Alan Gibney was over at Arup a couple of weeks ago testing a Wireless Sensor Network design tool in number 8 Fitzroy Street that he developed during his PhD on a tool for wifi access point positioning.

Using a 3D info of the building the tool allows us to figure out the best location for network gateways based on the required location of sensing nodes and the material characteristics of the building. This particular installation was of interest since the majority of the office is open plan which means that the "stuff" that interferes with wireless signals is much more dynamic and difficult to model than say a concrete wall or a glass partition which is traditionally quite stationary and has modelable properties.

Data Capture Process

The process shown in the sketch above involved 1] identifying sensor locations on the fourth floor of number 8 Fitzroy, 2] walking around the floor plate taking measurements of signal strength for each node in different areas, 3] mapping the signal strength, 4] generating a heatmap of gateway options, 5] running agent based optimisation algos to select optimal gateway positions.

Signal strength of node in different locations of office

The signal strengths were then loaded into the design tool to verify that the actual were similar enough to those predicted in the model. With a mean error of 1.41 the model seemed pretty robust.

The design tool then allows a variety of gateway / sensor nodes positions to be tested and compared for different types of optimisation (battery life, signal robustness, minimising nodes required etc.)

Topology of possible WSN

A ray launching method is used to propogate the signal strength from a node to a gateway with the journey being recalculated using a motif model that describes the radion propogation model of a material. The image below shows the heat map generated for a gateway positioned in the open plan area of the office.

Candidate gateway locations

Measurement vs Prediction

Heat map based on signal strength from gateway

Next steps are to use the design tool to model the whole building in preparation to roll out a 200+ node WSN in the building. The aim of the installation will be to monitor light (lux) levels in the office alongside occupancy to analyse and optimise both light comfort levels and energy efficiency.

More detail on the WSN design tool is available at:

Motif Model

Propagation Model

Optimisation Algorithms

All images on Flickr

I spent the day at Imperial College Business School as part of a Design London and Living Labs Global event to bring together the tech and public sectors to talk about connected cities and to launch the Living Labs Global report Connected Cities Handbook - "a book about opportunity and frustration" (Sasha Haselmayer)

The day was a mix of talks (mine is here), discussion sessions and elevator pitches: a great poem from TfL (on Design London website soon) and itiner.pl real time traffic info looked interesting (on living labs global showcase site). Below are my notes and points of interest.

Nick Leon - introduced Connected Cities education programme, an initiative between Design London at the RCA and Imperial College London and Living Labs global. The 3 day course introduces mechanisms for service providers to take ideas from concept to living lab to market place. Subjects covered include: well connected cities, transforming public services, the city as a system of systems, from idea to pilot to early market, true public private partnerships for innovation, innovation and new business models.

Dominique Laousse - RATP / Prospective and Innovative Design - "The mobility cocktail" how to make sense of the ubiquity of the mobile both from human ethology and urban ecology. Chronosapiens, promiscuity of the crowd, beta-city, wikipolis, metapolis. Trains, trams, buses in RATP for 30% of travelers it is their primary place to read - do we design for this? project Future en Seine - Re-enchant every day trips - leaving a trace, a narrative. project Musetrek - re-discover trip pleasure - info on stations? projects Social freight - with MIT - low cost delivery of small packages by existing travellers for elders, workers, ....

Andrew Davies & Lars Frederiksen - Innovation Mgt and Sustainable Cities
Case study of work with Arup on learnings from developing an eco city - Dongtan - shifting from industrial age to ecological age approach.

Erkko Autio - Prof. Qinetiq EPSRC Chair in tech transfer and entrepreneurship.
Global Entrepreneurship Monitor - mapping relationship between early stage entrepreneurship against GDP - interesting clusters of geographic regions.
"Entrepreneurship happens in cities"

Panel discussion.
Stephen Dodson DC10Plus
Victoria Thornton Open House London
Micael Gustafsson Oresund IT

Questions and observations floating around the room at the end of the day.
What is the most successful application of technology in the fabric of the city?
We need brave CIO's who are prepared to push technology to solve problems?
Why is there a mismatch between the concepts being shown in the demos / elevator pitches and what we see in our local cities?
Are the leaders in local authorities empowered, accountable to their constituents, capable of delivering the kinds of systems being pitched.

