Ambient Informatics

Our guests next time are Joe Paradiso and Bill Mitchell. I think this gives us a great opportunity to get some more feedback on the projects and if possible take them a step further. I’d like to put down my thoughts on the different projects and what I think could be the next step. If it helps anyone figure out some things then that’s great and if anyone would like to further talk about their ideas just drop me an email.

My general idea of what’s next is very straightforward:

1. Develop your own project proposal based on your experience and knowledge of Copenhagen/ Scottish H&I. There are no guideline for this only that your proposal is based on something “real”. When I say real I mean a problem, a need, something in need of tweaking, a service or anything of that sort that exists or is missing in your respective site (Copenhagen/ Scottish H&I). You should paint a clear picture of how you identified this “real” issue, the benefits of correcting it or basically proposing your project. All the rest of your proposal should try and elaborate on how your proposal works.
2. “Demo or Die” is the Media Lab’s motto…we’d like to keep you all alive…call us crazy but we like you guys…Anyway, the demo is NOT a must, in fact it would be a great idea if every team works together on demoing 1-2 projects from within the group. If you need any technological help come and talk to us about it and we’ll try and do whatever we can to accommodate you.
3. Taking into account the last two sections each team MUST produce a document outlining its overall vision of the site (CPH/ H&I). Ideally, this document will bring together all your individual proposals and serve as an introduction to the work you did.

I hope these three remarks help put in order some of the confusion that’s been going around. One more thing, in terms of the future prospects of this workshop…once the semester ends and you’ve all handed in your project proposals, group document and demo (optional), certain possibilities could be considered such as further development of the project as a research assistant, collaborating with Distance Lab and other groups etc. Just to keep that in mind…

Ok, so about the projects..here are some thoughts…

Aydin:

I think the proposal is very implementable. In terms of concept I would try to elaborate more on how the system works, narrow it down to one type of potential user/ client and focus the scope of interaction. Because the proposal is so applicable there’s a risk of getting carried away in order to show the full potential of the system. As I was saying I would try and narrow things down and just briefly mention some of the other applications/ users/ content you had in mind. I would define the content…is it vacancy/no vacancy? Open/ close? I would also try to define what’s on the other end, i.e. what displays the information and how? Pick potential places of intervention like on Fort William’s High Street. Start to design both ends of the system - the sign and the information post. Create scenarios of using the system for example a tourist using the system as opposed to a local. If you decide to demo, put together a technical plan of how to do it.

Cici:

We’ve already talked about the project and I’m curious to see the revised version. Let me know how it goes with Elena and try to lay down some work schedule with her.

Christine:

I like the idea of thinking about the tourist as a pollinator/ agent. Issues like: methods of data collection, what data to collect and how to visualize it are what I would work on. I think you’re talking about those traces a tourist leaves behind after his vacation is over and specifically in relation to eco-tourism. I’m thinking about what do people do when they come back from vacation? They usually download a shit-load of pictures they took from their camera and possibly organize them in a digital album. Maybe there’s a way or working with that? What sort of information could they take with them? Their ecological foot-print? An analysis of the places they’ve been and what they did visualized in a different way other than pictures? How is that helpful for the people of Copenhagen? Maybe it’s a tool for city planners and local service providers which helps to analyze tourist behavior/ resource consumption/ impact on the city? Here’s a wild idea…the Copenhagen municipality originally wanted the “Real-Time Rome” project duplicated during their culture night, maybe you could use the already existing material + outcome of that project to propose changes to the the Copenhagen version? I think some of the things you brought up in your proposal could nicely tie in to that.

Rebecca:

I think Calum’s enthusiasm today was spot on. I would try and break the proposal apart, elaborate on each component, show how they are used. How does the system work? The key issue here are the interaction, content and ambiance. Your trying to sell an experience, the experience of being outdoor. I like what Calum said about doing stupid things in the Highlands…that could be a branding mark “Feel like doing something stupid? Come to the Highlands and Islands!”…you know what I mean…Like you mentioned picking potential places if intervention are crucial. Do you remember that huge square we went through in Glasgow just before we took the shuttle to the airport? Right around there is the heart of Glasgow if I’m not mistaken, there’s a very nice commercial street right around there called Buchanan street…it could be an interesting place to think about displaying screens and such. There’s also the Queen street train station right there where we came off the train…Also, the connection to Distance Lab and their “Remote Impact” project is something I think could help in terms of brainstorming and possibly taking the project to a more interactive place…punching someone in Fort William from a local pub in Glasgow…give bar fighting a whole new dimension.

