REPORT FROM PICS 2005

The first PICS workshop was held at the Ubicomp 2005 in Tokyo on September 11, 2005. The workshop attracted a multi-disciplinary group of 23 researchers from academia and industry, coming from Europe, Asia, North and South America. The questions posed to the workshop attendees covered the following broad areas on inquiry:

• What happens when image capture and sharing becomes an integral part of everyday life?
• What social practices exist today and what new practices are likely to develop?
• What are the implications for technology?
• What are the possible implications for social relationships and for practical activity?

Privacy. How can we design mobile media systems and applications that have effective privacy mechanism, interfaces and practices? What should be the access control mechanisms for widely shared pictures?

Creativity. What is the relationship between camera phones and new ways of picture taking that enable creativity in digital imaging? What are the ways in which mobile imaging informs or makes complex narrative, and influences aesthetic/expressive practices?

Effortless image sharing. How can image capturing and sharing enable effortless two-way communication patterns, much like in a game of ping-pong?

Barriers. What are the existing barriers to widespread pervasive image capturing and sharing? How is the heterogeneity of image capturing and sharing systems affecting different types of use?

Social Science Methods and Design. What methods for socio-technical analysis and design are best suited to studying and building large scale mobile media systems and applications? How to study mobile media in the near future through combining technology and social science methodologies for field studies? How to best study cross-cultural issues, share the findings and amplify existing differences?

Metadata. What is the impact and long-term effect of public image sharing, such as those enabled by moblogging and Flickr models? Will metadata be relevant? Will it reveal too much about the people and events? How much automatic image annotation and context capture is being foreseen in future use?

Groups. What are the novel ways of picture sharing that involve social groups? How does such image sharing affect social practices and identity of people who communicate via images? Will it allow for a more dynamic expression of identity in digital environments, where people can represent themselves through a hybrid of images, sound bytes, logos and music clips?

These topics and questions were discussed in smaller groups of 6-12 particpants. The attendees reflected on the discussions in the 10-minute period after each session and captured their notes. At the end of the workshop all of the notes were collected as a joint record.