venerdì, aprile 07, 2006

funology

MS Symposium on Intelligent Environments is end. We saw a lot of funny things during these days, we've met very interesting people and we discovered such an interesting convergence between social sciences and Computer sciences. Well, this convergence often is resolved in computer scientist that does sociology or sociological analysis (with very few methodological precautions...). Anyway our last morning here in Cambridge (Fabio just left and I'm leaving tomorrow morning) was quite interesting. The last invited keynote speaker was Françoois Pachet from the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris who talked about a couple of projects they are currently developing. Apart from the project, that are strictly related to the music, what I found very interesting is the concept of fun they are working on. Following their research fun is everything that is able to enact reflexive process in the user: reflexivity is fun. What the call reflexivity is nothing more that the ability to observe ourself and to start thinking from a critical perspective about it. This aspect is observable in every kind of generative process... you do something, than you can start observing what you've done and thinking about yourself. More interesting is that this aspect is obviously widly present in the way people use (and have fun with) Internet today: blogs, podacasts, videoblogs etc. etc. are all activities that allows a high level of reflexivity because they involve a lot of observers: you product, you, your visitors. From this perspective reflexivity explain what could be obvious: all these activities work because they are fun!