Lena:

The idea of growth and ecological impact makes perfect sense to me. I think I would try and figure out the medium…is it a digital installation? How does the visualization work? What is the content, i.e. what sort of data is visualized and who benefits from it? You pitched the idea of a Tamaguchi and I think that’s a very evocative object which could help you extract some basic concepts like the parameters of survival…what does the city need in order to survive? Is there a certain city spirit or image we’re trying to save by engaging people in this process of growth? I’m sure scenarios would be very helpful and give a better idea of what you’re trying to accomplish. I would also suggest something completely different…like taking a look at your idea of smart wearable material and soldier nanotechnology and perhaps thinking of joining Cici who’s also working on textile and wearables. It could be interesting to work on one project and apply it to two very different sites….or maybe your idea of a public screen could be broken down and distributed between people’s cloths?

B & B (Ben and Brian):

I just had an idea of opening this new kind of business called B & B = Beer and Breakfast. I think it could work! Donald Trump here I come!

Anyway, I think you guys are also in a very good position to implement a demo. I would try and develop the idea o visualization using the bicycle wheel. Elaborate on the way the system works, how is everything integrated into the bicycle? What’s the potential of this method your developing? I would try and create different visualizations with it and just document that…maybe use simple animation…!? Create a catalog of visual effects and appropriate them to your own interpretation of the city…perhaps offer a new map of the city based on your catalog…

Sangwook:

You’re trying to do something with bicycles. It sounds simplistic, I know, but you’re taking on a difficult task in a city like Copenhagen. I think you should definitely try and narrow the scope of your proposal to one thing. I like the idea of using the bicycle for collecting information that could be used by different communities. If this is what you’re into I would think what sort of data are you trying to collect? How would you integrate the technology into the bicycle? How is the information distributed and visualized? I’ve always been curious about how much energy could be produced by paddling? If you have 60% of the population riding bikes and paddling then harnessing that energy should account for something, right? Maybe that’s something to look into…

Wen:

I’m trying to think of a way to take your proposal a step further…I like the idea of stories and travel and I’m thinking why constrain that to a desktop computer? Why not think about a mobile method of collecting these stories? On my first trip to Scotland we came up with an idea about a personal diary…a kit for students going into the outdoor who would like to record their experience. This might be something to collaborate on with Andrew(?) I think that creating another website for people to post their stories might be just like building a blog and there’s no real added value. A search engine that goes through the internet and collects bits and pieces of data about Lochaber and puts them together in different ways to become sort of like a trip planner might be an improvement to the original idea. I would decide on one of these directions and start drawing up some scenarios, as well as a description of how the system works. Oh! I just remembered something…when I was going through my commander training back in the army we had to pass a few navigation tests. One of the tests included navigating from point A to point B by memory. We had to create a “story” for the path between the points to help us memorize where to go. This again I think ties in to what Andrew is doing and might be a way to link your idea of stories to his project.

Andrew:

Look at the last comment I wrote Wen. I would try and establish a working connection with Jon and Gerry from the Lochaber College to make the project more grounded and use their input to better describe your proposal. Who is the potential user? What does he need? How does the system work? Try to sketch out some scenarios…I still think that connection to machine learning and the group at the media lab that used the tag cloud is something worth looking into. They use clustering and I know that SENSEable has done a lot of clustering work on the iSpot project. Plus if you hook up with Wen I’m sure he eats K-Means Clusters for breakfast…and possibly lunch and dinner. I would also address the question Calum raised today about the economical model for your proposal….it will make it stronger if its feasible.

Start working on these comments and bring what you have to our next meeting. You don’t need to make a formal presentation but have something to show while you discuss your project with the group.

I think that’s about everyone…If I’ve missed someone of something please don’t hold it against me and just send me an email…or a chopped finger if you’d like to go “Sopranos” on me…

Junno

A link with some background information about Professor Ishii:

Link

Tangible Bits: Beyond Pixels

Talk abstract

Where the sea meets the land, life has blossomed into a myriad of unique forms in the turbulence of water, sand, and wind.  At another seashore between the land of atoms and the sea of bits, we are now facing the challenge of reconciling our dual citizenships in the physical and digital worlds.  Windows to the digital world are confined to flat square ubiquitous screens filled with pixels, or “painted bits.”  Unfortunately, one can not feel and confirm the virtual existence of this digital information through one’s body.

Tangible Bits, our vision of Human Computer Interaction (HCI), seeks to realize seamless interfaces between humans, digital information, and the physical environment by giving physical form to digital information, making bits directly manipulable and perceptible.  Guided by this vision, we are designing “tangible user interfaces” which employ physical objects, surfaces, and spaces as tangible embodiments of digital information. These involve foreground interactions with graspable objects and augmented surfaces, exploiting the human senses of touch and kinesthesia. We are also exploring background information displays which use “ambient media.” Here, we seek to communicate digitally-mediated senses of activity and presence at the periphery of human awareness.  Our goal is to realize seamless interfaces taking advantage of the richness of multimodal human senses and skills developed through our lifetime of interaction with the physical world.

