ggalaxy

Some insights from a recent study by NPD about portable gaming (collected from over 3,200 pre-identified sample owners of portable devices from September 16-23):

“79 percent [of those polled say] they use their portable device in-home, far more than any other location.
(…)
Gameplay is the feature used by most (84 percent) on the PlayStation Portable. Slightly more than one third of PSP owners are watching movies (35 percent) and listening to music (33 percent) on their device
(…)
Ninety two percent of Nintendo DS owners are playing games by themselves followed by close to one quarter playing games with friends locally using one game cartridge.„
(…)
Listening to music dominates iPod usage (96 percent) followed by playing games (20 percent) at a distant second.“

Although it’s not mentioned in the article, I guess it’s a US study. The conclusion states that (1) these devices may be competing with more stationary entertainment devices for a user’s time, (2) the scope of gaming devices is changing to entertainment devices, (3) “„iPods/iPhones are being treated as entertainment devices.
Why do I blog this? interesting evolution in the last few months wrt mobile entertainment. I also wonder about the range of applications, especially on the Nintendo DS as there are more and more cartridges which are not really games (such as Hello Kitty diary for example). The possibility to design non-games is more and more intriguing in this field.

Recently been working on the future of economic and cultural exchange with a good bunch of people. The project is called KashKlash and has the following purposes:

“KashKlash is a lively platform where you can debate future scenarios for economic and cultural exchange. Beyond today’s financial turmoil, what new systems might appear? Global/local, tangible/intangible, digital/physical? On the KashKlash site, you can explore potential worlds where traditional financial transactions have disappeared, blended, or mutated into unexpected forms. Understand the near future, and help shape it!

Imagine yourself deprived of all of today’s conventional financial resources. Maybe you’re a refugee or stateless — or maybe it’s the systems themselves that have gone astray. Yet you still have your laptop, the Internet, and a broadband mobile connection. What would you do to create a new informal economy that would help you get by? What would you live on? E-barter? Rationing? Gadgets? Google juice? Cellphone minutes? Imagine a whole world approaching that condition. Which of today’s major power-players would win and lose, thrive or fail? What strange new roles would tomorrow’s technology fill?”“

This public domain project is conceived and led by Heather Moore of Vodafone’s Global User Experience Team and run by Experientia, an international forward-looking user experience design company based in Turin, Italy.

You can check the project description for more info.

KashKlash also involved a participatory exploration phase in which you can join and follow the debate of our experts or contribute yourself by leaving a comment on the different matters or fill out our KashKlash questionnaire.

Short notice: I will re-play my xtopia talk from yesterday today at BTK Berlin at 5pm. Partly presenting my own work, plus a discussion of visualizations around the US presidential elections.

(Spare parts from an old robot encountered last year)

In “The Uncanny and The Everyday in the Design of Robots” (a paper submitted as a CHI workshop in 2004), Carl DiSalvo discusses an intriguing topic: how the design should not prevent people loosing sight how unusual certain artifacts are. He applies his reasoning to electronic products such as robots:

“Recently there has been a surge in the development of robots as products for use in offices, public spaces, and the home. (…) The forms and functions of robots are often explicitly constructed as imitations of living beings. Through these imitations, robots exhibit and are attributed qualities such as emotion, intelligence, and autonomy, (…) how can we avoid losing sight of how unusual it is to grant such qualities and roles to them? “

Di Salvo then proposes that “The Uncanny” is a relevant and critical approach to reveal the underlying issues and implications of robots. What he means by this term is simply that the familiar can act strangely, which is of course related to this “Uncanny Valley” notion:

“The Uncanny Valley is that point where the resemblance between a robot and a human is almost, but not quite, identical, and the tension between this difference/sameness is disturbing. Even though The Uncanny Valley has never been systematically examined, it is perpetuated in the robotics community as a place to be avoided. But perhaps, it is not a place to be avoided. Because The Uncanny causes us to confront basic assumptions central to the design of robots, perhaps it is exactly the place where a critical approach to the design of robots should focus. “

He then gives three conceptual propositions for the design of uncanny domestic robots:

1. Robotic Vacuums That Speak Their Mind (”I have never been in this room before, please stay with me while I clean it.“)
2. Homely Homes For Robots, Unhomely Homes for Humans (”uncanny homes, homes that were unhomley for humans but homely for robots — redefining the artifact as an inhabit“)
3. Real Appliance Pets (”transform a robotic vacuum cleaner into
   a more realistic imitation of a pet“)

Why do I blog this Beyond the fascination towards this sort of device (of course I’d love to have a nevrotic robot), I find this discussion about the Uncanny highly important. Not only about robots of course. Design is often based on the assumption that it will create objects and experiences that match up with people and their practices. Or that it can “integrate the new into the everyday”. I wonder about different ways to go beyond this situation and what Di Salvo describes in this paper is surely an interesting solution to create enriching user experiences. I guess personalization is also another relevant possibility.

