“Paper has its value. You can bleed on it… pour [bio-stuffs] on it… drop it on the ground….”

I thought that it is interesting to point out that the online world is a artificial place that was and is continually engineered and reengineered. Since web designers and others are in control of this environment, that means that, in addition to watching humans behave, we can design enviroments that lead users to behave in such a way that we learn more about what we are trying to gather data on.

For example, in a search engine, we can construct the search results page to also collect data on potentially relevant hits. For example, we could occasionally place a search result that technically has a lower score within the top ten results. This “mistake” and the related click-through data can then be used to calibrate the search engine. 

Granted, to build a webpage that collects user data is not a new idea, but it would be interesting to apply that theory to online spaces that scientists have been approaching in a very naturalistic fashion.

In an article in the Asian business publication Tech-on reporter Tomohiro Otsuki writes:

Retailers and contract manufacturers in Taiwan say that novice PC users there, like students and housewives, tend to buy the Linux version of the Eee PC701, while geeks go for Windows XP.

Does that sound backwards?

Yet a quick look at Amazon shows that Asus Eee’s with XP roughly $35-$100 more than their Linux brethern. Housewives know a bargain when they see one.

Or… to take another shot in the dark, is it that students and housewives are so unfamiliar with XP that the difference between XP and Linux is negligible?

Although, another factor to take into account is that the flavor of Linux on the eee pc has been advertised as simple and straightforward.

Marc Davis just gave a very interesting talk at the dub meeting today on social mobile computing and massive social-technical systems that take advantage of platorms like flickr tagging and cellphones with meta-data.

I got distracted in the middle because his (very good) talk got me thinking.

Davis is interested in leveraging two features of the mobile consumer. One is the existence of a powerful, ‘sensitive’, and ubiquitous computer. This is the mobile phone: it has cameras, processing, displays, bluetooth, GPS, compasses, and accelerometers. The second is the network effect. There are millions, soon-to-be billions, of these devices canvassing the globe. Intersected, these two factors offer an enormous array of potential. You can calculate Where, When, Who… and infer What and maybe even Why about all kinds of activities and objects. This enormous potential for deriving context can be applied to previously “NP-complete” tasks: computer facial recognition was his very nice example.

He also suggested another application of contextual meta-data: if you’re about to call someone on the phone, wouldn’t you like to know where he is so that you don’t interrupt him? or you might be reminded to talk to him about something (“I didn’t know you were in Tahiti, too!”). This would be the power of applying this meta-data to computer-mediated activities (making a cellphone call is certainly that).

I feel that this scenario surfaces a number of different responses. (E.g. “No, I wouldn’t want to do that.” or “I can totally think of a better application than that.” and etc…). We can revisit those later.

What I ended up thinking about is the source of this contextual meta-data. The two that Davis talked about are the two that I think are the most popularly perceived right now. You can arrive at contextual meta-data through one of two means:

a. User-input or

b. Sensor-data

Let me illustrate this with annotated sketch from my notes at the time:

So, examples of user-input are facebook status messages, twitters, responses to evites, tagging, etc… Examples of sensor-data are exif data from digital cameras, access_logs, and Intel’s mobile sensor platform. Within the cellphone scenario, this fits like so: “I’m about to call Daniel, but the mobile sensor platform on his cellphone tells me that he’s driving a car. Therefore, I decide to wait to call him later.” Or: “I’m about to call Daniel, but he just Twittered that he is in a meeting with his professor. Therefore, I decide to wait to call him later.” This is when I got distracted. I thought, those aren’t the only options.

There is a third source: myself.

Because *I* could input data about what *I* know about Daniel’s context. So, by distinguishing between “me” and “them”, the original dichotomy becomes a triangle like so:

Some clarifications. Two important roles are distinguished. One is the target. This is the person whose meta-data is worth collecting: Daniel, in the scenario. The other is … well, qui bono, the decision-maker, the sense-maker, the user: “me” in the above scenario. The unspoken part of all the scenarios about Daniel are that I am also applying my knowledge about Daniel to the information that I get from sensors or offered by Daniel himself. Suppose that I know that Daniel is avoiding his girlfriend and has been in “meetings” all day. Or that Daniel does or does not have a hands-free device in his car.

