Services as materials

Within the location theme of the Mobile 2.0 project, we’ve been producing quite some mash-ups on top of existing services like foursquare. Using existing services to build apps certainly has advantages in terms of development burden, and can leverage their popularity and existing user bases. Using services as materials however does have consequences that go beyond the technical realm, and are not necessarily about the API alone – especially in a research context.

Using mashups is research means being dependent on other services, and publicly releasing mashups means giving up the control you may have in smaller-scale studies. APIs change, services go down, and you might have to adapt the experience you were planning to offer. A service is more than just its API; they are part of businesses, with goals, PR strategies – and people. Services have target audiences, and have usage cultures that should fit your purposes.

In short, using existing services as materials has been very useful for us, but does require understanding your material. More about the various considerations in using mash-ups for research and our experiences in this position paper.

Location-sharing pres @ MobileHCI

Location-sharing has been a UbiComp topic for over 20 years, but services like foursquare and Gowalla have been taking off only recently in comparison. Tech and commercial aspects, including the proliferation of mobile devices of course play a role here, but most popular location-sharing services also have an interaction model different from most early research systems. They use manual ‘check-ins’ to pair user location with semantically named venues (rather than tracking), they mix public and private sharing with venues being visible to all users, location is shared with a potentially very large audience via multiple social media channels, and they employ incentives such as gamification elements and discounts.

As part of our location-sharing research, we’ve been taking a ‘performative’ view on check-ins on foursquare, and explore how these specific design elements facilitate emergent, and sometimes conflicting, social norms (not) to check-in. Read more in our MobileHCI’11 paper here.

Interested mostly in gamification elements? Shorter paper ‘Gamification and location-sharing: some emerging social conflicts’ presented at the Gamification workshop at CHI’11 here.

Research in the Large 2. Workshop at UbiComp 2011

We’re organizing a 2nd edition of our ‘Research in the Large’ workshop at UbiComp 2011 on September 18th in Beijing. Deploying your research apps through app stores? Dealing with big data sets resulting from large-scale use of mobile apps? Submit a paper! We’ll be discussing shared challenges and practical strategies to deal with the challenges inherent to wide deployment and dealing with large-scale data sets. Check out the CFP here.

My co-organizers: Mattias Rost (Mobile Life/SICS), Frank Bentley (Motorola) and David Ayman Shamma (Yahoo!).

Open post-doc position, join us!

We’ve got an open 1-year post-doc position at Mobile Life for a researcher with an interest in human-robot interaction. More info here (available now). Apply &  impress us with your awesomeness! update: the post-doc position has now been filled. 

‘Ethics, logs & videotape’ workshop at CHI 2011

App stores have made distribution of research apps to thousands of users incredibly easy. There is more user-generated content around than we can manage to analyze; millions of tweets, public status updates and shared locations are waiting for us. These are huge opportunities, but researchers now also run into some interesting ethical questions.

Procedures, regulations and ethics – especially in an international and intercultural setting – are unclear and the notion of informed consent is changing. Can we just use all data that is out there? Is someone’s tweet intended to be quoted in a research paper? How do we deal with permissions if we use data from users of freely available applications? Do we need to tell people about all our research plans? Is anyone downloading our app a participant?

Asking a million users for a signed consent form is not a feasible option. Notices and messages in apps telling people about our research plans will probably be skipped. If they are read, there is no guarantee they are actually understood. Sometimes researchers cannot even know who the people providing content for their studies are.

Not studies would be missing a huge opportunity, but a discussion is in order. Do we have added responsibilities if we log people’s actions? Can we always be sure there will be no adverse effects for our unwitting ‘participants’?

Join us for a discussion at the CHI2011 workshop we’re co-organizing in Vancouver, Saturday May 7th: ETHICS, LOGS, and VIDEOTAPE: Ethics in Large Scale User Trials and User Generated Content.

Position papers due January 14, 2011.
Co-organised by Donald McMillan, Alistair Morrison, Matthew Chalmers (Univ. Glasgow), Henriette Cramer, Mattias Rost (Mobile Life), Wendy Mackay (Univ. Paris Sud). (Update: previously involved Adam Greenfield unfortunately won’t make it to the workshop.)

Hej, that’s us in Metro Technik

Metro Technik had a nice little tidbit -in swedish- on our work on φ² PhiSquare and people’s use of foursquare.

Nice picture there of our excellent Sebastian Büttner, who also just happens to have graduated on his work on physical check-ins. (Congrats! glad you’re sticking around for a while).

Klokhuis

Het Klokhuis, one of my favorite tv-shows when I was a kid, aired a segment two days ago where I’m explaining social & affective robotics ‘for 8-year olds’. I’m talking for at least 5 secs around 3/4 into the show

Show in Dutch, segment ‘Robots vs. the rest’, recorded late 2009.
lego bot shout out to Anne Zwijnenburg, Nicander Kemper & Ork de Rooij.

Why do you check in?

After our interviews earlier this year, location mashups and our ongoing studies into different ways of checking in, we’re now gathering more data to understand how people use location-sharing apps.

Gowalla & Foursquare users, why do you check-in and share? Help us out by filling out our survey.

Update: This survey is currently closed, thanks everyone!
If you’d like to participate in Mobile Life’s future studies on location-sharing or try out new location-based apps, please contact me via henriette AT mobilelifecentre.org. We’d really appreciate it!

Photo sharing, with restrictions

The last week of summer, Mobile Life’s Mobile 2.0 crew has been hanging out at Ung08. The crew was handing out Most Wanted, a mobile photo sharing app with a slight twist to bring back the preciousness of giving someone a physical photo print. To collect pictures you have to meet people in real life and they have to decide you’re worthy of sharing. You have to be close and you cannot ‘pass it on’ and you have to hang on to your collection.

The Ung08 festival is organised every last week of the Swedish summer holidays and it’s Europe’s biggest festival for 13-19 yr olds. At the Most Wanted tent they can have their mugshot taken, have the mobile app installed to share their picture with, show their picture on their Facebook profile and take a physical print. The atmosphere at Ung08 has been great and I’m loving the mugshots and sign poetry.

Interestingly, the Ung08 festival was started about 15 years ago as a way to ‘keep kids out of trouble’ during the last unruly week of their vacation. Even while the reason for its inception seems slightly cynical, it it actually quite inspiring to see the Stockholm approach to ‘youth issues’; rather than cracking down on the negative, you can inspire and have people enjoy themselves instead.

From a ‘research in the large’ perspective distributing an app at a festival to teenagers by allowing them to have their picture taken is quite interesting. What happens if you treat your app as a ‘product’ instead of just a research endeavor? iPhones, Droids and dataplans might be cool, but most teens are on a budget. If you don’t want teens to spend money on data traffic and use a local Bluetooth app, you have to convince them to spend effort and return to show who they’ve shared with. And how will they actually use the app? Or is it actually all about the old-fashioned photo print? Lots of lessons learned there already and there’s definitely not one size fits all solution. The follow-ups interviews are underway, now let’s see what we’ll learn about photo sharing, collecting and being cool…

the human condition

Encountered on the streets of Amsterdam. Love lost, a desperate search, a secret ploy, just a scam or a wonderful mystery?