Ken Rinaldo is an artist known for interactive robotics and bio-art installations. He sure knows how to make robots cool, cute, and thought-provoking. His installation 'Fusiform Polyphony' consists of several long-necked robots suspended from a platform that seek eye contact with human beings. A camera in each of them captures facial expressions and sort of semi-randomly converts this into new dynamic behavior of the robot. These furry creatures are made of polyurethane casts, carbon fiber rods, laser cut aluminum, and for the uncanny-valley-factor, some human hair, supposed to suggest a hybrid state between robots and human beings. This work reminds one of Philip Beesley's installations, although Ken Rinaldo has managed to create a much different experience with highly energetic movement. And perhaps to some surprising, humans seem to be totally in love with the robots and vice versa. There seems to be hardly any distrust or fear, maybe some cautionary exploration at most.
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.
It looks like a kind of cactus straight out of Avatar, but the impressive Alphasphere is an actual interactive prototype of an electronic musical instrument. It has 48 pressure-sensitive pads that can be programmed to respond to touch by playing a sound. The player can thus pat and tap all over this cushioned orb in order to freely give shape to his own tunes. The placement and size of the pads was chosen to be somewhat optimal for intuitiveness of interaction, and gives the design an almost technobiological feel of a simplicity that has been reached through complexity.
I know, I know. This looks like a lot of things. A native American chief's headdress, a peacock's plumage, a porcupine, a torture tool, a toilet brush, or something Lady Gaga would wear on stage. And sure, only a tiny group of individuals would probably invest in fitting themselves a high-tech, cyborg identity by wearing such a contraption. Yet although this concept is almost unthinkable to hit the shelves, it does show us an interesting glimpse of the future.
The idea was developed by Jop Japenga, and is meant to share the mood of the music you are listening to with others around you. The device has scales that will behave in a physical way according to six modes: happy, dreamy, passionate, angry, mysterious, and sad. So when the extensive Beatles playlist on your iPhone hits the Vedanta-ish lyrics of 'Within You Without You', the scales will slowly start waving upwards, towards the realm of the infinite, eternal, and absolute. And when it reaches 'Cold Turkey' where John Lennon is roaring because he wants his heroin, the scales might start to stand up out of pure frustration. This way, in Japenga's words, 'a small peephole into our private atmospheres' is opened.
To see why this is interesting we have to think back in time a little bit, to the time before people stuffed their ears with white plastic before heading out the door. Back then, people didn't really live in an information-space like we do now. The television had been suffusing our minds with data within the confined realm of our homes for a while, but as soon as we stepped out the door we were in the big world out there, and there was no other information to control and connect to. So then naturally, people focused more on the people around them, because they were simply the most interesting things around to pay attention to. Now I have not lived long enough to experience this time as a grown and fully conscious person, but I can imagine that this gave rise to much more spontaneous discussions that, no distractions being present for a decent amount of time, led to many intellectually interesting, even philosophical, everyday conversations. And I can imagine too how listening to personal music in public after the Walkman was released was considered rude, and a sign of intellectual decline.
But the digital generation didn't care. The idea that you could control your perceptual space simply won over letting it up to chance who or what you met on your way. I guess it just didn't seem wrong to listen to Metallica or Madonna all the time, if the chance that you might strike up a rich and personally enlightening conversation was remote anyway. Little did we know that our attention would become so fragmented, and digital media would control us to such an extreme extent as they tend to do today.
So we were mostly cut off from our direct surroundings, our mind always tending to be somewhere else. And over time, we each have created an own digital information space to live in. An own cosmos, so to say. What digital media have showed us over anything else is that really we can decide what we perceive and alter things to our liking. The drive to freely explore, create, and experiment is more and more being met through digital media, which is an enormously empowering development.
But the result is a brain that can tend to associate wildly, and always create intentions to explore more, consume more, share more, and create more. Mental calmth is hard to enjoy these days. And we are not giving up our personal layer of information. So what do we do?
What this strange-looking headset does, and what we should do, is to enlarge our information space to connect to our immediate physical surroundings. We will become transparent, we will become our environment, we let our data go, and let it wildly interact with other data. We trust in that simple entanglement will produce something good, something beautiful. The social communication protocol is only one perspective now. With each sensor and actuator we add to our body, we add another perspective that can influence our decision making and our consciousness. This liquifies, even vaporizes our personality to something that is less in our own hands, but can more and more be shaped by our direct surroundings. It doesn't matter with what we interact anymore, we simply interact. And bring the attention back to the physical world. By engaging our full attention with our embodied existence in this world where the digital has blended with the physical, then, our mind does not wander off, because it realizes that the entire universe is here already. And that it is in the present moment where everything needs to be done.
I almost expect that in the coming decade, a breakthrough mobile product will hit the market that will be massively adopted, and that connects us to our direct embodiment stance in the world again. With this headset being one of its conceptual precursors.
With the agility of a supermonkey and a peace-sign on his shirt, the kid in the movie below shows the stylish skills he developed while playing on a system developed in Finland by the Virtual Air Guitar Company. The system films the user and puts him straight into a virtual world, where in this particular game he has to fight off enemies with the movements of his own body. It's great that we keep on waving bye-bye to button-pushing in many areas of human-computer interaction, but although they might rid us from obesity and laziness, of course the new interaction styles will present their own challenges, which may even be vaster to overcome.
One of these is that using your body for a world that's still hidden behind a screen makes not only the mind, but also the body more apathetic. It's already known that soldiers tend to sooner make a kill if their actions are mediated through a screen-based interface, removed from the actual location. And I don't doubt that videogames can tip people into behaviors in the 'real world' in which they mentally distance themselves from the consequences of their actions. If we now start to physically interact with our computers, we are teaching our bodies movement habits that we will also tend to try to employ in the 'real' world, simply because these movements get so deeply ingrained into us.
If we are going to treat our world like a video game, we will probably overcome fear of death, but apathy is the next danger. We need to make sure that the behaviors we teach ourselves through interaction with technology will be mindful, and in line with reflections of the ethical kind.
What I love about Yu-Ying Wu's 'breathing' chair is that it is such a simple example of a very sophisticated design philosophy. I namely very much resonate with the idea that intelligence should be a potentiality of form, growing through explorative embodied interaction to an optimal end-state. When a system stays open ended and does not force a certain static pattern onto an individual, this optimal state can then be attuned to each individual, and in return the individual will naturally become more open to adaptation himself too. This object, that has a simple pattern of holes that increasingly grow in size throughout the shape, does not tell people it 'is' a chair, or meant to sit on in a certain way, like most chairs quite paternalistically do. Instead, it is just being itself, not distanced but also not attached to the human form a priori. It offers a physicality that invites people to interact and play, and through that function arises. Like this, objects become intimately coupled to the human body through all the complex and unpredictable visceral interactions it can elicit.
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.
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