ALL ART BURNS

The Wall Street Journal has a nice article on Maeda and the future of RISD.

“Everyone asks me, ‘Are you bringing technology to RISD?’ I tell them, no, I’m bringing RISD to technology.”

I wonder how many design schools could benefit from that way of thinking.

Technorati Tags: design, Maeda, RISD

Been busy, but time for a quick xref: Tom Igoe has a really nice write-up of common projects in physical computing classes. More importantly, he explains why all these (often) obvious projects are still worth doing in class and why students shouldn’t feel like they’re just duplicating someone else’s efforts.

Technorati Tags: physical computing

A few days ago I finished Valentino Braitenberg‘s Vehicles, Experiments in Synthetic Psychology and I have been letting it gel while trying to figure out how to write about it. Vehicles is a short book written in plain English without a lot of fancy technical talk and yet I feel like someone’s taken my brain and run it through a thing that makes brains different. Braitenberg leads the reader through a series of thought experiments creating vehicles using only sensors, connectors, motors, and a few other basic items. Starting with simple vehicles that can drive around a table top, each short chapter adds a concept or idea to make the vehicles more complex and capable of more sophisticated actions. It’s not long before the imaginary vehicles have the complexity and capability of humans and I found myself going back to re-read chapters thinking I’d missed something. Even before I finished, I was already looking at my cat differently: ‘Is she experiencing a correlation match or causality match with past events? Does she have any comprehension that my head and my hands are connected and related or are they all just correlations?”

This morning I was watching video of some flocking behavior and it it hit me that this is a perfect example of what Braitenberg is talking about in Vehicles when he describes “the law of uphill analysis and downhill invention”. A key reason for using thought experiments is that as outside observers, we are often unable to comprehend why something exhibits a specific behavior and are unable to build or define a structure that would exhibit a specific behavior. On the other hand, we are able to build simple things and understand their behavior because they are things we have created. His suggestion is that rather than spend lots of time and energy trying to analyze behavior from a top-down perspective, try building things from the bottom up and see if we can replicate the sort of behavior we’re trying to understand.

As a software type interested in kinetics and robotics, “top-down vs. bottom-up” is a very familiar argument. Every time I work on a distributed computing problem in CS, I (and my cohort) default to a top-down, control-the-flock algorithm that makes each element of the group do its thing. When I got into MIMD programming on supercomputers, I would solve problems by having different nodes exchange data needed to make decisions, but it was still “Thing A decides what to do after taking orders from or talking to thing B”.

I’m pretty certain birds aren’t having little chats about where they are headed next, and they’re probably not psychic, nor do they otherwise communicate with one another across space and time. My assumption (not being a biologist or psychiatrist) has always been that the “separation, alignment and cohesion” argument explains things; as a software type, it’s something I find easy to implement. How birds can see/think/react so quickly to small objects at a distance is beyond me, but again, I’m not a biologist.

Looking at things from Braitenberg’s perspective, what if it’s a much simpler solution? Perhaps the birds aren’t going through an observe/calculate/act cycle and are instead merely responding to the cues of their neighbors using learned behavior memorized (or evolved) during their lifetime. Pattern A results in Action A, Pattern B results in Action B, etc. If there’s an error — hey, that’s not pattern A — then a quick decision is made to either continue with Action A, go back to the previous action, or react in a new way to try and solve the problem.

I don’t know if that’s the right answer, but I’m starting to think about making some Arduino-based flocking robots for a little tabletop exercise. Even as a thought exercise that I never get around to building, it’s an interesting question. Can individual bots learn to flock based on keeping distance from things next to them and learning a set of patterns to repeat based on the movement of their direct neighbors?

If the flocking of birds, the action of ants and bees in colonies can be explained or modeled using this bottom up behavior (I suspect it can), how would we humans benefit by implementing similar, bottom-up mechanisms?

For example, why does Amazon need to collect all sorts of data about me (in an identifiable, non-anonymous database) just so I can get “other people who like what you like” style suggestions? Why do we need a centralized last.fm server to track all our listening histories — why not share it with people physically near me as I wander around town or post updates to my “Universal Friends List”?

