workshop on mobility and environment ~ april 21, 2008

09.30 - 09.45: Introduction to the workshop
09.45 - 10.00: Ann Morrison: The zone of progressive activity: Designing for locative mobile experience
10.00 - 10.15: Peter Peltonen and Petri Saarikko: Personalised mobile ubicomp applications in public spaces
10.15 - 10.30: Giulio Jacucci: Ubiquitous media for performative interaction and collective experiences
10.30 - 10.40: Break
10.40 - 10.55: Martti Mäntylä: Large-scale experimentation of mobile social media applications: The OtaSizzle project
10.55 - 11.10: Timo Partala: Field testing of mobile location-aware systems
11.10 - 11.25: Alison Lee: Mobile web challenges in mobile meeting service
11.25 - 11.40: Antti Nurminen: Designing interactions for 3D mobile maps
11.40 - 11.55: Radek Grzeszczuk: Mobile services using online collections of geotagged photos
11.55 - 12.10: Rich Hankins: EveryBit
12.10 - 12.15: Break
12.15 - 13.00: Lunch talk by Elaine Huang / Motorola Labs
13.00 - 13.10: Break
13.10 - 13.25: Vidya Setlur: Semantic graphics for more effective visual communication
13.25 - 13.40: Sami Vihavainen: Tagging in ZoneTag and Jaiku
13.40 - 13.55: Manish Anand: Towards intelligent media contents
13.55 - 14.00: Group division and instructions
14.00 - 14.45: Group discussion and brainstorming
14.45 - 15.00: Break
15.00 - 15.40: Findings from the four groups
15.40 - 16.00: Wrap-up and next steps, closing words by Peter Boda

1. Social environment
2. Location
3. Field experiments
4. Bridging the virtual and physical

The Zone of Progressive Activity: Designing for Locative Mobile Experience
Ann Morrison
The Practice of Locative Experiences" is a workshop paper that was presented at Digital Arts and Culture Conference 2005 (DAC), Denmark that discusses a framework to ensure essential elements are continually re-cycled back into complex design problems. This method was developed in response to designing an initial set of trials for a Mobile Locative User Experience for the transient back packer community in Brisbane, Queensland, 2004, as a part of Australasian CRC for Interaction Design (ACID) projects. Similar principles form the backbone in looking at designing User Trials (and ultimately successful use experiences) for Augmented MapLens technology, which had its first light-weight user trial in Helsinki, March 2008 (HIIT).

Personalised mobile ubicomp applications in public spaces
Peter Peltonen and Petri Saarikko
We present the PUPS project, which purpose is to design, implement and field trial prototypes of novel ubicomp applications that combine context-awareness with personalisation in order to provide a better user experience in everyday tasks in public spaces. We present two application prototypes: Massive, a mobile shopping assistant, and Funnelry, a mobile social media aggregator.

Ubiquitous media for performative interaction and collective experiences
Giulio Jacucci
Prototypes and field evaluation demonstrate that mobile and ubiquitous applications can contribute to sustain performative actions (embodied, expressive and experiential) and collective experiences. Conceptual work aimed at better articulating these actions and experiences could provide a more conscious, critical and grounded constructive research.

Large-scale experimentation of mobile social media applications: The OtaSizzle project
Martti Mäntylä
Our accumulated experience in designing digital customer services, such as Jaiku.com, www.kuvaboxi.fi, and comeks.com, suggest design principles dealing with the service life-cycle. They include: how to gain the interest of the user at first encounter; how to hold it during the process of service appropriation; and how to make the contact durable. However, even though the evidence towards these principles is clear, and comes from several parallel sources, a number of open lines of research remain: How do the principles scale with the size of the user population? Are some further design rules needed to deal with larger crowds? Just how general are these rules? Are there also domain-specific rules (what it yes, what distinct domains are identifiable)? The successful services are also characterised by continuous contact with users and very rapid evolution (daily builds). Is there some larger principle behind this? The recently started OtaSizzle project is designed to study these issues. We plan to build services following the above principles, focusing on service initiation; hooking the user; and building a durable relation. We will test the services them with sufficiently large user populations and over sufficiently long time to see the dynamics of service diffusion and the impact of various principles. To achieve this, we will involve partners with access to large user populations and service infrastructures for reaching the users and deploy multi-disciplinary researcher resources for really studying, understanding and explaining the phenomena taking place.

Field testing of mobile location-aware systems
Timo Partala
This presentation addresses problems related to studying mobile location-aware systems in the field. Recent field experiments on car navigation and location-aware mobile learning are discussed, and a design for an upcoming field experiment on streaming mobile videos from public events is also presented. The meaning of environmental variables in the field testing of mobile location-aware systems is discussed.

Mobile web challenges in mobile meeting service
Alison Lee
The mobile phone is a critical and common accoutrement of mobile workers. Yet, except for communication, email, and personal information management tools, there are many traditional computing capabilities and business activities (e.g., productivity tools, meetings) that remain unsupported on mobile phones. EZMeet is first exemplar of a service offering developed to enhance the mobile business user experience. It is a Web-based meeting service developed with AJAX and Apache/Python technologies that works on a variety of browser-enabled smart phones. A pilot of this service within Nokia has just begun. In rethinking electronic and face-to-face meetings for the mobile context, our design and development has sought to lower the barriers to meetings in order to nurture new and emerging meeting behaviors facilitated by mobility and mobile technologies. We present the capabilities of this service, illustrate some scenarios of collaborative use, and describe some key usability and sociality issues impacting initial adoption. The discussion of issues touches on familiar topics related to input and output modality challenges but it will be couched in terms of needs and requirements posed by meeting activities, collaborative-application support, and longer-lived activities (conducting meetings compared to reading email, accessing calendar, sending SMS). We will also discuss our experiences with using AJAX and Web technologies to deliver services on mobile phones supporting different browser technologies (e.g., Firefox, Opera, S60 OSS).

