Post from Fade to play

Stumbled across a post from the blog fade to play caught my eye as ties in some nice ideas with Sellen & Harpers book the myth of the paperless office from a research study conducted in 2006

"This 2006 research paper entitled “Our Lives in Digital Times” by G. Sciadas from Statistics Canada has just been released. It discusses how the notion that we have become a paperless society is a myth as the use of office technologies such as email have actually increased paper usage.

Statistics Canada found that:

Not only is the notion of a paperless society defeated by existing data, but a visit to any modern office workplace will confirm that printers everywhere continue to spit out massive amounts of paper, and paper recycling bins are full,

There are also social behavioural trends in ICT and communication that are discussed:

The pattern of communication and interaction has changed. The reality is that people are talking to other people – whether to the person next door or to someone thousands of miles and time zones away. Thus, it is not that people are becoming anti-social; it is that people are becoming differently social.

In summary, key outcomes of ICTs are manifested in shifting behavioural patterns everywhere, with real consequences. Moreover, the pattern of communications has changed, something exemplified by the rise in long distance and the explosion in international calling made possible by
liberalized markets and falling prices. Such expanded circles of communication have found an even better expression through e-mail that knows no boundaries. People make the choice to expand their associations and move from geographically defined communities to communities of interest. As well, they are willing to pay for their choices. ICT spending is on the rise and, within this higher spending, substitutions take place in favour of newer ICTs, such as the Internet, and against older ones, such as the telephone. The willingness of people to pay can also be seen by the fact that many low income households choose to spend a relatively higher proportion of their income on ICTs.

A summary of the report can be found in this CBC news report.

This report confirms finding from Richard Harper and Abigail Sellen who wrote The Myth of the Paperless Office (2001) and found that paper usage increased on average 40% because of email in an organisation).

Relevance: Although offices are using paper more, I wonder about whether students are printing more in universities. I would say that they are printing less. I spend a significant time with my laptop around undergrads that I see reading papers in pdf form online on their laptop rather than printing them out. This may be due to convenience and a desire for cost savings. Perhaps, older people just feel more comfortable with paper."

Also the blog has recommended the book

Tagging: People-powered Metadata for the Social Web (Voices That Matter) (Paperback) - but only on American amazon!

Why blog this?

A blog to keep an eye on as holds some really interesting points, and research paper mentioned above may hold some significance for future reference .

DEFINE: Affordance

DEFINE: Affordance

URL: DEFINE: Affordance

In the discipline of IxD, the word has been used to define a possible

action perceived by a user within some environment (Norman 1988). In the

classic example, the affordance of a door with a flat metal plate is

"push." The affordance resolves to a verb, an action to be performed.

However, of late, I've seen the word used loosely to describe the clues

that suggest an object's possible actions. Applied in a colloquial sense

to the classic example above, the "affordance" is the flat metal plate.

Another example of this usage would be gloss applied to the visual

design of a UI button. The gloss itself is the affordance, as opposed to

the action "click".




I'm curious as to the community's opinion on this matter. How do you use

the word in your day to day discussions? Is it appropriate to use the

term both ways?

Appreciate your opinions?


Why blog this?
Evidence of the misinterpretation of the word within the field useful to throw out some ideas and gather how it is being used in the field or not...

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Collection of thoughts

A couple of posts captured from RSS feed and a comment from Wendy Mackay e-lab paper

Delver Reinvents Search

URL: Delver Reinvents Search

The most impressive thing about the new search engine Delver is that it knows who you are and who your friends are even if you don't import your address book or add your social networking profiles. Instead, Delver leverages the social graph to map out a user's social connections. Since everyone's social graph is unique, like a fingerprint, the same query will yield vastly different results for each user. The results are more personal and meaningful to users than a generic search using "normal" search engine.

But don't call Delver a "social search engine."

"That name belongs to services like Mahalo," says Liad Agmon, Delver CEO. "We prefer the term 'socially connected search engine'." That term makes sense because Delver is not a social network built around a search engine, but a search engine who indexes and queries your social network to deliver its results. Instead of just looking at a web site's popularity, Delver looks at information like whether your friends have tagged the site or if it's found on their social network profiles, bookmarking sites, photos and video sharing sites, or on their blogs. The results are more relevant because they account for who a person is and what they find valuable.

Agmon adds, "People want trusted information from their friends, but may not know who in their network is knowledgeable about a given topic. We make Web search more fun and meaningful by prioritizing results based on a user's network, while enabling the user to discover others in their extended network who share common interests."

