“Don’t ever think that a small group of conscious and dedicated people aren’t able to change the world. In fact this is the way it always happened!”

Margaret Mead

As part of my thesis I am trying to understand what are the things that people do with Google Map or with any other cartographic service. One of the way to answer this question is to look at new services/hacks/mash-ups that are developed around GM hoping that these will correlate with actual use. Here is a list that I put together.

1. HousingMaps: Craigslist apartment listings plotted on Google Maps
2. Found City: A community-generated map of interesting places in New York City
3. Google Sightseeing: A blog that shows “the best tourist spots in the world via Google Maps’ satellite imagery.”
4. Google-Traffic.com: Maps traffic data onto Google Maps
5. Google Maps Wallpapers: Merges Google Maps satellite “tiles” to produce wallpaper or a poster
6. Cheap Gas: Find cheap gas prices, powered by gasbuddy and Google Maps
7. Entertainment locations listed on Lawrence.com are shown on mini-Google Maps inserted on the site’s pages
8. Chicago transit maps on Google Maps
9. ChicagoCrime.org. You can view crimes by type, location and a number of other criteria and see them plotted on a Google Map.
10. Incidentlog.com – Real-time and historic archive of police, fire, and 911 incidents for many major U.S. cities
11. A flight simulator which uses Google Maps
12. Washington DC Metro Map
13. New York City Subway Map
14. New York City Subway Map – with lines and address search/plotting
15. Boston MBTA Subway Map
16. Gasbuddy and Google Maps for comparison shopping for gasoline
17. Cytadia.com – Real estate ads geolocated on Google Maps (USA & Canada)
18. Google Maps Pedometer – An application to measure distances traveled during a running or walking workout
19. Los Angeles Earthquakes – Displays Earthquakes across Los Angeles (and the whole nation) with different icons representing different magnitudes
20. Burbank Maps – Provides geospatial searching of news and realestate in Burbank, CA.
21. Google Maps Route Planner – Place a number of points on a map, then ask to get a route with driving directions both written out and with a polyline on the map.
22. GeoURL Mapper – GeoURL married to Google Maps. Demostrates how to use javascript RSS feeds to incorporate data onto google maps. Requires Firefox.

To resume there is a huge variety of hacks. The most common application consist in displaying fixed resources of the city like subway stations, or gas stations or things like that. Another sort of application requires to track variable features of the space like weather conditions or traffic etc. The only commercial application so far is the mapping of real estate.

We can also describe the above services in terms of the source of the geolocated information, which is given by some information providers. In other applications the source of the information are the people which contribute in the service. It is the case for Found City or SightSeeing. For a third category of these services the information is automatically bounded to specific coordinates using a gazetteer.

I think we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg of services using geolocalization. I share the enthusiasm of all the hackers out there imaging new services and use and I strongly believe that the killer app in this field must/will involve the community in the production of the information.

Tags: Location Based Services, map algorithms, maps, tagging, urban, urban exploration

Jan Chipchase gave a super interesting talk at EPFL on the Exploratory Field Study Reseach (thank Nicolas). The presentation was informal so we had a chance to interact a lot and to exchange ideas. Here are some random bits I annotated on my paper moleskine during the speech.

Jan works in a group that conducts field study to understand how people deal with technology in different cultures. Nokia uses these reports to inspire and inform new design.

Jan’s group uses different techniques to collect data. For instance, they use shadowing, following and taping people while using technology. They try to step in the customer’s shoes trying to act as if they were a Nokia costumer in different parts of the world. For instance they buy a phone, they break it and then they try to repair it in that particular location.

Another technique that they use are field questionnaires. For instance they go on the street and they ask a bunch of people structured questions on specific subjects (like: where would you put a phone?).

In Jan’s opinion diary methods do not work because the respondents restructure their assignments.

Jan’s group uses several methods on the same research subjects in such a way that the findings gets reinforced by, what he called, convergent validity.

