Technology is becoming increasingly people centric. Intelligent environments, pervasive and ubiquitous computing, sensing and mobile technology etc are all about people interacting with technology. It is more crucial nowadays, than ever, to open up research in these areas to a broader audience, to explain (often sophisticated) research advances to non-scientists, as well as to get contributions and feedback from experts outside the IT field.
This one-day workshop is an attempt to set up an ‘intelligent environment’ where everyone can understand everything despite their background, culture, professional language or field of expertise. To achieve this, the most ancient form of communication, namely creative art (along with the more conventional methods, such as academic writing), will be used as means to convey scientific achievements related to the topic of Intelligent Environments to as wide an audience as is possible.
The primary goal of the workshops is to explore:
· What various disciplines have to say about, and can contribute, to the future development of Intelligent Environments.
· How concepts used in non-technical research fields could be used to advance the technological development of Intelligent Environments.
· In what way various disciplines outside science and technology can benefit from the latest achievements in IT in order to establish the environments people would like to work and live in.
· How achievements in various research and development fields could be effectively communicated to a multidisciplinary audience.
More.
Thursday, 31 March 2011
DT on Play (cont'd)
We then sorted these notes into three categories:
i) Verbs/Actions
ii) Nouns/equipment
iii) Values/emotions
(additional categories that could have been useful included iv) roles/characters, and v) sites/locations).
i) Verbs/Actions
ii) Nouns/equipment
iii) Values/emotions
(additional categories that could have been useful included iv) roles/characters, and v) sites/locations).
Wednesday, 30 March 2011
A piece of "emotional engineering (...) to turn nouns into verbs"
Handspring Puppet Company: The genius puppetry behind War Horse
"Puppets always have to try to be alive," says Adrian Kohler of the Handspring Puppet Company, a gloriously ambitious troupe of human and wooden actors. Beginning with the tale of a hyena's subtle paw, puppeteers Kohler and Basil Jones build to the story of their latest astonishment: the wonderfully life-like Joey, the War Horse, who trots (and gallops) convincingly onto the TED stage.
View.
"Puppets always have to try to be alive," says Adrian Kohler of the Handspring Puppet Company, a gloriously ambitious troupe of human and wooden actors. Beginning with the tale of a hyena's subtle paw, puppeteers Kohler and Basil Jones build to the story of their latest astonishment: the wonderfully life-like Joey, the War Horse, who trots (and gallops) convincingly onto the TED stage.
View.
EDG Play Methods 1. (cont'd).
Textual Interventions (creative vandalism - e.g. "I think therefore I am.")
The Exquisite Corpse.
Definitions, or Question and Answer.
Conditionals.
Syllogisms.
Opposites.
Dadaist poem – newspaper and scissors.
...(to be continued)
The Exquisite Corpse.
Definitions, or Question and Answer.
Conditionals.
Syllogisms.
Opposites.
Dadaist poem – newspaper and scissors.
...(to be continued)
EDG Play Methods 1.
Task: Identify and gather play methods.
Make faces.
Make sounds.
Passing time.
Fooling with truth (April Fools, hoax, trick).
Hacking.
Renaming.
Listing/memory game.
Gossip/Chinese whispers.
Changing scale.
Mimicry/imitation.
Imagination (being pursued by sharks while swimming).
Imp of the perverse (Edgar Allen Poe).
Substitution.
Create a space in which things can happen.
Imaginary friends (live under the stairs).
Scary play (fox in henhouse).
Do a play audit of the day/week/month.
Cooking and play: throw spaggetti to 'test' it.
Play with adrenalin.
Continuity: play for its own sake.
Colour transformation e.g. colour-themed transformations or algorithms.
Qualifying things via time ("rapidishly").
Involuntary movement tracking ("an orchestra of linguistic twitches").
Breath retention: conditions change when you exhale or inhale or hold your breath. Breath as a time marker ("Every time I inhale I'm prey; every time I exhale I'm a predator.")
Cross over: mix child's game with a sport (soccer + catch; wrestling and eating). i.e. X + 1 method.