Photos of the day are on flickr

Interesting SENSEI quarterly meeting at Telenor in Oslo. The WP5 guys spent most of the week hacking in the reception of the Radisson where wifi was good and ports were open to get the demo working for the plenary on Thursday. The pan European testbed is starting to take shape with islands of sensor networks in Norway (2 in the plenary room using two different sensor platforms), Finland (Sensinode) and Romania (where the primary Sensei platform is hosted).

Had some interesting discussions on the proposed field trials - three have been proposed to date including:

1] environmental monitoring using mobile sensor nodes fixed to buses in Belgrade (EYU)

2] workplace monitoring using room access, comfort data, booking information (TID)

3] sports / environmental monitoring in the customisabale environment at eXperience Lab (UTwente)

In the pipeline is to create a SENSEI wrapper to connect the current Arup sensor network data. I need to also throw in a couple of actuatable devices in there. Need to explore possibilities of connecting to and from SENSEI platform via Pachube. Second Life was also mentioned as an interesting platform to test the horizontalisation theme. If we can create a connection between SENSEI applications and objects in SL then we have a virtual mechanism to test multiple uses of SENSEI data.

Also discussed in the field trial session was the issue of horizontalisation. A key goal of the SENSEI architecture is to facilitate the ability for nodes within islands of sensors networks to be re-used by multiple applications. It would be interesting to do an Architecture School project during one of the field trials where all the sensors / actuators being generated for the field trial are accessible for a group of designers to re-purpose / re-imagine the kinds of services that such data could create. Get in touch if you are interested and have a bunch of students...

The photo at the top of the post is of the Telenor buildings in Fornebu, Oslo. I was impressed with the art around the building - striking to me was the digital facade when i arrived which advised that i "think differently" and "be kind to others". The buiding long facade installation was created in 2002 by Jenny Holzer. I also loved the Daniel Buren columns and the large glass mosaic:

More photos on flickr

Just back from a beautifully sunny Brighton attending dConstruct 2009. The blurb says: "dConstruct 09 brings together leading thinkers from the fields of ubiquitous computing, interface design, gaming and mobile to explore the challenges of designing for tomorrow." Great low cost conference, sold out, great speakers, in a great venue. Below is a summary of observations during the day.

First up was Adam Greenfield talking about "Elements of a Networked Urbanism". Lots of interesting pairs now >> new got me thinking about how the digital layer may manifest itself in our cities. Of particular interest were information that:

expires >> persists - as we create geolocated information that is stored in the temporal ether history will persist - both at a public and personal level.

wayfinding >> wayshowing - typically signs are located statically (even if they have dynamic content). Mobile mapping is already creating the personal "showing" devices of the new.

objects >> services, vehicle >> mobility, ownership >> using, I can understand the Spotify example and the StreetCar one (although i have never used the latter), but I like to own my Triumph, do I need to? Not sure. Do i want to? Yes. I think there is more to ownership than functional need. When i look at my young son he is desperate to own toys - not just play with them but he wants to take them back to his cave. How will we release our desire to own?

Schelling >> shoaling - rather than the static mtg points (under the clock at Grand Central) a move towards dynamic, social networked "i am here" gatherings.

community >> network - you don't necessary want to know everything about your neighbours, ignorance can make community friendships easier, in the virtual space you connect to those who have similar affinities to you more easily, in a way that you cannot in cities. You cannot necessarily overlay online social space to the physical cities - if we did would it look like the suburbs?

consumer >> constituent - in the new we are equal co creators - what will this mean in the urban environments we are desiging?

