ICS203B

Firstly, I found these readings interesting because they were about the other? The other is always more interesting than myself for me. But what they did do for me was bring to light some connections – linkages between this class and my work.

I am interested in the use of technology in relationship to the body, and how it can be used to mediate a space or place for the benefit of the other?

SO here are a few questions in relation to that?
The suffering body?
Do others perceptions and uses of space influence how I interpret the world around me?
How important is the use our use of language in the construction of an particular image that is emblematic of a situation?
Can the collection and surveillance of a person or persons mobility be used to actually benefit them by devising a system where the implimentation of compatable mobile information, communications technology structures are accessible to all but not bounded by others?

In On the move?
What actually is the compression of time?
Is time really about the increased number of actions on does over a period of time?
Did Einstein really prove factually what time was?
P281 “Abstract statements are made about how……” the notion of time is dealt with not as action but a temporal
SO technology is creating a collapsing of distance (me speaking to my parents in Australia) But is this distance really collapsing or just reconfiguring the distance by providing an abstract space where we are told we are collapsing the distance but really we are creating a chasm between action and imagined communication?

The aboriginal article:
Their use of the negative space?
Is this an issue that is directly related to the aboriginal or is it just an analogy of how we interact within our own space?
How do we interpret cultural as bodily action?
Is it because the action then redefines the place which in turn affects the space? P451
What is a detour in contemporary cyber space?
An alternate use of an apparatus – an appendage – re Marshall McLuhan?
Can boundaries be challenged?
Particularly if they become submerged in our actions. A part of our daily rituals that eventually become habitual and hence embedded in our actions?
Do we have to really look for some sense of the self through surveillance and observation to allow the morphing of boundaries? – perhaps this can be a part of generic education?

The case of the female tramp:
Can the body be redefined by the use of technology to mediate the space?
As the body is being defined by the public and this affects us in our private worlds, can we reclaim a sense of control over who we are?.... or is that already predetermined?
If the body is never fully inscribed is there a place for alternate actions that can redefine a space?
Can we use the body as an appendage for technology as a place of resistence?

Posted by Angela Willcocks at 01:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

a move towards more sustainable design, if only in concept.. story on gizmodo.

Posted by roxy at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Reading about arphids and the internet of various things, it is undoubtly clear that we have really come a long way from paper barcodes , manually locating lost things to the simplicity in finding and managing them via global positioning systems. But one things which was not touched in detail here is the security issues. Arphids and leaking of data out of computer monitors can prove seious security threat . In india in last month, such security concerns were raised from GPS and RFIDs as it becomes very easy to spy on security instituions and eastiblishments. Also , another issue I feel is the interfacing , as tracking so much information often can lead to complexities in interfacing all of them together.
But despite these drawbacks, it still remains a very important feature of making life simple and simplifying how we interact we various things around us.

Posted by Hironmay Basu at 11:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The beginning of our discussion today about detachment from the physical world reminded me of an Asimov story I'd recently read. It's not entirely on topic, but since we're reading sci-fi authors anyway, I thought you guys might enjoy a peek at another visionary's depiction of a fully detached and searchable world:

The Last Question

Posted by Sara at 06:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

since there's not been much action on the blog yet, and since i'm one of the leaders of today's dicussion i figured maybe i should throw some ideas out for consideration. i got into a long discussion with a colleague of mine about this book last week - she was taking a bit more of a critical view of what sterling sets out to do but i think her main point is a good one for discussion: can designers really "change the world" or is that just something we tell ourselves to feel good? my friend was pushing that a lot of the world altering decisions are in the hands of the big companies and governments. a bit of a pessimistic position, but i think it's useful to consider how exactly to go about the mission which sterling is advocating. what are the practical ways we can get together and make a change [this of course goes back a bit to the reflective design stuff we were getting at a while ago - how do we take theories into action?].

the other general topic for discussion i'd like to open up is one of information. this is something i've been keenly interested in lately and i take some issues with sterling's views. i think here the notion of information is clear one of data collection, though he proposes using mining and sort of communities of interest to do the filtering for us. i wonder though - 100 years ago a wine bottle could be read in a very different way, the color and the texture of the glass telling us something about the wines origins, something for which we have lost the skill to discern [and this is due in large part to a world of mass production and globalization, there are more choices for which we would have to be familiar with]. but still, i don't believe there is really any more information, just very new ways of uncovering, representing and examining it. however i think that sterling might be conflating at times "information" with "informative" and i think for the purposes of this book it is a dangerous mistake...

