Cellphonia

Cellphonia
H79.2472
Fall 2004
Instructor: Steve Bull
Tuesday 3:30 - 6 PM
Office Hours: Tuesday 2:30 - 3:30 PM or by appointment
Email: steve.bull@nyu.edu

Week 1. Cell phones: tiny, cheap, multimedia computers with subscription economic models.

The cell phone: a rocket in your pocket--or are you just glad to see me? Bring your own and let's analyze it.
Evolution of the cell phone from phone call, SMS and games, smart mobs to stock alerts. Discuss cell phone social context of historical tours, integrating with the physical world, democratized telejournalism, and algorithyms for art.
Reading: Information Appliances and Beyond by Eric Bergman, chapter 7, "Designing Mobile Phones and Communicators for Consumers' Needs at Nokia." Handout.
Reading: Mobile and Wireless Design Essentials by Martyn Mallick, Chapter 12, "Thin Client Development."
Assignment: Sign up with your developer that corresponds with your cell phone (Nokia, Sony-Ericcson, etc.) to discover the capabilities of your phone and post your phone stats to your journal page.
Assignment: Sign up with UPOC at http://www.upoc.com/ and join "cellphonia" and make journal entry of this experience.
Assignment: Sign up with Dodgeball at http://www.dodgeball.com/, post a photo of yourself, add class mates and me as your friends and make journal entry of this experience.

Week 2. User Experience

How to cheat and flirt in class most effectively. Discussing in detail the user experience with SMS. How many button clicks will a user endure? Need analysis. Dungeon and Dragons vs. customer service. Imagine Mom as your user and explore possible scenarios for designing a fun or useful application.
Reading: GUI Bloopers by Jeff Johnson, Ch7, "Responsiveness Bloopers." Handout
Reading: Mobile and Wireless Design Essnetials by Martyn Mallick, Ch4, "Mobile Application Architectures."
Assignment: Design an application for your Mom, and prepare as power point demo with printouts for class.

Week 3. Pick Your Poison: Tools and Their Limitations

So many browsers, so little time: limitations of VXML, WAP/WML/XHTML, text, images and streaming media.
Present simple tools for writing a WAP page.
Critique Mom's application.
Reading: Mobile and Wireless Design Essnetials by Martyn Mallick, Ch13, "Wireless Languages and Content-Generation Technologies"
Reading: Persuasive Technology by B.J. Fogg, Ch8, "Increasing Persuasion Through Mobility and Connectivity."
Assignment: Code something WAPish and propose midterm project by writing/sketching a one page user scenario.

Week 4. Cell Phones as a Networked Computer

Each cell phone has an unique identity. How can this private information enhance a social space?
Discuss proposals for midterm project, review user scenarios and pick a partner if necessary.
Reading: Mobile and Wireless Design Essnetials by Martyn Mallick,, Ch9, "Persistant Data on the Client."
Assignment: Students begin midterm project with detailed user scenario and flow diagrams. Post descriptions on web/wap site.

Week 5. Recording User Input

All the things you never thought you wanted to know about data. Turning users needs into zeroes and ones and storing it for retrieval later. Exploring gateways and the server computer to transport data.
Reading: The Media Equation by Reeves and Nass, Ch13, "Teammates" Handout
Assignment: Complete midterm project.

Week 6. Critique 1st half of midterm projects

Reading: The Media Equation by Reeves and Nass, Ch14, "Gender" Handout

Week 7. Critique 2nd half of midterm projects

Reading: GUI Bloopers by Jeff Johnson, Ch1 - First Principles 1.8 "Principle 8: Try it out on users, then fix it." Handout
Assignment: Conduct user evaluation for midterm project based on reading.

Week 8. User studies

How can a user study be helpful on groundbreaking applications? Focus group vs. questionnaire.
Critique evaluation findings.
Reading: Location-Based Services by Jochen Schiller, Agnes Voisard, Ch2, "Case Study: Development of the Find Friend Application." Handout
Reading: Mobile and Wireless Design Essentials by Mallick, Ch6, "Mobile and Wireless Security."
Assignment: Write a location application scenario.

Week 9. We're all somewhere: Location-based applications.

Keeping track of the babysitter, finding someone compatible at a party, drive-by tank assaults and the new social space of shared GPS. Questions of privacy vs. accessibility.
Reading: Persuasive Technology by B.J. Fogg, Ch3, "Computers as Persuasive Tools,"
Reading: On networked cell phone games TBA.
Assignment: Propose final project.

Week 10. Real community and virtual community meet on the cell phone.

