I’m off to Redmond tomorrow, having been invited by Marc Smith to attend the Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium. Judging by the documentation from last year’s workshop, it promises to be an interesting gathering.

Here’s my short position paper:

The Social Implications of Location Awareness in ‘Third Places’: Learnings from Aula Helsinki

A large part of mobile messaging traffic is about coordinating face-to-face meetings, many of which take place in so-called third places between home and work. A growing number of mobile social softwares (e.g. Imahima, Dodgeball, Plazes, GeoNotes) allow people to define a physical location, announce their presence in that location, and see who else is now checked in, was there earlier, or plans to head there in the future. However, we know relatively little about how these services actually affect the usage patterns of cafés, bars, and other third places. In our research on the use of the Hunaja (Finnish for ‘honey’) system at Aula’s social club in Helsinki, we found that new forms of serendipity, self-promotion, stalking and avoidance emerged when club members used their mobile phones to check who was in the Aula space. The focus of the talk will be on an ethnographic case study of these emerging social uses of the Hunaja system. The case will be related to the broader social implications of proximity and location sensors in mobile devices. The central argument is that location-awareness services can turn third places into physical buddy lists where comings and goings become ways to change one’s status from ‘online’ to ‘offline.’ To the users, such services can function as symbolic instruments for acquiring and maintaining membership in a community and marking territory; practical tools for optimizing paths in the city to initiate and avoid encounters with specific others; and playful objects for expressing humour and triggering creative social mischief. However, they are also a rich source of misunderstandings and afford ways to purposefully stalk and deceive other users.

Here’s a link to my profile at the MSR SCS2005 site.

It’s been a good week in Finland. Bright sunshine, walks on the ice, great food, friends with interesting new ideas. I had a chat with Chris about the various crazy ways how people are personalizing their mobile phones. Having thought about it for a few days now, it seems to me that clearly some of the personalizing works to give the gadget magic powers (to quote HobbyPrincess) by turning it from a standard commodity into an object with hidden personal meaning. Another form of personalizing is the ‘bubblegum fix,’ e.g. taping phones that are falling apart. Then there’s the ‘extra functionality’ category. I became aware of this when I spent a month loitering in Den Den Town in 1999. That’s where I first saw things like mobile phone antennaes that flashed when the call was active. Another such eye-opener was when a friend of mine taped a mic to his glasses to record interviews for his radio programme.

In my case, the ‘killer’ functional add-on would be a little pager on the key chain, with which I could locate my phone, wallet, moleskine, PowerBook charger, and Nokia ID badge. I seldom manage to leave home without forgetting at least one of the above but oddly, I never misplace my keys (perhaps because they’re always in my pocket).

Clearly, the demand for such an ‘object pager’ is growing. A few years back all we had to remember was the designers’ holy trinity of wallet, keys, and mobile phone. But now there’s also the iPod, the digital camera, and the Blackberry… people even forget their laptops: BBC News reported in 2001 that

Hurried travellers have left as many as 62,000 mobiles, 2,900 laptops and 1,300 PDAs in London taxis over the past six months …. Businesses now risk losing valuable or confidential information stored on handheld devices through the carelessness of their employees.

The problem with the existing key-finders etc. out there is that the firms who are making them think they’re in the gadget business. They’re not: they’re in the gadget personalizing business. The pagers look horrible and the fobs are totally uncool. Someone should do to the key-finder what Apple did to MP3 player: make it cool. Here’s one rough proposal (these slides are from spring 2004):
Download objectpager.ppt

TheFeature.com has an article by Howard Rheingold on mobilities research at Lancaster. I’m quoted near the beginning on my research on the RFID phone, which is one of the ventures that I’ve been studying at Nokia over the past two years. The discussion started when we met on May Day at Howard’s with Aleksi, Ulla, and Justin and the five of us hiked up Mt. Tamalpais for views of the ocean. Justin blogged the hike.