of modern, widescreen televisions.

              Try extending the safe area for non-essential text in interactive projects, and consult broadcaster guidelines for their widescreen policies: many channels now broadcast in 14:9 to terrestrial boxes, and offer options to satellite and cable viewers.

              The largest problem is that widescreen viewers often crop the top and bottom of the image by setting their TV to crop 4:3 to 16:9. Some cable/satellite companies remove the left and right of the image to crop 16:9 to 4:3 for non-widescreen viewers, leaving us only a tiny, safe rectangle in the centre of the image to work with.

              Robert Bradbrook (maker of Home Road Movies) has a some technical but excellent information on designing graphics for 16:9 television and film formats, including a sample safe area.

              There are also excellent documents on picture standards from the BBC.

              But this is one thing I don’t understand: according to the BBC: “Additional [20 or 26 horizontal] pixels are not taken into account when calculating the aspect ratio, but without them images transferred between systems will not be the correct shape.” Can anyone confirm that this is the case for PAL images?

              ]]> http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/03/design-for-television/feed 0 http://www.elasticspace.com/2003/10/design-management http://www.elasticspace.com/2003/10/design-management#comments Sun, 12 Oct 2003 23:46:56 +0000 Timo http://www.elasticspace.com/2003/10/design-management Mastering the Requirements Process

              Suzanne Robertson, James Robertson.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              Software Requirements

              Karl E. Wiegers.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              Collaborative Web Development

              Jessica Burdman.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              Web Redesign: Workflow that Works

              Kelly Goto, Emily Cotler.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              Rapid Application Development

              Steve McConnell.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              ]]> http://www.elasticspace.com/2003/10/design-management/feed 0 http://www.elasticspace.com/2003/08/usability http://www.elasticspace.com/2003/08/usability#comments Mon, 11 Aug 2003 09:40:59 +0000 Timo http://www.elasticspace.com/1999/11/usability The Design of Everyday Things

              Donald Norman.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              Things That Make Us Smart

              Donald Norman.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              The Design of Sites: Patterns, Principles, and Processes for Crafting a Customer-Centered Web Experience

              Douglas K. Van Duyne, James Landay, Jason I. Hong.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              User-Centred Web Design

              John Cato.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              Contextual Design: A Customer-Centered Approach to Systems Designs

              Hugh Beyer, Karen Holtzblatt.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              User and Task Analysis for Interface Design

              Joann Hackos, Janice Redish.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              Shaping Web Usability: Interaction Design in Context

              Albert N. Badre.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              Submit Now: Designing Persuasive Websites

              Andrew Chak.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              Handheld Usability

              Scott Weiss.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              Web Accessibility for People With Disabilities

              Michael G. Paciello.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              Design by People for People: Essays on Usability

              Russell Branaghan.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              Designing Web Usability

              Jakob Nielsen.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              Usability Engineering

              Jakob Neilsen.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              Web Site Usability

              Jared M. Spool.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              Don’t Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

              Steve Krug.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              ]]> http://www.elasticspace.com/2003/08/usability/feed 0 http://www.elasticspace.com/2003/04/game-design http://www.elasticspace.com/2003/04/game-design#comments Thu, 10 Apr 2003 23:45:28 +0000 Timo http://www.elasticspace.com/2003/04/game-design Rules of Play : Game Design Fundamentals

              Katie Salen, Eric Zimmerman.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              Game Design

              Bob Bates.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design

              Andrew Rollings, Ernest Adams.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              Game Architecture and Design

              Andrew Rollings, Dave Morris.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              Game On

              Lucien King.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              RE:Play

              Liz Faber.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              Electronic Plastic

              Jaro Gielens, Robert Klanten.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              Trigger Happy

              Steven Poole.
              amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

              ]]> http://www.elasticspace.com/2003/04/game-design/feed 0