Posts Tagged: mobility

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11
Jun 08

What we can learn from coins

One of the wonderful things about the design of the new UK coinage is that it makes the relationships between the coins far more important than the individual items. In fact, the individual coins are only interesting insofar as it’s possible to tell a story about the relationships between them. Pushing it further: the design is all about the negative space.

This, I think, has some interesting implications for the design of mobile devices and systems. How we can create systems that are more interesting in the spaces between the devices we are designing and other objects; how can the design focus be on the space? How can we create systems that are literally piece parts of the collection of physical and virtual objects that people use in their mobile lives?

royal_mint

Link: The New Designs Revealed (royalmint.com)

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31
May 08

Mobile Technology and Society Book

The recently published Handbook of Mobile Communication Studies looks like it has a lot of interesting pieces in it.

Digital Divides and Social Mobility

  • The Mobile Makes Its Mark – Lara Srivastava
  • Shrinking Fourth World? Mobiles, Development, and Inclusion – Jonathan Donner
  • Mobile Traders and Mobile Phones in Ghana – Ragnhild OverÃ¥
  • Mobile Networks: Migrant Workers in Southern China – Pui-lam Law and Yinni Peng
  • Mobile Communication in Mexico: Policy and Popular Dimensions – Judith Mariscal and Carla Marisa Bonina
  • Reducing Illiteracy as a Barrier to Mobile Communication – Jan Chipchase
  • Health Services and Mobiles: A Case from Egypt – Patricia Mechael
  • How the Urban Poor Acquire and Give Meaning to the Mobile Phone – Lourdes M. Portus

    Sociality and Co-presence

  • Always-On/Always-On-You: The Tethered Self – Sherry Turkle
  • The Mobile Phone’s Ring – Christian Licoppe
  • Mobile Technology and the Body: Apparatgeist, Fashion, and Function – Scott Campbell
  • The Mediation of Ritual Interaction via the Mobile Telephone – Rich Ling
  • Adjusting the Volume: Technology and Multitasking in Discourse Control – Naomi S. Baron
  • Maintaining Co-presence: Tourists and Mobile Communication in New Zealand – Peter B. White and Naomi Rosh White
  • The Social Effects of Keitai and Personal Computer E-mail in Japan – Kakuko Miyata, Jeffrey Boase and Barry Wellman

    Politics and Social Change

  • Mobile Media and Political Collective Action – Howard Rheingold
  • Mobile Multimedia: Uses and Social Consequences – Ilpo Koskinen
  • Mobile Communication and Sociopolitical Change in the Arab World – Mohammad Ibahrine
  • Locating the Missing Links of Mobile Communication in Japan: Sociocultural Influences on Usage by Children and the Elderly – On-Kwok Lai
  • The Effects of Mobile Telephony on Singaporean Society – Shahiraa Sahul Hameed
  • Mobile Communication and the Transformation of the Democratic Process – Kenneth Gergen

    Culture and Imagination

  • Cultural Differences in Communication Technology Use: Adolescent Jews and Arabs in Israel – Gustavo Mesch and Ilan Talmud
  • “Express Yourself” and “Stay Together”: The Middle-Class Indian Family – Jonathan Donner, Nimmi Rangaswamy, Molly Wright Steenson and Carolyn Y. Wei
  • Nondevelopmental Uses of Mobile Communication in Tanzania – Thomas Molony
  • Cultural Studies of Mobile Communication – Gerard Goggin
  • Mobile Music as Environmental Control and Prosocial Entertainment – James E. Katz, Katie M. Lever and Yi-Fan Chen
  • Supernatural Mobile Communication in the Philippines and Indonesia – Bart Barendregt and Raul Pertierra
  • Boom in India: Mobile Media and Social Consequences – Madanmohan Rao and Mira Desai
  • Mobile Games and Entertainment – James E. Katz and Sophia Krzys Acord
  • Online Communities on the Move: Mobile Play in Korea – Youn-ah Kang

    Conclusions and Future Prospects

  • Mainstreamed Mobiles in Daily Life: Perspectives and Prospects – James E. Katz

    Link: Handbook of Mobile Communication Studies (mit.edu)

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13
Apr 08

Economist special report on mobility

This week’s Economist has a special report on mobility. Here are links to some of the articles in the report (which seem to be available for free now), more are after the link.

Nomads at last. “Wireless communication is changing the way people work, live, love and relate to places—and each other, says Andreas Kluth”

Labour movement. “The joys and drawbacks of being able to work from anywhere”

The new oases. “Nomadism changes buildings, cities and traffic”

Family ties. “Kith and kin get closer, with consequences for strangers”

A world of witnesses. “When everybody becomes a nomadic monitor”

Homo mobilis. “As language goes, so does thought”

Link: Economist: A special report on mobility (economist.com)

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12
Feb 08

Narrative of mobile futures

Dan Hill put together a piece with the title “The Street as Platform” describing in narrative form the interplay between technologies in the public environment, many of them mobile. It’s not groundbreaking, as he notes in the introduction, but the story form is a nice way of capturing some of the possibilities that mobility bring.

“In the shoe-shop next door, a similar hand-held scanner, unknowingly damaged in a minor act of tomfoolery a day earlier, fails to register the barcode on a box of sneakers, resulting in a lost sale as the assistant is unable to process the transaction without said barcode. The would-be customer walks out in disgust, texting his wife in order to vent his furious frustration on someone. She sends a placating if deliberately patronising message back within a few seconds, which causes him to smile and respond with an ‘x’ two seconds after that. In doing so, his allocation of SMSs for the month tips over to the next tier in his payment plan, triggering a flag in an database somewhere in Slough.”

