metabolo.org - behaviour

Exploring gestural interface principles through Wii remote+Max/MSP granular synth mashup

gva — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 10:19:03 -0500

I developed this gestural interface prototype that offers an intuitive and performance-friendly interaction model. I'm exploiting the physicality of Nintendo's Wii controller by aiming to drawing out visceral, subtle, and "quasi-analogue" possibilities.

To build the prototype I combined functions from two existing Max patches: aka.wiiremote Nintendo Wii Remote Handler by Masayuki Akamatsu and granularized by Les & Zoax.

I chose the granular synthesizer because it provides a high degree of independent control of all sound variables, allowing the interaction design to access many parameters heuristically, looking for the most subtle and intriguing degree of sonic control. For example, pitch can be transposed independent of tempo and duration of sample playback. In terms of sonic culture, the quality of granular synthesis is less familiar and more more contemporary than, say, analogue modeling, or conventional sample playback. The sound of the granular synth has a "twenty-first century" quality that ties well with gestural control. The short demo video is not exhaustive or methodical but captures a bit of practice as I began to learn the characteristics of the system.

Thanks and shout out to Professor Joshua Goldberg, Brian MacMillan and other classmates at Integrated Digital Media Institute, Polytechnic University, Brooklyn.

Architectures of Control v. Designing for Emergence

gva — Fri, 18 May 2007 13:20:20 -0400

In the course of research for my Media Law paper, on Creative Commons and designing for emergence in law, I came across this excellent blog. In many ways this site might be considered the opposite of "designing for emergence":

Architectures of Control
http://architectures.danlockton.co.uk/

What are Architectures of Control?

[example images - Audi A2: The user cannot open the bonnet; Bench designed to prevent lying down: 'redesigned to face contemporary urban realities'; printer: Some HP printers shut down the cartridges at a pre-determined date regardless of whether they are empty]

Increasingly, many products are being designed with features that intentionally restrict the way the user can behave, or enforce certain modes of behaviour. The same intentions are also evident in the design of many systems and environments.

This site aims—with readers’ input—to examine and analyse the ideas and techniques of these architectures of control in design, through examples and anecdotes, and by keeping up-to-date with relevant developments...

I plan to redesign metabolo.org later this summer and intend to emulate many of the successful features I see here...

Designing Systems with Emergent Behavior at BayCHI

gva — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 22:10:18 -0400

A recent Bay Area ACM SigCHI panel on "Designing Systems with Emergent Behavior" featured Tim Brown (IDEO), Peter Merholz (Adaptive Path), Larry Cornett (Yahoo), and Joy Mountford (Yahoo), and was moderated by Rashmi Sinha.

Peter Merholtz blogged his thoughts here: www.peterme.com/archives/000793.html

Core77 offers a rundown of the event here: http://www.core77.com/blog/events/design_for_emergent_systems_4821.asp#more

And the organization's event page is here: http://www.baychi.org/calendar/20061010/

SHARE: supporting collaboration in new media communities

gva — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 21:34:20 -0400

Here's a reference from one from my fellow grad students:

SHARE.global
http://share.dj/global/

* new york
* montreal
* wiesbaden
* san diego

SHARE is an organization dedicated to supporting collaboration and knowledge exchange in new media communities. Local SHARE groups hold free, open jams and workshops in their communities. Participants bring their portable equipment, plug into our system, improvise on each others' signal and perform live audio and video. SHARE furnishes the amplification and projection. SHARE happens weekly to monthly in cities around the world. Interested in starting a SHARE gathering? See the do it yourself page.

The Birth of “Interaction Design”

gva — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 15:47:11 -0400

The term "interaction design" is attributed to a number of different parents, some from the academic and theory world and others more rooted in client practice.

Another example comes from the recent book Designing for Interaction by Dan Saffer. There is also a "Definition of Interaction Design" post in Saffer's blog. The book offers the following account:

Back in 1990, Bill Moggridge, a principal of the design firm IDEO, realized that for some time he and some of his colleagues had been creating a very different kind of design. It wasn’t product design exactly, but they were definitely designing products. Nor was it communication design, although they used some of that discipline’s tools as well. It wasn’t computer science either, although a lot of it had to do with computers and software. No, this was something different. It drew on all those disciplines, but was something else, and it had to do with connecting people through the products they used. Moggridge called this new practice interaction design.

A recent paper by Wakkary and Budd traces the term's birth to Terry Winograd's “From Computing Machinery to Interaction Design” in Peter Denning and Robert Metcalfe (eds.), Beyond Calculation: The Next Fifty Years of Computing:

In recognizing the impact of the increasing role of computing in people’s lives, Terry Winograd at Stanford University was among the first to identify a design practice whose outcome and focus was a qualitative process rather than a thing or an object. He labeled this new practice “interaction design.” Winograd identified the need to focus on the perceptual and psychological aspects of human experience by rooting interaction design equally in graphic design, psychology, communication, linguistics and computing science.

And my fellow instructor at OCAD, Martha Ladly, suggested Nathan Shedroff in a recent discussion about this question.

Thoughts from the readership of this blog are welcome. To be continued?

------

After posting these definitions I received an addendum in the comments field, which I want to add here, to reward the commenter, amend my original post, and stimulate discussion:

Bill Verplank would like some credit as well... From his website:
http://www.billverplank.com/professional.html

"From 1986-1992, he worked as a design consultant with Bill Moggridge at
IDTwo and IDEO to bring graphical user-interfaces into the product design
world; he started calling it 'interaction design' instead of 'user-interface
design'."

