February 2004 Archives

Update: Hi, everyone. Because for some reason this entry gets massive spam, and I need to get the admin of this (school-based) server to install the anti-spam plugin for me, I'm disabling comments here. Don't everyone complain all at once.

So my head has been in the land of large stationary LCD screens for a while (meet my new best friends) and not in the land of small mobile devices. But I had a helpful conversation with the mighty Mer, scourge of careless thereminists and mean people, so I have made a bit of time to finally answer Matt’s question from Etech.

Addendum: I fixed all the links now. Sorry about that.

Part I: Portholes and lighthouses

It’s important to note that I’m not really a gadget person. I’m sure there’s all sorts of lovely and exciting stuff out there that I just don’t know about. However, now that I am extremely mobile myself (no landline, no ISP, no permanent address) I’m beginning to get more and more interested.

The problem is that I want my cell phone to be both a porthole and a lighthouse. I want it to show me what’s going on elsewhere in my little social world (a la Upoc) and I want to reveal more of my world to my friends. Location data, photos, sounds — whatever. Thus far, my mobile phone has been a terrible disappointment on both counts.

Part II: There’s no time (and place) like the present

It’s clear that mobile interfaces are going to have to deal better with context — geographic and social. I'm thinking here of Scott's and the Bell Labs systems' attempts to deal with mobility, location-sensing, and privacy preferences. And I’m also thinking of all the ubicomp work on trying to determine “social context” and have devices that automatically respond. [The IDEO Social Mobiles take a different tack by attempting to modify user behavior.

The problem with preferences, as Scott says, is that establishing them ahead of time doesn’t really help manage the unexpected — and we encounter the unexpected everyday. So you’ve got to have a mobile UI to manage who knows where you are, when. And it needs to take into account the fuzziness of all those concepts. The “are you my friend?” question is getting ever more unhelpful, as is the “are you a friend of my friend?” question. And the thinking of “location” as some sort of unified, uncomplicated set of numbers that we can all just integrate into existing interfaces is also pretty unhelpful too. As Chris Heathcote remindsme, “location” means something different when you’re driving than when you’re walking. It’s different at 1am and 1pm. It’s different when you know where you are and when you’re lost.

That’s a lot of difference to pack into a tiny screen. I’m thinking here of what Pet Shop Boys told us back in the ‘80s:

Too many shadows, whispering voices
Faces on posters, too many choices
If, when, why, what?
How much have you got?
Have you got it, do you get it, if so, how often?
And which do you choose, a hard or soft option?
(How much do you need?)

Part III: Soft options

It’s funny how “preferences” in UI-speak mean the exact opposite of general usage. Often, “preferences” are a code word for maturity. I prefer cream in my coffee — but I don’t need it. I’ll take the powdered stuff if necessary. Preferences are why adults don’t raise bloody hell over dairy-free coffee at 8am. People with preferences, as opposed to people with needs, have a little built-in wiggle room. They are tolerant of failure.

Preferences in UIs, whether mobile or otherwise, tend towards the imperious and the absolute (it’s like they’re small children or celebrities). [This is, I think, a discussion similar to Molly’s thinking on vagueness.] My cell phone doesn’t have preferences in any way I understand the phrase. It has dictates. I wish there was an input field for commands like: “I’d actually rather not get calls right now, but if the message seems very urgent you might keep bugging me until I pick up" - but that’s a bit much to expect. However, it's reasonable at some point soon to expect the phone to cope a little bit better with social ambiguities.

Sketching on a touch screen (including pressure and speed variables) is one way to introduce that kind of softness. I could doodle on a map of NYC to register interest in events in specific neighborhoods. Or I could draw “blackout zones” where the ringer is never on. Drawing could also introduce some social distinctions in my address book by letting me create, edit, and link groups more quickly.

Time-based media and semi-transparent overlays might also help add some flexibility to the mix. I’m just wildly speculating here, but maybe managing my social/geographic visibility by using transparency as a UI widget might be helpful. I’m recalling a very interesting paper I saw last year from James Hudson and Alan Parkes at Lancaster University on combining “context dependent gestures, animated periphicons and transparent overlays” to save on screen real estate.

