Sharon's blog

information visualization and social visualization

2008-03-14T10:31:00.000-07:00

. Early work on information visualization emphasizes the power of graphical representation in enhancing our cognitive capabilities to process data and information. By representing abstract and numerical data in graphical forms, it makes the data and relevant patterns more perceptually intuitive and easy to understand. its power has been widely employed for data intensive fields such as scientific and business data processing and analysis . As Card points out, "Information visualization is commonly defined as ''the use of computer-supported, interactive, visual representations of abstract data to amplify cognition"

More lately, graphical visualization techniques have been applied not just on scientific or business data for the purpose of intellectual inquiries and analysis, but also on social data (e.g. social presence and activities) in support of social interactions, especially in the field of computer-mediated social interactions. The latter is generally explored under the term of "social visualization" by Donath or "social proxies" by Erickson and Kellogg. for revealing patterns, structures and impressions, graphical representation is considered to be superior than text-only interfaces.

Issues with social visualization is different from general information or data visualization in a number of ways. First, social data is usually subjective and inexact, and poor choice of graphical representations can be easily misleading and spurious. For instance, Donath et al. () discuss how the color codings tend to suggest meaningful interpretations (e.g. orange conveys a cheerful mood while a dull brown is depressing) and careless coding might introduce confusions. Fisher have discussed this issue in their work. Second, social data is a more sensitive material than general dataset, since it is to disclose information about people after all, which requires designers to be more responsible and sensitive to the potential ethical, political and moral issues that social visualization might introduce in the setting. In particular, privacy factors must become an integral part of design considerations. Third, social data is more dynamic, especially when visualizing real time social data for on-going social actions, which poses great challenges for designers to accommodate unexpected characteristics of incoming data.

the central question, Donath et al. tries to answer with social visualization is "what does an on-line conversation looks like?" They have explored social visualizations, in an attempt to reveal individual identities and convey the ambiance of the site as a way to provide a richer environment for online social itneraction as well as provide insights of the community itself. the They are concerned with conveying the right information that is already there and try best to avoid being misleading and spurious.

. Nowell (Graphical encoding for information visualization) suggests that no more than five to six colors should be used in coding a display and that color-coding should only be used for the information that is most directly relevant.

2. social visualization in actions

Technology is a double-edged sword

2008-03-09T13:50:00.000-07:00

What isn't? Stone, Knife, Wealth, Beauty, etc. With no exception, they are all double-edge swords.
What new insights Steven Levey's "Tech's double-edged sword" can tell us?

"The more powerful our tools are, the more dangerous they are when turned against us"- very true!

Lawrence Lessig discusses the phenomenon of internet, how it was like a shooting star, flaring across the night sky and disappearing just as unexpectedly. It suggests that the new laws and regulations is dismantling the very architecture that allows internet a framework for global innovation.

Lessig discusses the notion of commons, the resources that everybody has equal access, and is not controlled and regulated, unlike other private and owned properties. What is the role of commons in our society? What does commons do to a culture? (it reminds me of a particular way of thinking of places: some are designed to distinguish, others are designed to remove distinctions. High profile places targeted one kind of consumers, the wealthy, powerful and famous. Other places, such as a coffee houses are more widely accessible. It is not which is better. I believe we need both to exist. ) for traditional physical resources, limiting commons makes sense, because individuals might over-consume resources and lead to depletion, but there are particular kinds of resources that are not subject to this rule, such as knowledge, music, poems, and now the software. The resources will not decrease when someone gets a copy. This insight of the distinction between software property and others is important!

He talks about the internet as composed of several layers, the physical, code/internet/logical, and the content. Neither the physcial layer (computers, cables) nor the content are resources of commons, only the middle layer is!

"This balance of control and freedom produced an unprecedented explosion in innovation. The power, and hence the right, to innovate was essentially decentralized. "

"This history should be a lesson. Every significant innovation on the Internet has emerged outside of
traditional providers."Patent regulation, although was designed to spur innovation, maybe in the end do harms to innovation. Because it is taxing to apply for patent, which means only those who are powerful like big companies can afford the tax to do it. "The law becomes a tool to assure that new innovations don't displace old ones"

"the right to compensation shouldn't translate into the power to control innovation."

Design and use issues in HCI

2008-03-06T09:19:00.000-08:00

HCI, as a field centrally concerned with user experiences with computing systems , has long been taking the intersection between technology and human being as its central focal of inquiry. However, the relationship between technology and human being has been reduced to relationship between technology and users, the relationship between designers and technology, and relationship between designers and users are largely under explored.

Daniel Fallman discusses three accounts of design: conservativeness, romanticism, and pragmatism. While conservative account as derived from science and engineering tradition, emphasizes a transparent , rational and rigid process which lead to design solutions to preset problems; romanticism, following artistic practices from poetry, sculpture, music, etc, emphasizes individual imagination and creativity, which put more attention to the final product and individual designer, and largely regard the design process as a "black box"; pragmatism, rather than science or art, takes the form of a hermeneutic process of interpretation and creation of meaning. It views design as a dialogue between designers and the settings crammed with people, cultures, values, materials, etc., where designers engage with the world, make do with what is available in a specific situation, define the materials and tools at hand by its potential use. (I feel it was an extension of phenomenology from issues of use to issues of design). It operates from the available means, and treats them abstractly, by seeking to determine and redefine the roles they can play in a given situation by entering into a dialogues with them. So rather than leaning on theories and methodology for guidance, pragmantic accounts acknowledge the pre-reflective knowledge of everyday life and work as the main elements of knowledge. Designers in this veiw is thought of as a "self-organizing system" with constructutive as well as reflective skills.

He argues that none the three aspects alone can fully account for what design is. We can not treat it as a fully scientific conduct, nor black-box, nor an unimportant practical bustle with reality. It should not be treated as a disciplinary mix, existing in between science and arts. Rather, he argues, design is a tradition that guides action and thought. "it is a tradition f pro-activity; and active stance. It includes the archetypal activity of sketching by which designers becomes involved in the reflective conversation needed to bring new artifacts into being." "the role of design in HCI is thus to be found in the act of trying to unfold a coherent whole, from the various bits and pieces gathered together in the process of research." "Field work, theory, and evaluation data provide systematically acquired input to this process, but do not by themselves provide the neccesary whole. For the latter, there is only design."

However, I am not convinced how distinction between design-oriented research and research-oriented design can be useful.

Shall we consider deployment as design, shall we consider use as design? design is a very fuzzy word.

Phoebe Sengers and her colleagues propose for reflective design. They argue that reflections on unconscious values embedded in technologies and every practices it supports should be a core principle of technology design. In their definition, reflection is referred to as critical reflection, which bring unconscious aspects of experience to conscious awareness, thereby making them available for conscious choice. Therefore, reflection, or critical reflection, is important for "individual freedom and our quality of life in a society as a whole", because it allows us to consciously think about attitudes, practices, values and identities that we might unconsciously espouse.Furthermore, since our everyday experiences with the world are shaped by our unconsciously held assumptions as part of our identity and the ways we experience the world, critical reflection can open opportunities for us to experience the world and ourselves in a fundamentally different way.

Senger's reflective design encompasses a much broader agenda. It include reflections for designers to rethink about their design practices, what values are embraced in their design choices, the role of users in the design process, and also provoke reflection on users what role the technology play, what is the relationship between technology and every lives. Much of their work of reflection design focusing on challenging the role played by technologies in our lives. Thus, they propose to embrace reflection not just in the final products, but in the whole design and evaluation process.

Furthermore, sengers also argues for an integration between reflection and actions, "critical relfection is effective only when it is immediately folded back into our experiences, actions, identities, and practices, rather than intellectual practice separate from actions." Thus social information, information about user presence and activities and patterns over time, should not just used for post-hoc reflection and evaluation, as traditionally favored, but should provide an "ongoing opportunity for everyday, open-ended reflection for the users during their own activities".

Phoebe Senger is very inspiring. It inspires me to think, traditional conception of location-based computing centered around locating, tracking, coordination, and etc. It is concerned with the accuracy, granularity, and ways of locating people. However, location could mean much more. It does not just indicate activities, but also collective and historical whereabouts can convey an atmosphere of the collective. Are they all together, are they isoloated in a quiet space? how often do they use the public space? will they tend to spend a lot time at certain play, or move around? How busy the faculity life is, they might be able to people's sense? people's collective use of the space overtime is a narrative of people, and vsualization provide a means to engage people to reflect and think of these questions.

Also by providing an easy means for people to opt in and opt out, it provokes them reflect on presentation, not just merely disclosure. to think of what does the place mean for them. when exposure is too much, how do they adjust to level of exposure. By providing simple means for them to supply place name and activity information, give them an chance to play with it, give them opportunities to shape the use of the technologies.

reflective design is a framework and a set of design strategies derived from a set of critical approaches: participatory design, value sensitive design, critical design, ludic design, critical technical practice, reflection-in-action. They argue, design should incorporate reflection as its fundamental principle.

reflect design argues for incorporating dialogue between designers and users in the

Bill Gaver suggests using ambiguous output to discount the interpretations made by sensing and learning in ubiquitous computing systems. Due to the inherent heterogenous and idiosyncratic nature of human activities, computer are relatively incapable to understand the full meaning and activiites and context. Therefore, they explor using embiguous outputs as a tactic to undermine system authority in favor of user's interpretations, stimulating reflection in ways.

Design for engagement

2008-03-05T21:01:00.000-08:00

Traditional system design and HCI favor accuracy and efficiency. These are values derived from task oriented and engineering tradition of computing design that are largely originated and take place in work places. As computers continually spread into other places of everyday lives, where computers are embedded in settings not just physically different from work places but also culturally, socially and historically different. It challenges these underlying values and approaches inherited from engineering tradition.

Built on Philip Agre's notion of critical technical practice which proposes that practices of technology design should incorporate philosphical and critical reflection , Pheobe sengers and her students propose a program called "cultural embedded computing", with its aim of building technologies not just for people to use, but also for people to think about technology and themselves. In this program, they turned the role of user studies from straight technology evaluation towards sociocultural research, where the goal was not just to improve understandings of people and technology, but also encourage participants to rethink their own experiences in light of their participation; they also designed systems to trigger people to interpret and reflect on the relationship between machine and emotions (the influencing machine), and interpret and reflect on a group;s ongoing emotional experiences.

Therefore, the way of measuring the success of system turned away from measuring efficiency towards concerns with how people worked with the display and what meaning they attributed to it. So the technology is not just a tool to inform affection or others, but what experiences that display can evoke.

Adoption and use issues of new technologies

2008-03-05T16:50:00.000-08:00

Bradner, Kellogg and Erickson's study of the adoption of the "Babble" system illustrates again how local cultures together with technological characteristics can impact the adoption and use of technologies. They also proposes a number of notions and frameworks to understand the adoption phenomenon, such as critical mass (they pointed out that not just the absolute number of participants are important, but also different types of participants for different types of communicative practices - while announcement practice requires a large audience, "good morning" greeting might only need two people), social affordance (whether the interaction between local culture and techological characteristics and afford certain types of practices), and ecology. They illustrate that in the shared culture, people can easily infer about what is going on with the small social cues in the babble systems.

Design for privacy in ubiquitous computing environments

2008-03-05T15:34:00.000-08:00

Bellotti and Bly discuss various ways technology breaks down social communication conventions and mechanism that are taken for granted in everyday world, and suggests that technologies result in disembodiment of context from and into which one projects his information and and disassociation of one's actions. For example, when computer mediated, a lot of social cues are attenuated or we might not realize that our information is visible to others. For disassociation, it might be that, for a shared workspace, only the results of our actions are shared, not our the process of actions itself. Considering these issues, they propose a framework for designing and evaluating privacy issues in ubiquitous computing systems.

It seems while RAVE system is well accepted in this specific culture, it was highly suspected it might very likely be subject to sinister use in other cultures.

It is interesting that they discuss the privacy mechanism itself might introduce new privacy issues. for example, in order to inform the visitors in the commons area with cameras installed who are connected and are able to see them, one solution is to project images of those who are connected, which then makes individuals who connects to the common area feels intrusive. it is an interesting dilemma, when you introduce new solutions to other problems, these solutions introduce new problems to solve.

They mentioned issues of awareness and privacy: while providing too much awareness information of others people's activities and availabilities might seem to be intrusive, so is too little awareness information - it can cause intrusion too when one can not tell easily the availability of others.

Culture and control in a media space

2008-03-05T15:17:00.000-08:00

Dourish discusses the technical-social relationship in regulating access and accessibility in media spaces. He suggests there is a social-technical continuum along which mechanisms of regulation is located and enforced. While some media spaces such as Xerox PARC's don't have explicit technical constraints on media space access and use, it has a explicit "sign up" step in order to be part of the media space. This way, it is subject to the soical practices and norms to govern acceptable media space use. Others such as the Godard in Rave, which provides a set of mechanisms for users to set access and accessibility among a set of services including a sound based feedback mechanism. In this way, the control is largely technical to reduce the misuse of media space technologies. At the same time, he emphasizes even in Godard which has explicit technical constraints for access and accessibility, it is still subject to social regulations, for example,social pressure may mitigate against refusing video access to superiors, or the feedback on the other end will render constant "glancing" into others' offices inappropriate.

Surveillance vs. Souveillance

2008-03-05T09:29:00.000-08:00

Steve Mann distinguishes between SURveillance which means "eye-in-the-sky" and SOUveillance which emans bringing cameras from the heavens, "down to earth". ("Sousveillance")

Surveillance refers to situations where people of higher authority such as government, department store owners, safety guard and the like watch and monitor the citizens, shoppers, and suspects from the above. The authority is often seen as "Godlike" rather than down as the same level as individual parties. He refers the capture of multimedia (audio and video, etc) content of individual activities by a high entity as surveillance.

As an inverse of surveillance, he suggests the notion of souveillance, which refers not people of high authority looking down, but individual parties looking up and looking around, such as citizens photographing police, shoppers photographing shopkeepers (looking up), or individuals recording scenes around for personal experiences (looking around), etc. So it is both a reversal of hierarchical structure, and human-centered experiences.

