Science and technology reporter Katia Moskvitch reports for BBC News.

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City as a platform (video)
In her role as Chief Digital Officer for the City of New York, Rachel Sterne is tasked with strengthening the City’s digital media presence and streamlining internal digital communications.
In her talk Sterne demonstrated recent innovations that are shaping the city’s future. Mentioning how city resident participation is crucial with a real-time approach, attendees were shown “The Daily Pothole,” a Tumblr that tracks the D.O.T.’s progress in filling potholes in the five boroughs and its companion app, the roll-out of QR code technology on building permits, the NYC 311 app, as well as fielding service requests via Twitter.

Industrial Design: ID For The City (alternate) (video)
Duncan Jackson and Eoin Billings (interview), are both partners at Billings Jackson, a design firm specializing in public spaces. They spoke about their work, history and how they bridge the gap between architecture and manufacturing. Instead of re-inventing the wheel, they appreciate and embrace the the urban landscape for what it is. Crafting solutions that interpret design vision in city environments is their forté and the duo explained the value in understanding the intricacies of each place, culture, and its residents before beginning a new project. Their approach is exemplified through their architectural work, with city life exuding from each structure rather then being blurred by it.

> Check also the video and PSFK report on the Microsoft Home of the Future.

Synopsis

Recent developments in new media devices and applications have led to the rise of what have become known as ‘social media’, ‘Web 2.0’, ‘social computing’ or ‘participative web’. This shift in ICT, from unidirectional to conversational media of mass self-communication has lowered the technological thresholds for everyday users to cooperate for their own benefit, to participate in online environments and social network sites, to co-create business value and to become ‘produsers’ or ‘pro-ams’. At the same time, we see an evolution towards people-centred design and user-driven innovation in the design of new media technologies. This has created new opportunities and heightened expectations regarding user empowerment in different societal arenas.

However, the question remains to what extent users and communities interacting in an all-IP new media ecosystem are empowered (and not disempowered) to express their creativity and concerns in their social and cultural environment and to obtain a prominent role in the process of new media design and innovation. The book attempts to answer this question through a collection of chapters that scrutinise this issue. The different chapters focus on the way that social and economic opportunities and threats enable and/or constrain user empowerment.

This work consists of four major sections, each of which examines the (potential) empowerment/disempowerment of users in relation to new media technologies from a different angle. The chapters in the first section describe different theoretical perspectives on user roles and user involvement in the new media ecosystem, referring to interpretative, positivist and critical schools of thought. Based on these overall guiding frameworks, we then explore the leverage users have, both on content level and on technological level. This refers respectively to the second and third section of the book. In the fourth section different case studies are presented, each of which highlight how user empowerment manifests itself in different new media sectors and environments (such as publishing, the music industry and social networking sites).

The book is based on interdisciplinary research. It offers innovative insights based on state-of-the-art academic and industry-driven ICT user research in various European countries. This work will appeal to post-graduate students and researchers in the field of media and communication studies, social studies of technology, digital media marketing and other domains that investigate the mutual relationship between new media technologies and society.

Contents

• Yves Punie: Introduction: New Media Technologies and User Empowerment. Is there a Happy Ending?
• Enid Mante-Meijer/Eugène Loos: Innovation and the Role of Push and Pull
• Valerie Frissen/Mijke Slot: The Return of the Bricoleur: Redefining Media Business
• Serge Proulx/Lorna Heaton: Forms of User Contribution in Online Communities: Mechanisms of Mutual Recognition between Contributors
• Aphra Kerr/Stefano De Paoli/Cristiano Storni: Rethinking the Role of Users in ICT Design: Reflections for the Internet
• James Stewart/Laurence Claeys: Problems and Opportunities of Interdisciplinary Work Involving Users in Speculative Research for Innovation of Novel ICT Applications
• Marinka Vangenck/Jo Pierson/Wendy Van den Broeck/Bram Lievens: User-Driven Innovation in the Case of Three-Dimensional Urban Environments
• Mijke Slot: Web Roles Re-examined: Exploring User Roles in the Media Environment
• Philip Ely/David Frohlich/Nicola Green: Uncertainty, Upheavals and Upgrades: Digital-DIY during Life-change
• Eva K. Törnquist: In Search of Elks and Birds: Two Case Studies on the Creative Use of ICT in Sweden
• Levente Szekely/Agnes Urban: Over the Innovators and Early Adopters: Incentives and Obstacles of Internet Usage
• James Stewart/Richard Coyne/Penny Travlou/Mark Wright/Henrik Ekeus: The Memory Space and the Conference: Exploring Future Uses of Web2.0 and Mobile Internet through Design Interventions
• Sanna Martilla/Kati Hyyppä/Kari-Hans Kommonen: Co-Design of a Software Toolkit for Media Practices: P2P-Fusion Case Study
• Ike Picone: Mapping Users’ Motivations and Thresholds for Casually «Produsing» News
• Stijn Bannier: The Musical Network 2.0 & 3.0
• Enid Mante-Meijer/Jo Pierson/Eugène Loos: Conclusion: Substantiating User Empowerment

