A new source of info

Stephanie Regier, who has been a big part of the design and deployment of this web site and should be writing a blog of her own here, I think, has sent us a link to a site that I hadn't come across before: "experientia ". These folks scan the world for information on, as they put it: "DAILY INSIGHTS ON EXPERIENCE DESIGN, USER EXPERIENCE AND INNOVATION." They seem to do very well on their mobile phone/mobile experience coverage, and the most recent set of posts provides some links with a great deal of insight for mobilemuse researchers:

The first post that caught my eye was the one that Stephanie sent to David and I. Called "MULE" (an acronym for "Mulecular Urban Ludic Entity"), this is a mostly theoretical implementation of games in the city, using cell phones as game-enabling technology. There are quite a number of these world-wide, ranging from the commercial products (such as the game in Sweden profiled in Wired magazing a few years ago) to the notional and prototypical like this one. I think we should call this type of stuff "LudiCity." Get it? Ahem. Our own digital dragonboat was in this vein, and there are elements of this in the new metrocode project, as well.

The second post that I was interested in, once I started browsing around the experientia site, was the one called "herescan." This project, from the same design school as the MULE project, aims to provide a user interface to a growing (well, soon to grow, I suppose, if you don't live in Vancouver where the conditions for innovation are antisceptic, at best - see Jim's post
on this problem) number of location-based applications that ask for your attention on a whole range of topics. The students put together a combination of hardware and software that lets you take part in location-based services without having to walk around with your eyes glued to the screen of your phone (always a problem in a busy urban environment, and something our fellow Heritage Canada project, the MDCN in Montreal, had to wrestle with in their application - people just didn't like wandering around a park staring at a little screen).

The third item, also from a student at ivrea, in Milan, is called uni.me. Uni.me seeks to provide an alternative interface to the availability of your friends, sort of like those lists that come with your instant messaging program but in this case it takes a graphic representation - little floating bubbles that are either open or closed and vary in their proximity to you. To my eye it looks a bit precious and probably not something that a regular person would easily adopt, but the principal - of knowing where your friends are and if they are available for a call - seems like a good one to explore fuller. The availability of your friends is, as David would point out, just another aspect of the all-important context element that mobilemuse is working on.

Three interesting links for mobilemuse from one new web site. Thanks, Stephanie!