Surveillance//souveillance
God's eye from above//Human's eye view, down to the earth

Cameras' usually mounted on high poles, up on ceilings//camera down to the earth, at the ground level

eyes in the sky//eye in the eye

watch from above//to watch from below

architecture centered, cameras mounted on or in structures// human centered, camera carried on or worn by people

recording made by authorities, remote security staff // recording of activities made by the participants' of activities

In most of states, it is illegal to record other parties' phone conversations//in most of states, it is legal to record conversations when you are a party

recording is usually kept in secret//recordings are made public (e.g.on the www)

processing is usually shrouded in secrecy // processing is based on open source

originated from panoptic in the context of prison, surveillance tends to isolate individuals from one another, while setting forth a one way visibility to authority figures// it has the community based origin, it brings people together, and makes the large city functions more like a small town, with the pitfalls of gossips but also the benefit of sense of community

privacy violation tends to be unnoticed, unchecked and not be self-correcting//privacy violation is usually immediately evident, and tends to self-correcting
it is hard to talk to people behind the surveillance cameras//there is chance to talk to people behind the souveillance cameras
when combined with computers, surveillance tends to rely on cooperation with the infrastructure around us//wearable computing, doesn't require cooperation with the environment
the locus of control tends to be on the authorities// it is possible for the locus of control to be more distributed, to rest with individuals

The Transparent Society

2008-03-02T13:37:00.000-08:00

David Brin's book "the transparent society" argues for a more transparent and open society, where we will not just be watched by authorities, but we will also watch the authorities and each other. The key is a two way watching, or reciprocity or mutuality. His basic argument is that, the transparent society will encourage criticism, which is the mechanism for civilization and progress, and what we need is a courage to face criticism. So while some argue for shields and masks for privacy, he argues for transparency and openness for privacy.

The problem is whether "mutuality" can be actually achieved in reality?

Symbolic interactionism

2008-02-28T09:50:00.001-08:00

According to Herbert Blummer, symbolic interactionism is a distinctive approach to group behavior and human conduct from other more traditional approaches in sociology and psychology. It rests on three premises:

1. human beings act towards things on the basis of the meanings that the things have for them. So our actions are not merely driven by some psychological factors such as attitudes, conscious or unconscious motives, or incentives or external social factors such social roles, statuses, social demands, social norms, cultural prescriptions, etc.

2. means arise out of social interactions that one has with one's fellows. So it is not that meaning is inherent in the things and just emanate from them as held by the realism philosophy; it is not meaning just as an expression of human subjects' psychological elements such as sensations, feelings, ideals, memories, motives, etc.

3. the meanings are handled in, and modified through an interpretive process used by the person in dealing with the things he encounters, so the use of the meaning is not simply arousing and applications of already established meanings..

The wisdom of crowds

2008-02-26T10:36:00.000-08:00

How can a group of stupid individuals that only think locally (within their own specialization and local knowledge) result in a solution that can serve the overall common good for the collective as a whole? "the wisdom of crowds" by James Surowiecki convinced me with numerous examples that that is possible. But why are there many examples and arguments that a group of people is more stupid than individual? James suggested that three conditions are important to ensure collective wisdom: diversity, independence, and discentralization. I think that is very insightful.

Diversity is key to collective wisdom. First, because it provide alternatives for options. Like many industries in history, at the start, there are always many kinds of design, many kinds of technologies, and many kinds of styles produced many companies trying to create a market. However, in the end, usually one a very small of them remain. None was able to pick the winners beforehand, but "what makes a system successful is its ability to recognize losers and kill them quickly." (p.29). Second, the diversity of options are not enough, but the group has also to be diverse because only so we can have different perspectives, and diversity has its value on its own right. "Homogeneous groups are great at doing what they do well, but they become progressively less able to investigate alternatives" (P.31)

"Ultimately, diversity contributes not just by adding different perspectives to the group but also by making it easier for individuals to what they really think...diversity helps preserve that indpendence, it's hard to have a collectively wise group without it" (p.39)

Another key condition is independence. It is interesting that he discuss independence that we as autonomous beings with we as social beings. Although he recognizes the social nature of existence, he argues that "the more influence a group's member exert on each other, and the more personal contact they have with each other, the less likely it is that the group's decisions will be wise". that is a very strong point, and kind of work against what we believe in social computing, which is based on the assumption that, we are fundamentally social creatures, and if we make social information visible, if we encourage social interactions, we can have positive results either the enhanced connections or informed decisions. He mentioned the information cascade effect, where people who do not have complete information will follow and learn from others, however, bad things happen when at certain point, people become stop paying attention to their own knowledge and just blindly imitate others, this is when information cascade stops being informative.

The final condition is decentralization. Decentralization foster and is fed by specialization. it also means only people know the local and specific situation and come up with the best solutions. The key is a balance between making individual knowledge globally and collectively useful will still allowing it to remain resolutely specific and local. "A decentralized system can only produced genuinely intelligent results if there's means of aggregating the information of everyone in the sytsem"

the work of art is the resolution of conflicting relations

2006-12-15T20:51:00.000-08:00

Before I came back to Irvine, a few books I borrowed from UCI library were overdue. "From Lascaux to Brooklyn" by Paul Rand is one of them. I returned all the books except for this one. This book is not a story, but full of statements about art and aesthetics. However, with all the variety of forms of statements, I think the gists are simple and very concentralized. That is true art is timeless; it is a instrinsic quality in the piece of art itself and independent from the external environment and the audience, or there are certain abstract properties determine the quality of art; it is a result of an interpretation of an artist over a subject, not the subject itself; it is the resolution of conflicting relations.

Many of the claims knock my mind and I can't help quoted them here:

"Perpectual moderness is the measure of merit in every work of art. "-- Ralph Waldo Emerson.

"There is no such thing as bad content, only bad form. This explains the place of form in art. "

"Art is an intuitive, autonomous, and timeless activity and works independently of the development of society."

"Like mathematics, the principles of aesthetics involve the abstract formal properties of things and applies to everything - to apples and to oranges, to ideas and to things - regardless of one's feelings, opinions, or emotions."

"idea is the very life of form. "

"a great poet or painter may hold the wrong theory, an array of conflicting theories, or no theory at all. Who cares? The work is the thing." -- Albert Guerard

"In the visual arts all content and forms depend on optical, tactile, and motor senstations - the first are dominant in painting, the second in sculpture, and the third in architecture." -- Max Raphael

"One must not reproduce it. One must interpret it; by means of what? by means of plastic equivalents and color." -- Cezanne

"On one who has a real understanding of the art of painting attaches any importance to what we call the subject of a picture - what is represented. To one who feels the language of pictorial form, all depends on how it is represented, nothing on what." -- Roger Fry

"One quickly realizes that simplicity and geometry are the language of timelessness and universality."

"The toy is the child's first initiation into art."

"The language of morality and social awareness is expressed in a language of form that endures."

"I learned from poetry that art is best derived from artless things." -- Jimmy Carter

"What a particular proportion contains, and how it is designed, are more important than the shape and its containment."

"Proportional systems are an incentive for some, an inspiration for others, and a crutch for too many."

"The creator understands that emotions can best be expressed visually by overstatement rather than by literal depiction"

"What was ritual and symbolism to one was invention and formalism to the other."

"Grace, dignity, passion, and pleasure signal the presence and suffuse the atmosphere of anything worthy of the accolade art: a persuasive poster, a painting, ann elegant room, a Gothic cathedral, or a simple utensil"

"Art changes our whole attitude to life, not merely out understanding of it but also out evaluation of it, in fact, all our perspective." - Max Raphael.

"The quality of a picture is measured not by how much it adheres to nature bu by how far it departs from it."

"Artisitic beauty stands higher than nature, for the beauty of art is beauty that is born - born again, that is - of the mind, by as much as the mind and its products are higher than nature and its appearnaces, by so much is the beauty of art higher than the beauty of nature." -- G.W.E.Hegel

"Aesthetics is the standard by which a work of art is judged. It is essentially the study of the successive or simultaneous interaction of form and content. How skillfully these components are fused will determine the aesthetics quality of the work in question."

"It is a unity of opposites: a series of steps reflecting Hegels's dialectics: thesis, the subject; antithesis, the conflict; and synthesis, the resolution."

"art is commentary, art is revelation, art is culmination of the creative process. It is a by-product, not a goal, a point of view about a particular object that rises above its topical source. It is not just a facsimile but an opinion expressed visually in a distinctive way."

"Art is reality enhanced."

"By its very nature a work of art hides its wrinkles by constantly renewing itself. The term old-fashioned is an expression of sentimentality and nostalgia, both of which tend to distort one's understanding. sentimentality provides only a momentary response to a work of art; nostafia provides a momentary escape from reality."

"A work of art elicits unsuspected associations and defines vague boundaries-it does not particularize, it generalizes."

"Seeing the new in the old is one aspect of innovation and a rich source of ideas."

"When there's nothing new in what I have to say, I must make up for its staleness by something new in the way I say it." -- H.W. Fowler.

"The confluence of form and idea can be attributed to a fluke, or a bit of luck. The answer is always obvious once it is pointed out."

"Ideas are fuel for the imagination; they are the unique response to the meaningful question."

"I keep six hoest serving-men, they taught me all I knew, their names are what and why and when and how and where and who." -- Rudyard Kipling.

"There are four stages in the creative process: 1. preparation, during which a problem is investigated; 2. incubation, during which conscious thought is useless; 3. revelation, which yields the "happy idea"; and 4. verification, which embodies working out an application of the idea."

"The spontaneous in art is the complete absorption of subject matter that is fresh, the freshness of which holds and sustain emotion. Staleness of matter and obtrusion of calculation are the two enemies of spontanety of expression." - john dewey.

"Sensitivity to a medium as a medium is the very heart of all artisitic creation and esthetic perception."

"A loggo is the distillation of the complex, the absence of the irrelevant. It is the visual essence of simplicity."

"The content of art is the idea and its form lies in the plastic use of images accessible to sense."

"The solution to a problem is inherent in the problem itself - a game of hide-and-seek."

"I do not seek, I find. ARt is an idea that has found its perfect form."

"The role of the imagination is to create new meanings and to discover connections that, even if obvious, seem to escape detection."

"Imagination begins with intuition, not intellect."

"The products of originality, very often, have less to do with invention than with interpretation-with seeing things in a way that is unexpected."

"Knowledge is power." -- Hobbes.
"Imagination is more powerful." -- Einstein.

"things that sometimes appear original often turn out to be meaningless, for they depend on visual devices that appeal to those interested only in novelty or in formalist ideas, which corresponds to fashion rather than to real need."

"Brevity and wit play a role, as do talent, good fortune, a receptive and intelligent client, and an audience conditioned to accept good work."

"The real culprit is the business community's fear and mistrust of the nature and/or relevance of good design - of design's importance as a cultural necessity, as a social responsibility, and as a sensible vehicle for sensible business."

"The degree of interest a picture holds is often determined by its abstract quality, which is the artisit's critical commentary, expressed with emphasis on interpretation rather than on verisimilitude."

"The abstract also provides room for the imagination to roam."

"The art that is frankly decorative is the art to live with. It is, of all visible arts, the one art that creates in us both mood and temperament. Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied by definite form, can speak to soul in a thousand different ways. The marvels of design stir the imagination...By its deliverate rejection of Nature as the ideal of beauty, as well as of the imitative method of the ordinary painter, decorative art not merely prepares the soul for the recpetion of true imaginative work, bu develops in it that sense of form which is the basis of creative no less than critical achievement."

"Nuerals are abstract symbols. They are the busy bees of the world of mathematics. They annouce births and deaths, weddings and anniversaries, happy and sad occasions."

"Art represents a social necessity that no nation can neglect without endangering its intellectual existence." -- John Ruskin

"Good desing cannot be dictated or willed; alas, it is not the product of market research but of natural talent, relevant ideas, and mutual respect, without which design programs eventually will unravel and good design wither away."

"Design can help inform, delight, and even persuade -- assuming that the designer is an artist and not just someone focused on the nonsense of "self-expression" or on the fads of the moment."

"simplicity is never a goal; it is a by-product of a good idea and modest expectations."

"A work of art is realized when form and content are indistinguishable, when they are in synthesis. When form predominates, meaning is blunted; when content predominates, interest lags."

"A consumer survey cannot predict the long-term benefits of design, nor can it evaluate the contributions of an experienced designer. Only time can elucidate such mysteries. A survey can disclose facts, demographics, and opinions but not a future response or reaction."

"Art is a mode of prediction not found in chars and statisitcs, and it insinuates possibilities of human relations not to be found in rule and percept, admonition and administration." -- john dewey

tele- and mobile work

2006-09-11T08:59:00.000-07:00

I was interested in papers about tele-work, but for some reason, I encountered more papers about mobile work. Although both are concerned with new working practices done outside of the traditional working places, they are certainly represents different dimensions of the relationship between work and space: the former has something to do with stability and mobility, while the latter is more about the degree of isolation or integration between work and life, and self and others. They provide cases to examine these dimensions when we discuss the relationship between work, space, life, and others.

If the work is mobile, like traveling all over the places to give services, such as sales persons, delivery persons, or consultants, then the person has to be mobile. There are also different degrees of mobility in terms of spatial and temporal dimensions: local/remote/global mobile; short term/long term moble(delivery vs. customer site development).

Work can be done in a variety of places, traditional office as the first place, customer site as the second and half place, home as the second place, coffee house as the third place, and tranportation as the forth place. If the work is conducted at home, the first thing coming up is how the boundary between work and life is managed, and how the isolation is dealt with. If the work is conducted at a customer site, how the we can connect to the infrastructure, what spatial arrangement can we occupy seems questionable. If the work is conducted in a third place, it is good balance between isolation and sociability, and it is more relaxing. If the work is conducted at the forth space, the network connection, the attention management, the environment management are all issues we need to be concerned about.

ISR research forum

2006-06-02T23:58:00.001-07:00

I was in ISR research forum today. There are some interesting points worth noting:
Some guy conceptualizes a spectrum of knowledge from data, information, knowledge, understanding and wisdom, and suggests that data, information, knowledge and understanding are for efficient, wheras wisdom is for effective.

The same guy also gives a two dimensional conceptulization of knowing:

"I know what I know" "I know what I don't know"
"I don't know what I know" "I don't know what I don't know"

Interesting, I hope at some point, I will know what I know, and also know what I don't know.

I love the words "it is not here yet, but we are concerned with how to pass from here to there". I very much appreciate these words at this stage of my life.

security vs. privacy

2006-06-01T11:14:00.000-07:00

This morning, I was listening to "Common Sense with Dan Carlin". Today's topic is called "the big snoop show ", which is concerned with how government surveillance such as recording phone conversation in the name of national security intrude civilian privacy. This is an interesting connection between security and privacy. While I have already accepted that we should distinguish between security and privacy (believe it or not, in computer science arena, the line between these two concepts tend to blur), I never thought privacy sometimes can be traded off for security.

Social Proxies

2006-06-01T00:03:00.000-07:00

I have been interested in social proxy approach to support online social interactions. The concept seems simple: by visualizing some socially salient aspects such as participants' presence and activities in an online setting, it keeps participants aware of each other and makes it easy to maintain social accountability in online context, which it is usually considered to be more difficult than face to face situations. While the concept is simple, the design space inspired by this concept is not small. It can be explored in terms of different dimensions. What are relevant socially salient aspects? Social presence and activities certainly are, what else? How shall these social aspects be visualized? What is the balance between visibility and privacy? What are genres of social interactions, such as lectures, meetings, nothing talks, etc? What are appropriate social proxies to support these different genres?