We can even go back to one gut reaction to the original cell-phone scenario, “No, I wouldn’t want to do that.” I presume that one objection is that sensors and twittering border on the edge of surveillance and invasive knowledge. A system that is based solely on “personal knowledge” basically sidesteps these issues and allows us to examine the scenario on different merits.

By acknowledging that the user’s mental model of the target is another source of meta-data (and certainly it is equally relevant to the user’s decisions), I think this expands how we think about and design information systems that infer conclusions from a sea of bits.

Where to go from here

Privacy issues: This triangle allows us to look meta-data driven systems that are sensitive to privacy. Or, maybe they raise new questions about privacy – I don’t know. Are personal notes and observations that I make about another person’s activities a violation of their privacy? What if my personal information management system (yes, we’ve been talking about PIM all along!) remembered notes and observations that I would have forgotten long ago? Or made connections between bits that I never would have noticed (“e.g. Didn’t you say, earlier, that she was unemployed?”).

Incentives: When would I decide to manually input observations about another person?

Testing the model: What is data collection that is part-automatic and part-offered? Would that be when I use my Safeway card knowing that it is been recorded? How about other points on the triangle?

Social Theory / Lit. Review: This model could be supported (or challenged) with a better understanding of how people see or model other people in their heads. Right now, all I can think of is Goffman, but I know there’s more on how I perceive people (and how I perceive how people perceive me, ad inifinitum.)

Well, its been fun…

I guess I got bitten by a bug. I got excited and wrote a post — I hope it provokes thought and that the idea holds water. I guess you don’t know until it survives a little criticism. Who knows, maybe I’ll come back to this idea in the future. Peace.

Instructions are:

(1) Download these two files:

a. acm.src

b. acm.gif

(2) Save them in C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins

(3) Restart Firefox.

Enjoy!

“The contribution our project makes to the next decade of game design is a rigorous, systematic means to take human values into consideration in design at many levels.”

Goal: Produce a methodology.

Everyone understands the importance of games as an entertainment form and its role in education, healthcare systems, etc… How do we embed principles that society values into software systems like games?

General questions: How can we design for multiple learners and playstyles? Can you help the underrepresented. How do you design for both cooperation and comeptition?

Mary showed a number of games with an activist angle. One example is a 3 person chess game. Player 1 controls all the pawns (black and white). Player 2 controls all the rest of the black units. Player 3 controls all the rest of the white. Player 2 and 3 are trying to destroy each other. Player 1′s goal is to stop the war by enforcing space between p2 and p3.

Here is her methodology:
1. Discover the values relevant to the project.
2. Translate the value into the architecture and the features
3. Verify that the values outcomes have been realized in the game.
These are to be embedded alongside traditional iterative design modesl for games.

They tested this out in the design of a system called: the Rapunzel project. The engaged in participatory design with kids. And found the kids (as players) wanted human actors rather than abstract characters. Some of the kids wanted the ability to kill (yup.). Furthermore, the kids wanted to use characters that were more sexualized than Mary wanted to promote. Mary showed character designs that the kids rejected and showed completed designs that were more of a compromise for the activist designers and the players. She talked about how she embedded values such as cooperation and equity in other aspects of the gameplay.

She also shared a tool to challenge game designers and to help design games. I think these were used in the Rapunzel project. They were notecards with game names (pacman, tetris, etc…) and notecards with values (healing, colonialism, etc…). The challenge is to randomly draw notecards and to design a game that is <X> and reflects the value <Y>. E.g. Design a pacman game about colonialism.

Note, her lab is making proof of concepts for many different models, producing many different games to expand the direction of game design.

Questions:
In this participipatory design process. Is this a chance for the participants to find their own values?
- Yes. In a participatory design activity, the players fill out notecards themselves as well. It is a chance for these concepts to get surfaced.

Do you design games to be played with a facilitator?
- Standalone games are preferable when we design. It depends on the project.

Do you ever worry that the values you are trying to impart are too heavy-handed?
- “We can’t be so goody-goody that people don’t want to play our stuff.” “We produce games that are complex. This complexity keeps the game interesting” (paraphrased…maybe poorly)

Rule design is fundamental to game design (a board game designer asked this question). Do you have a methodology for generating game rules?
- Mary didn’t have a quick answer for this, and, it seems she acknowledged that this is an important question. One related design-practice she mentioned was to make only incremental changes to game rules and paradigms. (Presumably, this was to make it easier for users to be exposed to something new. Doubly presumably, because her activist games are often unexpected kinds of games with unfamiliar game mechanics.)