Rhythm: changing tempo.
Excluding as play method.
Unexpected play through the environment (short cuts).
Repurposing toy elements.
Object-based play facilitating shifting roles. Object as way of starting/stopping game.
Pranks/practical jokes. Planning phase as method of play.
Make faces.
Make sounds.
Passing time.
Fooling with truth (April Fools, hoax, trick).
Hacking.
Renaming.
Listing/memory game.
Gossip/Chinese whispers.
Changing scale.
Mimicry/imitation.
Imagination (being pursued by sharks while swimming).
Imp of the perverse (Edgar Allen Poe).
Substitution.
Create a space in which things can happen.
Imaginary friends (live under the stairs).
Scary play (fox in henhouse).
Do a play audit of the day/week/month.
Cooking and play: throw spaggetti to 'test' it.
Play with adrenalin.
Continuity: play for its own sake.
Colour transformation e.g. colour-themed transformations or algorithms.
Qualifying things via time ("rapidishly").
Involuntary movement tracking ("an orchestra of linguistic twitches").
Breath retention: conditions change when you exhale or inhale or hold your breath. Breath as a time marker ("Every time I inhale I'm prey; every time I exhale I'm a predator.")
Cross over: mix child's game with a sport (soccer + catch; wrestling and eating). i.e. X + 1 method.
Rhythm: changing tempo.
Excluding as play method.
Unexpected play through the environment (short cuts).
Repurposing toy elements.
Object-based play facilitating shifting roles. Object as way of starting/stopping game.
Pranks/practical jokes. Planning phase as method of play.
Sunday, 27 March 2011
“The Bed of Procrustes” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
"As he reminds readers in a brief introduction, the Procrustes of Greek mythology was the cruel and ill-advised fool who stretched or shortened people to make them fit his inflexible bed. Mr. Taleb’s new book addresses the latter-day ways in which “we humans, facing limits of knowledge, and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas, reductive categories, specific vocabularies, and prepackaged narratives, which, on the occasion, has explosive consequences.”
Read NYT review.
Read NYT review.
Intense Hunt for Signs of Damage Could Raise Problems of Its Own
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Published: July 27, 2005
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., July 26 - Now that the Discovery is in orbit, the examination begins. Its 12½-day mission will be the most photographed in the history of the shuttle program, with all eyes on the craft to see if it suffered the kind of damage from blastoff debris that brought down the Columbia in February 2003.
There were cameras on the launching pad, cameras aloft on planes monitoring the ascent, cameras on the shuttle checking for missing foam on the external fuel tank, and a camera on the tank itself. One camera caught a mysterious object falling from the shuttle at liftoff; radar detected another, about two minutes into the flight. Cameras aboard the shuttle and the International Space Station will monitor the Discovery until the end of its mission.
But all this inspection may be a mixed blessing. The more NASA looks for damage, engineers and other experts say, the more it will find. And the risks of overreaction to signs of damage while the shuttle is in orbit may be just as great as the risks of playing them down.
Read article.
Published: July 27, 2005
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., July 26 - Now that the Discovery is in orbit, the examination begins. Its 12½-day mission will be the most photographed in the history of the shuttle program, with all eyes on the craft to see if it suffered the kind of damage from blastoff debris that brought down the Columbia in February 2003.
There were cameras on the launching pad, cameras aloft on planes monitoring the ascent, cameras on the shuttle checking for missing foam on the external fuel tank, and a camera on the tank itself. One camera caught a mysterious object falling from the shuttle at liftoff; radar detected another, about two minutes into the flight. Cameras aboard the shuttle and the International Space Station will monitor the Discovery until the end of its mission.
But all this inspection may be a mixed blessing. The more NASA looks for damage, engineers and other experts say, the more it will find. And the risks of overreaction to signs of damage while the shuttle is in orbit may be just as great as the risks of playing them down.
Read article.
CAN MACHINES THINK?