Erickson's recent paper "Cooperation Among Strangers: Visualizing Norms as a Means of Supporting Cooperation in Online Systems" proposes some new social proxies with particular emphasis on exploiting the power of social norms by providing visual cues as a reminder to support online cooperation. Unlike previsou social proxies as in Babble and Task Proxy, the proxy is specifically designed to reflect some asymmetry and diversity inherent in certain social interactions, such as a lecture where the lecturer and the audience play asymmetrical roles or a meeting where a variety of activities are involved such as brainstorming in front of a white board, private concentration and active discussions. These genres of social interactions have certain social structure maintained by some social norms, and for online settings, the visualization reflecting and supporting the maintainence of this structure becomes desirable for participants to behave according to the social norms.

This is certainly a step further towards more sophisticated online interaction systems. I also have a strong feeling it has become more and more like an online place, rather than simply online space. At the same time, it also opens up more research questions to me: Who is going to decide what norms and how the structure should be visualized, designers or users? Should designers take the role to highlighten certain norms and structures, such as preassigning some places for social interactions? This could be both empowering and limiting since I believe the assumption of one single social interaction genre might not be the reality. The reality is more dynamic and sublte, just like a room can be either a classroom or meeting room, where the social interaction is defined by social properties not the physical ones. How can the online place be designed to support the dynamic and flexible properties in face to face interaction? Or we might just leave this to users to specify? But will users take specific effort to specify that in their online environment? As revealed by some studies of cities (city: rediscovering the center), people tend to select the site of social interactions right in or very close to the pedestrian flow. While it seems an obvious misbehavior because their social interactions will obstruct the traffic flow, I think it is understandable in some sense: because some specific effort made to step away from the traffic flow will make the social interaction appear too serious, and might not fit the casual social interactions arisen from an serendipidous encounter between acquantences on a street. In online context, will users bother to make this specific effort such as assign or assume certain roles in order to exert some social pressure?

Another interesting issue this paper brings up is social cooperation among STRANGERS. Most of researchers in CMC tend to assume social interaction within social networks, and social interaction among strangers tend to attract less attention. The concept of strangers is interesting. Does it simply mean the first time social interaction, or it include all social interactions where offline part of social interactions is absent? If we only meet online, but have interact for while, does it still count as social interaction among strangers? There are cerntainly some interesting things to look at. While this paper brings up strangers, it seems that it does not explicitly address how special is social cooperation among strangers rather than friends or coworkers. It sounds reasonable to believe that people rely more on formal and strong social norms among strangers than among friends. But is it true?

post CHI2006

2006-04-27T17:12:00.000-07:00

All of sudden, the thousands of people, the hectic hallways, the enthusiastic talks, the witty conversations, the packed parties, etc, became a matter of the past. Every morning, people came from different directions, aggregated in Palais des Congres at the center of Montreal and disppeared into different rooms to participate in intellectual or non-intellectual exchange. Every evening, people dispersed from the Palais des Congres and entered into bars, resturants and parties to strike out new ideas, new stories and new social relationships. It has been an exciting and exhausting week. Now, the conference is over, and people start to pack and see what they can bring back from this intensive or even overwhelming week.

On the stage set up by CHI, there are figures standing in the spotlights, stressed by the amplified visual and audio effects. Some are more passionate, claiming their new findings from their fields; some are more composed, introducing their work in a orderly manner; some speak very fast, making you wonder whether you need to take a train or flight to catch it; some have strong accent, giving the conference a exotic flavor;some are humourous and playful, offerring a little break for us to breath from the scientific and academic "rigor"; some scratch and reflect on the CHI itself, winning applause from the audience; but probably most of them make you wander around, sliding into an internal conversation with yourself. In the background, there is hand shaking, there is "Hi, I am..", there is card distribution, there is drinking, etc, sometimes, even busier than the "foreground". Probably, the most exciting thing is still that during the conference, you see all the familiar but dry names become people in the flesh that can walk and talk and show the sides that won't be accessible on a paper. Now the conference is closed, and we are reflecting on who we are, who we met, what happened, what we found, and what we can get from it.

There are many technologies and designs striving to keep lovers, family and friends connected remotely. They use the mundane artifacts such as one bit(Joseph 'Jofish' Kaye), slippers (ComSlipper) and cups (Lover's Cups) to transfer love signals. They sense motions, temperatures and clicks, and translate and transmit them into meaningful reactions remotely. To them, such simple things as drinking can be very psychologically, and socially meaningful. You are drinking to relax, to calm down, and to keep yourself busy in a diversity of social situations. Aslo, drinking could be very culturally sensitive, and the same drinking can integrated into different forms into different cultures. This is an explicit effort to fight for absence by providing virtual presence. There are also people who work on theoretical framework, and using linguistic features for analysis and measurement of presence. However, Russell Beale offers an observation how people are mentally or virtually absent when they are physically present while we, as technology designers, are striving to provide virtual presence to complement the physical absence. We are writing emails, enagaging in conversations through IM and browsing web sites while we are sitting in the conference rooms. We are cocooning ourselves using the headsets on the street and cut ourselves off from the "real" and "rich" world - there is no hustle and bustle of people and there is no bird sing and people talking but loud musics from the headsets. Although they seem to drive into two opposite directions, I would rather see them as the same line of technology that enables us to negotiate the presence and absence.

While technologies are enabling sharing, communication, and collaboration, technologies are are disruptive, so not little effort is focused on making technologies less disruptive. Mark Altosaar and others provide a technique called AuraOrb to check our eye contact to predict our interruptability. Others developed statistical models to predict our responsiveness to incoming instant messages.While we want to create more fun and engaging games, we are facing a problem about how to measure fun and pleasure and emotion. So our muscle is detected (EMG by Richard L. Hazlett) and vision equipment is deployed to learn whether we are happy or not.

There are more technologies that make music composing, personalization, drawing, picture editing and comics making more accessible to the lay person, and even to the disabled, as well as invent new forms of engagement such as "the affective remixer" and "BashoCam".

While we are interacting with the world to get our business done, we are too close to make sense of it. Now more and more visiualizations are designed to help us step back and visualize the patterns so meaning can emerge and be revealed, such as Fernanda B. Biegas's email visualization.

Location awareness still attract a lot of interests and attentions. Here is location-based reminder application and there is application development method for location tracking techiques for Wizard of Oz Testing.

Technology is not just for function, but also for expression to signal who you are such as Urbanhermes. Mobile phone is not just for communication and sharing, but also for us to kill boredom, fill the break, manage our mood, and keep ourselves busy as a way to deal with awkardness in certain social situations, according to Akseli Anttila (I added the last point:-)). We can also make boring interactions more fun by using tangible computing technologies, such as using dancing to editing our emails.

Privacy is still a big issue. More terms and words keep coming, such as "incidental information privacy" by Kirstei Hawkey. Some turn attention from privacy itself and prevent us from being watched and mornitored to see how we feel more comfortable being watched and mornitored, and what is cultural and social meaning behind it.

While usable security still drives very active research explorations, some people suggest that the reason why encrypted e-mail is not used is not usability, but some social meanings associated with it. Social meaning is gaining stronger and stronger voice. It also sheds light on how we can understand achiving activities, which seem to be weird if we ignore the social meaning associated with it.

nice start

2006-04-24T19:35:00.000-07:00

Today's reception was amazing, especially the circus acrobatics. It is just beyond what i can say so many words (Totally moved by the french music. After I go back to Irvine, I could also post some pictures). The food was great too. After a glass of wine, I was very relaxed, walking around, meeting some friends, seeing some familiar faces, having a palm reader telling my fortune - I have a lot of fun. I think they put posters in this reception event might not be a very good idea - too relaxed to be able to engage in those(It is strange that I do not remember how last year's reception go. )

I was also impressed by Joseph 'Hofish' Kaye and Jenet Vertesi' talk today. I was trying to figure out why. Is it because of the content? Because of the topic? Because of the way of presenting? Or because of their personality? I think the last one might be the most important! Just like what Scott Cook was told by his "loving wife" about how to present in this year's opening plenary session, "don't be charming, don't be smart, just be yourself!" Exactly, i think the reason why their presentation was so engaging is because they were totally themselves on the stage, the same feeling I got from Stewart hosting this year's oscar. It is so simple to say, but so hard to do! (thinking of staying in front of hundreds of people delivering a 15 to 20 minutes talk. Not everyone can do it well.) I think giving a presentation is hard enough already, the even harder one is the question answering part . Today, I just experienced such a presentation. I thought the presentation was good, the visualization was beautiful and intriguing. However, at the end of the presentation, somebody stood up and began with "I was troubled by the presentation...", and continued with "What did you learn from the project"... Can't not image how I would respond if the presenter was me, but the presenter took it very well!

I took many pictures and videos today. post them later...

"about face"

2006-04-23T15:10:00.000-07:00

Just want to jot down what I have experienced in today's "about face:creative engagement" workshop when the ideas are still warm and oscillating in my mind.

Today, we started with brainstorming some of the themes, concepts, and ideas emerging from yesterday's presentations. At first, we categorized them into 5 groups: methodology/evaluation/research practices; epistemology/knowledge/constructions; Education/pedagogy; organization/institutions; Aesthetics vs. process.
However, we constantly experienced some difficulties in deciding which belongs to which. What was interesting to me is I can see how some of the themes and theories and practices I have been reading and thinking have also been reflected and discussed from other practices and disciplines. I think "Translation" is a very telling word describing how people engaging in different domains have to struggle to communicate with each other about those actually similiar concerns but having different appearances. "translation" is a naturally outcome when fields are differentiated and tried to identify themselves.

(This is also resonant one of the groups' disucssion about institution in the afternoon. While we are struggling to lay down a foundation, and to maintain a knowledge base for reproduction, education, identity and autonomy, we are also setting a wall for others to enter into this field. Once the institution is established, later potential members have to learn and acquire that knowledge to be able to contribute to it. come back to this later..)

After that, we broke up into 4 groups following the discussion. The topic for our group was "epistemology/knowledge/constructions". Since this topic is relatively distant from real world practices, it prevented us from expressing ourselves fully. Most of the themes and concepts under this category are very much human constructed, and the condition for us to engage in this kind of discussion is to read similiar literatures and understand some of the concepts, and establish a common vocabulary. This creates some hurdles for us to have productive discussions in a couple hours, especially for us who have just met the first time. To me, it is particulary challenging to get my points across (since english is my second language). I got explicitly feedback that people had troubles understanding me and were kind of uncomfortable sometimes. Getting my point across is hard already, not to mention how to express my points in a friendly and constructive way. But, I felt three of us who are closer to HCI backgrounds tend to share more common ground and can easily achieve understanding. What i learned from this experience is : for people with different backgrounds to discuss productively, we should start with practical topics, so people will have more things to say and contribute, rather than theories. I was a little bit frustrated from this discussion. It seems we have a lot of difficulties to communicate with each other, and I didn't see a coherent theme running across the issues arising. However, when in the afternoon, we need to present our discussion, Sara and Palema did a great job to summerize.

Of the four presentations, the Education/pedagogy group triggered the hottest discussion. I guess part of the reason is many workshop participants have teaching backgrounds, and really have a lot of experiences of some of the issues and concerns. One thing impressed me is the power of politics. The choice of tools, the way to attract students to come, and how to encourage multidisplinary conversation all have something to do with politics. The issue of shared space is also brought up. One example is concordia university, where art students and engineering students share a building, (which is designed to be shared) and this shared space has led to more students to be interested in media art. Another very interesting issue is how students really learn about media art. What is the role of mentoring or more formal education versus learning by online community or other forms of participation? How do they learn outside of the class? Whether we should teach them tools or just principles? What are the differences between studio, classroom and lab? The only difference is space arrangement? What is the core of this discipline, or is there discipline yet? Maybe because I haven't thought about those issues seriously, they all sound fresh to me.

We also think about the future of new media art. How can we have a voice in HCI community?How do these two communities can benefit each other? How can we open and continue the dialogue?( I hear the voice in my heart saying,"If we can do great job and make impressive works, people we intiate the conversation! Everybody loves creativity!" But I know the answer is not that simple) .

Anyway, I stop here today. Tomorrow's opening plenary is at 8:30. (Still feel angry that when I was urged by my starving stomach to go to the networking events to find some food, the food was already gone when I got there!)

Montreal for CHI

2006-04-22T18:01:00.001-07:00

This is my second time at CHI conference and the first time to attend CHI workshop. While yesterday's struggling is still vividly in my mind, now I have already had the first day of workshop in Montreal. A whole day's introductions and presentations and meeting new people is really a lot, but so far I really enjoy it. It is a creative engagement workshop, and I really appreciate that I could have this opportunity to interact with these creative people. Some of the issues we as computer scientists have been debating, and struggling, have already been naturally incorporated in there artistic and design practices.

The small games played during the workshop are worth a few words. At the beginning, through picking jelly beans of different colors, we were asked to answer different questions telling about our working and collaborative experiences. Through such a way, we got to learn about each other. At the end, we were seperated into different groups, and asked to design human machines with each individual as a component in the machine. They also provided kitchen appliances as props. So people play with pans, with rubber, balls, strings, hammer, etc, as materials showing how a human machine work. Our group got up to the desk late, so we can only took the left over. But our group has really creative people, Greg, Palema, Nick. They came up with a lot of good ideas, making the components of our people machine very collaborative, and the playing with the material very interactive. I had such an enjoyable experience with this group of people.

We had lunch at China town. I think the organizer picked a very good restaurant, because the food was great. However, the end of day, I heard some people saying "NO China town anymore". I don't know how I should interpret it, but I guess it reminds me how easily we impose our own judgement and experiences on others.

I didn't take notes about the talks in the workshop. I tried my best to recall, so to hold them before they disappear.

One amazing thing I found from this group is, in their practices, meaning and structure coming out from interactions and actions, rather then determining interactions is very deeply seated, and taken for granted, which is in stark contrast with computer science and HCI, where we are still taking pains to argue for that, and fighting for the position of phenomenology against the domination of positivism. Here, practices are so much stressed, and participation is their common language, where in HCI, we just started to pay attention to it.

"not restriction" is very much emphasized in new media design, and they are proud of saying that they always put no restriction on students to design and try. It seems that is the way for creativity. But is it enough?

It is also funny to see that there are a couple of cognitive psychologists interested in new media art and have done very interesting work.

Many works are about music making, and they have offerred all these inspiring approaches for interaction: walking to make musics, eye tracking to make musics, collectively clicking on a visual interface to produce music collaborative (I love that music)...

This group is very much concerned with social relationship, awareness of environment whether it is social or ecological, community building, multidisciplinary collaboration and of course creativity.