Final opinion: I am curious about an evaluation of this games and this methodology. That’s all – 

Designing a visualization of IBM’s corporate business controls. (via Participatory Design)

This is an experience report. The story begins with a meeting with IBM controllers in the midst of this design process. They met with controllers and showed them visualizations. They described their design process to them:

The controllers shared their control process. Controllers are responsible for compliance with regulations (e.g. legal responsibilities, accuracy, financial reporting, address or report controls). A business control is a documented and verifiable test of a business process. These are run every quarter and reported.

The controllers were using a home-grown Lotus Notes db.

(Switching to 1st person, Rachel == I/We)

We offered visualization for access to their data. We ran into participatory design issues:
- We could only have read access to their database
-This would limit our possible solution
- They were considering alternative reporting solutions, and were under pressure from their management to adopt one in particular
- We needed approval from upper management for further work,
etc…

We moved forward anyways.
We learned about the compliance process.
We started to do design experiments and used them as a way of learning more about what their needs really were. We used sketches as conversational props. For example, we showed relative proportions of defects (“5% failed”), they didn’t want that they wanted more concrete details (“3 failed”). The reason for this is that compliance is concerned with each error, not relative percentages.
We built a prototype. (Note, many designers have rolled their eyes at the ugliness of the design. However, the controllers sought this.)

Note about the sensitive power issues.
We needed to involve (more controllers?) or upper management. At the beginning of the design process this was seen as a problem. Now that trust had been built, this was sensible to the controllers.

To deploy the visualization, the controllers participated (and had a solid amount of control).

Note, in design they would have conflicting feature requests from two controllers. There was a tension between group needs and the specific needs-of-a-few. It is not cost-effective to serve the needs of just individuals (not sub-groups or roles or etc…). How to address this *one* frustration?

This issue caused us to revisit our design process. This issue with the common vs. the individual is not new.

MacLean et al. (1990) prescribe a slope towards tailoring as a solution. (ref. End-User Programming). Allow for customizations and allow people to help each other do that (via sharing customizations).

We’re still working. To be continued.

Questions:
Does this require the software engineers to change their relationship with the controllers? Yes, this affects both the software engineers giving daily IT support to the controllers and the software engineers designing the solution.

This is difficult because now you are asking software engineers to meet a different kind of challenge.
- Yes.

In a Scandivanian context, one answer would have been to catch this issue much earlier instead of being surprised by this. One could have held an information forum in advance to educate the users of the limits? (I’m not sure I caught this comment correctly).

Note, another ref: C. Letondal. (2006) Paricipatory Programming: Developing Programmable Bioinformatics Tools for End-users.

The solution to individual needs was “End User Programming”. Wow, I didn’t expect that at all. I would like to see where they go with this project. Someone in the audience essentially said, “In Scandinavia, an introductory forum would have avoided this issue.” Is that the solution to individual needs? Educate users that this isn’t possible? I must have missed most of that comment. 

That still leaves the question. How, as a designer, do you address the individual needs of a user when you are trying to serve a plurality? Perhaps one solution is to make a tough decision and decide whether or not Bob’s particular concerns ought to be cut from the program. This is a difficult decision. The least critical issue is: if you are interviewing Bob at the minimum you know that if you please Bob, you’ll have someone who likes and uses your design. A larger issue is this. How do you decide whether Bob is representative or not? On what authority?

(Note, personally, I am partial to the tailorable/customizable/end-user-programmable solution). 

This group used location-information from mobile devices to inform the scenarios they created for design. They are designing mobile devices.

User study: “Exploration tasks” To trigger insights through ‘doing’.  (with professional designers?)
E.g. draw a map of your city to introduce it to a stranger.
E.g. list your favorite zones.
E.g. given an old photography of yours, describe everything you remember about it.
E.g. take pictures of yourself and others often (every X ?) for a day.
E.g. photodocument a path from A to B for a stranger

Note: Given so many tasks, they encouraged participants to complete the tasks by formating it like a workbook or homework checklist.