• SNIFtag
  "If you ever longed for a way to monitor your dog's social life, map out his buddy network, and sense who its true friends are, you might have been waiting for SNIF"

It’s been a while that I haven’t seen lot of innovation in the field of location-based games. It’s as if the game play were always repeated (object collection, finding a human who have to escape…). There were some good projects about this in the past but the field has some trouble going beyond a limited range of scenario.

Within this context, Turf Bombing, designed by Che-Wei Wang, looks intriguing:

“Turf Bombing is a location-based turf battle game which rewards and encourages traveling and learning about different neighborhoods.

This game requires a laptop and works anywhere in the world where there’s a wifi connection. Your laptop’s wifi connection is used to triangulate your position.

Gangs are assigned by the zip code of your home address. The goal of each gang is to gain as much territory as possible.

Territories are acquired as players plant time bombs at different locations in physical space. If the bomb is not diffused by a local gang member in time, the bomb will explode and the territory will be turned over to the gang that planted the bomb.“

Why do I blog this? I find interesting the use of a location-based game as a way to encourage new transport modes. A sort of “serious game” in the field of pervasive gaming.

• The sickening secret of Mirror's Edge
  "When you run, you see your hands pumping up and down in front of you. When you jump, your feet briefly jut up into eyeshot — precisely as they do when you're vaulting over a hurdle in real life. And when you tuck down into a somersault, you're looking at your thighs as the world spins around you. What's more, the Mirror's Edge world feels tactile and graspable."

• Processing monsters [rmx]

Some material about location-based services… and how the user adoption of such artifact has been somewhat delayed (a topic I addressed copiously in my ETech 2008 presentation):

First, this IHT article entitled “Still searching for profit in location-based services”. It addresses how mobile operators are hoping that LBS can lead to new profit for quite a while now. The main issue is that while car navigation devices has been successfully adopted, other technologies typically remains “crude and unhelpful - and unused - for mobile navigation”:

“Despite the increasing availability of GPS-enabled mobiles, many consumers are still reluctant to pay for mobile navigation, said Velipekka Kuoppala, a vice president for sales and marketing at Bluesky Positioning
(…)
How soon will the sales come? André Malm, a senior analyst at Berg Insight, offers this forecast: Global sales from location-based services will more than triple to $740 million annually by 2014, as the number of GPS users rises to 70 million globally from 16 million this year.

But for that to happen, Malm acknowledges, operators will have to sell mobile navigation services for which consumers are willing to pay.“

David H. Williams at Directions Mag has its own bits about why LBS fails to reach a mature market. He sketches 7 deadly sins:

“Sin #1 - Poorly Identifying Opportunities
Sin #2 - Poorly Articulated Customer Value Proposition
Sin #3 - Weak Business Case
Sin #4 - Inflexible Business Model
Sin #5- Flawed Technical and User Design
Sin #6 - Inattention to Intellectual Property
Sin #7 - Deficient Marketing“

Also very interesting for that matter, Gerhard Navratil and Eva Grum from the Institute for Geoinformation and Cartography (TU Vienna) have a paper about What makes Location-Based Services Fail? that gives a good overview that overlaps with my etech talk. They basically explain how technical solutions, legal restrictions and usability influence the design and efficiency of LBS. What is interesting there is that they show how the failure is systemic, that is to say, how the combination of factors per se leads to a problem in user adoption:

“A reason for failure could be that one of the three influences limits the service. It may be that the technology simply does not allow locating the mobile phone accurate enough or the LBS is not accepted because it is too difficult to use. Also threats of a lawsuit for violation of patents or copyright law may stop an LBS.“

Why do I blog this? material for a book about LBS/locative media.

• Ignition City: Steampunk Meets Cowboy Cursing In Ignition City [io9]
  New project by Warren Ellis

Incomplete buildings are something that fascinate me. The raw backbone of the buildings looks as if it had been never finished or strip naked after a momentarily stopped renovation. To me, the city of the near future definitely looks like this sort of architecture. And this fascination is not just poetic, it’s a very recurring encounter in lots of cities due to economic and cultural issues in construction.

For example, the picture above has been taken in Cusco, Peru. It nicely reveals how the floors reached different levels of completeness. The one above is a restaurant where I had lunch in august, whereas the two other stories below have a totally different affordance. Sometimes, it’s even more fascinating when you have incomplete skyscrapers, falling into despair. Some are totally abandoned, some only partly… with pockets of emptiness. These structures often lead to interesting new forms of socialization that would surely need some time to be uncovered.