Designing interactions for 3D mobile maps
Antti Nurminen
Mobile 3D maps could be the next generation of navigation and location based information browsing, offering an intuitive gateway to the environment. However, navigation is not just model viewing, and 3D maneuvering requires control over many dimensions. We present the problem of 3D interaction with limited inputs, and our first solutions. What methology would be most suitable for rapid development of interfaces for a new family of applications?

Mobile services using online collections of geotagged photos
Radek Grzeszczuk
Providing mobile services, such as image-based information retrieval or landmark-based navigation, faces the problem of lack of content. Building suitable databases is a daunting task. Brute-force acquisition is very costly and the information goes quickly out of date. A promising approach of addressing this issue is to use online collections of geotagged photos. With the emergence of camera- and GPS-equipped mobile phones, the growth of this resource is bound to accelerate in the near future. In this talk, we describe a method for adaptively maintaining a database of user-contributed images. We show that such database scales gracefully with addition of new data and adapts to changing environments. We then describe two applications built on top of this resource: a robust image-based information retrieval system for mobile devices and a landmark-based navigation system that uses an online collection of geotagged photos for automatically generating navigation instructions.

EveryBit
Rich Hankins
Mobile devices provide a wealth of information and abundant opportunities for building highly personal services, as well as understanding large-scale social patterns. Many researchers, startups and established Internet service companies are currently experimenting with novel applications based on this personal data. Unfortunately, a lot of infrastructure often needs to be built just to prototype and experiment with these services, and it is rarely known initially what data is most important to collect, requiring many experiments and iterations on prototypes. To ease the situation, we have created Everybit, a community platform for mobile data collection, aggregation, and dissemination. The Everybit system consists of three components: (1) client software for collecting context, content, and community data from mobile devices; (2) server software for aggregating and indexing this data; and (3) a simple HTTP-based API for storing and querying data on the server. While the system is conceptually simple, it greatly reduces the effort required to collect, analyze and publish mobile data. As a result, researchers can rapidly prototype new services, possibly leveraging other web-based services (such as Google Maps), and test out theseservices on a community of users. In this short presentation, I'll go over the design of the Everybit system and show how it's currently being used within the C3 team.

Sustainable Interaction Design for Mobile Phones
Elaine Huang (Motorola Labs)
As electronic waste and mobile device proliferation present an increasing ecological problem, industry has responded by working towards more environmentally sustainable solutions largely through advances in materials science and industrial design. In this research, I investigate how interaction design informed by studies of current phone ownership practices can play a complementary role in the design of mobile phones that support more sustainable ownership practices. Through qualitative studies of people's practices for replacing and disposing of mobile phones, this work uncovers some of the challenges to sustainable practices and the complexity of the decision-making processes involved in mobile phone ownership. Based on these studies, this research identifies design opportunities and interface ideas for mobile phones that can help provide users with information and options regarding environmentally sustainable phone practices. Such interaction design, in parallel with materials science, industrial design, and advances in other areas, is a step towards solving the e-waste problem posed by ubiquitous computing devices. In addition, I will also touch upon other current and recent themes in my research, including ethnographic studies of social networks throught the United States that seek to understand how people maintain connectedness within their networks of friends and family through social exchange through a variety of conventional and technological media.

Semantic graphics for more effective visual communication
Vidya Setlur
Computers are becoming faster, smaller and more interconnected, creating a shift in their primary function from computation to communication. This trend is exemplified by ubiquitous devices such as mobile phones with cameras, personal digital assistants with video, and information displays in automobiles. As communication devices and viewing situations become more plentiful, we need imagery that facilitates visual communication across a wide range of display devices. In addition, producing effective and expressive visual content currently requires
considerable artistic skill and can consume days. The goal of my research is to develop new techniques and user interfaces that enhance visual communication, while making it fast and easy to generate compelling content. New algorithms in semantic graphics, i.e. combining concepts and methods from visual art, perceptual psychology, information processing, and cognitive science, help facilitate users in creating, understanding and interpreting computer imagery. In this talk, Vidya Setlur will present the usage of semantic graphics for various information visualization goals.

Tagging in ZoneTag and Jaiku
Sami Vihavainen
Development of mobile phone technology and mobile data transfer technology has generated web 2.0 related mobile services that enable people to share information with their social network regardless of time or location. One specific technology often part of these services is tagging. Tagging itself is not anymore a new innovation. It has been a feature in many web 2.0 services (social tagging systems) for several years. Social tagging systems in mobile terminal are however quite new. Like from desktop terminal also from mobile terminal people can use tags for both to organize information and to communicate with other people. However, mobility has brought especially location tagging into a more interesting light. With a mobile phone it is possible for user to add a location tag to her camera phone photo right after taking it, or to tag her current location and share that information to her friends via microblogging service. In this presentation I’ll show preliminary results from our recent case study, where two mobile/web based social media services, Zonetag/Flickr and Jaiku, were introduced and given to three social groups: high school friends (Finland), interest group of bird watcher (Finland), and group of ‘hipster’ friends in their 30’s (USA), to use mainly for their inner communication. Based on those results I’ll argue that although there are advantages in using location tags for communicating with one’s social network it is not always self evident that people use them. I’ll also argue that the technology itself and the structure of a social group can affect on the appropriation of the tagging technology, especially in location tagging.

Towards intelligent media contents
Manish Anand