Archive for technology
February 1, 2010 at 12:19 am · Filed under community interaction design, digital design, interdisciplinary, proposals, science, teaching and learning, technology
After ManU went up 2-0 against Arsenal I started browsing and commenting on the submissions to this year’s Digital Media and Learning Competition that the MacArthur Foundation and HASTAC run each year.
Some observations:
- Lots of games and game-like labs in the mix.
- Art/Sci is now officially mainstream.
- Climate and Sustainability are BIG social issue themes in the sci/tech proposals.
- Lots of brands in the mix (Exploratorium, National Park Service, xlabs, Media Lab, Eyebeam, etc)
But after culling through them for an hour and a half, I think I got a good sampling of the 800 or so submissions to the Learning Labs track. Here are a few that seemed interesting, relevant and promising….to things I’m interested in..
ENERGY & CLIMATE ADAPTATION
Empowering Collaboration between Students and Vulnerable Communities in Three Degrees’ Real-World Climate Justice Seminar
Energy Game
The Wild Life Virtual Barnyard… Saving The Planet One Climate Cartoon At A Time!
Powerhouse: A Social Game That Teaches Players About Energy Efficiency
Climate Changers: An MMO virtual lab game to save a planet
Young People Take the VITAL SIGNS of Climate Change, Build Scientific Habits of Mind
Disadvantaged Youth Exploring Sustainable Energy Collaboratively Through Video Games
Pooling Resources Project [Prp]
OUTLIERS
EpiLab: Student-led epidemiology and public health surveillance in a global network of high school classrooms
HowStuffisMade & HowitcanChange: participatory platform to change the most toxic of global human activities.
Hackteria
WATER
On the H2O Case
Dry Land, Grey Water, Green Future: Interactive STEM Learning Through Gathering and Visualizing Environmental Data
Water Case Studies: Exploring Social History and Environmental Impact to Create Collaborative Solutions
June 16, 2008 at 9:31 am · Filed under boundary objects, community interaction design, interdisciplinary, making it public, maps, network entrepreneurship, science, teaching and learning, technology, visual culture, visualization
This is a nice compilation of resources assembled for a course entitled MAPPING CONTROVERSIES in MIT’s STS program. The course focuses “…on developing aptitudes for combining multiple ways of knowing: textual interpretation, intensive search in heterogeneous databases, and design tasks; all of which point to the invention of new tools of representation for an increasingly complex environment.
Sounds fun.
Addendum: you can also view an explanatory video about Mapping Controversies, narrated by Bruno Latour
June 7, 2008 at 7:19 pm · Filed under bioinformatics, community interaction design, complex systems, cybernetics, heterarchy, making it public, technology
A letter to this week’s Nature describes a study that reveals an interesting model of human movement patterns. The study is the first of its kind for the simple reason that the researchers were able to objectively track people in the natural environment by using mobile phone locations as proxies for their movement.
location tracking phone
Biologists have been performing similar studies on animals for years, using radio tracking devices and similar forms of locations awareness. However, because people tend to be difficult to keep track of, subject to influence from experimental methods, and resistant to monitoring by others, it has been previously difficult to get this kind of accurate data about humans.
Without recapping the study itself (you can read the original abstract and related news stories from the links below), there are many reasons why these data are interesting and useful. The least of which concern us with how people behave and how their behavior translates into public health practice, urban planning, education and communication. For me, the most interesting questions come when we understand what kinds of heterogeneity exist in populations. Understanding what motivates people to behave and respond differently is curious, especially when it relates to their cognitive capacities, their environment, and their learned behaviors. Thus we can begin to ask questions about how systems like architecture or policy, at very different scales, affect systems at other scales–like human reproductive choices for instance.
This study demonstrated that people aren’t really all that interesting in the movements, which is to simply say that we are predictable. We generally stay close to home or work and move in small bursts around these areas most of the time. Occasionally we make wider forays across the landscape.
There are privacy concerns to be negotiated. Many have been critical of the use of this information for the study. To my mind I don’t find the use of the data in the current study problematic for two reasons: 1) there is no identifying information available in the data, and 2) the mobile phones companies have been collecting this data, often out of legal obligation for billing precision, and using it for proprietary purposes with contractual consent from subscribers. I think it is important that some public good be made of the information, even if it means simply bringing to light the fact that these kinds of data are ubiquitously collected under the terms of cell phone contracts. Furthermore, a sample of people in the study explicitly consented to having their movements tracked as part of a value-added service, associated with navigation or weather for example.
