Outdoor mobility project
People spend 5% of their time outdoors. This statistic from my Living Green Page-A-Day calendar struck me as awfully low. Per day, it translates to 1.2 hours of being outside, which may seem high or low depending on where you live. I’m currently working on a survey to better understand the activities people do indoors and outdoors, how their home and work lives play a part in indoor/outdoor habits, and the reasons why we are not spending more time outdoors. There is a lot of research on how physical activity, being outdoors, and nature have positive effects on physical and mental health, the factors that promote popularity of certain urban areas, and literature that focuses on specific populations: children, particularly overweight children, the elderly, and the mobility impaired.

Along with the broad survey I’m conducting to get a better idea of this area (and hope to find some interesting correlations), I’m also designing a second survey based on the literature on outdoor mobility and social interaction for the elderly. I hope to create an intervention for the home that brings the outdoors to those who are mobility impaired and might not be able to go out often. More to come on that soon.

Current: IRB undergoing review
Next: Hope to deploy by the end of the week

References I’ve collected:
- Outdoor mobility, urban and public spaces
- Outdoor mobility and social interaction for the elderly and mobility impaired

Pachuino
Meanwhile, I’m continuing building simple sensors using the Arduino as part of my engagement in public spaces research. I’m currently working on combining an RFID reader with a WiShield to upload tagged items to Pachube. I built this with logging elevator data in mind: the probe would be placed unobtrusively near an elevator door, and whenever it reaches a new floor, the RFID reader will read that floor’s tag and uploaded it to the Pachube server. The idea is that manually logging elevator activity for observation in public spaces is very time consuming, and this is one way to automate it.

I’m currently in the process of getting the WiShield to communicate with Pachube, but it’s a little harder than I thought. The tutorial on Pachube for connecting WiShield to Pachube is incomplete, and seems to be missing a chunk of code that’s present in the Arduino Ethernet to Pachube tutorial.

Current: Connecting WiShield to Pachube
Next: Create casing for probe, deploy in elevators

That’s all for this week. I’ll be visiting family in China for 2 weeks and will be back in early July. Will post later this week an update on some things related to public spaces.

Earlier today, I watched Objectified, a great documentary about industrial design.  It reminded me of how permanently-built and unsustainable many material things are, and how easy it is for us to form emotional attachments to objects with personal stories that we then are reluctant to part with.  At the same time, I was thinking about different signs I could create for my public spaces project, signs that would tailor to people’s emotions in hopes of changing their behavior.  For example, an elevator will have a speech bubble sign on it that says “I’m feeling tired today. Please take the stairs!”  I started thinking about what the world would look like if our environment “spoke” back to us, even through inanimate signs. If we are taken off guard by a new friendly “Good morning!” thought-bubble-shaped sign on the door when we go to work, would our initial reaction be to say “Good morning!” back, before realizing that we were just about to talk to a door? Would we start noticing more things around us, and could we become more appreciative of them?

I applied the same idea to daily material things often taken for granted.  What if your toaster told you when your bread was done, and when you said “thank you,” it replied “you’re welcome”? I’m not talking about creating robot appliances that will chat with you about your day and the daily news, but simple conversation pieces that made you feel like you were interacting with someone who just did you a nice favor. Not everyone can say “ah yes, this [insert thing] was passed down by my grandma and has considerable sentimental value to me,” but what if by giving certain products simple voices, you will form an emotional attachment to them and are less likely to replace them when something shinier comes along? (Come on, do you really need this muffin toaster that cooks your eggs too?)

In this age, we are constantly making things faster, smarter, smaller, bigger, better, building more and more until you walk into a Walmart Supercenter and suddenly you’re dizzy thinking about how much stuff there is. Some people don’t think twice about replacing a 1-year old digital camera when a newer model arrives, or even a 1-month old bag for another bag (of course, this one is absolutely perfect and you will never ever have to buy another bag ever again). Instead of designing new products that come equipped with these voices, we could build our own little toaster soul and equip it to our toaster, adding another kind of “creator bond” to our new relationship with the toaster. These low resolution social-emotional interfaces have the potential to increase awareness of our surroundings and make people more appreciative of what they have.

Update 1/19 – Suggested readings (thanks to all those who contacted me and suggested the following)

Cziksentimihalyi, M. 1991. Design and Order in Everyday Life. Design Issues, vol. 8, no. 1 (Autumn 1991), MIT Press, 26-34. (Works that have cited this paper)

Alex Taylor, Microsoft Researcher.

Blevis, E. 2007. Sustainable interaction design: invention & disposal, renewal & reuse. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (San Jose, California, USA, April 28 – May 03, 2007). CHI ’07. ACM, New York, NY, 503-512. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1240624.1240705

Lim, Y., Donaldson, J., Jung, H., Kunz, B., Royer, D., Ramalingam, S., Thirumaran, S., and Stolterman, E. 2008. Emotional Experience and Interaction Design. In Affect and Emotion in Human-Computer interaction: From theory To Applications, C. Peter and R. Beale, Eds. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, vol. 4868. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 116-129. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-85099-1_10

Norman, D. A. 2004. Emotional design: Why we love (or hate) everyday things. Basic Books, NY.

