Returning to Toronto's Tech Centre for Mobile HCI Conference

I spent much of this week at a tech conference at the Hyatt hotel on Toronto's King Street near Toronto. I haven't been to this hotel for many years, since the height of the dot.com era. The hotel was a Holiday Inn back then. There wasn't much else of note in this area except parking lots and a few restaurants. Back then this former "fashion district" was increasingly populated by tech startups filling the old smallrise buildings left by banished furriers.

The first two jobs I had in the tech sector were within a few blocks of the hotel so we had all-staff meetings at the hotel a few times. Where TIFF is now was a parking lot that I shortcutted through to work.

A business association formed in this area, called SpadinaBus, to foster the nascent Internet sector companies and workers. Pre dot.bomb there were big events and great tech work being done within about 10 blocks of this area. SpadinaBus reached its last stop in the early 2000s along with the Internet crash. Since then Toronto's tech sector (and Canada even) has become decentralized (and less extravagant in their parties).

Now I'm back here for an international tech conference and it was both strange and nostalgic.

The conference was Mobile HCI, an ACM conference about front-end mobile innovation. I volunteered at the conference so I didn't get to attend many sessions, but there were some excellent work. It was the best organized (and cattered) academic conference I have ever attended (which made conference volunteering actually a pleasant experience for the first time).

As with many academic conferences, the presenters are not the most engaging (to put it mildly and politely). I would also have liked to see more of an emphasis on the human dimensions of innovations presented - i.e. more "H" of "HCI". I also think that there needs to be a better mix of methodology - more qualatative data would have helped demonstrated the value and dimensions of the innovations presented.

The conference papers are made available freely for a year. Here are the proceedings.

There was an insipring keynote, Collective Mobile Interaction in Urban Spaces,  by Amahl Hazelton of Moment Factory from Quebec, outlining his organization work of digital, multimedia art and entertainment installations.

Here are my favourite work presented at the conference (with a link to the paper).

• Identity, Identification & Identifiability: The Language of Self-presentation on a Location-based Mobile Dating App by Birnholtz, Fitzpatrick, Handel & Brubaker


• Understanding Localness of Knowledge Sharing: A Study of Naver KiN 'Here'
  by Park, Kim, Lee, & Ackerman


• Was It Worth the Hassle?: Ten Years of Mobile HCI Research Discussions on Lab and Field Evaluations by Kjeldskov & Skov


• ReviewCollage: A Mobile Interface for Direct Comparison Using Online Reviews by Jin, Sakai, & Yatani
• Polly: "Being There" Through the Parrot & a Guide by Kratz, Kimber, Su, Gordon, & Severns
• Narratives: Geolocative Cinema Application by Nagler, Hicks, Hackett, & Zachkarko

The highlight for me, however, was the workshop lead by Martha Ladly on locative mapping and geo-targetted storytelling - as I covered in my blog post, Putting Toronto on the Locative Map, earlier this week.

It was great to hear about some inspiring work happening in my field and returning to the site where my tech career began.

Putting Toronto on the Locative Map

It seems that in tandem with the growing popularity of cellphones and then smartphones and tablets has been the criticism that they detract us from our world. Concerns that technology distances us from the real world and our real lives goes back as least as long as the Luddites raged against the machines 200 years ago.

Technology in the form of mobile computing, cell networks, open geographic information software, and social media have come together in contemporary mobile devices and have undoubtedly impacted our relationships to the physical world in numerous ways. Mobiles have made it easier for us to stay connected to one another throughout our daily travels, to find our way in unfamiliar spaces, or to report political events to the world.

Yet much of the academic research on mobiles has neglected the human dimension and instead fetishizes technology or has shunned it all together for its perceived dehumanizing qualities. There are a few scholars who are demonstrating that mobile technology can be used to enhance or share our relationship to the physical world.

One such scholar is Martha Ladly, a professor at Toronto's OCAD university. Martha's work has explored how mobile devices can be used to share spatial stories and representations that foster people's connections to the places they encounter. In 2007, she developed an early locative media app, Park Walk, which used the GPS capabilities of people's mobiles to deliver geotargetted narratives of particularly places (Toronto's High Park and Grange Park).

So I was really excited when I heard that Martha was leading a day-long workshop in conjunction with the Mobile Human Computer Interaction conference occurring this week in Toronto. The workshop called People, Places, and Things - A Mobile Locative Mapping Workshop was organized by Martha, Bryn Ludlow, and Guillermina Buzio. They described their goals as:

Cultural production is about people (both contemporary and historical); places (existing situations, and their connections with the past); and things (artifacts and archives). In this workshop, participants will learn how to explore people, places, and things through the creation of personal narratives in small collaborative groups. They will then visit and locate their stories in public space at a nearby local park, connecting with their potential audiences through mobile storytelling and interactive GPS mapping on Google Earth.

