This account by a brit teenager of how he used a Sony Walkman from back in the days is highly intriguing. The kid tells his story and compare it to the ipod. Some excerpts I enjoyed:

“My dad had told me it was the iPod of its day.
(…)
Throughout my week using the Walkman, I came to realise that I have very little knowledge of technology from the past. I made a number of naive mistakes, but I also learned a lot about the grandfather of the MP3 Player.
(…)
It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette
(…)
Another notable feature that the iPod has and the Walkman doesn’t is “shuffle”, where the player selects random tracks to play. Its a function that, on the face of it, the Walkman lacks. But I managed to create an impromptu shuffle feature simply by holding down “rewind” and releasing it randomly - effective, if a little laboured.
(…)
This is the function that matters most. To make the music play, you push the large play button. It engages with a satisfying clunk, unlike the finger tip tap for the iPod.“

Why do I blog this? this is both fun and inspiring as it is always curious to see how the naive usage of previous devices is described (especially in conjunction with the use of new artifacts). Of course, beyond the fun read, it’s interesting because it allows to grasp todays’ users perception of certain features and affordances. The need to have a reference (”the iPod of its day”) and the understanding of switches and button is shows how mental model are shaped by previous usage of technologies.

These four pictures depict different ATM interfaces from Lyon, Santa Monica, Lisbon and Paris. As usual, there is a lot to draw here: keyboard minimalism versus “a button for each bill needs”, presence or absence of jack-entry for headphone, paper annotation, ATM receipts dumped in the cracks, etc.

Why do I blog this? An always-interesting approach to object and design analysis consist in taking pictures of similar items in various places, and to adopt an analytical perspective (drawing comparisons, observing exceptions or recurring phenomena, trends and patterns, etc.). I wish I had more time to spend on this sort of analysis.

(an interactive display at Zürich train station)

In his chapter called “Extreme Informatics: Toward the De-saturated City” (taken from “Handbook of Research
on Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City” by Marcus Foth), Mark Shepard offers an insightful critique of urban screens. He basically posit that they operate as “skeuomorph” in the evolution of urban informatics.

The notion of “skeuomorph” is taken from Hayles who borrowed it from anthropology to describe transitional objects and meme in the context of cybernetic theory:

“In archaeology, skeumorphs are material artifacts that simulate an aspect of a previous time using a technology that has superseded it. They are derivative objects that retain structurally necessary elements of the original as ornamentation, stripped of their original function. Skeuomorphs are often deliberately employed to make the “new” look familiar, comfortable and accessible. Examples include the simulated stitching of the vacuum formed vinyl replacing the fabric upholstery of car interiors, the mechanical shutter sound produced by digital cameras, or more abstractly, the metaphor of the “desktop” work-space of the personal computer introduced by Apple with the Macintosh computer in 1984, where the organizational syntax of files and folders serves to orient us within an otherwise unfamiliar space“

For Shepard, these transitional artifacts enable to soften the transition between technological phases. As he points out, “Artifacts (and by extension ways of thinking) of one moment are carried forward into the future by simulating aspects of the past“. Quite an inspiring quote I think.

Using this notion, he then explains how urban displays are based on a longstanding model of information access and distribution in public space that is old (and flawed): the fact that we need to access MORE information (and that it should be broadcasted to a “public”):

“I would argue that the paradigm of large-scale “urban screens” operates as a skeumorph in the
evolution of urban informatics. It is based on conceptual categories whose relevance vis-à-vis contemporary societies is questionable. While this paradigm may serve to smooth the transition of integrating digital information systems into urban environments, it does so by reproducing modes of information access and distribution that no longer hold sway. In doing so, it perpetuates design logics regarding “the public” and “public space” that are perhaps less reflective of the way we access, share and distribute information today.“

The paper also offers an interesting exploration of other strategies for urban computing/informatics to offer alternatives.

Why do I blog this? I have to admit that I am often on the look out for such theoretical constructs that enable to reflect on technological design. The notion of “skeuomorph” seems relevant and largely applicable to other fields. It’s surely important to use in a course I am preparing for next week about innovation and foresight.

A quantification device encountered on a bike path in Marseille last sunday when riding “le vélo” (that’s how they call the bike rental system down there). Two intriguing pieces of strings connected to a metal box. As an aside, the warning sign on top of it could even be re-used by angry punk-rock guitar players if they wish to start a new band.

This artifact led me thinking about how measurement devices could take different shape.