Second up were Mike Migurski and Ben Cerveny from Stamen on the theme of "Let's See What We Can See (Everybody Online And Looking Good)" Great walk through of some their projects which i had seen but not analysed before.

Ever felt alone sitting by yourself on a telecon call? moveon.org was a project where they mapped large numbers of people listening into conference call based meetings to give people a feeling of participation since they can "see" others on a map.

For sfmoma artscope, they were given a 6000 strong art collection and asked to create an interactive web based browsing interface. One key aim was to get the zeitgeist view. They used pan, zoom, tile metaphors of mapping. Each image of artwork is rendered as a tile with top left showing first bottom right showing most recent.

One of my favourite nebisms was "dimensional synesthesia" - taking the temporal time line of the collection and transposing it into the spatial. Visualisation being used to stimulate a different way to look at the data. One for me to explore with our internal R&D / innovation projects website (6 years of data 2000+ projects)

Also great to get a first hand demo of the hurricane tracker web app which i had read about but not really looked at. On the meta view of the hurricane tracker "the individual instances when taken together allow us to understand the whole piece" another nice nebism on *sculpture in possibility space*.

The final speaker of the day was Russell Davies (Materialising and Dematerialising A Web of Data. (Or What We've Learned From Printing The Internet Out)) who i have heard much about but never heard. A great, funny speaker who uses props on stage - excellent! Best quote was one he made at Guardian conference re Stuff we read in 2008 "we have broken your business, now we want your machines" Take away message was that we need to think more about how we embed the web in the world around us (and not just try to put the world into the web).

Other comments that i liked included:

Brian Fling (What's Next? How mobile is changing design) "twitter the product is not a website it is an api" the result of mobile is that the future of web is not about a single website but about designing for different contexts. Mobile - portable, personal and ubiquitously connected.

Robin Hunicke (Loving Your Player with Juicy Feedback) on making your app juicy (fun, playful, engaging - more bouba less kiki) and introduced the MDA framework to me (mechanics dynamics aesthetics) examples of juiciness included: prius energy display, armchair revolutionary website, wii, iphone

August de los Reyes (Experience and the Emotion Commotion) supporting use of MDA but in an industrial design perspective. Also his great prickles and goo clip - http://www.neticons.net/prickles

books to search out:
The emotion machine - Marvin Minsky (via August)
The nature of technology - Brian Arthur (via Russell)
Digital Fabrications - Lisa Iwamoto (via Adam)

At Imperial College for a UK centric workshop on current state of the art in Ubiquitous Computing research in the UK. Most of the UK universities were represented with talks covering the Art and Design of Ubiquitous Computing, the Politics of Ubiquitous Computing (sustainability and environment issues) and the Science and Technology of Ubiquitous Computing.

Gonzalo had a poster accepted based on some of our previous work. My notes from items of interest follow.

BOP - Making Sense of Space was a £1 million, two-year, multidisciplinary project, funded by the UK government’s Technology Strategy Board. It investigated how ubiquitous computing, using wireless sensor networks (WSN), could be used to create a better understanding of the creative workplace. The project ended in December last year but I am still finalising the last few *project management* items.

I have been asked by a few people to provide a summary of the project and what we learnt. A summary pdf was created for the final conference. Below are my thoughts.

What did we do? BOP gathered quantitative and qualitative data about the physical environment, the use of space and the mood of the work force. The WSN toolkit enabled the collecting, manipulating and displaying of both tangible environmental factors, for example, light levels, heat levels, noise levels and people’s presence, and workforce reports on intangible factors, such as perceptions of personal energy levels, sense of well-being, stress and feelings of connectedness with others. In practical terms this meant we deployed a 20 node WSN capturing environment data, activity based sensors and prototyped several different polling devices.