Authors

• Jo Pierson is Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel – Department of Communication Studies / SMIT (Studies on Media, Information and Telecommunication)
• Enid Mante-Meijer is emeritus Professor at Utrecht University – Utrecht School of Governance
• Eugène Loos is Professor at the University of Amsterdam – Department of Communication Science / ASCoR (Amsterdam School of Communication Research).

“When it comes to identity, users have historically been locked in a dance with the devil—our data in return for some subsidized service (search, email, whatever). Frankly, in the past it’s been a raw deal, because the data has typically been working for advertisers, rather than for us. But smart designers are now turning this equation on its head, creating a raft of sexy, bespoke services that use our data to better reflect our identities in their products, and (if we so choose) share that data with the wider world. They are designing these services to be transparent, intuitive, and delightful. And they are pointing the way towards a future where sharing data is actually worth doing.”

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His main point is that “augmented reality is the experience of contextually appropriate data in the environment. And that experience not only can, but MUST, use every sense available.”

He expands:

“If AR is the experience of any kind of data by any sense then we have the options to associate secondary data with secondary senses to create hierarchies of information that match our cognitive abilities.

For me, augmented reality is the extension of our senses into the realm of information shadows where physical objects have data representations that can be manipulated digitally as we manipulate objects physically. To me this goes further than putting a layer of information over the world, like a veil. It’s about enhancing the direct experience of the world, not to replace it, and to do it in a way that’s not about being completely in the background, like ambient data weather, or about taking over our attention.

So what I’m advocating for is a change in language away from “augmented reality” to something that’s more representative of the whole experience of data in the environment. I’m calling it “Somatic Data Perception” and I close on a challenge to you. As you’re designing, think about what IS secondary data and what are secondary, and how can the two be brought together?”

Mike Kuniavsky is a writer, designer, researcher and entrepreneur. His focus is the intersection of people and technology. His 2003 book, “Observing the User Experience,” has helped thousands of people understand the relationship between people and products, and it is used as a textbook by top universities around the world. His 2010 book, “Smart Things: ubiquitous computing user experience design” is a guide to the user-centered design of digital consumer electronics, appliances, and environments. He has designed dozens of award-winning product experiences that are used by tens of thousands of people every day. He is a cofounder of ThingM, an electronic hardware design, development and manufacturing company, and was a founding partner of Adaptive Path, an influential San Francisco internet consultancy.

Be nice to the telepresence robot
If you’re talking to a colleague on the other side of the world via their robotic representative, will it be rude to turn down its volume?

Stroll through data in the augmented city
City streets, buildings and even people are about to be painted with a vibrant array of virtual information and adverts.

Don’t invent, evolve
We are about to enter a new era of invention, thanks to software that can evolve designs we could never dream of.

Eat a printed dinner in your printed home
3D printers can fabricate objects of any shape – jewellery and machine parts for now, but printed buildings, food and even body organs could be on the way.

Jacking into your brain
Direct link between our brains and computers are set to challenge our notions of identity, culpability and the acceptable limits of human enhancement.

The crystal ball internet
Sentiments expressed in the torrent of blog posts, tweets and Facebook updates offer a powerful way to predict the future.

Digital wallets will empty faster
The ability to pay with a swipe of a cellphone will shorten queues in stores – and make it easy for us to spend much more.

