Recently heard some group feedback on our HCI textbook. Nearly all said that they did NOT want any CSCW. I was appalled as considering any sort of user interaction without its surrounding social and organisational settings seems as fundamentally misbegotten as considering a system without its users.
Has the usability world gone mad or is it just that our conception of HCI has become too narrow?
Last night we watched Jurassic Park 3 and today found you can have a little dinosaur all of your own!
Sony have robot dogs, Phillips robot cats (albeit stuck sitting in one place) but Ugobe have little robot dinosaurs called Pleo. In the videos they do move like little baby creatures and the lady in the shopping mall coos over one as she strokes it.
Central to Pleo seems to be:
embodiment – they feel through 40 sensors and move in their environmentThis seems to pay off in people’s reactions, both on Pleo’s own videos (well they would!), but also in owner’s plogs (sic) … one owner says:
“she acts just like a cat concerning keyboards.. just crawl on the darn thing while I’m typing! I know Penny,. you’re so cute it doesn’t matter what you do. But you should have a little sensor strip in your butt to spank when you’re bad1 or to pat gently to urge you to go explore. Go to sleep my little love” ArcticLotus
Pleos making friends :-/
For researchers there is an open architecture so it should be possible to play oops experiment with them 🙂 The API doesn’t seem to be published yet, so wait until you get your cheque books out!
I just wanted to print a file, now it is an hour and a half later and I still have nothing … this is where all our time goes gently coaxing our computers in the hope they may do what we ask.
Such a simple thing to want to do … and so much pain on the process, and so many simple things that application designers could do it make it better.
On the forum of our MRes course at Lancaster one of the students posted a link to Middle Ages Tech Support on YouTube. It shows Ansgarr a Mediaeval monk struggling with his first book.
I first saw this video when I was giving a talk at University of Peloponnese in Tripolis. Georgios1 showed the video before I started, just because he thought it was fun. I was talking a little bit about physicality and the video brought up some really interesting issues relating to this and usability. Although it is a comic video we can unpack it and ask which of the problems that Ansgarr has as he changes technology from scroll to book would actually happen and which are more our own anachronistic view of the past.
Nad did a brilliant guest lecture for our undergraduate HCI class at Lancaster on Monday. His slides and blog about the lecture are at Virtual Chaos. He touched on issues of democracy vs. authority of information, dynamic content vs. accessibility and of course increasing issues of privacy on social networking sites. He also had awesome slides to using loads of Flickr photos under creative commons … community content in action not just words! Of course also touched on Web3.0 and future convergence between emergent community phenomena and structured Semantic Web technologies.
Last Tuesday morning I had the pleasure of entertaining a group of attendees to the Matterealities workshop @ lancaster. Hans and I had organised a series of demos in the dept. during the morning (physiological gaming, Firefly (intelligent fairylights), VoodooIO, something to do with keyboards) … but as computer scientists are nocturnal the demos did not start until 10am, and so I got to talk with them for around an hour beforehand :-/
The people there included someone who studied people coding about DNA, someone interested in text, anthropologosts, artists and an ex-AI man. We talked about embodied computation1, the human body as part of computation, the physical nature of code, the role of the social and physical environment in computation … and briefly over lunch I even strayed onto the modeling of regret … but actually a little off topic.
physicality – Played a little with sticks and stones while talking about properties of physical objects: locality of effect, simplicity of state, proportionality and continuity of effect2.
physical interaction – Also talked about the DEPtH project and previous work with Masitah on natural interaction. Based on the piccie I may have acted out driving when talking about natural inverse actions
ubiquity of computation – I asked the question I often do “How many computers do you have in your house” … one person admitted to over 10 … and she meant real computers3. However, as soon as you count the computer in the TV and HiFi, the washing machine and microwave, central heating and sewing machine the count gets bigger and bigger. Then there is the number you carry with you: mobile phone, camera, USB memory stick, car keys (security codes), chips on credit cards.
However at the Firefly demo later in the morning they got to see what may be the greatest concentration of computers in the UK … and all on a Christmas Tree. Behind each tiny light (over 1000 of them) is a tiny computer, each as powerful as the first PC I owned allowing them to act together as a single three dimensional display.
embodiment of computation – Real computation always happens in the physical world: electrons zipping across circuit boards and transistors routing signals in silicon. For computation to happen the code (the instruction of what needs to happen) and the data (what it needs to happen with and to) need to be physically together.