Even without registering for an account, Delver will try to determine who you are by searching any public social network profiles you may have on sites like Flickr, Facebook, and YouTube. If you do decide to register on the site, though, you can then choose to associate your accounts with Delver in order to obtain even more accurate results. Delver currently indexes the entire web, and specifically indexes people's social connections on flickr, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube, hi5, facebook, Blogger, and, they are adding more all the time. When they go into public beta (circa May, 2008), an optional email import process will be provided as well.

Maximizing Your "Whole" Social Network

Many of us have friends, family members, or colleagues on sites like MySpace and facebook who aren't into using all the latest and greatest web apps and technologies. These friends may have a MySpace profile or a blog, but without visiting these sites directly, there was no way to gather information from these people before. Now with Delver, their profiles and contributions to your social graph are indexed.

No one has to sign up for Delver for you to have them included in your search results.

This is a real breakthrough since prior to Delver, the maximum value you would get out of social networks was directly related to how many of your friends would join. I don't know about you, but I still have plenty of friends who are on MySpace and nothing else, and are quite content with that. With each new social network I joined, the number of my non-tech friends that would follow me dwindled down to nearly nothing. Now it doesn't matter. They can stay on MySpace forever and yet the content they create there will be valuable to me.

Privacy Concerns?

It's important to understand that Delver doesn't display anything that isn't already publicly available. "If Google can get to it, so can Delver," says Agmon. But Delver just makes it so much easier to do so. You can access people's social information with such ease that anyone who hasn't been good about setting their profiles to "private" (or who doesn't know to do so), may be surprised to find themselves searchable on Delver.

Using Delver

After claiming your identity in Delver, your social graph is mapped and displayed for you beneath the Delver search box. Dotted lines connect you to your friends and your "friends of friends.

- Why blog this?
Insight to how social search could be thought of, and how in fact may provide the desired insight for scientific work ?

Collaborative Technologies and Science: More Tools or More Risk?

URL: Collaborative Technologies and Science: More Tools or More Risk?

Social networking has begun to make inroads in the scientific community. The Scientific American recent article, Science 2.0: Great New Tool, or Great Risk, discusses wikis, blogs, and other technologies and how their usage by researchers could be transforming how science is researched, published, disseminated, and viewed. Research work is beginning to become available through blogs, wikis, and social networks by a small but growing group of researchers.

In Eric Schell's post, Evidence of the Value of Blogs as Scholarship, he mentions a case where a postdoc geneticist received credit and acknowledgement for his blog entries. Reed Cartwright posted his random thoughts on a mutant plant gene on his blog in March 2005. One year later after reading the post Luca Comai, a plant geneticist, contacted Reed. He and said that he had coincidentally arrived at the same hypothesis, and was about to publish his research in Plant Cell. Comai said he felt obligated to acknowledge Mr. Cartwright’s blog post and offered to make him a co-author of his article. Mr. Cartwright, who is not a plant geneticist, accepted the offer.

Of course this method of information and knowledge sharing is not without controversy. While there are researchers praising the transparent and "open notebook" approach citing various success stories like OpenWetWare, UsefulChem, Chembarkothers, there are others worried about potential minefields. The fear of being scooped and the lack of attribution and credit can be huge barriers to overcome in a system where being the first to report a discovery, publishing peer reviewed journals and having heavily cited articles is the foundation for promotion within scientific community.

I like what Bora Zivkovic said in the Scientific American article, "It's a Darwinian process. About 99 percent of these ideas are going to die. But some will emerge and spread." I think that not only sums up the evolution of these tools in science but other disciplines as well such as medicine, education, and libraries.

Why blog this?
Raises some of the issues of the potential of Web 2.0 and the areas of sharing and collaboration where may need consideration, think enforces the link with Bruno Latours model of creditability and how scientists search for this in their work. Question in how to overcome this for collaboration?

Extract from The Missing Link: Augmenting Biology Laboratory Notebooks Wendy E.Mackay

"This project is one of a series that examine settings in
which attempts to replace paper artifacts have failed
[16,17,18,19,20 ].We observe and work with users as we
try to understand their interaction with both paper artifacts
and on-line systems.Then,through a series of
brainstorming and prototyping participatory design
sessions,we create prototypes that integrate paper and on-
line documents,attempting to integrate the different media
and benefit from the advantages of both.Each setting poses
unique design challenges,but when examined together,
they begin to offer a more complete understanding of how
to effectively manage the link between physical and on-line
documents and questions the assumption that documents of
the future will exist solely in electronic form."