As Bruce Sterling points out, Augmented Reality is “truly a child of the twenty-teens, a genuine digital native,” and one visible indication that …the Internet really could look like a “legacy.”

“The Legacy Internet as an old-fashioned, dusty, desk-based place best left to archivists and librarians, while the action is out on the streets.”

Read interview (alternate link)

The fate of your online soul
We are the first people in history to create vast online records of our lives. How much of it will endure when we are gone?

Archaeology of the future
Future historians will want to study the birth of the web using our digital trails – but how will they make sense of it all?

Respecting the digital dead
How can we keep digital bequests safe without poking our noses where they’re not wanted?

Amateur heroes of online heritage
It’ll take more than money alone to preserve today’s internet pages for posterity

Digital legacy: Teaching the net to forget
We’ve begun to accept that the internet cannot forget, but the power to change that has been in our hands for decades

“Can a $5 or $10 app really make visiting cities like Paris, Tokyo, or Moscow a breeze? To find out, I flew to Rome carrying an iPhone 4 and a Samsung Captivate, which runs Google’s Android operating system. After three days of rigorous testing—during which I walked more than 25 miles, weaved past several thousand tourists, consumed two excellent bowls of pasta and molti cones of gelato, and downloaded over 100 megabytes of data—I had the answer. So, does AR deliver all that it promises? Not so much.”

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Now the Intel website provides some more background on Intel’s work on Context Aware Computing.

“Context-awareness can make computing devices more responsive to individual needs and help to intelligently personalize apps and services. Using self-learning mechanisms, sensor inputs, and data analytics, Intel research teams are engaged in a number of projects that promise to take machine learning beyond the lab to practical, real-world applications.”

Most interestingly, the site goes into some depth on Intel’s current projects that explore the boundaries of context-aware computing:

• Online Semi-Supervised Learning and Face Recognition: Use face recognition in place of a password to log in to any protected site. The self-learning techniques being refined by this project can be adapted to many areas of context awareness.
• Context Aware Computing—Activity Recognition: This project is developing techniques so that your computer can adapt to your patterns of activity and, based on your needs and expectations, instruct and guide you on a daily basis.
• Context-Aware Computer—Social Proximity Detection: Your friends, family, and co-workers all play a role in determining how your daily activities unfold. This project identifies ways to use the proximity of people important in your life to adjust communications and to help coordinate activities.

There is also more information on Intel’s Tomorrow Project & Futurism initiative.

“The project features science fiction stories, comics and short screen plays based on current research and emerging technologies and examines their affect on our future. “

Check the stories by Douglas Rushkoff, Ray Hammond. Scarlett Thomas and Markus Heitz. The next one is by Cory Doctorow, it seems.

Based on the deep research and collective experience of PARC and other practitioners, both books draw on extensive case studies or field experience to make the areas they cover more accessible for broader audiences. The books highlight how innovations and business applications in these areas have and can give companies a real competitive edge, especially in today’s environment, where products are always at risk of being commoditized, the services sector increasingly dominates economic activity, and global competition is intensifying.

In Making Work Visible: Ethnographically Grounded Case Studies of Work Practice (Cambridge University Press, April 2011), Peggy Szymanski and co-editor Jack Whalen share how “ethnography” engagements are conducted, and how findings from these studies can lead to business impact. By applying naturalistic observation in different contexts to understand what people actually do – as opposed to only what they say they do – ethnography makes the unknown known, makes the tacit explicit, and reveals insights that would not otherwise be revealed. The embedding of social scientists in technology companies (often referred to as corporate ethnography) was pioneered at PARC in the 1970s, and has evolved here and elsewhere since. Drawing on contributions from PARC, Xerox, and other researchers throughout the world, this book demonstrates how ethnography can improve technology design and help develop better ways of working. The book focuses on case studies in production, office, home, and retail settings – including the critical “customer front.”

