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Here is my selection on mobility related papers presented at CHI 2008.
(Papers are linked to their pdf downloads, if available.) A diary study of mobile information needs [abstract] Accountabilities of presence: reframing location-based systems [abstract] |
| Posts in category 'Mobility' |
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3 May 2008
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17 April 2008
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13 April 2008
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Daniel Lende wrote a good annotated summary of the New York Times magazine feature of Jan Chipchase, on the “Neuroanthropology” blog.
He thinks the “world is going to see a transformation through the convergence of four factors: people-driven processes, change for the rest of us, human-centered science, and emerging methods”. |
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11 April 2008
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The Economist asked Nokia’s “user anthropologist” Jan Chipchase to self-document his nomadic life in Tokyo and Seattle, taking pictures and leaving phone messages.
The video is part of The Economist special report on mobility and “digital nomads”. |
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10 April 2008
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The Economist newspaper has published a special report on mobility, wondering what the social effects will be.
Sources are some of the top people in the field (many of whom are frequently written about on this blog). Our nomadic future [leader article] Nomads at last Labour movement The new oases Family ties Location, location, location A world of witnesses Homo mobilis |
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10 April 2008
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Luca Chittaro (blog) of Il Sole 24 Ore’s Novà just published his last three CHI 2008 interviews:
Talking cars Accessibility GPS and the perception of the world |
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10 April 2008
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Luca Chittaro (blog), who covers the CHI 2008 conference in Florence for Novà, the innovation supplement of Il Sole 24 Ore, Italy’s business newspaper, continues with his gruelling pace of interviews. Here is another batch:
Technology among the homeless Attractiveness on-line On-line friendship Friends and enemies in social networks What do people do with Facebook? Interaction with future cars Driver distraction Phishing the common user Graffiti-covered desktop |
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5 March 2008
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| Darren Waters of BBC News recently visited Nokia’s scientists and researchers at their lab in Palo Alto to talk about the future of mobile phones in three, five and eight years, and also beyond that.
The first thing he highlighted is the fact no-one at Nokia calls the devices phones anymore; they are multimedia computers. He was shown three projects being developed at Nokia’s labs around the world, two of them in Palo Alto. |
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26 January 2008
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Putting People First regularly features the work of UC Irvine professor Paul Dourish, whose interest lies in the crossover areas between computer science, anthropology, ubiquitous computing, mobility, design and HCI.
Here are some of the recent publications by this very prolific researcher:
(via Pasta&Vinegar) |
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6 January 2008
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A few weeks ago, I announced the new direction taken by Interactions Magazine under its new editors-in-chief Richard Anderson and Jon Kolko, and now the first issue is out.
The content looks very exciting indeed and the editors-in-chief have done a great job at getting some of the best people in the field to contribute. Columns
Features
In addition, there are several “Forum” pieces and a few book reviews. Unfortunately, the publishers (ACM) have taken a weird approach to the online version: while the site has all the trappings of an online publication (with a nice design, a good table of contents, commenting, and article blogposts), it contains hardly any content! They only have excerpts available online - you have to be an ACM member to read the full text - in the printed issue that is (at $50 for 6 issues). Also there is no information about the authors online. Not surprisingly, the site has very few comments and I doubt it has much traffic. I hope the hard copy will arrive quickly here in Europe, but even more that Richard and Jon will be able to convince ACM that this is not a very good online policy. |
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3 December 2007
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The TED conference has published its video of the talk by Nokia’s “user anthropologist” Jan Chipchase in March this year:
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1 December 2007
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From Intel’s Essential Computing website:
Videos
Researchers The Essential Computing site also links to a page which presents some key Intel researchers and the projects they are working on, including many of the People and Practices Research Group (P&P):
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27 October 2007
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The Dott07 festival, curated by John Thackara, and taking place in the English city of NewcastleGateshead, is now in its last few days. One of the events was a series of debates on a variety of topics, such as energy, food, health, movement, and schools.
The debate on movement started from the assumption that the movement of people and goods around the world consume vast amounts of matter, energy, space, and time - most of it non-renewable. Question that arise are: Should sustainable development therefore be concentrated in cities, where economic progress can most feasibly be de-coupled from transport intensity? Or are there ways to ensure that rural communities have access to services by using transport resources more smartly? And could new forms of sustainable tourism be enabled by access to territorial and cultural assets that already exist? The session began with a keynote from Anthony Townsend, research director at the Institute of the Future in Palo Alto, California, who has now posted his entire presentation online.
