Speculative Design

Brownfield Remediation Robot

2009-11-23T12:30:00.003-05:00

Urban Brownfield Remediation Robot: Reusing an abandoned and contaminated site

A robotic module that identifies and remediates the urban brownfield, a property that is abandoned and contaminated

Every modern city has an amazing amount of vacant, unused land in its downtown core-hundreds of acres in most major cities. The wasteland is referred to as a brownfield, a piece of industrial or commercial property that is abandoned, idle, or under-used and often environmental contaminated, especially one considered as a potential site for redevelopment [1]. How do we reclaim the brownfield for citizen use in a way that is flexible and contextually appropriate to the site in question? The Urban Brownfield Remediation Robot is therefore to build the capacity of neighborhoods to evaluate brownfield sites and to envision and design reuse projects. Though remote sensing, the remediation robot analyzes brownfield sites by collecting the necessary data and materials to evaluate contaminants such as Volatile Organic Components (VOCs). The data from contaminants allows the robot to decide the way to transform the site into viable and environmentally responsible sites.

Here are the images that I created for web documentation and poster. Now, I'm trying to figure out how to create animated video by using this graphical components.

Draft, growBot poster

2009-11-23T10:52:00.003-05:00

Here's a draft of my poster for demo day. The text is all placeholder, and there are few images at present. I hope to keep the text to a minimum. Feedback appreciated!

BuddhaBot: Week 6 Progress

2009-11-22T17:04:00.001-05:00

Brochure and booklet prototypes

I used the library's color printer to print these FYI. Trying to figure out if I could use my own paper...

Xtra-Normal for Demo Video

2009-11-18T01:14:00.005-05:00

Hey all ... stumbled upon this WYSIWYG animation creator online tonight; apparently you PC folks have a desktop version. I spent about 20 minutes putting together this (not very good) little reel to play with. Might be useful to those of you wanting to hack together some animation for your demo video.

UPDATE: No idea why it is taking so long to render. Tis online here.

Some interesting droid videos

2009-11-16T11:49:00.003-05:00

BuddhaBot: Week 5 Progress

2009-11-15T19:01:00.003-05:00

Mistakes made, lessons learned

Curing the clay and painting the legs

Creating the visual assets

I'm going to have to change my project scope a bit, because I want to focus on the design and photography. Which would mean forgoing creating a book. BUT if I will still create the faux marketing materials. They will be more "real" in that I will create actual brochures and pamplets, as opposed to compiling them in a fancy hardcover book.

growBots, you got some esplaining to do!

2009-11-09T14:25:00.001-05:00

Redroid Blog

2009-11-09T14:17:00.004-05:00

I started a blog on the Public Design Workshop site for The Redroid Project.

http://publicdesignworkshop.net/redroidproject/

BuddhaBot: Week 4 Progress

2009-11-08T17:08:00.001-05:00

Prototyping almost done and ready for photographing...

I've also started writing copy for the BuddhaBot related publications...

Talking to Plants

2009-11-06T08:16:00.003-05:00

Nice suggestions on Monday! I found an article called "Talking to Plants". Also, Myth Busters did a segment on plants and their response to music.

Here's a Quote from the article

"The idea goes back at least as far as 1848, when a German, Gustav Theodor Fechner, claimed that plants had souls. Fechner was interested in mathematically measuring the relationship between stimuli and sensation, for instance the difference between the weight of an object and the perceived weight of it. I don’t know what kind of experiments he did with his plants, but I picture him shouting at his ficus until it dropped its leaves."

BuddhaBot: Week 3 Progress

2009-11-01T20:56:00.002-05:00

Sculpting materials acquired

Designing the mass mailer and book

Progress Update

2009-10-26T14:37:00.002-04:00

One of the questions that has been troubling me about the project is, in what form am I going to give the data back to the city? In a fruitless attempt to answer this question, I realized that this was related closely to the kind of data that I was tapping from the city.

I am still not clear about what kind of information I will extract. I would certainly like to incorporate different kinds of information, and city weather updates are part of that. For instance, if its raining in one part of the city, its natural that the rain will move to another part in due course of time, depending on where the wind will take it. But it would be useful for the second zone to be informed of the incoming rain. Just like this, traffic information could be left by people in a traffic jam in location A, and that bit of info could be sent to other parts.

One common underlying need from such case scenarios is the need to get information faster that it would normally arrive. In situations were information is available when none was previously available, its a step forward. But in situations where the information needs to reach a place in advance of the event/entity it describes, I believe this network that this project aspires to be will be very useful.

One of the things I did this week was to find out about wind patterns within a city. Usually, cities have a dozen or so wind stations located at different parts that measure the different parameters associated with the wind, in context of those locations. Until now, data of wind patterns in a city has been mostly used for prediction of spread of toxic material in the event of an accident. A project in this regard is the work done by environmental scientist Alan Huber in New York.

Redroid Project Quick Update

2009-10-26T14:33:00.004-04:00

I am currently working on implementing communication between the Arduino and the canary. I am using the following page as a guide to obtaining data from the serial output of the canary:

http://pdw.lcc.gatech.edu/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

Stuff on the way:

Hamster Ball

Blimpduino

All Terrain Robot

2009-10-26T14:26:00.002-04:00

Status report:
I am currently working with the Arduino board and Processing software. I found out I am pretty rusty in Processing so I had to breakout that old book I thought I would never have to touch again.

Designing the Story of BuddhaBot

2009-10-26T13:40:00.002-04:00

I've decided to create a hypothetical mass mailer and a documentation book for my BuddhaBot speculative design project. I've begun sketching out layouts here:
http://www.dm.amycheng.info/buddhabot/documentation/?p=40

A few interesting environmental sensor droids

2009-10-26T09:11:00.010-04:00

Developed at the University of New Hampshire, researchers are using this 'smart' balloon to sense ozone levels over the Gulf of Mexico, and to study how pollution disperses from Houston, Tx into the air above the Gulf of Mexico. Equipped with environmental sensors, the balloon floats freely, but researchers can control the height for obtaining ozone levels from different layers of the atmosphere.

The real advantage of the balloon is its slow speed.

"...a smart balloon, drifting at 10 meters per second in a polluted plume of air, can make much higher resolution measurements than an aircraft traveling ten times faster and flying in and out of the plume"

Similarly, balloons such as these pictured will be semi-permanently place in stationary location in the skies of japan, collecting climate data and relaying it back wirelessly to weathernet.com

Starbug will monitor water quality, map fish inhabitants, and survey threatened coral reefs. A series of Starbugs will work as a team as an alternative to the "big, dumb, and expensive" bots currently in use which are typically drug behind a boat. Because of its size, Starbug is able to visually map areas and object with cameras, and therefore does not rely on sonar for collecting information.

Priming the pump: growBotics is born

2009-10-25T14:49:00.004-04:00

The first step in establishing a conversation space - or any brand, for that matter - is defining who you are.

And so the growBot logo was born, with a wee sprinkling of rudimentary design skills.

The second step to brand creation is being there - and thus this week's work of creating a growBotic presence on the internet.

rogueApron, Atlanta's independent food community and supperclub, is scheduled to receive a (delightful) amount of press before the end of the year; with mentions scheduled in November's Atlantan magazine (circulation 50,000), December's Air Tran's inflight magazine (1.8 million circ), American Airline's inflight magazine American Way (321,000 circ), and rumored mentions on online newsletters.

The work of the last week has been creating the click-thru opportunities from rogueApron.com to the growBot project - making sure that the rogueApron 2.0 identities feature the growBotic logo with prominent linkage back to our developing sites.

Given the unprecedented nature of this opportunity, this was the logical first step in creating the conversation space between roboticists and growers.

I've annotated screencaps of this process on Flickr.

$5,000 for a Used (parts) Robot

2009-10-25T09:54:00.002-04:00

eBay would like some publicity. In exchange for YOU building a robot out of parts that you could feasibly purchase on eBay (a rather loose parameter), you might have the chance to win $5,000!

$5,000 of course being .000002 percent of eBay's third-quarter revenue. [sourcing that.]

So if you happen to be building a robot n-e-ways, I suggest giving old eBay a chance to take a gander at it and give you a little something for your trouble.

Immaterial : seeing RFID

2009-10-19T15:56:00.003-04:00

Using a simple LED and an RFID sensor attached to it, combined with some clever photography, folks at nearfield and berglondon have come up with this real neat visualization of actual RFID field around any given RFID reader objects. I decided to post this since it seemed like a continuation of the discussion we had earlier on trying to visualize the 'invisible' around us. The video explains how this is done.

Immaterials: the ghost in the field from timo on Vimeo.

The Touch project at nearfield also proposes that the most common shape that has resulted out of the visualization process be used as a symbol for RFID objects worldwide. The image is shown below.

Irrigation system for urban gardening

2009-10-12T01:01:00.005-04:00

I was looking at an interesting gardening project that builds a Moss panel with irrigation system on the wall. I thinks it is a good way of restoration or revitalization of abandoned buildings or vacant lot.

Vertical Irrigation System: Installation of an autonomous irrigation system can bring barren places in the city back to life, with no tending needed after installation.

David de Buyser's project Acoustic Mirror_Moss brings technology and biology together in several ways. First, the project’s longterm goal is an installation that uses vertical moss carpets for the projection of computer-generated images. The cultivation phase, however, features several subprojects that also forge interesting relationships between technology and biology. For instance, David recently developed a MAX/MSP-driven irrigation system to provide a constant supply of water to the moss in the installation at the Visual Arts Academy in Anderlecht.

The next steps in the development of the overarching project will be:

1) Linking the water supply to the moisture of the moss carpet – to do this, David will measure the moss carpets’ conductivity (a measure of moisture) using sensors and link this to his MAX irrigation patch in order to continuously provide the moss with the ideal level of moisture. (A self-supporting water-circulation system will prevent water spillage.)

2) Generating the energy necessary for the irrigation system using solar panels, which will allow the irrigation system to function completely autonomously.

Aside from these steps’ purpose in the overarching project, the development of such an autonomous irrigation system is artistically relevant in its own right. With a system based on DIY materials (such as Arduino) and methods and making these available as open source, the irrigation subproject comprises an urban gardening strategy. This isn’t guerrilla gardening but guerrilla irrigation! Installation of such an autonomous irrigation system can bring barren places in the city back to life, with no tending needed after installation; it can also be used in support of urban and community gardens. The project thus deploys DIY technology to help urban flora flourish.

SmarterCities.org

2009-10-07T10:26:00.002-04:00

Hey all. Check SmarterCities.org. It's all speculation: ideas to make a city better using technology. Great spot to post your project and get feedback from the smarties ... and also pretty much nerdporn. Wordz.

BuddhaBot (intro video)

2009-09-28T16:05:00.001-04:00

How Buildings Learn

2009-09-28T15:57:00.002-04:00

[video series of the book by Stewart Brand]

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8639555925486210852#

(embedding the video here doesn't seem to work. please visit the link directly on Google Video to access the series.)

POWER Booth Video Link

2009-09-28T15:40:00.001-04:00

POWER O.A.S.I.S.

city talks to its self.

2009-09-28T15:27:00.002-04:00

earlier video has been removed because the video embedded on youtube was of really low quality. new video should be up in a few days.

Pollinating the Robogarden

2009-09-28T15:07:00.001-04:00

Pollinating the Robogarden, v2 from Rogue Apron on Vimeo.

word.

Design Documentaries, building personas and scenarios

2009-09-28T13:07:00.006-04:00

In the article Design Documentaries, the author explores a series of films made by the Phillips company about the average persona of a specific heart monitoring equipment. In each of the examples given by the author, we find a film that move closer and closer to a traditional documentary film.

However, since the goal of these films seems to be to move away from traditional advertising, and to move more towards a documentary style representation of reality, the pre-constructed manner of the films seems amazingly odd to me. I will agree with Amy in her blog post that these kind of personas, scenarios, etc.. hinder the filmmaking process, but I don't think they need to be refined more in their current state, but moved to a different realm altogether; the realm of the filmmaking itself. I understand the need in this case to generalize the type of user of the equipment, but often documentary filmmaking itself can be a study of these personas, and yield more effective results than personas built on interviews and statistics. These personas, scenarios, and everyday life can be the creation of the documentary itself, and not the end result of an exhaustive process which holds control of an end product higher than the openness of documentary filmmaking,

However, I do agree that documentary film techniques when designing for a group of people can be innovative and useful. In a project such as Projected Realities, the artists design for a specific group (the elderly), while attempting to make a space speak the underlying consciousness of this group of people. While the designers did not go and physically film in a documentary style, they did do several proto-design efforts which can be likened back to documentary filmmaking. Information was collected by giving 10 elders in the community a packets of maps, postcards, photo albums and other items to which they could respond and post back. While this does seem similar to the example given above in which Phillips created personas before creating the film, this was more in the sense of filmmaking in that it was not seeking information about the group, but more "inspiration-clues about their attitudes, their aesthetics, and their desires." The final product would not be film representing the personas of a group of people, but rather a design and implementation of a product for a specific group of people, based on a process which can be likened to a video-letter created by the group itself.

the art side of hci

2009-09-28T12:10:00.005-04:00

@Carl always hands out readings that really reinforces & reinforms me of the interdisciplinary nature of the course i'm doing my graduate studies in, which happens to be HCI.