Lucky for me, Martha made it possible not only for me to participate in the workshop but also invited me to help out in planning it. Martha had lead a similar workshop in Italy and shared with me her steps. With Guillermina, I put together instructions for the workshop that lead people through mapping a route via their mobile device, documenting their experiences and impressions, plotting them on a map, and sharing them with others. I posted the instructions so that others can also do it as well.

What I found particularly exciting about the workshop is that it uses technology often used for plotting quantitative info related to demographics or infrastructure and repurposes them to plot and share the very human elements of stories and creative expressions. As one who follows the mobile and geoweb fields, this use of technology is not as common as it could/should be.

Before the workshop, I tried out all the steps with my ten-year-old daughter at her favourite park. As I mapped her route via the GPS-tracking app MapMyWalk on my mobile device, my daughter took pictures of her favourite places on another mobile. Together we made short videos on the mobile of her describing the park's highlights and her memories. Later, she used the free photo-editting software to Picasa to play around with the photos to make digital art.

Using Google Earth, we imported her route as a path and plotted her photos and videos of the park onto a map. My daughter did almost all of this by herself (it's that easy to do). She loved the ability to have her stories and images added to the map and loved interacting with it all. She wants me to do this workshop with her Grade 5 class (even if it is easy and fun to do, the idea of being with 23 little kids as they run amok in a park is not inspiring). Here's her final tour as a KMZ file.

Martha opened the workshop on September 23 by defining locative "not as positioning ability but rather, it means tied to or embodied in place". Although locative media has a short, about 15-year, history (see a history I compiled), Martha placed the workshop project within a history of other innovative locative media work, as can be seen in her presentation she has posted.

Later, the attendees went to a nearby park and began capturing their experiences and creative encounters with place. Some people captured the park's soundscapes while others arranged playful, expressionist imagery. Martha describes the outcomes of the workshop:

The workshop was a great opportunity to connect with both residents and visitors to Toronto attending Mobile HCI, and gave us a chance to relax together in a beautiful historic location; to document and share stories and experiences in the park together and record them with the Google Earth Toolkit; to enjoy some of the best weather of the season; and to see Toronto at its best! We had a great group and learned many new approaches to mobile locative mapping, with a delightful day in Grange Park. I was particularly impressed with the wide variety of approaches and aesthetic and technical responses to our challenge to create new narratives in the Grange Park setting. And it was a lot of fun!

The workshop was fun, but it really impressed upon me that digital technology can easily and freely be used to share our experiences of space and enhance our relationship to place.

Idle Moments

As I posted a couple days ago, I've quit Facebook. But now I find myself frequently with times throughout the day when I have a few free minutes and need something to occupy them with.

Everyone has such idle moments - time when it isn't feasible or desirable to do productive or deeply engaging activities. They occur while waiting for appointments, riding the subway, during TV commercials, sitting on the john, etc.

Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram can be excellent snacks to satiate these idle moments. But as I indicated in my prior post, I find my Facebook use to be overall more negative than positive. And I never particularly liked Instagram and Twitter's firehouse of content (much of it visual and textual diarrhoea).

I have also found good mobile app games, but I find they get boring or overly frustrating after a few weeks. For instance, this summer I discovered the trivia contest app, Quiz Up, but abandoned it after a few weeks when I earned all the realistically attainable titles and rewards. (Quiz Up is a great app, but they direly need to rethink how they keep players beyond the initial novelty usage phase.)

A new book (recommended oddly enough by a friend via Facebook), The End of Absence by Michael Harris discusses how our always-connected to social and information networks has resulted in a "absence itself-of silence, wonder and solitude" that is important to have time for contemplation and freedom. Silent moments, however, don't work for me- I have a nonstop interior monologue that provides an endless supply of worries and problems that I must constantly keep at bay.

So I'm feeling good about giving up Facebook, but I don't know what to do with these idle moments now!

Any suggestions for great ways to occupy a few minutes of free time (both wired and unconnected) would be greatly appreciated.

Closing the Facebook

A few days ago, I signed back into Facebook after a month long self-imposed exile. In an effort to improve my work-from-home efficiency, I had my wife change my password and not give it to me. I did the same with my email and Twitter accounts (I still haven't signed back onto Twitter, but I couldn't live without email beyond a couple days.)

In terms of improving efficiency, the effect was negligible - an expert procrastinator can always find pressing distractions. But the Facebook vacation did offer a personal experiment. I haven't gone more than a week without accessing Facebook since I became a member years ago. My usage has grown exponentially over the years, particularly when I got a smartphone and also when I started working from home. Pre-exile, I was visiting Facebook several times a day to read posts and comments and I would post at least once a day.

Over the years, I've read a lot of criticism and thought they were ignoring the positive aspects. For people geographically or socially isolated (e.g. moving away from friends or suffering from social phobia), Facebook can serve a vital social function.

