M. Ito and D. Okabe. Personal, Portable Intimarte: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life, chapter Technological Situations: Emergent Structurings of Mobile Email Use, pages 1–15. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 2005. [pdf]

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The authors analyse the use of mobile phone in Japanese youths. Instead of considering the aspect of the mobiles that are often critiques as disrupting currnet social practices, the author propose a view of phones that create new kind of boundled places that merge the infrastructures of geography and technology, and technological practices that merge technical standards and social norms. They call these “technological situations”, a way of incorporating the insight of theories of practice and social interaction into a framework that takes into account mediated social orders.

They present three different technological situations that are built on mobile email: mobile chat, an analoguous of text-chat used to fill dead time; ambient virtual co-presence, a way of mainitaining background awareness of others; and the augmented flesh meet, a way to augment the experience of physically co-located encounters.

I like this excerpt of an SMS exchange, which shows some linguistic markers of location cues (in Italics). Also landmarks are explicitly stated (in bold):

[Bus stop] 15:00 (Send) I’ll be about thirty minutes late.

[Bus stop] 15:01 (Receive)  Okay.

[Shibuya station] 16:32 (Send) I’ve arrived at Shibuya.

[Shibuya station] 16:33 (Receive) Where in Shibuya are you?

[Shibuya station] 16:34 (Send)  Hachiko Square.

[Shibuya station] 16:35 (Receive) Wait there.  I’ll be right over.

[Shibuya station] 16:36 (Send)  Okay.  Will wait.

[Shibuya station] 16:40 (Voice call) “Where are you?  Oh, there, okay, I see you.”

Tags: ethnography, research, research methodology, Short Message Service

An interesting research project from the Austrian Ministry of Education, Science and Culture:

The ongoing process of European integration and in particular the planned enlargement of the European Union present new challenges for the evolution of democracy in Europe. The research programme >node< of the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Science and Culture (bm:bwk) addresses the future of democracy in Europe. With >node<, we are inviting scientists to rethink democracy, to analyse political developments and processes and the mechanisms that guide and control them, and to come up with options and alternatives for the further development of democratic politics.

Research themes and research objectives of >node<:

The fundamental principle of the research programme is the scientific analysis and discussion of the European integration process, i.e., a critical examination in which Europe is understood as a “contested space.” The following major questions form the framework for projects within >node<:

• Which models of democratic deliberation and participation characterise the political and social developments and the diverse players in these developments in Europe?
• Which differing policies are predominant today?
• What processes and development trends can be recognised?
• How and by whom are they controlled and/or influenced?

Using this link is possible to provide your own definition of what democracy is. This is my preferred definition:

… when all people have an equal input on decission making based on true and independent information. (17. 11. 2005, Jarno Gieteling, Communicating European Research – CER 2005, Brüssel)

Copyright notice: the present content was taken from the following URL, the copyrights are reserved by the respective author/s.

Tags: politics, eGov, research, society

R. E. Grinter and M. Eldridge. Wan2tlk? : Everyday text messaging. In Proceedings of ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing System (CHI 2003), pages 441–448, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, USA, April 5-10 2003. [pdf]

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Texting—using a mobile phone to send text messages—has become a form of mass communication. Building on studies that described how British teenagers have incorporated text messaging into their lives, we examine the purposes and nature of the conversations themselves.  We also present findings that suggest that teenagers do not have many simultaneous multiple conversations via text messaging; end most text messaging conversations by switching to another medium; and, that, despite popular beliefs, communicate with surprisingly few friends via their mobile phones. Finally we describe how and what words they shorten in their text messages.

This paper describe an indirect form of observation through logging. The authors used a low-tech solution to record how participants used SMS in their daily activities. The asked them to fill a paper form adding contextual information and the content of the messages.

Analysing these logs they could report some quantitative results on the usage of this form of communication.

Tags: Short Message Service, research methodology

I/O Plant is a tool for designing a content that utilize plants as an input-output interface. It enables designers to connect actuators, sensors and database servers to living plants. This means that plants become a part of an electric circuit or a network terminal.

For example: you can control a switch of a household electric appliance by touching a plant.

Tags: interaction design, plants, domotic, user experience

This summer I had the opportunity to play with disposable underwater cameras. I tried the a Fuji and a Kodak. It was fun but there were a couple of factors that made me love the Fuji more than the Kodak:

1- First of all the price: both of them are priced 10.25 USD in the States but the Fuji had an immediate discount of 1 USD (almost 10% less).

2- The cameras comes with an elastic stripe that you can use to hold the camera while swimming. However the Fuji stripe is already attached to the camera while you need to attach the stripe to the Kodak.

3- The shutter button is extremely small in the Kodak impairing its use while underwater. In the Fuji one the shutter is a big lever, its operation is extremely comfortable.

4- Some simple instructions of use are printed in the back of the camera but the instructions on the Fuji are easier to understand.

5- I have to admit that the quality of the pictures of the Kodak camera was higher but I cannot tell wether this depends on the fact that I used the Kodak after the Fuji and that I was more accustomed to taking pictures underwater with the previous experience.

Fuji

Kodak

Just before leaving the States, we could not miss this one: a trip to Hawaii to enjoy some sunshine and the sea. It is difficult to tell what is most astonishing of these islands: they are a true paradise! Words a useless in some cases and this is one of them …

Zeno, one of my colleagues at EPFL, has finally published his Podcast application called XCast. At first view, the interface is pretty clean and stylish with a clear ‘Zeno-OSX’ style. The application is very well done responsive and fast while downloading the enclosures.

What distinguishes XCast from other RSS readers is its focus on enclosures. Its focus is on Podcasts, multimedia content published in the form of XML feeds. XCast allows to better handle this content, offering support for intelligent archiving, use and removal of this sort of “attachments”.

One of the best feature is its connection with iTunes, which allows to use the downloaded attachment from the iTunes interface keeping the index on both applications in sync.

I know that is kind of late to blog about this but I just wanted to annotate my impression on this new service from Flickr. I like to see the pictures attached to a map. After all, its the subject of my thesis. I think there is a great deal of inference that we can make just by playing with this simple cartographic representation and with pictures.

One of the things that I really would love to have is a camera with a built-in GPS. I know that there are already a couple of models (cfr. sony) out there but their software lacks of the simplicity that will make it appealing to me.

What I would love to have is an hack on my phone so that it can take a picture with the embedded camera, connect with an external bluetooth GPS to take the location, embed this information in the EXIF format of the picture and finally upload the picture to Flickr without bugging me about all these steps …

Maybe I’ll write my own python app at some point.

(Rome, Italy)

Tags: citizen journalism, collaboration tools, field tools, interaction design, location awareness, Location Based Services, psychogeography, tangible interface, urban exploration, urban planning

Have you ever seen a headline that read: “Atheist militants detonate bomb in city café” -?

Doug Stanhope

Chase, William G., and Herbert A. Simon. 1973. “Perception in chess.” Cognitive Psychology.

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Given a perception task and a memory task from a briefly exposed position, chess players of varying strength extract different amounts of information according to their strength. Superior performance of stronger players depends on their ability “to encode the position into larger perceptual chunks, each consisting of a familiar subconfiguration of pieces.” There is evidence that pieces converging on the opponent’s king (or other) position are chunked in a more abstract attack relation. “Finally, the number of chunks retained in short-term memory after brief exposure to chess positions is about the magnitude we would predict from immediate recall of common words … and copying of visual patterns.”

Copyright notice: the present content was taken from the following URL, the copyrights are reserved by the respective author/s.