Paper #6 - [DIS 2014] Time Telescope: Encouraging Engagement with Heritage through Participatory Design

This paper [1] details Time Telescope, a digital art installation focused on the history and heritage of Newcastle upon Tyne and Gateshead (referred to in the paper under the brand-name NewcastleGateshead), and the design process behind it - a participatory process involving students and young people as part of local engagement efforts on the part of BALTIC, the gallery which the installation was designed for. The paper describes the artifact itself in some amount of detail, but places equal (or sometimes greater) importance on the process itself, of engaging young people and fostering research, discussion, learning, and experimentation as part of designing Time Telescope.

This is what intrigued me about this paper - the treatment of the in-depth design process as of equal importance to the project as a whole. Ultimately, the thing described in this paper is a deeply altruistic design, and one that I admire - I consider having knowledge of local heritage to be incredibly important, and as well as that I sympathise heavily with the thoughts of some of the young people involved (noted towards the end of the paper), which point out the value of providing a space of structured experimentation in order to foster skills and talents that, in the normal course of primary education, remain largely untouched or tossed to the wayside. In Time Telescope, BALTIC and the project's organisers are not only educating people who visit the gallery and view the installation, but are also educating the people involved in designing the project, and opening up new worlds and avenues to them that they may have been all but unaware of beforehand, and exposing them to history they might otherwise have passed by.

This kind of student engagement is incredibly exciting to me, partly because it was something that, until college, I had no real access to. That sense of discovery and the acquiring of interesting new sets of skills is vital and powerful at the ages the people involved in this project were at (16-22, as detailed in the paper). Through projects such as this, a person's eyes can be opened to possibilities outside those demarcated by the rigid hierarchical approach to subjects in contemporary primary and secondary education.



[1] Guy Peter Schofield. 2014. Time telescope: engagement with heritage through participatory design. In Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Designing interactive systems (DIS '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 117-120. DOI=http://dx.doi.org.cit.idm.oclc.org/10.1145/2598510.2598517

Paper #5 - [TEI 2015] What Things Dream Of

This paper [1] details an installation wherein various object appear to "dream" when not being interacted with, and appear to "see" the user when they are. As shown in the paper, this is achieved using touch sensors, conductive thread and paint, small webcams, Arduino and Processing, and video projection. Noting the list of references, this project builds on a series of ideas around personifying and anthropomorphising otherwise inanimate objects and pieces of technology. The paper also uses the idea of dreams as a catalogue of our experiences, and thus in this case the dreams of objects being a catalogue of their use through their "eyes," so to speak. However, what interests me the most is the anthropomorphisation of the objects. Two of the previous projects referenced in the paper do similar things with this, creating objects that react in lively, playful, and personality-filled ways, or at least ways that suggest personality or where personality or intelligence can be filled in by the viewer:

Royal Opera House: Audience. from Random International on Vimeo.

Pinokio from Adam Ben-Dror on Vimeo.

Both projects are intentionally ambiguous to a casual viewer - is what you're seeing merely a complex tangle of code, or is there genuine curiosity and intelligence in the way it moves to follow you, or to grab you're attention, or to turn itself back on? It seems that humans are eager to personify the things around them, to put a face to things, to ascribe intelligence, especially when it comes to technology. This was something I dealt with in a project last semester, in which, with the help of Katie Rose Pipkin, I explored the idea of people as very willing to fill in the blanks and perceive intelligence or person-hood where, arguably, none exists:



The central idea of all these projects is fascinating to me, as it brings to mind a question - if genuine artificial intelligence ever developed, would we be able to recognise it? There exists the idea of the Turing test, in which a third party observes a human subject and a computer interacting through a simple text messaging system. If the human subject believes the computer to be another human, the computer has passed the Turing test. Our problem nowadays is that there are computers that could easily pass the Turing test, that learn how to reply to us algorithmically, without what we would call actual intelligence. These projects seem to question what our parameters for intelligence or personality are, and how useful they are (if at all).


