I stumbled on this cultural model of the software development space. It represents well the influences and constraints. In the mobile and ubiquitous world, this is one set of constraints developers must face (Development with Constraints). Another, lower level of constraints would be the technical, economical and physical limitations (Design with Constraints).
Development with constraints
Cartographic Anamorphosis of Europe based on distance in time with high-speed trains.
Via City of Sound and Barcelona: The Urban Evolution of a Compact City, by Joan Busquets.
To be aware of it, and not necessarily rushing to read it, Windows and Mirrors Interaction Design, Digital Art, and the Myth of Transparency by Jay David Bolter and Diane Gromala, seems to provide a design and art oriented approach to invisibility in the digital world. A good example of the relevance of digital art to technologists for experimental design.
Bolter and Gromala argue that invisibility or transparency is only half the story; the goal of digital design is to establish a rhythm between transparency–made possible by mastery of techniques–and reflection–as the medium itself helps us understand our experience of it.
Effect of Location-Awareness on Rendezvous Behaviour by David Dearman, Kirstie Hawkey, Kori Inkpen, Dalhousie University, Canada. Short paper at CHI 2005.
This paper presents an exploratory field study investigating the behavioral effects of mobile location-aware computing on rendezvousing. Pariticipants took part in one of the three technology conditions: mobile phone condition, location-aware handeld condition and mobile phone and location-aware handheld condition. Data was collected via field notes, audio recording, data logging, questionnaires, and semi-structured interviews. The results of this study clearly demonstrates that the participants exhibited very different behaviors depending on the technology used. Interesting to me is the location-aware handled condition in which half of the participants chose to leave the rendezvous location to attempt to meet their partners:
Participants who chose to leave seemed confused about their partner’s actions or believed they were lost. [...] it was very disconcerting to the waiting partner because they did not have enough contextual information to determine what the problem was. This uncertainty was strong enough in some cases to actually draw the waiting partner away from the rendezvous location.
Uncertainty raising from the lack of contextual information is something that should also appear in our CatchBob! experiments. Location is difficult to convey accurately through dialogue, resulting in ambiguity and misunderstandings. Automating location-awareness raises other issues, because contextual information are not often conveyed by positioning systems. Users must deduct the context which can lead to increased mental load (to be proven), confusion and frustration.
Harrison, S. and Dourish, P. (1996). Re-Place-ing Space: The Roles of Place and Space in Collaborative Systems. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work CSCW’96 (Boston, MA), 67-76. New York: ACM.
In this paper, Harrison and Dourish make the distinction between “space” and “place” to facilitate and structure interaction in collaborative environments. We are all highly skilled at structuring and interpreting space for our individual or interactive purpose. The implied rational is that if we design collaborative systems around notions of space which mimic the spatial organiszation of the real world, then we can support the emergent patterns of human behavior and interaction which our everyday actions in the physical world exhibit. The authors argue that it is too simplicitc. In everyday action, appropriate behavioral framing comes not from a sense of space, but from the sense of place.
Space is the opportunity; place is the understood reality
A place is general a space with something added – social meaning, convention, cultural understandings about role, function and nature and so on. From their experiments in Making a Place in Media Space, the authors believe that one critical factor contributing to the very different patterns of use is this ability to participate, adapt and appropriate.
In A Historical View of Context, Early draft of paper in J. CSCW 13(3), 223-247, August 2004, Matthew Chalmers a number of approaches of context-aware systems design, emphasizing on the way to reflect the historical aspect of context and how to make good use of the past to support ongoing user activity. He also pragmatically reasses of the notion of invisibility or disappearance that often characterises ubiquitous computing and opens doors to my research interest:
It seems more difficult to accept Weiser’s ideal of ‘invisible’ technology as an achievable ideal, as we have to accept that a system will be, and should be, used in an more ready–to–hand way occasionally.
Definition of context differ in CSCW and ubicomp, and I am stuck between both trying to make both fields bridge or even synthesis:
CSCW focuses on intersubjective aspects of context, constructed in and through the dynamic of each individual’s social interaction, and defends against reductionism and objectification. In contrast, context–aware and ubiquitous computing often concentrate on computational representations of context that span and combine many senses and media—rather than the social construction of context in interaction.
The problem with the ubicomp perspective is that it tends to emphasize objective features that can be tracked and recorded relatively easily, and to de-emphasize or avoid aspects of the user experience such as subjectivity perceived features and the way past experience of similar contexts may influence current activity – issues which are central concerns of CSCW.[...] One key issue has been how systems can represent work and its context without over-formalising, over-simplifying and over-objectifying it.
Workflow-like representation of activity have been brought into context-aware computing (Activity-Based Comuting (Christensen 2002; Bardram 2003), “task driven computing” (Garlan 2002). However, such representations of activity have a potential danger of becoming too formal:
“that their design is predicated entirely by formal procedures—ignoring (and even damaging) the informal practice” (Bardram 1997)
Dourish’s approach to combine CSCW and context-aware systems, the “embodied interaction”:
A contrasting approach to combining CSCW and context–aware systems emphasises socially–constructed situated action, and is also inspired by some of the foundational work of ubiquitous computing. The embodied interaction perspective on HCI (Dourish 2001) binds together CSCW and context–aware computing issues in presenting everyday human interaction as non–rationalising, intersubjective and bodily activity. [...] More recently, however, Dourish applied this embodied interaction perspective to the notion of context and context–awareness more practically (Dourish 2004). This paper focuses on a question highly relevant to our focus here: “how can sensor technologies allow computational systems to be sensitive to the settings in which they are used, so that, as we move from one physical or social setting to another, our computational devices can be attuned to these variations?”
