Congratulations to Annika Waern and her group, on their move to Uppsala University in April!

Waern, formerly of Stockholm University, served as the Mobile Life Centre’s director since April 2012. She also headed the Mobile Life project PlaySpace, which explored how people can play games in public spaces such as malls and museums, with and without mobile technology. The program also examined how elderly people might benefit from NAO robots and physiotherapy, among other subjects.

With Waern’s departure, the PlaySpace project wrapped up in March, after a flurry of analysis and writing about the project Codename Heroes. The experimental game incorporates gender-awareness targeting teenage girls, and has the potential to be commercialized, an effort that Waern continues to explore with Mobile Life.

Kristina Höök has stepped in as director of the Mobile Life Centre, with Maria Holm as co-director. The researchers at the centre look forward to continuing their collaboration with Waern and her team in Uppsala.

People like to share, and Mattias Rost of Mobile Life wants to explore how we share on the go. Rost defended his doctoral thesis, Mobility is the Message: Experiments with Mobile Media Sharing, in March, with David Ayman Shamm of Yahoo! Research’s Internet Experiences group as his opponent. Rost’s thesis explores how four different mobile apps function, for sharing photographs, music, restaurant reviews and other information with people immediately nearby – and without a computer.

A team of researchers including Rost, based at the Future Applications Lab led by Lars Erik Holmquist, carried out their experiments at the Viktoria Institute in Gothenburg and the Mobile Life Centre in Stockholm. They tested how people used three applications that Rost helped build: Push!Music, Columbus (for photos tagged with location), and Portrait Catalog (a self-portrait photo app meant for sharing “face to face”). The team also examined how people use Foursquare, a commercial app that lets users “check in” at locations and make recommendations or post reviews.

Rost started his PhD work in 2005, before the advent of marketplaces for apps like AppStore and PlayStore. He noted in his final work that with easier online access, apps can be picked up by thousands of people very quickly; that density of users can help developers. Plus, mobile devices have since become small computers that are always online.

Those changes affect how people use apps: Rost argued that the ability to share with your immediate physical neighbors, whether close friends or perfect strangers, is an important aspect that mobile app designers often miss.

A paper by Mobile Life researcher Kristina Höök of the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) and her colleague Jonas Löwgren of Malmö University was chosen by the Association for Computer Machinery (ACM) as one of the best of 2012. ‘We make the rather obvious point that design research is rarely interested in constructing universal theory’, the authors write, ‘yet aims at a level of knowledge contributions that abstracts slightly from individual artifacts’. They suggest that ‘strong concepts’ could lead to the kind of midlevel knowledge that could be useful in design, without engaging in high-level academic theory.

In their paper, they note that it’s possible to come up with a core design idea without going to high-level theory, while examining interactive behaviors and practice at a basic theoretical level. The researchers present the concepts of social navigation and ‘seamfulness’—the idea that nothing is seamless in real-world technology, and that glitches and transfers from system to system should be open to users to see while they are happening.

Mobile Life recently traveled to India and visited the cities of New Delhi, Bangalore and Chennai with a group of 15 people from the Centre’s industry partners and research organisations. The purpose of the trip was to further our understanding of research and industry in the rapidly growing mobile and home technology development in India, as well as establish working contacts and relationships with local companies and research groups in the field.

Yangqing Celia Zhang looks at how fashion fits to mobile life – and argues that mobile life should fit to fashion too.

Look around at the smart phones near you: they are probably clothed in a beautiful cover, perhaps with trendy patterns and colors, or even personal photos gracing their plastic cases. Phones’ fashion, however, shouldn’t stop with the phones themselves. Instead, mobile devices should be part of human fashion as well, argues Yanqing Zhang, a PhD candidate in the mFashion project at the Mobile Life Center.

Think about the most common ways that mobile devices are folded into our clothes: usually smartphones are used as timekeepers, strapped to runners’ arms, or as music-streaming devices attached to brightly colored headsets on the heads of teenagers bopping down the street. But mobile devices should be more fashionable, says Zhang. The graduate student, who goes by Celia, is also at the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University, and finished her Master’s degree in 2009 at the Centre for Fashion Studies in Stockholm University.

Nokia’s L’Amour Lipstick phone
nokiamuseum.info/nokia-7380

Current fashion should be a starting point for inspiration, she says: ‘It is insightful to study the relationship between clothing and human body, between clothing and devices, and to see how we could design a mobile phone that’s connected to our garments, our appearance and the whole outfit. This is what we call “outfit-centric accessory design”, where a mobile phone is no longer treated as an isolated designed artefact, but something related to the whole display of ourselves’. Mobile phones are intimate tools on which we rely every day, so it’s not a surprise that ‘we aspire to have a phone that’s expressing “me”’, she comments.

Zhang currently is examining the history of mobile design and fashion: While classic shapes like the ‘candy bar’, ‘clamshell’ and slide phones have dominated in the past, large-faced smart phones with interactive interfaces are the current market favorite, which means that ‘every phone looks the same with a big screen’, Zhang says. That universal shape constrains what a fashion designer might create.