Matt Jones scenarios

Designer Matt Jones has a set of stories he's writing for the BBC about artifacts from 2013. They're very stimulating.

INCITE

I've been looking at the work of INCITE, the Incubator for Critical Inquity into Technology and Ethnography (what a great name!) at the University of Surrey. They've got a number of interesting projects, most notably one titled Urban Mobilities: Locating Consumption of Ubiquitous Content, which looks at "the relationship between mobility and experiences of place, with particular reference to the use of digital content."

They've also done projects on design and ethnography, and "mobile devices and the cultural worlds of young people" (a popular subject these days, as this bibliography attests).

[via icon's blog

More Convenience, Less Fragmentation

My second interview was with Chuck, a man in his late 40s. As someone who “works on vacation,” his interview focused squarely on his work. He is the founder of a strategic advisory firm that consults to high growth information technology companies. Chuck had been a CIO of a large company where he rarely dealt with the customer side. He was responsible for internal management issues. Now he meets with prospects or customers and his work is largely controlled by their schedules. He says that the contrast and need for technology that moves with him is startling: “It really is a convenience issue.” Work “invades all parts of your life and the locales that you’re in.” Continuous connectivity for Chuck has led to a “resegmentation of time,” and the venues are “just the places” where he works.

Two insights emerged from this interview. First, Chuck likes technology that allows him to work as if he were sitting at his personal desktop. Convenience is a major element in his daily life. His ideal is to have everything that one has at home, behind your own firewall, wherever you go. "At home" he says, "you have no security issues, symbolically, not literally.” “Using Wifi gives you only about one-half of this functionality that you’re used to such as security issues.” Away from his personal desktop and access to the data on the desktop, he feels less productive. Second, he notices that social cues or metaphors are mismatched both in his communications over email and the reason for why some technology, such as knowledge management software, is not as effective.

Convenience

Coordinating Family Activities with Client Appointments
Chuck bought the Treo, which is a phone/mobile email/palm device to keep track of the calendaring and coordination of his family’s activities. This is useful because whenever he needs to make an appointment with a client, all he has to do is refer to this calendar to see if his family has already scheduled an activity. He uses an electronic calendar, an exchange server, to coordinate his family’s schedule. He lives with his wife and three children – ages 8, 13, and 15. The house includes a full-time child care person who is not on the exchange server. He attempted to get his parents to use the exchange server but he hasn’t been too successful yet; they live in Chicago.

Being Wired and Productive During Downtime at the Airport
On the road and in the airport, Chuck prefers wired access. He no longer attempts to use the wireless service because it takes too much time to get connected and because these services typically charge fees for longer-term access. He also doesn’t know if he’ll return to that airport on a regular basis: “There isn’t this sign-up rigmarole,” and the “intercarrier relationship isn’t functional.” Instead, he’ll use the Internet service connections for $15 or if he’s at the airport for longer periods, he’ll download email messages and upload later using wired access. Hence, finding an outlet is more important than finding a connection. He may find himself sitting at the gate using the Treo for the mobile mail function. So, he’s seeing “some substitution,” in lieu of his laptop and wired access. With the Treo, he feels he works continuously and immediately sees if he has email to which he must respond. He also works on the Treo in the cab to and from the airport. One caveat is that continuous connectivity produces more anxiety for Chuck because he always checks for urgent email messages. It is rare, he notes, that anything is really that urgent.

Matching Time and Place with Space
When Chuck is “on the road,” his time is dictated by his clients’ schedules. He may go to a breakfast meeting, have downtime until 3pm, and attend a cocktail or dinner event. Sometimes he has two to three hour meetings over a meal with clients. But between meetings he has to ask himself, “Am I killing time or am I having a meal with someone.” Whether he’s “killing time,” or seeking out a venue for a client, he goes to switchboard.com. He uses Starbucks sometimes for meeting clients, while traveling, because there’s some predictability about the product. "The Internet is big for finding places." Regis, he notes, is good if a space is needed and a client’s space is not available.