Part of why I keep the clamshell — despite its evident flaws — is the satisfying snap when I close it. With my last phone, I’d periodically forget to lock the keys and would suffer inevitable embarrassment when it dialed friends, ex-friends, and casual acquaintances. I like the snap — so why not use more tactile interactions? Why not a squishy phone I can squeeze to shut up, or a phone that responds to gesture and deletes a txt when I shake it.

More and more, I don’t want to fiddle with my phone to get a message. I'm not so convinced I want an always-on, push-to-talk, radio-style communicator. But it would be nice if the little screen on the front of my clamshell acted like an always-open porthole, providing a limited, fleeting glimpse of a larger sea of social communications. I may not always have the time to read messages or participate, but its nice to hear my friends as a low murmur of conversation underlying the main activities of my day. Because that’s what I did with shells when I was a little girl. I put them to my ear and listened for the ocean.

Like Minnesotans, people in Japan do appear to have more mobile fun, as evidenced by Mogi, a game where:

Players move outside, pick up virtual items through their mobile phone interface then trade with other players to complete collections. The goal is to get the maximum points completing collections.

Paul Baron has a good explanation of what makes this game so interesting:

- It uses the GPS in my phone, and that's so cool.
- It maps a virtual data layer onto Japan and brings a fresh new way to look at my map of Tokyo.
- All the trips I make in the city are now randomized, as I will often divert a few hundred meters to go and collect an object around me. I get a chance to discover parts of the city that I ignored, a motivation to check out that parallel street I never took.
- It has a community dimension to it, I chat with other players, I also know how far I am from them and finding out some are less than a few hundred meters to me is really exciting. Over the past month, I bumped into a player who turned out to be the creator of the game, I had to race to pick up a flag that had been put on the map at equal distance between me and another player to encourage us to meet.
- The web interface of the game is pretty impressive, with nationwide 3D map with cool visual effects, detailing where all the objects are, along with special items and shops.
- The game offers a few different scenarii to accumulate points, for instance you can pick up scrolls along the way, which when activated in those shops can produce new objects.

Paul Baron is an expat Brit in Tokyo. Mike Liebhold posted a link to his blog on geowanking....and here we are.

Mogi is moving towards Matt Walsh's plan for a MM(offline)RPG played by people on city streets. I always had a soft spot for the idea of joining together with fellow guild members to slay a dragon underneath Times Square. Just imagine the kind of carnage we could create in the Meatpacking District.

When you make machines that are computers but don't look like desktop boxes an accepted part of routine transactions, it's awe-inspiring how easy it is to rip people off. For example, take ATMs and electronic voting machines. I don't think much about the former, and have pretty much exhausted my outrage over the defects of the latter. But today, John Benton reported this "elegant and malevolent" ATM scam at U Texas that reminded me of both.

The equipment used to capture your ATM card number and PIN is cleverly disguised to look like normal ATM equipment. A "skimmer" is mounted to the front of the normal ATM card slot that reads the ATM card number and transmits it to the criminals sitting in a nearby car.

At the same time, a wireless camera is disguised to look like a leaflet holder and is mounted in a position to view ATM PIN entries.

The prop leaflet container (which, if you know how to look for it, has a big ol' hole for the camera lens) reminds me of the potential exploits discovered (PDF linked here) by a team of security experts hired by Maryland to analyze the Diebold voting machines last month. Lots of ink and pixels have been expended on the potential electoral disasters discovered, but my favorite scenarios were less about scripts and more about picks. Apparently, it took an inexpert member of the team about three minutes and a cheap set of lock picks to access the box inside.

Those kinds of voting machine defects exist because Diebold employees were naive about physical data security in the face of criminal ingenuity. Just because a box is locked doesn't mean it stays closed. In the same way, just having a secret PIN doesn't mean there aren't ways to track where you put your fingers on the keypad. We tend to trust banks and, well, we used to trust the electoral system. It's disconcerting but ultimately safer to remember that neither can ever guarantee our safety from other people's malevolence.

I had the best of intentions and had planned to annotate all the talks I attended, then post them with lucid and thoughtful commentary. Fortunately for me, this unexpected freelance job showed up and I am now totally overwhelmed. So I am going to have to declare timeliness the victor in this skirmish in the never-ending war of "late but beautiful" vs "timely but imperfect."

I will just have to addend later.

