For some reason I love to talk philosophically or at least pseudo-philosophically about technology, and videos such as 'Design' by Glasser can trigger those downpours of thoughts:
This artist is clearly inspired by technology as well, as she moves sensuously around an essentially abstract object, exploring her relationship to it. The video shows the object changing along with her movements, unfolding its potentials and showing possible stances it may take in relationship to her. First, the object and human being are presented as essentially quite naked and empty. It shows the object being confined to nothing but empty straight lines, which is, you might say, the monolithic essence of machine-made artefacts. And the human being is confined to its organic essence, empty with nothing but animal impulses inside. These two empty containers are in a way quite ridiculous in themselves. But when the object and human being start to complement each other, dramas unfold, and the relationship deepens. It is interesting that sometimes it shows her clearly manipulating the object in order to control it, but as soon as she stops, the object takes on its own behavior again, driven by its own life force, ready for the next unfoldment in the drama. This is unlike many human beings who tend to remain obsessed with ideas of control. But the human and his objects inherently seem to dance around one another, as the relationship is more mysterious and unpredictable.
I see technology as a great mirror for humanity. It is in itself very pure and abstract, able to reflect many different things, whereas human individuals often are only able to reflect a limited number of things and that's why in our lives we need to meet all these different people, from simple fools in random bars up to the highest gurus in holy places. But a single technological artefact can potentially shift in all these forms, emotionalities, and roles, and so it could shift relationships much more powerfully and efficiently. This will lead to a next sort of modernist project, namely the automation of our inner development.
Design luminary Philip Ross has developed what could be the most beautiful lamp, or even the most beautiful product, in the history of mankind.
It is called Fonckel, meaning 'glisten', and you interact with it by touching it on its back. Your hand movements will then more or less literally be translated into the behavior of the light, which swoops across the entire front surface. The movie below shows it all:
Fonckel is the result of Philip's PhD project at the University of Technology in Eindhoven, which again proves itself to be the city of light. His initial research was into how interactive products can elicit in people an experience of human values, such as creativity, helpfulness, and social power. Iteratively, and with the help of students, of which I had the fortune to be one (check www.nothings.nl/luxalive.html), he developed prototypes of lamps with different forms and behaviors. His final design, which was used for his scientific experiments, then led to the development of Fonckel.
From an aesthetic point of view there is not much to criticize about this design. You could say it can be categorized under the upcoming design movement of what I have termed 'biological modernism', as it has the purity of a design a la Dieter Rams, but also the organic and 'intelligent' forms that you see in nature. It would not surprise me if Fonckel would get an order from a Hollywood movie director in the near future, to have the lamp play a role in one of the next major science fiction films.
From an interaction design point of view you could argue that this design lacks both augmented and functional feedforward. Somebody who has never seen the object may have a hard time figuring out how to use the object, or even figuring out that it is a lamp in the first place. But I think the aesthetics and overall experience of the product overrules the usability issues here. This lamp is not meant to be useful. This lamp is meant to be beautiful and elicit a 'higher', even mystical experience in our little everyday lives. It intrigues people through its noble silence, its lack of communication, and invites them to touch it by the subtlety of its surfaces alone (this could be enhanced through certain materials or patterns though). Adding practical features would make this object much too earthly.
A main point for future improvement might be to expand the product's range of behaviors, possibly also with color, and the ability to link the light to things like sensors in the environment, or signals it gets from social media. Instead of having the user control the device fully, it may also attain some autonomy so that it starts to feel more alive (maybe this lamp will someday walk or fly around the home as part of a domestic robot). The product just feels so high-tech and sophisticated that you would almost be disappointed that in the end, it's just a lamp.
As far as I heard, Fonckel is ready to be sold at the moment, however I don't know the price. This is clearly still a product for the 'elite' who can afford quite a sum of money just to buy a lamp. But we need to start somewhere in putting beautiful products and experiences out there, don't we.
By now we all know that shape-shifting can be a very powerful aspect of technology. Since we witnessed the T-1000 change his hands from knives into hooks into pins, we all unconsciously knew that one day, we could have forks that can change into spoons or into scissors. And after a dream finds root into our psyche, the real work begins, which requires us to selflessly devote our mind-processes to the manifestation of that dream.
Many creatives around the world have become fascinated by products that can morph, with one of the new minds in the game being a guy from Eindhoven, the Netherlands with a good name for a designer, Jeffrey Braun. He has posted a video that shows an initial vision towards shape-changing kitchenware. In the video, you will see him varying his movements and gripping positions in order to morph his incredible tool towards the desired shape.