In Projected Realities, Gaver & Dunne make a very interesting proposition to an audience (CHI) that is usually not accustomed to having art principles used in their projects. I really appreciate the fact that they make it clear from the beginning that the paper is an attempt by artist-designers, and not by engineers or technologists. They expose new means od design research using conceptual art thinking, and fit that into the HCI domain, which for me, was otherwise running out of creative ideas for user research. Granted that this paper was published 10 years ago, but I'd have really liked to see more user research done using the methods described in this paper. Some of the points that really spiked thought in me are the following :

- By staying away from scientific methods to study users' needs, and adopting techniques from conceptual arts, the authors have managed to pique certain emotional reactions from the users which would otherwise have remained dormant and hence unknown to the researchers.

- I realized that as a designer, I need to develop a stronger sense of a 'subjective stance' towards my project idea(s). Gaver & Dunne point out that such a stance is important to elicit a certain amount of creativity from the creator as well as the final beneficiary/user of the project.

- The paper does not make it clear as to how did the authors actually manage to sift through the tons of information that they received from the initial probes sent out by them into the user population. Its definitely an exciting set of responses that they got, but I am not sure as to what process was followed in atleast normalizing the responses to come up with a final design plan.

- Myself included, a lot of designers make the mistake of trying to create something that is later thrust into the environment. It doesn't work. The authors indicate thatsocial or cultural 'interventions' would be more meaningful rather than specific instantiations.

- The practice of presenting imagery with accompanying text seems to be a very effective mode to get the users' attention towards an issue. In all the diagrams, the designers steer clear of the possibilities of technologies that can be used, instead, maintaining focus on establishing the right social context and capturing the users' emotional response.

- "..technology used on the periphery of attention can allow new forms of sociality to emerge." : Bingo! This can be most certainly highlighted by one of the works of Krzysztof Wodiczko, who is a projection artist. During an evening while showcasing his work in London, at a time when Margaret Thatcher donated loads of money to South Africa even when discrimination was rampant, Wodiczko turned his projector towards the South Africa house. He projected an image of a swastika over the outline of a boat, with text that read “Good Hope.” [connect it with Cape of Good Hope]. For a design act that lasted for just two hours, 'on the periphery of attention', Wodiczko's projection garnered a lot of attention from the world press.

Isn't it just incredible how such small design actions can have such a huge impact?

Drones for a New Tomorrow

2009-09-28T11:43:00.000-04:00

This PSA brought to you by me...

Drones for a New Tomorrow from Atlanta Stock Footage on Vimeo.

Practicality of Design Documentaries

2009-09-27T15:30:00.001-04:00

Reading Design Documentaries reminded me a lot of user experience deliverables which consist of:

*personas: profiles of potential users of the product
*scenarios: concise narratives of how the personas may use the product
*storyboarding: visual representations of the scenarios
*user surveys
*process flows/flowcharts: abstractions of scenarios

Design documentaries seem to encompass all of these kind of deliverables.

Also, in terms of web page/application design, these kind of deliverables can be considered as brainstorming and inspiration tools, just as the design documentaries were served as “sources of both information and inspiration”.

Some in the industry argue that creating personas, scenarios, etc., hinders the design process. While such tools may help with initial brainstorming, further refinement of these tools (such as more descriptive personas and comprehensive flow charts), takes away resources away from the actual process of designing the product. So, I have to wonder if the usefulness of design documentaries outweighs the time and effort making them?

Design documentaries are not meant to be the final product, yet all this investment was put into filmmaking. Personas and user surveys/interviews were done beforehand and compiled. For the film, scripts and storyboards were probably created. In addition, time must be spent filming and editing.

Are design documentaries are not the final product, are they really practical in the long run?

Source:
User Experience Deliverables

No, to compilations.

2009-09-26T12:50:00.011-04:00

Until reading the "Design Documentaries" paper by Raijmakers, Gaver, and Bishay, I would have never thought the design process could be inspired by documentaries. I guess after watching the film, Super-Size Me, I have been inspired to stay way from eating fast food, especially McDonald's, for the past 4 years. Although he ate a seemingly unrealistic amount of fast food in this film, it opened my eyes to what could possibly happen to me as a result of eating fast food. Design documentaries by described in this paper proved to be inspiring in a similar way.

This paper gave several examples and styles of documentaries. The authors believe that the least effective approach is the fly-on-the-wall technique of documenting stories they call neutral observation. It may not be as effective as the re-enactment or self-performance techniques, but to me, the least effective would be the compilation technique of documenting events or people. This style, like Fahrenheit 911, seems to be more of a propaganda. Michael Moore has his beliefs and compiled a lot of news clips, possibly out of context, and created his own translation of the events mentioned in the documentary. I didn't feel that design could be inspired by creating compilations of information from different sources and making them equal one persona, so I decided to find the Fred design documentary and watch it.

After watching the available clips of all three documentaries (Debra, Kent, and Fred), Fred was the least helpful. The voice-over along with the photos were confusing. I guess knowing ahead of time that they were random photos taken by 9 patients and compiled together as the life of one patient, made me less receptive of the film before watching it. I disagree that this method of documentary is helpful in the design process.

The other two design documentaries, Kent and Debra, proved much different. Although there was a script used in Kent, the patient used to portray Kent, David, was very similar to the persona on the poster. David even agreed that after reading about Kent that his life was very similar to his own life. Following the everyday lives of these people seems to be more helpful in the design process than compiling an everyday life. The real everyday of the user is ultimately what the design is for.

Collective Intelligence in RoboCup soccer robots

2009-09-21T14:34:00.005-04:00

Most of the papers I saw dealt with a single robot's array of capabilities - like its intelligence, movement, interaction, health etc. However, to dig deeper into my interest in collective intelligence, I looked around for multi-robot systems that involves 'intelligent communication' between 2 or more robots trying to achieve the same goal (pun intended). Thats when I came across the RoboCup Soccer Robots.

In the paper Coordinated Team Play in the Four-Legged RoboCup League, the authors Georgios Kontes and Michail G. Lagoudakis explain the logic behind how decisions are made by each robot on the field, and communicate it to each other, to achieve the goal. The RoboCup competition involes four-legged Sony AIBO robots, and since the basic hardware remains the same for both competing teams, what makes the difference between a team winning or losing is the set of algorithms it uses while playing. The authors try hard to model the robotic understanding of the game based on how we humans understand and play the game of soccer. That means, using certain Attacking tactics when in need of a goal, or Defensive tactics when trying to protect a lead. But how are all these decisions made? And more importantly, how are they communicated between the teammate robots?

The roles of players are designed and ascribed using a scheme called Petri-Net-Planning. It is a graphical language used in modern dynamic systems. It allows the description of a system

in terms of a weighted directed graph, where the nodes denote places (circles) or transitions (boxes) and the edges between them represent possible paths of execution as well as certain conditions (weights). Each game tactic would have its corresponding Petri-Net Plan, and the player robots switch between PN Plans depending on the state of the game, and information received from teammate robots.

Communication : Due to the generally unreliable nature of the wireless network in the playing arena, the designers of these robots make the communication protocol as flexible as possible, making sure that even if one robot happens to "die" or drop out of communication, the rest of the team still goes on playing. All communication takes the form of messages sent by a single robot to all other team members. This is required because each player executes its own local copy of the FSM and therefore trigger events must become common knowledge to ensure that all robots switch to the same tactic. For tasks like passing the ball, robots use a series of messages like intent-to-pass, sent-pass etc to complete the task. All this is done over the UDP protocol.

Autonomous City Explorer Project - A System Overview

2009-09-21T13:50:00.006-04:00

read the paper here

One of the primary aims of this paper was to communicate the reader about the shift in complexity involved when a robot is introduced to real-life unstructured territories, rather than the comfortable confines of a research lab. The Autonomous City Explorer (ACE) Project sets out to highlight the high-level concepts required and used by a robot in performing task like autonomous navigation, path planning, environment modeling,

and last but not the least, human-robot interaction.

To explain all this, the authors felt that it was necessary to first expose the hardware aspects of the ACE robot, to truly appreciate the high-level functions that it was supposed to do. Hardware specifications primarily focused on parameters like range of vision that it had courtesy of the laser range finder, mobility speed and how it would be constrained during climbing over an inclined surface. Interestingly, the paper suggests that every robot has an intrinsic error in movement (linear and/or rotational). The ACE robot handles this by dynamically adjusting its movement on the fly by turning a certain number of degrees to ensure it follows the intended path.

I was particularly interested in the vision system of this robot to find out how it would deal with real-life urban environments, which would involve a lot of movement of objects, and having to find the way through this maze of people and urban objects. ACE is equipped with a multi-focal high-performance vision system which was actually developed for an humanoid robot (LOLA). It boasts of multiple vision sensors with independent motion control, thus lending itself a high degree of freedom in its fields of view. However, I was not fully sold on the authors' claim that "High-speed gaze shift capabilities and novel intelligent multifocal gaze coordination concepts provide fast and optimal situational attention changes of the individual sensors. Thereby, large and complex dynamically changing environments are perceived flexibly and efficiently." A little elaboration of this point would have served well to clarify how exactly does the ACE robot manage to weed out visual noise and focus on elements of interest.

After the hardware overview, the paper dives into the software framework that the robot runs on. The basic software architecture has 4 layers :

Low-level Functionality - deals with logging data, and robot's health monitoring.
Sensors & Actuators - visual sensors, auditory system, laser range finder interfaces
Perception & Abstraction - Visual Processing & Speech Processing
Decision & Supervision - Final path planning, interaction, etc.

The paper provided a very in-depth look into how the hardware and the aforementioned software interfaces interact to make the robot a functional unit.

Bio-Inspired Robotic Swarm

2009-09-21T13:38:00.005-04:00

The paper 'Spatial Macroscopic Models of a Bio-Inspired Robotic Swarm Algorithm' presents a comparison of two macroscopic models of an autonomous robotic swarm. A macroscopic model is one in which a single agent is only modeled through agents' collective behavior, as against, when an agent is explicitly modeled as in a microscopic model. The robots in these experiments measure local luminance, and stay in a zone/ space for longer depending on how high the local luminance of the space is. On the whole, the robots acted quite like a swarm of insects would, on seeing a source of light.

In the experiments, generic model for the swarm's navigation was established. The model was fairly simple comprising basically of defining the robots' motion and establishing the way the robots would identify each other, and once they have done so, what their behavior would be like. The model was created under the assumption that the movement of the robots resembles Brownian motion.

The two macroscopic models that were tested in these experiments were a 'compartment' model, in which the space was explicitly split into compartments, and a 'continuous' model in which the space was hypothetically continuous. Despite significant differences in the process of modeling, the authors were surprised at the close convergence of some parts of the experiments. Though both models have their own tradeoffs, they also seem quite effective for abstractly defined spaces.

In the conclusion, the authors acknowledge that the choice between the microscopic model and the macroscopic model is in itself a tradeoff, and each of these models cater to different definitions and parameters.

ROBOTS! Swarms and drone controls.

2009-09-21T10:46:00.011-04:00

I've been exploring a number of technical papers related to creating a small, cheap, and durable participatory sensing drone for urban areas. These articles relate to military drones, military swarming robots, and space rovers, focusing on new designs for robots to new algorithms for controlling swarms of robots and error correction for drones.

Trying to relate this back to my proposed project, the first essay I read was Motion Planning of Aerial Robot using Rapidly-exploring Random Trees with Dynamic Constraints by Jongwoo Kim and James P Ostrowski. This article deals with randomized motion planning algorithms for trajectory planning in military robots. The authors uses an unmanned blimp as their model for the theoretical scene which they set up. The object of these blimps is simply to take off and travel from point A to point B. The formula they use to calculate a path is known at a Rapidly-exploring Random Tree.

As describe by the authors:

"The Rapidly-exploring Random Tree (RRT) is an algorithm which is suited for quickly searching high-dimensional spaces that have both algebraic and differential constraints. The key idea is to bias the exploration toward unexplored portions of the space by sampling points in the state space, and incrementally pulling the search tree toward them, leading to quick and uniform exploration of even high-dimensional state spaces."

While this article is geared towards high flying surveillance blimps, this kind of formula could most likely be adapted to the coverage of a confined area by a low-flying drone, such as an adapted blimpduino, or even a ground roving vehicle. While the goals of my project and this one are inherantly different, they do share the common question of how do we cover an area in the quickest way possible? In the case of participatory sensing of inaccesible areas, time might very well become an issue, and it is important to address how can we quickly scan and sense an area in the most efficient way possible?

The next article I read, Sea-Dragon: An Amphibious Robot for Operation in the Littorals by MIDN 1/C Patrick D. Healy, outlines the preliminary design of an amphibious reconnaissance and escort robot. The robots primary purpose would be to escort troops to and from the beach land areas during combat. The robot could be deployed safely from a ship, and could operate either by remote control or completely unmanned.

The article creates a layout for a 6 wheeled, flat, 200lb robots which carries a payload of a single weapon with 200 rounds of ammunition. The design borrows heavily from existing military robots. The robot could move with ease between the water and the beach. The article addresses load stresses, and technically what is necessary for easy movement between water and soil.