16.Mackay,W.(1998)Augmented Reality:Linking real
and virtual worlds.In Proceedings of AVI'98 ,L'Aquila,
Italy:ACM.p.1-8.
17.Mackay,W.(1999)Is Paper Safer?The Role of Paper
Flight Strips in Air Traffic Control.ACM/Transactions
on Computer-Human Interaction,6(4),p.311-340.
18.Mackay,W.and Pagani,D.(1994).Video Mosaic:
Laying out time in a physical space.In Proc.of
Multimedia '94 .San Francisco:ACM,p.165-172.
19.Mackay,W.,Fayard,A.,Frobert,L.&Médini,L.,
(1998)Reinventing the Familiar:Exploring an Aug-
mented Reality Design Space for Air Traffic Control.
In Proc.of CHI '98 ,L.A.:ACM,p.558-565.
20.Mackay,W.,Pagani D.,Faber L.,Inwood B.,
Launiainen P.,Brenta L.&Pouzol V.(1995).Ariel:
Augmenting Paper Engineering Drawings.In CHI '95
Video Program ,San Francisco CA:ACM.

Why blog this?
Think the extract captures the way in which existing e-lab book work has gone and focused upon the action of emulation of paper, where must acknowledge the evolutionary process of paper as a technology and so open a direction to open up for new technology to strive too.

Collection of really useful other blog thoughts

Great post on Recursive affordances - post from Past&Vineger

These two ash-tray found in Geneva and Lausanne are two impressive examples of an object affordances:

Why do I blog this? This is utterly curious from a design perspective. the artifacts designed to received trashed objects looks like the object itself. A sort of recursive affordance to some extent. What does that mean? It’s actually not that recursive and the second example if maybe more self-explanatory since the two different garbages are next to each other. Besides, the first one has a little hole that only allow to receive small things like cigarettes.

Style of posting taken from this blog
- The "Why I blog this?" point is a great way to capture the reasoning behind the post and so I will look to adopt this approach as think it could provide more clarity for reasoning behind each posting of thoughts.


Why do I blog this? - recursive affordances

I have some thoughts to draw up a table of the range of affordances of the lab book as I have provided/put forward an argument that the affodances of paper and so lab book is the foundations of what makes it a ideal mobile ubiquitous artifact, with the ability to fit int work practice.

Some thoughts now maybe with gather the existing range of affordances from Gaver, Sellen & Harper etc to collectively put forward which of these are why the lab book works and where the shortcomings have been in existing technology.

Steve Portigal on scanning/meme-broking

URL: Steve Portigal on scanning/meme-broking

There is a great interview of Steve Portigal in influx. Some excerpts I found relevant:

“A great design strategist (…) someone who has had a few different professional identities and gets excited by the spaces where disciplines, schools of thought, and methods overlap. They are curious and easily intrigued: they like to observe what’s going on around them and they’re good at listening to people. And they know how to use all this data to synthesize new patterns and communicate them clearly to a range of audiences. Charlie Stross, in the sci-fi book “Accelerando”, describes the profession of a “meme broker” and the intense amount of content they have to assimilate every day in order to do this. Bruce Sterling calls this activity “scanning“ looking at all the sources one can and constantly asking what does this mean for my clients. Being able to work through all those data sources and pull out the implications is crucial for design strategy.
(…)
The best research brings to life the imperfect and messy stories of real people and presents generative frameworks that lead the way forward for new designs, products, services, features, communications, or whatever is needed.“

Why blog this ?
Some good insights here that rings a bell with personal thoughts, especially concerning the messiness of reality and the need to uncover quirks, peculiars situations, extreme users as well as exceptions.

Love the idea too of what design strategist should represent and what I think the different perspectives that are required to allow for insight - nice to point to think on for my own work as would like to look for a final position to allow for recommendations to be made in a design strategy context - drawing on use from work and in particularly table of affordances from lab books.

I agree massively with too:

"The best research brings to life the imperfect and messy stories of real people and presents generative frameworks that lead the way forward for new designs, products, services, features, communications, or whatever is needed."

Feel the methods selected for my own research will be part of the comment by Bruce Sterling:

"Bruce Sterling calls this activity “scanning“ looking at all the sources one can and constantly asking what does this mean for my clients. Being able to work through all those data sources and pull out the implications is crucial for design strategy."

- Feel this relates to the conversation that was had with Richard Coyne from Edinburgh and his talk on design tunning - do have his slides to verify/support this.

Web 3.0: Is It About Personalization?

