Super busy at the moment but I’m delighted to announce “BumpList: An Email Community for the Determined” (my project in collaboration with Jonah Brucker-Cohen) is back online after being offline for 4 years! So now is your chance to join the email community that had most people scratching their heads and wondering what happened to email as they knew it.

Join the list here!

We’ve put it back online because it’ll be showing in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) as part of “The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now” from November 8, 2008, through February 8, 2009. Press release for the show is here.

Other artists in the show include “bramović/Ulay; Vito Acconci; Francis Alÿs; Chip Lord, Curtis Schreier and Bruce Tomb (former members of Ant Farm); John Baldessari; Joseph Beuys; Blank & Jeron and Gerrit Gohlke; George Brecht; Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Mike Bennett; John Cage; c a l c and Johannes Gees; Janet Cardiff; Lygia Clark; Minerva Cuevas; Maria Eichhorn; VALIE EXPORT; Harrell Fletcher and Jon Rubin; Fluxus Collective; Jochen Gerz; Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz; Matthias Gommel; Felix Gonzalez-Torres; Dan Graham; Hans Haacke; Lynn Hershman Leeson; Nam June Paik; Allan Kaprow; Henning Lohner and Van Carlson; Rafael Lozano-Hemmer; Tom Marioni; MTAA (M.River and T.Whid Art Associates); Antoni Muntadas; Yoko Ono; Dan Phiffer and Mushon Zer-Aviv; Raqs Media Collective; Robert Rauschenberg; Warren Sack; Mieko Shiomi; Torolab; Wolf Vostell; Andy Warhol; Stephen Willats; and Erwin Wurm.”

Enjoy, next week regular blog posting will resume.

Very neat – A Periodic Table of Visualisation Methods from Visual-Literacy.org. Hover your mouse over any of the entries and up pops the related visualisation.

Excellent, the 2nd Irish Human Computer Interaction Conference is going to be on on the 19th and 20th of September in University College Cork, Ireland. Submission date is June 13th, 2008. Get writing! For more details keep an eye on the 2008 iHCI website.

Get a very brief glimpse Inside Microsoft’s Research Labs. If you want more depth wander over to Microsoft Research’s website – while there have a look at the recently released report Being Human: Human-Computer Interaction in the year 2020.

Recently I’ve been reflecting on Science 2.0, especially wondering what my research practices will be post-PhD. Science 2.0 (or whatever its getting called this month) is a much more open approach to science. Scientific America has a good introductory article explaining it. For example Science 2.0 scientists put their lab books online, writing about failures as well as success’ while making early stage research work (pre-publication) available for all to read about. Like others I suspect that the rise of the Internet inevitably leads to the emergence of Science 2.0, with a corresponding increased fluidity of idea exchange and cross pollination. There’ll probably be some of the same kind of issues occurring as in other digital media industries, i.e. ignore the openness, then fight the openness and finally embrace it. Admittedly the process of figuring out how to make Science 2.0 work fairly is going to interesting.

Test how your website looks in different web browsers with Browsershots.

You might enjoy the high volume Interaction Design Association (IxDA) mailing list, which is good for getting a sense of interaction design as practiced in the business world.

Visit Riding With Robots for eerie photos of what Spirit and Opportunity see on Mars, along with images from other space robots.

You can find out more about their research at the LEURRE project website, where they wrote about their work experimenting with Artificial Life Control in Mixed Societies.

Separately MIT’s Rodney Brooks and others have been speculating about controlling insects and other creatures via brain implants Can cyborg moths bring down terrorists?

There are also examples where social behaviours, such as altruism, occur in other species Ape Aid: Chimps share altruistic capacity with people.

Now imagine designing a living space, a house, where tiny robot (overlords) carry out constant pest control. Not pest control practiced in an aggressive kill-everything-that-isn’t-human manner. Instead take a subtle holistic approach, which may be more sustainable and environmentally sounder than spraying all kinds of chemicals into our living spaces.

Pest control could be carried out by having the robots exert peer pressure on the insects. Reshaping / redesigning the behaviour of the insects by fooling them into doing what we want, i.e. have a set of tiny ant robots create Follow Me trails that lead away from inside your house. Or get spiders with robotic brains to encourage other spiders to build webs around your porch light. So at night moths are snagged in spider webs rather than swarming into your house when you open the porch door.