Designing for Emergence at Harvard U

gva — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 12:30:37 -0400

Here's a Harvard University engineering and applied science graduate class that asks, "How do we engineer robust behavior from the cooperation of vast numbers of unreliable parts? Biology hints that there may be significant power to be achieved from building things out of cheap, imprecise parts with limited life."

CS 266: Biologically-inspired Distributed and Multi-agent Systems

Research topics include: swarm behaviors and robotics, amorphous computing and smart materials, reconfigurable robotics, immune-inspired systems, synthetic biology.

technorati tags:engineeringBlogged with Flock

About Metabolo: From Mechanics to Mimesis

gva — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 00:56:21 -0400

Far from becoming tamer, the far-reaching effects of electric technology that were presaged by Marshall McLuhan seem to be waxing wilder, penetrating ever more deeply into our personal and social lives. Is it alarm we’re sensing, or the thrill of recognition – a quickening? Are we attempting to maintain control, or building a portrait of our environment and ourselves that is beginning to rival the responsiveness and creativity of the natural world?

We wonder aloud whether we’ve traded too much privacy for convenience and access, meanwhile scarcely noticing that all these musings have migrated into that ever-widening and ever-converging data stream that suddenly seems more real and more -- accessible? -- than ever before. This veritable Mississippi of data offers more manipulability and meaning as the tools, their default settings, and their recombinant interactions increasingly evidence startling levels of transparency, empathy and relevance to daily life....

Our brains, our bodies, our social relationships, the webs of life that nourish and sustain our physical selves and natural environments, no longer are these being taken for granted, denigrated, made incidental -- at any rate, not in the same blind and wholesale way. On the contrary, these are being methodically rediscovered and appreciated as irreplaceable, unique, meaningful, and worthy of support, research, emulation, connection, amplification, celebration.

As a candidate for the Master of Science degree in Integrated Digital Media at Polytechnic University, I offer this space to the investigation of these developments and these questions.

In this discursive space I intend to share and solicit interdisciplinary research interrogating emergent effects at the intersection of three organizing discourses: technology and design; biology and social behavior; ecology and environment. The diagram that follows illustrates broad relationships and selected patterns characteristic of the intersections:

I will survey the literature pertinent to these intersections, including historical texts as well as emerging theoretical and practical developments from both academic and professional sources. The underlying theoretical and methodological framework and vocabulary will be informed by the closely related discourses of cybernetics, systems thinking, complexity, and network studies. My objective will be to document and explicate applicable laws and principles in order to forge a new level of synthetic understanding with an eye to guiding the design and implementation of beneficial systems.

To assist the analysis and communication of my findings I intend to use appropriate techniques in media production that may include data modelling, visualization, and/or motion graphics. The resulting thesis will seek to articulate and demonstrate design principles in response to the critical question: “Can we learn to design for emergence, in order to develop and distribute more human-friendly and ecologically responsive social and technical systems, by studying and mimicking deep patterns originating in the realms of biology and social behavior?”

Following is a preliminary and partial list of sources to be consulted:

Biomimetics; Sociomimetics; Social Software; Networks
Barabasi, A. Linked: The New Science of Networks. Perseus Books; 2002.
Benyus, J. Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. William Morrow; 1997.
Hock, D. Birth of the Chaordic Age. Berrett-Koehler Publishers; 1999.
O’Reilly, T. What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software. http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/6228
Reed, D. P. The Law of the Pack. Harvard Business Review; Feb. 2001
Surowiecki, J. The Wisdom of Crowds. Anchor Books; 2004.

Commons; Cooperation
Axelrod, R. The Evolution of Cooperation. Basic Books; 1985.
Bricklin, D. The Cornucopia of the Commons: How to get volunteer labor. http://www.bricklin.com/cornucopia.htm August 7, 2000.
Creative Commons. http://www.creativecommons.org
Hardin, G. The Tragedy of the Commons. Science 1968;162:1243-48.
Lessig, L. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Basic Books; 2000.
Rheingold, H. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Basic Books; 2002.
Rheingold, H. and Institute for the Future. http://www.cooperationcommons.com/
Wright, R. Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. Pantheon; 1999.

Cybernetics; Systems Thinking; Complexity
Capra, F. The Hidden Connections: A Science for Sustainable Living. Anchor Books; 2002.
Weiner, N. Cybernetics, or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. M.I.T. Press; 1961.
Weiner, N. The Human Use of Human Beings. Houghton Mifflin; 1950.

Emergence
Fromm, J. Types and Forms of Emergence. http://arxiv.org/abs/nlin.AO/0506028
Fromm, J. Ten Questions About Emergence. http://arxiv.org/abs/nlin.AO/0509049
Helms, M. Design That Improves With Use. Ambidextrous. http://www.stanford.edu/~judywen/ambidextrous/page36-39.pdf
Johnson, S. Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. Scribner; 2002.
Van Alstyne, G. From Induction to Incitement: Inside the Massive Change Project. What People Want: Populism in Architecture and Design. Ed. Michael Shamiyeh. Birkhäuser; 2005:188–205.
Van Alstyne, G. and Logan, R.K. Designing for Emergence and Innovation: Redesigning Design. Publication pending; 2006.