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