Interesting link, via Anne Galloway, about “Constructivist Compositionals”. I am always interested in these sorts of project where the approach is not to offer a finite number of ‘moves’ or predefined paths. I must admit that three years talking about constructionism and Papert’s theories profoundly changed my perspectives on what interactivity, HCI, and learning are.

From Bearskinrug Compositionals: What’s the story with all this?:

What I find most interesting about the Compositionals are their collaborative nature. I create single compositions of my own; yet the added interactivity allows others to discover inumerable compositions residing within their dynamic structure.

Interesting art piece, realised by Jota Castro of Peru, entitled “B.B.B. Oil Shame II” on display at the Frieze Art Fair in London’s Regent’s Park on October 14, 2004. It represents British Prime Minister Tony Blair (L), US President George Bush (C) and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi (R), hiding in oil barrels.

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Sometimes napkins ideas can be extra powerful!!!

Initial design of the telephone as shown in Alexander Graham Bell’s preliminary sketch. (Courtesy of The Library of Congress.)

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Nice post on Nico’s WP blog on the reason why people will geo-annotate physical place. The author, Jason Tester, describe a possible categorization for these annotations. First of all he divide these contributions in two big groups:
– I was here (the author wants the receiver to know s/he was there)
– You are here (the author has some information useful for the receiver for the receiver in that location).

The former is for the author more emotionally driven, although they are still meant for other people, and for the receiver the value will be to participate in someone else’s unrecorded history of a place.

The latter can offer more utility to the viewer and the emitter, and can span into several categories:
– announcements
– events
– tips/assistance/warnings
– lost&found
– temporary notes
– gaming
– none of the above

In a previous post I sketched one categorization we did during a spatial brainstorming:

recommending system (good/bad), help, threaded discussion, wiki-like (to reach a consensus), reminder system, spam/virus/breakdown, I’m late, anchors (like rave party system), synchronous/asychronous use, query (anybody wants to paly tennis here?), crowd scenario…

Many different criteria may apply to define a proper categorization. The question is then: Can we find a criteria that is based on the collaborative activity running between the emitter and the receiver rather than on the content of the message? Is this kind of criteria going to be more universal?

1- Summary
Should characterise the planned PhD work : give a brief presentation of the topic in the framework of which the planned research is to take place. At the end of the summary, please characterise the project in the form of eight keywords.

keywords: (8)

2- State of Research
The current status of research in the field, previous approaches, current open questions, hot fields.

3- State of research work performed by student
What was done during the preparation of the plan. The approach chosen.

4- Detailed research plan
Motivation/introduction; The PhD project in detail; Methodology chosen; Scientific contribution.

5- Program of doctoral research up to thesis defence
Gantt; expected deliverables;

Giles, if you read me, we need to invent an equivalent of ‘blogging’ for the ubiquitous activity of creating a pocket for a location. May it be something like: ‘tapping’? How does it sound a question like: “did you tap about this place?”. Let’s propose some alternatives:

– tapping, to tap (the activity on the screen of the mobile)
– vannoting, to vannote (virtually annotating)
– mnoting, to mnote (mobile annotating)
– mlogging, to mlog (mobile logging)
– pocketing, to pocket
– …

The discussion is open to everybody in the audience!
Cheers

I have been thinking a lot on the expansion of the current Internet into the ubiquity of our daily life. Many pointers raised my interests towards this idea that every actual object could have its virtual counterpart, its expansion of sensorial perception outside the boundaries of the hic et nunc paradigm. The last one came from a discussion with Peter Waller. He was mentioning this idea of “The internet of Things“:

The EPC network (Electronic Product Code), using tiny RFID (Radio Frequency ID) tags, will enable computers to automatically recognize and identify everyday objects, and then track, trace, monitor, trigger events, and perform actions on those objects. The technology will effectively create an “Internet of things.” RFID will fundamentally impact the industries of manufacturing, retail, transportation, health care, life sciences, pharmaceuticals, and government, offering an unprecedented real-time view of assets and inventories throughout the global supply chain. And in the process, whole new vistas (and challenges) will open up to software developers.

Then I was connecting this idea with the principle that in the Internet2 project, the renewal of the current Internet, the current IPv4 will be replaced with the newest IPv6 protocol, which will raise the address space from 4,294,967,296, or approximately 4.3 billion, to 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456.

Considering that the world’s population is approximately 60 million, IPv4 cannot allocate an address for every person on the planet. Should the same number of addresses be allocated to everyone in IPv6, the number of addresses per person would total 100 billion times 5,600 billion

Considering that the earth surface is calculated as 10¹⁵ m², we can calculate a density of 3,4 x 10²¹ addresses/cm²(approx). Math apart, we can conclude that there will be a huge density of these addresses per square centimeter surface of the earth. The usage of such addresses is currently thought for accessing single computers, as containers of resources, but what if these addresses could target each object on earth: e.g., the washing machine, my car, my swiss knife, my corn flakes package, …

Well, we can imagine thousand of thousand of applications if we will be able to attach a virtual identity to each object of our daily life and if these identity would be accessible everywhere at everytime. Which is the new paradigm.

Project CityNotes.
List of Data to be monitored in the system.
Ver. 0.1 – 19 October 2004

This list of data is needed to construct a model of the ‘context’ in which the communication takes place. Essentially, we are interested in understanding how the peers of the communication ground their communication and how the inference takes place.

These informative tag should be attached by the system to the record of the message and stored in the general DataBase.

1- time of MSG
The time when the message was sent.

2- position of content (x,y)
The intended position of the message. If different from the current position, the position of the emitter at the moment of postion should also be logged.

3- position of the emitter, receiver at the moment of posting
The position of the emitter and the receiver, if any while the message was posted.

4- content of the MSG
The content of the message should be organised in a databese.

5- history of the emitter, receiver (previous, current and future position)
The span of interest for the connected activities of the message should last longer than the moment of posting.

6- Activities of emitter and receiver (as assumed from their pre-defined position)
There should be some position pre-defined in the system, like the office place, home, school, etc. From that an assumption of the connected activity in that place.

7- emitter inputed categories
Some generic categories can be added to the message from the emitter, espetially if the message is sent to the larger group. Eventually, we may think these categories as socially defined by the group and rated.

8- friend of a friend chain
The FOAF description of the emitter, receiver chain.

9- social editing/rating of the message
The acknowledge of the reactions of the other readers to the message, if this is not private.

10- shape of the buildings and other geographical objects on the way
Important landmarks socially defined by the users which happen to be along the way or close to the message anchor point (AP).

11- thread of the message
The chain of the messages answered to the main. Time and history should be connected as the main.

12- acknowledge of retreive of the message
The acknowledge of the retrieve of the message by the receiver or the receivers.

__

Peter Waller pointed me on this forum thread concerned on the hacks of the Motorola A925 which linked me to this interesting project called “findtheplace”.
This midlet access the GPS module on the Motorola phones and displays the outcomes in a readable format. It is also possible to find location points (or waypoints: WP). A plus is that is an OpenSource project. To be continued …

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Recently there have been a growing number of projects trying to organise photos with maps and time. In most of the cases the interaction design consist in pin-pointing pictures on two dimensional maps. Here some links: [1], [2], [3], [4].