Leave it here...
Will add the dramatic trip to montreal later..

computational technology as design material

2005-07-31T20:03:00.000-07:00

(After reading "Abstract Information Appliances")
What computational technology to interaction designers is like what paint is to painters, or what sound is to musicians. It is a type of material for expressions. While in the field of computer science, some fundamental design aspects such as aesthetical considerations are easily hidden and forgotten. It might be not a big deal for traditional computers, which were almost exclusively used by a few experts to do computaitons. However, with the popularity of computers, when HCI is more and more of a concern, the design decision we make for computational technology can not be reduced to issues of functinality, performance, usability and user requirements anymore, other design choices such as aesthetic concerns should also be involved. Expressions and functionality - what is their relationship in computational technology?

Aesthetics conerns the formal reasons explaining and describing the appearance of given things. The concerns include structure and composition, use of material, overall consistency, etc. They are the basis to analyse how the choices are made and for what reason.

When computational technology is seen as only means for implementing some practical functionality, many aesthetical decisions become mere consequences of other concerns. However, since now we live with them as they surround us all times and condition the way we live, the expressional part becomes important because they form the basis for the presence of these things.

HCI has borrowed rudimentary asesthetics from areas such as graphic design, a disciplinary dominated by "design by drawing". It is obviously important for screen dominated interaction, however, it does not tell too much about the computational aspects of this new matieral.

Material is to build things. Form is the appearance what material builds. What is involved in making something computational in appearance? Programs, interactive appearance and hardware?

The inherent characteristics of computational technology as a new design material are the temporal structures enabled by programs. However, this temporal structures have to be manifested in space to make it perceivable, like the temporal structure of music is manifested as sound that is generated as musicians play their intruments. We need to combine other materials to manifest the temporal structures as spatial structures such as on a screen, or as sound coming from speakers.

As any new materials, this new material will challenge existing ideas about aesthetics and design as it opens up new possibilities. Traditionally, we start with a general notion of function and some general usability criteria, we use stepwise refinements that finally result in a concrete desing, which then can be subject to test using prototypes. These concrete things have appearances. They talk to us as we live with them. This expressiveness is more or less of design choices? Where do these design choices come from and how are they related to functionality and usability?

The function-expression-circle: expressions define functionality while functionality explain design expression. The functionalist leitmotif "form follows functions" is a a leitmotif that emphasizes functionality and where we start at the "function" side of the circle. What if we turn the functionalist leitimotif upside-down and try to work from the other end of the spectrum. Thus, we can use the following leitmotif to guide such an investigation: function resides in the expression of things.

The two methodological exercises in redefining and rediscovering the role of aesthetics in the design of computational things: "discovering functionality in a given expression" and "discovering expressionals in appliance".

leisure, tourism, work and ...

2005-07-20T10:19:00.000-07:00

The existence of work and leisure depends on each other. If there is no work, there is no leisure, and if there is no leisure, there is no work, just like the relationship between high and low, rich and poor, failure and success. They are all relational concepts. Also the concepts of work and leisure actually overlap to some degree. For example, when we follow the tourism agency to visit, ususally we have to follow very strict schedules, getting up very early and only had limited time for each place. We have no freedom to choose the places we want to go or how long we want to stay. We are like materials going through the product line of the tourism industry, under the control of somebody else.

In tourism, what becomes things to visit usually is not the things themselves, but its representative significance. For example, people visit the hollywood, because it, to some extent, represents Los Angeles. People visit Nanjing Road in Shanghai, because it was part of the Shanghai identity. The same holds true for the Great Wall in Beijing, and the Statue of Liberty in New York. Some of them are truly masterpieces of humans, and can evoke deep feelings in our hearts, while others are just symbols, usually from historical importance, and even when the history is gone, they still stay there as simply a gear of the tourism industry. To visit those place mainly means "I have been there", just like to ask signature from a star, the only connection is the two things intersect at a particular temporal and spatial point.

Tourism is also a means to sharpen our perceptions. Without going out, you can hardly appreciate how nice the home is. Without experiencing the unfamiliar, your lose sense of the familiar. Without relaxation, you have no motivation to work.

tourism as status of leisure

2005-07-20T00:39:00.000-07:00

---after reading "Behavioral conceptualization of tourism and leisure"

Without doubt, tourism is a very important phenomenon in contemporary life, whether from the point of view of economic significance, social, cultural and environmental influences, and the role it plays in the personal life. As its impact touches upon all the difference levels of the society - from the marco to the micro, and it involves a variety aspects of the world from transportation to international relationships, it is no surprise that this phenomenon has attracted research interests from a range of disciplines - sociology, psychology, geography, social psychology, economice - just name a few. And now, it also became one of the attractions for computation, since, you know, computing is supposed to be everywhere (Well, what do you think of the term "ubiquitous computing"). As a natural result, the definition and meaning of tourism, and its relationship with other concepts such as leisure are neccesary fuzzy and controversial.

The paper "Behavioral conceptualization of tourism and leisure" seeks conceptual clarification of tourism as well as leisure by examining the relationship between these two. By limiting its discussion around the behavioral aspects of these two areas, it focuses on the proposition that tourism might warrant "special status" within a leisure context.

As for leisure, this paper proposes that while there are different concepts of it, such as a work/non-work dichotomy, a state of being, state of mind and a multidimensional construct, one conceptual strand threads through all the above conceptualizations - that is "freedom". Also leisure is examined in relation to many aspects of life such as family life cycle, and Kelly has made an important contribution to characterize the multidimensional nature of leisure, from leisure "core", which involves relatively accessible, low cost, low effort, and often home-based activites, to a balance to "core", which require significant effort and are senstive to resource difficulties such as education and income. Conceptualizations of tourism are as varied as leisure. Smith states that tourism "does not have a real, objective, precise, and independent existence", but is "to a significant degree, whatever we decide it will be". It has been defined as an industry, tourists' behavior, as well as geographic tour from a "generating region" to a "destination area" via "transit routes". So the interdisciplinary nature of both tourism and leisure is acknowledged and to integrate a large number of perspectives into a highly complex framework is required for both fields of study.

Then this paper seeks common ground between these two fields at the level of individual behavior, especially from the demand side of the phenomena. Demand of travel has often been analyzed in terms of two sets of factors: travel facilitators that enable person to travel and travel motivators that help explain why people who are able to travel actually choose to do so. According to the paper, while it is mainly social economic factors that contribute to the former, the "pleasure" represents a motive for behavior. And this facilitator for travel has its parallel in Kelly's dialectic analysis of leisure. Thus at the behavioral level, there is room for the investigation of common social, economic, and political factors that may effect all forms of leisure behavior, including tourism. And in behavioral terms, there seems little neccesity to insist on a major distinction between tourism and leisure phenomena.

The paper also argues the distinct differences of social theoretical treatment of these two fields reult from iedological thrust of researches into these two areas - one is dominated by industry needs, profit, and development goals and another is from "welfare" concerns, not due to the "nature" of these two phenomena.

Finally, it suggests that a potential starting point for the behavioral synthesis of tourism and leisure is through conceptualizations of leisure that integrate into the context of everyday life. By developing such an approach, the relationships between leisure and tourism could than be clarified by progressive research into the way in which they affect and are affected by the process occuring along three planes, which are "life line", "family" and "work" respectively. At the same time, a further avenue of enquiry that could lead to the production of a more synthetic behavioral account of tourism and leisure would be to develop a "motivtional matrix" for all leisure. This matrix could in turn be connected to the ongoing development of an overall lifestyle in which various motivational needs are met through unique mixes of leisure, family, and work careers.

What is "context", anyway

2005-07-06T12:00:00.000-07:00

A major line of research in ubiquitous computing is "context-awareness", which means computational systems can sense and respond to various aspects of the settings where we live and work. Attractive as it might be to have sensors and computational systems to take care of somethings for us, more fears and doubts are aroused considering how much privacy we have to sacrifice for it. Do we really want computers to be able to figure out our needs and even emotions for us? If that is not the direction we want to drive - to sacrifice our privacy for automation, then where is the direction?

Advancement of technology and desirable pictures of future life should form a symbiotic relationship. On one hand, a digital future with computation embedded in the fabric of the world is driven by the development of low power, low cost, ever smaller and ever smarter devices; on the other hand, the advocate of these pictures should also foster the development. It seems most literatures around ubiquitous computing simply emphasize the former, while do not give the sufficient attention to the later as it deserves. Part of the reason can be traced back to when the notion of "ubiquitous computing" was coined by Mark Weiser. He proposed "transparent computing", where users only need to know what to do, with little concerns about how to do. Thus, the computing should be smart enough to figure out our situations and do things for us with our least attention. While "transparent" is a nice concept to describe how easy it is to use computers to commit our tasks, its implication that computings can fetch our personal info without our attention is a different story. How should we resolve this ambivalence around ubiquitous computing? How should we make the technological development and the vision of its usage benefit each other?

(The following arguments are mainly based on Dourish's paper "What we talk about when we talk about context")
One approach to draw a desirable picture is to gain insights from social science point of view. Actually, according to Dourish's paper "What we talk about when we talk about context", the incorperation of "context" or "situation" in computational design is a repsonse to social scientists' critique of traditional interactive systems. Social scientists have argued that traditional interactive system design often fails to take into consideration the specific setting where action unfolds, and Suchman's notion of "situated actions" becomes a common souce for reponsive and sensitive computational systems. However, it seems to make responsive and sensitive computation do not address the sociological critique successfully, and "the social and technical ideas often sit uneasily together". Obviously there are problems to translate ideas between these two intellectual frames: computer science and social science.

The difficulties of turning social observation into technical design come from the incompatibility of the respective approaches adopted by these two disciplines. Computing system designers take the positivist's tradition, the rational, empirical and scientific tradition, seeking to reduce the complex observable phenomena to underlying idealized mathematical descriptions, reduce social phenomina to essences, or simplified models that capture underlying patterns, and seeking for objective, independent descriptions of social phenomena, abstracting from the detail of particular occastions or settings. On the other hand, social scientists' approach are heir to a phenomenological legacy; in this view, social facts are emergent properties of interactions, not pre-given or absolute but negotiated, contested, and subject to continual process of interpretation and reinterpretation. They turn the attention away from the idea of a stable external world as unproblematically recognized by all, and towards the idea that world is essentially a consensus of interpretations.

With these two distinct approaches, they have different interpretations of "context". System designers take a representational approach, concerned with how context can be encoded and represented. The concept of context in this perspective have 4 assumptions: context is a form of information - it is something that can be known and hence encoded and represented; context is delineable - so we can define what is context in advance; context is stable - the determination of the relevance of any potential contextual element can e made once for all; context and activity are seperable. However, this definition of context is not the kind of context in social scientists' minds. They take an alternative point of view: context is not information, but a relational property that holds between objects or activities - the question is not whether something is context or not, but whether it may or may not be contextually relevant to some particular activities; the scope of contextual features is defined dynamically; context is an occasional property, relevant to a particular setting, particular instance of action, and particular parties to that action; and context arise from activities. So we should not consider context as a representational problem, in which the question is about "what is context and how can it be encoded". Rather, we should take it as a interaction problem, and ask "how and why in the course of their interactions, do people achieve and maintain mutual understanding of the context for their actions". So just like ordinary-ness, context is also an "interactional" problem.

Since the main concern of the use of context is to discriminate or elaborate the meaing of user's activity, the link between aciton and meaing as a primary concern, and we find the link in "practice". According to Etienne Wenger, practice is not just what we do, but what we experience in the doing. It is a process by which we can experience the world and our engagement with is as meaningful. The unification of action and meaning is also central to the question of context, since context is essentially about the ways in which actions can be rendered as meaningful - how a particular action, for example, becomes meaningful for others by dint of where it was performed, when, or with howm. So what constitutes context, how people may orient to features of the world as contextual or central, how relevance is managed, etc. - are questions of practice.

What is crucial to the interactional view is to see practice as a dynamic process - it evolves and adapts. By turning attention from context as a set of descriptive features of settings to practice as forms of engagement with those settings. Thus, the concern of ubiquitous computing is not a "transparent" computing interface where computing systems take care of everything automatically, rather a open-ended new form of interaction where users engage, adopt and adapt technologies and incorporate them into their own work, and new meanings are created and communicated.

tourism vs. travel

2005-07-05T22:32:00.000-07:00

I never thought that there would be any big difference between these two words: "travel" and "tourism" until I came across this paper "Representations of international tourism in the Social Sciences: Sun, Sex, Sights,Savings, and Servility" by Malcolm Crick. According to Crick and other sociologists, these two words certainly mean different things. While traveling is to discover the undiscoverd, or at least "reveal what history has discovered", tourism, on the other hand, "is merely about a world discovered (or event created) by entrepreneurs, packaged and then marketed". As MacCannell puts it, "the term 'tourist' is increasingly used as a derisive label for someone who seems content with his obviously inauthentic experiences". With the development of modern travel industry, tourism becomes a degenerate offspring of travel.

my ever growing to-read list

2005-06-29T00:01:00.000-07:00

I took back 3 more books from the library today. Plus what I've been constantly borrowing from my advisor, the book list I am intended to read runs ever longer. While I can not stop my impulse to appropriate them, I guess I just have to deal with them. However, imagining how I am going to take control of all the conversations with these wisdoms I invited back home, I am getting pretty excited about it: I can let one talk and stop as I want; I can have them repeat what they have talked; and I can have them take turns to talk to me. Haha, isn't fun enough?

computing augmented travel

2005-05-27T22:15:00.000-07:00

In order to have a happy, relaxing and successful trip, we need to manage a lot of information from diverse channels of resources. The process of traveling involves a lot of decision makings, attraction appreciations, and planning, all of which are very information intensive processes. The decision could be where to go, where to stay, how to transport, what to bring, what to wear, what events are interesting to attend, and etc. We need to learn the introductions of different places, find out the news such as whether a certain place is open or closed, we need to pay attention to the weather conditions, read feedbacks from other travelers, find out whether there are suitable restaurants and etc. How toursits manage to obtain all these information? How are these kinds of information supposed to flow from the sources such as the park administrations and other tourists? Who will check in information? How and where should we check out information? Usually all the information is distributed in different brochures, forms, books, websites, and etc. I want to understand the tourists' behaviors and how information technology can ease the decision making process. One important thing is that the decision making process doesn't need to be rational and should also be emotional. For example, how can information be presented that users can feel it and immediately make decisions. However, most of the information so far is textual, and with maps sometimes. For example, when I was in Yosemite last time, we wanted to hike for a while. However, which trail to take is hard to pick. The visitor center gave us a table listing all the trails, with information regarding how long the hiking will take, how to get the entrance of the trail, and what attractions are there on each trail, and how difficult the trails are. However, I need to read them, understand them, and make decisions. But if I don't know so well about those attractions, it is hard for me to make decisions. How can the information presented that we can feel how interesting the trail is? Whether augmented reality can help that situations?

focusing on "process"

2005-05-27T00:25:00.000-07:00

I found out that I was always fascinated by how things are formed, how ideas are shaped, how activities are motivated and executed. In short, I am obsessed by the process, the change, the event, and the activity. I believe everything is associated, and in order to have insightful analysis, we should use some kind of Actor-Network theory to examine the connections, to identifies the underlying forces, to analyze the ways these forces work together, and find the machinsims used for collaborations, fights and negotiations between these forces, thus finally keep the process going and get things transformed. I believe the power of contrast. In terms of Chinese traditional Yin Yang philosophy, I think it is important that we should identify the Yin factors as well as Yang factors, that is to find the negative forces as well as the positive forces, and be always aware that things can go wrong, and things can be done differently.

