lift-at-home

Book reading : Les flops technologiques

Les technologies de l'information (TIC) ont connu de nombreux revers et des flops parfois spectaculaires. Pourquoi le visiophone n'est-il jamais parvenu à s'imposer au domicile ? Pourquoi personne ne possède le réfrigérateur intelligent dont on nous a si souvent vanté les mérites ?

A l'occasion de la sortie du livre "Les Flops technologiques" (FYP éditions), cette mini-conférence consistera en une présentation du livre et une discussion du rôle des échecs et ratés dans l'innovation.

Speaker

The presentations will be followed by a Q&A session with the speakers.

Cyrus Farivar is holding a reading session of his book: The Internet of Elsewhere. He will read us a few passages and kick start a discussion on how the internet is transforming communications, politics, and economics. Cyrus explored the Internet's history and effects in four distinct and, to some, surprising societies--Iran, Estonia, South Korea, and Senegal. So expect a very rich discussion full of learnings on how the digital revolution affected these countries.

The session happens on Friday July 1st at 5pm at the Lift office. More information (and free registration) can be found here.

You can also meet Cyrus in Lyon the day after (information here).

Cyrus Farivar will be hosting two Lift@home events on the 1st and 2nd of July.

His new book, "The Internet of Elsewhere," has just been released and he will be reading a few passages from the book, answering a few questions/having a discussion, and chatting over drinks!

Cyrus is a freelance technology journalist, a freelance radio reporter/producer, and is a wanderlust geek who lives in the city of Bonn, Germany. He is also the science and technology editor for Deutsche Welle English and is the host of its internationally-syndicated radio program, "Spectrum." (http://dw-world.de/spectrum)

Come and join us for:

• Geneva event (Lift office, July 1st)
• Lyon (July 2nd)

Last week saw the first of my lift@home series for this year, in partnership with Imaginove, a French cluster made of video-game companies, animated movie studios and web/mobile design firms.

As an echo to the debate at the Game Designer’s conference in San Francisco, we chose to talk about gamification, which is defined in the Wikipedia as:

“Gamification is the use of game play mechanics for non-game applications (also known as “funware”), particularly consumer-oriented web and mobile sites, in order to encourage people to adopt the applications. It also strives to encourage users to engage in desired behaviors in connection with the applications. Gamification works by making technology more engaging, and by encouraging desired behaviors, taking advantage of humans’ psychological predisposition to engage in gaming. The technique can encourage people to perform chores that they ordinarily consider boring, such as completing surveys, shopping, or reading web sites.“

Given the heated debates lately about this topic, the point was to go beyond this buzzword and discuss the implications of using game mechanics for non-game applications.

In my introduction, I drew a parallel between the Serious Games meme and the Gamification meme… to show that there’s a long time interest in translating “something” from games to other domains. My point was that this “something” varies over time: game mechanics, game play, game-like visuals. Interestingly, this transfer can be caricatural. At worse, gamification means “add external rewards such as points or badges to your service” and Serious Games sometimes corresponds to “add 3D graphics to your training program and you’ll learn how to use this CRM”. This is a bit sarcastic but it’s unfortunately the case. Concerning gamification, my introduction focused on some of the limits of this approach:

• Being engaged in a video-game is not just a matter of earning points and rewards, there are different motivational aspects that range from learning the interface, discovering the challenges to be completed, the completion of these tasks, the fun of being with others.
• One should distinguish what’s called internal motivation (playing the game itself) and external motivations (being rewarded for the task completed). It’s as if proponents of gamification only focused on the second one.
• Above all, playing a game is fun because of its design, not just because you can get points (what Steffen Walz called “pointification” in his talk at Lift11) and go from one level to another.
• A gameplay (or a game design pattern) is much more than “earning points” or “collecting artifacts”. A game is fun to play because there’s a good team of game designers who created it, not just because of basic cooking recipes.

The two other speakers built upon this to demonstrate the limits and opportunities of employing game mechanics. The first one dealt with the importance of this approach for Social Web platforms and the second one showed the potential of game design for urban informatics.

Josselin Perrus

A consultant in User Experience design Josselin started off by showing the drawbacks of external rewards (points, badges). The underlying idea with “gamification” is that designers identify a certain behavior, find a metric that would represent this behavior… and reward the performance of this behavior. In return, this results in participant trying to maximize this metric. Which is very close to performance or sales management with KPI.