Posted by roxy at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"A new device merely opens a door: it does not compel one to enter."

It seems to me that we are often trying to specialize technology to the extent that we now design technologies, not only for their original purpose, but any other purpose we can possibly conceive. With this increased specialization, we are allowing technology telling us how to use it instead of us telling technology how we want to use it. In some instance these specializations are beneficial and even useful; in other cases it seems to be overkill. We can have hundreds of products that are esentially the same, but are different enough that they can be marketed as different products. For some products that we desire uniqueness (cars, houses, clothes, etc.) I see the specialization as an important factor, but for other products, the uniqueness seems somewhat excessive. In the Culturally Embedded Computing paper, the trigger spray example comes to mind as an example of an unimportant use. Although the spray bottle designs were meant to evoke thought instead of introduce actual products, I find just the idea of some of the spray bottles laughable. I would prefer to see people increasingly finding new uses for existing devices instead of creating or obtaining new devices to fulfill a use. That's just me, I guess.

Posted by Doug Kim at 01:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Lillie notes that "the status quo is never challenged by the technologies presented" in narratives like Cooltown. "Rather, these technologies allow for social relations to seemingly flow as well, ensuring that social breakdowns do not threaten the efficiency of labor or the transmission of information." as a technologist/designer/builder, I'm left asking, how can we make technologies that challenge the status quo? could we make domestic products such as those for cooking and cleaning geared obviously toward a male demographic? could we make other products such as those for yard work or car repair geared obviously toward a female demographic? I suspect we could, but I'm not sure this would really get at the point. I think the point might be more to get users of these technologies to question, to challenge the status quo. so, how do we go about doing that? how do we grant efficacy to such challenges? moreover, how do we get people to use such "challenging" technologies in the first place?

Posted by Eric Baumer at 03:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In case anyone has trouble finding it, you can view the Cooltown video ad from the Lillie paper's source website:

http://www.ibiblio.org/jlillie/cooltown/lillie.htm

"Congratulations, Bob!" is my favorite part.

Posted by Sara at 11:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

agre concludes his chapter saying that "A critical technical practice will, at least for the foreseeable future, require a split identity -- one foot planted in the craft work of design and the other foot planted in the reflexive work of critique." he focuses strongly on grounding such a practice in both the history of the discipline and in daily practice. however, in talking about AI he is describing a uniquely american grounding. of course it is not wholly unreasonable given the history of AI, but when considering in our case ubicomp i think such a narrow view is problematic. culture needs to be taken in to account, and not just the culture of the discipline itself. bell et al. solve this somewhat by attempting to "make strange" our everyday world and thus help us get a handle on how deeply ingrained our cultures are and sengers et al. take this further by helping us to use design to disrupt these notions. it seems though that these new "discoveries" occur on a "per-culture" basis - but how can we fold this back in to what agre was getting at? how can we begin to have a cross-cultural dialogue about these matters? what is the same enough to share and what is different enough to draw boundaries? can all ubicomp work be put under one umbrella or do we end up with "american ubicomp" "european ubicomp" not to mention asian, african, south american and so on... ?

Posted by roxy at 02:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In the paper "A Historical View of Context", Matthew Chalmers puts forward an interactional view of context and offers three system design principles. The second one being, "deep system structure should be revealed so as to support system inspection and adaptation" which I find to be going against the principles of what ubiquitous computing stands for. Should the user be bothered with the deep system structure in order to develop context. Isn't revealing the deep system structure making things more complex for the user. Instead of focusing more on the task at hand, the user is focussing more on the system at hand which infact what ubiquitous computing set out to change.

This is more about the positivist theories in social science. I find it hard to understand how a social phonemena could be reduced to simplified models and how they could be proved using mathematical equations. There are so many variables to be considered and so many unknowns making up the model which in turn could affect its accuracy. Doesn't social phonemena vary more and more with different individuals. Giving a generalized view may not be entirely representative of the social phonemena but in many cases can lead to a flawed theory especially so when it comes to predictions in areas such as social phonemena.