Of course, this video is just a video and only a small step away from the T-1000 towards actual, marketable products. If his aim was to show us something magical, I think he has succeeded. We must not remain sentimentally engulfed in a dream for too long though. I always love to see a designer step up and create a concept that actually has potential to hit the markets within a certain timeframe. It is through the largely social filter of the marketplace that true innovation occurs, after all.
I would actually be interested myself in seeing if we can develop something. Many things need to be critically thought out to see which concepts can survive. For one, magic has its limits. It can draw attention and evoke interest to buy a product, but a product will also have to match and support the actual ecology of use, including the physical, socio-economic, cognitive, and emotional environment. For one, I think that a clear mental model has to be available. Magic can be interesting, but it actual use not being at one with our products but having them do unpredictable, magical things, can be dangerous and induce uneasiness, even fear when using the product. True magic would occur when technology would be able to perfectly decipher the intention of someone in real-time. But in general, we humans have not even generated this ability yet, as this requires an intense felt oneness with the other.
Another approach is to make symbolic couplings from a consciously implemented human action to a consciously implemented technological action, as Jeffrey has shown in his movie. But the value of this is limited by how much we can and are willing to load our cognition. Then there is the issue of confusing an actual functional action in use for having a symbolic meaning for the product, so that it accidentally triggers a function. And the last major issue is that symbolic couplings disembody us from our ecological embeddedness. We lose track of what we are embodied in when we are acting as a result of a symbolic trigger. For example, you don't want to have to stab a knife backwards four times to make it turn into a fork. I can see the symbolic approach working for only a few actions per product, as both cognitive load and accident rate are minimized. If we have to go through the interaction design paradigms that human-computer-interfaces have gone through also for everyday physical tools, things might get a little chaotic.
I see most value in direct embodied couplings, say, when the amount you squeeze the handle of the knife determines the length of its blade, and the pressure you give with your thumb the width. These couplings are intuitive, do not necessarily require sophisticated AI, and have the human being actually become more embodied because it requires him or her to develop more physical control skills. There is a great shift starting towards embodied interaction, and I think that also for shape-changing products we should follow along with it.
Besides the fresh feel-good boost, the trailer of this iPhone app also gives you a peek into what could grow into the interactive children's cartoon of the future:
Jens Dyvik is a product-, concept-, and interaction designer from the Netherlands with some very interesting work I'd like to share with you.
First, he has created a movie to reflect on the notion of the 'superstar designer', which can help all creatives from time to time to remind themselves that there is more to work than fulfilling personal ambitions. Watch it on http://www.dyvikdesign.com/ or http://www.susanchristianen.com/.
In another project he imagines a hotelroom with a floor that is completely sculptable through a gesture-based input device. You enter the hotelroom, and the floor is white and flat. But with a few well-pointed waves of the hand you will have a bed, a partysetting, or even a bowlingalley in no time.
His graduation project at the Design Academy Eindhoven is the current summit of his work, if you ask me. He designed a wearable device that directly feeds back, in a simple but not simplistic way, the emotional state that the wearer is having. It is a quite biological looking bracelet with a head and a tail section that can lift up to show for example your tenseness. This way, the emotion is objectified, which is a very powerful mechanism for the mind. Think, for example, of spit. Yes, saliva. It's always in your mouth, being one with you, you could say. But once you put it 'out there' as an object of spit, say, you put it onto your hand, you suddenly treat it completely differently, and will probably not want to put it back in your mouth again. Also putting your thoughts or emotions 'out there' makes you instantly get into a reflective relationship with them, which can help you bring awareness to yourself so you're not just getting dragged into emotional patterns like a robot.
Ok, it's not much, but isn't this heading somewhere? I personally can't wait to have an organic modeler that works through using the designer's entire body as an interface a la Kinect.
Through our increasingly intelligent and interactive technologies, we are making our lifeworld more and more manipulable, giving rise to a world where humans are directly creatively involved in their environment. We understand now that everything is makeable, if only we have a sufficient palette of resources. Through technology we will be able to become superintelligent, superathletic, superhealthy, superhappy, and according to Dutch designer Ivo Daniel de Boer, we can even become superheroes.
Ivo envisions to extend human capabilities through interaction with technological devices, to make everyday events more extraordinary, and give rise to the feeling of being a superhero. He has made his vision tangible in a prototype for a ball that can be moved around without touching it. All you have to do is wear a wristband, and with specific ways of gesturing and moving your hand you can then make the ball move. Ivo positions this device as a toy, though I see many more applications of this so-called 'tele-kinesthetic' interaction paradigm in the future.