Work: Office Space
He subleased an office space because his children are home for the summer. He is a “one man company.” While the office is equipped with a LAN line, he is finding that it’s easier to use his cell because giving out two numbers, one for the office and one for his cell, would be disruptive for the client relationship when he moves from the subleased office. He is wondering more and more if he will substitute the cell phone for the wired line. He has also ordered IPTelephony, a find me follow me service. IPTelephony’s service is “disengaged from the geography.” His messages are automatically forwarded to him wherever he travels with IPTelephony. If he forgets to tell his current forwarding service where he is located, he is unable to access his phone messages.

Integrating Fragmentation
This is the heart of the convenience issue. The reason for why Chuck purchased the Treo was because of the “disconnect,” or “fragmentation of the databases which are essentially tied to different technologies.” His former Palm and desktop were integrated, but his cell was not integrated with either the Palm or desktop. Without devices that integrate the fragmentation, he states that his life gets compartmentalized between the differing channels. The “switching costs [to be productive] are high” and it is “a burden.” The IPTelephony allowed him to integrate the fragmentation of forwarding calls.

He was an early adaptor of Next Step. As the CIO of a large corporation, he had access to this type of software 12 years ago. Next Step had ISP driven services and it was integrated with the desktop. “When you sign onto your own computer all your documents are there and filed the way you filed them, and all your applications are set up, . . all those things that you spent time personalizing are there. So if you have a find me follow me desktop, you’re inextricably linked to all the stuff that’s stored on your hard disk and stuff on the central server. You can configure stuff on your hard disk,” or leave it on the server. So when you sign off you always get that same desktop and the same view of the world.

Chuck is “against WiFi and the Starbucks set-up.” He prefers Peet’s [coffee] to Starbucks so he isn’t inclined to sign up with Starbucks. But he also doesn’t want “18 different ISPs” because he thinks this is “too hard to manage.”

Social Cues and Norms and Virtual vs. Physical Spaces

Chuck uses email rather than phone calls because if forces him to think about what he is saying. But he thinks that others, “particularly younger guys,” write email that is too casual because there are no social cues. He categorized email message into three: casual, formal, and composed.

-Casual email expresses personality and it’s not written to “save me time.”
-Formal email can be “stilted but it allows you to get to the bottom line,” and it has attachments or templates.
-Composed email has been rewritten several times and reformatted into paragraphs.

-IM is “the worse” because little thought goes into what is being said.

In contrast to email, the physical environment tells Chuck how formal his pitch will be for a client. He categorized these spaces into three formats: informal, somewhat structured, and structured. In cafes, the meeting is less formal. In restaurants he may only bring his Treo and not his cell because he’ll turn it off. In a conference room he may do a paper pitch. And a structured pitch requires him to bring his laptop, projector, and software to produce mind-maps. In the email environment he thinks these cues don’t exist.

Chuck thinks that people operate in inappropriate ways because they don’t know where they are. He views the hard drive as only existing in the personal space. Each of the workspaces--personal, workgroup, and corporate--has different social metaphors. So cues are needed to say where one is functioning. Chuck believes all of these things are interrelated. For example, knowledge management has failed because the designers of these applications did not integrate the social space of knowledge, which is mostly personal and workgroup related. A combination of the social metaphors and the standards and the technology integration all need to relate to one another in a reasonable manner.

First International Moblogging Conference

Last weekend I attended 1IMC, the first international moblogging conference, organized by Adam Greenfield and sponsored by Sony and i-mode. I spent a day in a dark basement nightclub with about a hundred others hearing presentations mostly on photo blogging sites, applications, and services.