With these recognitions, I want to take the experience as the unit of analysis. The concept of experience here is similiar to the concept of process, program and activity, such as vacationing/tourism, Ph.D. or Master programs in universities, design process/prototyping, appearing and disappearing of disciplines, and etc. Since I have decided to focus on the process as the unit of analysis, and since everything is changing, all of sudden I was opened up to a wide range of possibilities to explore. Are they relevant while they obviously appear to be so diverse? Are there any underlying general principles? Are there similiar machinisms behind these processes? Are there similiar approaches to these phenomena? These are questions I don't know but am very curious about.

During each event, process, and experience, there will always be unexpectations, weird things, and misfits, to which I believe we should pay considerable attention to make sense of what's going on. News is important resource for me to find those unexpected, significant and strange phenomena around our everyday life, and I did find huge interesting topics from reading news paper in the past week.

Take tourism as an example. Here are some questions can be asked about that: Why do people would like to go traveling? The reason could be a mixture of personal, economical, social, and cultural reasons. It could be that people are stressed out from their work, so tourism is to balance the stressful work and get relaxed (kind of conform to Yin-Yang operation ). It could be from a personal curiosity, or interests of exploration, discovering, experiencing, and changing. It could be as an accessory to other activities like business trip, family reunion, celebration of milestones in life such as marriage or retiring, and attending some big events like conferences. It could be that a war keeps people from traveling for a while, and when the war is over, people can't wait to go abroad. It could be that the government want to encourage economy, and arrange a national vacation for a whole country. It could be that the competition of the tourism industry results in a lot of business promotion activities, which simulate the desire to travel. So the personal interest, time available, goverment regulation, economic conditions, cost, and quality of traveling (people certainly don't want to go the places packed with people) could all be important factors that contribute to the idea of taking a tour. It is interesting fo find out how the activity of traveling could be all connected to these underlying reasons. The alternative of traveling could be other leisure activities, such as reading, movie watching, party, and etc. It is an issue of vacationing, and it would be interesting to see how technology plays a role to let people know the commercial information from travel agencies or park administrations, how different the activity patterns are of vacationing over different countries. I believe to identify these different underlying reasons are important to understand tourists's activity patterns which certainly includes how they use technology in the whole process. For example, if the vacation is given by the goverment of the whole country, keep aware of the traveling flow is important to ensure the quality of vacation. If the traveling is from personal curiosity trying to broaden knowledge, then it is very possible that the travlers would like to check out historical information and geographical information from various sources, including websites, before, during and after the traveling. So all these will affect the activity and technology design.

Next question would be, how do they plan their trip? What information do they need to plan? How do they find that information? How do they decide where to go, how to go, where to stay? Are they informed enough before they make decision? What technologies to they use to get these information? What kind of things will they do online such as airline tickets booking, finding interesting places to go , hotel reservation, and whether checking? Do they use online forums more often? Do they use official forums more often? Are the plannings distributed to different members of the traveling group? Will they ask travel agents for information? What resources are available for them to figure out the plan and to make decisions? How the online or offline information systems could be designed more helpful, how they can complete each other?

In the process of traveling, what technologies do they use, digital cameras, mobile phones, vedios, GPS? What roles do these technologies play in the experience of traveling? Do they use cell phones a lot among group members, or beyond group members? What do they use cell phones for? How do they use wireless connections available during the travel, for work, for checking emails, for next day's itinerary or for reading news?

After the travel, what do they do to retrospect the traveling? By playing with pictures? By writing blogs? By telling stories? What information would they disclose to others?

(Still more questions to ask, but I have to stop for today because it is too late. To be continued..)

Am I a 'Taoist'?

2005-05-26T00:35:00.000-07:00

Seems everything comes together. I just had a conversation about religions with one of our group members over lunch today. When she asked me whether I had any religion, my answer was NO. Then I was wondering what religion was for? Why do people need religions? I think I have never identified any religions as my faiths, but I don't think I have no faith. I think I become more and more strongly believe something or suspect other things. Since I was fascinated with all these changes, processes, activites, events, experiences, for some reason, I ran into this traditional Chinese philosophy - Yin-Yang theory, and then the Taoism, which is all about changes and how the opposing forces Ying and Yang, work to cause the changes. I was obsessed with the Taoist beliefs, and suddenly I identified that Taosim was the faith I'd like to follow. As "Taoism started as a combination of psychology and philosophy but evolved into a religious faith", I guess that was the "religion" I have then!

It is all amazing that the typical symbol of Taoism has been around me since forever(You know, I was born and grew up in China), but I didn't recognize its significance until now, and in a country other than China. All the doctrines in Taoism are full of wisdoms. I am so proud of being a Chinese.

"Taoism takes the doctrine of yin and yang, and includes it in its own theory of change. Yin originally meant "shady, secret, dark, mysterious, cold." It thus could mean the shaded, north side of a mountain or the shaded, south bank of a river. Yang in turn meant "clear, bright, the sun, heat," the opposite of yin and so the lit, south side of a mountain or the lit, north bank of a river. From these basic opposites, a complete system of opposites was elaborated. Yin represents everything about the world that is dark, hidden, passive, receptive, yielding, cool, soft, and feminine. Yang represents everything about the world that is illuminated, evident, active, aggressive, controlling, hot, hard, and masculine. Everything in the world can be identified with either yin or yang. Earth is the ultimate yin object. Heaven is the ultimate yang object. Of the two basic Chinese "Ways," Confucianism is identified with the yang aspect, Taoism with the yin aspect.

Although it is correct to see yin as feminine and yang as masculine, everything in the world is really a mixture of the two, which means that female beings may actually be mostly yang and male beings may actually be mostly yin. Because of that, things that we might expect to be female or male because they clearly represent yin or yang, may turn out to be the opposite instead. Each force contains the seed of the other"

These two forces coexist in everything, and can't be independently identified. There is no "good" without "bad". There is no "energy" without "rest". There is no "calm" without "excited". I am fascinate about how this view of world can explain so many things. That is why "contrast" plays such an important role for us to make sense of things, because one thing is meaningless without its opposite, and all things develop and progress from the interactions of these two opposing forces. This thought is all relevant to the "negative space", or "backchannel". I feel this the essence of life.

Taoism, itself as one force as opposing to Confucian, coexist with confucian in Chinese history, and could coexist in individual."In China, and some other areas in Asia, the social ethics and moral teachings of Confucius are blended with the Taoist communion with nature and Buddhist concepts of the afterlife, to form a set of complementary, peacefully co-existent and ecumenical religions. "

The coexistence of these two forces and the operation between them is where the complexity, or the richness of life is from. However, whether these two forces can form a harmony of life is something we should query into.

Then I found these words - "Taoism is not a religion, nor a philosophy. It is a "Way" of life. It is a River. The Tao is the natural order of things. It is a force that flows through every living and sentient object, as well as through the entire universe. When the Tao is in balance it is possible to find perfect happiness. " Ok, I agree, I don't think it is a religion. I still have not religion, but I have the faith of life which could be identified with Taoism. It reminds me of an article i read today, which is about a director called Shell. He said "When you have the cast, the sets, the lights," he says, "an opera takes on its own life". It seems he also has Taoism spirit. "I am not oe of those directors who marches in with a set of plans. Go wherever you want, and when you'redone, I'll look at it and make suggestions, adjustment." It seems, everything has its own life. Leave it alone, and it will grow, but of course, it needs adjustment and suggestions.

"The most common graphic representation of Taoist theology is the circular Yin Yang figure. It represents the balance of opposites in the universe. When they are equally present, all is calm. When one is outweighed by the other, there is confusion and disarray. The Yin and Yang are a model that the faithful follow, an aid that allows each person to contemplate the state of his or her lives. " It is kind of relevant to "sense making".

"Taoism is a religio-philosophical tradition that has, along with Confucianism, has shaped Chinese life for more than 2,000 years. The Taoist heritage, with its emphasis on individual freedom and spontaneity, laissez-faire government and social primitivism, mystical experience, and techniques of self-transformation, represents in many ways the antithesis to Confucian concern with individual moral duties, community standards, and governmental responsibilities. " Sadly enough, I didn't feel its influence in contemporary China as important as past.

Here I just want to quote more:
"But the original source of Taoism is said to be the ancient I Ching, The Book Of Changes. "
"The order and harmony of nature, they said, was far more stable and enduring than either the power of the state or the civilized institutions constructed by human learning. Healthy human life could flourish only in accord with Dao -- nature, simplicity, a free-and-easy approach to life. The early Taoists taught the art of living and surviving by conforming with the natural way of things; they called their approach to action wuwei (wu-wei -- lit. no-action), action modeled on nature.
Their sages were wise, but not in the way the Confucian teacher was wise, learned and a moral paragon. Zhuangzi's sages were often artisans, butchers or woodcarvers. The lowly artisans understood the secret of art and the art of living. To be skillful and creative, they had to have inner spiritual concentration and put aside concern with externals, such as monetary rewards, fame, and praise. Art, like life, followed the creative path of nature, not the values of human society. "

"Tea with Hitchcok"

2005-05-20T22:06:00.000-07:00

I read an artical about this master of suspense - Hitchcock titled as "Tea with Hitchcock". The story behind this interesting title is: "Hitchcock liked to have tea with his family and frequent collaborators in the garden with their dogs. They could have tea for a few hours by themselves, because he always felt it was a wonderful way to talk about everything, over food." When I read these lines, I was wondering what is the myth with tea or food that can make people talk for hours. That also reminds me that Japanese take tea time so seriously, that they will rinse their hands and mouth meaning purifying themselves before they enter a tea house. What is so special with tea in Japan? Another story about tea takes place in the South of China, where people would spend a half or a whole day to have 'morning tea' with their friends, although, during their 'morning tea' time, they do not just drink tea but also eat various snackers. But anyway, this activity is surely more than just drinking and eating. How come drinking and eating become such an identified cultural phenomenon?

"I have always been uncommonly unattractive. Worse yet, I have always known it. The feeling has been with me so long, I can't imagine what it would be like not to feel that way... Until I met Alma. I never understood what women wanted. I only knew it wasn't me." It struck me that how much pains Hitchcock's looking had brought to him. He must have gone through some very unhappy times. Fortunately, this special experience constructively turned him into a very creative person. "Actually he said that in a way his looks were a help to him because if he would have been good looking, maybe he wouldn't have devleoped his artistic interests. He might have found somebody before Alma and made some terrible mistake in life, so he felt that he owed a lot to the way he looked. he said he didn't feel inside like the person he looked like on the outside, and that looking in mirrors remained throughout his life a little bit of a shock." "As a very young man he was happy to go and sit at a table at his favorite restaurant alone. It didn't bother him because he was an interior person who could amuse himself with his own thoughts..." I was amazed how a person's outside looking can so greatly shape a person's inside personality.

"Romantic obsession has always obsessed me," Hitchcock said,"Obsessions of all kinds are interesting, but for me, romantic obsession is the most fascinating". I believe great masters all grow some kinds of obsession!

David Harvey's lecture

2005-05-20T00:27:00.000-07:00

Thanks for my advisor's information, I didn't miss David Harvey's lecture on our campus this week. Although at the first, I was very doubtful about how geography could have anything to do with Information Technology, or the social or culture, I was impressed by his perspective about various issues of the world on the first day(It was a three day lecture). It is very informative, insightful, profound, imaginative, and critical. He touched all these general issues concerning humanities, which is certainly what we should understand to make computers really work for people. This level of concern about humanity is much more profound than just make computers more efficient.

During the lecture, a audience asked him who started cultural geography(actually that's what I want to ask too. obviousely, he is also confused by the name Cosmopolitan Geographies, or Geographical Ontologies, or Freedom Geographies). His answer was if you can say intelligent things, who cares what discipline that is. I feel this is kind of trend in contemporary academia, that people are less concerned about which discipline the study is. we are trying to work across boundaries, and make insightful studies. It seems it was like before middle ages, scientists could be artisit, and etc. There are intellectuals but not field experts. The division of disciplines sometimes cause reductionism, and since more and more fields are interconnected, reductionism will become obstacles to the truth. Shall we advocate holistic thinking? Architeture is not just about a building, but also compatible with the enironment, view, energy, comfort, urban and etc. I believe that should become true to for the IT field. Maybe we could be experts in every field, but we should have this holistic thinking when we approach issues.

Starting from Geography, David has wide ranging enquiries from politics, nature, economics, and human natures. Facing the globalization, he shows his concerns about what is freedom, what is justice, how the globalization should work, and whether freedom is gained just for some group but at the cost of another group. Is there absolute justice or freedom? Surely, the answer is no. Facing the globalization and the growing interdependence, who is able to stand for the global benefits. How things are going to work out? According to my observation, the advancement of technology, the release of labors, and the imperialism have profoundly caused inequality. The widens the gap between classes. I observed in the previous years in China more and more workers were laid off from manufacture industries, and can only become cheap labors for capitalists. Although overall, seems more people are becoming wealthier, still more and more people are becoming poorer, and the machinism of this pattern seems to reproduce itself.

What struck me most was his distinction of the concept of time and space in terms of "absolute", "relative", and "relational". He explained this concept by analogy of "use value", "exchange value", and "representational value". It is from more concrete to more abstract. "Absolute" is the reality, the world, and the practice. "relative" is about who see it, so it is relative to the person who perceive it. "relational" is after the things are represented, it has its own form of existence, and it is tranfered. They are immaterial, but they are objective. Like thoughts, they exist in our mind. You can't see, can't touch, but they exist in our mind objectively. I feel what IT has big impacts is in the relational level.

He mentions process philosophy several times. Obviously process philosophy has a big impact on his thinking. Process philosophy stresses that the nature and reality is best understood in terms of processes rather than things, and things are just stabilized existences. In process philosophy, recipes are more important than particular cookings, because according to the former, you can reproduce the later. So what we should concern is the process that makes the product, rather than the final products. In the same way, the realy and culture are ongoing productions of certain processes.

So we are all in the process. I am in the process of some projects, in the process of getting my Ph.D. degree, in the process of a meeting. The problem is where to find the transitional point.Where is the closure? Where is the beginning? To answer these questions, we should not ignore negative aspects of things such as resistence and conflicts. Rubbing two rockes to make fires. We should always have this critical thinking, examine all the sides of problem, assemble things in different ways and to find new forms of existence. We should all try to make new kind of fires.

