PICNIC07: Fabien Girardin

September 28, 2007 | Comments

Fabien GirardinPICNIC07: Fabien Girardin

Some challenges of ubicomp:

  1. Invisibility: things may not be immediately apparent and will need signposting.
  2. Heterogenity: things need to work together seamlessly.
  3. Ownership: users of infrastructure don't own it.
  4. Cultural bias: designers add their own bias to designs.
  5. Decay: what do we do with old or decommissioned sensors?

One response to these challenges is playfulness:

  1. Seamfulness: deliberately exposing the existence of ubicomp sensors, say - e.g. by exposing the range of CCTV cameras to ensure people know where they're being watched.
  2. Ambiguity to draw attention or provoke questions about how people experience the environment;
  3. Learning from accidents, not just positive perspectives. Better can be worse sometimes.

Conclusion:

  1. Technological messiness shouldn't be ignored
  2. Little works has been done on this
  3. We should understand how malfunctions can be communicated

See also the talk Fabien did at LIFT07

PICNIC07: Dennis Crowley

September 28, 2007 | Comments

PICNIC07: Dennis Crowley

Used to work on Dodgeball, now looking at how people experience urban spaces. Sounds like a micro-dopplr: once your friends are aware of your location, it encourages interactions.

Now works at Area/code. As devices and people become location-aware, they're using this data for playful purposes.

Plundr: why should games be restricted to a board? Why can't monopoly be played across Manhatten? Plundr uses wi-fi positioning and creates a commodity trading game around it. Islands are superimposed onto a real-world map by the game, and players collect items from islands to sell them on other ones. It's a bit like a location-aware dopewars, where you need to physically move.

(Wonder what, exactly, he means by "wi-fi positioning")

Done a game for the Sopranos; a game you play whilst you're watching the broadcast. Each element on the game board appears in the TV show, and the aim of the game is to position the elements on the game screen such that as many as possible are in the programme at the same time: betting that characters appear together. All synced up with the broadcast.

Shark Runners: they partnered with marine biologists, tagged real sharks, and used the movement data of these sharks in the real world game, played out in real time. It's not be played in a short setting, it's a long-term, in-the-background game.

(Is there a term for these games which involve infrequent interactions, but play out constantly?)

Dennis shows Pacmanhattan, obviously. Crossroads is a game where you capture street intersections from other players.

One for the Locomatrix crowd :)

links for 2007-09-28

September 28, 2007 | Comments

Amazon Mechanical Turk and international access?

September 28, 2007 | Comments

I received this email from Amazon a week or so back:

You are receiving this email because you registered with Amazon Mechanical Turk as a Requester with an address outside of the United States. We regret to inform you that Amazon Mechanical Turk will no longer support international Requester accounts starting October 1, 2007. On this date your Requester account will be closed.

A real shame, as we had a couple of interesting projects we were thinking might be a good fit with it over the last few months. But also a bit of a wake-up call: the lesson here is that unless a provider of APIs is going to commit to an SLA, or even their future availability, then it's probably foolish to rely on them. A semantic web of collaborating services is a lofty goal, but we'll still need commitments (probably underpinned by commercial relationships) to realise it.

PICNIC07: Things I have learned in my life so far, Stefan Sagmeister

September 27, 2007 | Comments

PICNIC07: Things I have learned in my life so far, Stefan Sagmeister

Talks on work for a logo for a new building. Spent weeks trying to avoid using the building itself, then realised the building itself was the logo. Isolated the building, flipped it around, and took 6 different views of it for 6 logos. Colour scheme taken from any image pumped into a logo maker programme. Summary of it here.

Socially responsible design: an organisation of 500 American businessmen got together to petition the government to reduce military spending by 15% and spend the savings on education. The group has marketing know-how and money; they ran full-page ads, but for the $75k this cost (in the NYT) they could build vehicles, running around the US looking good on TV so local news picks up on them - generating more publicity than a NYT advert does.

For a lighting company, the brief was "show the power of light". Did a raise imprint with various shadows etc playing off it, with different colours.

In 2000, he decided to do no client work and just work on his own ideas. One of these was "unavailability creates desire": when they reopened they got loads of work, with better briefs. In his client-free year he makes a list of thoughts, e.g. "everything I do always comes back to me". He was surprised that he got a load of difficult feedback from ads he rang along these lines. Another: "trying to look good limits my life". Another: "Everybody thinks they are right". Clients were now coming to him asking for another sentence to use for their campaigns.

"Starting a charity is surprisingly easy": written using microscopic photography.

"Being not truthful works against me": a spiderweb projected onto a white wall which reacts to passers-by, all created using an iMac and custom software.

"Keeping a diary supports my personal development". As time went past, clients became free-er and free-er in their briefs.

"Money does not make me happy": lettering raised in what look like piles of flour or sugar. The printer lost some of the original artwork and reproduced it, changing the meaning. The piece was rerun by a casino (!).

From 0 - 35,000 euros/year money makes a significant difference to peoples lives. Above this quantity, it makes no difference at all: your level of comfort remains the same.

"Having guts always works out for me".