Now of course this type of human-computer interaction is quite close to the culmination of the Western ego-drive externalized. Who, at some point in their lives, and especially among boys, does not dream of being the omnipotent cyborg? Yet I don't think that we should avoid this possibility. On the contrary. It's great that dreams, silly as they might be, can come true through our own creative action. It's only when a dream gets realized, that we start seeing its flaws, after all. So I say yes to these developments; let people become almighty, let them become the alphas of the world, let them do whatever they want and can. The consequences will organically unveil themselves, so we'll only have learned from it.
These switches by Katrin Baumgarten are meant to evoke repulsive feelings. One switch has a snotty substance oozing out of its pores when you approach it. Another switch has hairs that it moves, and yet another is a shy switch that retracts when you come near. This exploration is definitely one away from designing for function or usability, but these things do prepare us for a future where technology is more sensitive and feels more biological.
GUI's on your skin, that's 'Skinput' as developed by Chris Harrison at Carnegie Mellon. I heard about it before but only now I found some interesting visual material actually showing how Skinput is used. It works with an armband that through a picoprojector shines a display on the user's forearm or hand, and it senses where the user taps through acoustic vibrations within the body. Finger gestures like pinching can also be sensed for special actions.
This is definitely going to the ultimate seamless wearable technology, where the body becomes the technological medium. To see Skinput for yourself, get your body over to CHI2010, April 10-15 in Atlanta, Georgia.
How simple an idea, yet how brilliant the enaction. Mitchell F. Chan had the idea of physicalizing voice through ondulating ropes, and used the increasingly popular programming environment Processing to analyze the voice of soprano Ashleigh Semkiw and turn this into output for motors to change the frequency and intensity of vibration in the ropes. Thus he gave nascence to a kinetic sculpture in which human and technology are intrinsically connected as if they were one.
Check out the Misa Digital Guitar. There has been an ongoing evolution of digital music instruments, but this one is pretty interesting. Of course, you lose the traditional beauty of sound that directly comes from vibrations in the material of the instrument, but the main point why these digital instruments are so interesting is their programmability. In the future devices can intelligently adapt to their users so we might come to see a true mutual interaction between a human and his instrument, where next to the human playing his instrument, the instrument plays its user too.
With Microsoft's Natal project, a markerless full body motion and facial expression capture system for the Xbox 360, virtual reality is coming close to the real thing. The body becomes the interface, and you become the virtual character. Thus, we have nearly created the perfect fake world to escape into from our real lives. This is a great development, finally virtual reality is coming to a fully embodied stage, and when we can live it we can also come to see how it's only a niche of what we can do with new technologies. Moreover, we can come to see more clearly what new purposes these technologies can serve and how they can uplift us in our lives. I might just wait for the Natal system to become available by next Christmas, and play my friend's Wii's for now instead. There is something disturbing about girls playing virtual soccer in a densely furnished living room though.
After seeing this movie you have to conclude that doing academic research is not so bad. Here's some interesting research called "Enabling Always-Available Input with Muscle-Computer Interfaces" that was presented on the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST'09) in Victoria, BC. But *poke poke* really guys, you just wanted to be able to play Guitar Hero in mid-air, didn't you.
But of course, it's definitely mind- and bodybogglingly interesting to make human computer interfaces more intimately connected to the human body, therethrough getting closer and closer to the actual motor neurons instead of only connecting technological artefacts to the end effectors of the infinitely complex and self-optimizing systems that our bodies are.
It's always interesting to see how patterns can emerge in a group without any individual knowing about it. But in this case of a bee swarm it's even more amazing since it is so evidently visible, for the actual purpose of this pattern is purely visual. It appears that, when a bee detects a specific anomaly in how another bee enters the hive, it can set off a wave-like pattern in the swarm in order to scare off a potential attacker. Watch it in action here:
This simple mechanism is another clear example of the power of swarm intelligence, which is more and more entering the picture nowadays. The coupling also has already been made to interactive product design. You will probably have seen Chris Woebken's video fragment showing his vision on 'Sensual Interfaces' in which products can dynamically emerge from small, intelligent particles.