If like me you’re into this sort of things, you may be intrigued by a french architecture firm called coloco which works on this concept. Régine pointed me to their Skeleton Observatory. It’s actually a summary of their exploration, about why the think this architectural typology is important and may play a role in the near future. It eventually lead them to describe projects about “inhabiting the skeletons”, i.e. the re-appropriation of abandoned and incomplete architectures. The skeleton becomes and “invitation à l’usage” (i.e. “an invitation to be used”). They even have their own France-based abandoned building to test their hypotheses.

Why do I blog this? cataloguing curious signals about new forms of architecture on a pure exploratory angle.

Flickr place info now includes shape data for many places. See the Flickr code blog for more.

We’ve correlated most of Dopplr’s places with Yahoo WOE IDs using Flickr’s reverse geocoder, so we can use this data too. As an experiment, I wrote some clientside code to overlay this shape data onto the maps we use on Dopplr. Help yourself to the code if you want it: gist.github.com/25502

In “Experience Models: Where Ethnography and Design Meet” presented at the EPIC2006 conference, Rachel Jones discusses the roles of ethnography in design. She gives a quick overview of the literature regarding this topic:

• “Identifying “sensitizing” concepts (the identification of researchable topics)
• Developing specific design concepts (studying settings that may shed light on what abstract design concepts might mean concretely in order to sketch out and work up potential design solutions)
• Driving innovative technological research (explore the sociality of novel design spaces opened up by radical technology in real world settings)
• Evaluating design (conduct a “sanity check” on the design. Ethnography has also been used to inform the iterative design)
• Context awareness (immersing researchers, designers and sometimes clients in the setting, for the purpose of understanding the context in which a product will be developed)
• Identifying key emerging themes (an area of study, and developed with a view to identifying design opportunities and influencing design solutions)
• Developing experience frameworks (models that identify the key components of an experience and indicate the structural relationships between those components… facilitate the generation and mapping of opportunities)”

Why do I blog this? interesting overview, material for my UX course where I show the importance of “people research” (based on ethnography-inspired methods) for design.

On a different note, I am less and less using the term ethnography because (1) I am not an ethnographer, (2) the use os methods coming from ethnography is far different from conducting ethnography, (3) there seems to be some weird trend currently that confuse ethnography with data collection.

• Blended Reality: Reports from the Digital/Physical Future [IFTF]
  I am intrigued by the IFTF process: "You will interact with researchers developing some of the leading edge applications, people on the forefront of evolving new social practices in the blended world, and IFTF researchers who will share foresights based on their recent ethnographic research. And you will experience the debut of a unique video installation called Global Lives, a project that embodies what IFTF has termed "bottom-up ethnography." Global Lives is an international collaboration of filmmakers, designers, architects, and activists from around the globe who are documenting 24 hours of the lives of 10 people from 10 different countries."
• About Qwitter (monitors your twitter account and notifies you when someone stops following you) [Sean Bonner]
  "I’ve had 4 people confront me because I stopped following them and Qwitter told them. All 4 of those people were pissed off at me for it. 3 of them had stopped following me to get even. The one who didn’t, well he didn’t follow me to begin with but was still angry, yet in the e-mail he sent me he noted that he didn’t know who I was. The truth is I didn’t know who he was either, don’t remember following him, don’t recall anything he’d ever tweeted about and can only assume I added him by accident at one point when following a reply thread. Qwitter caused negative drama between two people who don’t know each other, have had no interaction, and really no reason for any bad feelings."
• Also Plants Fly
  Nice blog by Andrea Bianchi about interaction and interfaces
• Where is the future that we were promised? [Martin Varsavsky]
  "My worry is that, regarding scientific and technological innovation, the creativity of this generation is slowing down and this slowing down of innovation only makes it less likely that future generations will be able to brake the cycle of stagnation." "Five years into the 20th century, Einstein was living his Annus Miarbilis. Where is our patent office today? Who is our Einstein? Are we the first generation in many years incapable of true innovation? And let’s not just talk about things as complicated as the theory of relativity."

Signage frenziness redux in Lyon, France. Certainly the second phase of bopano.

An occidental kitchen, classic, with postcards, boxes and… this lighbulb. Why would people keep this? To have it up one’s sleeve if another one breaks? Actually no, the bulb is sitting there because the owners do not know where to put it. In a 21st century society where you cannot trash anything (especially in Switzerland), when you don’t know how to toss something, you preciously keep it.

Why do I blog this? thinking about practices related to electricity for my course/lecture in Paris tomorrow.