Still, the study raises questions and begs for further social questioning and negotiating. I think where it starts to become problematic is when these studies begin to impede personal autonomy. Then again, the negotiations are where all the fun is…
BARABÁSI LAB
For a rundown on how the press is selling the story-via Google
Cellphone Tracking Study Shows We’re Creatures of Habit-NYTimes
Cell phone users secretly tracked in study-CNN
How Will Disease Spread?-ABC News
Mobile phones expose human habits-BBC
May 23, 2008 at 1:02 pm · Filed under Design, boundary objects, cognitive justice, design ecology, ecoregionalism, india, interaction, interdisciplinary, making it public, relational aesthetics, teaching and learning, technology
This semester I have the pleasure of being able to lead and help two teams of students create engaging, socially-embedded, interactive design projects. The experience was a success both for me and the students. I learned a lot about my students and what they needed to do excellent work. I think we also found some new ways of working here at Srishti that may prove valuable in the long-term.
The teams also took part in a competition in which the winning team is invited to present their work at the Microsoft Research Design Expo, part of the Faculty Summit held in Redmond, WA in late July. We’re all looking forward to attending because we are very proud of the students’ accomplishments.
The ‘Moon Vehicle’ project consisted of a system to create interactive storytelling experiences around themes of the moon, space exploration and colonization, and India’s forthcoming launch of the Chandrayaan-I moon satellite.
Screen captures from the \'Moon Vehicle\' project design.
The Moon Vehicle team’s design developed in part from the Bangalore Space and Culture Initiative, an interdisciplinary endeavor of artists, scientists, designers, and technologists that began in late September, 2007 and coordinated by Srishti, NIAS, and ISRO.
The Play Revolution project changed many times, but it was always focused on the idea of building a socio-econo-technical system for improving the knowledge-networking opportunities of children living in slums in and around Bangalore.
The lab itself and the social interactions were influenced in part by the GROCS lab at the University of Michigan. Thanks go to Linda Kendall-Knox for her willingness to share aspects of their process.
The course started as a relatively straightforward user interface design series of topics, but this plan was quickly abandoned for a more socially-embedded model that would adapt to the different concerns and questions we were going to encounter. The primary article guiding this process was entitled “Products and Practices: Selected Concepts from Science and Technology Studies and from Social Theories of Consumption and Practice” (Ingram et al. 2007). The article stressed six stages of technological adoption: acquisition, scripting, appropriation, assembly, normalization, and practice.
We used these stages to guide our design process.
The students were given a design brief that consisted of two challenges: one consisting of Srishti’s existing commitments to cultural, educational, artistic,and design-based engagements with society, and another consisting of a more general challenge to design a user interface and/or interactive experience around the theme of learning and education. They were asked to develop a project that synthesized these challenges into one unique approach that incorporated the concerns, commitments, and constraints that were implicitly and explicitly embedded in the issues raised.
The theme of this year’s competition was “Learning and Education”, and students were challenged to design a user interface and/or interactive experience around the theme of learning and education that improves the daily life of a wide variety of users through learning and education, promotes creativity and curiosity in new topics, demonstrates novel ways of providing instruction, and rethinks education systems and tools.
For more on the project, visit their site.
April 4, 2008 at 3:39 pm · Filed under Design, cognitive justice, technology, visual culture
Check this: This report is intended to help companies design specifically for the so-called base of the pyramid in Emerging Economies such as Brazil, China, Indonesia, India, South Africa, Egypt and Kenya.
An EMERGING ECONOMY is a country that is experiencing rapid informationalization under conditions of limited or partial industrialization. In the past, some of these regions have been understood as being in the process of industrial development, and were therefore described as ‘developing countries.’ Alternatively, they have been described as ‘emerging markets’ for goods and services created in the industrialized nations of the world. Our conception of Emerging Economies, however, recognizes that these parts of the world are not merely slow to industrialize, nor merely markets, but strategic centers for the emerging networked knowledge economy.
One of the biggest challenges found in India is convincing others about the value of design and design research. On the other hand, I have never been in a better place for learning and conducting research that takes into account the views, perspectives, and voices of others. Call it a post-colonial mandate or whatever, but in terms of making design adaptable and responsive to user needs, the context couldn’t be better for innovation and the creation of appropriate technologies and product service systems.
February 20, 2008 at 9:14 pm · Filed under Design, interaction, teaching and learning, technology, visualization
I’m leading a lab this semester where two groups are developing new and interesting models for user interfaces and interactive experiences. One of the groups is looking at toys as a model for engaging intimately with science. The other day, we started thinking about toys as knowledge-networks and what that might mean for the design of interactive, tactile systems.
They’ve been using SCRATCH as a platform for development, but they’ve also been moving beyond. The team identified a few core values that they hoped to embody in the toys:
1. Astonishment
2. Play/ Tactile/ Haptic
3. Access
4. Information – Knowledge
5. Relatedness of things
6. Engagement – Belonging
Sounds like they’re off to a great start!