[1] Min-Ji Ku, Bo-Kyeong Kim, and Younghui Kim. 2015. What Things Dream Of. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 403-404. DOI=http://dx.doi.org.cit.idm.oclc.org/10.1145/2677199.2690870

Paper #4 - [DIS 2014] Some Variations on a Counterfunctional Digital Camera

This paper [1] is a pictorial presenting various concepts for counterfunctional digital cameras, and is intended as a companion piece to another paper by the same authors [2], in which the idea of designing counterfunctional digital objects or tools, pieces of digital technology given deliberate artificial limitations, is put forth as a new way of thinking about how we design digital tools. The second paper describes a counterfunctional thing as something that "figuratively counters some of its own functionality". Some examples from the pictorial include cameras that have to be smashed open to retrieve the images, cameras who's stored images can only be viewed at the time and place at which they were taken, and cameras that can only shoot at ultra-low resolutions, among other things.

Digital technology is often designed along the lines of Turing completeness - if it can be made to do something, it should be. As mentioned in the second paper, limitations are thus seen negatively - free trial software having locks on certain features encouraging the user to buy-up to the full version, for instance. However, both papers also provides salient examples of useful and engaging limitation, such as Twitter being limited to 140 characters, or Snapchat's time-sensitive photos. The pictorial serves as an illustration of how this line of thinking can be useful in design - each of the cameras shown may seem useless, broken, or obtuse, but they are at least interesting as alternatives, as ways of changing how a user thinks of or interacts with a camera.

This is the reason this paper and its companion jumps out at me - they playfully and informatively point out different and intriguing paths for design. Even if the results are odd or counter-intuitive, there is something fascinating about them, about imagining myself using one of these counterfunctional cameras. The pictorial's conclusion makes reference to findings that indicate we have "latent needs and desires for limitations", and talks about working within constraints and the "positive value of limitation."

Mentioned in a previous post, game designer Brendon Chung, while he might well have access to all manner of freely-available, high-end, modern game engines such as Unreal or Unity, purposefully uses an engine called Dark Radiant, an open-source level editor based on Doom 3's in-house id Tech 4 engine, designed for use with The Dark Mod, a total conversion of Doom 3 intended to emulate the original Thief. One of the reasons for his choice is familiarity, but another is the limitations imposed that make the final game more interesting - Chung if forced to work with simple lighting (by today's standards), low-res textures, and a low polygon budget. This is all self-imposed, and leads to him employing a unique style that is unlike anything else out there.

screenshot from Thirty Flights Of Loving, one of Brendon Chung's games

Many other game designers work like this too - JP LeBreton is creating (and designing games using) Playscii, an ASCII-based game- and art-creation program, with all the inherent and provocative limitations that entails. Numerous other designers still use older engines, or open-source variations on them, such as TrenchBroom's take on the original Quake engine.

JP LeBreton detailing some features of Playscii

example screenshot of TrenchBroom

Another example of a counterfunctional game engine, a game engine created with intentional limitations and constraints that at first may seem over the top, is the voxel-based level editor released with a recent patch to stealth game NEON STRUCT.

JP LeBreton takes a look at NEON STRUCT's intentionally limited level editor, as well as brief looks at Radiant and TrenchBroom

I find these approaches to game design fascinating because, in the modern gaming environment of ultra-realism, high-end graphics and engines that can simulate all manner of physical properties and the like, turning to old or limited game engines are not only interesting ways for designers to flex their design muscles and create things that are unlike most modern games, but are also in-and-of themselves challenges to the modern paradigm - an engine doesn't have to do everything. It can be limited and those limitations can be part of the appeal. This speaks to the broader conceptual ideas pointed-at by the papers at hand, and shows how valid these approaches can be, not just conceptually but practically and artistically.

[1] James Pierce and Eric Paulos. 2014. Some variations on a counterfunctional digital camera. InProceedings of the 2014 conference on Designing interactive systems (DIS '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 131-140. DOI=http://dx.doi.org.cit.idm.oclc.org/10.1145/2598510.2602968

[2] James Pierce and Eric Paulos. 2014. Counterfunctional things: exploring possibilities in designing digital limitations. In Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Designing interactive systems (DIS '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 375-384. DOI=http://dx.doi.org.cit.idm.oclc.org/10.1145/2598510.2598522

Paper #3 - [DIS 2014] Encouraging Ambiguous Experience: Guides for Personal Meaning Making

This paper looks at the idea of creating pieces or works that are intentionally ambiguous, that allow the user/viewer/reader to create their own meaning through interacting with the work. The main way it does this is by looking at project undertaken by the author, wherein a class was tasked with engaging with Gertrude Stein's collection of prose poems Tender Buttons (1914) through the mediating mechanism of a notebook filled with prompt-style questions and gridded space for drawings. The paper explores whether this mediation of the students' engagement with the text was helpful or intrusive - it is notable that the response from the class is mixed, as some found it helpful at guiding them through, some found that it blocked or waylaid their personal experience of the work, and others found the mediating notebook to be more of an engagement than the work itself [1].