The full content of the talks can be found at Wireless Watch Japan, so I won't recap the talks. Probably most interesting in relation to this research was the use of WiFi at the event and the moblogging of the event itself. The network set up by the organizers was swamped immediately, even though only Macs were able to access it, causing trouble for the presenters relying on web access. At least judging from those sitting around me, attendees were keeping up with the live moblogging of the conference, uploading pictures from their camera phones, digital cameras, and PCs, contributing to an unofficial conference wiki, and participating in an IRC channel commenting on the event. I was happy to have my FOMA camera phone that I borrowed from my lab, and contributed to this conference moblog set up by Daiji Hirata. This was definitely the most live blogged event I have ever attended.

More conference blogging can be found at Pete's Eats, Margin Walker, Tokyo Tidbits, moblogging.org, and RowBoat among many other sites. Justin Hall has an article in The Feature.

Wi-Fi vs 3G

I am posting this for Tim Oren, IFTF affiliate and a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. Relates to the earlier entry on a continual battle btw wi-fi and 3G.

See Tim's non-interactive blog at

http://www.pacificavc.com/blog
Well, if I read this article and the context was North America, I'd say it was just plain wrong. In the NA context, while I'm skeptical of 'standalone' branded hotspot subscription models, it does seem to me that an add-on model to ISP and mobile subscriptions may be viable. I like models like Cometa, so long as they are ruthless in keeping their expenses and APPU expectations low. The analyst is correct in diagnosing back-haul expenses as the most problematic issue - and they are likely a good deal higher in Europe than here. But he's just plain wrong - here, in Europe, anywhere - in saying "Bluetooth and WLAN are complementary technologies that rarely compete". They certainly do, at least for silicon space and BOM costs on portable devices, and I'm already aware of US targeted products that have dropped (or never considered) Bluetooth in favor of WiFi. (See my recent blog post for some relevant details: http://www.pacificavc.com/blog/2003/06/20.html#a267)

Now things may be different in Europe. It has always been more skewed to mobile phones than laptops, and the market seems to be willing to pay (for instance) 10 cents to a dollar equivalent for an SMS text message rather than use IM for free. You'll note that the Euro-centric analysis is all in terms of mobiles as a driving market force, leading toward Bluetooth as the conclusion. I've also heard lately that WiFi acceptance in Japan lags here, but I haven't seen it interpreted as a Bluetooth win.

Cell phone repairs and ubicomp

This is a bit off-topic, but I've recently gotten interested in the subject of cell phone repairs, and the effect that mobile, handheld gadget service might have the evolution of smart mobs and ubiquitous computing.

I recently had a string of bad experiences getting my phone fixed, and it made me realize two things: 1) the speed with which I've come to be dependent not just on cell phones, but on the particular constellation of features and form factors that define my phone (versus the bricks that they give out as loaners), and 2) the fact that as technologies like cell phones, PDAs, etc. become more deeply integrated into our lives, bad repair service is going to become increasingly intolerable.

I was interested enough in the subject to ask a couple people I know in Korea and Japan about repair policies there, and got a couple interesting responses (here's the report from Korea, and here's the report from Japan). Clearly the U.S. is way behind on this.

More updates as I gather information from other parts of the world.

Ring Ring: Can You See Me Now?

I conducted my first interview with a 25-year-old male law/PhD student, “M.” He is currently in a joint JD/PhD program at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB).

There were a few captivating aspects of this interview.
* M uses connectivity and space to create social space that is “fun.”
* A glimpse into what one cafe offers for the socially inclined.
* The PDA: Out of sync?
* M’s sense of being “bounded by battery life” whenever he visits wireless cafes.
* Temporal space and transportation.

His enthusiasm was contagious.