There are lots of other possibilities of adapting / redesigning group behaviours by controlling and influencing a few individuals in a group. For example encourage swarms of fish to swim into waiting nets, or encourage animals to eat food waste from dumps so the waste gets “recycled naturally”.

Of course there are negative implications, such as potentially throwing the ecological balance out. Or it’d become possible to literally send a plague of locusts to attack your annoying neighbour’s farm.

Insects and their behaviours as design materials!?

During the week I was at the first Irish Human Computer Interaction Conference (IHCI) in the University of Limerick in Ireland. Thanks to Luigina Ciolfi and members of the Interaction Design Centre (IDC) for organising it and thanks to Liam Bannon for chairing the event.

The purpose of the conference was to bring together researchers and practitioners involved and interested in Human Computer Interaction in Ireland. There was a great turn out with lots of interesting presentations. I’m not sure of the exact numbers but there was around 40 people from all over Ireland.

I think one of the really pleasant surprises for everyone was finding out about the amount and diversity of HCI research going on in Ireland. For example Hyowon Lee talked about the research into interfaces for interacting with large collections of videos and images at the Centre for Digital Video Processing in DCU. Aphra Kerr from NUI Maynooth talked about some of her research into digital games and also touched upon some of the fascinating work they’re doing in the School of Sociology, e.g. social networks, etc. John McCarthy, Ian Pitt, Niamh McNamara and numerous others from Cork talked about research into People and Technology, Auditory/Speech Interface Design, Educational Game Design and Usability Evaluations. The IDC people gave overviews on some of their contributions to Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Auditory Displays, Haptic Interfaces and Software Development Tools. We also heard from TCD’s Gavin Doherty who talked about Games for Mental Health and Speech Interfaces. There was lots more interesting work presented but I’m not going to try and stuff it all into this post.

One of the talks that struck a strong chord with me was Mark Magennis’ presentation about what they do in the NCBI Centre for Inclusive Technology, where they work towards helping make the information society accessible to all.

Of course I babbled about my own work (view slides) on haptics, spatial cognition, information visualisations, embodiment and helping people with colour blindness or low visual acuity see complex visualisations.

As part of the conference there were discussions about what next for the HCI community in Ireland. There’ll definitely be a IHCI 2008 and over the next few months there’ll be a number of other initiatives including a mailing list, workshops, networking and educational events, etc. As I hear about them I’ll post about them on this blog.

Update: There’s a new wiki for carrying on the discussions at http://www.idc.ul.ie/idcwiki/index.php/IHCI_SIG

You could also wander around the Fab Labs Out Reach website, which details efforts to bring “prototyping capabilities to under-served communities that have been beyond the reach of conventional technology development and deployment.”

There’s never enough time for reading BUT you might want to dig into the deeply related “Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata” by John Von Neumann. Or Gershenfeld’s book “Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop — from Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication”.

All this work on personal fabrication makes me drool. It brings together the fundamental tools people are going to need to design, shape and build anything to meet their needs and wants. Without this kind of basic research we cannot hope to have a future where everything is malleable.

I hope and expect that over time less technical knowledge and skills will be required to build. A lot of the tools mentioned in the personal fab space are complex – though not so complex they’re beyond people’s abilities to learn. Easy building tools are important because lots of people will want to build things that enable them to achieve something else. They won’t be inherently interested in the act of building.

I haven’t played with Ning (yet) but based on the video and from reading around it sounds like the commoditization of software infrastructures for social software.

The implications of Ning and cohorts are that we can expect to see lots of small social networks. Are there certain thresholds for small social networks? Will there be too much choice in a small social network? If you have a bunch of friends, say around 20 connected people, will they drown in too many options?

By giving people so many avenues of communication and interaction you could reduce the amount of shared virtual space between a group of friends. For example I often come across quiet web forums with lots and lots of different sub-forums. Each of those sub-forums commonly only has a few threads consisting of a scattering of posts made by different users, and often the posts are widely spread out in time. If you count the total number of posts on the forums there is activity but because the posts are so spread out between different sub-forums and threads the forum feels empty and devoid of participation. Will the same thing happen with small social networks? Do too many ways of contributing and interacting encourage small social networks to die?

Related to that I wonder will people become overloaded with update choice? Should they update their blogs, their photos, their videos, their profiles, leave comments on members blogs, or respond to comments on forums, etc, etc? All that content creation via so many paths sounds like time consuming work.

Mind you automatically pulling together and mashing together (via Ning, RSS, etc) people’s online contributions might help create a community and sense of focus – a village square.