Architec Tradure

Author: Julie Knight

  • 11MayWhat’s next with social networks?

    I recently thought of creating a social network for dead people. Everyone could provide their digital representations, biometry information, simulation of personal touch that would only be revealed when dead. However, Mission Eternity is a similar concept that Regine Debatty noticed at ISEA.

    The M∞ ARCANUM CAPSULES contain digital fragments of the life, knowledge and soul of the users and enable them to design an active presence post mortem: as infinite data particles they forever circulate the global info sphere – hosted in the shared memory of thousands of networked computers and mobile devices of M∞ ANGELS, people who contribute a part of their digital storage capacity to the mission.

    Video




    Arcanum Capsules contain digital fragments of the life, knowledge and soul of the users and enable them to design an active presence post mortem.


  • 11MayHello Kitty, a social identity?


    Hello Kitty vintage phone

    I remember this funny phenomena.
    Back in Paris, I had a few Hello Kitty toys from the 80’s floating around, toys of my childhood. A few friends would come over and would be like: “wow Hello Kitty!!! you like Hello Kitty!!”, I would be “well not really, it is from my childhood and I have only a very few of them”. Then at my following birthday, friends would come with Hello Kitty new toys, being like :”we know you love Hello Kitty!!!”. I would keep them, touched by their gesture and the fact that they remember these 4-5 toys I had from my childhood. This phenomena mutiplied and started to be annoying, always receiving Hello Kitty toys, and trying to explain that it is not that I don’t like their gift but it just that I only like the vintage Hello Kitty from the 70’s.
    Later on, I shared with a friend a passion for vintage toys including Sanrio based characters, it was however impossible for my friends to distinguish vintage toys from new toys and would keep insisting that I liked Barbie, Hello Kitty and so forth. I started to have a collection of them that i got rid off flying to Boston (and broke the heart of a few of my friends by doing so).

    Funnily enough, I keep receiving comments like “Cati loves pink! Cati you love Hello Kitty” or genuinely keep receiving these new commercial Hello Kitty toys that I completely dislike. I don’t find them charged with personal meaning or design value either.


  • 11MayAlmost Safe



    Deconstruction, 2007; Low Tide, 2007 by Anthony Goicolea

    In his new show “Almost Safe,” photographer Anthony Goicolea presents digitally-composed, black-and-white images of a shattered earth. The artist portrays a world that bears the wounds of globalization, war, and a crippled environment. Only these wastelands are left in their wake. Goicolea has composited images taken at several disaster sites, adding elements (like power lines across an ocean rock formation) that seem out-of-place or just barely plausible. In Deconstruction, ominous dark clouds form over an office building that’s been halved in two and thrown across a beach. In Black Ice, a car is shown leaving a post-apocalyptic cityscape that’s maybe part-New York City and part-Oz. This world is only half-real, but the more you look at Goicolea’s constructions, the less impossible they seem. – Christopher Bartley

    “Almost Safe” opens April 28 and runs through June 2, 2007 at Postmasters Gallery, NYC.

    More info

    Via V magazine


  • 10MayInspiring book : the Prosthetic Impulse

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    The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future, by Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra, eds. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2006.

    The prosthesis is not a mere extension of the human body; it is the constitution of this body qua “human.”
    —Bernard Steigler,Technics and Time

    With every tool man is perfecting his own organs, whether motor or sensory, or is removing the limits to their functioning. . . . Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God.When he puts on all his auxiliary organs, he is truly magnificent; but these organs have not grown on to him, and they still give him trouble at times. . . . Future ages will bring with them new and probably unimaginable great advances in this field of civilization and will increase man’s likeness to God still more. But in the interests of our investigations, we will not forget that present-day man does not feel happy in his Godlike character.
    —Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

    The first chapter can be downloaded here

  • 09MayWearable robotic

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    Today at the h2.0 event -new minds, new bodies, new identities- Hugh Herr, director of the bio mechatronics group, presented his latest research. I am impressed by his work and fascinated by his own prostheses. He presented the number of persons who could benefit from wearable robotic and wearable attached to the body. From veterans who have parts of their body amputated, to anyone who could be robotically augmented. For instance, with wearable robotic, anyone could wear 100kg in a bag pack and not feel the load because it would be transmitted to the robot.