We are in the process of transformation, and the world is in the process of transformation. How we can transform ourselves depends on how we can transfrom the world, and how we can trasnform the world depends on how we can transform ourselves. It seems the fragmentation of cities, the reforced class power is resulted from the "let market do it". Where is the outrage then?

Wiping as interaction

2005-03-07T00:36:00.000-08:00

In my last blog I imaged to use remote to control how clear you want to reveal yourself. Acturally, at beginning I was thinking of using wipping to interact with the system. Imagine a glass window covered with vapor, so it is kind of blur. If you want to make it clear, you wipe it. I know it is a weird idea. But I decided to post it here anyway.

balance using transparency

2005-03-06T21:30:00.000-08:00

In the field of Ubiquitous Computing, we are facing a lot of embarrassments. We bring computers into everywhere, but we are concerned about our privacy. We try to make computers more intelligent, but we don't want to lose control. We would like to share more over the network, but we're not always sure whether we share too much. In a word, where is the balance?

For some reason, I have been playing with the idea to use tranparency, or degree of blurness, to find this balance. One application in my mind is a background screen for a community, a project team or whatever. An example is shown in the picture below.

(balance using transparency)

So the grey rectangle represents such a screen, on which each small icon is a live video of a room, and the largest one is my own room, which could be a meeting room, a lab, or an individual's office. The black gadget below is something like a remote for users to control the degree of blurness, the transparency or the volume or whatever, kind of let the user control how clear he would like to reveal himself and his environment.

A possible scenario goes like this: we are a department, and we install this screen in each of our rooms for us to keep aware of some activities around. I participate in this community, so I have one screen in my office too. For example, A is a meeting room, there are always some presentations there. For a presentation, I am not sure whether I'd like to join. If the presentation is totally public, then the video is very clear, so I can see who are there, how many people are there, which helps me decide whether it is a good one or whether it is relevant or not based on the attendence. If it is a meeting, but not public, the meeting people can make it kind of blur, we can only see there is meeting there, but have no idea who are in the meeting, and what the meeting is. If the room is a lab I am working with, it is public to me, I can always see what's going on there. For instance, if I see my teammates are getting together, discussing, I probably would go there to join them, or increase the volume of that video to get some sense of what's going on. I would also be able to see my teammate's offices, and they can see me too. It is always reciprocal, you know. I can control how much I'd like to reveal my office to them. If I am reading, and I don't want to be bothered, I make my video very blur, meaning I am having my private time but still let them know I am at office. If I am working on my project, I would like to be very clear, meaning I am public now and let them know I am working on that, so if we have questions, we can discuss right awa. I can also control what to show, and in which angle the video should be taken. All the controls are done with the remote.

Several characteristics with this specific application:
1. I control the degree of clearness and volume of sound to control how much I want to reveal myself
2. it is at my background, most of time, it is quiet, and especially after I get used to it. Once in a while, a glimpse of it can give me some information of my environment and keep me current about what's going on in my department and have control about how much I'd like to get involved. If nothing special, i go back to my own business. If I find there are a lot of people in a room, and it is very clear, I can choose to increase the volume of that, and to get some sense of what's going on, and decide what I should do in that case.
3. So it is about sharing, and we can choose how much to share, because we can see ourselves on the screen too. It is reciprocal, so according to the screen we know who are able to see me, which helps me to decide how much I'd like to share.
4. The system just bring the information to me, it is me to notice something, analyize and control how much I'd like to invovle if something special happens. I am in control!

Part of this idea is from my own experience. Sometimes, I'd like to study in a chair, with TV on, but without sound. So the TV is not intrusive at all. Once in a while, I look up from my own books, make a glimpse of the TV, if I see something unusually, I'd increase the volume of the sound, and listen to it. If some Ads come up, I decrease the volume and go back to my own study. With this practice, I can keep current with the news with not so much cost. It is very simple, just to use remote change the volume. The information keeps flowing into my living room, and I am in control how much I'd accept it. I works very well for me at least.

I came across a vedio sort of close to the idea to control the degree of clearness:
http://www.ralphammer.de/hp/flash/Berlin_engl.html

As for research, what potential things I can get out from it:
1. to explore the idea of design for experience. It is not to make some tasks easier or efficient. It is an experience for users. It is concerned about how users reveal themselves and get involved in the community, with the change of sense of spatiality by the system.

2.to explore the idea of holistic design. Since users are important part of the system, in the sense they themselves are the information, they control how to present the information, and they also analyze and make sense of the information with social practice(join the meeting, go to have chat with teammates. )and users' s social behavior based on the information. How such a system should be designed? How should the designers work with users? What elements should we take into account to design such a system? What methods, artifacts and social practices should be used to design such a system?

3. It could be used as a testbed to study privacy issues, attention practices and community.

The issues with this idea is:
1. Why would users pay extra effort to control the clearness?

2. Is it true that less tranparent, or less clear, then less privact information?
3. what are the privacy concerns with this setting? Is it 1 or 0 case? That means if I agree to use video, I don't have privacy concern. Or else I won't use vedio at all.

I don't know!

Understand experience by reading "Technology as Experience"

2005-03-01T00:26:00.000-08:00

I have been reading John McCarthy's book called "Technology as Experience". I found I really appreciate John Dewey and Mikhail Bakhtin's approach towards experience. I always go like "exactly". The ideas that keep resonated in my mind are:

1. It (Experience) is more inclusive than knowledge because it tries to encapsulate a person's full relationship - sensory, emotional, and intellectual - with his or her physical and social environment.

-Exactly. That explains why some background knowledge of a piece of art can help us appreciate it more, because the background helps us understand the art more and get us intellectually involved. Furthermore, if we personally have the similar experiences, it will get us emtionally envolved. So experience is more than feeling, more than knowledge. It is the irreducible totality, and we should struggle for richness in our experience.

2. According to Dewey, therefore, experience is constitued by the relationship between self and object-by concerned, feeling people acting and the maertials and tools they use.

He (Bakhtin) thought that totalizing systems worked by alienating people from the most meaningful quality of everyday experience, the particular response formed in relaiton to and with others from which a sense of self emerges....Thus although experience always occurs in cultural, historical, and material contexts, meaning engagement depends on the event or action being felt, known, and valued in unique way. This is also the kind of meaningful engagement that transforms people and systems.

-Exactly. Experience is about individual discovering and making sensing about himself, through interactions with the world, to answer questions like what he is interested in, what are his potenticals, and how unique he is... It is very personal, and can't fully represented by types.
It is also about growing, development and changing.

3. (About Aesthetic experience as a paradigm of experience) In turning to aesthetic experince, Dewey brings to the fore the rythms of life, the tenseion and release of engagment, and the feelings of vulnerability or the face of our own needs and desires.

-Exactly. Again and again, I encountered this concept of rhythm, which always makes me feel things are so beautiful, from music, from pictures, and even from everyday life. I guess it has something do with our own heart beating and life cycle. When the rhythm goes fast, we feel heigh, passionate and energetic, wheras when it goes slow, we feel peace, calm, relaxing, and quiet. Hmm, Rhythm is very beautiful, and it is kind of sensory beauty, a good way to organize things.

4. For pragmatits, creative action is always embedded in human situated freedom...This suggests a view of the world as an open, unfinalized, and unfinalized place where every person and thing is always a dynamic process of becoming, always open to future.

-Exactly. Where are those new ideas coming from? I have been asking this question since forever, and it is also the answer from my own experience. I believe the firm connection between freedom/openess and creativity. I also believe it should work together with the dance of rhythm in our life. One one hand, we need to accumulate knowledge and experience the world to acquire ideas, thoughts and concepts, on the other hand, we need to relax, let the ideas play in your head - and here comes new ideas, that is called creativity.

5. The emotions at work in an experience belongs to a self engaged in a situation and concerned with the movement of events toward an outcome that is desired or disliked. ... in a more recent treatment by Martha Nussbaum, who argues that emotion views the world from the perspective of our goals, needs, desires, and values... We do not perceive an objective, representation of the world; rather, we perceive a unique version colored by our unique desires and vlaues as experienced in the situion we are engaged.

-Exactly. Whether the outcome makes your happy or not largely depends on your expectations, or your desires or needs. Sometimes, I think the key to make ourselves happy is "Don's expect too much". A quote from a Chinese Cartoon - "I am not happy is not because I don't own anything, I just don't have the feeling of owning them until I lose them". Sadly, only after we lose something, you start to lower your expectations and appreciate what we currently have.

6. Faced with the potential arbitrariness of experience, a meaning-making creature or culture may try to bring a meaningful quality to experience. The doing that we engage in can be mindless or mindful. The more we attend to that doing, the more likely our experience is to be meaningful and value ot use. We can also make decisions about the beginnings and the ends of experiences, which would dissolve some f the arbitrariness. Jackson (1998) calls this "framing experience". By framing our experiences and giving ourselves as fully as possible to those experiences that we have diliberately framed, we begin to bring structure and meaning to them.

-Exactly. The world itself could be very rich and very meaningful, but to fully perceive that, or appreciate that, we still need to work one that - that is called sense-making, which I think is what I have been doing. So to be creative, open is good. But to avoid arbitraness, and make the ideas we create more meaningful, we need some frames, like some high level ends "to make something fun" or "to make people think" or "to make people feel connected".

7. One of the main distinguishing characteristics between understanding and interpretation is whether the meaning making involved is linguistically mediated or not. ... Our sense of any particular situations depends on previous experience and reflection....As meanings developed through reflection are absorbed by the object or situation, the sense of that sicuation changes.

-Exactly. It is about how we can make sense of our experience, how we can do reflection - by linguistic articulation, by composing music, or by painting? I think the more ways for you to express, the better chance it is for you to get meaning from the experience and become more senstive to your environment.

Put it in perspective

2005-02-22T23:28:00.000-08:00

Ok. It is holistic design. Ok, the situations and context are important. We all know that. How new is that? How different is this idea? Yeah, I think it is time for me to stop personal speculations, and to put the idea into perspective, to examine other related ideas, concepts and theories, and to see the relationships and differences it is from them.

So holistic design is to expand the scope of design, expand from a computer and a distributed system, to a setting, where the elements under design include the environmental and the social settings as well as technologies. But how should we include those elements beyond computers? Where and how can it apply? How practical is this idea?

Let's examine some relevant theories and ideas first:

Actor-Network Theory(ANT)
(From Thierry Bardini): "It evolved from the work of Michel Callon (1991) and Bruno Latour (1992) at the Ecole des Mines in Paris. Their analysis of a set of negotiations describes the progressive constitution of a network in which both human and non-human actors assume identities according to prevailing strategies of interaction. ... In the actor-network theory , both actors and actants share the scene in the reconstruction of the network of interactions leading to the stabilization of the system. But the crucial difference between them is that only actors are able to put actants in circulation in the system. "

This theory is to anaylze how a technology is shaped by a network system composed by both human actors and actants. It is from social construction point of view to study the formation of technologies and is widely used to analyze the stablization of frastructure. It is kind of backward analysis starting from the existing technologies, with concerns about forces towards the existence of technology. Holistic design also takes into account of elements beyond technology, which is similar to actor-network analysis, but it is concerned about design, not analysis. It starts from knowledge of computer and social science to design and create practices and experiences.

Activity Theory :
It is originated from Russian psychologists. (Bonnie A.Nardi From Activity Theory and Human-Computer Interaction) "It is a descriptive tool rather than a strongly predictive theory... The objective of activity theory is to understand the unity of consciousnes and activity. Activity theory incorporates strong notions of intentionality, history, mediation, collaboration and development in constructing consciousness."

It is tool for us to understand human activities, and since it is from psychology, it is pretty much concerned with the construction of consciousness and is kind of individual oriented, not social setting. While it is good tool for us to understand humans psychologically, and gives us some implications about how to design our computing systems(Since we need to consider human and design for human), it is kind seperated from design stage. It is like, "here is what we found about humans and activities, you should design according to that. " So when it comes to design, it still takes computing as the only resource to design for humans, which is different from how holistic design see design.

Participatory Design:
(Computers and Design in Context by Morten Kyng and Lars Mathiassen)"It refers to the pragmatic approach of direct collaboration between designers and users, and the more conceptual approach that incorporates complementary perspectives to help designers come up with better soluctions. "

It is about a methodogy or practice of design computings. It emphasizes how users and designers should work together, and the design process also involves uses at different stages to make sure the system is really designed what users want. It starts from tasks and functions, and examines in such way of design, the final system will be easy to use and easy to learn.

Situated Action:
(Plans and Situated Actions by Lucy A. Suchman) It arouses our awareness of another type of actions called situated actions different from planned actions, which is the model most of our computing systems base on. It helps me realize the existence of this action pattern and it is important to consider this pattern, but gives little clue about how - How should situated action play in the design of computing systems?

Technology and Experience (Technology as Experience by John Mccarthy, Peter Wright): It is good to see how technology is connected with experience, and there is good analysis with some everyday examples about why we feel certain way. It gives me a good vocabulary to talk about experiences, but when it comes to expain experince with technology, I feel it is limited and not so satisfied.

When I say holistic design, I don't mean that every time when we design computing systems, we should employ this approach, or concept. Most of today's computing systems are built to finish tasks, where usability is still their major concern, because it is task-centric, the purpose of good HCI design is the interaction between computer and human should not be in the way. In that case, Participatory Design as well as some HCI guidelines with some consideration of user experiences(depending on different situations, for example for a car sale support system) should be enough.

Where I am really concerned to use holistic design is in the area of ubiquitous computing and design for experience. Ubiquitous computing is to weave computings into our everyday fabric life, where functions and efficiency should not be the major concern anymore, usability is not enough, wheras experience, quality experience becomes critical issue. Since experience is so personal and context sensitive, we should really look beyond computers, and expand our scope of design to include elements of humans, settings, environments, timing and others to create quality experience.

holistic design

2005-02-18T00:13:00.000-08:00

Social setting is not static. Settings are changing, and people are learning and developing. The old way to do design that we go to the setting, study the practices and code those practices into systems doesn't work, because the introduction of the technology is going to change the practices themselves, and trigue new issues and ideas. We should do holistic design instead, which means design involving both technology and social setting, technology is only taken as a component of the holistic design. The design should include both design of social setting and design of technology to have it meet our needs. When we consider context, it should be considered as another element of the whole system, instead of being taken as some static thing and to make our system automatically detect and adpat to that. For experience design, since there is no preset requirements, it is particular important to do holistic design and we should know where it is best for computers to fit in, where it is better to change people.