Posted by Yogesh Natarajan at 01:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

After the last days lecture some thoughts on social meaning came to my mind.I felt that like any big technical revolution, computarization also has an impact on social behaviour and hence on language or other means of communication.For example, I got an instant message which said " the last evening was gr8". 'Great' has been replaced by 'gr8' under this impact.Not only in language , it has brought changes in our social protocol.Like, if we want to report against one of our office fellow, we write him/her an e-mail and give a cc to the boss.
It has also changed our way of telling lies. If we want to avoid some friends, we project ourselves as offline to those friends. And sometimes even they take offense understanding that we are avoiding them.
This is a great lot of change.

Posted by Ishani Chakraborty at 02:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Several thoughts went in my mind going through the interactions between designers and user through an interactive system. Emergence of Ethnography is one of them. The two examples of Air Traffic Control center and printing shop doesnot describe methodologies as laid in formal manuals rather how it unfolds in day to day every moment experiences by people. Many other places like pipelined automobile manufacturing unit also focuses how the work happened by people moving outside rules and guidelines.Even ethnomethodology rejects abstractness and theorizing but respects practical issues and methods. The examples show the use of sociology in interactive system design. It can be used to understand how work can be conducted in practical environments and how these systems can be designed to help it. The term technomthodology is describing this relationship.

Posted by Hironmay Basu at 04:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Thinking about the conversation on Tuesday about the Pickpocketing game and the less than stellar responsiveness of its PDA's user interface, I wondered if the game would be as attractive if the interface was more responsive.

I came to a conclusion (based on the responses of Johanna and others and my own experiences in similar situations) that it probably wouldn't. It seems the faults of the game made it more interesting and deepened the experience for the user because they had to devote more of thier attention towards learning how to exploit its emergent properties. Which leads me to believe that the failure of perfect seamlessness between virtual and tangible interfaces can be potentially beneficial from an experiential point of view. Maybe having the seams is better if the target of ubiquitous computing is not purely enhanced productivity but a better productivity to pleasurable experience ratio.

Also, I think the Urban Probe paradigm seems to tread on thin ice as far as actively experimenting on people (in the "Lost Letter Technique") without their consent.

Posted by Rubikzube* at 01:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

just a quick thought about some of this urban computing ubicomp work: who is the target audience? who are the intended users? from the Duruz and the Brown and Chalmers papers, it seems like the target audience is people who have lots of free time and the liesure of mobility; in these cases, older (presumably retired) women and tourists. This also seems the case with the Mainwaring et al. paper; the demographic they chose is more likely to be voluntarily mobile. in this case, there's a lot more to the paper, but I think it's an important trend to notice. Paulos and Jennings don't target this audience as specifically, as pretty much anyone in an urban area can use a trash can. however, trash can "stalking" #3, from which most of their data is derived, took place in the early afternoon, when people who are not voluntarily mobile will likely be at their jobs. even in the Barkhuus and Dourish paper, where they say that their population's locations and mobility are constrained by a schedule of classes, they are more or less incredibly mobile in between classes, choosing whether they will study in the library lounge, meet their roommate for lunch, or take a nap somewhere. going beyond these readings, a lot of ubicomp literature in the past several years has focused on gaming with mobile devices (e.g., the Barkhuus et al. from Tuesday). who has the time (and equipment) to play these games? young, urban "hipsters" with enough disposable income to buy the gadgets and enough disposable free time to play.

this isn't necessarily a problem; lots of technologies are developed with a very specific user demographic in mind. rather, it's something that should be explicitly considered in the description and design of these technologies.

Posted by Eric Baumer at 01:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Paulos and Jennings paper lists as part of its motivation, "This research investigation must begin before urban inhabitants acquire strong mental models and expectations from the current emerging suite of standardized urban applications."

The statement gives the impression that inhabitants are entering their environment naively, treating it all the time as a brave new world waiting to surprise them. In fact, people already have a host of mental models and expectations, both for the urban environment and for personal technology. I would argue that Paulos and Jennings's crucial moment has already passed, if it ever existed, and while it is certainly true that a city's ecology is continuously being remade - more rapidly than ever - pre-existing expectations persist through change. Technological expectations are merely overlaid onto this existing structure.

I'm intrigued by the idea of reworking these models to create a better fit, but the task should be approached knowing it's a reforming effort, not a creative one (in an ontological sense).