Would you play a first person performance game in the street with strangers? Smart mobs: organizing demonstrations on the cell phones. Stalking celebrities.
Discuss final project proposals, pick your partner if necessary.
Reading: Mobile and Wireless Design Essentials by Martyn Mallick, Ch18, "Other Useful Technologies.".
Assignment: Students begin final project that includes user scenario and flow diagrams. Post descriptions on web/wap site.

Week 11. Slow down! Network speeds and downloading

Introduction of J2ME, Brew, Symbian OS and Windows CE and Web Services
Share the code on final projects and discuss limitations.
Reading: American Cities and Technology: Wilderness to Wired City Rutledge, 2000, Chapter TBA
Reading: Marketing Without Wires: Targeting Promotions and Advertising to Mobile Device Users by Kim M. Bayne, Chapter TBA
Assignment: Project is due in two weeks. Conduct preliminary user study and post results on web/wap site.

Week 12. Business, Branding, and Breaking Even

Branding and culture, when is a deer antler no longer an antler but an evolving tool? What is the life expectancy of a wireless application? The wireless teleco service providers, content agents and micro-billing solutions.
Assignment: Submit final project description for catalogue and continue coding final project.

Week 13. Present 1st half of final projects

Week 14. Present 2nd half of final projects

Midterm and Final: Every student will complete a midterm project and a final project, an original application of some of the principles covered in class. Students may work alone or with one other person. If you work together then each of you will be expected to know how the whole project works and be able to explain what each of you has done on the project. It's possible that your final project may be an expansion of your midterm project. That's great, as long as there's significant refinement of the project from midterm to final. Midterm and final projects will be shown in class.

Journal & Documentation: You will be expected to keep an online journal of your work in this class. Think of it as a letter to the next group to take this class: the tricks you found that work, the pitfalls you hit, ways around them, code samples that you find useful, sources for materials, reference material, etc. It can be no-frills HTML Pictures are helpful, but not strictly necessary. Blogs and wikis are fine. A Moveable Type installation is available for all students to use on the ITP server.. Feel free to use it to set up a blog if you don't have much experience making websites. No flash, shockwave, or other sites that are not text-searchable, please. Ideally, it will give you a head start on documenting your projects for future portfolio reference, and those who come after you a place to look for advice. A journal entry is part of the assignment for each project you do, at the least. Feel free to do more entries as you see fit. These will be added as links to the class site. Work on this as you go, don't put it off until the end. Your fellow classmates will find your notes as useful too. You should document your projects thoroughly. Plan in advance, and perhaps as a group, to have what you need to document at least your midterms and finals. Photos, video, flow diagrams, and notes are all valuable forms of documentation.

Grading:

Participation & Attendance: 30%
Journal: 20%
Midterm: 25%
Final: 25%

Participation & Attendance Showing up on time, engaging in the class discussion, and offering advice and critique on other projects in the class is a major part of your grade. Please be present and prompt. Lateness will hurt your grade, as I use Tom's "ghost rule." Show up late, and you can stay, but you can't talk or ask questions. Late attendance affects your grade adversely. If you're going to be late or absent, please email me in advance. If you have an emergency, please let me know. Turn in assignments on time as well. For every week an assignment is late, it loses a letter grade, e.g. 1 week late means a maximum possible grade of A-, 2 weeks is a maximum B+, and so forth.

Laptops I'm all for people taking notes on laptops in class, and there will be occasions when it'll be useful to connect to the net in class for classwork, but please don't check email, or IM, or surf the net on unrelated topics, or do your work for other classes in class. That's rude to everyone else in the class.

Cellphones Cellphones in class are for viewing of classwork only. You can not take phone calls in class.

Books:
Mobile and Wireless Design Essnetials Martyn Mallick ©2004, Wiley; ISBN: 0-471-21419-1
Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do B.J. Fogg ©2003, Morgan published by Kaufmann; ISBN:

Recommended texts:
Physical Computing: Sensing and Controlling the Physical World with Computers, Dan O'Sullivan and Tom Igoe ©2004, Thomson Course Technology PTR; ISBN: 159200346X

Course Description: How many parts does the cell phone play in the symphony of your day? Sports announcer, smart mobs, beacons at parties, museum guides--it can offer a lot more than just ring tones. Cell phones are the new portable computers. The challenge is to identify useful applications--beyond games and SMS--that can leverage this technology and the servers powering it. Students will explore the social, technological, and creative possibilities of cell phones to make new applications for cultural growth. They will identify, build and test projects individually or in teams. User interaction design will focus on the dilemma of a device with so much possibility but with so many limitations. Discussions will also include the developer's dilemma of promoting unbranded applications to markets controlled by telecom giants.