Categories
Innovation

On Surveillance

I don’t have a problem with someone filming another person on their mobile phone in a public area where it’s obvious that many people are watching, so why do I have a problem with surveillance cameras in workplaces and some other locations? Isn’t that inconsistent? What’s the difference? I think the answer is that the first scenario does not break social protocols. If you’re speeding down the highway, you obviously know that there are going to be tens, if not hundreds, of other people watching you. That somebody might capture your flaunting of the law on camera does not change the social protocol. That is, you know you are being watched by human eyes. The same goes for taking recordings during meetings. There are other people in the meeting and they’re going to hear what you say anyway. In the second scenario, the camera is always turned on, even when there are no other people around. This is the important difference. It is easy to forget that your actions might be caught on camera, even if the camera is in plain sight and there are notices everywhere warning that there are surveillance cameras in use. So a woman might adjust her bra, or a man might pick his nose, not realising in the instant that it’s all being caught on camera. You might begin to sing, forgetting that it’s being recorded. Despite technology, we are still very social animals. That means we think in terms of the other people who are physically around us, overlooking the fact that technology enables others to be present in spite of their separation in space and time.

At the QRL labs of NICTA, surveillance cameras have been installed for research purposes in the hallways. I’ve grown kind of used to them. But I do completely forget about them until I get up from my desk and see them hanging out of the ceiling in the hallway. If one were installed in my office where it could record me at my desk, I think it would similarly escape my attention until I turned around and looked at it. I wonder what kind of unconscious embarrassing behaviours the camera would record if it were trained on my desk?

Categories
Innovation

Schulze & Webb: Awesome

Before I go any further with this post, I want to thank Ben for imploring the readers of his blog to check out this presentation from some guys called Schulze & Webb. These days, you get pointers to so much stuff out there on the web, a lot of it interesting, but a lot of it only so-so. Then, occasionally, you’ll come across a gem, which truly was worth reading, and the presentation by Schulze & Webb, for me at least, is one of those gems. A word of advice if you do decide to read it, though: if you’re going to read it, read it right through as there’s a lot of good stuff in it.

I can relate to the presentation, titled The Hills are Alive with the Sound of Interaction Design, and its authors, Schulze & Webb, on a number of different levels. For starters, they use the example of football, specifically that magical goal Argentina scored against Serbia and Montenegro in the 2006 World Cup, to illustrate the concept that the means or the experience is more important to most people than the end result. In scoring that beautiful goal, Argentina strung together 24 passes before Cambiasso struck the ball into the back of the net. Football fans all over the world appreciate that goal because of the lead up to it, not the goal itself. This is also one of the reasons why football lovers can tolerate nil-all draws, and indeed why it can be truthfully said that some nil-all draws are more enjoyable than games in which five goals are scored: there’s so much more to the game than the goals. But football is only the most obvious example. The same can be said of other sports from cricket (the innings-long battle between batsman and bowler, rather than the fall of the wicket) to tennis (the rallies, rather than the rally-ending shot). Anyway, using football to illustrate a neat concept is a sure way to get me on side!

Their presentation also resonates with my recently written “About” page. They both speak of thresholds, boundaries and tipping points. They both talk about figuring out how to develop new things that harmonise with human experience and the human cognitive model (I love their bumptunes hack for the Powerbook; I wonder if the MacBook Pro has an accelerometer?).

Several months before submitting my Ph.D. thesis, I made the decision that I wanted to refocus my subsequent pervasive computing research more towards the user, or at the very least, to ensure that if I was going to be developing middleware to support pervasive computing applications, I would lobby hard to have some time and resources set aside to build decent, cool applications to exercise that middleware. It turns out I didn’t have to lobby that hard! But the point I’m trying to make here is that the Schulze & Webb presentation has provided a timely reminder of why I made that decision to think more about the user in the work that I do: it’s because in the research space I work in, that’s where the rubber hits the road. You can build middleware, context management systems and so forth, but in the end, it’s all in support of what the user wants to do, and it’s a fun challenge figuring out neat applications that people actually want to use because they’re a joy to use.

The challenge in my particular line of work is this: how do you create applications for emergency and disaster prediction, response and recovery which are “fun” to use? How do you design an application for the emergency services sector which creates an experience as pleasurable as watching Argentina’s second goal against Serbia & Montenegro in the World Cup? Is it even appropriate to create fun applications for an industry that, by definition, regularly deals with human tragedy? I hope the answer to the third question is a resounding “yes” if the applications help to save more lives than would otherwise be the case. Perhaps the word I’m looking for isn’t “fun” but “rewarding”. An application that makes its user feel rewarded for using it is a successful application because, presumably, the user will want to continue using it. An emergency worker feels rewarded if they are saving lives and making snap decisions that turn out to be good ones. Therefore, I think a good reformulation of my goal while I remain part of the SAFE project at NICTA is this: to develop rewarding applications (and supporting infrastructure) for the emergency services sector. This isn’t far off my official job description, but what it does is bring into sharp focus the importance of considering the users’ experiences as they interact with the application and system.