Matt Webb

glancing.interconnected.org

Lili Cheng and Sean Kelly
MSR

Social computing

[as usual, anything in brackets is all me]

Fiona Romeo

finding the right moment: fluidtime timing tools for social networks

Molly Steenson and Michael Kieslinger

[mostly quoted directly, if garbled-ly. sorry.]

Collaborative contexts and relationship-based computing

Social relationships transcend applications
Manifesto/slogan1: don’t build applications. build contexts for interaction.

Architecture of entertainment has been shaped by the idea of “immersion”
[architecture for participation]
: architectures built to spend time in (for transactions)

Play is about people, not places

Play is often about building things (including places) collaboratively

Most expressive forms of play involve improvisation and collaboration

ex: A badge which shows whether you’re on or offline in the game

: creating a game that’s more than an island on the net
: bridge the outside world to the game

ex: social network explorer
: in-game relationships applied to “out of application” actions

GNE neighborhood browser
: transpose the game relationships to a blog context (instant blogroll)
: blur the lines between the game and the rest of the net
: using a js include to help surf relationships between players

Manifesto/slogan2: Not application-based computing, not document-based computing, but relationship-based computing

ex: Flickr
: shape the flow of content that you generate
: create paths for distribution
: batch upload to enable and annotate realtime group communication
: ways to manage sending/receiving to others
: filtered Amazon recommendations based on your friends’ recs on Flickr

Applications, like architecture, can shut down possibility

I just moved back to NYC for a temporary (but very intense) freelance job. So I'm a little distracted at the moment. A lot distracted. New York is just a ridiculously irritating and wonderful place to live. Do you know that I spent four hours on Tuesday first trying to find a curtain rod that would fit in my window, then trying to find hammer and nails? The city may never sleep, but its hardware stores are all closed by 9pm.

I'll be here for about 3 months. I should be reacclimated in a few days and posting again.

Sorry for the delay.

Returning to the subject of Etech, I'm still thinking about Don Norman's keynote, which made one nice suggestion and two unhelpful ones.

Norman is selling the importance of emotions to "win hearts and minds." Emotional (sometimes called "affective") design is a big thing right now; I think it represents an attempt to bridge the gap between design as art practice (usually taught using group studios in art schools, usually with aesthetics as a metric of success) and design as scientific discipline (usually taught in CS or engineering depts, often using cognitive efficiency as a metric of success). So Norman's trying to be a peacemaker by reconciling engineers to the value of nonquantifiable factors like emotionality and aesthetics in creating successful products. He's trying to explain why "poorly designed" (from an engineering POV) products often do so well in the marketplace. Which is laudable, as far as I'm concerned.

The problem is that in promoting art-design values to an engineering audience, he implies two crucial misreadings of the lessons (I, at least) have learned as a designer. Since I haven't read the book, I'm willing to admit that I may be misreading him, and that many of my complaints may be based on the way authors often simplify complicated arguments in order to fit them into an hourlong speech. Still. I think his pedagogical mission is better served by fully explaining fewer concepts, rather than breezing through a laundry list.

Maya just sent me this site, a collection of photographs of chain stores that have been...repurposed.

It is not without the bitter taste of self-awareness, specifically about the overwhelmingly crass and commercial (and, indeed, downtrodden and dreary, bleakly suburban, and economically grim) nature of the content of this site, that we at NFA embark on our quest to document bad conversions. That said, it is perhaps best that we look at this phenomenon as a delightful yet sad part of our culture's clattering landscape: it is an amusing diversion, it is an economic gestalt, it is a crime of design, it is a confusion to the would-be consumer. Let us rejoice in bad conversions and seek to amuse ourselves with them wherever possible, taking utmost pains to observe the careful, hopeless touches of their renovation and their indelible flourishes of nonsense on our landscape. Embrace blight! We have no other hope.

Someone named Liz Clayton is responsible.

So lo these many weeks ago, I found a super-cool site, downloaded a jpg to blog, and then promptly got distracted, forgot about it, and couldn't find my way back a few weeks later when I remembered again. Luckily, BoingBoing takes care of such things for me, because the guestblogger is one of the people responsible for the genius illustration above: Project Mendel:

Logos taken from companies listed in the Fortune 500 were mixed strictly after Mendel’s theory of heredity, using characteristics such as colour, type face, type size, type style, et cetera. The decision about who is the dominant partner was of course determined by capital.