"On the UK's Guardian newspaper site today, writer Jemina Kiss suggested that Web 3.0 will be about recommendation. "If web 2.0 could be summarized as interaction, web 3.0 must be about recommendation and personalization," she wrote. Using Last.fm and Facebook's Beacon as an example, Kiss painted a picture of a web where personalized recommendation services can feed us information on new music, new products, and where to eat. It's a marketers dream and it's really not far off from the definitions we've come up with in the past here on ReadWriteWeb. We've written about web 3.0 and attempted to define it many, many times here over the past year. One of the common themes between almost all of the posts is that Web 3.0 and the vision of the Semantic Web are joined at the hip. Last April, we held a contest asking readers for their web 3.0 definitions. Our favorite came from Robert O'Brien, who defined Web 3.0 as a "decentralized asynchronous me." "Web 1.0: Centralized Them. Web 2.0: Distributed Us. Web 3.0: Decentralized Me," he wrote. "[Web 3.0 is] about me when I don't want to participate in the world. It's about me when I want to have more control of my environment particularly who I let in. When my attention is stretched who/what do I pay attention to and who do I let pay attention to me. It is more effective communication for me!""

Why blog this?
My own work is directed to both web2.0 and incorporating its concept so I am particularly interested where the next step is with the web 3.0 direction - in order to give further power of a tool for scientists, especially when a concern for scientists is about privacy of their own environment and the background to what 3.0 is building towards is "control of my environment particularly who I let in."

Finally -Quote of the day, Feb 3rd, 2008: Interaction-Design.org Quote-of-the-Day

"On the one hand, design must be firmly rooted in the work practices of both users and designers; on the other it must confront these practices with their existing shortcomings and introduce new artifacts such as mock-ups, prototypes, or metaphors, and potentially cause breakdowns. This is how we may lean to transcend our own tradition as users and as designers. -- Boedker, Greenbaum and Kyng, p. 147-148 in "Setting the stage for design as action""


Why do I blog this?
My interpretation of this quote is to take the best of both worlds work practice of users and designers & then how must have ability to confront practices with shortcomings I think this is where continued research questions lie...

Social affordances

A really interesting article on the concept of affordances from affordances evoked by social interaction highlighted several points to some of the current thoughts/reading/ideas.

" The concept of affordances, as introduced by Gibson (e.g., 1979), provides a way to describe the world that cuts across traditional subject-object dualities. Affordances go beyond value-free physical descriptions of the environment by expressing environmental attributes relative to humans. At the same time, they go beyond subjective interpretations (e.g., associations, schemas, or social conventions) by describing meaning relative to an objective physical world.

Affordances are primarily facts about action and interaction, not perception."

As technology is becoming more ubiquitous the concept of 'social affordance' , at first thought may provide an avenue of awareness to move towards the concept of 'invisible computing' as discussed by Don Norman. In such a way though that the step before this must be in an understanding of the situated actions per se as discussed by Lucy Suchman.

"Affordances exist not just for individual action, but for social interaction as well. Research on “social affordances” (e.g., Still & Good, 1991; Goldring, 1991) focuses on the possibilities for action that people offer one another and on the role of other people in pointing out new affordances (e.g., to babies). These are not social affordances, as defined above, but affordances for sociality."


I think this may be a start to inform the way in which I can think about the design environment/ecology by questioning the design of social affordances based upon an understanding of the ecology.

"Perhaps the most important affordance of the everyday world lacking in media spaces is the ability to move. As Gibson (1979) emphasised, movement is fundamental for perception.
We move towards and away from things, look around them, and move them so we can inspect them closely. Movement might allow people to compensate for the discontinuities and anisotropies of current media spaces (Gaver, 1992; c.f. Heath & Luff, 1991). Social interactions in media space would be better supported if people could explore remote sites as easily as they can move around their own rooms.

The ecological approach is useful in the design process because it describes perception and interaction in terms of the properties of the environment, as well as those of people, and design is fundamentally about manipulating the environment for people. Thus the ecological approach challenges researchers to avoid the temptation of using memory and inference in explanations of perception, and encourages them instead to discover the possibly high-level physical attributes that serve as information about the world."

And so my impression from this is that the 'Ecological approach' can look to challenge the way ubiquitous computing is perceived? And social interactions both with the artifact of the e-lab book and is ecology it operates within could be a way which to move forward with the e-lab book concept should operate.