In Ubiquitous Computing for Business: Find New Markets, Create Better Businesses, and Reach Customers Around the World 24-7-365 (Financial Times Press, March 10, 2011), Bo Begole shares how companies can incorporate this game-changing technology into their products, services, processes, and strategies while mitigating their risks, making better decisions about “build vs. buy,” and sorting hype from real value. Conceived at PARC in the 1990s, the paradigm of ubiquitous computing – pervasive, mobile devices; embedded sensors and data; and seamless integration across physical and digital worlds – has recently exploded in the form of pervasive personalized devices and services. From the Web to the iPod, smart phones to social networks, “Ubicomp” technologies continue to interweave computing more deeply into human life than ever before, enabling massive new industries and destroying companies that can’t adapt. The book describes the general capabilities that Ubicomp technologies create, the limitations they face, and their impact across industry categories. Begole shares proven strategies for leveraging Ubicomp technologies to drive business value, illustrated with a number of real-world innovation case studies.

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Natural user interfaces (NUIs) have been hailed as next evolutionary step in human-computer interaction. As software companies struggle to catch up with one another in terms of developing the next great touch-based interface, designers are charged with the daunting task of keeping up with the advances in NUI technology and this new aspect to user experience design.

Product and interaction designers, developers and managers are already well versed in UI design, but touch-based interfaces have added a new level of complexity. They need quick references and real world examples in order to make informed decisions when designing for these particular interfaces.

Brave NUI World is the first practical book for product and interaction developers and designing touch and gesture interfaces.

Written by the team from Microsoft that developed the multi-touch, multi-user Surface® tabletop product, this book gives you the necessary tools and information to integrate touch and gesture practices into your daily work, presenting scenarios, problem solving, metaphors, and techniques intended to avoid making mistakes.

Daniel Wigdor is UX Architect and Platform Architect at Microsoft and an Assistant Professor of computer science at the University of Toronto. Before joining U of T, he worked at Microsoft in nearly a dozen different roles, among them serving as the User Experience Architect of the Microsoft Surface product, and as a cross company expert in the creation of Natural User Interfaces. Dennis Wixon is currently Discipline Lead for Microsoft US BPD. Prior to this role he was the head of research for Microsoft Surface, and has also managed research teams at Microsoft Game Studies, and MSN/Home Products.

Sample chapter

Abstract
Our cities are “smart” and getting smarter as information processing capability is embedded throughout more and more of our urban infrastructure. Few of us object to traffic light control systems that respond to the ebbs and flows of city traffic; but we might be taken aback when discount coupons for our favorite espresso drink are beamed to our mobile phones as we walk past a Starbucks. Sentient City explores the experience of living in a city that can remember, correlate, and anticipate. Five teams of architects, artists, and technologists imagine a variety of future interactions that take place as computing leaves the desktop and spills out onto the sidewalks, streets, and public spaces of the city.

“Too Smart City” employs city furniture as enforcers: a bench ejects a sitter who sits too long, a sign displays the latest legal codes and warns passersby against transgression, and a trashcan throws back the wrong kind of trash. “Amphibious Architecture” uses underwater sensors and lights to create a human-fish-environment feedback loop; “Natural Fuse” uses a network of “electronically assisted” plants to encourage energy conservation; “Trash Track” follows smart-tagged garbage on its journey through the city’s waste-management system; and “Breakout” uses wireless technology and portable infrastructure to make the entire city a collaborative workplace.

These projects are described, documented, and illustrated by 100 images, most in color. Essays by prominent thinkers put the idea of the sentient city in theoretical context.

Case studies by David Benjamin, Soo-in Yang, and Natalie Jeremijenko; Haque Design + Research; SENSEable City Lab; David Jimison and JooYoun Paek; and Anthony Townsend, Antonina Simeti, Dana Spiegel, Laura Forlano, and Tony Bacigalupo

Essays by Martijn de Waal, Keller Easterling, Matthew Fuller, Anne Galloway, Dan Hill, Omar Khan, Saskia Sassen, Trebor Scholz, Hadas Steiner, Kazys Varnelis, and Mimi Zeiger

Mark Shepard is Assistant Professor of Architecture and Media Study at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, and an editor of the Situated Technologies pamphlet series, published by the Architecture League of New York.

(via Stowe Boyd)

Here are some of the articles I picked out:

Executive Insight
Guy Laurence, CEO of Vodafone UK, knows a thing or two about information overload. Feeling stressed out by statistics? He has the cure for data impotence.

Lunch with Hal
Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google, sinks his teeth into data obesity and how to treat it.

The Mobile Revolution
As Barclays Cycle Hire approaches its first birthday, we consider its strengths and weaknesses as a source of data.