Townsend believes in the future of virtual worlds, telerobotics, and high-definition videoconferencing. But does presence really always require such high-end technologies? Townsend’s talk was followed by a review of Dott 07’s Move Me project, which explored the potential to transform transportation resource efficiency in one village, Scremerston, in Northumberland, and by a review of three Dott 07 projects - Sustainable Tourism, Welcomes and Mapping the Necklace. |
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15 October 2007
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The always very well-informed Internet Actu blog has posted an article by Bruno Marzloff, a sociologist and the driving force behind the Chronos Group, a research lab specialised in mobility and dislocation. Marzloff reflects on the future of our relation with the city, with our urban environment, to better understand how we will interact with it, and how this environment itself will become the support of our media. Has the urban become the media? [The translation from French to English is by Mark Vanderbeeken]
“People are the new media“, said Pierre Bellanger in a recent article in Netéconomie (”The social network is the telco’s future“). If this means extending the collaborative approach also to the mobile phone, it is not really much of a surprise. For sure, “the new culture is participative” and extending this approach to the world of mobility seems rather straightforward, even if one can only guess the shapes this culture might take once it is detached from the PC and the big stationary screens. But Bellanger, who is the founder and CEO of Skyrock radio, goes quite a bit further in this reasoning. What he has in mind is nothing less than a revolution taking place, with him sitting in the front row. Or said differently: the mobile person is the media (and the individual gets mixed up with his mobile). Therefore the mobile (individual and machine) becomes the fulcrum of his communication and his outreach. The mobile is receiver, sender and relay station. This central role of the mobile in our media world becomes amplified, adds Pierre Bellanger, because “Who knows better what I am doing, what I am watching, what I am listening to, with whom I am talking or where I am, than the machine that carries all these activities?” The media inserts itself in the mobility of the user while at the same time giving him “full control of his exchanges. The modest size of the screen and the keyboard is no limitation: it can connect to whatever other machine, appear there as a virtual support and therefore use the connected machine, including its peripherals, as an extra resource“. The mobile takes control of its surroundings: “A bit like the iPod takes control of a stereo system to which it is connected“. Bellanger concludes: “It is the small terminal taking charge of the big one“. The “small terminal” is the new screen that comes in the wake of others that mark the history of communication. The first screen in the history of technology was a public one: it was the big cinema screen. The second one was a collective one, but it wasn’t public: it was the television set. The third one, the computer screen, was personal but could be shared. The fourth one, the mobile, is on itself, intimate, not to be shared, and accompanying me wherever I go. And the evolution isn’t finished yet. A fifth screen is already on the horizon. A screen perhaps without a screen, without contact even, or on the contrary connected through a multitude of extensions. A screen that will highlight the evolution towards more autonomy and more mobility (i.e. the capacity to mobilise our resources, which the English call “empowerment”). This fifth screen covers a collection of things:
Now set up as a human cyborg through the mediation of the mobile, the individual enters into a dialogue with tags, that become increasingly pervasive in the city. The urban nomad navigates along the structure of his own information system; in a dialogue with real time and real places; in continuous interaction as well with other nomads. This media complex integrates the individuals in a moving tissue. The fifth screen marks the arrival of ambient technology, of the Everyware that Adam Greenfield calls it in his book Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing (see here and here). This Everyware is the field of development of the fifth screen and the new online service and media perspective of thecity. It is also one of the open topics to be addressed in the Villes 2.0 [Cities 2.0] programme, and a challenge to understand the city of tomorrow. Everyware is a real revolution due the way extends the power of us all (but also of the various operators and of authorities) in the public realm. This is why in the city of tomorrow, the urban is the media. The “familiarity” one can feel towards a city or a neighbourhood, even while discovering it, is the real stake of the fifth screen. We will rather speak of a “permanent process of familiarisation” in a city where everything changes and moves all the time. Or in the words of Peter Morville, author of Ambient Findability, it is crucial to provide people the tools for their autonomy, their wayfinding and their choices - the author speaks of freedom that is granted to individuals (”empowering individuals with information and choice”). How? The answer to him requires a neologism: findability (which describes “a world in rapid emergence where one can find whoever or whatever, from wherever or whenever”). What does that mean concretely? One goes from the web to the city, and from the link to the place. One googles the city like one googles the Web. “Findability” applies to the existence of signs, reference marks, beacons and other types of information in the city, links as it were to real times and places, that allow us to navigation and to be secure in the city. The goal of the fifth screen development, as some experiments are already