Category Archives: Technology

Create[d] World

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A few thoughts from the recent Create World conference of clever, creative people.

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Panel on place and creativity – how does digital alter the way we think?

Architect Richard Kirk made the point that perspective drawing as a tool is only a few hundred years old, so we are yet to reap the full benefits of new additions to our creative lexicon, such as virtual worlds. Performance designer Anna Tregloan commented that some people can quite naturally translate a 2D image to imagine it in 3D space, but for others that will always be more difficult, so the theatre tradition of building a little model of the set may endure. Continuing the theme of how we translate human experiences into digital form, and whether we can learn to think in a hybrid way between digital and physical, creative innovator (?!) Hael Kobayashi described the process of making penguins dance for Happy Feet. Humans danced in a warehouse, each one wired for motion capture. A set of screens displayed the merger of their movements with the digital penguins, so the director and key creatives could see, in real-time, penguins dancing on an iceberg.

Keynotes on photography, animation and the active audience

Tom Ang‘s keynote was an entertaining blend of a romp through the history of photography, some behind-the-lens information about particular shots, and some philosophical observations about value and power in photography’s new world:

  • Photoshop has programmed us!
  • Boundaries of what is shareable have shifted.
  • The concept of the ‘still image’ is now a misnomer: they fade, zoom, slide – and fast. And the more abundant they become, the less we attend to each.
  • Because images are so abundant, there are no longer iconic images of world events. (I’m not convinced of this point. The process by which images become iconic has changed, but I reckon crowd wisdom will choose images over time. Note, for example, the twitter #ows discussion of iconic imagery, and the meme of the cop casually pepper-spraying seated protesters.)

Ian Taylor’s story of the success of Animation Research Ltd – and his team’s down-home methods – was awe-inspiring. But my strongest takeaway from his talk was the importance of taking your time to learn – ergo the immense value of free education. Which we no longer have.

As a longtime advocate for participatory approaches to cultural representations, I was very interested in Ernest Edmonds‘ talk on art and the active audience. My favourite parts:

  • Some early research found that babies less than one week old can learn – by controlling the turn of their head on the pillow – to switch a light on and off, and that once mastered, they become bored with it.
  • Our vocabulary for interaction is developing. For example, there are many different kinds of play: danger, competition, camaraderie, subversion, fantasy, sensation, captivation, difficulty, simulation. And so on!
  • Don’t assume that more is better. Performance and communication might be better with lower bandwidth. This is an intriguing point, and I wanted more from him on this. I wonder if he means, for example, that in some cases audio works better than video,   because it gets inside your head but doesn’t restrict your visual attention. Or that pixelated imagery like in Minecraft, works in part because it’s low-res, so the player can more actively/imaginatively inhabit the scene and the characters. In short, I suspect this point relates to the value of leaving space within a representation, for the audience to fill from their personal creative sources.

An audiovisual meditation on gold

Not your average academic conference, Create World includes a range of clever, creative performances. Of the four, this was my favourite – it’s an audiovisual meditation on the mineral gold, and it made my heart hum. (I recommend: go full-screen and use headphones or big speakers.)

The Solar Angel from abre ojos on Vimeo.

Other prezos

The quality of stream-session presentations was consistently good. I attended those on:

  • a multi-disciplinary creative technologies degree (Judit Klein, Auckland Uni of Technology)
  • iPads for music-making (Jamie Gabriel, Macquarie Uni)
  • an iPad app for assessing teachers of music, art and drama (Julia Wren & Alistair Campbell, Edith Cowan Uni)
  • EEG-mapping of artistic consumption and as artistic work (Jason Zagami, Griffith Uni)
  • a weather-data-generated sonic sculpture in Sydney (Kirsty Beilharz, Uni of Technology, Sydney)
  • kinaesthetic potential of educational gaming (Helen Farley & Adrian Stagg, Uni of Southern Queensland)
  • serious games (Tim Marsh, James Cook Uni)
  • digital research methods, including Wikipedia article-writing (Kerry Kilner, Uni of Queensland)
  • Playtime, an animated movie (Thomas Verbeek, Uni of Otago)
  • Ishq, an audiovisual work commissioned by the Art Gallery of New South Wales as part of its exhibition on Islamic art (Kim Cunio and Louise Harvey, Griffith Uni)

I presented – and have shared on the Museum’s Education blog – Gamifying relatedness: an iPad app-in-progress. Hearty thanks to Paris for his guest appearance.