Next: In-depth Interviews (with normal users?)
Here, they were looking for needs and wishes that can be addressed by location-based mobile devices.
E.g. Confusing trainstation systems.
E.g. Trust issues in depending on drivers
- These seemed to be different insights from different countries.
Next: Creative exercises (These appear to be an extension of the prior exploration tasks).
E.g. given the photo-trail, traverse it and make amendments?
- All materials were collected and analyzed for major concepts.
E.g. the group was interested in “spicing up the daily routine”

Now, they developed use-scenarios to appeal to these themes.
E.g. “Serendipity” is movie describing a location-based awareness tool of nearby friends.

Questions:
44 interviews, 4 hours each. Was that too much, in retrospect?
Due to the number of cities (6, multi-national) in which we wanted to conduct these interviews, it gave us more confidence. Our concern was to be able to explore across 6 different places (countries?).

Note: Their position in the company was to inspire design and to push designers in Nokia to explore different possibilities for location-based technology.
 My overall impression? This work’s strengths included: their exercise-driven approach and their multi-national approach and their fairly large number of interviewees (~12 per city?). Their weakest points are (1) choosing designers as study participants (As normal and mundane as they may be it doesn’t help that they, in the end, are *not* end-users). and (2) the emphasis they made in seeking unusual forms of design. They stated clearly that they wanted to explore possibilities in design. This makes for an interesting set of discoveries, but it also means they were more interested in “creativity” rather than “success”, which may well be the mundane. Augmenting life certainly sounds interesting, but to whom?

“Experimentally evaluates the efficacy of still images in triggering the remembering of past personal events, having implications for how we conceive of and the claims we make about ‘life-logging’ technologies.”

A SenseCam hangs around your neck and captures many, many things.

Though,
Do we really want to remember everything (isn’t it important to forget)?
What is digital memory?
What is capturing an experience?
Can a machine remember?

Manageable questions,
Do life-logging systems in fact support human memory?
In what ways?
How does this change over time?
What kinds of data should we capture, and how?

There are alot of assumptions about the answers to these questions. There is only weak evidence that videos, still images and audio can trigger recollection of everyday events.

Relevant psychological concepts:
General knowledge (Semantic) vs. Recollection (Episodic) memory

This study:
Q1. Do Sensecam images actually improve our memory for past personal events?
Q2. In what ways do Sense cam images help us connect wiht our past?
Q3. How do cues strenghten or decline over time?
Q4. Are actively captured Sensecam images better retreival cue than similarly passively captured images.

Method:
- Lab control outside the lab
- 3 variables, 2 were
Condition: Sensecam or Control images
Interval: Short vs. Long
For one day a friend wore a sensecam. For two days, the participant wore their own sensecam. The next day, the friend wore it. The friend’s cam pics were considered control images. Addendum: These two are not actually friends and didn’t hang around each other, the were just considered experimental pairs. Later, the participant was given a free recall test to list all the events they can remember and the details of who-what-where-when. They distinguished between mentally recalling/reliving the event and a general knowledge memory of the event (“I usually eat lunch at this time”). They were given a recognition test to see an image and guess whether it was their sensecam image or not. And again, four months later for recall and recognition tests.

Results:
People remembered more on the days they wore the sensecam. This shows a novelty effect and a flaw in the experiment (they students should have worn a inoperative camera on the control days).
If you view your sensecam image you’re more likely to recognize the event. With your sensecam image you’re able to know a little more about what you’re up to even if you can’t remember them. They were good at distinguishing their own images rather than those of others.

Discussion:
Sensecam images improve people memory of the past. The images are meaningful to people on a personal level. Participants are better at ordering their own images than other people’s images. They might be looking at the images and recollecting the events. They could be using their own general knowledge of their routines to make deductions. The difficulty of ordering other people’s images suggests a personal aspect to this recollection. However, (this seems interesting) as people “generally forget”, this personal-advantage-in-sorting-your-own-images may be lost over long-term.

Claim: This stuff helps us with with information retrieval, but maybe not in remembering.

Grabbag:
Taking an active picture was a worse trigger of memory? Because they were already likely to remember the moment anyway? I may have heard this wrong.
Questions/Note:
Did they not want to wear the Sensecam?
-Good question.

We still need to look at whether a fisheye 1st person photo is better than a 3rd person photo for triggering memories (as some have claimed).

Sharing aspect will be important.