Many of Sea-Dragons issues are comparable to my proposed project of a localized participatory sensing robot. While a participatory sensing robot would not be subject to heavy artillery fire, it would be subjected to various water and soil conditions while roving unexplored areas. It would be subjected to an unpredictable environment, and would have to know how to problem solve when in such an environment.

I also like the idea of a robot escort. This is another military idea which could repurposed for public in urban spaces. While Sea Dragon protects soldiers running from the water to the beach and back, perhaps a robot could escort us to our cars and back at odd times of the night, through unfamiliar areas of the city, or give us directions by guiding us to our locations.

One simple solution to creating a durable, throwable sensing robot would be to make it completely round in shape. In a sense, it would be a hamster ball robot. I found the article Dynamic Modeling and Sliding-Mode Control of a Ball Robot with Inverse Mouse-Ball Drive, which deals with robots that are shaped like spheres. The article produces a design for a spherically shaped robot which can easily move around a household. The article explores ways in which the robot can remain balanced and keep its orientation and location awareness at all times. Using two DC motors, the ballbot switches power back and forth in order to achieve a fluid balance.

The last three articles I read focus on swarms of robots, how to design them and how to control their behavior.

The article A Small Wheeled Robotic Rover for Planetary Exploration focuses on the design of a planetary rover bot geared towards exploration. The robot is designed to be small, two wheeled, and would be disbursed in swarms. The idea is that the small robot rover would be able to traverse simple terrain quickly on it own, and when a robot needs to travel into a more difficult area, these robots could connect together in different configurations, forming a larger more appropriate robot for the task at hand.

How could this idea of swarming be repurposed for urban space and participatory sensing? Multiple drones could be used to quickly and efficiently scan an area. Much like the rover bot described above, drones could come together into packs to get a more accurate reading on an area which is reading an unusual sensor level. There is also the factor of strength in numbers, which could supply a layer of protection for drones scanning an inaccessible area.

The idea of replicating animal behavior is often key to creating a truly autonomous robot. How can robots survive on their own? How can robots learn to protect themselves? What happens and how do robots react when they are damaged or injured?

In the article Pheromone Communication: Implementation of Necrophoric Bee Behavior in a Robot swarm, we find a tested system for locating injured robots in a swarm via the release of pheromone like chemicals. The pheromones are released at the time a robot loses complete power. Mimicking the behavior of bees searching for dead bees, other robots in the swarm can sense the pheromone, and retrieve the injured robot.

ROBOTRAK: A Centralized Real-Time Monitoring Control, and Coordination System for Robots Swarms, is an article which describes a newly design software for dealing with the problems of controlling swarms of robots. The software boasts of a consolidation of functions from a control module, a monitoring module, to a coordinating system. The software is easy to use and features a user friendly GUI. Outside of it basic control operations, ROBOTRAK deals extensively with robot retrieval of a robot swarm that is split up during its operations. It also features dynamically changing encryption techniques to stop intruders from taking over operations of the robot swarm.

Both of the articles above address a key issue in creating a participatory sensing drone for inaccessible areas: How do we get our drones back from an area that is in accessible to ourselves? Tracking could be done between drones to keep the swarm centrally located, or a low flying blimpduino type droid could be used to fly over barriers for easy retrieval, however in any scenario we set up for such a participatory sensing drone, there will always be the chance that a drone may be lost during the operation. Do we consider these sacrificing for the cause of participatory sensing, or do we devise more in depth methods of retrieving our drones?

SoundSense

2009-09-20T23:26:00.003-04:00

In the paper SoundSense: Scalable Sound Sensing for People-Centric Applcations on Mobile Phones (2009), written by Lu, Pan, Lane, Choundhury, and Campbell, an "audio event" classification system for mobile phones with limited resources is described.

In this paper, SoundSense was implemented for the Apple IPhone. The program classifies sound events as voice, music, and ambient noise (the article calls these as course categories). Ambient noise is considered every noise that isn't voice or music. For ambient noise, SoundSense uses an "unsupervised adaptive classification component" (1).

(1) It think this is a Bayes classifier (ie. a formula) that uses converted waveforms (or maybe uses temporal analysis?) as variables.

Robotic WiFi Network

2009-09-20T22:53:00.002-04:00

In the paper A Networked Robot System for Wireless Network Emulation by Chiueh, Krishnan,De, and Chiang, the authors describe the MiNT network simulation system.

Each Roomba robot acts as a node in the network, and carries several 802.11 interfaces, an antenna, a computer, and router board. All of this is powered by the Roomba's self-charging mechanism. The PC acts as the central controller, directing movement.

This system is not an actual network, but a testbed for researchers to study networks. However, I don't think it farfetched to see this system extended for real-world use.

Mapping the City: Strategies and Cognitive Maps

2009-09-20T22:44:00.001-04:00

In the paper, Adaptive Multi-Robot Wide-Area Exploration and Mapping (2008) by Low, Dolan, and Khosla, the authors describe a dynamic programming formulation (1) that allows the robot or multiple robots to execute exploration strategies of wide-area coverage and hotspot sampling at the same time. Wide-area coverage strategies aim to accurately map all environmental phenomena while hot spot sampling strategies focuses on locations constrained by the design of the robot’s programming. In addition, MASP (Multi-robot Adaptive Sampling Problem) has levels of adaptivity that can be adjusted. Adaptive strategies uses procedures that select hot spots based on sampling data gathered during exploration. Non-adaptive strategies assume that the environment isn’t varied, so mapping becomes less accurate as the environment becomes more varied.

In another paper, Methodology for Robot Mapping and Navigation in Assisted Living Environments (2009), by Mehdi, Armbrust, Kock, Berns, a non-adaptive strategy is described, called ARTOS. The mapping method maps the room onto a grid, and on top of this grid, maps RFIDs embedded in the carpet of the assisted living situation. The bottom of the robot is equipped with an RFID sensor.

In the paper, Initial Experiments with a Mobile Robot on Cognitive Mapping written by Yeap, Wong, and Schmidt, a robot was used to test theories of cognitive mapping. The article sites the following as important characteristics of cognitive maps:

distorted information about distances and directions
landmarks, places, paths
hiearchical organization
multiple frames of reference

The robot used in these experiments had 8 sonar sensors and was placed in the corridor of an office. It collected sonar data and when faced with physical obstacles, it would stop, turn away, and continue mapping. It calculated ASRs or absolute space representations. The robot than calculated the shape of these ASRs to construct a cognitive map. When directed to return to home base, the robot computed the ASRs in the homeward journey and then mapped this onto the ASRs it had actually traveled. This method was deemed fairly accurate.

I found these papers to be interesting, because a robot operating in the city (such as BuddhaBot) would need a program such as MASP to collect data. This data must somehow be stored and used by BuddhaBot to travel in the city, and to travel to LotusLocations (locations that contain minimal sense pollution) and its homebase. I also imagined LotusLocations to be tagged with RFID.

These papers represent possible solutions.

(1) I’m going to guess that this is a set of of problems that the computer continually solves with each new variable derived from the environment. The solution would then somehow translate directions for the robot.

Ah, Don Norman, We Hardly Knew Ye

2009-09-20T22:25:00.004-04:00

The idea of the "affordance" is central to HCI. However, there is a lot of controversy over just what an affordance is and where it's found (in the environment/object, in the interaction, etc.). Sahin et al.'s "To Afford or Not to Afford" is an excellent and accessible formalization of the idea of the affordance, and they propose a useful paradigm by which the idea of affordances can be applied to autonomous robotic control systems.

In short they propose a 3-part system: entities, behaviors and effects, which all relate in order to construct an affordance.

A couple of weeks ago we briefly discussed a couple of major strains of robotics research: In the first, the robot creates a model of the external world and then navigates through it. In the second, the robot senses the world and acts locally as needed. The affordance paradigm described in this paper is an extension of the latter.

Through their paradigm they've been able to create robots that can traverse a room filled with randomly placed objects, deciding for itself whether it should navigate around an obstruction or whether it can move it out of the way. The robot "knows" what to do based on what it has learned about the affordances of different objects, not based on whether it has encountered the object before or not.

Even more astonishing, to me anyway, is that it can gain a sense of whether or not it can fit through 2 immovable objects based only on a combination of its understanding of moveability and avoidance strategies. It has no internal model of its own size and it doesn't measure the width of the opening. It just says, "I know about how the world operates, and I know I can't get through there."

Air, a source of power for Robot

2009-09-20T22:20:00.006-04:00

The Air Muscle is an soft actuator that is powered by air. It behaves in a very similar way to a biological muscle. When actuated with a supply of compressed air, they contract by up to 40% of its original length. The force it provides decreases as it contracts.

The energy source may be stored gas or via a compressor, i.e. Chemical energy storage. The power that is delivered to the actuators pneumatically could be comparable to traditional battery and motor combinations.

Robotic house flies

2009-09-20T19:48:00.002-04:00

I found this article in the latest MAKE (http://makezine.com/19/robotflies/). The technology described in the article might be applied to the drones that comprise Buddhabot.

Robert Wood, director of the Harvard Microrobotics Lab devised a new process of building small, complex mechanisms. Special laser cuts, would cut thin slices of carbon fiber into 2D patterns, that would later be folded into 3D shapes.

The robotic wings then creates vertical lift by creating forces known as the leading edge vortex.

Pollinating the Robogarden

2009-09-14T14:25:00.006-04:00

In furthering our examples of speculative robotics projects, we were asked to consider the following questions:
• What about your project is speculative?
• How does it fit/work/exist within the city?
• What technology might this project reference?
• What cultural/social issues or ideas does your project reference?

Food systems being an enormously complicated, culturally integrated, and politically powerful, it seemed to me that the most fruitful (ahem) area of speculation when it came to robogardens ought not to come from an individual, but rather from the unoccupied conversation zone between food producers and technologists.

What questions would the food producers ask? What answers could the technologists give? What real world problems could roboticists solve at the drop of the hat - and what problems could the food producers illuminate should these conversations happen?

Perhaps this is where the speculation truly lies.

What if the goal of a project studio was not to unilaterally create or imagine an object to work within the city, but to facilitate knowledge specialists in a city to create their own artifacts, utilizing the skills of the technologists to solve problems of food producers?

What if our role was to host symposiums of said knowledge specialists? To apply the resources of a (relatively) powerful and wealthy institution upon a problem that is scalable and profoundly democratic? To serve as communication conduits, in iterative real-time design loops that involve community, food producers, technologists and observant, essay-writing grad students?

The One Acre Challenge

How can robotics impact a single acre of food-producing soil? How can low-cost, scalable robotics be integrated and adapted into low-tech food production systems? How can we reconcile the divide between old and new school, creating sustainable food technologies that engage communities without creating automation that disrupts sustainability?

How can we, as a group, help Farmer Collins, on Harvest Farm in East Atlanta Village?

Harvest Farm, April 2009

Starting from scratch in April 2009, Harvest is an urban organic farm run by a young man in his 20s. With a small budget from his employers, and the aid of volunteers, Collins has been able to transform his farm to a degree. [Check photos of 70 rogueApron rockstars clearing the fields of sticks and stones.]

Collins riding technology

Harvest Farm, July 2009

At this junction, 2 acres of 12 are producing, and Collins sells produce at the farmers market in East Atlanta Village. But his work is labor intensive and not easily scalable. What technological, robotically powered solutions can we put into place to ease the work of converting unused urban space into farms? How can we develop solutions that scale to backyard gardens, Farm to School projects, and other emerging food production models?

My proposal is simply to gather the right folks to answer these questions.

If you are a food producer reading this post, please let us know - what robotic technologies would you like Tech to build you?

Project Studio in Action

2009-09-13T15:43:00.001-04:00

Innovation and Speculation

2009-09-13T13:32:00.004-04:00

W. Brian Arthur's The Nature of Technology has been getting a fair amount of press lately. A recent article in Miller-McCune caught my attention for a couple of points it made.

The basic point of the book is that technological advances don't descend from the sky in flashes of genius. They're developed by people who know a lot about what already exists and figure out how to put together something new from a bunch of old stuff. In other words, it's about building with existing blocks, not inventing new blocks from whole cloth.

Anyway, this paragraph caught my attention and I think it relates to our work in Speculative Design:

Innovation is something that comes from the hard work of decades and decades of education and training. It is something that comes from devoting lots of resources to universities and investing in loads of basic science. And it is something that is fundamentally unpredictable. Who knew, for example, that vacuum tubes would lead to modern computing? (emphasis mine)

Are we doing a form of "basic science," i.e., the kind of science that's not designed to solve any problems but just designed to see what can be done for the sake of it?

Also this quote seemed appropriate:

All technologies create new problems. And these new problems call for new technological solutions.

Perhaps anticipating and articulating the new problems is at least as important as solving them.

Sept. 8 - Initial Concepts

2009-09-13T10:49:00.012-04:00

Cheng_Sept8_InitialConcept_A

Cheng_Sept8_InitialConcept_B

Ethiopia_Sept8_InitialConcept

Barnwell_Sept8_InitialConcept

LadyRogue_Sept8_InitialConcept

Hicks_Sept8_InitialConcept

Lots o' Links!

2009-09-12T14:04:00.020-04:00

Here are some linked projects that tie into some of the themes we discussed last week. Also, please check out Lady Rogue's post from last Wednesday below. Not all of these robots and designs are speculative, but they all have something to do with our themes.