Posted by Sara at 12:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

one question implicitly raised by the Barkhuus and Dourish paper is that of who does the analysis of a deployed system. on the one hand, you can have the the system architect/builder/designer/implementer perform the analysis. on the other hand, as is the case in this paper, you can bring in someone separate from the design team to perform the analysis. is either one necessarily better? what are the situations in which one is preferrable to the other?

Continue reading "architect as analyst?" »

Posted by Eric Baumer at 11:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I liked the game a lot.
But I think that the idea of 'walking on mines' does not match exactly with losing coins.If it were a video game then the players may have been blown to pieces.
God forbid :)
I have another idea for using the mines. Every player should be entitled to inititiate another operation : blowing mines. They will blow the mines to destroy the coins that are going to be picked up by their opponent player who is nearer to the coins.This may intensify the competiton and enhance interaction between players.

Posted by Ishani Chakraborty at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I liked the game a lot.
But I think that the idea of 'walking on mines' does not match exactly with losing coins.If it were a video game then the players may have been blown to pieces.
God forbid :)
I have another idea for using the mines. Every player should be entitled to inititiate another operation : blowing mines. They will blow the mines to destroy the coins that are going to be picked up by their opponent player who is nearer to the coins.This may intensify the competiton and enhance interaction between players.

Posted by Ishani Chakraborty at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have certain questions regarding Ticket2Talk and AudiSpeakID . I feel it though its a good idea to display the name of the speaker in AudioSpeakerID , but sometimes displaying on board may distract audience from the main question .
I am also not clear about how we can change our profile information within the conference if we are more interested in knowing some other topics in Ticket2Talk .Also, how we can make sure Ticket2Talk is going on handle multiple users when they are near the display screen. If a group if person arrives at same time, how can we distinguish which information is for a particular user .

Posted by Hironmay Basu at 03:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've got a couple comments on the discussion points posted here, and then some more comments that I'll save for class discussion tomorrow. here are the questions I'm addressing:

T2T:

6. the best part of this system is that it links names to photos. hmmm, nametags anyone? as frank said, "these guys wouldn't have published a paper on nametags, so they made an extremely complicated nametag."

ASID:

1. Why are we reinforcing associations that a person is involved in that may jade our interpretation of their words? why not present their most recent projects or paper titles?

Crafting Participation:

1. interesting: getting to know the work as a satellite observer, watching others explore and discover it. getting to know the work through social interaction.

read on for my thoughts...

Continue reading "Response to Some Discussion Topics" »

Posted by Eric Baumer at 12:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Do the systems in the "Augmenting the Social Space of an Academic Conference" promote interaction or do they actual inhibit it? By providing certain information on individuals, it may pigeonhole that person, causing others to focus their interaction on whatever information is given by the system or even avoid interaction because of bias obtained from that information. A valuable part of human interaction is discovery; as we interact more with one another we learn more about each other. Althought the AutoSpeakerID and Ticket2Talk may serve as “icebreakers”, I can see people becoming too reliant on the information presented instead of exploring other areas of shared interest.

Posted by Doug Kim at 10:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Going through the discussions last week and chapters in the book , my mind was intrigued with certain questions I would like to post on the blog. We divide ubiquitous computing strategies in inch ,foot and foot depending on the size of the device . I was wondering if the distinction is clear and we can represent all devices and application models as to me , devices like digital desk technology can be somewhere between foot and yard as we use differnent application models to represent it. With Reactive rooms clearly moving out Computers from box on desk to environment and getting involved in relationships , It becomes pertinent to me to explore designs with more generic applications rather than being confined to one application itself and how designs could be extended to other settings, adapting to changes in the relationship between environment and activities in it. Are we being able to interactionally equate physical and digital media? One important question in social computing is how the different incompatible approaches with different sets of assumptions and commitments have helped us in understanding social action . Is there some underlying equalities in all of them. We all being embodied, all our social and physical actions being embodied,how the embodied interactions is meaningful. I hope to search through the answers of these questions in the coming week

Posted by Hironmay Basu at 03:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have a bunch of random thoughts on the readings and the class discussion from Tuesday so I thought I'd simply vomit the contents of my brain on the blog.

First of all, in response the the debunking of Cartesian dualism in class, (and bear with me because I'm totally obsessed with "low" technology and "ancient" schools of thought and medicine), there is a tendency in Buddhist thought to be aware of the incredibly strong link between physical sensation and mental state, and also the fact that through training it is possible to divorce one's mental state from the constant stream of sensation that flows into it. So while I would agree that Cartesian dualism is not a natural state of existence, with sufficient attention and practice it may be possibe to achieve something that may resemble it. Why one would want to do that, I have no idea... just a thought.

