‘Playful Identities’ research blog

[I wrote this blogpost earlier for The Mobile City]

[...continued from last post]

Thursday May 22 2008 I visited the CHI conference The Web and Beyond: Mobility in Amsterdam. Keynote speakers were: Adam Greenfield (Everyware); Jyri Engeström (Jaiku); Ben Cerveny (Playground foundation, Flickr); Christian Lindholm (Fjord, Nokia).

Jyri Engeström talked about how mobile technologies have become social objects. Social network theory is good in representing links between people, but not in the nature of these links, what their content is, or through what media these links are actually established. Jyri used the term “social peripheral vision” to describe how we are co-present with others through our mobile media that enable us to be aware of what’s going on elsewhere. Jyri sees games, such as World of Warcraft, as playgrounds to experiment with the use of media for social ends.

(From left to right: Ben Cerveny, Jyri Engeström, and Christian Lindholm. Photo by Kaeru)

Ben Cerveny talked about “Geomorphic organisms”: how networks of people/users together come to function as an organism. He used lot of biological metaphors, but frankly I kept wondering what insights do we gain by this paralel? There was one interesting thing I picked up from his talk. Similar to a flock of birds or a school of fish, in such a collective it isn’t necessary to have a total overview of all that is happening. A little local trigger can be enough to get people moving in a certain direction. This point by Cerveny challenges the dominant idea of rational total control over technologies and puts in place a more instinctive micro-view. It shows how often we are reacting to technological triggers without fully understanding what is going on. This observation seems particularly applicable to the field of “background computing” in which the computer doesn’t take up all our attention but really only works on an ambient level, or - using Greenfields’ talk - its workings dissolve into everyday behavior. Cerveny ended by saying something interesting to my own research project about “Playful Identities‘: “We are constantly at play within the stream of possibilities in the city”. We are “playing the model”. According to Cerveny, these mobile technologies afford a certain playfulness in the way people reappropriate their environment, their lived space. Unfortunately Cerveny did not give much attention to the other side of this: the fact that often we are ‘being played’ by those same technologies.. It is not all about playful mastery of city-space through media.

The last keynote speaker, Christian Lindholm, gave a very entertaining speech that however didn’t really transcend the kind of well-informed techno-babble you encounter on websites such as Engadget, Appleinsider, Digg, and what have you. He talks a bit about handphones, why the Apple iPhone has become so successful, and the race between who puts the biggest screen in a phone. Lindholm sees a big future for the Asus Eee, the very small UMPC (ultra-mobile PC) weighing under 1 kg and costing less than $300. This device is especially attractive to women and children, he says, groups that have largely been ignored by the nerdy hardware marketing bizz. Lindholm’s most interesting point in my view was the term “casual computing”. By this he meant the types of devices that can be used ‘casually’ without disturbing a particular social situation. E.g. in a restaurant you don’t flip open your laptop. But a device the size of a handset you can use there to look something up or check your email.

I would say that theme of casualness, backgrounding, and technologies becoming part of everyday behavior was the overlapping theme of all four speakers. Thus, perhaps, the ‘mobile’ aspect of these technologies is not so much their portability, or the physical mobility they enable, but their integration into everyday life and ongoing social processes.

Oh, and for more pics, see Flickr (tag: twab08).

[I wrote this blogpost earlier for The Mobile City]

Thursday May 22 2008 I visited the CHI conference The Web and Beyond: Mobility in Amsterdam. Keynote speakers were: Adam Greenfield (Everyware); Jyri Engeström (Jaiku); Ben Cerveny (Playground foundation, Flickr); Christian Lindholm (Fjord, Nokia).

I was particularly impressed with Adam Greenfield’s presentation. He had a very rich and dense talk based on the material of the book he is currently working on called “the city is here for you to use”. Below some notes about his talk.

Greenfield starts by stating his affiliation with the urbanist tradition of Jane Jacobs and others, who see the city made up of bottom-up processes by ‘ordinary people’. He then described the current state of the city. The (American) city nowadays is characterized by repetition, deliberate attempts to make certain public spaces less attractive to dwell in, and a lot of junk space and privatized commons [although Martijns' recent post shows how these kind of spaces are re-appropriated by kids].

(photo made by Antje Roestenburg)

The result, Greenfield says, is a withdrawal of people into mobile phone’s private spaces. The challenge is to overcome these threats to urban life - “the crisis of the American city” - by refinding what constitutes the city in Jacobs’ tradition. Greenfield tries to find that answer in ubiquitous computing. Networked processors are already showing up in new places, on the level of bodies and on the level of the streets. These become social objects. They help create an “ambient informatics”: delivering information locally upon which you can act. This really becomes ambient when information processing dissolves into behavior. Greenfield gives an example of a woman he saw using her transit card in public transport by swinging her handbag in full speed in front of the reader, almost becoming a choreography.

Architecture and building is becoming increasingly shaped by computation. It changes the city-scape. It changes mobility too. Objects become accessible, scriptable, queryable, and connected. All this changes the way we use cities from browsing to searching. We can now directly look for something and this search can be customized by recombining elements.

Greenfield is somewhat critical of all kinds of informational mapping projects such as the Oakland crime map. People have started to how up at the precinct with such maps demanding more police presence! So are these maps really representing actual risks on the streets, or are they misleading? There are other things more likely to kill you than street crime.

Greenfield goes on to talk about “the big now” and “the long here”. He talks about Twitter, and how it is used to become immersed in other places at the same time. This changes city life. Greenfield calls this “The Big Now”. But places are also accessible from multiple other places. Greenfield calls this “The Long Here”: you don’t enter a place, you enter a time.

Another thing we should be critical of is “differential permissioning”, the way technologies are used to differentiate people into allowed access or denied access to certain places based on predefined characteristics (this is what Graham calls “the software sorted city”). What is happening to public space? Formerly, everyone had the right to use pavements, parks, etc. We’re moving away from guaranteed availability and access, to differential access. [But hasn’t urban space always been differentiated? For example the ghetto vs. the theater, each barring off groups of people that 'do not belong there'.]

We have to keep in mind that cities are not all the same, but all have their own particularity. We also have to take into account unexpected emerging behavior. These “ambient informatics” objects may be hackable and even used for dangerous/bad ends.

Greenfield ends with some “proposals for the real time city” that urban/media designers should leep in mind:

1. Create beautiful seams: read/write access to city

2. Underspecify: do not too much closure to space.

3. Understand changing city life: from flaneur to consumer to user.