I met these really nice undergrads who had somehow convinced O'Reilly to give them free press passes to the conference in the name of an undergrad weekly newspaper -- which is akin to me getting a free pass by telling O'Reilly I'm going to write it up for my blog. I respect ingenuity in the face of relative poverty and exclusion, especially from people under drinking age.

Anyway, they had very long faces after the Microsoft Research presentation on Wallop, and came over (I think) to get some sympathy. Basically, they felt as if MSR had taken its 500 lb gorilla self and sat on all their cool ideas. And because it's Microsofty, Wallop is bigger, glossier, more function-packed and infinitely more robust than anything two undergrads could put together in a semester. It synthesizes a lot of thinking about PC-based group communication into one overwhelming package.

I sympathized. I did. It always sucks when you learn that your brilliant idea has already been had, articulated, developed, and publicized by older and better funded people. Oh, and it also sucks when they're getting paid to work on it 8+ hours a day and you're paying tuition.

But so what if they feel that Wallop has blocked an entire avenue of creative development? So what if they feel that a lot of their own thinking and insight has been steamrollered by a monster truck that they're not even allowed to drive? Knowing what you're NOT going to do can sometimes produce more knowledge than knowing exactly where you're going.

What I tried to tell the undergrads, in my own confused and ham-handed way, is that their job is not to compete with the MSRs of the world. Their job is to find the interesting ideas that MSR can't imagine (being more established can be a barrier to certain kinds of innovation, Shawn Fanning being a case in point), then run with them. MSR is doing Wallop - they should go off and do something else more exciting.

I'm not sure if they believed me. I'm glad I'm not an undergrad anymore.

Hi there. I was too distracted by interesting people at the conference to be much good at writing anything thoughtful. You know, I'm just not one of those people who can simultaneously write in paragraph form and IM and listen to a speaker and read slides.

Now I can post again, and will post more as I get my balance back.

Via SmartMobs, I just learned of the work of Usman Haque and have been thinking a lot about SkyEar.

This non-rigid "cloud", made up of several hundred glowing helium balloons will be embedded with mobile phones. The balloons will contain miniature sensor circuits (simple gaussmeters) that detect levels of electromagnetic radiation at a variety of frequencies. When activated, the sensor circuits will cause ultra-bright coloured LEDs to illuminate. The cloud will glow and flicker brightly as it passes through varying radio and microwave spaces.

As visitors to the event call into the cloud to listen to the distant electromagnetic sounds of the sky (including whistlers and spherics), their mobile phone calls will change the local hertzian topography; these disturbances in the electromagnetic fields inside the cloud will alter the glow intensity of that part of the balloon cloud. Feedback within the sensor network will create ripples of light reminiscent of rumbling thunder and flashes of lightning.

I also read Sky Ear (although Haque probably does not intend this reading) as an echo of the extent to which features of the “natural” landscape have disappeared into human-built structures. The lights from the Los Angeles skyline turn the night sky lavender; the lights from oil drilling platforms out at sea look a bit like low-hanging stars.

The interaction concept is very apt, very clear, very elegant. The clouds of elecromagnetic washing the earth become visible, human intervention imagined as flashes of lightning. But somehow I’m not convinced. I want some things to remain invisible, unless there’s real need. In this case, the sky is enough for me. I’ve beent rying to figure out why I responded so negatively, but somehow the physicality of the cloud disturbs me. It’s a beautiful idea, but the plastic bubbles in the air seem like pollution: plastic bags washed into gutters that strangle sea animals; city lights that occlude the stars; smog that chokes the Valley. Extra elements that cloak not clarify. There’s a glut of visual information in the air now: billboards, signs on skyscrapers, plane winglights. Even in interaction there’s an (understandable) obsession with visibility at the expense of other senses. Even if the lights are pretty and interactive and meaningful, they’re still one extra ingredient in an already crowded sky. I’d prefer a Sky Ear above my head that listens, but doesn’t talk back.

I’m more excited about Haque’s project Haunt, which uses humidity, temperatures and electromagnetic and sonic frequencies that parapsychologists have associated with haunted spaces...[to build] an environment that feels "haunted."