Also, I was wondering why the natural human drive to create causal relationships between events wasn't really addressed in the readings, although it was probably just assumed. In any case, all of the approaches to tangible interaction in the readings seemed to rely on this fact and quite a few of them seemed to exploit the power of this drive novelly in creating relationships across the virtual/physical divide. I just think that it's interesting that people seem to want to create these relationships inherently.

And finally, I was really intrigued by the notion of sources and sinks in Ishii's paper, and how it may be possible to build on that and treat computation as a "source" that one "sinks" into an physical artifact to create a computational device. In essence, instead of embedding the computation into a single device, make it embeddable into a slew of devices, each of which manifests the computation differently.

Posted by Rubikzube* at 01:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between People, Bits and Atoms" - Ishi, Ullmer

I agree that manipulating physical rather than virtual objects is more natural and intuitive. It is not surprising however, that Ishi's first tangible works consisted of ideas being extrapolated from virtual paradigms back onto physical ones. Could Ishi have jumped to an entirely new physical paradigm without this intermediate stage?

"Getting a Grip on Tangible Interaction: A Framework on Physical Space and Social Interaction" - Hornecker, Buur

"too many tangible interfaces aim for direct one-to-one
mappings, remaining literal and missing out opportunities
for employing magical metaphors or for providing the user
with computational re-representations of information [26]
and transformations of input (highlighted by the theory of
distributed cognition [16, 23, 25])" (Hornecker and Buur, 4)

I wonder if this approach would actually work with task-oreiented scenarios. It seems logical for an arts interaction, which is trying to portray abstract meaning which can be interpreted differently by various individuals, but abstracting specific tasks can be problematic. As with the Clavier, users are using their entire bodies but essentially are just triggering "buttons" - there is no real complex movement being interpreted by the system.

"From Interaction to Participation: Configuring Space
through Embodied Interaction" - Williams, Kabisch, and Dourish

"We also noted a woman who put the compass up to her ear, as if expecting the sound to emanate directly from it. These were the most noticeable illustrations of the general tendency to focus on the physical objects as the source of the sounds and regard the digital system as transparent. Universally, when a participant’s attention was attracted by a sound associated with a certain object, they turned not towards the physical source of the sound – the speakers – but to the causal source of the sound, the object." (14)

I wonder as we try and apply computation onto physical objects, as we are accustomed to actual objects emitting sounds, rather than audio feedback coming from somewhere else, how we can design systems to make participants understand the goal of a system, without explicitly stating it. Obviously with this work, exploration was intended. As noted by the authors, this correlation of sound to action is confusing if auditory feedback is coming from somewhere else, but their intentions were to create a system to use objects to collaborate with a system as a whole. I guess i dont really have a point.

Posted by ftsonis at 12:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

i just want to set down a few brief reactions and comments.

first, i have to disagree with you a little bit eric, not completely tho, in your statement that "the ways in which the physical properties of a tangible interface can take on social meaning aside from their primary function" is something that is vastly overlooked. i would say in many related disciplines it is something that's pretty strongly analyzed [as i am reading sharon traweek's beamtimes and lifetimes just now i see another example of that: the way various dectectors take on meaning for physicists, and also they ways they display meaning, such as the style of the group who built them]. in any case though i see two interesting aspects here: one is how do certain artifacts affect fine grained interactions, and the other is how do they fit into a broader social whole. as an example, what does the way in which i'm using my cell phone right now say to you as another person in the same space, and what does the general trend point to overall. these questions i think have been looked at in various settings, but, here is where i agree with you eric, often they are a bit overlooked by HCI proper, especially in the design of new technologies. often these two categories of social meaning, which are not the direct purpose of the device, are not addressed when technologies are designed or evaluated. as greg was saying, ishii et al. seem bent on packing more "ambient information" in to a space without regard for the "side-effects" [which i would argue are just as important as the intended effects] of their designs. without consideration of the broader picture, current cultural metaphors, etc. the designs seem a bit detached from real interaction.