Link: The street as platform (cityofsound.com)

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6
Feb 08

Identifying people’s needs in ubicomp

“In large ubiquitous computing environments it is hard for users to identify and activate the electronic services that match their needs. This user study compares the newly developed service matcher system with a conventional system for identifying and selecting appropriate services. The study addresses human factors issues such as usability, trust and service awareness. With the conventional system users have to browse a hierarchical list of currently available services and activate the service that they think satisfies their current needs. With the service matcher users just enter their current need using natural language, after which a wizard, emulating an existing service matcher algorithm, searches for and activates a matching service based on the given need and the users’ location and gaze direction. This study shows that with the hierarchical list, only 66% of the tasks are solved correctly, and females score significantly worse than males. With the service matcher, the performance increases significantly to 84% correctly performed tasks and the gender difference disappears.”

Link: Improving service matching and selection in ubiquitous computing environments: a user study (springerlink.com)

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5
Jul 07

Transitioning between desktop and mobile

The winner of Yahoo Hack Day London 2007 was an RFID-based system that helped make the transition between desktop and mobile computing much easier. A nice and simple concept piece from the NYT Labs. Video embedded below for those on the RSS.

Link: SHIFD.COM (nytlabs.com)

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10
Apr 07

Ubiquitous computing is messy

Genevieve Bell and Paul Dourish suggest that the age of ubiquitous computing is not characterised by seamless, tidy, integrated experiences but rather a messier world of ad-hoc solutions.

“We have suggested that our failure to notice the arrival of ubiquitous computing is rooted (at least in part) in the idea of seamless interoperation and homogeneity. The ubicomp world was meant to be clean and orderly; it turns out instead to be a messy one. Rather than being invisible or unobtrusive, ubicomp devices are highly present, visible, and branded, but perhaps still unremarkable in the sense explored by Tolmie et al. Ubicomp has turned out to be characterized by improvisation and appropriation; by technologies lashed together and maintained in synch only through considerable efforts; by surprising appropriations of technology for purposes never imagined by their inventors and often radically opposed to them; by widely different social, cultural and legislative interpretations of the goals of technology; by flex, slop, and play.”

Link: Yesterday’s tomorrows: notes on ubiquitous computing’s dominant vision (ics.udi.edu, 240k PDF, via)

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5
Apr 07

All games, all the time

“Game designer Jane McGonigal has a vision for a new generation of network games that will pull players away from their lonely consoles, and get them out in the world, interacting with each other and changing their own lives, and society, for the better…In the next five years, the criteria used for evaluating personal technology will shift from things like cost and features. Instead, people will evaluate technology based on whether it improves their quality of life and happiness, she said.”

Link: Network Games That Change Their Users Lives, And The World, For The Better (informationweek.com, via)

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6
Nov 06

Designing games for people’s pockets

Some guidelines for the design of handheld games.

“There are two major things you have to keep in mind concerning the interface and user-experience, first one is that most players will be picking up your game in short breaks. They need to be able to quickly start it, and quickly put it away without losing “everything”. The second thing is that you are dealing with alot of non-technical people, without any or little gaming experience. So keep things simple and intuitive.”

Link: Mobiles, design, and gameplay (orangepixel.net)

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25
Sep 06

Women in pervasive computing

“Women in technology & culture : An in-progress list of women researchers, designers & artists working in pervasive computing-related fields.”

Link: Women researchers, designers & artists working in pervasive computing-related fields (purselipsquarejaw.org)

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20
Sep 06

Papers from workshop on pervasive computing

A collection of papers and presentations from a conference workshop on pervasive computing.

“Mobile devices have become a pervasive part of our everyday lives. People have mobile phones, smartphones and PDAs which they take with them almost everywhere. So far these mobile devices have been mostly used for phone calls, writing short messages and organizer functionalities. Today we see that the development of context-aware services for mobile phones which often take the user, her situation and location into account.

“But why not use these devices for interactions with the real world, as a mediator between the virtual and the user’s world? While certain research domains within the fields of mobile applications and services advance at an amazing speed (e.g. context-aware services on mobile devices, using sensors in mobile phones), the areas of pervasive mobile user interfaces, mobile devices as interaction devices, mobile devices for interactions with the physical world and user experiences in this field are still rather limited.”

Link: Mobile Devices as Pervasive User Interfaces and Interaction Devices (lmu.de)

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9
Jun 06

Ambient sound awareness

Google’s developed a system for listening to your television and serving up relevant content. What if my mobile devices had the capability to listen in on what was happening around me?

“A team from Google Research has developed a prototype system that uses a home computer’s internal microphone to listen to the ambient audio in a room, determine what is being watched on TV and offer web-based supplemental information, services and shopping contextual to each program being watched. It’s strange, but it sounds like it works and people might really like it. There’s no indication yet whether or when this could be available as a service.”

Link: Google Research prototypes ambient audio contextual content (techcrunch.com)

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8
Jun 06

Experience design at Nokia

An interesting interview with the Head of Brand Visual and Sensorial Experiences (nice one!) at Nokia.

“Even today my work is still very much involved in understanding and recognising trends and the way people or societies are changing. One of the important things is to realise the difference between ‘long-term’ societal trends and ‘short-term’ lifestyle trends, but also to understand that some short-term trends have the potential to cross into the mainstream of society, where they become much more influential.”

Link: New levels of Experience Design (pingmag.jp)

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