February 20, 2008 at 8:57 pm · Filed under interdisciplinary, making it public, proposals, teaching and learning, technology
Sometime this evening (Bangalore standard time) HASTAC and the MacArthur Foundation announce the winners of the digital media and learning initiative. Last October, CEMA submitted a proposal designed to create knowledge-networking at the intersections of art, science, and technology. You can read the main part of the proposal below. Things like these always seem a both awkward when you’ve been distanced from it for awhile, but it’s surprising just how closely the proposal matches our activities these days. In upcoming posts, I’ll be writing about and sharing images from some of those activities.
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The IDEOGRAM project proposes the development and implementation of epistematic architecture for knowledge-networking at the intersections of art, science, and technology. Epistematic architecture is information technology that scaffolds our ability to create new knowledge. We intend to make visible the connections, activities, and characteristics of the Leonardo/ISAST network and its affiliates, to learn from them, and to recontextualize this knowledge into solutions for doing informal science. Our goal is to connect the benefits of digital media and learning to underrepresented communities, provide creative mechanisms for redressing their concerns via informal science, and incorporate these concerns into the epistematic architecture project.
We propose to situate the project in the CEMA lab in Bangalore, India (see below). This will facilitate additional perspectives as we implement social frameworks and technologies to reach our goals. In this manner, we hope to more closely involve local individuals in India whose disengagement with science and technology can stimulate creative interactions and help bridge knowledge-networking gaps.
The Leonardo network is composed of 8000+ individuals and organizations from across the globe and whose engagement of science and technology characterizes their creative work. Using existing and lab-built technologies, we intend to make the network’s creative activities available as a medium for understanding how science and technology are leveraged in the cultural landscape. For example, what are individuals looking at, searching for, reading or doing? Do the metaphors used to couple knowledge vary with age? We will connect these semantic patterns to inform tactical media projects and recontextualize digital media and learning for local situations. Tactical media solutions could involve anything from creative visualizations and physical computing to social technologies.
Combining the characteristics of digital networks with local epistemologies and embodiments creates scaffolds for positive interactions among groups typically isolated for reasons of geography, age, or educational level. Scenarios for these interactions include:
- Artists, philosophers and space scientists from six countries working to provide data feeds for informal science during an upcoming mission to the moon,
- Retired scientists and policy makers working with cultural entrepreneurs to find new opportunities for engaging the public over health issues,
- Artists working in tissue culture create a meatless steak from one’s own cells, thereby providing a personal protein alternative for vegetarians, or
- Engineers and artists developing an inexpensive and portable science lab for schoolchildren to informally explore their world in and beyond the slums of India.
The exciting thing is that aspects of these scenarios are already being carried out. However, because the information/epistematic architecture linking these activities is solely the result of volunteer work, they have lacked the financial and institutional support necessary to bring them to a critical level of exposure.
Contributions to the field of digital media and learning include some of the methods we will use to accomplish this goal.
- Recognizing identities, behaviors, artifacts, and environmental influences that characterize knowledge-networking at the intersections of art, science and technology.
- Identifying objects that permeate community boundaries and coordinate diverse concerns.
- Creating new relational and interactive opportunities.
- Using individual and community characteristics to suggest opportunities for building connectivity across educational, national, income-level, and disciplinary boundaries.
- Semantic networking and making individual concerns visible can suggest emerging trends, paradigms, and models of cultural introgression.
- Questioning model knowledge-networkers to assess their relative roles as translators, naïve participants, and/or catalysts.
- Antagonizing new models of scholarship and peer-review to make use of digital media and create opportunities for underrepresented scholars.
January 24, 2008 at 11:23 pm · Filed under Design, complex systems, design ecology, ecoregionalism, interdisciplinary, proposals, technology, visual culture
The Emerging Economy Report is coming! This is a project I’ve been working on over the last few months. It’s been in development for almost a year and a half and represents research in seven countries, all of which have been identified as emerging economies. An emerging economy is a country that is experiencing sustained economic growth as a result of rapid informationalization and limited or partial industrialization. Economic growth in the information economy will continue to be driven by these emerging economies who will benefit from rapid informationalization, innovation, and ephemerilization of the economy, leapfrogging many of the requirements and costs of the Industrial Revolution.
We’ve been working to develop insights into global trends and user perspectives across seven nations including: India, China, Indonesia, Kenya, Brazil, Egypt, and South Africa. By examining specific case studies, visual research, economic trends, and user perspectives on (among other things) technology, access to information, heathcare, and economic resources, we have been able to create strategic knowledge for those wishing to do business in these emerging economies.
The 7 emerging economy countries studied in this report account for 46% of the world population. The report offers a variety of innovative recommendations that will help businesses engage with these economies.
Visit emergingeconomyreport.com to find out more.
November 23, 2007 at 5:56 am · Filed under Design, boundary objects, ecology, ecoregionalism, interdisciplinary, network entrepreneurship, technology
How do you take into account the diverse factors that contribute to a product or service’s ecology? How do you determine which factors are more relevant than others? One of the ways to begin this process is by mapping these interactions at a conceptual level. Then, we an begin to map them in individuals, societies, and real-world environments.
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