Ring ring: Can You See Me Now?
M uses his cell phone, which has infrared and Bluetooth, to take pictures of friends and scenery and then uses these pictures for the caller ID function. He also changes the background of his phone using the pictures he’s taken. “I take pictures of all my friends and those photos turn out to be the caller ID. So in a sense that’s wireless.” M’s friends and family don’t get the usual caller ID number. Instead, the receiver gets a fun picture of him. For example, M likes to use pictures of his parents and friends on his cell phone rather than phone numbers. “This is fun,” M says with a smile. “When my boyfriend calls I get to see his picture and not just his phone number. Or if my parents call, their picture pops up on my screen. When my friend C called, he grew up on a phone in Minnesota, so he took a picture with a cow, sent it to me, and that’s his caller ID. . .. I receive a picture by email on my computer, and then I beam them to my phone.” M says this makes him smile in the middle of the day because the “pics” he gets and uses are usually funny ones.

He also uses his cell phone as a “gaming function.” He convinced some friends to get the same cell phone because he liked his so much; “It was adorable.” Using Bluetooth, they now share games on their phones. “This is fun,” he said.

Café Zeb
One café that M frequents 2-3x a week is Café Zeb. One side of the café has good food fare. Business students often come to Café Zeb because the food at the business school is apparently less enticing. On the right side of the café are tables, chairs, and a couch. Located on the 2nd floor of the law school, Café Zeb is M’s social hub at UCB. UCB is the “locust” of his “professional life.” Using his laptop and the wireless service, he checks email and the Internet for news and hopes to run into friends and people he knows by “pretending to study.” He reveals that out of two hours in the café, he more realistically studies for about 15 minutes. His primary interest is to socialize and to catch-up with his friends. One drawback of the café is that “there aren’t too many outlets” for his laptop. Students work, eat, study, hold study groups, and swap files by wirelessly emailing one another. Daily newspapers are provided on a stand, although some students like M get their news through the wireless service. Professors and teaching assistants may also hold office hours in the cafe.

Out of Sync?
M notes that the PDA for him has become less useful. When he was living with his parents after college, he would download daily news from websites like CNN and the NY Times onto his PDA and then share the news with his folks at supper. “This was kind of fun. But now that I have wireless access I can get news instantly.” In another instance, M took his PDA to class for note taking because his laptop was cumbersome to carry; students typically bring their laptop for note taking. While synchronizing the class notes with his laptop one day, a full day of class notes was completely lost. After this incident, he decided that using the PDA and losing the information was too risky. M now prefers to use his laptop. The laptop has the original program so he’s no longer interested in trying to synchronize the PDA and potentially losing information. The PDA has become a mere tool for addresses and calendaring.

Bounded by Battery Life
While wireless access is the reason for why M visits cafes, he is also “bounded by battery life.” M tells me that he takes his backpack, an AC adaptor, two batteries--one that has “extra capacity and runs about 3-1/2 to 4 hours,” books, and whatever else he needs for studying. So in a sense, he is always looking for an outlet in cafes. He has to be aware of things like battery life and who is sitting at a table that has an outlet nearby. In a neighborhood café called Jumping Java, M has a favorite table that is located in the middle of the café. This table is also a favorite of a number of patrons and it is almost always taken; it has an outlet and it’s near a window with natural lighting. In other words, M keeps an eye on the table and actively pursues moving to the table whenever the patron leaves to avert using his laptop battery or running out of battery time.

When I asked M how enabled technology would be more useful to him, he replied:
"I would like to see cards that we could carry around which would have our hard drives on them. Then we could plug them in to terminals everywhere, anywhere. Also it would be nice to see engineers work on batteries that could regenerate or charge themselves, without ever having to be plugged in (or, ideally, small <8ounce batteries with 15-20 hour life spans at least, for long flights and airports)."

Transportation and Temporal Space
While reflecting on our interview, M realized that he uses his cell phone to keep in touch with friends and family when he is riding on public transportation or taking the train. Because he doesn’t have a car, and has “dead time” in these transition spaces, he uses this time as social space. This is a useful he notes, because when he gets home after school, for example, he can make dinner, eat, and get back to work.

