When robot mimic tongues and tentacles…

What a curious device on “extreme engineering” (Discovery channel): A robot with a flexible, trunk-like arm could one day work like an elephant to grasp unwieldy loads, navigate like a snake through the rubble of a disaster zone, or feel around inside the dark crevasses of other planets.
:

Unlike conventional robots with rigid joints — picture a crane-like appendage with a claw-shaped hand — the OctArm’s nimble design allows it to move freely and adapt to its surroundings.

“These robots are invertebrate robots and are good at getting into tight spaces and wriggling around,” said Ian Walker, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, whose team at Clemson University in South Carolina has been working on the project for nearly 10 years.
(…)
A scientist uses a joystick to the control the OctArm, which resembles an elephant trunk: thick at the base and tapered toward the tip. A computer responds to the joystick’s motions by changing the air pressure inside individual tubes.

Why do I blog this? a robot with a trunk sounds a bit odd but it might have curious affordances… biomimicry to its best?

Extreme behavior

I am always mesmerized by sort of attitude: 70,000 Beer Cans Found in Ogden Townhouse:

When property manager Ryan Froerer got a call from a realtor last year to check on a townhouse, he knew something was up. Ryan Froerer, Century 21: “As we approached the door, there were beer boxes, all the way up to the ceiling.”

Inside, he took just a few snapshots to document the scene. Beer cans by the tens of thousands. Mountains of cans burying the furniture. The water and heat were shut off, apparently on purpose by the tenant, who evidently drank Coors Light beer exclusively for the eight years he lived there.

The cans were recycled for 800 dollars, an estimated 70,000 cans: 24 beers a day for 8 years.

Why do I blog this? it’s a quirky but I am impressed by this sort of squalor behavior… Extreme user of cans…

Role played by artifacts in cognition

How social is the social? Rethinking the role of artifacts in cognitive science is a paper by Ana Viseu that I came across while sorting my “to read” txt file. It’s basically a good account of the role played by artifacts in cognition. It describes them from the perspectives of 3 different schools of thought:

• Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory: the notion of mediation through artifacts.
• Marshall McLuhan’s view of artifacts as extensions of Man
• Actor-Network Theory (ANT), in which humans and non-humans are each considered to be actors, their agency depending on their relationships

I particularly like the 2 tables she’s using to summarize these issues: the first one is about the nature and role of artifacts and the second is about the character of cognition:

I also like the final word:

The solution may lie in the combination of these different perspectives, a multi-disciplinary approach to cognition. But it will also lie, as Lucy Suchman puts it so well, in finding a new language to talk about cognition, for both persons and artifacts. We have to shift from a language that focuses on separation, disembodiment and isolation to one that focuses on relatedness and relationships (Suchman, 1997).

Why do I blog this? these theories of cognition quite fit into my research perspective and are totally different from what is still taught sometimes in cognitive science degrees (in which the paradigm are much more limited to the individual’s mind).

meanwhile… 2nd blogject workshop

These last 2 days, I am busy managing the blogject workshop 2 with Julian Bleecker at EPFL. There’s a small group of very relevant people there (Julian Bleecker, Fabien Girardin, Mauro Cherubini, Mark Meagher, Frédéric Kaplan, Laurent Sciboz, Timo Arnall, Sascha Pohflepp, Regine Debatty, Fabio Sergio, Fabio Cesa, Marc Hottinger, Cyril Rebetez, Alain Bellet, Manu Bansal, Cyril Rebetez).

This one is a bit different from the first one we had during LIFT06, with different people, from different background and more anchored into concrete projects and scenario developments.

Still have to write report from the tons of notes, drawings and audio files we have!

There will be a 3rd workshop on its way… (source), stay tuned

Communications of the ACM on hacking and innovation

The last issue of Communications of the ACM is about “Hacking and Innovation”. There are some very interesting papers about that topic; ranging from hacker ethic to hardware hacking and academic freedom.

Hacking and Innovation Gregory Conti, Guest Editor
Academic Freedom and the Hacker Ethic Tom Cross
Security Through Legality Stephen Bono, Aviel Rubin, Adam Stubblefield, and Matthew Green
Research Lessons from Hardware Hacking Joe Grand
Software Security Is Software Reliability Felix “FX” Lindner
Explorations in Namespace: White-Hat Hacking Across the Domain Name System Dan Kaminsky

Why do I blog this? that’s a topic I am interested because it wraps up some thoughts about independent activities (research, design), connected to a new ecology of doers.

When location information undermines navigation

Does Location Come for Free?
The Effects of Navigation Aids on Location Learning by Carl Gutwin and Diana Anton; Technical report HCI-TR-06-03.

Navigation aids such as bookmarks, target prediction, or history mechanisms help users find desired objects in visual workspaces. They work by highlighting objects that may be important, and they can improve performance in spaces where the territory is not well known. However, by making navigation easier, they may also hinder acquisition of a mental map of the space, reducing navigation performance when the navigation aid is not available. We carried out a study to determine the effects of three different types of navigation aids on spatial location learning. We found that after training with a navigation aid, there was no reduction in performance when the aid was removed. Even with training interfaces that made the task significantly easier, people learned the locations as well as those who had no aid at all in training. These results suggest that designers can use navigation aids to assist inexperienced users, without compromising the eventual acquisition of a spatial map.