It can also be a great way to share information from people who share similar interests and viewpoints (although such homophily can also limit the depth and diversity of information one gets exposed to - see this article for more). It can also provide entertainment and information for the many otherwise idle moments of life.

Considering these and other benefits and also considering my prior addiction-level usage, I thought I would go into heavy Facebook withdrawal. Much to my surprise, however, I didn't miss Facebook.

Not Missing Facebook
Other than a slight desire a few times to share a particularly great photo of my kid doing something novel, I never missed Facebook once.

It's not like my life during the Facebook break was busier or more fullfilling than before. During that time I also didn't interact any more or less with my friends face-to-face than normal, as some Facebook quitters insist will happen.

Even before my Facebook exile, I had started to feel that Facebook was becoming less interesting and meaningful. Most of the people I knew had reduced posting their quality and volume of posts and comments.  With a few notable exceptions, the bulk of posts in my feed (aside from ads) were pictures of people's food, trip photos, with the occasional cartoon, George Takei post, or cat meme thrown in. Don't get my wrong, I love cat videos, cute baby pictures, and George Takei.

Upon my return to Facebook rather than feel like I had missed out on great stuff and connection with friends, I questioned why was I had been using Facebook in the first place?

But I was still surprised why I didn't miss Facebook considering how much I loved it before. So I googled quitting Facebook for others' thoughts on this.

Why Quit Facebook?
It turns out that lots of people have quit Facebook and found it similarly relieving. So I gathered some of their points below to help explain why giving up or reducing Facebook can be beneficial. I don't share all these points, but they present some keen insight into the effects of using and not using Facebook:

[Quitting Facebook meant that] I've sequestered myself from the content that moves me to compare my haves/have nots to others' and overanalyze my life and my choices.

Jordan K. Turgeon Huffington Post

In getting rid of my account I had no option but to send personal e-mails, texts, cards, letters, and make phone calls, and have the quality and substantive contact that is impossible to achieve through Facebook. While the amount of contact I make with individuals on a daily basis has, of course, decreased, the quality of that contact has been greatly improved and I have started to re-establish meaningful friendships with those whom, despite social networking, I had lost touch.

Abigail O'Reilly, Little Red Ranting Hood

After posting [on Facebook or Twitter], I would just move on, like a junkie moving from score to score, always looking for the next high and rarely enjoying or examining the one I was having. Posting on Facebook or Twitter just lets me flit my nails across the surface of my writing itch. Then I'd move to the next mini-moment, without ever letting whatever I was experiencing resonate within me.

Maile Keone, Huffington Post

What we want when others view us [on Facebook, per a study] they learned, is praise. It's gratifying when people "Like" and/or comment on your new profile photo. The problem is that, when they don't grace you with "Likes" or comments, it makes you feel less valuable.

Araceli Cruz, Fusion.net

[One of the main things I don't miss about Facebook is] the wasting of time. True story, I finish work about a half hour early each day, thanks to my not having Facebook. In between writing posts, I'd always log in, see what was up, and then I'd inevitably wind up going down some rabbit hole into someone's life I haven't physically seen in 15 years.

Nicole Fabian-Weber, The Stir

All this social sharing has too often ruined my ability to be present and live in the moment. It’s easy to start viewing the world in terms of what will make a great status update. Or taking photos only for the sake of letting other people share in a moment. We soon find ourselves viewing every thing we do in life through the lens of our smartphone. Constantly reporting our lives rather than living them. Only valuing activities to the extent that they can be captured and shared online.

Mathew Warner, The Radical Life

One writer, just swore off using the Like button on Facebook but found meaningful results:

I had been suffering a sense of disconnection within my online communities prior to swearing off Facebook likes. It seemed that there were fewer conversations, more empty platitudes and praise, and a slew of political and religious pageantry. It was tiring and depressing. After swearing off the Facebook Like, though, all of this changed. I became more present and more engaged, because I had to use my words rather than an unnuanced Like function. I took the time to tell people what I thought and felt, to acknowledge friend’s lives, to share both joys and pains with other human beings.

Elan Morgan, Medium.com

The points raised by these writers and myself are consistent with a study ran by Pew. It turns out many people take a Facebook break - and many go back to it. Beyond the people who reported being too busy to use Facebook (21%), other people noted that they had lost interest in Facebook (10%), found that the quality of content was not compelling (10%), found the site was too full of gossip and drama (9%), or that they were spending too much time on Facebook (8%).

Although my Facebook break did not have the desired effect of improve my work efficiency, it did allow me some time to reflect on my usage and consider the effects Facebook was having on me. I strongly recommend other Facebook addicts consider a similar break.

In the end, I can't imagine quitting Facebook completely as it is a dominant communication channel and cultural outlet. But I do intend to limit my use to once every two or three days - and go from there.