WLAN--The Next Dot-Com Bust?

some interesting input for our discussions and scenarios concerning WLAN in Europe -
Regine

Source: http://www.telecom.paper.nl/index.asp?t=a&i=30499&n=500

Public WLAN hotspots will be the next dot-com crash

09:12
Friday June 20, 2003, Telecom.paper

A new brief by Forrester Research forecasts that there will be 286 million Bluetooth-enabled phones, laptops, and PDAs in Europe in 2008 compared with 53 million WLAN devices -- mostly laptops. But Bluetooth and WLAN are complementary technologies that rarely compete. Significantly, and contrary to today's vendor and operator noise, public WLAN hotspot business cases will largely fail -- as they’ll only serve a paltry 7.7 million users in 2008.

"With all the hype today about the rollout of WLAN public hotspots, it's as if the dot-com boom and bust never happened," said Forrester Senior Analyst Lars Godell. "We believe that much of the money being poured into public WLAN today to enable access -- from places as diverse as bars, marinas, hotels, and airports, as well as train, bus, and metro stations -- is being wasted. Simply, basic constraints on the number of devices in use and users' willingness to pay a significant amount for Internet access on the go will limit public WLAN users to numbers well short of planned networks' carrying capacity. Additionally, the sky-high costs of providing Internet backhaul from hotspots will kill many hotspot business cases."

Embodied Information

On information becoming embodied into simple physical objects such as name badges--will this be an ice breaker, a filter, a game? Probably all of the above.

You May See a Soul Mate Across a Crowded Room

May 22, 2003
By BOB TEDESCHI

Sizing up fellow travelers at an industry or professional
conference is always tricky business. Do you care to chat
with the guy in the brown velour jacket? And what could you
possibly have in common with that woman
with all the facial piercings?

(Link to the full article.)

HP Websign project

This is an older article, but I just ran across it: Amy Cowen, "Through the handheld looking glass: Under the 'websign' model, buildings, objects, and locations are transparently linked to virtual resources," mpulse (2001). It describes an HP project involving planting digital information physical places, using "websigns" (a nice play on "web sites"):

Imagine walking down "main" street in your hometown and seeing a set of clickable "signs" pop up over the various buildings. Each "sign" allows you to link, on the spot, to more information about the building, to a related service, or even to a private message left for you by someone else who has recently visited that same location. This vision of an information-rich computing model in which physical reality is interwoven with virtual resources to provide location-based services for nomadic users is one Salil Pradhan, a researcher in HP Labs, is helping to make a reality.

Update: Jokko writes,

I had the opportunity to work with HP Cooltown labs in a project two years ago. It involved designing appliances and embedded systems that supported social interaction in a co-operative space in downtown Helsinki. For more information please see the project web-site.

Beyond Wi-Fi

Sent by Marina. Follow this link to Wired Magazine's look at what's Beyond Wi-Fi: ultrawideband, mesh networks, software defined radio, wireless personal area networks, and adaptive radio.

Wi-Fi Technology Overview

Sent by Tim Oren, an affiliate at IFTF. Take this link to John Patrick's blog to see a good overview of Wi-Fi technology, standards, etc.

http://patrickweb.com/weblog/categories/wifi/wifi_update_8.html

Staying connected outside hotspots

Yesterday I conducted my first Place and Space interview. Initially I tried to arrange the interview at one of the hotspots I assumed the interviewee frequented. He replied to my request that since acquiring a bluetooth enabled GPRS phone (Ericsson T68) he doesn't rely anymore on hotspots to access the Internet.

I was impressed with how he had managed to set-up his lap-top (Apple PowerBook) to adapt to network availability. When he opens his lap-top, it checks which type of network is available. First it polls for ethernet, if that fails it checks for wi-fi and if that fails the lap-top opens a GPRS connection to the Internet using the phone as a modem. The lap-top and phone are paired Bluetooth devices. The lap-top recognizes the phone as a modem and is able to send commands to it and receive data from it. Accessing the Internet is seamelss for the user; regardless of which network is available all the user has to do is open his lap-top.