I found this paper particularly intriguing because it engages with something I've been thinking about a lot recently, which is the fact that often a large part of the enjoyment I get from a work, be it a book, a film, a piece of art or even an installation or interactive piece, is in the exploration and personal interpretation of it, the fact that I have to grapple with it in order to unearth or tease out meaning. More parochial works, works that assume an average reader and prescribe a certain reading approach, what Umberto Eco and others refer to as "closed" works [2], lack something for me. I enjoy reading above my own presumed reading level, so to speak. I enjoy encountering something I do not understand, that I must wrestle understanding from as an active participant.

The Stein quotes used in the paper reminded me of an artist I mentioned in the previous post, Katie Rose Pipkin. Her work in generative art is highly ambiguous by its very nature, and all the more intriguing to me for it. I was particularly reminded of a curatorial chapbook collection of algorithmically-generated poetry she released last year, picking figs in the ˚̥̞̞̽̽ͯ garden while my world eats Itself.  The work is initially alienating - it throws the reader - and yet attempting to wrestle meaning from an essentially meaningless thing is the very intent of the collection. It is consciously asking us whether these machine-written poems are any less compelling or meaningful than those with a real human mind behind them [3].

inflorescence.city, another of her collaborations with Loren Schmidt, also calls to mind a similar feeling, and that aspect of "thrownness" mentioned in the paper at hand, the idea of a work plunging the audience into a seemingly fully-realised world with little explanation, and have that feeling of disorientation be a conscious affect. This is something present in some of my favourite novels by authors like William Gibson and China Miéville, who's books force the reader to learn the language of the world in order to understand the novel, and Umberto Eco, who's collection of semiotic essays The Role of the Reader: Exploration of the Semiotics of Texts (1979) is referenced in the paper itself.

China Miéville has mentioned in interviews his love of pulp surrealism in particular, in which there is "radical alienation," the "aesthetic of undermining and creative alienation," and an attempt to "constantly surprise the reader" [4].

See also this BBC book club interview with Miéville: http://bbc.in/1kQFj8r

The fact that there is similar thinking in more multidisciplinary fields such as those dealt with at conferences such as DIS is important to me, as ambiguous experiences, those that not merely ask for but require the active exploration by and participation of the audience, are for more interesting and vital from my point of view than more "closed," packaged, and mediated work which tends to proscribe broad or conflicting interpretations.

[1] Daniel Carter. 2014. Encouraging ambiguous experience: guides for personal meaning making. In Proceedings of the 2014 companion publication on Designing interactive systems (DIS Companion '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 61-64. DOI=http://dx.doi.org.cit.idm.oclc.org/10.1145/2598784.2602782

[2] Eco, U. The Role of the Reader: Exploration of the Semiotics of Texts. Indiana UP, Bloomington, 1979.

[3] Pipkin, K. R. picking figs in the ˚̥̞̞̽̽ͯ garden while my world eats Itself. Self-published, 2015. Available online at https://katierose.itch.io/picking-figs

[4] Marshall, R. The Road to Perdido: An Interview with China Miéville. 2003. Accessed 25/02/2016, available at http://www.3ammagazine.com/litarchives/2003/feb/interview_china_mieville.html

Paper #2 - [DIS 2014] Crafting Code at the Demo-scene

This paper [1] was more high-level than the previous, concerned with looking at the practice of coding as craftsmanship, making special reference to the way sociologist Richard Sennett approaches the subject [2] as a broader definition that can cover not just manual labour, but the work of programmers, doctors, artists, and so on; craftsmanship as skill not merely in making things by hand, but as artistry in a particular craft no matter the medium. The paper looks at the demo-scene, wherein coders use their skills to create audiovisual art, and accesses the idea of coding as craft by explicating how the act and practice of coding plays into the ideas of craft engagement, craftsmanship rhythm, and craftsman expressivity.