Why do I blog this? this is interesting to my research since I also encounters similar results: by providing different location information, there was some undermining results concerning, not navigation, but collaborative partners’ navigation memory. And this, with a very different setting since it was pervasive computing.

Extraordinary architecture: futurism from the 70s

Last week I went to La Grande Motte, an impressive city created in France in 1974 to be populated with tourists during the summer.

Why do I blog this? The architecture is very intriguing to me, very stylish and not passé at all; I like the shape, the colors and the global impression (it reminds a bit of UC Irvine’s computer science building); a real sci-fi place.

Carpet fighting

An interesting project from the //////////fur//// workshop @ ECAL, 2004 :

CARPET FIGHTING by Patricia Armada / Pierre-Abraham Rochat / Gabriel Walt / Mathias Forbach
Compete on the keyboard against a player in the real space in this multiple reality crossing, tic-tac-toe like game.
(PC Laptop, EZIO interface board, carpet, electronics)

Why do I blog this? I like the reality crossing idea and the messiness of such technology with wires.

Ito on kids participation in new media culture

Cultural anthropologist Dr. Mizuko Ito recently published a draft about Kids’ participation in new media cultures which is very worth reading. She addresses the question of how young people mobilize the media and the imagination in everyday life and
and how new media change this dynamic. Some excerpts I found intersting:

Our contemporary understandings of media and the childhood imagination are framed by a set of cultural distinctions between an active/creative or a passive/derivative mode of engaging with imagination and fantasy. (…) Scholars in media studies have challenged the cultural distinctions between active and passive media, arguing that television and popular media do provide opportunities for creative uptake and agency in local contexts of reception. (…) new convergent media such as Pokemon require a reconfigured conceptual apparatus that takes productive and creative activity at the “consumer” level
(…)
The important question is not whether the everyday practices of children in media culture are “original” or “derivative,” “active” or “passive,” but rather the structure of the social world, the patterns of participation, and the content of the imagination that is produced through the active involvement of kids, media producers, and other social actors. This is a conceptual and attentional shift motivated by the emergent change in modes of cultural production.
(…)
New technologies tend to be accompanied by a set of heightened expectations, followed by a precipitous fall from grace after failing to deliver on an unrealistic billing. (…) technologies are in fact embodiments, stabilizations, and concretizations of existing social structure and cultural meanings, growing out of an unfolding history as part of a necessarily altered and contested future. The promises and the pitfalls of certain technological forms are realized only through active and ongoing struggle over their creation, uptake, and revision.

She then describes 3 important constructs:

contemporary media needs to be understood not as an entirely new set of media forms but rather as a convergence between more traditional media such as television, books, and film, and digital and networked media and communications. Convergent media involve the ability for consumers to select and engage with content in more mobilized waylateral networks of communication and exchange at the consumer level.
(…)
These changing media forms are tied to the growing trend toward personalization and remix as genres of media engagement and production. Gaming, interactive media, digital authoring, Internet distribution, and networked communications enable a more customized relationship to collective imaginings as kids mobilize and remix media content to fit their local contexts of meaning.
(…)
described the kind of social exchange that accompanies the traffic in information about new media mixes like Pokemon and Yugioh as hypersocial, social exchange augmented by the social mobilization of elements of the collective imagination

Why do I blog this? I met Mizuko last month at the Netpublic conference and was very interested in how she’s taking another stance regarding kids engagement in new media culture, especially what she was explaining about convergence and hypersociality. I find particulary pertinent the way she rephrase the question of the kids participation into something broader and – in the end – much richer. These constructs are important to me, both as researcher in the field of emerging technologies and also when working with game designers to make them understand the implications of their creations.

Playful situations at home

“Playfully situated messaging in the home: appropriation of messaging resources in entertainment” by Mark Perry (Brunel University, UK), Dorothy Rachovides (Brunel University, UK), Alex Taylor (Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK) and Laurel Swan (Brunel University, UK) is a paper from the “Entertainment media at home – looking at the social aspects” workshop at CHI 2006.

The authors promotes an an embodied, everyday gaming paradigm in which people artfully employ the everyday resources in the world around them to entertain themselves and others. This is exemplified by a field study of how people are engaged in playful activity through (asynchronous) messaging at home.

The activities that we have seen are very much about household members creatively making use of the resources around them to entertain themselves, and (they hope) the others around them. Here lies a serious point for technology designers: systems that open themselves up for, perhaps unanticipated, use (cf. Robinson, 1993) give their users a powerful tool for artfully integrating them into other practices, a good deal of which in the home are playful and entertainment-related. By allowing users to generate, co-
opt, display and annotate a variety of media we can give them the resources to do many forms of communication, one of which is the ability to support play. And whilst play does embody social rules, it is the very socially constructed nature of these rules, and not their technological embodiment, that makes them powerful, and allows them to be applied in a variety of ways. We would therefore not encourage strong rule sets that form ‘methods’ of play, but would rather allow these to be generated on an ad hoc basis, and to draw from the existing social practices around messaging that household members already use in their everyday lives.

Why do I blog this? What I like here is the idea that gaming is not just interacting with a gaming system (console, PC…) but something broader that would involved everyday artifacts.