    In Hugh Herr’s research, living muscle tissues are stimulated electrically to get the desired motion response. He presented the motion by mechanics in prostheses developed by the mechatronics group at the MIT media laboratory. The Rheo knee prosthesis allows to reduce the energy consumed in walking, allows to walk downstairs, upstairs, faster and slower. The person who wears the prostheses is controlling the lift. This research is based on nature, on how nature functions and steals from nature for its design.

    Hugh Herr’s goal for the next years is to build the first hybrid body or limb by attaching robotic limb to the skeleton, load being transferred to the tissue. One of the main challenges is for the body to create its own seal. The group will develop the next generation of legs, and neurocontrol strategies for a direct control on these prostheses. Hugh Herr mentioned that his group developed the most powerful ankle in the world.

    For the Human 2.0 event, John Maeda composed of 24 scribbled personas. I still have not chosen the one I am …


  • 09MayA living sculpture

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    Aimée Mullins

    Today at the fantastic H2.0 event hosted by John Hockenberry and organized by the MIT Media Laboratory, key speakers presented new research initiatives for augmenting mental and physical capability and this to vastly improve the quality of human life.


    Pictures from Aimee Mullins’s talk

    I discovered the inspiring work of Aimée Mullins, that not only is functional but also beautiful. She raises questions on identity and the body, on what it means to loose her lower self. She worked with various artists, designers and modeled for Alexander Mc Queen.


    Aimée Mullins, Dazed & Confused, September 1998 by photographer Nick Knight

    In Cremaster 3, actress Aimée Mullins wears blades on the soles of her shoes or a white dress and transparent crystal legs.


    Cremaster 3

    At the end of the H2.0 event Aimée Mullins declared: “people say i have no legs, but I have ten pairs of them and my interaction with them allow me to be a living sculpture”


    Aimée’ Sculptural legs, photographer: Webb Chappell


    Model: Aimée Mullins, photographer: Chris Winget

    video

  • 04MayTouch Sensitive Apparel at Chi 2007

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    Poster presented at Chi 2007

    Our Touch Sensitive apparel is inspired by the vision to leverage stress, comfort, and massage people while they are on the move. When always on the move, as an interview based study has shown, people use technological devices to “tune-out” or express their fear of technology by finding “a place where [their] soul is” . What if objects that people carry with them and even carry on them could offer this sensory comfort that they seem to seek?

    More on our Touch Sensitive Apparel.

    Inspiration In hypermobile societies, people carry objects, information and goods. They develop habits. The notion of habitus coined by Bourdieu relates to everything that someone does, and in fact defines the individual. The search for comfort, to feel at home (to inhabit space through hab-its, habitus) when on the move defines the populations of our hyper-societies.

    Design

    Touch·Sensitive is a work-in-progress to develop a series of haptic modules that allow computational massage therapy to be diffused, customized and controlled by people on the move. It provides individuals with a sensory cocoon. Our current prototypes succeeded in defining a flexible structure, a mechanism of diffusion, and a feedback system for alerting and comforting the user through haptic means.

    In addition, we propose to integrate machine-learning algorithms to understand the massage needs of the users through the analysis over time of the correlation between the motions of the user, the location of the pressure points, the intensity and qualities of the stimulus. We plan to develop these next steps along with specialists in massage therapy.

    Download Chi 2007 WIP paper

    Touch Sensitive Apparel was presented at Chi 2007. Enthusiasm, advices, references, and new ideas inspired by the visitors will lead to a new prototype this summer.


  • 04MayTouch Sensitive Apparel at Chi 2007

    If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed to receive the latest Architectradure’s articles in your reader or via email. Thanks for visiting!


    Poster presented at Chi 2007

    Our Touch Sensitive apparel is inspired by the vision to leverage stress, comfort, and massage people while they are on the move. When always on the move, as an interview based study has shown, people use technological devices to “tune-out” or express their fear of technology by finding “a place where [their] soul is” . What if objects that people carry with them and even carry on them could offer this sensory comfort that they seem to seek?