A grand design for active digital learning

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This week I wangled a visit to the digital learning facility work-in-progress that is UC‘s InSPIRE centre, directed by Prof Rob Fitzgerald and site-managed by Jonno – thanks for the tour, people.

InSPIRE will be “a focus for research into innovative good practice pedagogy that utilises ICT to enhance student learning outcomes”. So it’s a technology-enhanced space for teaching and learning about technology-enhanced teaching and learning. Deliciously meta! And if, like me, you wonder about the little ‘n’ in amongst all those caps, ‘InSPIRE’ stands for Innovative Sustainable Practical Imaginative Research Education.

Below are images I snapped; see the InSPIRE site gallery for building plans.

It is exciting to preview this embodiment of technology-enhanced active learning; and I like the approach Rob is taking: set it up then see how it’s used; like building the footpaths once you can see how the space is used. That means you build in flexibility – roll-out lecterns, lots of AV points in the floor, digital switching to project one room’s proceedings into another.

InSPIRE has all you need to create and share media (down to kitchenettes :) , and it includes some great lo-tech: writeable walls, and a good-quality audio podcast room — with video capability, yes, but – isn’t podcast mobility great?

It has an industrial, resource-conscious aesthetic: projecting onto walls rather than screens, exposed ducts, recycled hardwood timbers, underground 25kl rainwater tank.

And it embodies a DIY ethic: BYO mobile or laptop and data: input plates for USB to project your data or to record proceedings; mobile interactive.

I can’t wait to see it in action. It’d be a wondrous venue for THATCamp Canberra, or any other smallish conference.

Maybe Rob will chime in if I have munged any details. (If he doesn’t comment, let’s just assume it’s all just so :)

Perceptive pixels

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Yesterday I met and played a bit with a Perceptive Pixel multitouch screen and software for presenting and/or collaborative compiling and editing of live data. Below is a post-demo elaboration of the notes I took during.

Originally these goods were used in defense and intelligence; now they’re going public.

It’s $55k for the basic hardware that I saw – there are other models – and more for the software.

The Storyboard application is like a meta-Prezi – ie awesome (although I did miss Prezi’s peculiar elegance as I watched the demo). With Storyboard you can:

  • compile data from multiple formats onto a pasteboard, and interact with your sources in their native form;
  • annotate — scribble, take stills from video and hand-carved crops from stills;
  • move and zoom things to your heart’s content;
  • order the flow of your presentation by pointing from one source to another, and instantly show that series;
  • collaborate with or present to a co-located or distributed group.

Note: I might gave munged two different apps in the above account — <excuse> it was a fast-paced demo.

One of the wow factors was how very fast the data flowed – and the demo I saw was apparently using 3G mobile.

There are APIs. You can create custom gestures, feed in from a camera, and out to a printer.

The unit is sensitivity-adjustable. I don’t know why it was set the way it was for the demo, but I’d want a lighter-touch setting more like iPhone. The screen I played with demanded I be firmer — heavier — than my natural state. It was not always easy to perform the necessary gestural pattern; and I wasn’t the only one who had trouble.

An interesting side discussion was about how the conductivity (? however it works) of the touch between fingers and screen varies according to skin colour and dryness.

We asked to see the system in action with a large data set, so they pulled out the fancy CNN-commissioned interactive US election history viewer, drawing on a petabyte of data. (I wonder if Antony Green has seen it.)

It sure would be ace to see some great Australian content on that baby – and not just political; cultural too.