Some thoughts from the book Thoughtful Interaction Design

The following is taken from the book 'Thoughtful Interaction Design: A Design Perspective on Information Technology' by Jonas Löwgren & Erik Stolterman

" We live in an artificial world. It is a world made up of environments, systems, processes and things that are imaged, formed, and produced by humans. All these things have been designed, and all new things have to be designed. Someone has to decide their form, function, and structure as well as their ethical and aesthetical qualities. In this artificial world created by humans information technology is increasing becoming not only common but a vital and part. Our design world world is full of digital artifacts, that is things built around a core of information technology. We can find them in our workplaces, in our meeting and public spaces, and in our homes. Digital artifacts have a direct impact on our everyday lives. "

Although very abstract in terms of the nature of 'digital artifacts' the nature of design questions that I think the paragraph looks to open is very much within the direction of my own work for the fundamental reason that

"Digital artifacts have a direct impact on our everyday lives"

And so if the concept behind the fundamental design is not clearly directed and understood in the working practice(even more so within the working practice of a complicated domain of scientists) then there will be fundamental flaws - This may lead to thoughts of a potential question towards the understanding of the present way of working(with paper) and existing technology and how it is and actually used - with this I feel there is a lead with some of the thoughts on ubiquitous computing and the concept of invisible computing, in that ubiquitous computing can in some scenarios be a collection of broken processes where the ideal solution would a scenario based around the invisible computing concept (I would interpret the invisible computing concept as the way someone can work with technology and not have to consciously think about using the technology - similar to the way a scientist will use and write in a paper based lab book now.- reminder to check the name of the research paper for the discussion of this debate. )

Again initial thoughts would point to how such a design strategy would provide how to move forward with the development of technology to the invisible computing concept ?

The thinking from the above book has been inspired by some thoughts from the blog by david roedl materiality-in-languages-of-interaction where several more interesting points are raised

"Lowgren and Stolterman present their notion that interaction design works with a ‘material without qualities’. By this they means that digital artifacts can take on so many different forms–and the forms possible are constantly shifting due to technological advances–that is very hard to pin down a set list of qualities to describe the medium, as say a sculptor could describe their stone. They make this point more clear by suggesting that we think of bits as our material. Pondering this for a minute, I begin to realize that are an infinitum of possible physical forms and consequently qualities that bits can take on as they are presented to a user."

The following is then pointed out which I feel is closely linked with the understanding and concept of what an e-lab book is as a 'digital artifact'

"However, all digital artifacts have an aspect that doesn’t seem miles away and of which qualities can be quite easily pinned down: hardware used for display and input. While there are vast possibilities in this area too, for most part digital interaction to date has consisted of some basic elements of monitor, keyboard and mouse. It occurs to me now that there a lot of limitations in this configuration, and that by switching it up we might greatly reduce the percieved ‘distance’ between the physical and virtual world. G. Smith talks about the 4 dimensions of previous traditions that interaction design draws upon. I might argue that the 3-D, that is the language of traditional product design, has been the least utilized. With hardware advances this is changing a lot though, and the result is the introduction some much needed physicality to our overall language of interaction."

The final thoughts from david roedl materiality-in-languages-of-interaction lie with Lev Manovich who through his own approach of digital materialism and how analysis to these newer forms of interface hardware could/can question how the conception of the medium change?

This I think is a step towards the right type of questions that can be asked for my e-lab book , in a similar manner I wish to question how the concept changes from a working paper based artifact with clear affordances to the medium of technology and so how the concept of an e-lab book can be more clearly defined.

- the thoughts to do from this is to create an affordance list of the paper based lab book, this can be further enhanced by the information from the interviews - a further thought to raise is I still don't believe or have read any reasoning to believe an electronic version should be in any way a copy of a paper lab book and so such a design can simply borrow the best bits of the mental model of paper and maybe even the situated action to the various way of working(a more complete understanding would be required to demonstrated this part- maybe such a strategy for future designs can be informed by such existing mental models &/or situated actions of the work environment - which would have to be dependent on if the mental models &/or situated actions are effective ways of working - if not then this is where the continued development of technology can be designed more clearly to addressed the nature of poor/ineffective ways of working with the technology - instead of what continues to appear to be technology for technologies sake and not effectively directed at actually helping real peoples/scientists working problems (do need an an analogy and examine existing further research to help understand and demonstrate this )

Some quick thoughts towards design thinking

Some thoughts taken from Mindspace blog discussing the article More from Mentors to the Masters

With some particularly interesting points on design thinking that I think is more than relevant

"The extent of overlap between design thinking and social-sciences and research thinking. I particularly found mysef nodding at this first note by Yves Behar, Founder, fuseproject - Design thinking is about filtering culture. To do that, you have to put yourself in the broadest possible context to understand from all different angles how people live and work. It’s not enough to be an observer, even an empathic one. You have to observe at the intersection of things."

And again very useful thought from Charles Eames

Charles Eames was asked the question,

"What are the boundaries of design?"

He answered,

"What are the boundaries of problems?"

- Charles Eames