For some shuttling between a 11MB connection and a 40kb one might not be worth the while, however, if all you use the Internet for is to IM, e-mail or fix programming bugs (as in the case of the informant) then its the perfect solution.

Groovespace

Groove's continued focus on collaboration activities and its open architecture is generating some interesting fringe discussions of mobile work, inside and outside of organizations. Note that M$ chose today to add SharePoint to its Office suite.

InfoWorld  //  Test Center
REVIEW
Uniting under Groove
Groove 2.5 ties shared spaces into the mainstream
By  Jon  Udell
February 14, 2003  
http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/02/14/07groove_1.html?s=tc

Groove founder Ray Ozzie and his teams have always pretended to build application software. But what they have actually delivered are the operating systems of the future ? years ahead of schedule.

The XML business Web is only now achieving the architecture that Lotus Notes laid down 15 years ago: message-oriented exchange of semistructured documents. As today's operating systems catch up with that paradigm, Ozzie is tackling the next set of challenges in Groove: drop-dead simple, secure collaboration, presence management, coordination of user and device identities, and ad-hoc group formation. ...

That's the ticket! Until now, you had to step out of the mainstream to take advantage of Groove's advanced collaboration technology.

Finally, we can have our cake and eat it too.

Stop me before I become a Wi-Fi evangelist

Paul Boutin has a nice piece in Slate about the new Centrino, and the rise of Wi-Fi. Partly to see what all the fuss was about, partly to do a little technological ethnography myself, and partly because I sometimes just need to geek out, a couple weeks ago I set up a base station in my office, and bought a card for my laptop. Since my office looks out over a couple picnic tables, this means that I can go outside and still be online-- an appealing prospect here in California. Last week, I got a new PDA, and chose it largely on the basis of it having WiFi capability. (It also plays MP3s.) So what's my experience?

The short answer is that I love it, and am already frustrated by its limitations.

First of all, WiFi feels like a clunky prototype of the future. Not the technology itself, but rather the practices it enables. Being able to access the Web, or your e-mail, on the road will change social practices as much as cell phones have. The most important thing is that it'll enable all manner of real-time, place-specific forms of information retrieval and creation: we're already starting to see this with moblogging, but it's got huge implications for travel (what's that plant? what's that painting?), shopping, emergency services, etc.. WiFi offers a tiny sense of what ubiquity is going to feel like, and it's going to be cool. (Another way of putting it is that WiFi will create a level of familiarity with wireless Internet access that will raise the demand for mobile services and content.)

It's also going to drive Internet access off the desktop, and onto other devices, like my PDA. This in turn will increase the pressure on the WIMP interface, and encourage people to develop new kinds of interfaces that you can access while walking down the street, or operate on the margins of your awareness.

The fact that Wifi is available only in highly localized areas-- there's a reason they call it "hot spots"-- is rapidly becoming a real irritation. Why can't I get online at [insert random location], I grouse, even when I've never EVER needed to check my e-mail, much less surf the Web, at that location. It also makes me appreciate those places that do have WiFi access even more.

Then there's the problem that even if you have the technology, access isn't particularly easy to set up: everyone has proprietary systems that require different setups, passwords, accounts, etc.. Thus Starbucks teams up with T-Mobile to offer WiFi in its cafes, Wayport partners with a different set of cafes, etc.. Clearly the idea at present is to use hotspot access to build loyalty to particular franchises or places: once you've got a T-Mobile account, you're less likely to stray to Le Boulanger. A sensible idea from the providers' point of view, but a terrible one from the users': even a very big network is still restrictive, and it dims the appeal of WiFi to have to stay in particular places to use it.

If the technology is really going to take off, we need a different access model: one in which, say, services allow for roaming onto each others' networks, with some additional charge (like getting money from another banks' ATM machine). Better yet would be for stores to treat WiFi like the bathroom or overhead lights: something that you just provide for customers' convenience, with the understanding that customers will buy something for the privilege of use.