[Door picture from ArchiExpo]

- How can we encourage people to approach and engage with technology in public spaces?
- How can ambient technology in public spaces help us be more aware of 1) our environment, 2) our automatic behaviors in public?
- How can ambient technology in public spaces encourage us to make positive choices?
- How can ubiquitous computing affect our outdoors experience by tailoring to our emotions?

Although these questions mostly focus on the outdoors/public spaces, particularly cities and towns, some of them can also apply to private spaces such as offices or homes.

Also, here are a few research questions I had been thinking about social interaction in public spaces, as a follow up to an old blog post.  These questions were inspired by a visit to NYC as well as One in 8 Million, a collection of short documentaries about people in New York.

- How can collective public storytelling improve social interactions between strangers, particularly in waiting spaces?
- What’s the best way to share and display your own stories with others?
- How can we use design to address some of the privacy concerns?

I’m working on a few projects dealing with the first set of questions right now. I’ve chosen to look specifically at: stairs, trees, umbrellas, and maybe bike racks. I’m still thinking of ways that I can tie both sets of questions together, and to refine these questions further as I gain more experience with research.

Social Computing
This existing HCI/CS subfield applies more to online social networks and their trends and implications about social behavior. These online social networks make up Web 2.0 and can be anything from instant messaging to blogs (Blogspot, Twitter) to social networking (Facebook, MySpace) and social bookmarking (Digg, Reddit).  (For a list of my networks check out the “My Profiles” box in the right column.)

Paul Graham: Cities and Ambition
Popular online essayist Paul Graham describes famous cities as hubs of ambition. Cambridge says “You should be smarter.” New York City says “You should be richer.” Silicon Valley says “You should be more powerful.” You get the idea. Paul Graham suggests that one day, the cities we live in will be virtual. A comment to this essay provides a city-like view of the popular online social networks we live in.

Essays by Danielle Fong: Third Places
In her blog post, Danielle Fong talks about the decrease in “third places,” especially in the suburbs.  A third place is somewhere outside of home (family bonds) and workplace (united purpose) such as cafes, where community and creativity can grow.  They are on the decline because many people nowadays would rather watch TV or go online and use social networking sites instead of going to somewhere for some real human interaction. How can we get this physical interactivity back?

Pattie Maes – Fluid Interfaces
A group from the MIT Media Lab, Fluid Interfaces design interfaces that enhance objects and spaces in our environment in ways that are intelligent and responsive to our needs.  In particular, the Blossom project uses non-attention-demanding devices (called Blossoms) to connect friends and family using digital communication.  These devices are different from mobile phones and email in that they do not demand immediate attention, but form an “implicit, always-there link” between connected individuals who own this device.

So how do these all fit together? I love how online social networks introduce me to people I would never have known, and connect me with people I probably would never see again, but the great downside to online technology is that it can be very addictive and tie us to our computers rather than encourage us to go outside for some fresh air and face-to-face interaction. There is a humorous and poignant scene in the movie “Mean Girls” where two girls are walking side by side, but they are text messaging each other instead of conversing. In an example in real life, on Boston T, there are always a handful of people in view sporting an iPod or texting on their mobile devices. People are absorbed with their gadgets, and there is little room for casual conversation anymore.

So how can we create technology that encourages social interaction and collaboration in ad-hoc communities?  What locations are we targeting, and what kinds of technologies should we use?  A few locations that come to mind are coffee shops, museums, and bookstores.  Tabletop and wall displays allow for multiple user input, and if presented correctly, could draw a lot of strangers together in the same place and strike up conversations about common interests.  Following the Blossom idea, perhaps there could even be a device that lets us browse the social profiles of people around us and allow us to quickly pick conversation partners.

WiiPaint (my thesis project) actually fits in quite nicely in this niche. It is meant to be displayed in a museum setting to draw all kinds of people and encourage them to collaborate with each other in creating digital art. This scenario highlights the difference between collaboration and interaction; one is task-based, the other is not. WiiPaint can fall in both categories, but it is more task-based, more collaborative. I’m more interested in interaction rather than collaboration because it is a bigger challenge when there is no common task to facilitate interaction.

Even though there are plenty of opportunities to meet cool people online, there is no reason why we can’t improve meaningful chance conversations in real life as well. This is an issue that I feel strongly about and hope research it more in graduate school.

Further reading on Third Places:
- Wikipedia – Third Place
- Tech Telecommunters – What’s Your “Third Place”?
- The Economy and Us: ‘Third Places’ are becoming scarcer, just when we need them most.