April 06, 2003
Proximity research at Nokia
A recent talk by Nokia researcher, Marko Athisaari on interaction design for mobility and proximity - more at: http://flow.doorsofperception.com/content/athisaari_trans.html
My topic is proximity. By proximity, I mean, quite simply, physical closeness; and many among you will ask, “How close is close?” But I mean the stuff that happens between the one-to-ten centimetres range and room-size interaction, and what people do, what kind of activities they undertake in that kind of space.
I might also add that although mobility and mobile telephony seem very much to do with being apart, in fact the evidence is quite to the contrary: a lot of telecommunications behaviour is aimed at getting together physically in the same place.
I will then discuss quickly a couple of groups of services that we might expect to emerge in proximity, and then close with a few challenges for interaction design in this area........Now I’ll look at four kinds of services and product services value that people might get in physical closeness:
1) People in places
2) My things with me
3) Enhanced Spaces
4) Consumption.
Comments
"4) Safe consumption refers to the fact that in physical proximity, a lot of issues concerning trust and security are tacitly taken care of . Imagine paying at a sales counter where we can see the person’s face, perhaps the credit card leaving and then coming back, so many things are taken care of so I can be sure that something has been delivered. And this offers opportunities. In particular, with all of these very intangible mobile services besides messaging that are only just starting to take off, linking them to physical environments where they’re actually activated is a very promising area, and it’s a matter of will to make that happen. Most of the technologies are available."
This is a fascinating topic - one that really gets to the heart of an important way that meaningful social interactions are constructed in "technologically mediated" ways. In Smart Mobs, Howard Rheingold talks about Reputation based systems - "Reputation marks the spot where technology and cooperation coverge...The most profoundly transformative potential of connecting human social proclivities to the efficiency of information technologies is the chance to do new things together, the potential for cooperating on scales and in ways never before possible"
I can see reputation systems - like that of ebay, for example - being a integral part of the way that Athisaari's idea of safe consumption will play out. And as a result, the possibilities for highly collaborative social interactions will hopefully become more ubiquitous. So there.
Posted by: will at April 7, 2003 05:34 AM
please send me informatian of proximity detection that contains electronics circuit and phisilogy
Posted by: farshidsaberian at December 15, 2003 12:00 PM