This is more-or-less a paraphrase. I've tried to put all direct quotes in, well, quotes. Enjoy. [my comments in ital]

The O’Reilly Radar

key word: “amplify” -- it’s occurring often at this conference

“The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” --Wm Gibson

Following the Hacker Frontier
- hackers push the limits of new technology
- entrepreneurs apply hacker knowledge to mass consumption
- tech becomes widespread
- hackers move on

The New Killer Apps
- we all use web services like Google, ebay, amazon, paypal etc
- funny how all the web services run on linux, but we wouldn’t describe ourselves as linux users
- software is elsewhere

What O'Reilly Thinks Is Interesting
- Internet is platform
- Built on top of open source, but not open source
- Services not packaged apps
- Exploring becoming platforms thru web apis
- Data aggregators, not just software
- User contributions are key to “market dominance”

Geoapps
- the mapping service that gets user participation right will win in the end
- maybe with meetup.com?

Mobilizing people
- moveon.org: largest advocacy organization in the world
- just getting people to do stuff

Wikis
- SO easy
- wikipedia
- wordspy

Wireless devices
- mobilewhack

iTunes
- Rendezvous
- mobile enabled
- no architecture of participation for users
- data sharing is limited
- why no iPhoto and iTunes buddies?
- need best practices for network-generation apps
-- managing relationships: modes of intimacy and interaction
-- also, the “where is my address book?” question

[where is the sweet spot of p2p and webservices data aggregation?]

Network-enabled Market Research
- spiders: asking the computers what they’re doing

Manipulating data through visualizing it
- netscan
- technorati
- Valdis Krebs’ political book selling map (watching the purchase patterns)

Hacking
- FirstMile in Cambodia: the guys on motorbikes picking up email [DTN: Delay Tolerant Networking]
playing with hardware

“second generation network effects”
social software
network enabled market research/data visibility
architectures of participation
robotics/hardware

Intersections, crosswalks, street corners, and destinations: it was one of those mornings with a lot of correspondances.

A locative space looks then like an intersection, a space defined by community, place, interests and tasks, a hybrid of digital media, the dimension of place, and physical reality. from the (increasingly fascinating) Locative Network blog

tactile crossing guard: The small, grooved rotating devices are being attached to the underside of push-button panels at pelican crossings.[...] When they spin in the hands of blind or partially sighted pedestrians, it is safe to cross. via BBJ

Liminal spaces are the spaces in between, thresholds or transitions from one state or space to another. Also boundaries, beginnings, becomings, and similar forms of cultural transition. via plsj

10 most dangerous intersections and photos, ranked by an insurance company (and why can't I get this kind of info as a warning signal from my car?)

We are trained to be in relation to the goal, to live in absent time. Joseph Chaiken

...and this intersected photo from glowlab's fotolog.

The SWIPE Toolkit is a collection of web-based tools that sheds light on personal data collection and usage practices in the United States. The tools demonstrate the value of personal information on the open market and enable people to access information encoded on a driver's license or stored in some of the many commercial data warehouses.

Turbulence.org has sponsored the project which includes directions on how to decode the 2D barcode on the back of some drivers licenses, get information on what kind of data commercial warehouses are collecting and selling on you, and a data calculator, which gives you "the fair market value of your data bits."

Easy. Free. Disconcerting.

via del.icio.us

You know, Minnesotans do have more fun, typographic and otherwise. Cf. the Design Institute's BUG

The Big Urban Game (B.U.G.) is a five-day city-wide event that transformed the Twin Cities into a 200-square-mile game board. Three B.U.G. teams raced 25-foot-tall Red, Yellow and Blue inflatable game pieces through the streets of Minneapolis and St. Paul each day. As players in the B.U.G., the public chose which routes the pieces raced along, and followed the day's progress on the B.U.G. website. B.U.G. checkpoints were the start for discovery walking tours based on specially commissioned KNOWLEDGE MAPS — nine interpretive maps of the Twin Cities — available now through the Design Institute.

Inflatables + city streets + group action = so good.

Via heidi's photo albums at memyi

Mexico City has launched a book-lending program to promote literacy and good behavior on subways by handing out 1.5 million free books to commuters. The idea is that commuters pick up the special editions at the entrance, then return them at the exit.