On one side you can have small and portable objects like pedometers or fancy nike+ shoes. You just take the damned thing and put it in your pocket or simply sport it while walking/running. It’s individual, each human who like to have a reflective account of his/her own movement use it. And that’s all good: as a user you can access the data and reflect on them. Of course, there are different levels of access ranging from reading them on the screen to exporting them in a fancy spreadsheet to run statistical computations.

On the other side, it’s also possible to have measurements infrastructures like the one represented above. It’s collective and generally put in place by a city stakeholder (be it a transportation company/institution or the city council). In this latter case, the information is less accessible to the users: it sits rights there in the weird box and some human comes uploading them before parsing the whole thing on the 7th floor of a building owned by his company. Obviously, the granularity of the information collected by this device is way different than our first category. In addition, the aim is also distinct. The point here is to get some insights about the number of cyclists riding on this bike lane. For the record, this is the “sensable city” from the 20th century: situated data-capture at its best, then-turned into a tool for decision-makers about how this place is “used” by people who ride bikes.

Why do I blog this? categorizing different measurement devices is intriguing and contrasting the approaches.

A subtle cue on the pavement that indicate that you should press “2″ on the audio-guide. An interesting location-based service which do not necessitate a GPS or any other positioning technology. In this case, it relies on people’s curiosity and will to spot this sort of red dot on the pavement.

Why do I blog this? apart from the general aesthetic of the cue, it’s interesting to contrast this sort of approach and a positioning technique. What are the pluses and minuses? What are the conditions under which it would be better to let people spot such cues (and hence be more active)?

Sunday morning in Marseilles, France. This folk is collecting material and old devices in the city. I don’t really know what he’s going to make out of it but he seems to be fully equipped. Perhaps some tinkering and device repurposing, the fan may surely prove handy with Marseilles’ hot temperatures.

A practice that I see more and more in occidental cities.

Somehow, this soft infrastructure, a zebra crossing in Marseilles, is quite intriguing: (1) it’s yellow (which reveals that it’s a temporary signage), (2) it’s interrupted by a layer of concrete that has been added there.

Why do I blog this? observing the decay of soft infrastructure and how different layers pile up in the urban environment.

“in the land of the mute - the blind are deaf“, the local version of “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king“. This is Marseilles, France and today is Workshop-day, lots of things going on.

A recent telco ad campaign aimed at showing the pervasivenness of the Internet in the physical environment… through a chaotic set of arrows that indicate the omnipresence of network access in the environment. 10′000 arrows have been deployed last saturday in certain swiss cities.

From another point of view, it may be perceive a physical spam.

As shown in his book “Social Theory and Social Structure”, Robert Merton coined the expression “self-fulfilling prophecy”:

“a situation where “a false definition in the beginning… evokes a new behavior which makes the original false conception comes true (…) this specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error. For the prophet will cite the actual course of events as proof that he was right from the beginning“

Why do I blog this? preparing a course about innovation and foresight leads me to revisit this notion. The history of sciences and techniques has a great list of such prophecies.

In the various interviews for my book about location-based services, privacy is often brought to the table, especially with french journalists who really want to deal with this angle. What happens is that most of the discussion revolves around the potential fear caused by Google Latitude, Aka-aki (I was even asked what I thought about the GPS bra). Most of the time, there is a big confusion between the imaginary representations some people of these technologies (trackable everytime everywhere) and what is really implemented.

It’s generally hard to talk about something else so I try to move the discussion to different grounds. My point is to show that privacy is indeed a problem but that there are other interesting matters when it comes to locative media. In order to do that, I highlight how locative technologies can be repurposed or hacked through playful or critical practices. Projects such as iSee that that maps the locations of surveillance cameras in urban environments and propose paths to avoid them are interesting for that matter. The possibility to avoid surveillance becomes a purpose here.

Which is why I was interested in reading “Playing with Surveillance“, a short paper by Judy Chen that deals with this issue. It basically presents a playful design of an application that exploits surveillance as a playful practice through a camera phone. The paper describes the application but I was more interested by the design rationale:

“Our design for mopix was inspired by an observation we made of a woman taking a photo with her phone in a shopping mall. The woman was photographing an object in a store across the walkway, but another woman sitting nearby hid behind a baby stroller in an effort to avoid being in the photograph. To the first woman, her camera phone was a device she could use to capture a memento from her experience at the mall. To the second woman, the camera phone was an unwanted surveillance device that was invading her privacy and anonymity.
(…)
By taking a playful approach in our design, we trivialize aspects of surveillance that are typically disconcerting to users, while at the same time, providing engaging experiences with the system and between users. “

Why do I blog this? documenting interesting examples of technology ambiguity and their non-neutral nature. This work is interesting also in the discussion about locative media and privacy or how to go beyond the general discourse about these 2 issues.

