Wednesday 6th February
Workshops(at the uniMail)
“Help us design a nex type of web to manage presence, feeds, flow, activity and peripheral awarness (with GTD!)” presented by Lee Bryant
At first I’ve thought”wooo,what a title!isn’t it?”
Then I have to explain something…what’s a GTD?
Coming from my naïve world, it was the first time I’ve ever heard about such a thing. Maybe it has the same effect on you now.
Basicaly, to summarize, GTD means “getting things done”, it helps you to visualize the different tasks you’ve got to do.
Lee Bryant leads a company called HeadShift, based in London, mainly dealing with organisation and social systems in companies. How can we improve and organize people’s work, or should I say, their working methods, through interfaces and managing systems for informations?
We had a quick overview of the different stakes and random needs, such as the “overload informations” phenomenon, the “ inbox syndroma”, and the anonymous information drama ( yeah! Give a Name to your folders and files guys, it’s easier then…)
The aim of the all thing, finally, consists in providing people a sort of personal radar, increasing human interactions, personalising informations, and the last but not the least, using attention feedback to drive relevance.
At this moment, the first question I had in mind was ”do they want us to think about a new netvibes?” ,which seemed quite ambitious and exciting.
After this promising speech, Colin and Tom (Lee’s assistants…?)Came more concretely to the point, presenting different archetypes of communication tools, solutions for information storage,such as outlook,iGoogle,Twitter,…
This presentation has led to an interesting diagram

DIAGRAM coming soon

Then, we’ve been presented two topics, leading to a brainstorming in group of nearly 4 or 5 people: “How technologies can influence and affect our decisions?” and “What sort of features list could be relevant into this context?”
The first one brought on the table the remaining and important question of the truth online. Are the informations you may find about people through social network tools valid?Are we loosing certain obvious elements such as instinctive feelings, during the first meeting, the firt face to face with someone new, for instance?
The second one aimed at putting analogue versus digital questionning, because, as a matter of fact, digital world doesn’t necessarily improves people’ s life.
What do we want to pipe through? How do we want to access and transform this information? What sort of global action do we need to support? What are the key features of the tools?
We took netvibes as an example of a personal virtual landscape, but built on postcard views, boxes are not opened yet…So how could we keep this feeling of an overview of a personal virtual landscape,but with opened boxes?
We (Erwan McIntosh, Benedikt Foit, a smart English girl…sorry for the name..and me )finally proposed a simple idea of a basic interface, as a search boxe, with clouds and lens behind,in the foregrounf, reacting to any keywords…

Y generation and teeangers and new technologies/medias.

This workshop turned naturally into a discussion envolving many topics, leading us to understand new social behaviours, helped with four Swiss teenagers, pupils coming from “la Chataigneraie”school(Chloe,, Louisa, Leam and Eliott) who gently answered, and illustrated their uses of internet and mobile phone in their dailylives.
The different topics we came through:
Social networks(facebook), IM(msn), music, video films, email, blogs, niche web2, location based, connectivity, phone-sms, own tools, virtual world-games, real world, friends social circle, buying-ecommerce, advertising-marketing messages, privacy, organizing…
The conclusion of this conversation, finally, made me think “cool, those guys seem to be on earth, no danger for young generations…”(did I have doubts about it by the way?...)

Pictures coming soon

Thursday 7th February
Welcome to LIFT!(at the CICG)
After a brief speech of Bruce Sterling, going from global warming to the new first French lady “Carla Bruni” or should I say Madame Carla Sarkozy, Pierre Bellanger ( Skyrock radio, France), presented “skyblog”, the 1st French social network, targeting teenagers. According to him, instant messaging on a desktop, as it is now, is going to disppear, to be mainly replaced and used on mobile devices such as mobile phones. Social networks represent the future of telecommunictions. He talked about a “netamorphasis”(game on words), and the obvious birth and creation of new general mobile platforms.
Jonathan Cabria highlighted the identity issue, and developed his point about permeability and transparency online.
The virtual life added to the real life equal to THE life.
The human being needs to be connected in order to feel safe. but there’s apparently no choice, since you’re marginalised if you don’t attend to those social networks.
It brings a felling of belonging, necessary to the social animal,the human nature. The virtual life allowed people to express their repressed personalities, ”in a safe harbour”.
Stephaie Booth, a former teacher, now working as a web freelancer, presented ”going solo”, a professional tool, providing advice for freelancers.
Ewan McIntosh,(he’s baaaack!remember?we were together during the worshops…such a surprise!anyway) a former teacher as well, presented ”edubuzz.org”, an educational tool for children, a sort of teacher blogging community, using the internet medium to help and educate children more easily.
”something has changed…”
In my opinion, such an interesting project, illustrated and supported by a nice and funny video(link coming soon )
USER EXPERIENCE
Younghee Jung is a researcher working at Nokia company.
3,1billions/6,5billions people have a mobile phone on the planet.
As a matter of fact, it’s easy to figure out that mobiles have become the main way of communication.
She focuses her researches on the basic but complex question of ”what’s a cell phone?what’s it going to be?”. The “Nokia open studio”competition, challenged 3 local teams in different areas of the world: India, Brazil, Ghana.
“mobile phones for the future should come from the people”
As a result, many poetic and surprising ideas and project poped up, such as a celly broadcasting peacefull vibes to prevent people from violence, a mobile phone giving informations about weather when you point it at the sky, or an entertaining mobile device, educating children, leading them on the right way…
Geneviev Bell, an anthropologist, gave precisions on the concept ”lying online” and “the other perspective of secrets”.
Lie is not the opposite of truth anymore but the opposite of reality.
To lie expresses the desire of the deny of he reality. That’s why, perhaps, finally, a lot of companies made a business out of it.
Paul Dourish, researcher for Apple(for instance), pointed out ethnography’s relevance to design, and questioned the mobility matters : presence, absence, being somewhere.
and how we reproduce reality’s behaviours linked to space organisation, in the virtual world.
Rituals(nomadism, pilgrimage…), structures(boundaries, categories…)…