Theme: Robots in the Wild/Biomimcry

5 Robots That Act Like Animals. Robots that look and/or behave like grasshoppers, birds, fish, jellyfish, and my favorite FLIES.
Sprawl Robots. This has nothing to do with cities that grow to fast. These robots are "hand-sized hexapedal robots ... designed to test ideas about locomotion dynamics, leg design and leg arrangement."
Pollen Robots. These don't act like pollen, but they are released into the wild to report on and visually display pollen levels. Complete with Japanese cutesy-poo form factor.

Theme: Sound Sensing/Voice-tone Sensing

MacSpeech Dictate Medical. Here's an actual product out there on the market! A speech-recognition, voice robot controller. It analyzes, among other things, "the prosodic information indicating emotions of the user's speech."

Theme: Agriculture

The Oracle Robot. Sounds peaceful, doesn't it? Actually it turns sheep over on their side and shears the wool off of them. We talked about agriculture that deals with something other than fruits and vegetables. Well, here's one. And this one is actually in use in Australia.
Public Air Quality Indicator. This was related to our discussion of agriculture. This project from Denmark shows that some are already experimenting with sensors in public places. This also deals with the issue of hyperlocal sensor readings.
Mars Greenhouse. Not much information here, but it's from NASA and the name makes me think it's a greenhouse designed to work on... um... Mars.
Telegarden. Ken Goldberg and Joseph Santarromana's modern day classic.

Theme: Human-Generated Power

Botanical Gameboy. It's actually inverted from what we talked about (human power to grow gardens). With this project, Futurefarmers powers electronic equipment with citrus fruit. Kind of looks like something you would have done in the 8th grade.
Play Pump. Vasudhara mentioned this during class. Children play on the merry-go-round and in the process pump water for the people in the area.
The Green Microgym. A gym where all the workout equipment generates the power needed for running the gym itself. OK, my friend and I totally thought of this idea about 10 years ago. Only in our version people get discounts or credits the more power they generate. We totally could have been millionaires by now.

Theme: Collective Intelligence/Algorithmic Intelligence

Mesonic Emission. Alisa Andrasek' s BIOTHING project. Basically, these are art objects design algorithmically based on the behavior of electro-magnetic fields. They respond to the shape of their environment and "grow" around obstructing objects. Not really "intelligence," but related.

Theme: City Phone Booths

Pay Phone Murder Mystery
Ryan Holsopple launched a public pay phone who-dunnit that invites people to make a toll-free call from any public pay phone in Canal Street Station and solve a murder mystery.
Set in the maze of tiles that make up the station, the Canal Street Station game puts participants in the shoes of a private investigator, as he searches the depths of Canal Street Station for a young French woman that may have committed a murder, or may be a figment of his own imagination.
The game uses a Trixboxserver, a phone application platform based on Asterisk™, to collect caller ID from payphones in the Canal Street Subway, and pinpoint where the player is located.

Theme: Bike Parking

• Subterranean Bike-Parking Robot
A giant mechanism will park your bike for you in an underground facility in a train station in Tokyo. It packs more than 9,000 bikes tight as sardines, and when you swipe your card to pick it up, it will find your bike and spit it out in 23 seconds!

• Guide Robot for visually impaired individuals

It uses 3 Devantech SRF02 ultrasonic sensors to detect obstacles, and controlled by a Wiimote remote. When it detects an obstacle it provides a vibrational feedback to the user on the Wiimote. Read more here.

• Robot Navigates City by Asking for Directions

Enlarge

ACE the robot asks for directions while navigating Munich, Germany. Image credit: New Scientist.

Theme: Meditation

Guru Meditation for iPhone. Persuasive Games designer Ian Bogost createdGuru Meditation, a relaxation game for Atari VCS that has players sitting cross-legged on a Joyboard. So long as the player sits still, an on-screen yogi character will levitate as on-screen clouds wander by.

Theme: Human-Generated Power

Botanical Gameboy. It's actually inverted from what we talked about (human power to grow gardens). With this project, Futurefarmers powers electronic equipment with citrus fruit. Kind of looks like something you would have done in the 8th grade.

Keep On Truckin, Garden Ideas!

2009-09-09T06:13:00.007-04:00

Yesterday's discussion focused quite a bit on mobile garden devices. While I'm not convinced that this has any impact on growing quality, I will heartily cede that these mobile devices attract attention in a way that a superwired school garden never could. So, for purposes of discussion amongst the fellow foodboters, meet Truck Farm, from Wicked Delicate. GreenUpgrader has a succinct summary here.

10 Garden Hacks

These Garden Hacks are all lofi - now.

On Beer and Cheese

I've been trying to think of things cheese and beer, but my ideas for this are all old school.

Robotics in the Food System

2009-09-08T16:05:00.002-04:00

I couldn't find a great way to print out this drawing that I have on a white board in my house, so here is a digital version:

This impacted my thinking quite a bit in brainstorming how an alternative (local organic decentralized) food system could utilize robotics. This sketch is the first idea.

And, a bonus candid.

Toward the Sentient City: Too Smart City

2009-09-08T15:58:00.001-04:00

Link

Robots in the wild and robots inspired by nature

2009-09-08T09:25:00.010-04:00

One topic that I find particularly interesting is the notion of robots that either interact with nature, are released into the wild, or that take a large design influence from wildlife and nature.

Here are a few examples.

Rocky the robo-squirrel is a creation of the Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass, and an example of how robots are being used to study animal behavior. Rocky, having successfully infiltrated several squirrel populations, has already led researchers to new discovers related to how squirrels communicate with one another.

These Aquajellies will serve similar purpose, interacting with real jellyfish to help understand the communication of body motion between jellyfish.

The Electronic Life Forms project 'releases' simple tiny robot 'lifeforms' into the environment for people to stumble on. The project explores the creatures existence in both in nature and captivity, and how they react differently in those different environments. The reaction when interacting with one of these creatures is intended to evoke the same natural reaction one has with nature and creatures within nature. In nature, the ELFs chirp and bounce happily. Within captivity, they clink against the walls of their cages, and make significantly less noise.

Although we've already mentioned them, I think the Strandbeasts deserve an honorable mention as a fascinating mechanical creature that is design to be released into the wild and survive on its own.

The wilting flower is a nature inspired robot indicator which reflects how much energy we are consuming. If you maintain a low level of consumption, your flower will flourish. If you are wasting large amounts of energy, your flower will slowly wither and die.

Michael Mateas' Office Plant is a robotic planted adapted for the office 'ecology', and attempts to substitute the same 'emotion niche' as a traditional office plant. The plant, rather than feeding and reacting to water, light, or climate, reacts to data collected from the office environment. Via a packet sniffer, the plant determines its mood based on terms, phrases, and words used in office emails, and then reflects the overall state of the office by either blooming, wilting, or actively moving.

The army is developing a series of robotic bats and robotic spiders for the purpose of sensors reading and surveillance during war. The bat will fly silently taking sensor reading and video footage of the area ahead, relaying the information back to the approaching troops. The spider will crawl the lands on a similar mission.

Looking a step beyond military uses and warfare, how could these spiders and dronebots be used within an urban environment? What would be the result of passing a technology such as this down to the people for the purpose of participatory sensing? How could we use successful integration of robots and nature to meaningfully reflect information about our environments?

The sensing spider/rover bot

The sensing spider/rover bot could be place in inaccessible area, such as just beyond an impassable fence, for the purpose of collecting sensor readings. The bot could roam freely in a group or by itself. Guided either by a remote control or an obstacle sensor, the bot could roam an area collecting air quality, sound levels, and visual data related to different areas. The data would be logged with GPS data, and stored for later retrieval. Another thought is that in a more accessible area, the bot could take on a more adaptable operation to its environment, similar to the way in which tween bot operates.

The Pigeon Pied Piper Bot

The Pied Piper Bot could be used to actively relocate overpopulated areas of pigeons. Using a bell and a food dispensing system, the robot would train pigeons to follow it away from undesirable areas into less populated areas.

A Speculative Air Quality On-The-Go iPhone App

2009-09-07T11:31:00.003-04:00

In Citizen Science by Paulos, Honicky, and Hooker, the authors predict that future mobile phones will with sufficient sensing and processing capabilities that will allow users to practice citizen science.

I think the future is already here. For instance, the iPhone is perfectly capable of supporting an air quality sensing device, as well as the software to interpret input.

The reasons why an air quality sensing mobile application doesn’t exist are because:

a) there is no market for it
b) there are no developers or designers to create a market for it

Let’s assume that there are developers and designers who are willing and competent enough to create an engaging air quality sensing application for this mobile device. How would such an application work? And would it look like?

The following are a flowchart and a mock-up I made to think about what an app would be like:

Bad Times in the Botconomy

2009-09-04T23:17:00.005-04:00

Poor robots can barely get a job washing dishes.

“Japan’s legions of robots, the world’s largest fleet of mechanized workers, are being idled as the country suffers its deepest recession in more than a generation as consumers worldwide cut spending on cars and gadgets. [...]

At the same time, the future is looking less bright. Tighter finances are injecting a dose of reality into some of Japan’s more fantastic projects — like pet robots and cyborg receptionists — that could cramp innovation long after the economy recovers.[...]

Japanese scientists grew up watching robot cartoons, so they all want to make two-legged companions,” Mr. [Kenji Hara, an analyst at the research and marketing firm Seed Planning] said. “But are they realistic? Do consumers really want home-helper robots?” - NYTimes.com

Cymatics

2009-09-03T15:04:00.003-04:00

Cymatics is the art of visualizing sound.

Furthering Monday's discussion on the quest of making invisible things visible, I just found this Ted talk. Thought it might be interesting to some.

Environmental friendly computer/workshop

2009-09-01T01:10:00.004-04:00

I am interested in nature environment, eco system and also it is meaningful to let people consider these issues.

The first one is the Fruit Computer Laboratory. It was a part of Interactivos? workshop in Madrid. It doesn’t seem to be practical since they could only turn on “0” and “1”: relatively too small ram. However it is meaningful attempt to try environmental friendly computing from natural energy source.

The second one is more about recycling. Participants take obsolete or old electronic parts and recreate it. Whit this process, they could understand better our environment and electronic recycling possibilities.

Making Visible the Invisible: Carbon-sniffing robotic "Translator II: Grower"

2009-08-31T13:17:00.006-04:00

Making visible the invisible is a key Worldchanging tactic. We live in a world of flows and systems kept largely opaque to us. Illuminating those flows and systems in a new way gives us a critical window into how our world actually functions -- and thus, sometimes, suggests tactics for changing the world for the better. At the very least, it's fun to tweak our brains with unexpected information. Here is the good example of what we can sense and how we can represent it by using robotics. The drawing robot make visible the invisible thing which are the chemical and biological contents of the air we breathe.

Click to see the video

The Grower is a small ‘vehicle’ that moves around the sides of a room, hugging the walls responding to carbon dioxide levels in the air by actually drawing lines of varying height on the walls. The Grower is used in public exhibition spaces, so the number of people in the exhibit have an immediate effect on the CO2 sensor–the more people, the more C02, the higher the lines drawn. At the end of the trip around the room, the height of the ‘grass-like’ drawings directly relates to the human activity in the space. The designer Sabrina Raaf, a new media artist and teacher at the Columbia College, Chicago, says “This piece makes visible how art institutions depend on their visitors to make them a ‘healthy’ space for new art to evolve, and flourish within. It’s not only an interesting project from the visual side, but exposes a deeper issue about peoples support of the arts.

Projects like Sabrina's help us, just for a moment, understand a little better what their world may be like.

s.p.e.c.u.l.a.t.i.v.e

2009-08-31T13:09:00.012-04:00

001

Commissioned by SEED, designers Daniel Gross & Joris Maltha conceptualized a slice of the future of human identification. They call it the Personal Genome Card (aka Personal DNA Card). The objective was to be able to reference an individual's genetic information, which could then be used for more elaborate tasks like asking personality-related questions, degree-of-confidence metrics related to that individual etc.

The design of this card allows us to postulate about the possible usage scenarios, and more importantly, raise scenarios that have high ethical issues associated with it. The design framework of the artifact mentions that as the card is fed with more and more genome data of a person, the better it gets at answering questions. A concept like this enables conversations in many quarters. For instance, social media experts would huddle together to formulate possibilities of linking genomes of different people in a large population to find those who are related far more than they could dream of. One can envision a scene where status updates & sharing interesting links fade away and far more psychologically relevant acts of sharing occurs that can arise from common/interesting genomic data.

One can surely speculate as to how people would have (atleast an initial) reluctance to carry information that is potentially too sensitive, that could be read/learned by others around them if they happen to have access to the card. In the proposed design, the front of the card carries a visual pattern of chromosomal intersections - and this could give rise to a very interesting branch of information visualization (something I believe Ben Fry - creator of the Processing language - has already explored in his thesis).

#end 001

002

Ever since I learnt about magnetic forces & fields in high school, I've wondered what they looked like. Given the fact that electromagnetic fields are invisible, the urge to find out what they looked like (colorful/not, cool/not, scary/not,..) was never taken care of. Until recently that is, when I happen to come across a mind-blowing video by Semiconductor Films.

Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

The movie that was shot at the NASA Space Sciences Laboratory, made use of real objects with real contexts, combined with the artistic inputs in sounds & visuals by the design team involved. The result is a fascinating glimpse in to the secret world of electromagnetic waves - exposing their lazy yet vibrant movement & patterns around emitting objects & spaces. So, what is speculative about this? Everything!

Until now, this was an idea that was trapped inside science textbooks in boring black-and-white static images of what they might look like. The video opens up a world that allows us to first be amazed, and then use this visualization as an understanding-framework to build interesting machines. One such body of work, which in itself can be considered an entity of speculative design, was borne out of the (n)certainties studio at Die Angewandte in Austria. A couple of students came up with the concept for a machine called Fara+-Day, using this movie as an inspiration.

Detailed design images of the new machine shows how "liquid metal" interacts with a machine's electromagnetic environment. In what appears to be a mind-bending mixture of physics, visualization & product design, the students create an artifact that can be discussed about - like its scientific ramifications, the tangential contribution to machine intelligence & behavior, and so on..

#end 002

Real-life Wall-E Recycles

2009-08-31T12:51:00.003-04:00

Italian scientists develop DustCart, an on-demand robot trash collector.In the small Italian city of Peccioli, Dustcart, the green, friendly robot has been created to recycle. The 8th century town's most profitable business currently is recycling in their local state of the art garbage collection factory. The Robotics Department at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna University developed Dustcart to as a public robot to aid in recycling for the local residents. DustCart is part of a project called “DustBot,” a $3.9 million research program that started in 2006 to implement robotics in society in useful ways, such as cleaning the streets. Dustcart travels the streets collecting trash. When you verbally call, he travels to the caller and asks for an user id and type of garbage, (recycle or trash), he collects the refuse and takes it to a predetermined dump site. His cute and friendly design makes him interesting to adults and delightful to children. He has a quiet design on purpose to help with the Itialian problem of nightime noise as garbage trucks collect. Some of the criticisim of him is that its inefficient for the robots to travel to and from houses and dumpsites and how could many of the Dustcarts travel the congested streets of larger European cities.

In response to the criticism, I think that the overall idea of robots involved in recycling is a good one. The scientist main point of design was that Dustcart was on demand, but i agree that numerous robots traveling in congested streets will soon become a problem in itself. An adjustment could be many stationary Dustcarts, maybe one per an intersection. This would allow convenience for the recycler still but reduce the travel issues of the Dustcarts. At night when the streets are less congested the Dustcarts could travel to the dumpsite, that would eliminate the need for garbage trucks, another goal of the developers.

The friendly and colorful design of the robot might bring some fun into the concept of recycling causing people to want to interact and recycle.

Mechanical Ecology

2009-08-31T12:47:00.003-04:00

The discussion that happened with regard to Natalie Jeremijenko's Ooz project last Monday got me thinking about how we perceive our environment. While the idea of inviting animals into an environment that we now own (they once inhabited it as well) is appealing to me, the methods employed create not much more than question in my mind.

With the following discussion, I am open to the possibility that it is probably just my mindset. So, the idea of creating robotic geese just gets me wondering whether we want the animals in our environment at the cost of fooling ourselves as well. I mean why the robotic geese? If the environment was simply made conducive enough - clean, unintrusive (?), maybe animals would just inhabit it without so much effort.

Also, why is it that we need to communicate with the animals in Goosespeak? Why this need to understand and decompose everything in our environment? Some may argue that it is the scientific quest which has led us to where we are. I am on the fence about this - is there somewhere that we should draw the line?

I remember reading this somewhere in Calvin and Hobbes I think -

The problem with science is that it is a bunch of empiricists trying to explain things of unimaginable wonder.

I understand that there could be the possibility of catering to needs of animals if we understood them, but being a skeptic, I wonder (read: doubt) if we will ever get over the Human-centeredness of things. And don't get me wrong, I see nothing wrong with that and understand that is a natural part of our evolution.

The whole idea of taming one's environment is exciting and scary to me at the same time. A tamed environment could be one that we understand, and can interpret well. It would be an environment that we would be able to communicate with. It would possibly even be responsive to our needs, or desires. But this level of transparency, communication makes me hesitant about whether this environment would ever invoke a sense of wonder. Is that reasonable?

Sensing Architecture ^ Implant Matrix

2009-08-31T12:37:00.006-04:00

Humans have become too used to static forms of structures around them, thereby taking their form & hence function for granted. Philip Beesley from University of Waterloo is an architect who pushed the boundary of landscaping by introducing a material that is capable of 'mechanical empathy'. Termed as Implant Matrix, the artifact is an interactive geotextile which contains a network of mechanisms that senses the presence of humans and reacts to the same.

I've always been fascinated to find out how urban landscapes could be embedded with a sense of digital identity that allows for more possibilities of human-to-structure communication and vice versa. It somehow seems very wasteful to me that we built acres and acres of buildings occupying precious space within the urban perimeter, and what they do more or less begins and ends with just being there. Empowering these otherwise boring & still buildings with the capability to do something interesting - something that provokes an emotional or intellectual response from humans is maybe one way of enriching the world around us.

photo courtesy: BLDGBLOG

Implant Matrix aims to do that and a little more. Beesley intends for it to be used even as a terrestrial foundation, more like a prosthesis of sorts, prompting BLDGBLOG to dub it as an earth-surface-machine. It employs capacitive sensors on multiple nodes to detect presence & contact of humans in its vicinity. Beesley et al calls this sort of interaction as architectural eroticism, which is probably due to the intimate relationship that is established if and when one is alone with the installation.

Sociometric Sensors

2009-08-31T11:42:00.003-04:00

Sociometric Sensors suggested by MIT & PARC researchers is an integrated kit of sensors called "Sociometric Badge" It detects various events happening in inter-personal communication.

Extracting speech features in real-time: The badge does not record any speech content, but identifiessocial signals such as speech energy and speaking speed of the wearer. Turn taking or interactivity level is
measured through synchronization of multiple badges.

Measuring body movement using a 3-axis accelerometer: This can detect individual activities such as gesturing, walking, and sitting as well as social interactions such as body movement mimicry.

Detecting proximity data using a 2.4 GHz radio or Bluetooth to detect distance of multiple wearers.

Capturing and identifying two person's face-to-face alignment using an IR sensor: This allows us to detect encounters as well as postural direction.

In there CHI 09 Work-in-progress poster, they present the result of user research. They provided 10 female-male couples of shoppers with the kits. Then analyzed the interaction between the female and male in a couple.

You can download the paper from ACM portal.
Here's another link from PARC.

Research

2009-08-31T10:17:00.009-04:00

Projects I think would be interesting to research:

1. Solar powered interactive kinetic pixels

This project involves multiple sensors that interact with people. The sensors react to sound and light.

http://www.aether.hu/2005/v4/

2. Qwerkbot Interface

I worked with the Qwerkbot robot in the past and had problems with the interface. I think researching and building a new interface using flash or flex would improve the overall interaction with this robot.
http://www.terk.ri.cmu.edu/software/qwerkbot-teleop-interface/

3. I like the idea of harnessing the power from humans for robots.

Potenco YoYo Power Generator

The use of bicyclists generating electricity to illuminate art project looks interesting and we could build some kind of interface to power a game or product that we use everyday.
http://www.assocreation.com/moon-ride/index.html

Heely's Energy Hack: Roller Sneakers

4. Healthcare Monitor

Develop a automated system to monitor the health of a patient and send conditions to a remote doctor. After reading the Autonomous Systems Report I think this subject would be interesting to research.
See Autonomous Systems Report 09.pdf page 9.

Semi-living worry doll

2009-08-31T09:35:00.002-04:00

These semi-living worry dolls are based on the Guatemalan children's tradition, of whispering one's worries into a doll before going to bed.

These dolls are grown from living tissue that are set on a graft. This graft is place in a bioreactor. In addition, a "worry-machine" is hooked up to the bioreactor, which whispers worries submitted via the internet.

These objects are considered "semi-living" are artificial designed biological systems. They are only "semi" living because they lack immune systems and other natural defenses that would allow them to live outside of a sterile laboratory environment.

I have to wonder what the implications of engineering nature are. We bioengineer vegetables and pets but in this case, someone has created a kind of living being that doesn't exist in nature.

Several questions came to mind when I was confronted with these dolls: What does it mean to be living? Do we have the right to bring to create organisms for our own selfish needs? Is it right to create beings that utterly dependent on us for their survival? Is it all just art? Is it moral to create semi-living objects, just because we can?

Related links:
The Tissue Culture and Art Project
Semi-living worry dolls
Engineering nature Issue 71
Bizarre Living Art Project Put to Death

Strandbeests

2009-08-31T08:35:00.004-04:00

'Strandbeests' are mechanical creatures that employ wind to power themselves. Theo Jansen, the dutch artist who created these kinetic sculptures claims these creatures are a new form of life.

When I saw this TED talk, I was just amazed at the idea and the execution of it. He had me wondering whether or not these creatures seem like a natural ramification in the way the world is evolving - how humans and machines are evolving, and how art and engineering are evolving. Huge structures that seems like skeletons of animals/ beasts, that can move autonomously using the wind without having any computational ability at all - does accepting them as a lifeform seem natural at all? At some level, it absolutely doesn't - how can we accept anything so completely mindless as evolution, especially while we are making robots - intelligent and more and more humanized? At the same time, it is hardwired with the most basic evolutionary instinct - the instinct of survival. So why am I still hesitant? Hayles notes in the paper 'Computing the Human', and I am paraphrasing here, that the future never happens the way we imagined it would.

To me, the very idea of wind energy literally breathing life into these vast complex structures leads me to the temptation of the possibilities that these creatures might offer. The strandbeests-carrying-huge-loads bit is almost unimpressive to me, and it is not as if I understand or have a clear vision of what these creatures can/ should do, but I can sense a tremendous amount of possibility there.

I wonder why I invest so much hope in something that may or maynot even be promising. A very human reason that I could think of is that with the mindlessness of these creatures comes a vague sense of security. While our fears of one of the doomsday possibilities being the robot outdoing and overpowering us, we can let go of those fears with strandbeests. While strandbeests are still wild and untamed, and it may still be a while before we understand how and when we should tame them, or even more importantly, what for - they do provide us the promise of clean, lowcost and unquestioning service. And this very (extremely human-centered) thought excites and scares me no end.

Die Electric: alternative uses for plug sockets

2009-08-31T01:01:00.005-04:00

Whatever will we do with all those electricity sockets once solar and renewable energy makes them totally redundant? Perhaps not the most pressing concern of the 21st century environmentalist, but one we should indulge, because it's led to some really amusing design ideas...

By using up sockets with handy toothbrush holders or funky vases, one will not be able to use that socket to suck energy incessantly. It is a reminder to unplug your hairdryer when not being used.

Here is a hook with a message – namely, “Turn The Lights Off When You’re Done”.

Keen to wean the modern world off its electricity supply, designer Scott Amron, the father of Die Electric has created a range of fun way to It to persuade people to use less energy, or at least think about how many things are plugged into sockets in their homes. The idea behind Die Electric's products is very straightforward and envisioning while it may be a simple idea.

Pleo: Robot, pet or both?

2009-08-30T23:01:00.002-04:00

Pleo, an 8-inch-high, automated Camarasaurus, is a pleasure to have around. His movements, slow and steady, are significantly more lifelike than those of his competitors. Like many robot pets, Pleo is programmed to change "moods" over time—but unlike others, his behavioral states are instantly relatable: Sometimes he's curious, wandering across the room of his own accord; at other points he's playful, sleepy, or affectionate. Leave him be, and he's a soothing presence with his deliberate gestures and gentle sounds. Pick him up, and he's cuddly as the White Tiger Cub, despite his rubbery skin. In short, Pleo somehow manages to be neither annoying, disturbing, offensive, pathetic nor scary.

This engineered by a group of robotics specialists, animators, technologists, scientists, biologists, and programmers. The design combined sensory, articulation, and neuronetics to create a life like appearance with organic movement and adaptable behaviors.

What I really liked is that it does not just a copy of dog or cat, which is an animal we can easily anywhere. Making an unrealistic animal we've never seen realistic is the most appealing part for me. Also, the sophisticated emotional responses to environment make me feel attached to the robot, but I'm not totally convinced that it is a pet. In theory, an animal constructed of plastic limbs, and servos is the perfect substitute for a demanding, flesh-and-blood companion. But how engaging are these mechanical beasts?

What's a bot?

2009-08-30T21:55:00.005-04:00

When I first saw this at the MoMa, I didn't fully grasp what the exhibit was about but I did understand it to be a thought exercise on what robots were, are, and could be. This Dunne and Raby project made me re-think what I thought I knew.

I found the concept of anxious or needy robots to be interesting because I've thought of robots as being machines self-confident in their program, capable of sentience at any given moment. These pieces (design briefs, prototypes?) suggest that if robots were sentient, that would be as neurotic as the humans that built them.

It makes sense that the creations of humans would inherit(learn?) their creator's faults, just like a son would inherit(learn?) his father's nervous tick. If the artificial intelligence becomes rampant, it will undoubtedly inherit(learn?) some exploitable and irrational human trait.

