Barry Brown

Tangible spotify

My masters student Roy Martens has created an awesome video of his “pick up and play” tangible Spotify interface. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5Q8sbIXWks

Happy new year!

Two recent publications of mine are forthcoming in this new year.  The first comes from some work looking at foursquare data where we explore the ways in which check-in data are not about location.   It’s fun…

Rost, M., Barkhuus, L., Cramer, H., Brown, B. (2013) Representation and communication: Challenges in interpreting large social media datasets. To appear in Proceedings of CSCW’13, Feb 23-27, San Antonio, Texas.

The second comes from work developing a new method of recording smartphone screens and recording device use “in vivo”.  I think this paper does a really nice job of opening up a whole new way of studying smartphone use.  More broadly it questions how we have thought of mobility when studying mobile technology:

Brown, B., McGregor, M., Laurier, E (2013) iPhone in vivo: video analysis of mobile device use.  To appear in Proceedings of CHI ’13, Paris, France, ACM Press.

New York Time coverage

Some coverage of my work with Eric Laurier has appeared in the new york times: “When GPS Confuses, You May Be to Blame”.  It doesn’t quite get the argument right, but it’s great to see the research having a life outside the conference hall.  It also got picked up by a few local newspapers and the Sydney Morning Herald, which I used to read when I lived in Australia - that made me happy.

There’s also a interview with me for “Voice of America” on the same research.

Studying iPhone use in the wild

I’ve been doing some really fun work with Moria McGreggor recently using small wearable cameras and software that records your interaction with an iPhone.  This lets us collect unobtrusive data about how mobile devices and iPhones are used ‘in the wild’ and over a long period of time.  What is fascinating is how much of activity on the device is dependent on what is going on around the device - conversations, buying things, where you are going, and so on.  Building on our earlier work on map use, it also gives us a view on how pedestrians use the iPhone’s maps, and how that gets combined with information search more broadly.

Here’s one example uploaded to you tube.  As the user is talking they ask about how to spell the word “saami” - as they type it, google suggests the correct spelling, and they then reply to their companion “saami”.  Google suggestions in this way becomes a party to the conversation!

B: But artists like Joni Mitchal 

A: uuuh 

B: are sammy

A: iis she sami

B: according to wikipedia

A: no ill use the phone

B: whos the other one

B: the other actress the one who used to go out with jack white [*]

[A does a google search for Joni mitchal]

B: the blonde girl

[A types Saa]

A: how do you write sami is it two a

B: S [*] a m i 

[sees saami suggested] 

A: saami i think

[types mi]

B: its just how you say  it

A: okkhhhhha

I’m really enjoying some of the data this study is producing.  This is also turning into a really interesting method for getting at the details of how mobile applications are used.