    More on our Touch Sensitive Apparel.

    Inspiration In hypermobile societies, people carry objects, information and goods. They develop habits. The notion of habitus coined by Bourdieu relates to everything that someone does, and in fact defines the individual. The search for comfort, to feel at home (to inhabit space through hab-its, habitus) when on the move defines the populations of our hyper-societies.

    Design
    Touch·Sensitive is a work-in-progress to develop a series of haptic modules that allow computational massage therapy to be diffused, customized and controlled by people on the move. It provides individuals with a sensory cocoon. Our current prototypes succeeded in defining a flexible structure, a mechanism of diffusion, and a feedback system for alerting and comforting the user through haptic means.
    In addition, we propose to integrate machine-learning algorithms to understand the massage needs of the users through the analysis over time of the correlation between the motions of the user, the location of the pressure points, the intensity and qualities of the stimulus. We plan to develop these next steps along with specialists in massage therapy.

    Download Chi 2007 WIP paper

    Touch Sensitive Apparel was presented at Chi 2007. Enthusiasm, advices, references, and new ideas inspired by the visitors will lead to a new prototype this summer.

  • 03MayCulturally embedded computing and HCI challenges

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    At Chi 2007 I met with Lucian Leahu, researcher from the culturally embedded computing group at Cornell University. The group researches on affective computing by considering the cultural context in which people are in while interacting with computers.

    We analyze, design, build, and evaluate computing devices in cultural context. We analyze the ways in which technologies reflect and perpetuate unconscious cultural assumptions, and design, build, and test new computing devices that reflect alternative possibilities for technology. We are part of a community of critical technical practices [as coined by Phil Agre], or practices that integrate technical system-building with cultural, philosophical, and critical reflection on technical practice. We have a focus on reflective design, or design practices that help both users and designers reflect on their experiences and the role technology plays in those experiences. We work with collaborators in the Affective Presence coalition to develop an approach to affective computing in which the full complexity of human emotions and relationships as experienced by users in central to design (rather than the extent to which computers can understand and process those emotions) (…)

    For instance, their ongoing Fear Reflector project aims to support emotional self-reflection of people while they expect to confront their fears. Using a combination of biometry and camera input, it takes pictures of situation in which the user “fears”. People are then given the possibility to reflect on these “fear” contexts.

    The group had a few papers being presented at Chi 2007. I attended a very impressive talk from their group How HCI Interprets the Probes. They discuss the research techniques of Bill Gaver called Cultural probes that uncover people’s values and activities. They discuss how the HCI community craving for flexible design methods adopted and adapted the probes in their research. By Kirsten Boehner, Janet Vertesi, Phoebe Sengers, and Paul Dourish (from Irvine), How HCI Interprets the Probes.

    .Pdf of the Paper.

    Also a nice interview of Bill Gaver on Designing Interactions for reference.

    Another very inspiring take on HCI is to look at Situationist art practice. The authors specify how the Chi community can be relunctant to consider these methods, or by reducing them to comform to Chi’s ones instead of using the richness of these methods.

    .Pdf of the Chi’07 paper by Lucian Leahu, Phoebe Sengers, Claudia Pederson, Jennifer Thom-Santelli and Pavel Dmitriev.

    Of course, nice references on situationism with video and sound recordings of Guy Debord on Ubu. The most famous and studied book-movie of Guy Debord being Society of the Spectacle.


  • 30AprTilt and feel

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    Shoogle, created by John Williamson, Roderick Murray-Smith, Stephen Hughes at the University of Glasgow, UK, is an interface for sensing data within a mobile device.

    It is based around active exploration: devices are shaken, revealing the contents rattling around “inside”. Vibrotactile display and realistic impact sonification create a compelling system. Inertial sensing is used for completely eyes-free, single-handed interaction that is entirely natural.

    Download the Shoogle’s paper for Chi 2007

    Video of Shoogle

    Stephen Hughes was previously a researcher in the Palpable Machines research group with Sile O’Modhrain at Media Lab Europe. The group published key papers on vibrotactile display and mobile multi-modal interfaces.



    MESH an iPaq running a simple tilt-driven maze game by the Palpable Machines group