Josselin’s argument is that this situation is fine in the short term but it doesn’t work in the long run because it’s not user-centric. For example, the accumulation of badges on Foursquare becomes difficult to understand over time. If you’re browsing friends’ profile, you see their badges but it’s sometimes difficult to get what they mean… because they’re only designed as a reward system. A more interesting approach in Social Web design would be to generate rewards as “social indicators”: hierarchical cues or categories that are actually relevant for users and which help them to get a perspective on a certain person. Meaningful badges would make users’ profile more legible to others.

If indicators became pertinent for others, they would count as intrinsic motivators:

• As a way to access to a representation about oneself: mirroring your activities, giving you the opportunity to learn about your behavior.
• Conveying information to others, showing them implicit cues about your behavior.

Philippe Gargov

Philippe followed up on this by questioning how the video-game culture (and video game mechanics per se) can be a facilitator for urban design. He began his speech by showing what he called a triforce of current urban challenges:

1. City 2.0: the need to integrate citizens in public debates,
2. Livable city: the importance of favoring more sustainable practices,
3. Social innovation: the need to facilitate the participation of citizens in the co-conception of public services.

For each of these challenges, Philippe exemplified how certain services anchored their design in game-related elements: 3D platforms employed to engage citizens in discovering how their neighborhood may evolve, the role (and the limits) of visual codes coming from video-games to be more appealing to users, etc. He then focused on two striking examples:

• Chromorama by Mudlark: a game that shows participants their movements and location as they swipe use their transportation card in the London Tube. The point of such platform is to “connect communities of people who cross paths and routes on a regular basis, and encourages people to make new journeys and use public transport in a different way by exploring new areas and potentially using different modes of public transport“.
• Waze: a social mobile application providing free navigational information based on the live conditions of the road (reported by participants who receive rewards for their input).

Philippe concluded by encouraging game designers in the room to participate to this shift. Their expertise and the solution they put together in their games can resonate with urban services… in a way that is not necessarily as limited as what gamification advocates.

A little while ago took place the lift@hackerspace workshop, which was the second part of the Urban-IoT 2010 workshop that took place on November 29, in Tokyo, Japan. The Urban-IoT workshop aimed to bring together experts from various areas related to smart cities to present and discuss their research in a formal, academic context. As a follow-up, the lift@hackerspace event served to deepen the conversations in a more relaxed environment context, where the various participants could explore some of the main topics and challenges that emerged during the formal session, in an open discussion format among a couple of focus groups.

The beer and barbecue certainly helped for richer interactions.

Yesterday evening, I co-organized a Lift seminar in Lyon, in partnership with Imaginove, a cluster of digital content companies. Located in a an old flour mill, the seminar was about new forms of video game play with a specific focus on Transmedia and Location-Based Games.

To deal with this, I invited two bright contributors: David Calvo who is Creative Director from French video game studio Ankama (as well as a fine writer, comic-book author) and Mathieu Castelli from C4M, who was also the founder of Newt Games, the now defunct company which was a pioneer in location-based games in Japan.

David started with a presentation in which he described his personal vision of what the "Transmedia" domain consists in. He basically debunked the fuss around this term by showing how this term is now used as a buzzword. According to him, adopting a "transmedia" perspective corresponds to the following approach:

This event is the hands-on part of the Urban Internet of Things Workshop that takes place in Tokyo, that same day as part of the Internet of Things 2010 conference. We will gather a bunch of hackers, programmers, designers, architects, and business people under the same roof to discuss about the future of our cities. We will explore through demos, hands-on workshops, pecha-kuchas and beers how new technologies can be leveraged to engage citizens to access and use real-time data from cities. Hopefully a lot of beer and a fantastic mix of creative and technical people will help in doing this.

More information

This event is part of the Lift@home program where members of our community self-organize their mini event.

The seminar on the Internet of Things organised by the Institute of Philosophy of Russian Academy of Sciences & Council, a thinktank for the Internet of Things, in alliance with Lift@Home, drew out about twenty participants that discussed with great passion the lecture of Professor Vladimir Arshinov, Head  of IPH RAS Department for Interdisciplinary Problems of the Scientific and Technological Development, on the new ontological foundations for a real hybrid world and Rob van Kranenburg who spoke about what it means if everything, everybody and every space becomes a set of qualities?

A car is a set of qualities, a person can be described as a long set of qualities, a park can be described as a set of qualities. Before the Internet of Things, humans decided these lists and sets of qualities. After the Internet of Things it will be a mix of entities deciding this, and in this mix are the protocols, algoritms and code that inform the databases what is data and what is noise. What is the role of objects and machine to machine (M2M) in this process? They can give clear signals, they can also be difficult and confusing.