now - all that said, i want to briefly touch on what i originally wanted to post on. eric sort of opened the door for me in asking about the alternate types of meaning which artifacts can embody and engender. what cut across most of these papers for me was space/spatiality. but often when we tackle these topics from an HCI perspective, we sometimes ask how can we design technologies to fit in a certain place... but more along the lines of what Williams et al. and to some extent Hornecker and Buur touch on, i think it is worthwhile to ask what objects residing in a place can tell us about it. Williams et al. focus more on the varying levels in which the objects can be used to explore a space; here though, i mean more to ask how a place, already populated with all sort of objects, technological or not, can tell us something about a place. though this venture would not be an explicitly HCI one, i think for the design of new objects for a place, it would be a worthwhile venture to try to examine what it's current character is via the things that are already present. taking a look around from this very low level could potentially open our eyes to considerations often missed by the broader view. just maybe ;]

Posted by roxy at 01:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

this post is mainly focused on issues i had with the ishii/ullmer paper, though the williams/kabisch/dourish paper begins to open up and explore questions related to those i pose in the comments below. apologies to the other papers. perhaps ill comment on them later.

in the tangible bits paper, while i like the idea of exploiting user expectations in an interface, i'm concerned about the attempt to satisfy the idea of generality using a tangible interface. the personal computer has become a general purpose machine, such that its impoverished interface controls are meant to manipulate the vast space of applications the computer can run. what's nice about non-general-purpose, physical objects is they only do certain things. a toaster makes toast. all of its controls are specific to making toast. you can toast many things, but in the end you end up toasting something. the metaDESK seems to attempt to be a general-purpose machine with a specific-purpose interface. they state that "Tangible Geospace" is “an application that runs on the metaDESK platform.” it isn't clear what this implies. is the metaDESK platform meant to run multiple applications, as the personal computer does, or is it something else?

(please note the link below if you wish to continue reading. i didn't want to take up the whole page with my commentary.)

Continue reading "general-purpose machines + software/hardware duality rant" »

Posted by Teh Greg at 07:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I'll go ahead and comment on what seems to be an interesting theme running through parts of these readings.

chronologically, it comes up first in the Ishii and Ullmer paper, in the very last paragraph. "When his mother kept household accounts, he was aware of her activities by the sound of her abacus, knowing he could not ask for her to play with him while her abacus made its music." this is interesting, as it takes a non-central aspect (the sound of the abacus) and gives it a social meaning (for Ishii, that his mother is occupied with household finances). the ways in which the physical properties of a tangible interface can take on social meaning aside from their primary function is, as far as I know, not a topic pursued further by Ishii's research group.

the social aspects of tangible interfaces are raised also by Hornecker and Buur, particularly in their discussion of what they term Spatial Interaction. "full-body interaction," they say, "acquires communicatie and performative function," that when interacting with a system, one is also interacting after a fashion with all observers present. they relate this to a case study of CLAVIER, an inherently performative interactive device. additionally, I think this performative aspect may also apply to interactions that are not inherently, explicitly, or intentionally performative. bringing in ideas from Ishii's abacus example, the act of typing on a keyboard emits a very distinctive noise, which lets everyone within earshot know that typing is going on. however, there is also a performative aspect in this task, as well. as I type this comment, my lab mate sitting across the room from me hears my keystrokes and knows, in the periphery of his attention, that I am hard at work. thus, there is a performative and communicative aspect to this interaction with my keyboard, even though the interaction itself is not intended to be a performance.

Williams et al. comment on such socially tangible (does this term make sense?) activities of the participants in their system. not only did participants "learn" how to use the system by observing others (moving through iconic, instrinsic, and instrumental interactions based on their observations of others), but they gained peripheral awareness of each other's activities through the sound scape and monitor each other with looking at each other.

I've not yet gotten to the Benford et al. paper, but I wanted to get this posted now. I'd suspect some of this stuff comes up there, too.

it's curious to me that this is such a widely known open question to the research community, and yet it has not really been addressed. Hornecker and Burr comment to this effect, but they don't offer any suggestion as to why. I'll venture a guess and say that the social aspects of tangible interfaces are caught up with the ways in which social groups repurpose and/or appropriate (depending on your preference of terminology) artifacts, a process of which we don't really have a great understanding. I'm not sure that exploring one will necessarily elucidate the other, but I suspect that a solid understanding of both will be necessary to really adress this issue.

Posted by Eric Baumer at 04:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)