So far, the program has been exceedingly popular. Many passengers said they could not remember the last time anybody gave away anything or trusted strangers. Television stations have been showing passengers reading on the subway, and in doing so, spreading the word about the program to its target audience: those who rarely read but watch a lot of television. [emph mine]

The book return rate is 64%, which is okay, if not stellar. But I don't think the cause of literacy is hurt by people taking books home to finish them later. This project reminded me a bit of Book Crossing, and I wondered what would happen if the Mexico city transit authorities started a Book Crossing-like website or, on the low-tech side, left some pages blank for people to write their own reviews.

Via WaPo

...I will be in San Diego next week being, um, "Socially Mobile".

Hecklers welcome.

The first time I saw the RemoteHome project, I missed the most salient point:

The RemoteHome is a flat share that will exist in two distant cities at the same time: London and Berlin. Both spaces are electronically connected through the Internet, to turn furniture and architectural elements into tangible and sensual means of communication. Sensory and kinetic devices, as well as an interactive light installation allow for the exchange between this remotely living group of friends. A mobile wireless artefact, in the shape of a transforming interactive bag, can be taken on journeys to stay emotionally in touch with the RemoteHome. [emph. mine]

...it's all about sharing life in groups over distance. Unless I misunderstood and the apartments are single-occupancy, this project is one of the first attempts at technology-enhanced domestic spaces I've seen that responds to the conditions of unmarried life in urban centers. Roommates, longterm friendships, delayed marriage/childbirth -- it suddenly hits me that there's been little telepresence work involving the kind of sustained group relationships Ethan Watters described in Urban Tribes.

Now, it could be that there's little work because this just not a good idea, like the doomed voyeurism of We Live in Public. But I wonder if it isn't just that, at least in America, there hasn't been a lot of attention to paid domestic spaces that don't conform to the three- bedroom-and-two-car-garage model, or the gadget-filled Maxim-al flat.

I don't know if I would want to live with my friends in New York, even though I miss them terribly. Part of friendship is the careful maintenance of distance, after all. But I'm touched that the aether design group are trying to support the friendships of people like me -- or even people like themselves.

Portland's City Repair is an all-volunteer grassroots organization helping people reclaim their urban spaces to create community-oriented places.

Their T-Horse project is a winged vehicle that travels around Portland every Monday evening during the summers.

The purpose of the T-Horse is to have neighborhood tea parties in parks, giving neighbors an opportunity to meet each other in a unique yet informal atmosphere. We flyer each neighborhood we visit, and ask neighbors to bring homemade dessert, music, and conversation to share with each other under the wings of the T-Horse. The truck provides tea and atmosphere for connections to take place.

So nice, especially when I think of the proliferation of parks in San Pedro, where I am now, and how rarely I see people in the early evening using them.

Anyway, my first thought was: "and why not add free WiFi?" Which is weird, since I'm already getting eye and wrist strain from the hours with the lid up. And also weird, since I'm already seeing a massive backlash against online connectedness, and especially against the advent of the umpteenth social software. As someone posted on one of my (too-many) mailing lists: I actually find myself withdrawing from the web: In addition to using it because of my job, I'm on only three discussion lists (on which I mostly lurk) and I keep in touch with friends and family abroad (though I find myself calling them instead of emailing these days). When I go on vacation,
I don't even check my email anymore.

Airports are great places for the kind of "take your work everywhere" ads that seem to be what marketers think business travellers will like. You know -- the ad where the guy is sitting on a swing or something with his laptop. Great. Americans now work more hours and face greater intrusion of work demands into leisure time. Cafes and parks are more and more workplaces, which is all very well. It's how I live my own life. But my own impulse to extend the permanet to the T-Horse is a symptom of my everpresent...busyness. I'm pretty much always working. Or on my way to work. Giving me more access to online communication -- even when I think I want it -- won't make my evenings any happier.

And why tie people to more screens? It's bad enough that every fifth SUV I see around LA these days seems to have a video screen hanging from the ceiling*. I love free public WiFi, as who doesn't**, but there's nothing wrong with enjoying a summer night without the glow of the monitor and the click of keys.

* Boredom is the mother of excellent car games.
** As I've already told everyone who will listen, I can't believe that T-Mobile expects to make a profit on charging for WiFi when any nearby business can reap the promotional benefits of doing it for free without also having to serve coffee or provide seating.