The rhythm in the workplace

2005-02-17T22:54:00.000-08:00

Traditionally, it is believed that people have many different types of mental and pysical abilities. Good arrangement of them can help the development of these different abilities, wheras bad arragnement will damage these abilities. For example, in the school, students are encouraged to switch between mental centered activities and physical centered actitivites to ensure the health development, mentally as well as physically. It is the rhythm of school study with this play of contrasted activities. They reciprocate with each other. However, it seems most our current workplaces are designed just for working, not for relaxing. For the most of the time, employees don't know what to do if they feel tired…

Another category of activities is in terms of means and ends. : means oriented activities vs. ends oriented activities. For most of our work, it is ends oriented – we have goal and then plan, and what we do is to reach the ends according to the plan. These are planned actions according to Lucy Suchman. There is another kind of actions – we don’t have clear goals or plans at the beginning, instead we just act to respond to the situaitons. These are situated actions. While the planned actions are neccesary for management, they are close actions – we follow the plan and are closed to other options. Situated actions, on the other hand, are open actions, through which we find new meanings and ideas.

My idea is to design a system similar to ambient displays in our workplace especially software development workplaces (Software development is typically mental centered and planned action) for means oriented situated actions and let employees switch between planned actions and situated actions. I call this play of contrast as the rhythm in the workplace. But it is different from ambient display in that the ambient display uses part of our attention while we are working to increase our awareness of our environment, while this system will use our attention when we are resting to help us relax, and help to generate new ideas. This system should be fun, and have our employees personal information to get them more involved.

The design is situated and include both technical and social considerations to see how the technology can fit the particular social setting. So far, most of our system design is really just about how to design technology. In contrast with that, I believe we should design the whole system involving both technology and social settings…..

create rhythm in the workplace

2005-02-16T00:56:00.000-08:00

There are two types of people - who would like to do multiple things at the same time vs. who would like to focus on one thing at a time. For example, for the first type, they can handle searching web pages, reading, chatting with friends through MSN, and cooking at the same time, but for the second type, at any moment of time, they can just do one thing, or else they will mess things up. The first type means efficiency, and they need to plan things very well to combine things with different paces together. During the time of baking, they chat with their friends through instant messages; During the time waiting for friends' responses, they can search for webpage; During the time waiting for web pages to come up, they even be able to do some readings. We call the first type as multi-threaded, the second as single-threaded.

So for the first type, they seem to try their best to fill any moment they can spare, by doing this, they seem to take the best advantage of time; as for the second type, there is time for learning, time for thinking, time for relaxing and time for cooking. For most of the time, we are familiar with and encouraged to be the first type - that's our traditional image of being busy and people tend to appear busy. If you close your eyes and tell other people you are busy because you are thinking, I bet most people will laugh and think it is an excuse of being lazy.

It is believed in computer science, multi-threaded is obviously more efficient and advanced than single-threaded computers. But the problem is we are not computers, besides doing things people tell us to do, we also create ideas and things to do. To me, these two types mean different rhythms of life, and single-threaded has its special beauty for us to explore, and maybe have something to do with creation of new ideas which, although, I am not so sure at this moment yet. Anyway, it is fun to look into it...

People have many different types of mental and pysical abilities. Good arrangement of them can help the development of these different abilities, wheras bad arragnement will damage these abilities. You can not use one ability too much for too long a time, that will make us lose interest and concentration, and feel tired, and be less efficient. Once you feel tired, it will take extremely long time for you to recover. For example, you can not do reading the same thing for too long. You may want to concentrate on other different things for a while, which may totally have nothing to do with your reading. The more it distracts you from the first action, the better it is for you come back to focus on the first action again. Here it is a play of contrasts. Some play it well and have developed all abilities very well, and these abilities are reciprocate with each other; Some play it bad, and end up with negative effects. What principles can help us to play it well is unknown yet.

I still remember a manager said, "It is to play kid show with plates(employees), and my job is to keep them going round and round, and never stop ". I believe that is a typical thing for most of the work places. Employers like to see their employees busy with something, for example, gazing at the screen and typing on the keyboard. Few will feel good if they see some employees sitting there with their eyes closed, which will usually be taken as being lazy, and leave bad impression. For the most of the time, employees don't know what to do if they feel tired, because the work place is designed for working, not for relaxing. But we do need to relax one in a while. Furthermore, we can take this relaxing time as resources to be used, to turn them into some constructive things....

What these things are for the work place? I don't know yet....

reflection on pairs of words

2005-02-06T22:39:00.000-08:00

Content vs. form:
Why do we need to wrap our presents with pretty paper and colorful ribbon bows? This wrapping adds delicacy to the present, while the present might be purely functional. The wrapper makes it look fine, the color and shiny from the ribbon bow brings attraction and suprise. Now the present evokes feeling such as pleasure and supprise, and what that present is becomes not so important. Also to hide the present inside the wrapper adds a taste of mystery. That's what the wrapper can present to us. An example about how important the form is.

Another exmaple is a lot of people dress up according to different occasions, dress for the office, dress for the party, dress for dating, dress for traveling, and etc. Different styles of dressing give different feelings, formal -> trustable, casual -> relaxing....

As for restaurants, maybe we have cared less for the food, but more for the environment, the services and others....

Ends vs. means:
Just like driving from LA to SF, we can either go on 101, or 5. This is an example that we reach the same end with different means. If efficiency is more important and you would like to get there as soon as possible, then 5 is the right choice, although it is very boring. If you care about the process or the means, and would like to make the process more fun and meaningful, then definitely you should pick 101, because there are great scenes along it. Means can mean different things for the same people at different situations.

To play a game, some care more about the result than the process, some just purely enjoy the game itself. Ends and means can mean different things for different people.

Sometimes, ends are very vague, like to relax or to have fun, in which case, means is almost, everything...

Sometimes, we forget what is our true end. Colleagues or friends get together to have a lunch, or dinner. We are not sure whether our end is to fill our stomach, or to chat and enjoy the time with friends. In this case, the dinner, or the drink become an excuse to other ends.

For some people, life is about to set ends and plan means to reach those ends. For others, life is about to find things and ways to enjoy, and the end is a natural outcome from them. A well planned life is a closed life. We act according to the plan and close ourselves from other opportunities. Taking life as a means of enjoy, instead, we lead an open life, full of curiosity, eager to try new things, and ambitious to explore the new world....Organizations and big projects care more about ends, and need more plans, but to individual, where the creativity is from, means are more important...

Abstract vs. Concrete:
Some paintings are abstract, some are concrete. For the abstract paitings, you can directly feel their beauty, but maybe don't know why, and don't understand the meaning of it. For the concrete paintings, we can easily understand the content, but maybe they don't strike us very beautiful.

We tend to use abstract words to explain theories, and these words can make neat and beautiful statements, but they are usually too dense to read. We can hardly understand them until we see concrete examples. So we tend to start from concrete, then to abstract, and then apply back to concrete. Usually that's the structure of a book or paper.

Who is in control

2005-02-06T16:47:00.000-08:00

Recently, more and more people would like to connect computers with emotions, feelings, and experiences. Obviously, I am one of them. It sounds very exciting to create emotional computers(or affective computing?), or see how computers can repsond to our mood, or to see how computers can affect our experiences. However, to be honest, just as I started to try to further explore this direction, I found I placed myself in a kind of awkward situation. For example, on one hand, I want to have computers know our emotions, and can automatically react accordingly. On the other hand, do I really want a computer to know what I am feeling or thinking? A very scaring idea. Furthermore, if we want to enrich our experiences, do we have to use or refer to computers? There are already a lot of interesting things happening in our everyday life. If we want to enjoy life, just stay away from computers for a while, to enjoy a face to face converation, a pleasant lunch or dinner with friends, and to drive close to the nature....

While we try all the way to generate a variety of combinations of computers and feelings, or emotions, or arts, and etc, we have to think what combinations are promissing or what are ridiculous. Obviously, the computer is not every thing, and we need to make it to do the right thing. What is the right thing? Here I think, the words from my advisor set one kinds of criteria : whether it is the right thing or not, it is a matter about who is in control - the computer or the user.

Since forever, "automatically" is a word that is most widely used to describe computer systems, and especially, in the HCI field, it seems, the more intelligent, the more friendly the interaction is, although in such a way, we have to struggle with privacy issues (Almost every ubiquitous computing paper will touch privacy, yet would always just stop there and leave concerns and awareness). It is the time for us to rethink about how smart a computer should be. If computers can automatically do everything, even automatically detect your emotions and respond, then how can imagine, how lazy, or passive humans are? Really, don't let the computer take control over your life!

With this concern, who is in control, I rule out the idea of having computers know my feelings. That's the only part that is something "MY", something that struke from outside, and something I still haven't made sense of it, and something I'd like to appreciate and stay in control. How can computers can know that better than myself.

Also, feelings, or emotions are something vague, something complex, and something personal, and maybe you can never find words to describe them exactly. How can computers control that without words being able describe accurately?

Then how can we connect computers and human emotions, feelings and experiences? What special about computers? What kind of things that can not happen without computers?

Design for experiences

2005-01-18T01:13:00.000-08:00

It is taken for granted that computing systems are designed to implement some functions, to do some tedious and repetitive jobs with precision, and thus to save us time and accomplish tasks more efficiently and effectively. With this perspective, we focus on the content of the computing systems - the function, the jobs or "the what" that computers can do for us, and coorespondingly HCI is concerned to make these functions easy to access and use.

This point of view, of course bears some truth. Anyway, that's the strength of machines. However, to just concentrate on "the what" will limit our understanding of computers and ourselves, and probably lead to the departure of our true motivation. What is our true motivation? No matter how many ways we can state it, to say we want to promote the quality of life will never be wrong. What is quality of life is a philosophical question that is beyond my ability to discuss here, but at least I can safely claim that it is more than efficiency, effectiveness or "the what" - we have to take "the how" into consideration as well. The breakdown of the myth of paperless office testifies that. No matter how much information a computer can instore, how efficiently it can process, or how fast it can transfer, we still can't live without paper. Because what we concern is not just the information, but the way to interact with information. As far as interaction - "the how" - is concerned, paper provides very rich features such as portable, flippable, tearable and drawable, of which computers can hardly achieve, yet proved to be very important for us to attain, exchange and operate on information. So it is time step back, to rethink about our deep value of life, and hopefull to avoid the dilemmas such as whether technology made paper useless or caused an increase usage of paper, or whether technology has improved our quality of life or made it worse...

The inclusion of "the how" together with "the what" will lead us to a more broad view of designing - not just design to implement functions, but design for experiences. Once we move to this perspective, we are opened up to some new and interesting ideas about design. We can reach the same experience by different means. For example, to calm down, we can either listen to music, or look at a painting. To refresh, we can either go to the gym to work out, or dance with the music at home. To have some fun, we can either find some jokes, or watch some comedies. Here we take the experience and the feeling as more basic and root human needs, and we take those into focus rather than some concrete actions. At the same time, some slight change of media, environment or time can greatly change our experience of the same thing. With the same movie, dependent on whether you watch it in a movie theater or on DVD at home, your appreciation of it could be very different. With the same food, different containers, or dishes can change our appetite for it. With the same article, to read it on the computer or on paper could make a difference of your level of understanding.....

What's its implications for design? I am not clear yet, but let's use some imagination here. Now our requirement document will not be like ""this interface should list all the items in the database", instead, it would be like "this interface should give an overview of all the items with a glance"... Also we take computing systems as medium to exchange experiences of designers and users. In order to do that, we designers and users have to share some experiences. So designers go into users to do some ethnographic studies, and users join the designers team to see how much technology can do for them....

crazy about Experience

2005-01-12T23:44:00.000-08:00

It seems I am pretty crazy about experience:

1. What does the picture in MSN make the communication experience different?
2. What does the handwriting instead of computer generated font types in MSN make the communication experience different?
3.How is the experience different whether you have CDs or not in your car?
4.How is the experience different if you can communicate with people from other countries with their native languages?
5.How is the experience different when you use different wordings to express the same content?
6. How is the experience different if you travel to the same place with different weathers, different seasons, or different people?
7. How does wireless make our life experience different?
8. What does the orientation of your room make your living experience different?
9. What's the arrangement of chairs in a classroom make the class experience different?
................

101. What are the words that can describe experiences?
102. What are quality experiences?
103.What's different between feeling and experience?
104. How can design create quality experince?

the history of Ethnography

2005-01-10T01:49:00.000-08:00

read Bob Anderson's "Work, Ethnography and System Design"

Suchman's book "Plans and Situated Actions" made the social science, in particular ethnography a subject of much fascination, when another emerging trend was from the development of domain called CSCW, to which Suchman is an early contributor. Then CSCW became the paradigm arena for design-oriented ethnogrpahic work to be done. CSCW itself was the consequence of a number of radical changes within computers sciences - design sytems from for single user to for collocated or distributed collaborative work groups. To solve the paradox that huge investation in information and communication technology didn't result in the improvement of productivity. Social science was introduced to reorient the understanding of CSCW and other interactive systems, such as participatory design and socio-technical systems approaches.

To be able to fully understand how social science can actually contribute to design, Bob proposes that we need to apprecaite the heritage of social science, and the issues social scientists are facing. Here comes this paper, which is a description of one element in social science - ehtnography.

The history of Ethnography:
A. Inventing the Professional Stranger:
Bronislaw Malinowski invented it in 1915, until then ethnography and anthropology were bookish in extreme. It was Malinowski who invented the modern form of "fieldwork" as a social science investigative technique and ethnography as its analytic complement by living in the Trobriand Islands. The intimate familiarity became neccesary to integrate and correlate various types of data, which could be categorized into three: synoptic chart, detailed description of day to day life and stories, myths, .... The motivation for ethnography is to look behind the appearance, which means they should not just describe what thing are, but to colligate them with evidence, and set all these evidences in a frame, in which accidental forms are explicated in terms of universal needs. The forms are those of social life and the needs are those of social structure.

But ethnography and functionalism are not identical, and other theoretical frameworks can be invoked. What Malinowski solved was "credentialisation" problem. "fieldwork" becomes de rigeur.

American anthropology is different from British by its interdisciplinary outlook such as Psychology and Psychiatry, instead of Biology. American Athropologists instinctively compare what they found "over there" to what was left "at home". Gregory Bateson bridged American and British traditions.

European ethnographers tended to focus around institutional and hence "objective matters", Americans often oriented towards experiential and hence "subjective matters", which was refined into a whole paradim called "interpretative Anthropology".

In the late 1970's, the authority of Ethnographer's experience was undermined by "de-constructionism", with assertions about ethnography's "perspectivalism", "constructivism", "ahistoricalism " and the like.

The encounter with desconstructionism has made ethnographers unconsciously self-conscious about their "place on the scene".

The ethnography in University of Chicago used ethnography to turn a mirror on American society.Here comes the important point to note for ethnography, that is "they" are "us".

Another step to connect ethnography to system design is the rediscovery of culture as "communities of practice". Becomming a member of culture - moving from the peripher of the culture to its centre - involves a complex process of assimilation and learning. But the legitimate peripheral participation is one of the crucial elements constituting the communities of practice which make up a culture. This notion of communities of practice has been deployed by many ethnographers to counter the overly cognitivist interpretation of learning which was dominated current thinking. An alternative to this cognitive model is "distributed cognition", which became of a key notion for CSCW.