Dourish suggests that the field’s ideals of combining the social and the technical computing have not yet been achieved: “turning social observation into technical design seems to be problematic” and “these two positions are incompatible”. This is something that I would like to investigate in my thesis.
Dourish points out 3 design principle to allow forms of practice to emerge and evolve, rather than requiring users to fix their work and their information to predefined patterns:
The problems with these design principles is that we have to be selective to reveal details of the system (we cannot present and let manipulate every details). There is a need for a degree of reduction and objectification, due to formal representational schemes of programs and databases, and finite capacities for storage, communication and calculation:
We must take a pragmatic stance if we are to design the finite and formal representation that constitute context-aware and CSCW systems. Embodied interaction is a good exemplar of research in CSCW and contet-aware computing that begins to bridge between useful practices and strong theory.
Make at tool invisible or ready-to-hand (Heidegger) through accommodation and appropriation
In time, this process of accommodation and appropriation lets one focus on the use of the tool, and not on the tool in itself, thus making the tool ‘disappear’ as Weiser later discussed. [...] Disappearance happens through the process of coupling and contextualization i.e. the circle of interpretation, action and experience that weaves together both ready–to–hand and present–at–hand uses of a tool by people over time. [...] No tool or system can always be invisible, and perhaps should not, as there are times when one cannot “focus on the task not the tool” because the task is the tool.
Weiser was clear that it was not the technology in itself that made for ubicomp. Instead he suggested that we should aim for and support accommodation and appropriation of computing into everyday life. One of my aims is to understand this accommodation and appropiration process in the real-world, and uncontrolled ubiquitous environments.
Reference I must read:
Abowd, G., Mynatt, E., and Rodden, T. (2002): The Human Experience, IEEE Pervasive Computing, Jan-Mar, 48-57.
A. Dix, A. Friday, B. Koleva, T. Rodden, H. Muller, C. Randell, A. Steed, “Managing multiple spaces” In P. Turner, E. Davenport (eds.) Space, Spatiality and Technologies, Kluwer, 2005.
Building interactive experiences and applications that exploit space and location requires both low-level underlying infrastructure for linking sensors and managing spatial information and also high-level tools to aid content developers to produce spatially triggered information. This paper talks about the co-existance of virutal and physical spaces:
By this we eman that people and objects may have locations in an relationships to both physical space and one or more virtual spaces, and that these different space together interact to give an overall system behavior and user experience.
I am very interested by the notion of “measured space” and how its accuracy and quality influences the relationship between virtual and real spaces.
This real-measured space relationship is about location sensing and the accuracy of sensors. I would add that the communication (latency, packet losses, data sanity, …) also impact the relationships between the spaces and ultimately the user’s experience. The dynamic of these relationships is not always controlled because it might not be instantaneous.
In fact, people are remarkably adapt at dealing with multiples spaces. Computationally things are more difficult. Like Nicolas rightly questions, we still have to more deeply find out on how much and to what extent that is true.
The window of the virtual space into the real space has 3 aspects:
A space can be in fact be made of multiple space, depending on the context. Those spaces moving relatively to each other and can differ in accuracy and extent:
Towards Reasoning About Context in the Presence of Uncertainty, Dan Chalmers, Naranker Dulay, Morris Sloman. In proceedings of Workshop on Advanced Context Modelling, Reasoning And Management at UbiComp 2004 Nottingham, UK, (2004)
The authors show how the relationship between real world actors (person, device, room, …) and contextual information can be formulated when uncertainty can be defined with numerical context values.
Context is not static in de nition or state – one of the properties of context is that it describes a changing relationship between users, systems and their environment. Describing these relationships is crucial in any model of context which seeks to address scenarios beyond isolated users. A key issue is the treatment of uncertainty in the relationships – the quality of the sensed context data will vary due to noisy sensors, erroneous readings, out of date data etc.
Their view of context is a set of name and value pairs. This requires that the values are typed and the possibility that the values from sensors may not be precise.
The model of values can be arranged to return a value range for a confidence level. An advantage of this approach is that a trade-off between certainty and cost (power, network load, processing time, memory use, etc) is possible where context sensing is distributed:
Sensor error (both inherent granularity and due to false readings), out of date data and poor predictions will give rise to some uncertainty about sensed context in most cases. To some extent this may be mitigated by applying fusion to multiple readings [7], but some uncertainty will remain. If an application could describe the confidence it requires in the context data, the returned value can be a value range which the context awareness system believes includes the current context within the certainty constraint. It can be expected that a higher confidence can be given to a larger range of values, while a response with a smaller range may be given if one relaxes the need to include less likely possibilities.
They present definitions of relationships which are applicable to realistic context values, using numerical and tree based unit systems with uncertain values.
Toucan Navigate is a collaborative Geographic Information System (GIS) for users of Groove. Toucan provide:
The image above shows satellite imagery combined with map data. The Locations for Gabriel and John are being gathered from GPS receivers and securely disseminated with other team members in real time.
A flash animation of Toucan is also available.
GeoChat is developed as an extension ArgMap and provides integration with IM via Jabber.
Geo-chatting is the ability to exchange text messages, geometries and georeferenced imagery with online contacts. The nice feature of geochat is that ink can be drawn has locational context. Most people will use geochat to “annotate” a map, like circling a shop or drawing a driving route. Very similar features as what we use in CatchBob!