Robots sitting in a tree. K-I-S-S-I-N-G

2009-08-30T21:40:00.003-04:00

There are robotics researchers that seem to focus on creating robots that destroy and terrorize and there are researchers that create robots that nurture and entertain. Then there are the researchers who create robots that mimic humans as much as possible.

Taiwanese engineers created a pair of robots that were able to mimic kissing. These robots appear to be primarily used in staged plays. (1)

Some of the response to this Engadget post expresses disgust and bewilderment. I dismissed this post at first. These kissing robots are a feat of engineered, perfectly in-sync mechanisms and nothing more. They mimic movement but not the emotion behind one of humankind’s intimate gestures. They are not wired to even recognize what a kiss really is. I don’t think these robots are a breakthrough.

Then, I read the comments and found them interesting because I was confused by the negative comments. Were people unsettled because robots that kiss are unnatural?

I also wonder what the motivation behind the creation of these robots was. To explore physical coordination systems? Or was it just for the hell of it? What kind of person receives inspiration to build kissing robots?

(1) I think these robots are like animatronics and closer to the Hall of Presidents than anything created at the Personal Robots Group at MIT.

A Thesis Paper on Speculative Design

2009-08-30T19:00:00.002-04:00

In case you're the kind of person who likes to read definitions of things to reduce haziness of certain themes, here's a thesis paper on Speculative Design (written by Nikhil Mitter at the Arts Center College of Design, CA) that you might want to skim through (atleast the abstract).

This is only if you're still fumbling (like I am) to comfortably grasp the concept of speculative design (where does it begin & end, what is the process etc.). I feel much better after reading some parts of this, and I have a feeling I can identify & detail speculative design projects more easily now.

Disclaimer: Kindly excuse if this paper introduces 'too much' structure for a topic that Carl might have intentionally set as very exploratory and flexible.

And in the Category of Things That Are Both Terrifying and Awesome

2009-08-30T17:53:00.004-04:00

Shape-shifting robots. Programmable matter. External input tells the flat form what shape to take on ... to slide through cracks, to join together in a "swarm." - via RoboticsBlog.org

and ...

Robots made out of mold.

University of the West of England Professor Andy Adamatzky explains,

“Most people's idea of a computer is a piece of hardware with software designed to carry out specific tasks. This mould, or plasmodium, is a naturally occurring substance with its own embedded intelligence. [...] It will be a fully controllable and programmable amorphous intelligent robot with an embedded massively parallel computer. [...] In the very distant future we may be able to harness the power of plasmodia within the human body, for example to enable drugs to be delivered to certain parts of the human body. It might also be possible for thousands of tiny computers made of plasmodia to live on our skin and carry out routine tasks freeing up our brain for other things. Many scientists see this as a potential development of amorphous computing, but it is purely theoretical at the moment.”

- via Physorg.com

I don't feel informed enough to fully parse out the implications behind these emerging, speculative technologies, but both were sufficiently awe-inspiring that I thought they deserved a blog posting.

Electric Café

2009-08-30T17:40:00.002-04:00

Robot Chefs from Japan's Food Machinery and Technology Expo 2009

Given: Robotics are an integral part of our modern food production system. From satellite-powered crop forecasting to roboticized RFID-powered pallet sorting, we use roboticized technologies in nearly every part of the industrial food production and consumption chain.

Question: What's new in Food and Robotics?
The International Food Machinery and Technology Exhibition [FOOMA] in Japan is the place to find out. [2009 FOOMA videos.]

Although all of this stuff is endlessly fascinating, I was most entranced by the idea of the robot chef - seen here making pancakes, and here expertly handling sushi. (Although not making it, one notes.)

From a supply-chain perspective, it makes absolute sense: removing the human from the equation ensures a consistent global product. Throw in the showmanship factor, subtract dealing with hungover line cooks ... remember Detroit used to build cars using humans?

But food is much more than business; it is conveyor of culture. What do we lose when we preference automation over autonomy? And what systems of production do these technologies favor?

This likely negates the need for tipping, but it probably kinda bytes when you need some extra ketchup. - Slashfood

And if we concur ... yes, we lose a little something by removing the chef ... what do we lose when we eliminate the waiter? Does he have more value than the cashier?

Ramen Robots

Bonus YouTube: Keepon Keeping On

Apparently I missed the boat on this 2007 meme, but the robot dance party (2:54) is pretty much the most heartwarming thing ever.

Pig City - Animal-centered sustainability?

2009-08-30T17:31:00.003-04:00

The Netherlands-based architecture and urban design group proposed almost a satire about contemporary pig husbandry system. The reason this seemingly unrealistic and humorous design is not a comedy but a speculative design is that they researched related issues such as pork production and consumption, animal diseases, organic farming extensively and suggested relatively realistic solution - changing the pork production methods rather than us becoming vegetarians. Also their approach is quite logical from their own introduction of Pig City at Pig City from MVRDV homepage.

Article about Pig City

Skinthetic - Branding Once Removed? Cyborg Branding?

2009-08-30T17:00:00.003-04:00

Peter Allen and Carla Murray's "Skinthetic" speculates the future of branding. As a contender of Core 77 Design competition in 2000, it throws out a question - what branding would look like in 20 years - from a very radical cyberfunkish perspective.

By designing an implemented logo into the body, it critiques the human desire toward luxury branding and addiction to plastic/aesthetic surgery, as well as the design strategy of luxury goods. What would be the extreme fetishism of brand? They suggested the cyborg-nized body with branding, just like tatoos that either disgust vested powers or lust others' jealousy.

Read more about Skinthetic here.

Robot Playmates

2009-08-30T15:15:00.004-04:00

Robot Playmates is a research project in the Socially Intelligent Machines Lab at Georgia Tech. Its premise is that learning socially from other robots may help robots learn tasks faster. In this case robots pick up and poke variously colored and shaped objects. Some of these objects emit a noise when the right action is applied to it. One robot learns from another how to find which objects and actions produce a noise through various kinds of mimicry, exploration and experimentation.

As an engineering project this seems to be entirely focused on functional methodologies. The problem being solved is how to get the robot to function better, rather than trying to solve a problem in the human world beyond itself. Obviously, digging further into the literature reveals that at bottom, this research is designed to make robots more useful to humans in a potentially wide array of areas. The current research, however, is the pure research prior to its use in an application.

I like the intersection here between machine worlds and humanlike behaviors. In the robot scenarios there is one learner and one teacher. I wondered what would happen if both were teachers and both were learners. Could an entire robot ecology of peer-to-peer learning be developed. Such experiments are being tried in the non-robot world.

RSS to share?

2009-08-30T12:51:00.001-04:00

Does anyone have a good collection of RSS feeds related to this class that they would not mind sharing?

Computational Nomadism

2009-08-30T02:30:00.009-04:00

I am interested in a pair of related issues: nomadism and improvisational spaces. First, a quick definition of terms:

Nomadism-The ever widening reach of network technology is pushing humanity toward an increasingly nomadic life condition. These technologies first allowed and then compelled us to reproduce aspects of our homes and workspaces anywhere and everywhere, making physical location relatively less important and connectedness relatively more important. Simultaneously, I believe these same technologies reconfigure national boundaries to disrupt (or at least challenge) the power of the state by making those boundaries less enforceable and less meaningful.

Improvisational spaces-unsanctioned living conditions, warehouses, shantytowns, homeless shelters, rooftops, converted garages, cyberspace forums... All of these are spaces that come to be used in unanticipatable ways. Even a suburban rec room can become improvisational space when used as a theater, a baby's nursery, or a meth lab--any purpose for which it was not designed.

Futurefarmers' The Reverse Ark was a project developed by the group as artists in residence at Pasadena City College. They worked with students within a gallery space to create a kind of preparation for a presumed flood, by packing up bales of reusable materials. During the process, the gallery became a space for lectures, research, and other activities in which the students discussed climate change issues and explored the history of water and floods on the planet. Their explorations were made concrete through a number of related artifacts that supplement the display throughout the space.

The Reverse Ark is an example of using the tracing tactic in speculative design. "To trace is to follow and record the presence and movement of an artifact, event , or idea" (DiSalvo, "Design and the Construction of Publics, p. 55). The entire project attempts to highlight issues of water, climate, and survival by marking its presence or absence in various ways.

I'm interested in how this project anticipates a nomadic future by looking at how the earth has behaved in the past. Also, I'm interested in how the building of these artifacts became an occasion to become engaged in serious issues and to build a temporary, improvised community.

Teddy Cruz (whose web site has been under construction for the last year), is an architect and urban designer whose work is highly influenced by having grown up on the border between the US and Mexico. Although his Casa Familiar project is not pure speculative design (plans appear to be in place for actually building the first phase of it), I've included it here because I believe it does draw heavily on projective tactics in the way it frames its own future growth.

Casa Familiar is a nonprofit housing agency developing a community center / housing / neighborhood complex in San Ysidro, California, a few miles from Tijuana, Mexico. Cruz has designed a system of 12 housing units, a neighborhood center, and an alley-like public garden, all of which merge into one another organically. With this design Cruz is intentionally importing the urban logic of Tijuana into a space north of the border. This use of the space is in direct violation of San Diego's zoning laws, which specify one house per lot, with each lot being extremely large. As part of his practice, Cruz and Casa Familiar successfully campaigned to have the zoning laws changed for this project.

The project plays out a clash of urban logics: Tijuana is dense and improvisational; San Diego is manicured and orderly.

Cruz's vision of the complex ultimately projects 3 decades into the future when, he imagines, the infrastructures of San Diego and Tijuana will have become so entwined and mutually infecting that there is no longer any meaningful distinction between the cities.

By deeply engaging architectural problems, Cruz's design highlights new economic and social problems that may not have been evident--the way the city attempts to enforce certain ways of living and the problems of immigrants moving from one spatial logic to another.

Tweenbot's Ubiquitous Existense

2009-08-29T16:51:00.002-04:00

Kacie Kinzer's Tweenbots "are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal".

More Info on Tweenbots Here

Surprisingly, after many test runs, the Tweenbot always made it to its destination. Getting caught by obstacles or heading towards dangerous roads, people assisted the Tweenbot, helping it avoid danger and getting safely to its destination.

Speculatively, I think this project is important because it provides an alternative to the envisioned future of all the encompassing, all knowing, all serving robots which are often portrayed in speculative design work. In this alternative future, robots are more ubiquitous, helping humans, and sometimes needing our help as well. This seems to imply a future in which robots co-exist seamlessly within our worlds, our interactions with them and their interactions with us will become more and more expected and transparent simultaneously.

Fleethorse Naturmobile: The Car of the future?

2009-08-29T16:44:00.002-04:00

Generally when we think of alternative fuel sources, we think natural gas or bio diesel, not.. horses. Fleethorse Naturmobile is a horse-powered car ready for the road whose purpose is two-fold. First, the Fleethorse Naturmobile provides us with an alternative to the ways in which we might typical see the future of green fuel sources. Second, the car provides an arguably 'cruelty free' environment from which to obtain literal horsepower that is removed from the more traditional and more stressful methods of drawing a carriage or riding on a horse.

Click Here For More Info

According to their website, "the first and foremost consideration and the most important factor in the invention of Naturmobil is to provide smooth mobility without threat to the environment".

So does anyone really think this is car of the future? No, and neither do the inventors of the Naturmobile, who see its purpose being used creatively in advertising, tourism, and education. However, while horsepower may not be the fuel source of the future, I do think that the car does serve as an important examination of un-tapped energy sources, it provides outward thinking towards the problem pollution produced by current day cars, and it shows the benefit of thinking outside currently existing schemas when trying to solve speculative environmentally and fuel problems.

Coffee Printer: Creative Reuse of Coffee Grinds

2009-08-29T16:31:00.002-04:00

The RITI Coffee printer is a speculative design of a desktop printer which recycles leftover coffee grinds into printable ink. The printer is completely free of a power source, utilizing human power to move the print head back and forth.

Click Here For More Info

The printer is limited to strictly brown or black ink, and the lack of a power source, while definitely green, does not seem to be the best of design choices for a usable printer. However, the strong suit of this speculative design is the creative reuse of waste products in an immediate and direct manner. Coffee grinds and office work seem go hand in hand, so using coffee grinds in this environment makes sense. The connection between the reuse and the user is direct; we aren't sending the coffee grinds away to a coffee recycling facility to be recycled into ink cartridge, but rather we see an immediate result from the action of recycling.

RoboJackets First Meeting

2009-08-25T18:52:00.001-04:00

Want to meet all the other kids on campus playing with bots?

Join the RoboJackets. First meeting Thursday, August 27 at 5:30 PM in Klaus 1116.

No Limits In Design

2009-08-25T09:41:00.003-04:00

In my reading and from the discussion in class yesterday, what stood out the most for me was the idea of projective design. Especially 'projective designs' that do not actually function. Coming from a scientific background of Math, and research projects, the concept of thinking or designing for design sake is unheard of. Research and projects have a conclusion and function often times before they have a hypothesis. This idea of thinking of new things without concern for actual function allows a larger portion of the public be able to participate in problem solving. There are a small few in the general public who actually know the programming needed for elaborate robots, but with this idea of functionality being secondary, they too are allowed to participate in solving problems. This is one of the major differences in the art and design communities and the science communities.