Besides such projects, researchers in the field of swarm robotics are already working on realizing such physical, intelligent swarms. Watch for example this mind-bending video where a physical model of a car is directly manipulable in three-dimensional space:
These developments are ground-breaking, since technology can now start to develop its behaviour adaptively, from the bottom up. These developments may feel right because they are promising and new, but to me it is evident that they call for a lot of critical reflection and carefulness. I want to make sure that we are not blinded by technological progressivism but learn to evaluate our creations on an ethical level. Without a vision of the future that holds a broader perspective and takes human values into account, nobody can predict what will happen. Of course we more and more need to accept living in an unpredictable and uncontrollable world, but I want to prevent that technologies become that powerful that people start to fear them or mistrust them. To ensure that, I feel that there should always be a large variety of human stakeholders in the development of a technology, so it stays rooted within the complex system of human culture and society. Then slowly but surely, a co-evolution can start to arise where man and machine maintain a socially acceptable level of mutual understanding and abilities to meaningfully interact with each other.
I know that it sounds very much like an apocalyptic scenario of a random science fiction movie, but nevertheless I feel that there is the potential for a catastrophe that would dwarf Katrina. When machines go wild without having been enlightened as you might call it, the consequences are simply unimaginable. Of course nature is very inspiring, and I would promote further work in biomimicry in design for example, but the underlying pattern of evolution as we know it and its creations is not all that desirable, although it may seem to be so if you only peek beyond the surface but don't dig in to the core of it. Obviously, evolution is blind, and it optimizes locally, having specific groups converge at the cost of another group's probability to survive. It is mainly based on the immediate, direct perceptions of an entity and not on underlying models that helps entities understand each other. Studying natural phenomena like bee swarms teaches absolutely nothing about how things can meaningfully interact on a social and even intellectual level, while that is where the really beautiful but challenging complexity lies. For this there is no reference, since we humans are the first species having developed a neopallium that allows us to create internal models and reason. And even within our own species, we often seem quite clueless as to how to align and integrate our reflective abilities and our instincts.
In other words, what I mean to say is that when we develop technological swarms, they will probably over time start acting in one way or another like those bees, developing behaviour to optimize a local parameter. These swarms will align to old evolutionary patterns, while what we need is an entirely new pattern that we rationally construct ourselves and through iterative creative processes learn to embody in technologies.
Isaac Asimov has laid a foundation for this rational construction with his three laws of robotics, which later turned into four. I find it worth the effort to recall these explicitly, and we don't let them swirl in our minds as merely an inspirational bunch of words look beyond the words for meaning too, so here it goes:
1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the first law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second law.
(from 'Bicentennial Man', Asimov, I. (1976) as quoted in Anderson, S.L. (2008) Asimov’s ‘‘three laws of robotics’’ and machine metaethics, AI & Soc.)
The zeroth law, according to Wikipedia, is as follows:
0. A robot must not merely act in the interests of individual humans, but of all humanity.
Without going far into these specific laws, I can only say that to me it is evident that a law-based ethics just can not work. The concept of harm is a rather ill-defined one, to start with. To me harm, just as necessity, is a culturally constructed, relative concept. The threshold after which an action results in harm we can set as high as we want to. What the laws basically state is that we want to dominate machines. The laws correspond to old evolutionary patterns, although the zeroth law seems to make an attempt at building a holistically desirable system. But the law does not state anything about how it can possibly know what is good for humanity, or how it can even maintain a concept that condenses something of this proportion and complexity. What Asimov's laws merely make way for is a preprogrammed, cognitivist approach to technology design, while the future of technology is in emergent behaviour, where machines learn in interaction with the environment. This is, by the way, what Rolf Pfeifer advocates in his recent and recommendable book 'How the Body shapes the Way we Think'.
Anyhow, I think there is a pressing need for theoretical work along the lines of Asimov, but from the perspective of the new 'emergent' paradigm. Of course we can semantically influence machines such as with laws, but also from bodily interaction they must learn what the most satisfactory ways to behave are in this world. As indicated before, people already have the greatest trouble with this, even with admitting to their own weaknesses, and ideas about selflessness from for example Buddhism aren't integrated in contemporary cultures beyond a level of merely remaining superficial catchphrases. So a first pressing research question I would like to pose is:
How can one make a machine come to see that the ability to act in a selfless way is desirable?
Here are a few brilliant projects on mirrors that show an image you can project yourself into in a different way than a usual mirror does. Hence, they can make you see yourself in a different way, and change your behaviour or even attitudes.
Shown above is the work of Daniel Rozin, who pioneered the area of interactive mirrors. His famous installations subtly play with distortions and abstractions in size and shape, while still mostly pertaining to the perceived data. To me, his mechanical mirrors especially emphasize in an ambiguous manner that in the future, technologies can learn to reflect parts of our inner selves in any means that it can find to accomplish this with. Even waste material we have thrown away might directly make an unexpected turn and start behaving in a possibly rather confronting way.
