metabolo.org - software

Wii Max Granu Boids gestural interface demo (featuring Howard Rheingold on Cooperation Theory)

gva — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 20:46:55 -0500

This performance demonstrates my evolving Wii-Max/MSP gestural interface prototype.

Beginning with Howard Rheingold's brilliant interview on cooperation theory, I used the Wii controller to manipulate audio with a granular synthesis patch, and filled the video track with flocking pixels based on Craig Reynold's famous Boids algorithm in an OpenGL Jitter implementation.

In performance I insert realtime video feeds of myself operating the wireless controller, grabbed from the onboard laptop cam. The purpose is to integrate my physical presence and gestures. This material may also be understood as a reference to Narcissus, whose reflected extension of himself was described by McLuhan as one of the first accounts of the narcotic effect of technology.

The demo was completed as part of my coursework for Master of Science degree with the Integrated Digital Media Institute, Polytechnic University, Brooklyn.

My approach to this project was roughly as follows:

The problem: prepare and present a five-min. audio/video performance using an external controller with a dataflow flow programming environment, namely Max/MSP/Jitter
Start with my previous WiiGrano_6 demo and extend it to include new functionality
Add Nunchuck controller to Wii remote setup for additional input control
Select jit.boids family of patches to modify and control for visuals (http://www.maxobjects.com/?v=objects&id_objet=3980)
Patch Nunchuck joystick, triggers and accelerometer data into boids patch
Select new audio sample material (Howard Rheingold on Cooperation Theory)
Optimize gestural control around interesting & sensitive feedback params.
Practice, record, and present integrated a/v performance

Hayden Hamilton, CEO of GreenPrint, answers questions | Grist | InterActivist | 30 Jul 2007

gva — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 11:35:45 -0400

"GreenPrint software ... analyzes each page of every document sent to the printer and looks for typical waste characteristics (like that last page with just a URL, banner ad, logo, or legal jargon) and then eliminates wasteful pages automatically."

Report from Massive Change Global Visionaries Symposium

gva — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 22:19:23 -0500

Just returned from the Massive Change Global Visionaries Symposium in Chicago. As a co-creator of the Massive Change exhibition I wanted to see it in the first US showing. Another aim was to study the public event and possibly seek out some of the speakers for a symposium I'm co-organizing with colleagues at the Beal Institute. The event was eye opening and highly enjoyable.

Overall my favorite speakers were Stewart Brand, futurist and author of the Whole Earth Catalog, The Clock of the Long Now, and How Buildings Learn; Gunter Pauli, founder and director of Zero Emissions Research Initiative of the United Nations University in Tokyo (Zeri.org), founder of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales, and Mary Czerwinski, cognitive psychologist and principal researcher at Microsoft. Brand and Pauli were certainly the most dynamic.

Other speakers were Gregg Easterbrook, senior editor of The New Republic and author of The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse; Dayna Baumeister, cofounder of the Biomimicry Guild; Hazel Henderson, futurist, evolutionary economist, and syndicated columnist; John Todd, biologist and ecological designer, and Reginald Modlin, Director of Environmental Affairs for Daimler Chrysler.

Stewart Brand presented first and he was superb. Soft-spoken and persuasive, he is a master inter-disciplinarian and unromantic humanist. His presentation was the only one with visuals, very polished with dense information demographics, many photos, sound clips, transitions, etc. Not as typographically sophisticated as Al Gore's show but equally dense. Brand focused on the city, its pivotal place in the pantheon of human creativity, its long history and the dynamic economic and demographic forces transforming it worldwide, in every continent and across all income strata. Overall he gave a picture of optimism about the creativity and resourcefulness of human communities to solve problems.

Gunter Pauli, based in Tokyo, described some of his initiatives in designing radically green urban / industrial communities at very large scales. Much of his work is in the developing world, e.g. Gaviotas in Colombia. These communities can leapfrog past current toxic practices and install new infrastructure that uses closed-loop, "waste=food" principles to achieve high employment, zero emissions, ample food production, etc.