Last tuesday I was in Torino, Italy for the “I Realize” conference organized by TOPIX (Torino Piemontre Internet eXchange). Participating as a workshop facilitator, I was told to focus on how people will move and interact in the city of tomorrow. We worked on identifying unsolved problems, suggesting possible (technological?) solutions. The day after the workshop, I presented a quick overview of the results that others such as Bruce Sterling commented during the panel. Annotated slides can be found here. The workshop was based on a quick field exploration in the morning, during which participants were told to collect some material about people practices and needs. The afternoon as devoted to material analysis and discussion of design issues and solutions.

Thanks Leonardo for the invitation!

An interesting example of a car carpet repurposed to hide a locker at the door of an urban garden in Torino.

The presence of scales in public space has always intrigued me. Such a quantification device is generally private but there are different occurrences of public appearances. The picture above in Torino depict street scales that people can use (and pay for) to know their weight, which is definitely a personal use, although it takes place in a public space. There is clearly a cultural thing to have this sort of artifact in the urban environment and I don’t really know the whole picture here. It seems curious though.

The one below, taken from a lift in an hotel in Paris shows the scale of the group: it’s a group indicator that is meant to prevent the elevator to break down if the weight is too important. I can’t help thinking about the awkward situation that may happen if the scale warns people that there are too much people in the lift. Will the negotiation process be fluid or will it lead to unexpected arguments. As usual with devices that make things explicit, I foresee surprises.

Why do I blog this? yet another example of quantification devices employed in our material world. The practices at stake here are important to document and compare to the whole discourse about how measuring our movements/activities can lead to original representations and services (will individual weight be a parameter in some sort of scary identification process? will we have elevator services based on group weight? how weird?).

The use of these measurement devices in public space is certainly an interesting locus of interest for people who want to explore what happens when “things that were implicit becomes explicit”… which is also what happens with ubiquitous computing as Adam Greenfield put it in his “Everyware” book:

“Everyware surfaces and makes explicit information that has always been latent in our lives, and this will frequently be incommensurate with social or psychological comfort“

Just finished reading “The Caryatids” by Bruce Sterling. This inspiring book is built around the history of the four Mihajlovic sisters, who are surviving clones of a biopiracy lab. Spread in different countries (Balkans, California and the Gobi desert in China), each of them represent a different “camp” (Acquis, Dispensation, China and crazy individual) with different values and approaches to see the world. All of this is wrapped in en eco-disaster twist that is a bit reminiscent of Sterling’s other novels (“Holy Fire or “Distraction”). Both a fun and deep read.

The novel is an insightful extrapolation of our present: the description of the faction (through each character in the 3 chapters) is a good example of how todays trends could evolve in the mid-term. We have networked-participative-ecofriendly Acquis, futile-wired-greedy Dispensation and Nation-State China who all have their own approaches to see the world. After Distraction and its “Moderators versus Regulators” factions, Sterling keeps exploring social and political differences of the near future. Like a foresight research report with a 3-scenarios structure, the book offer different visions of how tackling today’s world problems can be achieved through differently. Of course, these 3 responses correspond to existing forces at play nowadays.

This “3 responses” structure makes me think that futures think-tanks and foresight research group can take this novel as a great example of how they could craft engaging deliverables. The “futures/foresight” angle is important anyway and Sterling drops bits of wisdom here and there that will definitely echo with futurists’ approaches:

“the sea had no ‘real’ blue and the camp was no ‘real’ camp. There as a mélange of potent forces best described as ‘futurity’. They were futuring here, and the future was a process, not a destination.” (p13)

“it was an old trick, but often a good one. Most trend-spotters using the net looked for raising new items that were gaining public credibility. But you could learn useful things in a hurry if you searched for precisely the opposite. News that should have public credibility, but didn’t.” (p118)

“Futurism is prediction. We all know that’s impossible. But history is retrodiction, and that’s impossible too. Se we have to paper over these black holes with sheer imagination.” (p295)

Besides, one of the character (Little Mary Montalban, that looks IMO to some sort of “little miss sunshine”) even described herself as a Black Swan.

Beyond these general elements, The Caryatids is an excellent platform where Sterling brings a context and some carefully-crafted poetry of technological devices and social trends. By describing the crossing of these elements, the novel shows various implications about what our society (researchers, designers, policy-makers, entrepreneurs) are doing right now on our planet.