The Turing Machine, Alan Turing’s thought experiment, is a lovely example of this. Traditionally the tape in the Turing machine is thought of as being dragged across a read-write head on the little machine itself.
However … if you were really to build one … the tape would get harder and harder to move as you used longer and longer tapes. In fact it makes much more sense to think of the little machine as moving over the tape … the Turing machine is really a touring machine (ouch!). Whichever way it goes, the machine that knows what to do and the tape that it must do it to are brought physically together4.
This is also of crucial importance in real computers and one of the major limits on fast computers is the length of the copper tracks on circuit boards – the data must come to the processor, and the longer the track the longer it takes … 10 cm of PCB is a long distance for an electron in a hurry.
brain as a computer – We talked about the way each age reinvents humanity in terms of its own technology: Pygmalion in stone, clockwork figures, pneumatic theories of the nervous system, steam robots, electricity in Shelley’s Frankenstein and now seeing all life through the lens of computation.
This withstanding … I did sort of mention the weird fact (or is it a factoid) that the human brain has similar memory capacity to the web5 … this is always a good point to start discussion 😉
While on the topic I did just sort of mention the socio-organisational Church-Turing hyphothesis … but that is another story
more … I recall counting the number of pairs of people and the number of seat orderings to see quadratic (n squared) and exponential effects, the importance of interpretation, why computers are more than and less than numbers, the Java Virtual Machine, and more, more, more, … it was very full hour
Some of my research is in an area that is called ‘personal information management’ or PIM. PIM is about all the bits of information people store electronically: files on the computer desktop, web bookmark, calendars and address books and increasingly photos, movies and more.
However, physical information management can be just as fascinating … and a lot more creative.
Last week’s HCI2007 conference and the Physicality workshop now all finished (except sorting out the the final finances for HCI … but I’ll forget that for now!)
Being part of the organisation of things you always see so many things that are not as planned (like going wrong), but for the delegates it all seems a well-oiled machine. In this as in many other domains, the mark of a rubust system is not whether or not it fails, but how it copes with failure. This is the heart of my principles for appropriate intelligence when designing ‘intelligent’ user interfaces and also ‘fail fast programming’1 when designing and debugging critical computer systems.
Great to see so many old friends … and meet new people … and after able to show Nad2 the glories of the Lake District.
Fiona just pointed me to Visuwords a lovely visualisation of word association using WordNet data. The image below is of the word ‘human’ and you can see two clusters one corresponding to the noun human and one to the adjective meaning humane/caring
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Visuwords is Flash front-end and PHP backend. It appears to use some variant of spring and ball visualisation. You can download the source … so could use it as the basis of visualisation for other kinds of data such as web sites.
Last week I was stuck a night in Frankfurt due to the high winds. Soon after I settled into the 17th floor of the Holiday Inn, gusts screaming round the building, I got a call on my mobile. I thought it would be my taxi driver confirming the time for the re-booked flight the next day, but instead there was an unfamiliar voice:
“This is HM Revenue and Customs, we have a message for you, but first can we confirm your name and address”
Actually name and address to phone number is not that secret, but still I asked:
“How do I know you are who you say you are?”
“If you prefer you can ring back on …. it is to your advantage”
I checked that it would be OK to ring the next day on my return and rang off … I didn’t say (life is too short), that being given a number to ring back does not increase my confidence unless I can verify it.
In fact the next day I checked on the HMR&C site and the number was their helpline. However, this call had many hall marks of a fraudulent call: how could I, or a less technically aware citizen know this was a good call? In this case the information requested was relatively innocuous (but of course could easily continue, “and date of birth … bank details …”) and the phone number given was an 0845 number which costs the recipient money … either genuine or high-value fraud. Of course, if I was fradulently ringing up people pretending to be HMR&C, at any sign of trouble giving the genuine helpline numer would be just what I would do to allay suspicion!
It is not just HMRC that give calls like this; banks and credit card companies are forever ringing up and asking you to confirm your identity … and that usually does include giving some form of security code. But they have rung you up, so have more confidence in who you are then you do in them, yet never offer any means to confirm their identitiy.
Email too: I have received various mails from banks which look very like phishing emails. In one case I received an email where the domain of the sender was different from the domain of the reply email and different again from the domain of the URL link. It goes to say that none of these were the same as the standard domain of the bank. In this case the only reason I knew it was not phishing was that it offered information and did not request anything secure.
By sending emails and making phone calls that are virtually indistinguishable from fraudulent ones, the banks (and even HMR&C) are training us to be victims of fraud.
Literally we are encouraged to practice being insecure.