The final step is about "context", the "situated ", "local" and "occasional" appropriateness from "Ethnomethodology", another branch of sociology created b Garfinkel.

understand ethnography

2005-01-06T23:36:00.000-08:00

Ethnography-I heard this word long before I had any idea of what it exactly means. In my imagination, it was about to live in a strange and isolated island or village, with primitive life styles and some weird religeous practices. Simply put, it was some kind of adventure to me. I finally got the chance to go into it by taking the course called "Qualitative Research Methods". I think it is time for me to take it seriously, and see how this mythic word can have something to do with technologies.

Let's start with the called paper "Representations and Requirements: the values of ethnography in system design" by R.J.Anderson(The weirld thing is I couldn't find this guy by googling...). He firstly trys to distinguish enthonography from data colletion, as taken by most system designers. It does make information available for system designers, but it is different from data collection. To me, it seems data collection means you have ideas of what information you want. But for ethnographers, that is not neccesary. They are more open to probability. How are those ideas from, first of all! Anyway, the methodologies ethnographers apply to access that information is an important issue.

Obviousely, there seem some debates about how formal the representation of ethnographic should be to be used by system designers(That's one of the questions I want to ask since we have a homework to observe and write about waiting. I am wondering what kind of form it should be to make the representation about what we observe to be meaningful). Besides, according to the author, while the designers expects some prescriptive thing as requirements for the system, ethnographers seem staunchly refuse to be prescriptive but rather descriptive(don't know why). The author also mentioned "design sensibility", which means the design problems and the possible ways to approach it(not quite understand).

How did ethnography become so popular in the field of HCI? It was from the motiviation to facilitate requirement capture. Since for users' daily life, it is pretty much oriented towards the practical managemnet of organizational contingencies, the shared cultures, the hurly burly social relations in the workplace, the locally specific skills. All these dimensions of working knowledge, the formal methods of requirements capture, are not able to make visible. Here is where ethnography comes to complement.

But it seems that's a misconception of ethnography, because designers take ethnography as a way to collect data. Actually, ethnography is not data collection but reportage. So it not about recording or summery, but patterning obervation and their interrelationships.Using the author's words, the ethnographers' eyes are always interpretative(But if we can borrow some of its ideas to do data collection, why not?) Such as how to observe, and how to find the underlying orders or patterns. Furthermore, ethnography is analytic, not just about what life looks like.

Another point the author wants to make is that ethnography aims a slightly higher goal. Its goal is not just to tell what users are, but to be germane to new ideas and issues for the designer.

The authors traces some reasons from which those misconceptions are from. Simply put, the author wants to say, ethnography is not just to look, instead it is to motivationally look. He emphasizes some special kills are required to be ethnographers.

Then he emphasizes one of the important techniques is representation. He puts froward a concept called "synecdoche problem for cultural form"( That is an interesting concept. It inspired me to think about cells on our body. Undoutedly, cells are parts of our body, but paradoxically enough, we can grow out a new body from one cell. ) He stresses the analytic strategies based on the justapositioning of antinomies.

After the author explained what ethnography is, he goes ahead to examine issues to apply ethnography for technology design. It seems, there are two choices we can direct to examine ethnography for design, which is reportage genre and the play of possibility.

The author mentioned sometimes, ethnography tends to focus on social relationships, while technology vanishes to be replaced by the familiar nexus of social institutions, power, economic and social itnerest, and historical contingency. Then how can we remedy this outcome?

The author introduced a strategy called the adoption of a faux naivete (don't know why they like to use french sometimes, and don't explain at all). Anyway, I guess it means the other phrase "engineering strange" he uses( What a wierd word! )

A more intuitive way to explain this way is from Latour:

...every time you want to know what a non-human does, simply imagine what other humans or other non-humans would have to do, were this character not preesnt. This imaginary exactly sizes up the role, or function, of this little character..

Very straightforward and much easier to understand, right?

I like the author's comment against to take the design frame as that of design problem and its designed solutions. Then the author sketches several rationalizations of organizational life that run against just to be efficient and productive, which is the goal for most designs.

a little summery

2005-01-04T22:06:00.000-08:00

In the last quater, I took a course called "social analysis of computing". Activity theory for computing system design was emphasized in this course(To me, activity and interaction almost mean the same thing). When we talk about interactions, we usually refer to the interaction between users and systems, but to me, the interactions between designers and systems sounds more interesting.

Firstly, I'd like to question how "design" works. Usually we complain about the bad designs of different systems, saying that the designers don't know the users or don't know the environment where the system will be used. Is it true that to know more about the users is the only answer to improve the human computer interaction?Who are these designers? Are they software engineers? Are they usability experts? Are they graphic designers? Are they interaction designers? Or all of them (it seems to be a very natural answer in such a society with a high level of labor division)? Then how should them work together? What are required for an individual part of the whole design network? More importantly, according to actor network theory, the players in the design network should include nonhuman as well as human. That means to study design, we should be concerned about technologies, media, knowledge and skills, besides all different kinds of human designers and their interactions.

Then what exactly does design means? For some fields, design is too obvious an concept to explain, such as architecture design, graphic design, or car design. But if I say to plan a trip, to work out a market strategy, or to find a way to solve an everyday problem, you may be a little hesitant to take these activities as design. Furthermore, if I say I install a variety of softwares on my computer, and it becomes different from the original one and the others' , is that design? Maybe not. Here we should distinguish between design and development. Design has some purposes involved. We have certain goals in mind and design things to achieve them. According to this definition, we can certainly take the trip plan, market strategy or problem solution as designs, although they may not mean a physical object at the end. But we can only call installation of softwares as development. Because although we install different softwares to satisfy different purposes, but very possibly they are all independent, and we don't have a general goal about how to install and why. This process, as well as our adding furnitures or house appliances, if there is no general goal involved and these furnitures and appliances are irrelevant, their arrangement shouldn't be called design. Using Herbert A. Simon's words(he used the idea called artifact), the designers are concerned with how things ought to be to attain goals.

Herbert A. Simon is pretty much focused on engineering design or problem solving. There, the goals are relatively easy to define. However, when we enter the fields that are directly connected to end users, like buildings, HCI, or ubiquitous computing, the goals become complex and fragile to define, because humans are complex, flexible, diverse, developing and with emotions. When we focus on human computer interaction, it makes the design even harder. Not like architecture, it is static after it is built, HCI is dynamic, with time dimension involved.

Since HCI has its special quatlities, such as with end users and time dimension involved, then what special methods should be employed for HCI design? What knowledge or skills are required for HCI designers? How should these knowledge or skills be distributed among a variety of designers? What processes are appropriate for this variety of HCI designers to work together?I don't have answers to these questions right now, but I will be trying to answer them during the next quater...

on line and on paper

2004-12-28T23:39:00.000-08:00

This is about a book called "on line and on paper" by kathryn headerson. I totally agreed with her words that artistic rendering skills are not just for frill enrichment, instead they are connected to cognitive skills as basic as mathematics and verbal literacy and equally to all sorts of problem solving- in math and science as well as visual arts. she said "learning to draw improved my capacity to see things precisely, in fine-grained detail, but it also influenced the way I process and manipulate viusal information". Exactly, I believe learning to draw make us more sensitive to things around and can learn things others may not notice. At the same time, drawing has its own language to help people observe like structure, brush stroke, texture, palette, depth or flatness of space, narrative or abstract content. With enough sensitivity, observers can inpretate these language to reveal the contextual information of the artwork, like the historical, biographical and contextual information of the artists. With the same song, whether you know the background story of the song or not can really make it different for you to appreciate it. Here the artworks become index and the process of analyzing its formal characters. The skills may deteriorated without enough practice, but the cognitive skills will remain.

For some reason I don't know yet, I didn't her writing so much, but the above words say out what I am thinking.......

By recognition of visual skills as one of the basic cognitive skills, Kathryn questions why there is no corresponding emphasis in the public school curriculum. As for HCI design, both the users and the designers' visual skills are important. It seems visual knowledge got high status in the past, but today is at low status.

media and interaction

2004-12-05T13:01:00.000-08:00

These days, I have been hanging around on MIT's acg-aesthetics + computation group-website, and was very impressed and inspired with their works. Like always, I traced back to the person who drives all these fabulous works, and found the name called John Maeda. From John Maeda's simple web page, what impressed me the most is not his novel media arts anymore, but his thoughts, his concerns about education and his ways of teaching. What he teaches in his classes is not only knowledge, but also trainings of their sensitivity to the things around through various activities step by step. He combines art and computer seamlessly, and his progressive view of development and research provides me answers about how I should deal with implementation and research as an ICT(Interactive Collaborative Technology) student. Research and development don't and shouldn't conflict with each other.When I am able to develop, it should become my ways of doing research, and I don't need to consciously focus too much on it.

Art impresses me with its richness of ways to express. I realized to master art can empower me with a variety of novel ways to represent meanings. It directly penetrates the realistic phenomena, and deliever the very essential elements that can evoke our feelings. Repetition, variety, or rhythm are their language to communicate. With true art, we may forget what are the colors, or what are the forms, but we will never forget what are the feelings that are evoked.

From the principles of visual interface design, I learned a computer interface is interacting with both the data or systems underlying it and human input. I never expected that a simple mouse click can be interpreted as so many dimensions of information and parameters. At the same time, computer interface strikes me with its time dimension as well as space dimension. Probably this is its new challenge compared to archtecture.

The meaning of interaction is really rich, and the examples about how designs shape interacte are everywhere. The glass doors and glass windows at the office allow you to see but not hear. The glass counters in the cake store allow you to see but not touch. The paths across the grass land record how we interact with the nature. The location of windows talor the way you interact with the outside environment........They are all basic mundane things, but I learned a lot from these everyday experience.

Architecture and Human Computer Interaction

2004-11-29T19:55:00.000-08:00

How architects can combine art, design, enginneering and etc to build those awesome buildings has been fascinated to me for a long time. In contrast, so far, HCI still has a long way to go to have HCI architects combine all those factors. What can we learn from the field of architecture？

I would like to have an inside view of the architecture industry, and when I went to berkerly's architecture website, I found it has been subdivided into a lot of areas including community design, applied building sciences, design methods, history and theory, or the social basis of design. Compared to that, HCI is not so systematic.

Here are lines that attract my attention:
The real nature of the education offered by any institution resides in the interests and abilities of its faculty.

have a passion for cities, their form and the life that is supported by good city design
--- E T E R B O S S E L M A N N
(How is our life shaped by technologies? )

I ask my students to study streets and neighborhoods in order to better understand how conditions have come about, what has changed over time, what is likely to change in the future and why.
--- E T E R B O S S E L M A N N
(Human computer interaction has no history compared to architecture. Less users impact can be observed. NO physical media. Not the older the better, but the newer the better. )

What makes a building memorable? I believe it comes not from the glossy images in a magazine, but from the experiences of people who live, work, or pass through the interior spaces. The environmental forces of sun, wind and light have a strong influence on a buildings experiential aesthetic, and the consideration of these forces should be a purposeful part of the earliest stages of design. I guide students to learn about principles, tools, and values that will enhance their ability to create buildings that are both beautiful and efficient, responsive to climate and people, sensitive to the environment, and a delight to be in.
---G A I L B R A G E R

(I don't want to see other environmental stuff serves as resources of Ubiquitous computing，ubiquitous computing should server the environmental world. Instead of asking what kind of ubiquitous computing I should build, we should look around, find problems in the environment, and see what kind problems should be solved by ubiquitous computing systems. Thus, ubiquitous community should go outside, to work with architects, with schools, with companies and with urban plannings, to make the ubiquitous computing as part of the whole design. The focus is not the computer, but the environment. )

HCI's strength is dynamic, connectivity, flexible....

I believe it is true for a lot of issues, such as the nature of a building, the nature of a system, the nature of business, and etc all reside in the interests and abilities of persons involved, so to design something, the first thing to do, is to design people, or to cultivate people.

In a multidisciplinary department, the background of faculty is varied collectively. How to make them being combined in a more meaningful way is a question. Just as stated from the Gestalt psychology, the composition has new meaning from its parts, what's the way to combine to find this new meanings.

There is systematic way to educate architects, where is way to educate HCI architect? HCI from the start, very much focuses on the utility. No systematic education is there. One problem is HCI is too inclusive, maybe that makes it hard to establish systematic education.

Our commitment to excellence in design is strengthened by our recognition that the critical and creative process of design is inseparable from history, social purpose, environmental setting, and building process. For architecture students, they need to visit and study a hugh number of architecture works, to learn to accurately conceive and describe them, and then learn the process to bring the building into space. To me, to cultivate their sensitivity, and to lead them through historical and cultural journey.

The cognitive processes designers use when they explore, generate and evaluate possible ways to meet the goals these objects and environments ought to accomplish. Where is the cognitive process? Where can I access it?

"creating a light so bright that the machine and the mud and the world and the light itself became invisible, and only feeling was left. Then we filled this space of only-feeling with people milling about, intensely aware of the invisible light and mud and pulsing mechanical bodies, the swelling and sucking envelopes of heat, the gently drifting atmospheres, and pressures, and humidities". - from Anderson Anderson: Architecture and Construction, Princeton Architectural Press, 2001

Seems architecture, the functionality is not so much a big issue-basically it is something to accomodate people，but for HCI, the functionalities are so diverse.There is no physical shape, it is more flexible. there is less common base to compare different hcis, except for web design, or for certain areas of applications. Maybe we should categorize different interactions?

Artificial vs. Natural Science - reading Herbert A. Simon's "The Sciences of the Artificial"

2004-11-28T11:36:00.001-08:00

"The Sciences of the Artificial " is an amazing book. The author Simon could combine such a varitey of topics ranging from economics, organization, engineering design and Artificial intelligence into one theme called "Artificial". Of course, it must be much more challenging to establish artificial science than Natural Science, because it is man made, and it is changing for ever. Not like natual science, you progress to further understanding of same phenomena, the Artificial, with human involved, is about generating, which makes it impossible to have a fixed or stable set of principles.

My blog has been setup

2004-11-28T10:56:00.000-08:00

Finally I decided to try out blog. The most attractive thing for blog over personal webpage is that I don't need to maintain it and can just focus on the content. Plus, the web design seems very professional. To be honest, I heard about blog long time ago, but just didn't get it why people would spend a whole bunch of time to write it, but now I just love it. How great it is to have my voice heard with such a simple way! And it doesn't cost time at all. I just feel like I am talking to someone, and free to write anything and with any format, which is toally different from writing a paper or essay for a class. Just imagine, how many thoughts you will come across everyday. How fun it is you can write them down and let people know! Now, internet is not only for you to receive and check out information, but also check in information, and you have control of what the information is and how to publish it. That means you are the owner of blog in stead of a participant as in BBS or Forums.

Ok, let me start with my journey of blog, and this blog will be mainly focus on my book reading. It will record what I read and what I think.....