He showed us a couple of examples of specific researches carried out by his group:

(1) Rural Charging Services in Uganda. How people stay powered up in regions where there are frequent powers cuts. People uses batteries to prevent cuts. This is an example of creativity that changes the way we (as citizens of rich countries) think about that problem.

(2) SENTE, is a nice example of how people deal with the lack of a distributed banking system in Uganda. Money are transferred as airtime from a person in a city to a relative in a village who owns a cell phone. If the person does not have a phone, phone kiosks are usually charged of exchanging airminutes with cash.

(3) Informal Repair Culture in Asia. Phones have different values in different markets. In Asia, for instance, it make sense to repair a mobile phone. There is a huge market of 2nd hand phones, repair instruction, material and centers.

What are the possible implications for design of such studies: for instance Motorola recently putted evident screws on their phones so to facilitate repair practices.

(4) Literacy, Communication & Design. Illiteracy can be found everywhere. Most of the growth in the phone industries is coming from underdeveloped countries.

The question is: to what extent is textual literacy a barrier to device literacy? How do illiterate people solve their daily tasks? Illiterate work for long hours and have a low flexibility. They can do anything (it just takes longer). Most tasks can be learned given the proper motivation.

Our willingness to explore is affected by our ability to recover from a possible failure which, in turn, is related to culture.

I blogged a couple of days ago about one application which I really like when it comes to writing: WriteRoom. The application allows to fade out all the unimportant features of the interface to let the user concentrate on the text.

People from freeverse have expanded the concept further with Think, an application that allows to set the focus on each application of interest and to hide all the rest.

At this very moment, applications are fighting for your attention. Between chat windows, Finder windows, Web browser windows, and everything else, it’s amazing any of us can concentrate at all. As it has become easier to multitask, we’ve become more likely to have two dozen windows on the screen at any given moment. Innovations like Expose makes finding what you want in the sea of visual stimuli easier, but they’ve done little to remove those distractions.

Tags: interaction design, mac

I have to admit that I am really enjoying using the LG Shine. One thing though is still lacking: I cannot sync the Address book and the iCal appointments on my Mac. The problem is more serious when you need to call somebody and you do not have the number with you …

The unit I received was shipped without the necessary software. However, from the web site, I realized that in the commercial version a Phone Manager (only for Windows) will be included.

While I was waiting for the official launch next week, I tried a couple of things, one of which worked. So, the first thing I tried was to send each vCard individually to the phone using the Bluetooth file exchange utility. While this worked with a Symbian phone, I have got an error message trying to transfer the card to the LG unit. Probably the format is not recognized by the OS.

The thing the worked was to use a synced Symbian phone. From the phone menu is possible to send a contact in the address book via bluetooth to another unit. In this way the Shine recognize the business card and imports it correctly. The backside is that is a manual process that can be extremely tedious if you have dozens of contacts.

Tags: hack, mac, series60

Yesterday evening, TSR1, the Swiss National Television for the French-speaking part, has broadcasted a documentary showing some of our projects in the domain of Interactive Furniture. Two major projects were featured: the noise-sensitive table, which respond to the ambient noise with the aim of regulating the interactions of the conversation participants; and the docking lamp, a portable and intelligent beamer that can help to share laptop displays while working collaboratively.

Au centre de recherche pédagogique de l’EPFL, chaque séance se fait autour d’une table interactive qui clignote au gré de la discussion. Objectif : indiquer quand une personne s’exprime, repérer qui parle, qui ne parle pas. Et bien sûr tout est gardé en mémoire. «Plus je parle, plus le nombre de lumières devant moi s’allume, explique le professeur Pierre Dillenbourg, directeur du CRAFT. On pourra dire à quelqu’un: regarde tu parles depuis vingt minutes, ou alors: tu n’as pas encore parlé qu’en penses-tu? Le but de cette table est de favoriser la régulation dans un groupe. Apprendre en groupe est plus efficace s’il y a une répartition homogène de la participation. Si quelqu’un domine, les autres apprennent moins»

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Reading the Microsoft Research headlines this news attracted my attention: “MultiPoint, technology originating from Microsoft Research India, enables multiple computer mice to be connected to a single PC, thereby enhancing the educational value of that PC.”

