Logging calls and texts durings Friday night's experiment
Shown here is a short video recorded on Friday night when I conducted a small experiment involving my classmates, their mobile phones, and a party we attended.
This is the email I sent that afternoon before making the video:
Dear Party People,
Are you planning on going to the house warming party at
Skabelonloftet? If so, can you all help me with an
experiment for my final project?
What I have in mind is a small game with two very simple
rules:
1. You can not call or text anyone on this email list except
for me
2. You can not receive any calls or texts from anyone on
this email list except for me
I will act as an “operator” by keeping track of everyone’s
dispatches. You can call or text me to leave an update
about yourself, or to inquire about the latest update from
a particular person.
See you at the party tonight (i hope)!
Adam
There was no real objective for doing this other than seeing how the evening would be different when friends could not as easily contact each other. In the end, it really was not any different at all except for maybe people putting in a little more thought about where & when to meet. What was interesting though was that a few people broke the rules which they originally accepted from me. For example, Mimi got on a wrong bus which she perceived as a “little emergency” and felt the need to inform Nina immediately. Meanwhile, Magnus arrived at the party earlier than everyone else and out of discomfort (or boredom) decided to call people directly to urge them to hurry up.
It was also interesting being the hub for everyone, which made me realize just how much back-and-forth communication goes into something like meeting at a party. Keep reading for a transcription of all the SMS and calls I received… Read More »
There is actually nothing exciting about this video, but I enjoyed it for what it is — a really nice example of video ethnography. We have tried this a couple times, but it is a lot harder than it looks. Even if you can get someone to agree to being interviewed in front of a video camera, you still have to worry about eliciting responses that are somewhat clear and to the point otherwise editing a video as watchable as this one is really difficult.
On the Artefact website they have published the first of three articles about how to film customer insights.
This is going to be a 3 part series on how you can film participants as part of a customer insights deliverable. This is a specific type of output that does 3 things for us:
Greater client engagement by selling high level insights from the participant themselves
Greater audience immersion (designers and clients) in the research without the paperwork
Greater distribution and communication because of its sharable format
I don’t know how it started but someone thought it would be fun to play telephone (a.k.a. chinese whispers) during yesterday’s train ride to Malmö. It incited a lot of childishness and made the time fly. This same group of people routinely passes messages along to each other digitally. Can we sacrifice any of the clarity this affords us and bring back some of the random surprises word-of-mouth treats us with?
Another story I arrived late to are the padded lamp posts on London’s Brick Lane. As the story goes, this street, which has notoriously crowded sidewalks, is the location of countless injuries caused by people bumping in to lamp posts and other obstacles while texting. So the city used this street to test a new idea for making streets more safe — padded lamp posts.
This is wrong in so many ways, but you have to love such a low tech solution for dealing with the ramifications of such high tech devices.
UPDATE: There is a software solution! TXT’N'WALK app (http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/news.phtml/23288/txt-n-walk-mobile-app.phtml)
I will continue to post observations, inspirations and anything else that I come across in the city or online which may be relevant to urban computing, one of the domains of my final project
Someone recently showed me this ad campaign by Mini Cooper which uses RFID to target drivers of Mini Cooper cars as they pass by. From a New York Times article on the billboards…
The boards, which usually carry typical advertising, are programmed to identify approaching Mini drivers through a coded signal from a radio chip embedded in their key fob. The messages are personal, based on questionnaires that owners filled out: “Mary, moving at the speed of justice,” if Mary is a lawyer, or “Mike, the special of the day is speed,” if Mike is a chef.
I am not sure if an elevated highway is the safest place to put this but it’s a nice idea nonetheless.
I will continue to post observations, inspirations and anything else that I come across in the city or online which may be relevant to urban computing, one of the domains of my final project
We just finished our 10th or 11th project (i’m losing count) which was an industry project with Nokia. In the end, Nunzia and I produced a series of videos to demonstrate the concepts developed over the last two weeks. Hopefully I will be allowed to share more about this in the near future. In the mean time, expect more updates about my final project which is the only thing standing between now and September.
How does the process of designing a better product work? To show you, Nightline went to Palo Alto, CA to the designers at IDEO, and gave them the toughest problem we could think of. Take something old and familiar like the shopping cart and completely redesign it in just five days.
Keep reading for parts 2 and 3 of this video… Read More »