By ROBERT WRIGHT Monday, Mar. 25, 1996
WHEN GARRY KASPAROV FACED OFF AGAINST AN IBM COMPUTER in last month's celebrated chess match, he wasn't just after more fame and money. By his own account, the world chess champion was playing for you, me, the whole human species. He was trying, as he put it shortly before the match, to "help defend our dignity."
Read more.
WHEN GARRY KASPAROV FACED OFF AGAINST AN IBM COMPUTER in last month's celebrated chess match, he wasn't just after more fame and money. By his own account, the world chess champion was playing for you, me, the whole human species. He was trying, as he put it shortly before the match, to "help defend our dignity."
Read more.
Taking Play Seriously
By ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG
Published: February 17, 2008
On a drizzly Tuesday night in late January, 200 people came out to hear a psychiatrist talk rhapsodically about play — not just the intense, joyous play of children, but play for all people, at all ages, at all times. (All species too; the lecture featured touching photos of a polar bear and a husky engaging playfully at a snowy outpost in northern Canada.) Stuart Brown, president of the National Institute for Play, was speaking at the New York Public Library’s main branch on 42nd Street. He created the institute in 1996, after more than 20 years of psychiatric practice and research persuaded him of the dangerous long-term consequences of play deprivation. In a sold-out talk at the library, he and Krista Tippett, host of the public-radio program ‘‘Speaking of Faith,’’ discussed the biological and spiritual underpinnings of play. Brown called play part of the ‘‘developmental sequencing of becoming a human primate. If you look at what produces learning and memory and well-being, play is as fundamental as any other aspect of life, including sleep and dreams.’’
Read article.
Published: February 17, 2008
On a drizzly Tuesday night in late January, 200 people came out to hear a psychiatrist talk rhapsodically about play — not just the intense, joyous play of children, but play for all people, at all ages, at all times. (All species too; the lecture featured touching photos of a polar bear and a husky engaging playfully at a snowy outpost in northern Canada.) Stuart Brown, president of the National Institute for Play, was speaking at the New York Public Library’s main branch on 42nd Street. He created the institute in 1996, after more than 20 years of psychiatric practice and research persuaded him of the dangerous long-term consequences of play deprivation. In a sold-out talk at the library, he and Krista Tippett, host of the public-radio program ‘‘Speaking of Faith,’’ discussed the biological and spiritual underpinnings of play. Brown called play part of the ‘‘developmental sequencing of becoming a human primate. If you look at what produces learning and memory and well-being, play is as fundamental as any other aspect of life, including sleep and dreams.’’
Read article.
How Do You Think the Brain Works?
Jeff Hawkins brought the world the PalmPilot and the Treo. Now comes his boldest invention yet: a far-reaching theory of how intelligence actually works.
By David Stipp
Fortune Magazine
Mon, Oct. 18, 2004
All the while Jeff Hawkins was creating the PalmPilot, launching the era of handheld computing, and amassing hundreds of millions of dollars, a big part of his mind was somewhere else. It was somewhere else in 1994 when he dreamed up the Palm's clever handwriting-recognition system—the first that ever really worked. It was somewhere else a decade later when Hawkins helped spearhead smart phones, which can tap into the Internet and act as organizers besides letting you call home.
As far as the 47-year-old engineer is concerned, all that was mere prelude. His true passion, the one he has pursued on the side through all those years of success, is something entirely different. It is an Einstein-worthy puzzle that has fascinated scientists for centuries: What is the source of intelligence? In recent years Hawkins has been closing in on an answer, and this fall he is set to unveil his most revolutionary product yet: a big-picture theory on how the brain works.
Read review.
By David Stipp
Fortune Magazine
Mon, Oct. 18, 2004
All the while Jeff Hawkins was creating the PalmPilot, launching the era of handheld computing, and amassing hundreds of millions of dollars, a big part of his mind was somewhere else. It was somewhere else in 1994 when he dreamed up the Palm's clever handwriting-recognition system—the first that ever really worked. It was somewhere else a decade later when Hawkins helped spearhead smart phones, which can tap into the Internet and act as organizers besides letting you call home.