I also believe that the place chosen to showcase work completely does effect how the work is perceived. If a robot with lets say metal detecting abilities for recycling is built and shown at an engineering competition, but doesn't actually function the response of that public will be considerably different than if the same robot is shown as art or design. The idea of functioning being secondary is kind of a 'dream big' philosophy or a 'If you make it, they will come'. It conveys an optimism that I personally enjoy in design that is sometimes missing in Science.

2009-08-25T01:29:00.001-04:00

Is it possible to affect public life in the city using robotic and sensing technologies with designer mind?

Maybe.

First, I would like to clarify the confusion between science project and art project. Some of students commented on previous post about “Design and The Elastic Mind”. However when I was there I thought it would be the most stupid work. They were neither art nor science research project. I would say it looked like science project, but covered or wrapped by art. I think they should make just science research project, publish a paper and develop it for public to use better (/friendly) technology or add more creativity (more aesthetic view in material/form/shape) for art gallery.

My original background is graphic design, but I have been creating art projects for long time. As an artist, we sometimes discuss scientist should just do research and would not try having an exhibition in art gallery, (it sounds a bit aggressive. sorry!) since it is not art.

When we discuss project in theme of future such as near future life or future furniture, it is the way to give a new vision. However I would like to say, “please not to mix with art”.

So let’s go back to the possibility to affect public life in the city using technologies. Yes, it is possible. However I have another question about who is the public? The public who is accessible to technologies or anyone outside? That also closely connects with accessibility.

In Design and the Construction, Disalvo defines public as publics are constructed in the sense that they are brought together through and around issues. I suggest he would delineate publics as people who have common interests in the community base. The two tactics are explained clearly there, however I am not sure that assessment would be proper enough since he comments the limitation.

City Sense - Public Design Workshop Spring 2009

2009-08-24T18:40:00.017-04:00

City Sense exposes students to environmental sensing and demonstrates its connection to public health. Students use a mock sensor to explore 2-dimensional representations of the city.

Overview

City Sense is a short program, developed for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Global Health Odyssey Museum, that exposes middle school and high school students to environmental sensing and demonstrates its connection to public health. This activity encourages and educates the students on the use of environmental sensors and their importance in the health of the city.

The City Sense project’s concept was born from the development of the CDC’s National Environmental Public Health Tracking Network (EPHT). The EPHT network is designed to coordinate environmental and public health data from different agencies across the country. Currently this data is scattered across different tracking systems, but the goal of the National Network is to integrate data from these agencies into a network of standardized electronic data that will provide valid scientific information on environmental exposures and adverse health conditions as well as the possible spatial and temporal relations between them [1]. This is a very complicated concept, especially for grade school students. Our goal is to reduce this information and focus on the importance of environmental sensors, learning how these sensors work, and designing a sensor network.

Research

Our research for this project was similar to that of the design-based research process [2]. We had our initial discussion with the CDC education coordinator, where she addressed the need for a short (45-60 minute) activity for the students to participate in once the tour of the facility and museum were complete. Following that discussion we began reviewing literature, researching existing theories, and studying existing models of the same or similar topics. Literature about the CDC, past CDC projects and exhibits, and current CDC research was included. We also studied the existing models of Technology Enhanced Learning Environments (TELEs) including WISE (Web-based Inquiry Science Environments), BGuILE (Biology Guided Inquiry Learning Environments), CSILE (Computer-Supported Intentional Learning Environments), and the Jasper series. Our goal as designers was to incorporate the principles and ideas of design into the activity. Since we are not experts in the area of science and environmental health, we did not want to teach science. We wanted to teach design while including scientific facts provided by the CDC and other science-based resources, therefore, an important part of our literature review covered design and design attitude [3].

Following the literature review and research, was a brain-storming session in which we established our
initial learning objectives:

Students will…
• Use self-directed learning to connect public health information to everyday experiences.
• Understand the complexity of environmental hazards
• Reveal challenges confronted by public health systems.

Students will understand a key attitude when engaging in design:
• Making things visible.

Students will also understand these additional design attitudes:
• Seeing the whole
• Engaging uncertainty
• Avoiding premature closure
• Enjoying improvisation
• Relying on tacit knowledge

With these objectives in mind we completed our first iterations of activity ideas. After combining a few of these ideas, we developed two activities that were presented to the CDC’s education coordinator:
• Sights, Sounds, and Scenarios
• Sick City
After further iteration, these two activities were combined into one: City Sense.

Activity Summary

City Sense focuses on the use of environmental sensors and the role they play in public health. The
activity educates the students on the importance of designing an effective sensor network. Using a sensor prototype and a 2-dimensional map, students look for a specific element in the environment that may be hazardous to public health. After sharing their findings, they perform another searching task with the additional constraint of having to anticipate the locations of the environmental hazard based on their newfound understanding of the hazard.

The interaction of City Sense originated from the science of color filters. A transparent piece of glass transmits all wavelengths of light, while an opaque object transmits no light. A green filter will transmit green, a blue filter will transmit blue, and a red filter will transmit red. When a red filter is placed over an image, red, and similar warm colors, will seem to disappear while darker colors and cool colors will
remain. Our sensor prototype utilizes a red filter in order to reveal the blue environmental hazard hidden within the orange interference pattern.

Activity Prototype Steps

City Sense is designed to be able to emphasize any environmental hazard that is detected by the EPHT network. Our prototype uses light pollution as the hazard being detected. The activity will be lead by the education coordinator at the Centers for Disease Control, therefore we must supply a detailed script of each step in the activity.

Preliminary Activity:
Students are educated on the EPHT network, importance of sensors, and specific information in the environment that an environmental sensor can detect. Students are given examples of various kinds of sensors that the students may be familiar with (thermometers, barometers, ect). Then they are given examples of tools they may not be as familiar with (spectrophotometer - measures light levels). The instructor explains light pollution and asks students to respond with examples of what they may see as light pollution. Instructor then explains the health effects related to exposure to light pollution.

Activity 1:
Students explore a map with sensors to find light pollution.

Step 1:
In the first step the instructor explains how to use the map (see Figure 1). The map is a 2-dimensional representation of a city. Next to the map is a series of photos that represent what specific areas of the map look like up close. Behind the map is an orange interference pattern. Behind the interference pattern are the hidden icons that represent light pollution (see Figure 3).

Step 2:
Once the explanation of the map is complete, the students are to divide into groups of five. Each group receives the map show in Figure 1 and the light sensor shown in Figure 2. The students should then begin exploring the map, looking for areas contaminated with light pollution. Affected areas are identified by a light bulb with a number inside that corresponds with the number attached to each picture (see Figure 3).

Step 3:
Once all of the hazard is identified, the students then discusses why each area is considered polluted. The instructor may ask some of the following questions to begin discussion:

• Who would like to share where you found light pollution?
• Why do you think there was light pollution there?
• Was there any pollution that surprised you?
• What did others find?

Activity 2:
Students use maps to design an appropriate sensor network.

Step 1:
In the second activity, each group receives another map of a different downtown area (see Figure 4). They now have to use the knowledge gained from the previous activity to design a sensor network for the city. The photos to the right of the map correlate with the numbers on the map. Some of the photos illustrate light pollution, while the others don’t. The students’ job is to determine the best place on the map to place their sensors in order to detect the greatest amount of light pollution. For example, if a student thinks that photo #1 is a polluted area they should put a mark on the map in the place that is representative of photo #!. Each group gets to mark three places on the map. These marks symbolize light sensors that are placed in the city. Once the students are finished, they have designed a sensor network for their city.

Step 2:
Once the sensor network is designed the instructor leads a discussion by starting with the following questions:
• Who would like to share where you placed your sensors?
• Why do you think there would be light pollution there?
• When you checked, was there any light pollution there?
• Why do you think there was [was not]?
• Do you think you designed an effective network?
• What did others find?

In Conclusion

After completing the City Sense activities, students will have an understanding of the advantages, disadvantages, difficulties and tradeoffs of environmental sensing. They will understand some of the considerations when approaching design problems. Finally, they will understand how sensing is consistent with the CDC’s Environmental Public Health Tracking system.

Future Work

- Testing the activity with middle school and high school students at the Centers for Disease
Control.

- Web-based application that allows the students to upload their own town photos and repeat a
similar process as activities one and two.

Download Project Documents

City Sense Team:

Carl DiSalvo, PhD; Assoc. Professor, School of Literature, Communication, & Culture; Georgia Institute of Technology
Cinqué Hicks; Digital Media Graduate Student, Georgia Institute of Technology
Delisha Peterson; Digital Media Graduate Student, Georgia Institute of Technology

#include district9;

2009-08-24T14:01:00.010-04:00

It took a while for me to truly understand the meaning of the concept 'public'. Was it just a set of people with an associated set of issues? Did it have to be 'real'? Can one postulate about the formation of a public without even 'being in the present' of that public? This, coupled with the ideas of projection & tracing forced me to find an example that I could use to clarify my understanding.

That is when I happened to watch the movie District 9. At the risk of making this blog post seem like a movie review, I'm going to go ahead and list out the concepts that I could identify from the readings and relate them with elements from the movie. [Please be advised - movie spoiler ahead.]

The Constructed Public - Dewey's (The Public & Its Problems, 1927) treatment of the public as an entity could not have intersected more with the different kinds of population that were characterized as 'affected' in District 9. You have the citizens of Jo'burg who are feeling the heat of having to live with uncouth, indisciplined aliens, giving rise to a large set of issues in their lives which they wouldn't have had to deal with otherwise if the aliens had just flown away. Then, you have the prawns themselves who clearly feel very out of place crammed into a slum on Earth when they should be zipping around the universe in their mothership. This raised a question in my mind - Between two different publics, does having a larger problem set or number of issues to deal with, make one public bigger/stronger than the other? Just as any design entity is subject to comparison with another one of its generic kind, public(s) would also have to be put through this scrutiny. The concept of public is exposed even further by the movie through depicting the multiplicity of publics borne out of the same seed issue - that of the alien mothership being stuck in the city of Jo'burg for almost three decades. This becomes clear when as a viewer, I realized that being a denizen of Jo'burg did not require a character to be human.

The Tactic of Projection - DiSalvo states (Design & the Construction of Publics, 2009) that "projections are based in facts (or atleast information considered fact) - they are not fictions". District 9 is certainly fiction, but can more than aptly be used to illustrate the tactic of projection since the movie uses knowledge of the past & present to introduce a satirical take of what it might be like when applied to the case of aliens. And it uses designerly means to achieve this.
The movie's name itself is a spinoff of what people used to call 'District 6' - an area in Cape Town declared as a "whites-only" zone by the Apartheid govt in 1966. Sensitive topics such as racism, segregation & xeniphobia, that are normally the most common founding stones of many publics, are treated with an equal measure of satire & seriousness while trying to project the issues in a future point of time. The creator of the movie employs a vast array of design objects to attain his goal of this projection. Alien creatures created using raw CGi effects without any dilution of truth, a rugged massive seemingly indestructible mothership, DNA-coded bioweapons etc etc.

[Tactic of Tracing to be added shortly]

What is actually a well-crafted science-fiction movie also turns out to be a very good design scenario of the future. And then I read Bleecker's essay on Design Fiction, and I am confused as to whether I can call this movie Design Fiction rather than science fiction.

Political action?....no thanks!

2009-08-24T11:29:00.008-04:00

Helping and serving the community...sure. Political action...no thanks! At least that's what I thought before starting my first participatory design project about 8 months ago. Community activism and political action in the community, in my mind, was for the "people passionate about changing the world." It was a very outward display of feelings on injustice and what can be done to stop it. In my mind, that's just not me. I love to help, but behind the scenes mostly.

My ideas of political action changed once I looked at through the eyes of design and technology. This was due to the research and development of a short program designed for the Centers for Disease Control's Global Health Odyssey Museum. This program was designed to expose middle school and high school students to environmental sensing and its connection to public health. I started out wondering "how can design and technology possibly help in political or public action." Coming from a background of graphic design I understood the power of visual design, and the interactive technology of the web in sparking action, but not this idea participatory design.

The Neighborhoods Networks Project is a key example of the strength and important role that technology and the design of that technology can play in community action. Some of the participants, like me, had their doubts about the program's effectiveness. They probably went to to the initial meeting thinking, "These technology art hippies, trying to make something out of nothing." (yes, I've heard that exact phrase uttered from the mouth of my dad, a software systems annalist.)

As the program continued, the enthusiasm of the participants increased at each phase. They began to realize, not only the importance of sensing technology, but also the the importance of how that technology is designed, how the sensor captures its information, how that information is analyzed, and who that information is sent to. So, in the end they have not only designed a product that will spark action in the community, but they have also placed responsibility on the community leaders to take action.

Now I can say, "Helping and serving the community...sure. Political action...yes!"

Tracing of Cultural Objects

2009-08-24T11:01:00.002-04:00

Referencing the writings of John Dewey, Carl proposes the idea that the notion of public is something that exists as a recognizable reaction to an issue or event. The entity of a public does not entirely solidify until "making the conditions and consequences of an issue apparent and known". He continues by suggesting that it is therefore the case that we can examine the notion of public as something that can be activity constructed, built, and influenced from a design standpoint, allowing us to "extend" the familiar processes of design into the process of constructing publics.