What drew me to this paper, and why its content interests me, is the fact that I have been following a number of creative individuals for a year or more now who fit this descriptor of the coder as craftsman, who are skilled coders that use code as an expressive tool, as an artistic medium in and of itself. The contribution of this paper, while building on previous work such as Sennett's, is doubtless important. The broad field of modern art still struggles with the idea of digital objects created with code as art (for example, critics and publications are always grappling with the idea of games as art, often in profoundly wrong-headed ways that try to insist that games be closer to films, or art installations, or what have you), but I find the work of these individuals just as compelling as more traditional forms, and this paper supports a sense I've been getting about how they work and the new ways in which I'm beginning to look at coding as a result.

One of my favourites is Katie Rose Pipkin, an artist who started out in fine art but has since moved into creating twitter bots, data art, and other web-based digital artifacts. While her work is often reliant on generative methods and randomness, there is an undeniable personality to it all, and concern with certain recurrent pieces of imagery or subject material - hallmarks of well-crafted art.

catalpa
certella arfottia pic.twitter.com/2bfpWpI9J6

— moth generator (@mothgenerator) February 19, 2016

(an example of Katie's moth generator twitter bot, a collaboration with Loren Schmidt)

(a video diary of Katie's initial explorations in maxmsp, showing the intersection of coding, hardware, craftsmanship, practice, and artistic expression. Note the personification of the digital, of the programmatic - this is a very Katie thing)

See also this talk she gave at Pecha Kucha Austin, wherein she begins by linking fine art illustration to the idea of information storage.

The paper also made me think of game designer Brendon Chung, who designs independently under the banner of Blendo Games. In designing his upcoming game Quadrilateral Cowboy, he's taken to live-streaming and recording his process. Look at any recent video on his YouTube channel, and you get a sense of him as a craftsman expressing himself artistically, albeit through C++, Blender, and the Dark Radiant engine. All the elements talked about in the paper are there: engagement, rhythm, and expressivity.

[1] Nicolai Brodersen Hansen, Rikke Toft Nørgård, and Kim Halskov. 2014. Crafting code at the demo-scene. In Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Designing interactive systems (DIS '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 35-38. DOI=http://dx.doi.org.cit.idm.oclc.org/10.1145/2598510.2598526

[2] Sennett, R. The Craftsman. Yale University Press, 2008

Paper #1 - [DIS 2012] Discursive Navigation of Online News

This paper was concerned with developing a new way in which to think about and implement a new way of navigating online news that is closer to the ways in which our brains process information and memories, delving into discursive models like Foucault's Discursive Formations and Deleuze and Guattari's Rhizome (both of which are adequately detailed in the paper itself to provide a good basic understanding) in order to arrive at a possible solution.

The solution arrived at in the paper (that of a networked structure of nodes grouped emotionally and in terms of subject matter, which can be dialed to the user's inclination) is interesting in and of itself as an alternative way of looking at news items in aggregate, but my main interest in this paper is in the possible applications of this mode of thinking to all manner of written media online, not just news sites.

As the paper mentions, nearly all news sites are largely static, hidebound places delineated strictly into sections and sub-sections, where moving from one article of interest to another across sections is prohibitively difficult. I spend a lot of time reading articles on websites like these, some news, some games journalism sites, some opinion pieces, and they all have the blog problem - each piece is largely isolated. What I like about this paper is that it posits the idea of a holistic online reading experience, where pieces can be seen in situ as part of a continuum of other writing and reportage, public opinion, and larger events.

Many of us - though I can only speak for myself, I suppose - tend to want to treat the internet as an extension of immediate thought processes, constantly tapping in to current events and flipping from place to place at the speed of, well, thought. This, unfortunately, usually leaves us floundering without a good idea of the bigger picture (I mean, unless we tune our Twitter feed just right), getting news piecemeal from single, disparate sources. The idea of a thoughtfully discursive and relational way of viewing reportage online such as that posited in this paper is a seductive one, especially to fidgety digital magpies like myself.

Symon Oliver, Guia Gali, Fanny Chevalier, and Sara Diamond. 2012. Discursive navigation of online news. In Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 82-85. DOI=10.1145/2317956.2317970 http://doi.acm.org.cit.idm.oclc.org/10.1145/2317956.2317970