This week I am pretty happy because in Italy we made some progress for the freedom of press: a new journal is born, namely “Il Fatto Quotidiano“. This journal has some peculiar characteristics:

– it does not have an owner. It was founded by a bunch of journalists of “L’Unità” that left that journal and took equal shares of the new journal.

– it does not take public money. It works with subscriptions and selling copies through news-agents.

– it does not take a particular point of view. It criticize equally the government and the opposition, although it bends a bit for the opposition.

– it publishes news that nobody else usually want/can publish.

Today I stumbled upon two interesting news that made me remember the good old days of the Biosphera project. Different research teams tried to build a robotic plant that could behave like an organic plant.

One of the plant was developed by a Korean team, at Chonnam National University. The robotic plant has has humidifying, oxygen-producing, aroma-emitting, and kinetic functions. The robot was developed using characteristics of plants normally grown for ornamental purposes. It is 130 cm tall and 40 cm in diameter and consists of a pot, a stem, and five buds of a flower reminiscent of a rose of Sharon.

The second model was developed by Sega and it is called Pekoppa Robot Plant. It looks surprisingly lifelike but never needs watering or sunlight… what it craves is your attention. Talk to your Pekoppa plant and it responds to your voice by bending and moving in a very lifelike manner.

What I like about these two projects is that designers are increasingly more interested in plants as interaction objects. For centuries they have been delicate and vulnerable beings that did not interact at all with superior species. However, there is something primal in their essence that has always captured the attention and fascinations of humans (besides sustaining human life on earth). I also like the idea of a robo plant. In my digital seed project, I was using virtual characters to help kids interact with plants and learn about life science. However, the virtual elements of my design destroyed completely the tangible experience you could have with physical plants. I bet with a robo plant it would be completely different.

Biography:

M. Cherubini. Microworlds for ecology explorations: From DigitalSeed to Biosphera in fostering children’s understanding of plant biology. Master’s thesis, St. Patrick’s College, Dublin City University, Ireland, May 2004. [PDF]

M. Cherubini, H. Gash and T.J.J. McCloughlin The Digital Seed: An interactive toy for investigating plant growth and the generalized plant life cycle., Journal of Biological Education, Institute of Biology Press, London, 2008

Nessun dorma! Nessun dorma!

Tu pure, o, Principessa,

nella tua fredda stanza,

guardi le stelle che tremano d’amore

e di speranza.

Ma il mio mistero è chiuso in me,

il nome mio nessun saprà!

No, no, sulla tua bocca lo dirò

quando la luce splenderà!

Ed il mio bacio scioglierà il silenzio

che ti fa mia!

(Il nome suo nessun saprà!… e noi dovrem, ahime, morir!)

Dilegua, o notte!

Tramontate, stelle!

Tramontate, stelle!

All’alba vincerò!

vincerò, vincerò!

[G. Puccini, Turandot, 1920]

Joinson, A. N. Looking at, looking up or keeping up with people? : motives and use of facebook. In CHI ’08: Proceeding of the twenty-sixth annual SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (New York, NY, USA, 2008), ACM, pp. 1027–1036. [PDF]

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This paper investigates the uses of social networking site Facebook, and the gratifications users derive from those uses.

In the first study, 137 users generated words or phrases to describe how they used Facebook, and what they enjoyed about their use. These phrases were coded into 46 items which were completed by 241 Facebook users in Study 2. Factor analysis identified seven unique uses and gratifications: social connection, shared identities, content, social investigation, social network surfing and status updating. User demographics, site visit patterns and the use of privacy settings were associated with different uses and gratifications.

The author starting assumption is that actual uses and gratifications of social networking sites are not well understood. The authors shed some light on probe more in depth the exact nature of “keeping in touch” as both use and gratification. The results of this study suggest that comprises two main functions: the first is a surveillance function, while the second is a self-presentation function. The goal of using sites like FB is to meet new people and therefor making one’s profile more open increases the chances of an interaction. Finally, associated with this use is the social capital building gratification, where FB is used to build and maintain ties with peers.

We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

William Shakespeare

Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.

Randy Paush, 2006

Cell Press and Elsevier have launched a project called Article of the Future that is an ongoing collaboration with the scientific community to redefine how the scientific article is presented online. The project’s goal is to take full advantage of online capabilities, allowing readers individualized entry points and routes through the content, while using the latest advances in visualization techniques.

http://beta.cell.com/

I finally found some time to upgrade to WP 2.8.2. I really like the new dashboard and the auto upgrade functionality. This will reduce the administrative burden of keeping track of new releases…

Bilandzic, M., Foth, M., and De Luca, A. Cityflocks: designing social navigation for urban mobile information systems. In DIS ’08: Proceedings of the 7th ACM conference on Designing interactive systems (New York, NY, USA, 2008), ACM, pp. 174–183. [PDF]

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This paper presents CityFlocks, a mobile system to enable visitors and new residentsin a city to tap into the knowledge and experiences of local residents to gather information about their new environment. The main argument of the authors is that social navigation (e.g., the cue in front of a restaurant is an hint that the place is good) is one of the main mechanism that we use to discover new knowledge and find new places in the environment that we inhabit.

Unfortunately, social navigation cues are not available for digital information. While most of the previous projects discuss such different features around indirect and asynchronous interaction method (i.e., people attaching information to physical places), not much work has yet been carried out on studying direct interaction methods (e.g., phone calls, text message).

Therefore the author of this paper build an application for mobile phone called CityFlocks that allowed the user to be in contact with a local citizen when in the need of local information. The application allowerd the user to make a phone call to the local citizen or to send text messages. Interviewed participants reported to have preferred this latter method because they felt awkward to call a stranger. One of the major issues that was reported in the study was that users could not associate a specific level of trust to the strangers they were paired with using the application. Also they reported misgivings in the use of SMS for time-sensitive information because the method could not offer rapid feedback that was necessary in certain situations.

“Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud.”

Hermann Hesse