showing, is to make the city familiar, to provide useful information and transactions, to enable a dialogue between citizens, and to allow the population access to participatory information, without forgetting of course some space for the imaginary. The fifth screen is the city. It is the urban as a media. They are waves, labels, signs, screens, traces, … A city augmented with information, information augmented with geolocalisation. One can feel the pulse of the city in real time and one can even participate in its beat, as demonstrated by the projects Real Time Rome and WikiCity. The fifth screen is the next lever for urban governance. It allows the urbanite to express himself. The urbanite becomes the media in the city, just like the desktop user is in the world of Web 2.0. The fifth screen opens up a space to a wide range of actors that will use these opportunities of dialogue to share information, entertainment, services, and all kinds of offerings. But if the field is wide open, so is Pandora’s box! The fifth screen can also become a tool for repression, for surveillance and for all types of intrusion. It could be the opposite of the collaborative media of sousveillance (with the system allowing us to see our voyeurs and therefore establishing a balance of reciprocal transparency, as outlined by David Brin in The Transparent Society). The history of the fifth screen will need to be written together by citizens, companies, and regional entities. Bruno Marzloff |
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13 October 2007
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Just when you thought that science parks were based on a paradigm, a new mixed science, technology and business driven initiative - the Creative Conversion Factory in Eindhoven, Netherlands - will launch on 12 November. Note the current focus areas though!
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28 September 2007
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“From Boston to Brazil, city planners and transportation gurus are reimagining the possibilities of the humble motorbus, using high-tech ’smart mobility’ to challenge the preeminence of the car — and revive the urban commons,” writes the Boston Globe.
- Read full story |
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28 September 2007
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The mobile platform is currently undergoing somewhat of a revolution in the developing world — and so are people’s lives — with Africa now more advanced than the rest of the world in terms of mobile banking. The user experience challenges are only beginning to be addressed.
If you want to keep abreast on developments in this field, here is a crop of news stories from just this last week:
Note by the way that all the user research work by Jan Chipchase and others seems to have paid off: Nokia dominates the mobile handset landscape in India with an astonishing 74% market share. |
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18 September 2007
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“The user as an unconscious sensor of the environment” was the title of Antonio Calvosa’s (Ferrari S.p.A.) keynote speech today at the Ubicomp conference in Innsbruck, Austria.
Mr. Antonio Calvosa, currently leading the Ferrari’s Innovation Team Project, is in charge of bringing knowledge into the Company with respect to future and emerging technologies that can play a relevant role in enriching the Ferrari’s driving experience. He developed a series of international collaborations with leading institutions, mostly within the Seventh Research Framework Programme of the European Commission. In particular, attention has been paid to the identification and exploitation of new concepts for future human-machine interfaces. He is a co-author of a series patents at Ferrari on human-machine interface and of a patent on electron microscopy held at Philips Research. Antonio Calvosa graduated cum laude in Electrical Engineering from Politecnico di Milano (Italy) and also received his ‘Diplome d’Ingenieur’ from Ecole Supérieure d’Electricité (Paris, France) within the Top Industrial Manager for Europe Programme. He also holds a Master in Physics of nanostructures from Paris XI (Orsay, France). According to Rachel Hinman of Adaptive Path, who attended the keynote,
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30 August 2007
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“Starting next week, some Mercedes-Benz drivers will be able to plan trips to restaurants, stores and landmarks using Yahoo or Google, and then send directions directly to their vehicles.
The program, announced Wednesday, is called Search & Send. It was jointly developed with the two Silicon Valley Internet giants and DaimlerChrysler’s Research, Engineering and Design North America office in Palo Alto. Drivers can plot destinations, addresses or points of interest using Google Maps or Yahoo Local Maps. Then, they can click a “Send to Car” icon. The information is then sent to the vehicle’s GPS navigation system and can be retrieved by pushing a dashboard button on the car’s Tele Aid telematics system.” - Read full story [San Jose Mercury News] |
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25 August 2007
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Magyar Telekom’s new media lab Kitchen Budapest (KiBu), opened in June 2007, is a new media lab for young researchers who are interested in the convergence of mobile communication, online communities and urban space and are passionate about creating experimental projects in cross-disciplinary teams.
Promising idea-makers are provided with undisturbed working conditions and paid scholarships. One of Magyar Telekom’s objectives with this project is to promote new initiatives and creative ideas that later might be competitive on the market.
(via IFTF’s Future Now) UPDATE: 6 OCTOBER 2007: |
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