The Knowledge
Simon Rogers picks the 10 best places to see ‘sexy’ data online.

“Our current devices are terrible at determining context, especially with regard to how we relate to other people via our existing social networks. Today’s devices “blurt out the absolute truth as they know it. A smart device [in the future] might know when NOT to blurt out the truth.” They would know when to withhold information.”

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It took me a some time to write up all my (personal) thoughts on the presentations, but now the writing is done and the result is online on Core77.

Thank you Laurent, Nicolas and others in the LIFT team, for once again hosting a highly stimulating conference, and thank you LinYee (managing editor at Core77) for the edit, the addition of videos and photos, and the encouragement.

I can’t wait to read some comments.

Ubiquitous computing (or “ubicomp”) is the label for a “third wave” of computing technologies. Following the eras of the mainframe computer and the desktop PC, ubicomp is characterized by small and powerful computing devices that are worn, carried, or embedded in the world around us. The ubicomp research agenda originated at Xerox PARC in the late 1980s; these days, some form of that vision is a reality for the millions of users of Internet-enabled phones, GPS devices, wireless networks, and “smart” domestic appliances.

In Divining a Digital Future, computer scientist Paul Dourish and cultural anthropologist Genevieve Bell explore the vision that has driven the ubiquitous computing research program and the contemporary practices that have emerged–both the motivating mythology and the everyday messiness of lived experience.

Reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of the authors’ collaboration, the book takes seriously the need to understand ubicomp not only technically but also culturally, socially, politically, and economically. Dourish and Bell map the terrain of contemporary ubiquitous computing, in the research community and in daily life; explore dominant narratives in ubiquitous computing around such topics as infrastructure, mobility, privacy, and domesticity; and suggest directions for future investigation, particularly with respect to methodology and conceptual foundations.

Paul Dourish is Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, with courtesy appointments in Computer Science and in Anthropology. He conducts research in human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing, and social studies of science and technology. Before joining UC Irvine, he was a Senior Member of Research Staff at Xerox PARC.

Genevieve Bell is an Intel Fellow and the Director of Intel’s first user-focused research and development lab, Interaction and Experience Research. A cultural anthropologist, she studies the relationship between information technology and cultural practice both in technology design and in settings of everyday use. Before joining Intel, she taught Anthropology and American Studies at Stanford University.

“The way in which people frantically communicate online via Twitter, Facebook and instant messaging can be seen as a form of modern madness, according to a leading American sociologist.

“A behaviour that has become typical may still express the problems that once caused us to see it as pathological,” MIT professor Sherry Turkle writes in her new book, Alone Together, which is leading an attack on the information age.”

The article also covers other critical contributions, including The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, The Net Delusion by Evgeny Morozov, The Dumbest Generation by Mark Bauerlein, We Have Met The Enemy by Daniel Akst, and Cyburbia by James Harkin.

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Alone Together has also been reviewed in The New York Times and the New Scientist (see also this previous blog post).

“Where once artificial intelligence researchers proposed artefacts that would win us over with their smartness, designers of these latest machines aim to seduce with sociability. Sociable robots press our “Darwinian buttons”: we respond to humanoid objects that make eye contact, track our motion and say our names as “creatures” with intentions, consciousness, even feelings.

Indeed, when an object reaches out and asks us to care for it, we find we not only want to care for it, but want it to care for us in return. Nurturance turns out to be the “killer app” in our relationships with the inanimate. We are vulnerable to new attachments, seduced by machines that ask for our care. They “pretend” to converse, but do not understand what we say. Engrossed by sociable robots, we are alone yet experience a new sense of intimacy.” [...]

“Alone with robots, we feel connected; together with people but not fully relating to them, we feel alone. We are in the still centre of a perfect storm. I call this the “robotic moment”, a technological moment in which we fear our lives with technology are out of control, and we fantasise, paradoxically, that it is technology that will help us re-establish control.”

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In her new book Alone Together, she shares her ambivalence about the overuses of technology, which, she writes, “proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies.” The book completes a trilogy of investigations into the ways humans interact with technology.

Fast Company spoke recently with Turkle about connecting, solitude, and how that compulsion to always have your BlackBerry on might actually be hurting your company’s bottom line.

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