While it is easy to see the economical value of the idea, the question is: what is the educational value of having multiple controls on the same machine? I sketch here a possible answer.

Parallel controls on a shared computation. One of the script we work with on CSCL (Computer Supported Collaborative Learning) consists in splitting the controls of a simulation to the different participants. Each participant is in charge of a part of the simulation. It this way for the team to succeed it is important to coordinate the control efforts.

Coordinating, in this case means discussing pros and cons of each action, which was demonstrated to be connected to higher learning performances.

Tags: collaboration tools, Computer Supported Collaborative Work, education, interaction design, interaction regulations, learning technology

J. Cadiz, A. Gupta, and J. Grudin. Using web annotations for asynchronous collaboration around documents. In Proceeding of Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW’00), pages 309–318, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, December, 2-6 2000. [pdf]

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This paper presents a study of annotations on specs documents made using Microsoft Office web annotations. The authors presented statistics of usage over nine thousands annotations made on 1243 documents by 450 developers at Microsoft.

Interestingly, the authors noted as some limitations in the interaction desing of the annotation system affected the level of discussion in the annotations: a small portion of the notes were involved in threads with multiple answers.

The authors identified the changes awareness as an important mechanism for the users to be aware of the changes included in the system and the availability of new notes.

Tags: collaboration tools, collaborative writing, Computer Supported Collaborative Work, interaction design

Writing is part of my work. For me is a daily activity and a pain because I tend to multi-task a lot. Writing, on the other hand requires concentration and being away from the thousands of distraction that sorrounds us in each office. Most of these distractions are also inside our computers like small reminders and bouncing icons …

Fore this last category of distractions there is a nice program that I am using more and more: WriteRoom! An environment for removing all the superfluousness of the OS: it is just me and the text:

Walk into WriteRoom, and watch the distractions fade away.  Now it’s just you and your text. It’s a place where your mind clears and your work gets done. When your writing is complete, exit WriteRoom and re-enter the busy world.

In the last couple of days I had a chance of test the upcoming LG  KE970, codenamed ‘Shine’. I have received this unit from Hill & Knowlton, LG’s communications agency, for evaluation purposes. In this post I am summarizing my initial impressions.

First of all the phone is awesome! It has a full-metal case and the display is a mirror. When the phone is on standby then the display really acts as a mirror, whereas when the display is on it passes through. The effect is really spectacular, however its very difficult to take pictures of it or to video record what is happening on the display as the mirror fools the automatic focus of the cameras.

The package was also nice, although I received a pre-launch material which might differ from the commercial one. For instance, the manual and the sync softwares were missing (I took the pictures below with the phone’s camera at standard resolution 640×480). I also had an hard time to find the manual online (something in Korean here).

The display is really bright and the interaction with the scroll key is fluid. It took me some time to get used to the left-right function keys but after was easy to use. The menus are pretty intuitive and everything seemed easy to find. It has a 2MB camera with Schneider-Kreuznach lens (+ it has a flash), and it also records voice and video.

The image viewer is able to display Macromedia Flash animations and to open simple Office documents and PDFs.

The internal memory is 50 Mb with the possibility to extend it with microSD memory cards.

There are much better reviews out there that make a better work in detailing all the features of the phone [1], [2]. What I will be doing in the next posts is to detail how to use it with a Macintosh, the thing that interests me. So far it seems to be pretty hard …

One last thing: I posted a video on YouTube that I took with my iSight of the Menus of the phone. The result is decent but it was extremely difficult to realize due to the auto-focus problem discussed above.

More on the LG Sine Blog …