In the afternoon we walked across the bridge very near the Kremlin to Strelka, the high level design and architecture lab to continue the discussion on a more practical level. The Internet of Things means small computers or tags in basically every object. Our world becomes media, as any object can trigger a movie, a url, a story, no longer being tied to discrete units such as tv or radio. IoT is inevitable. But there is a choice. There is a choice in planning: for a city of ‘friends’ or for a city of ‘strangers’, for a city of 'magic' where any relationship can become real or a city of 'chill' where only a few preferred paths guide you through the city. 

Laywer Rustam Chernov invited the organizational team to present a practical plan guided by these ideas for Moscow to the political party the Right Cause, that is very much informed by thinking on new technologies as one of the key figures is Anataloy Chubais, head of Russian Nanoresearch Cluster. On Saturday November 6 the team consisting of Vladimir Arshinov, Vadim Checkletsov, Natalie Savicheva, George Prokopchuck. and Rob van Kranenburg presented the proposal for a study of 'Wise Moscow' as an antidote to the current paradigm of 'smart' cities. Wise cities aim to make the city a ‘school’: a big learning environment.

After all, was Plato's Academy not a public park?

Rob van Kranenburg is encouraging a vision that is a balance of relatively autonomous local priorities and 'soul' coupled  with a set of generic global protocols.

Thus Wise Moscow needs building it with a Russian soul, with poetry and making citizens part of it, connecting high business with the cultural elite and bringing back old manual skills, stop the ‘efficiency’ paradigm and bring back people into the technological loop: smart shopping+ cassier (concept of George Prokopchuk.)

How: a study with policy recommendations in text and pilots:

breaking down Moscow in neighbourhoods: 


• a) what is necessary where?
• 
b) citizen involvement

• a different approach for every neighbourhood

Result:

• 
a) mix of top down and bottom up wisdom of the group and long term planning
• 
b) innovation/ human / nature/ holistic/ a model for other wise cities

Formative principles:


• a) biotic (biocoenesis)

• b) autopoesis of large ecosystems

• c) guiding the new emergent qualities


“The importance of the biocoenosis concept in ecology is its emphasis on the interrelationships among species in a geographical area.” (wikipedia)


We want to look at neighbourhoods and give them the tools to transform into biotic communities using the design process of Usman Haque of identifying the dilemma, the stakeholders, the incentives for every particular stakeholder, the evidence needed to convince them and the tools for evidence that we can provide for stakeholders to construct their own evidence rationales for acting and changing roles.

Andrey Filippov from World Public Forum joined the editorial team for the proposal of Wise Moscow.

Lift Workshop @ Weimar

31 Oct 2010, 10:00 - 14:00, Weimar, Germany
"Sustainable Interaction with Food, Technology, and the City" by Jaz Choi
This workshop explores innovative approaches to understanding and cultivating sustainable food culture in urban environments via human-computer-interaction (HCI) design and ubiquitous technologies in urban environments. We perceive the city as an intersecting network of people, place, and technology in constant transformation.

Lift Presentations @ Council and Institute of Philosophy present Lift@Home Moscow

05 Nov 2010, 09:00 - 23:00, Moscow, Russia
"Smart Environments" by Vadim Chekletsov
New trends of NBIC-convergence, Human Enhancement Technologies on the one hand and Smart Environment (Ambient intelligence, Ubiquitous computing, Internet of Things) on the other prepare us to a future paradigm shift blurring Anthropology and Social Philosophy borderlines. We believe the "winning solution" to making the most open, inclusive and innovative Internet of Things is to transcend the short-term opposition between social innovation and security by finding a way to combine these two necessities in a broader common perspective.

More on lift@home

This post is a recap by Attila Bujdosó of the Lift @ Hungary event he co-organized in Pécs.

The first edition of Lift Workshop in Hungary took place in the Eastern Quartier of Pécs, European Capital of Culture in 2010. And more specifically, in Széchenyi István akna, a former coal mine, which is now part of the city’s cultural heritage.

The event was held in the amazing-looking but abandoned, old compressor hall. Despite the unfortunate weather on this cold and rainy late-September day, 35 participants gathered from 10 different countries: students, architects, designers and media lab researchers, mainly from Central and Eastern Europe.

Keynote presentations

In the morning session keynote presentations were given by the four invited speakers. Their talks formed a basis to explore the implications of urban information systems for architecture and urban design with a special focus on the context of peripheral urban areas.