Carl lays the groundwork out for the designing of publics by presenting several 'tactics' which can be utilized, including projection and tracing. Projection points towards the future, while tracing is more of a historical examination. Carl presents several examples that directly trace an issue's history, and then use that data to create a projection of the future.

However, I think it is important to realize that the tactic of tracing can be thought of something slightly more subtle and abstract than a literal retracing of history. For instance, the referencing of cultural objects in a presentation or art installation can hold significant historical value and information based on our own identities, and can have ability to be interpreted in different ways when presented to different audiences. When discussing the influence of 'science fact' on 'science fiction', and vice versa, Julian Bleecker presents us with the example film 'Death Star Over San Francisco', a film which features mocked up home video footage in which science fiction like technology is seemingly ever present in our daily lives. The Death Star looming in the sky has become expected, and large Imperial star ships crossing the San Francisco bay is an everyday occurrence. The film cleverly utilizes science fiction to depict what the future of tomorrow may appear like, playfully referencing the Star Wars series.

However, the film's use of the darker elements of Star Wars project concerns of the future, creating a metaphor for a world in which technology such as this slowly assimilates itself into our everyday lives. The film, although dealing with fictitious subject matter, can be viewed as a constructor of issues, and ultimately of publics in its own way.

But what history does this film trace in the context of Carl's article? Rather than pulling from the histories of the American space program and building on those in a similar fashion as the film 2001, the film references the pre-existing fictitious history of Star Wars, and utilizes it as the ground work for projecting our future. While the film does not actually present a complete history of the fictional elements it uses, it does perform a sort of tracing by referencing something which comes pre-packaged with its own history and pre-determined cultural meaning. This tracing is not a literal presentation of a history, but rather one that is apparent because of our familiarity with what is being shown; when we see the Death Star and Tie fighter, we automatically associate their context as dark and foreboding. The film intentionally references elements that liken to 'the dark side', as opposed to a future filled with ewoks and fuzzy creatures. This sort of subconscious tracing occurs based on our own identities and our individual cultural familiarity with the subject.

Collaborative Design Fiction

2009-08-24T08:25:00.006-04:00

Much of my work during this past summer as a User Experience Researcher Designer, was to gather people and get them talking about Augmented Reality - how they would want to see it in their lives within the next few years. It was amazing how a simple guideline like 'Do not constrain yourself with technology' to a bunch of highly technical folk (who were building the technology) led them to talk about how they really felt about it. [Sidenote: Also, despite initial hesitation, it was amazing how articulately they would express themselves even with really low-fidelity prototypes made with craft materials.] Then I would collate these ideas, translate them into coherent scenarios for usage. My work, just at this point, (right before the technical specifications would find their way into what I had to do) I felt was some form of creating Design Fiction.

While I do want to understand more deeply (through questioning) what Design Fiction constitutes of, I want to first share how enlightening the experience was for me, due to the collaborative nature of it. People's collective conception of the future was starkly similar in terms of the roles technology would play in their lives, it just had different form factors for different sets of needs. A lot of these themes were recurrent. (and surprisingly one of them was traffic management :) !)

So now, to better understand what design fiction is, I'd like to ask for opinions on whether in the Neighborhood Networks project, were people collaboratively creating design fiction? I understand that the viability of the designs was really high, and that there were little constraints technologically in being able to create it, yet there were social/ cultural constraints as noted in the paper to creating the technology. These constraints turn the absolute feasibility of these ideas into debatable possibilities for the future (fiction?). Which leads me to wonder - do social/ cultural/ political constraints constantly account for the fiction in design fiction? Also, now that we've established that technology can guide political consensus/opinion, its safe to say that it can guide the constraints of socially/ culturally acceptable/unacceptable (and therefore imaginable?) as well. Tying this back to my earlier finding/ idea/ notion that peoples' conceptions of the future seemed starkly similar in essence (even though the form factors of technology are different), it all seems like a big cycle to me. (Am I making any sense?) Thoughts?

Lastly, while reading the paper on the Neighborhood Networks, I couldn't help but notice the research design choices that were made to add robustness to the social experiment. I could visualize how these choices would put people at ease and better the experiment, and I felt that the experiment/ activities were very well designed.

Ooodles of Doodles: Looping the Regular Folks into the Imagination of the Future

2009-08-23T23:12:00.003-04:00

I identify as a digital populist - I believe in widespread access to tools and technology. I loved thinking about the Lawrenceville project in light of Bleecker's conception of digital facts and fictions as an interweaving loop. That got me to thinking ... which for me means a doodle ... about the myriad futures possible should the ideas of ordinary people gain cultural zeitgeist. A future dreamt up outside of the rarefied echelon of privilege and access; where just the manifestation of an idea, however crude, could spark scientific imagination and progress.

An interesting future ... just so long as the dude who invented the Snuggie doesn't have any more tricks up his staying-oh-so-warm sleeves.

Design (?) fiction

2009-08-23T23:04:00.007-04:00

In the essay/manifesto, Design Fictions by Julian Bleecker, Bleecker presents the practice of design fiction. This practice is a form of projection design tactic, which was articulated in Design and the Construction of Publics by Carl DiSalvo. Design fiction consists of creating stories and crafting physical/tangible objects to illustrate possible, sometimes multiple, futures. Yet the stories of design fiction artifacts are grounded in the present. They are reflections of today as seen in the lens of tomorrow. As such, Bleecker proposes that design fiction lies between science fact and science fiction.

This kind of design practice is fascinating to me. I was taught and trained to design to specification. In the case of design fiction, the spec is nonexistent. There is no creative brief, no focus groups, no market demands, and no end users. There is a story to be told but design fiction designers (DFD for short?) have creative leeway (ie free expression) to do this.

So is it safe to say design fictions are a kind of (installation) art too?

See: MoMa' recent exhibit, Design and The Elastic Mind:
http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/

I went to see this exhibit a few months ago. There was no doubt that the creators of the pieces shown were hybrid designer/artist/scientist but I was never sure how the curators of the MoMa wanted to me to see these pieces. As art? As design products? Speculative science?

What have designers contributed to the construction of publics?

2009-08-23T22:13:00.005-04:00

“Design and the Construction of publics” discusses the role of design to bring about construction of publics by describing two interrelated tactics; Projections which are shaping the future given what we’ve already known. In contrast, Tracings are making connections between experimental practices from the past to the contemporary design. What I was interested in both tactics position design as rhetoric which deliver arguments because I have though that design was always problem-solving process within a traditional product design educations. I rarely thought that design could be considered a form of argument that is a catalyst of public discourse.
Yet, I have difficulty in answering what political action is in this paper. Also, what kind of force is design in political action? Are those two tactics enough for increasing social awareness and motivating political action? How can design lead people take action? What have designers contributed to the construction of publics? I’m concerning about the separation of theoretical framework and pragmatic design work. Some interesting projects below might explore these questions.

1) Urban Space Station: http://www.urbanspacestation.org/index.htm

An Urban Space Station on the frontier of urban space (up) and energy harvesting adapts the systems engineering involved in Space Station design to pressing urban issues. The space station is designed to generate its own energy and can provide energy to the building it rests upon, in the form of parasitic mutualism. The Urban Space Station is an open urban agriculture and parasite architecture project. Its objective is to enhance life quaility (air, water, temperature, food, waste, social cohesion…) in cities and in outer space mission by complementing human existence with fauna and flora.

2) Open_Sailing: http://international-ocean-station.org/blog/about/

Open_Sailing is a floating architecture that evolves like a living organism, a laboratory for techno-social experiments. Open_Sailing aims to design an attractive technological lifestyle to overcome any possible natural and man-made disaster, stimulating people’s ingenuity and sense of solidarity. Be it overpopulation, global warming or energy conflicts, the designers are living in a time where “Apocalypse” beckons. They need to collectively invent and spread bootstrapping DIY technologies for the forthcoming challenges, not only to survive but to re-invent how we inhabit this planet.

Political action through computing?

2009-08-23T17:14:00.003-04:00

“The Neighborhood Networks Projects” is striking in the sense that it broke the conventional concept of “Participatory Design.” It was considered as one design methodology that includes end-users during the design process. Instead, Carl thinks PD can evolve to an independent design genre, which is not for creating a particular output, but whose process and entire experience of the participants can make rhetorical and political contribution to design knowledge and further community.

However, I have little skepticism about the effects of the elaborate and apparently systematic PD workshop.

First, I am not quite sure that the issues about the community brought by the participants can be found only through this kind of PD workshop. What they discussed in the workshop (e.g. noise by cars) seems to be what had been already acknowledged by the people.

Second, I am worried that the citizen might was frustrated when the sensing robotics did not work as anticipated. I am wondering about the motivation and any designer’s strategies that kept the 14 people working for 8 weeks, which is not short at all.

Last, I am not sure what Carl said about “political action through computing” in conclusion. I agree that the whole experience under the PD workshop gave the participants the opportunities of raising voices about their close issues. But how did the voices influence the politics of the community? Am I seeing the definition of “political” too narrow? Then, what does Carl really mean here by “political action through computing?”

Transactional Publics and the Notion of Identity

2009-08-23T12:04:00.004-04:00

In Carl's "Design and the Construction of Publics" [PDF] I find it useful to imagine the construction of publics as transactional; that is based on a certain set of actions and reactions rather than being based solely on abstract notions of shared identity. In this paradigm, publics must be always both provisional and fluid--they necessarily must combine and recombine as issues change and shift across a political or economic landscape.

However, this brings up at least one major problem for me:

I'd be interested in being more specific in describing the mechanisms by which these publics are drawn to particular issues. The reason this matters for me is that in practice, publics always intersect with certain real-life demographic fissures in terms of class, race, age, economic status, gender and the like. And these always pre-exist the raising of any particular issue per se. Unfortunately, I think the article leaves the opposite impression--that a public becomes constituted always afresh in an ahistorical vacuum.

It might be more complicated, but I think more fruitful, to think from the beginning about how we might ground our conception of constructed publics in the context of pre-existing identity formations. I believe in the attractive power of design interventions, but I also believe that people, like water, will generally flow through the channels that have been pre-cut for them and are therefore more likely to be attracted to some spontaneously formed publics than others.

(Above: Majora Carter is, I think, a good example of someone who uses a concept of design interventions and activism that is always grounded in particular geo-social realities.)

Test Post

2009-08-20T21:38:00.000-04:00

What does this look like?

Project Studio Researchers

2009-08-12T16:22:00.001-04:00

Principal Investigator

Carl DiSALVO is an Assistant Professor at The Georgia Institute of Technology.

Thomas BARNWELL is a second year masters student in the Digital Media program at Georgia Tech. He received his Bachelors of Arts in Film Studies from Georgia State University in 2003. Prior to his time at Georgia Tech, Thomas worked extensively in the field of video production and post-production. Since coming to Georgia Tech, Thomas has worked as a researcher and designer in the Experimental Television Laboratory under Janet Murray, prototyping applications for interactive television. His current interests include networked music, locative media, installation art, user interface design, and public design.

Amy CHENG has a background in information architecture and web design. She is also a budding artist and who likes to experiment with methods and materials from printmaking to physical computing.

Ethiopia HEWITT is from Atlanta, GA. She completed a Bachelors Degree in Mathematics at Spelman College. Afterwards she worked web and graphic design in Atlanta at several urban fashion companies. Her interests are in e-magazines, video, and fashion. Her hobbies include bowling, reading, and cooking.

Hwajung HONG is a second year MS-HCI (LCC) student at Georgia Tech. She has an BS degree in Industrial Design for which she explored social interaction through technology products. She is interested in how designers can incorporate knowledge about social issues into the design of products through sensing technologies and robotics.

Deepak JAGDISH is an interdisciplinary designer who is currently exploring ways to fuse digital media, urban design, collective intelligence and HCI to create concepts that can change some hardened notions of how we see our city. He has an undergraduate degree in ICT for which he pursued his interests in design and signal processing, and is currently a second year masters candidate in Human-Computer Interaction at Georgia Tech.

Vasudhara KANTROO is second year MS-HCI (LCC) student at Georgia Tech. She is interested in how technology-mediated experiences can generate intrigue and pique people's interest enough to reflect and think about themselves and their surroundings.

Tanyoung KIM is a second year PhD student in Digital Media. Her research interest is information visualization and its use as a persuasive means. For her, InfoVis is an extensive term beyond a mere representation of data; she explores its tradition from modern graphic design history and theories, and materializes InfoVis into various digital forms such as ambient media, interactive InfoGraphics and robotics.

Joel LINDERMAN attended Georgia Tech for a bachelors in LCC. Joel is a Digital Media masters student interested in sensors, robotics, data visualizations and public spaces.

Hye Yeon NAM is a digital media artist working in kinetic sculpture, audio and video in Atlanta and NYC. She is a PhD candidate at Georgia Institute of Technology and holds an MFA in digital media from Rhode Island School of Design. Her artwork reflects on human (e)motion, identity, and social issues.

Delisha PETERSON is currently a Digital Media grad student at Georgia Tech. She has a background in visual communication, including fine art, graphic design, website design, and user interface design.

Lady ROGUE is a cook, social provocateur, community organizer, asker of questions and maker of plans. She runs the underground food community rogueApron.com, its corresponding entrepreneur networking group LadyRogueBiz.ning.com, and serves on the communication board of Georgia Organics. Her background remains a mystery.