In this talk, I will present the design principles and a variety of tangible user interfaces the Tangible Media Group has presented in Media Arts, Design, and Science communities including ICC, Ars Electronica, Centre Pompidou, Venice Biennale, ArtFutula, IDSA, ICSID, AIGA, ACM CHI, SIGGRAPH, UIST, CSCW.

http://tangible.media.mit.edu/

Short Bio

Hiroshi Ishii is a tenured Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, at the MIT Media Lab. He co-directs Things That Think (TTT) consortium and directs Tangible Media Group. Hiroshi Ishii’s research focuses upon the design of seamless interfaces between humans, digital information, and the physical environment.

At the MIT Media Lab, he founded and directs the Tangible Media Group pursuing a new vision of Human Computer Interaction (HCI): “Tangible Bits.” His team seeks to change the “painted bits” of GUIs to “tangible bits” by giving physical form to digital information.

Ishii and his team have presented their vision of “Tangible Bits” at a variety of academic, industrial design, and artistic venues (including ACM SIGCHI, ACM SIGGRAPH, Industrial Design Society of America, AIGA, Ars Electronica, Centre Pompidou, and Victoria and Albert Museum), emphasizing that the development of tangible interfaces requires the rigor of both scientific and artistic review.  A display of many of the group’s projects took place at the NTT InterCommunication Center

(ICC) in Tokyo in summer 2000.  A three-year-long exhibition “Get in Touch” featured the Tangible Media group’s work at Ars Electronica Center (Linz, Austria) from September 2001 through August 2004.  He was elected to CHI Academy by ACM SIGCHI, and it was announced in CHI

2006 in Montreal.

Prior to MIT, from 1988-1994, he led a CSCW research group at the NTT Human Interface Laboratories, where his team invented TeamWorkStation and ClearBoard.  In 1993 and 1994, he was a visiting assistant professor at the University of Toronto, Canada.  He received B. E. 

degree in electronic engineering, M. E. and Ph. D. degrees in computer engineering from Hokkaido University, Japan, in 1978, 1980 and 1992, respectively.

http://ttt.media.mit.edu/

http://tangible.media.mit.edu/

Readings:

1) Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between People, Bits and Atoms

      Hiroshi Ishii and Brygg Ullmer

      http://tangible.media.mit.edu/papers/Tangible_Bits_CHI97.php

2) Bringing clay and sand into digital design - continuous tangible user interfaces

      Hiroshi Ishii, Carlo Ratti, Ben Piper, Yao Wang, Assaf Biderman, E. 

Ben-Joseph

      http://tangible.media.mit.edu/papers/Clay-Sand_BTTJ04.php

A link with some background information about Professor Paradiso:

Link

Reading:
http://www.media.mit.edu/resenv/pubs/theses/lifton_phd.pdf

A link with some background information about Professor Kocur:

Link
From Professor Kocur’s talk:

I’d talk a bit about changes in information systems and ticketing for the London Underground and show a Web app that we’re put together as a piece of this environment. If there’s time, I’d spend just a few minutes outlining a project planned for next year to determine passenger loads on trains and platforms in the London Underground, possibly in real time.

schedulerevised.pdf

Copenhagen:

additionalmaterialcph.zip

Scotland:

additionalmaterial.zip

Below you’ll find our itineraries for Copenhagen and the Scottish Highlands. These are still tentative so I will try and get the final versions out a.s.a.p.

Copenhagen:  itinerary-for-copenhagen.pdf

Scottish Highlands: itinerary-for-highland.pdf

Stay tuned!

We’d like to start putting together some ideas for Copenhagen and the Scottish Highlands.

Start by working individually. Based on the material we’ve given you and that which you collected, what is your proposed vision for the Copenhagen/ Scottish Highlands project?
While working on your proposal find a time to get together with your teammates to discuss the various ideas and get some feedback. During the group discussion keep this in the back of your mind: “Is there an all encompassing approach that unites the different proposals?”
 
For our next meeting we’re having Bill Mitchell as a guest so please prepare a presentation of your ideas/ proposal to present in class. I know some people were a little upset at our last meeting because we ran out of time and didn’t see all the presentations. With that in mind we will not have a reading for next week and use the full three hours for your presentations and an informal discussion with Bill about the various proposals.

some pix I snapped today…

This is starting to feel like a reoccurring pattern where we have a guest speaker, I make a point of listening in on the discussion and then let it all out in the form of postmortem thoughts about what has been said. So, pattern or not, we are creatures of habit and after our talk with Antoine Picon I have a few things on my mind.

I want to start by saying that I’m truly grateful to Antoine for coming in and talking to us and I thank him for being amusing and provocative and opening the door for us to challenge those provocations.