Here's a helpful third party commentary [http://www.planeta.com/planeta/02/0209gaviotas.html]:

Pauli, in some ways a younger version of [Paolo] Lugari, has some spot-on things to say. He is most definitely on The Right Track. Kind of a permaculturist-social-justice-guy with a penchant to use fairy tales to illustrate his points....
...ZERI's focus is on taking things that are considered "waste" and finding new uses for them.
...The trick to "zero emissions" is to use the "waste" of one of the five kingdoms as food for another.

In person Pauli is outspoken and imaginative, frequently alluding to his work with children and seeming to celebrate these same qualities in them -- they don't filter their ideas of what's possible. Not an easy personality, but much better than that. Pauli was on stage with Reginald Modlin, Director of Environmental Affairs for Daimler Chrysler, who was cagey, dry, and sycophantic. No surprises and few big ideas from the global manufacturing giant.

Next were Dayna Baumeister and John Todd. One very interesting moment of that talk arose through a question afterward by Stewart Brand regarding GMO's -- actually he scooped me as I was going to ask the same question. Brand pointed out that certain bacteria swap genetic material all the time, and that many scientists who understand biology thoroughly, including stellar minds like E.O. Wilson, are less disturbed by GMO than others who are not trained in biology. Todd gave a thoughtful answer that GMOs are a distraction in that he's more interested in the symphony of ecological relationships, rather than the admittedly interesting soloists or featured organisms.

Jimmy Wales and Mary Czerwinski offered slightly differing views on emerging digital media. Most telling comment in that session came from Wales who imagined that the open, volunteer-driven model of wikipedia would be a temporary architecture that would soon have to be replaced by a more restricted and conventional model. To his surprise, the need to install controls on the model never materialized. In fact he continually has to explain to the media that the organization's controls are less restrictive than they imagine. Simple rules, like requiring individuals to be members for four days before they can edit, have effectively dampened most of the troll-like behaviour in the system.

In the last session Hazel Henderson held court and Gregg Easterbrook held his own. Henderson captivated the audience with ideas such as unmeasured value creation within the "love economy," and the need for broader alternatives to the money-based economic indices, like triple bottom line and the Calvert Henderson index. Both speakers dealt with notions of wealth and politics, and the overall picture was one in which material prosperity has shown steady increases in recent decades. The passing of Milton Freidman was noted and some audience members noted that we've never really tried pure market economics because of massive subsidies for entire industries, including oil and gas.

“Theoretical Primer for Emergent Media” presented at Enterprise 2.0 event

gva — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 10:30:15 -0500

I'll be giving my Hyperpolis presentation and leading a discussion on the idea of "emergent media" as part of a Toronto event beginning 6:30 tonight at the Gladstone Hotel.

Hosted by Tom Purves, the gathering will feature speakers and general discussion on the idea of "Enterprise 2.0" The idea is to look beyond today's mostly consumer-oriented applications of "Web2.0" and "social media" and ask, What do these same technologies portend once they infiltrate the business world? How will these new media forms change everyday work, the structure of firms, and the way companies innovate?

The event has attracted a lot of interest from the Toronto area tech community who are plugged into these ideas, and has been scaled up from a smaller venue to the stately Gladstone.

For more information or to sign up for (free) attendance, visit this wiki: http://barcamp.org/Enterprise20Camp

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/

Nice compendium of location-based games

gva — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 16:14:31 -0400

Here's a nice compendium forwarded by David Frackman, a fellow student in my Integrated Digital Media program:

http://www.in-duce.net/archives/locationbased_mobile_phone_games.php

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'."

MIT Media Lab's Scratch: a programming language for animation, games, art

gva — Sun, 13 Aug 2006 22:33:28 -0400

I had a great meeting recently with Britt, one of my former students from the Institute without Boundaries. She had returned from visiting the MIT Media Lab where she toured the school and met Mitchell Resnick and others.

One project she told me about later was Scratch, a programming language for animation, games, art - From MIT Media Lab comes Scratch, a new programming language that lets you create your own animations, games, and interactive art.

Scratch is being developed by Resnick's Lifelong Kindergarten research group at the Media Lab, in collaboration with KIDS research group at the UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies. The language builds on the Squeak programming language, developed by Alan Kay and an open-source community of colleagues. Scratch will be available for public release later this year (2006).