Collaborative, intergenerational, play-based learning about history

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At THATCamp Canberra, I hosted a session on designing a dedicated digitally-enhanced physical space for collaborative, intergenerational, play-based learning about history (yes, it was ambitious!). I am finally getting down to documenting it.

How I thought it might work

In the lead-up to the camp, I had put a lot of thought into the issues, but I had consciously resisted planning the session in any detail. I genuinely wanted to facilitate rather than lead. I did consider splitting people into small groups for part of the time, but decided against it because the numbers seemed not to warrant it. (Didn’t realise at that point that people would continue to wander in throughout the session so by the end, it was quite a large group.) Ultimately, for better or worse (!) I resisted imposing any real structure on the session and instead surrendered to hosting an engaging discussion of possibilities in terms of both form and content, and inscribing  it with as much clarity as I could on a whiteboard.

What actually happened

You can probably guess that we didn’t go so far as to devise a single, clear plan for a game-space. But we had a great chat, which I will try to represent here. What follows is a transcription / translation / slight elaboration of the whiteboard notes.

Do what can’t be done elsewhere

  • in museum space, draw on the authentic, interesting objects
  • invite peer collaboration (note that teenagers in particular prefer to relate to known others rather than strangers)
  • encourage social interaction with strangers in a safe place

Pedagogy / structure / approach

  • use real-world physics (in digital designs) for improving literacy about how the world works
  • draw on imagination
  • welcome failure
  • involve the bodies of participants, not just the minds, index fingers, eyes
  • provide a loop structure: Context –> Challenge –> Feedback –> (Joy made this point after the sesh)

Elements of the experience

  • include a preparatory / warmup / contextualising activity
  • establish rules for local interaction but leave space for emergent collective behaviour
  • if the activity is individual, then build in a moment of sharing at the end
  • enable people to make / build / create something
  • build in different levels – a progression of experience, with rewards for completing each stage
  • provide a takeaway – go home and log in for… / or a physical memento

Flexibility

  • solo or collaborative
  • multi-layered approach (so it works for short, shallow or prolongued, in-depth engagement)
  • engaging for young children (7 and up), teenagers, parents and grandparents

Technologies

  • wifi
  • motion-sensors
  • ‘glass wall’ for being visible from the outside / online
  • RFID
  • etc

Concepts

  • an interactive augmented-reality RPG (role-play game) with historical characters, props; visitors inhabit a character, choose clothes; re-enact a historical scene of their choice (time, place, indoor, outdoor);
  • integrate user-generated media
  • ‘customisable avatar – discovery’ – I can’t recall what this means!
  • interactive video
  • mission-based games versus play-based games – there was a leaning toward the latter as less reductive / prescriptive
  • a whole room full of buttons and levers and motion-sensors that you could explore in a completely freeform way, either alone or in collaboration – this idea was imagined in a (beautifully sun-drenched) post-session chat with Mitchell and Geoff

Models / inspirations

While we spoke, Michael drove a web-connected laptop so we could look at possible models or inspirations for this space:

What now?

It was absolutely fantastic hearing ideas from everyone at the session and afterward. I’ve probably left things out and got things wrong here. I know I haven’t captured all the nuances of the conversation. Corrections and additions are of course most welcome. Leave a comment and I will incorporate it into the post.

Over time I will revisit these ideas. For now, I am letting them simmer in my subconscious.

Museum experience and participatory design

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This is a paper I wrote for my digital design course.

Is it possible for museums to think about their space, or at least their digital space, in a whole-of-experience kind of way? It seems both uncommon and important. So that’s what I tried to do in this paper about digital museum experience design (PDF ~200kb). I’m especially interested in participatory design – where both the process and the resulting ‘opportunity space’ are participatory.

As is my wont, I drew a diagram for the essay. It illustrates the shift from presenting users with a finished product, to designing with their participation. It can be beneficial to involve museum visitors at every stage of the design process and indeed, beyond, as visitors can valuably contribute to meaning-making through their interactions in museum space.