Crossbow WSN - light, temperature, pressure

Arduino based CO2 sensor

Arduino based activity sensors - presence at meeting tables

Beastie based activity sensors - ultrasounder to monitor corridor activity

Weigh your opinion - polling devices

Visualisation - ticker playing in entrance to office

Visualisation - intranet, screen based

Auralisation

Why do this? Organisations are potentially interested in space from three main perspectives: cost efficiency; employee performance; and brand image. Current measurement practice relies largely on hard-wired sensors, for monitoring of building services, and on manual clipboard surveys and/or online surveys for occupant feedback. Relative to these approaches, the toolkit offered several advantages, such as easier, cheaper data collection, more rapid analysis/presentation and the wherewithal to collect a broader set of data. In addition, the use of playful ‘front-ends’ offered the prospects of higher participation rates, hence more complete data sets, while the use of rapid visualisation techniques offered the prospect of a speedy feedback loop to building/office managers, line managers or the work groups themselves.

What did we learn? Here are my top three:
- The WSN technology worked but takes longer than acceptable to set up and use. Getting a network configured to reliably measure the data you want without intervention is not trivial.
- It is difficult to solicit qualitative environment information in an automated manner. Whilst the polling devices worked well I often found the data analysis sessions left me wishing we had measured more, or differently. I often doubted the scientific validity of the conclusions we reached.
- Presenting the sensory objects and data in a human readable manner increased peoples desire to participate / interact with an object. Sensing and monitoring should be a two way street. (maybe this is why self surveillance works)

Ubiquitous computing is still in its commercial infancy. BOP was the first project to use WSN to get a better understanding of the fit between built environments and the organisations and people who use them.

Other resources:
more photos on flickr
summary podcast with ppt slides
video of an IET presentation I made on this project

We have been working heads down for the past few months on a new EC FP7 project called SENSEI. The goal of SENSEI is to provide the real-time sensor and actuator dimension of next generation network and service infrastructures. Or as the project website puts it:

In order to realise the vision of Ambient Intelligence in a future network and service environment, heterogeneous wireless sensor and actuator networks (WS&AN) have to be integrated into a common framework of global scale and made available to services and applications via universal service interfaces. SENSEI creates an open, business driven architecture that fundamentally addresses the scalability problems for a large number of globally distributed WS&A devices. It provides necessary network and information management services to enable reliable and accurate context information retrieval and interaction with the physical environment. By adding mechanisms for accounting, security, privacy and trust it enables an open and secure market space for context-awareness and real world interaction.

The tangible outputs of the SENSEI project include:

1) plug and play architecture / protocol
2) open service interface
3) efficient WS&AN island solutions (targeting 5nJ/bit)
4) pan European test platform

Our focus has been on supporting the scenario development and hopefully over the next month or two I will post some the scenarios that we have been finding most interesting. The themes we have been focusing on include Smart City, Healthcare and Transport.

The project fits under Future Internet - ICT Challenge 1: Pervasive and Trusted Network and Service Infrastructures

Details of the Bop Creative Workplace conference are now available on the bop website. A pdf of the conference programme can be accessed directly. If you are interested in coming along contact myself.

Friday 30th November 2007
Central Saint Martins Innovation
University of the Arts London, Southampton Row, London WC1B 4AP

Spent last week at Clima2007 conference in Helskini. A podcast (with slides) of the presentation is available on the foresight podcast stream. Photos on Flickr

Crossbow Technology announces Imote2 .Builder for Microsofts .NET Micro Framework - looks like a MS version of the sunspot kit....

Spoke at ICT Call 2 Information Day - Hotel Carrefour de l'Europe 110, Rue Marché aux Herbes 1000 Brussels, Presentations have been uploaded to the agenda webpage.

Video of DW presentation at IET Wireless Sensor Networks Conference

The Bop project website has been updated to include more of a public overview of what we are upto. If you have any queries about the project then please get in touch. We are past half way so it should be all downhill from here...

The second public workshop of the DTI project Arup are leading. Drop me a line if you want to attend...