Rozin's software mirrors also reflect a quite realistic self-representation of the viewer, but as well make him more sensitive about other parts of life instead of how he looks. His shaking time mirror, for example, shows in a rather exaggerated way how time affects us, and how easy it is to use time for active self-transformation, as if we could just shake off our inner tensions, bad habits, traumas or other kinds of mental debris that seemed stuck to us.
Furthermore, Rozin made a few low-tech sculptural pieces that explore the role of mirrors in providing us with different self-representations than we would expect. A counterexpected effect is most strongly embodied in Rozin's 'Broken Mirror', which consists of a fragmented mirror, that through an ingenious physical configuration of the fragments shows not a reflection of the viewer, but an image of an old woman that is printed in fragments on a wall behind the viewer. Hence, for a moment the viewer is tricked, although it will probably not be impacting to an extent as to really make the viewer ponder existential issues of any kind.
Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman have approached the same line of work from a more social perspective and make construction of the self-representation a collaborative project. Their installation 'reface' takes samples of video directly from viewers who stand before the wall-hung device, and mixes up parts of video from different viewers, so you might see yourself as you are, but with the hair of your, say, american-indian grandfather and the surgically altered lips of your twin sister who also happened to be at the exhibition. This way of altering self-representations, to me, is on the edge of gimmickiness because of its obvious artificiality and would be much stronger if a database of recorded videos was input for a system that would dynamically morph your face, and change temporal and spatial parameters for example as a function of how you behave in front of the 'mirror', of how you feel or even of how or what you think.
Then another installation by Golan Levin, the Optoisolator, is less obviously a mirror, but definitely offers people a means to project themselves into an object and evoke focused self-reflective thought. It consists of a black box, attached to a wall at eye level, in which a mechanically moving eye resides that looks straight towards the viewer and follows him around the room, thus engaging him as in a game of staring. An even stronger connection is made by having the eye blink one second after whenever the viewer blinks their eyes, employing a technique called eye blink detection. By putting the viewer inevitably in the center of attention, he becomes an intrinsic part of the artwork, which makes it impossible to take on a detached, third person perspective of that of a mere observer, or even as an interactor without individuality. With technologies behaving like this, people would definitely be more invited to overcome traits like shyness.
To conclude on the psychological impact of such technologies, Yee and Bailenson's 2007 study showed that people conform to the expectations and stereotypes of the identity of their self-representation, which gives me faith in that these kind of technologies can have a truly immense transformative impact, if designed well for specific people in specific contexts. Considering the latter issues, these artistic translations of technology can merely be seen as explorations into a new paradigm where technologies are purposefully designed and even learn to guide and change people in direct and personal ways that people comply with much more than with conscious transformations through more semantic means like advertisements, therapies, or even laws.
I designed and built a lamp that elicits human values through interaction with its user. Human values roughly are what people strive for in their lives. The key idea is that when products are designed so people can employ behavior suiting their value priorities, interaction with these products can be much more satisfying, because a resonance occurs with the dynamics of the product and the preferred dynamics of the human. The two values the lamp can elicit are 'social power' and 'helpful'. Depicted above is the lamp behaving subserviently, following the user's movements and making the user feel powerful and in control. The lamp can make its light flow dynamically through its body, but moreover it can also move physically through a four bar mechanism powered by a servo motor.
This blog reports and reflects on intellectual and technological developments that can give rise to a liberated feeling of oneness with the whole of being, and an awakening of creative intelligence that empowers people to feel and act as inextricably linked with their lifeworld.
Special attention in this blog is paid to embodied intelligence, complex emergent behavior, applied behavioral economics, technology for physical behavior modification, and the merging of digital and physical experiences.
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The author
Ralph Zoontjens is a product designer from Tilburg, the Netherlands. He has graduated with a Master's Degree from the Industrial Design program at the Eindhoven University of Technology with an interactive jacket that gives feedback for yoga practitioners. He has worked for the Philips Design Probes group and currently does product design for Motio Development in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. In his spare time he pursues his many interests, does yoga and distance-running, and tries to immerse himself into creative processes as much as possible.
Furthermore, Rozin made a few low-tech sculptural pieces that explore the role of mirrors in providing us with different self-representations than we would expect. A counterexpected effect is most strongly embodied in Rozin's 'Broken Mirror', which consists of a fragmented mirror, that through an ingenious physical configuration of the fragments shows not a reflection of the viewer, but an image of an old woman that is printed in fragments on a wall behind the viewer. Hence, for a moment the viewer is tricked, although it will probably not be impacting to an extent as to really make the viewer ponder existential issues of any kind.
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