As far as the 47-year-old engineer is concerned, all that was mere prelude. His true passion, the one he has pursued on the side through all those years of success, is something entirely different. It is an Einstein-worthy puzzle that has fascinated scientists for centuries: What is the source of intelligence? In recent years Hawkins has been closing in on an answer, and this fall he is set to unveil his most revolutionary product yet: a big-picture theory on how the brain works.
Read review.
Saturday, 26 March 2011
Drumbeat to E-Mail: The Medium and the Message By JANET MASLIN
"Among its many other virtues “The Information” has the rare capacity to work as a time machine. It goes back much further than Shannon’s breakthroughs. And with each step backward Mr. Gleick must erase what his readers already know. He casts new light on the verbal flourishes of the Greek poetry that preceded the written word: these turns of phrase could be as useful for their mnemonic power as for their art. He explains why the Greeks arranged things in terms of events, not categories; how one Babylonian text that ends with “this is the procedure” is essentially an algorithm; and why the telephone and the skyscraper go hand in hand. Once the telephone eliminated the need for hand-delivered messages, the sky was the limit."
Read review.
Read review.
How We Know by Freeman Dyson
"Claude Shannon was the founding father of information theory. For a hundred years after the electric telegraph, other communication systems such as the telephone, radio, and television were invented and developed by engineers without any need for higher mathematics. Then Shannon supplied the theory to understand all of these systems together, defining information as an abstract quantity inherent in a telephone message or a television picture. Shannon brought higher mathematics into the game."
Read review.
Read review.
When Science and Poetry were Friends
"a new generation of artists, writing genomes as fluently as Blake and Byron wrote verses, might create an abundance of new flowers and fruit and trees and birds to enrich the ecology of our planet. Most of these artists would be amateurs, but they would be in close touch with science, like the poets of the earlier Age of Wonder."
Read review.
Read review.
Friday, 25 March 2011
PLAY AT IDEO
At IDEO, we believe in the power of play. It is an essential part of our approach: We use playfulness to design fun, inspiring experiences for kids (toys, games, and digital entertainment) and to bring elements of delight to more “serious” experiences for adults (cars, food, health, finance, and more). The latter may even include developing new methods for the workplace, such as helping clients boost the creativity of their innovation processes.
Play design at IDEO is grounded in human factors research, for which we conduct in-context interviews and empathy-building exercises with people of all ages. Our observations — combined with contemporary academic theory, our knowledge of cultural trends, and the expertise of our multidisciplinary designers, including leaders from our successful Toy Lab — help clients identify opportunities and rapidly build them into reality.
Read more.
Play design at IDEO is grounded in human factors research, for which we conduct in-context interviews and empathy-building exercises with people of all ages. Our observations — combined with contemporary academic theory, our knowledge of cultural trends, and the expertise of our multidisciplinary designers, including leaders from our successful Toy Lab — help clients identify opportunities and rapidly build them into reality.
Read more.
PLAY AT IDEO
At IDEO, we believe in the power of play. It is an essential part of our approach: We use playfulness to design fun, inspiring experiences for kids (toys, games, and digital entertainment) and to bring elements of delight to more “serious” experiences for adults (cars, food, health, finance, and more). The latter may even include developing new methods for the workplace, such as helping clients boost the creativity of their innovation processes.
Play design at IDEO is grounded in human factors research, for which we conduct in-context interviews and empathy-building exercises with people of all ages. Our observations — combined with contemporary academic theory, our knowledge of cultural trends, and the expertise of our multidisciplinary designers, including leaders from our successful Toy Lab — help clients identify opportunities and rapidly build them into reality.
Play design at IDEO is grounded in human factors research, for which we conduct in-context interviews and empathy-building exercises with people of all ages. Our observations — combined with contemporary academic theory, our knowledge of cultural trends, and the expertise of our multidisciplinary designers, including leaders from our successful Toy Lab — help clients identify opportunities and rapidly build them into reality.
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