Ubicomp, (museum) space and the social order

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What follows is a Master of Digital Design assignment – a ‘critical response’ to five papers on the topic of ‘Ubiquitous computing and urban informatics’. It includes (bonus!) references to a few other papers too.

Mark Weiser’s 1991 vision of technology blended invisibly into environments may not have quite materialised, but as Adam Greenfield points out, today’s phones, tablets and multitouch displays bear a close resemblance to his description of tabs, pads and boards. Ubicomp is spreading in many directions, from many sources. For example in Pachube, which serves out data streams about connected environments from people around the world, we can witness a growing wave of DIY ubicomp.

We can get a strong sense of technology’s wide and deep pervasion from Dan Hill’s account of the complex mesh of data flows in an imaginary-but-realistic city. Sensors, emittors and recorders are embedded in streets and buildings and carried by people doing business, passing by and hanging around. Data flows either with or without individual intent, and either functionally or dysfunctionally – in technical, personal and social terms.

Unlike the disembodied space of virtual worlds, ubiquitous computing works on, around and through human bodies; and in physical space, social relations are always at play. Ideally, we all have access (both read- and write-) to the data flows, as well as the ability to evade them. Ideally, we are also attentive to the affect of technology, and our interactions, on ourselves and the world around us. But real-world social space is messy. Anne Galloway warns that when technologies are invisible, so too are the power relations they replicate. The danger here is of our docile complicity in reproducing the dominant social order.

To mitigate against this risk, one of Greenfield’s ethical guidelines for UX in ubicomp settings is critical – ‘Be self-disclosing’. Seamlessness is rightly a feature, as Weiser imagined, but it must be optional, and reversible. And as with all new technologies, we must develop literacy about its use. We need to know that we have the right and the ability to ask the system to reveal itself – as well as its data.

Are there implications here for the digital design of museum space? For Foucault, museum space was heterotopia – ‘other space’ –  space that intervenes in ordinary space, and complicates our perceptions of it, illuminating and potentially contesting and inverting real-world social relations. To best serve visitors in their task of re-evaluating real-world social space, museum displays must not be seamless. They must ‘manifest their metatext’ (Lumley) precisely so that visitors can perceive the social relations implicit in both the product and process of their representation. Because of their particular role in representing ordinary space – because museum visitors are already immersed in a field of cultural technologies – the imperative for computational technology to be seamless might be greater here. If we can ignore the technology, do we gain a clearer view of social conditions? Or is it better to conceive of the technology as another layer of metatext, and therefore to render it visible?

Certainly, Weiser’s notion that ubicomp would be calm technology seems a better fit for museum spaces than the whizz-bang often associated with technology. It does not help museum visitors to be distracted by technology at the expense of their social engagement. So in museum building, exhibition and application design, that is something to note.

References:

Foucault, Michel. Of other spaces (PDF). Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism, 16(1), 1986: 22–7. (or here’s an HTML version)

Galloway, Anne. Resonances and everyday life: Ubiquitous computing and the city (PDF), 2003.

Greenfield, Adam. All watched over by machines of loving grace: Some ethical guidelines for user experience in ubiquitous-computing settings. Boxes and Arrows, December 1, 2004.

Greenfield, Adam. Real life: Weiser FTW. Speedbird, April 16, 2010.

Haque, Usman. Pachube, patching the planet: Interview with Usman Haque. Interview by Tish Shute, January 28, 2009.

Hill, Dan. The street as platform, City of Sound, February 11, 2008.

Lumley, Robert. The Museum Time-Machine: Putting Cultures on Display. London: Routledge, 1988.

Weiser, Mark. The computer for the 21st century (PDF), Scientific American 256, no. 3, 1991: 66–75. Reprinted in IEEE Pervasive Computing, January 2002.

Not explicitly referred to (I only had 500 words!), but also informing my thinking here, were these two papers presented to the Innovative Ideas Forum at the National Library of Australia on 16 April 2010:

  • Bell, Genevieve. ‘U are happy life: Making sense of new technologies’.
  • Manson, Rob. ‘Collections are leaking into the real world’.