Thank you Ben. Thank you Schulze & Webb.

Categories
Random observations

I’m a Mac, and I’m a PC

After a week of using the MacBook Pro that NICTA bought me (strictly for work purposes, of course), I gotta say, I love it! The MacBook Pro will be replacing my Windows desktop at work, and it’s also for taking back and forth between home and work and for taking to conferences etc. I’ve been working on a publishing and reviewing system, and up until now, although it’s NICTA’s IP, it was all being done on my own Linux box at home – not the optimal state of affairs. The sub-optimal nature of this arrangement was made crystal clear when my Linux box started to fail (it’s quite old). So, I asked for a laptop such that I could work on the SAFE project stuff at work as well the publishing and reviewing stuff at home. Somewhat to my surprise, NICTA duly obliged. At least now if something goes wrong with the laptop, all the code is on a NICTA machine and hopefully I won’t be culpable. Of course, it’s much easier to lose a laptop or to have it stolen than a desktop…

The loser out of all this is Linux. I bought a Dell to replace my home machine, and it’s got Windows Media Centre (with free upgrade to Vista) and Office on it. Karen and I need at least one up to date copy of Office between us. The Dell machine is very nice, but I’m a bit disappointed that I seem to have settled into using Windows at home, a day I thought would never come. I’m not a fan of dual booting – I’m generally too lazy for that kind of thing. To my chagrin, in my current job I really do need to use Office products quite frequently, and I’ve never been happy with any of the Open Source Office replacements. I’m still thinking this is only a temporary backward step, and that sooner or later I’ll be back on Linux, or I could even run Mac OS X on the Dell; now there’s an idea!

But one must give Microsoft credit where credit is due. My MacBook Pro has MS Office for the Mac installed on it and I’m using Entourage for mail. So far Entourage has left me with mostly positive impressions. I like it a lot. The Project Centre inside Entourage makes it easier to implement GTD, and it’s generally nicer to use than Outlook, and in my view it’s even nicer than Thunderbird. I haven’t tried Apple Mail, but my feeling is that those Mac users who don’t have a militant aversion to Microsoft products use Entourage in preference to Mail, iCal etc. I only wish that you could customise some of the properties of the mail folders in Entourage, like telling it to display a count of all the messages in the folder rather than just the unread ones. This is one useful feature that Outlook has which other mail clients don’t seem to support. I’ve been using this feature on my PC at work to help me implement my GTD system, and it works very well.

Oh, and here are my favourite Mac ads:

Actually all the ads are great.

Categories
Random observations

Inside NICTA

I’ve instituted a new post category on The Thin Line called “Inside NICTA”. NICTA is, of course, where I currently work. In this category I’ll be writing about things going on inside Australia’s information and communications technology Centre of Excellence, singing its praises and challenging it to be even better than it currently is, all the while being careful not to overstep any boundaries (and getting fired for troubles). RickyRobinson.id.au will be reserved for updates about the particular research I’m working on and the odd NICTA event announcement (again, there are intellectual property considerations that need to be kept in mind), while this weblog will continue to play host to a wide range of topics.

This weblog has been conspicuously quiet on the topic of NICTA, given that I spend most of my waking hours there. I intend for that to change. I want to do my bit to give NICTA the exposure it deserves and needs. I want to promote NICTA as being a great place for people to work, and in so doing, hopefully attract smart and creative people to work at NICTA, thereby making it an even better place to work. However, I also want to push NICTA to be all that it can be (not that I believe this weblog could have a major influence!), and so I will, from time to time, post constructive criticisms of NICTA. In the absence of a NICTA-specific blogging policy, I will abide by Sun Microsystem’s well known blogging policy. I am doing this in the tradition of many bloggers before me, from the Scoble‘s to the Zawodny‘s of the blogosphere. A final hope is that this new post category, in conjunction with the new look RickyRobinson.id.au, will attract potential research collaborators. So if you’re interested in any of the research I do (which you can read about over at RickyRobinson.id.au), just drop me a line: ricky at rickyrobinson.id.au.

I hope you enjoy reading the new Inside NICTA section of this weblog. As always, feel free to leave comments and pingbacks: my intention is to engage the readers of The Thin Line with this new category.