Antoine Pic(k)-on me

As I mentioned, I liked the fact that Antoine was amusing and provocative. I think he was trying to bring the discussion down to eye level and avoid any philosophical or higher level debate. I personally feel that it was the right way to go and when things are important and close to the heart you want to push away the clutter and talk from the heart, kinda like a good therapy session and in that sense I think Antoine was acting as our therapist, reflecting our frustrations and questions so we can learn to confront them ourselves. Having said that, I think that the overall approach of his discussion reminded me of arguments I had with my little sister when I was young, where anything I’d say she’d say the opposite. I think Antoine made a remark about how being able to contradict oneself is his privilege. That was sort of disappointing to me because it’s the sort of debate tactic you take when you do not respect your opponent or you think you are above him intellectually. It’s the rule which breaks all rules, i.e. how can you discuss something with someone who has no static opinion?

Just Do It! 

Another thing I find troubling is the role historians play in our society. My mother used to say to me when I was younger that if I don’t have anything nice to say about something or someone I shouldn’t say it at all. Historian such as Antoine have been watching our day to day “struggle” from a distance, analyzing past data and trying to infer from it about the future but not really getting involved. I’m not saying this about a specific historian or all historians for that matter but as the general approach taken by historian as to their role in our society’s evolution. Antoine mentioned historians as being pessimistic and I think that’s a valid perspective but one doesn’t have to be either pessimistic or optimistic but rather futuristic. What is it you can contribute to that future? other than a catastrophic promise? How is your insight to the past help us understand important steps towards the future?

Towards a non-modernistic approach

Antoine’s paper “Towards a city of events” plays on the name of one of the greatest modernistic manifests in architecture written by Le Corbusier called “Towards a new architecture” first published in 1923.

As I pointed out in class after Antoine’s talk, this is a very deterministic approach, a sort of problem-solving attitude that was prevalent in the beginning of the 20th century. The architects of that time were faced with the implications of the industrial revolution and desperately sought after way in which it could affect architecture. They did ask the big “whys” and how what they were doing was going to change the world and promised to solve all its problems. They dreamed up manifestos and theories about how the home was a “machine for living”, how the city should be divided into layers to accommodate all modes of transportation, and proud workers could enjoy cheap, industrial, customizable housing that would be grouped in mega-structures and leave enough open space for parks and recreational areas. Yes, they covered all their bases, tackled all the big “whys” and if you ever take a trip to Israel and walk through some public housing projects built in those days and under that spirit, I’m not sure you’d approve of how they answered those big “whys”. Big “whys” can be daunting, they can kill a creative process before it even starts, I agree with Antoine about the importance of being critical and reflective about your work but sometimes you “Just do it!”. Sometime you can’t see so far ahead to know that your this-won’t-save-the-world project might actually spark an idea in someone else’s brain and his idea has the ability to make a larger impact on the world. Maybe your idea was just a catalyst? I think Antoine advocated a very linear way of thinking and if i can be sure of anything today is that we are not living in linear times. Even the way he points out his examples of cartography, going from one era to the next shows his linearity where I would rather follow non linear models of history such as Manuel DeLanda’s “A thousand years of non linear history”.

Mapping the discourse

As Antoine mentioned the Renaissance map of Paris I thought to myself “what came first, the city or the map?”. Was is the difference between a plan and a map? could the map of Renaissance Paris been a catalyst for changing the city? Maybe it started out as a map where its maker added all these details and beautifications which caused the city planner to adopt it as a new plan for the city? Maybe the maps generated by SENSEable will one day have the power to trigger change in urban form and policy, maybe it’s just a matter of coming up with the right procedure and technology to do it? How’s that for a big “why”? Pfff….and I though I would have to kill myself with boredom.

A life less ordinary

And one last thing about life being boring. I understand Bo’s remark because he’s Danish and they’re lives are perfect (just kidding Bo…) but using “boring” as a parameter is just wrong in my opinion. I would suggest “Intensity” as a quantitative indicator for our lives. Yes, our lives today are more intensive than they used to be. Information is addictive but it has always been. Gossip is one good example of that. Women doing laundry on the banks of a river some hundreds of years ago is an example of that and if they had iPhones they would not stop doing the laundry but rather keep gossiping from home. Men would do it from the village’s pub and having more ways to communicate doesn’t necessarily mean they would stop going to the pub and their lives would suddenly become boring but it would enable them to stay more connected. If anything, our addiction to information should be regarded as a sign of us being intelligent life forms, in constant search for information and ways to expand our knowledge. I think using “Intensity” to describe our lives is a way to create a base for comparison between different times in history when life was less intensive than today or to describe one person’s day as a function of intensity. Intensity also hints to the existence of the “Event” which Antoine pointed out and could be thought of as an atomistic unit of data.

I have many more bits of thought running around in my head but I’ll leave it for now as is and maybe see if this blog generates any threats on my life?