One of the easiest aspect to get, if you’re following ubiquitous computing and networked objects, consists in the discussion of everyware and what Sterling refers to as the “Sensorweb”:

“the sensorweb was a single instrument, small pieces loosely joined into one huge environmental telescope. The sensorweb measured and archived changes in the island’s status. Temperature, humidity, sunlight. Flights of pollen, flights of insects, the migrations of birds and fish” (p10)

“now the island was an aspect of the web” (p11)

“your everyware touches everything that we do here” (p33), “cover the world with scanner and sensors” (p78)

The vision the reader is presented here is not just descriptive since the most interesting aspect of the sensorweb discussion concern its implications. As shown on the picture above (p72), there is a relevant differentiation between “sensory analysis” versus “sensory control”. The two correspond to different approaches to a problem at stake today with the advent of networked sensors and the possibility of collecting information from mobile devices and the web.
The current debate (today, not in the novel) is basic: (1) We have traces that are available today (generated by the use of mobile devices, picture upload on the web) and that will be easier to collect tomorrow (brain activity, heartbeats), (2) some people think it can be an opportunity for social sciences renewal, others fear that it can lead to greater control. Which actually corresponds, in the novel, to this pertinent quote by a cloned chinese state warrior who paraphrase Gilles Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control“:

“The worst threats among those state running dogs are provocative figures who foment new relationships emerging from the long-standing interplay of social and urban control experiments practices by the state elite against the colonized posturban peoples. Through continually linking sensors, databases, defensive and security architectures, and through the scanning of bodies, these running nodes export the state’s architecture of control” (p257)

“Diseases were everywhere, while surveillance was everyware, Everyware crushed diseases, subtly, comprehensively, remorselessly” (p211)

Moreover, Sterling reminds us that the situation is not so simple and that “blackspots” are part of the solutions:

“a hole in a sensorweb was called a blackspot. The laws of physics declared that there were always blackspots in the world. Computer science could assume perfectly smooth connections, but the Earth had hills and valleys and earthquakes and giant volcanoes. The sky had lightning storms, and even the sun had sunspots. Wireless connections were not magic fogs. Real-worl wireless connections were waves, particles, bits: real things in real places.
So, If you didn’t want to be seen, or heard, or known in a world of ubiquitous sensorwebs, there were options. You could find a blackspot. Or created blackspot. Some blaskspots were made by organized crime or official corruption. Other blackspots just grew in their natural blackness.” (p161)

If you read Human-Computer Interaction, you’ll recognize here the discussion around the messiness of the physical environment, seams and seamful design described by Bell and Dourish or Fabien Girardin). Which is exemplified by the part about augmented reality that is criticized by one the character as “pasting fantasies onto the island” and flawed because there is “a design conflict between strict geolocative accuracy and an augment that everyday viewers might willingly pay to see“. To put in shortly, the augmented layer is not well adjusted to the physical environment and the digital part “appears to be hovering” over the material layer.

As a side remark, I would highlight the fact that this argument about the inherent messiness of the physical world is one of the trickiest to convey to a certain class of people who always think that “eventually XXX will be taken care of” (replace XXX by “phone connectivity” or “GPS coverage). One of the concluding remark in the novel is not so optimistic though:

“Those ubiquitous systems, what they used to call the ‘mediation’, the ’sensorwebs’. (…) Those technologies advanced so far that they vanished. The language operating systems, frameworks of interaction, the eyeball-lasting laser-colored neural helmets… all that stuff is more primitive than steam engines now. I mean, you can tell how a steam engine works by just looking at it, but a complex, distributed, ubiquitous system? There’s no way to maintain that! That all became ubijunk! Those cutting-edge systems are gone like sandcastles. A rising tide of major transformations threw them up on the shore, and then the whole sea rose and they are beyond retrieval” p295

There is of course more in the novel. The two last points I was intrigued about are finally:

• Participation and reputation-based social systems are in the background, a bit less than in Distraction (with the reputation servers process). The Acquis faction is based on “glory rating” and they use “an architecture of participation” to promote people at other ranks.
• The whole fun around “correlation engines”n which are “an amazing new business tool (…) that never fails to hit on correlations of major interest“

Why do I blog this? this is a quick and rough transcript of the notes I’ve taken when reading the book. I enjoyed the whole thing and it’s interesting to put the novel in perspective with the author’s musings, warnings and speeches. As usual, there is a lot to draw from Sterling’s novel, and I tried to make some connections here in the 30′ I allowed myself to write in this blogpost.