On a more abstract level, instead of Master Control Programs sucking in data and spewing it back out, why can’t our MP3 players and book viewers and phones and laptops exchange information with nearby peers, constantly updating and exchanging anonymous lists of data, analyzing it, and reporting back to us?

Using the insect world as a parallel, what if all of our electronic devices behaved more like bees in a colony, each doing simple things with nearby (physically or electronically) devices leading towards a greater benefit for all? Do we really need our technology to be set up in a virtual army, taking orders from other systems in a hierarchy run by governments and international corporations?

Vehicles is an easy book to read and a hard book to describe. It really is one of those, “trust me, read it” books that you force on your friends until they read it just to get you to shut the hell up. Which, to me, is one of the best things you can say about a book.

Technorati Tags: Arduino, Braitenberg, review, Vehicles

“Before I tell you that story, I have to tell you this one.” — Howard Waldrop

Let me start by expressing my (probably unpopular) opinion: the vast majority of “conceptual art” has failed whatever purpose it was trying to serve. If I have to read a sign or a placard or a guide book to understand your art, then you have failed as an artist because your work did not communicate whatever it is you were trying to communicate. (And if I can’t understand what you’re trying to say after reading your explanation, maybe you should consider a new career.) I’m having a particularly dim view of “conceptual anything” right now, having recently visited the Carnegie Museum “Life on Mars” exhibit. There were some real gems here and there, but I still stand by my one sentence lolcat review:

“ART: UR DOIN IT RONG”

Now I can tell you this story that masquerades as a book review.

Recently my pal Golan Levin told me I should read hertzian tales in response to my blathering on about computational situational awareness, and I dug up a copy and put it on the “in” stack. When I saw the words “conceptual design” on the jacket I spit up a little bit in my throat and considered putting it way at the bottom of the stack. However, after seeing some of the work in the MOMA “Design and the Elastic Mind” exhibit, I realized I was probably being a little unreasonable and that I should at least give the book a fair chance. (More importantly, Golan is a very sharp sort who wouldn’t suggest I read something that would be a waste of my time.) The last time I was on a plane, I brought along it and a backup book just in case I got more than airsick.

I never cracked the other book. Dunne managed to both educate me about what conceptual design is and isn’t and really get me thinking even bigger questions than before about situational awareness and observing invisible spaces.

hertzian tales has two major components: the relationships between conceptual design, product design, and Hertzian space; and documentation of Dunne’s process in developing conceptual design pieces to investigate Hertzian space.

Dunne starts with a history and survey of conceptual design and product design. I think that many of us outside of capital-d design would probably describe “conceptual design” as “experimental design” — the design of objects not to fulfill a certain set of criteria, but to create either a physical or thought experiment that lets us gain a new perspective on some concept or object. These sorts of things can range from asking questions like “What if I had glasses that kept track of how much TV I watched and went dark if I’d watched too many hours in a given day?” or what sort of products would be useful for a lonely guy that had just been dumped by his girlfriend?

I like both of these because they don’t so much give you real answers as give you answers that make you ask more questions. What if my glasses went dark when I drove by a jumbotron screen, or just as a movie was ending? If I need “Accessories for Lonely Men”, which one should I get first, “Sheet Thief”, “Plate Thrower” or “Cold Feet”? It’s obvious what the products are going to do, who they are for, and why (in theory) someone would want such a thing. Well, maybe not. Do lonely guys really need reminders that they are lonely? Do I really want my TV watching regulated by glasses instead of common sense? Probably not, but thinking about these sorts of imaginary (and humorous, admit it, you laughed or at least smiled) products is a good way to open up one’s mind and think about existing technology and society from a new perspective.

Dunne’s survey of conceptual design projects is also useful in that he shows how they are relevant to the design of real products or how they change how we think about our relationships with technology and society. He doesn’t declare a bunch of truths because he’s an art professor, he substantiates his opinions with both factual history and well written arguments. As an example, I probably wouldn’t have taken Daniel Weil‘s conceptual radios very seriously if I saw them in a museum, but Dunne gives them a context that helps me understand some of what Weil was attempting to do.

Having led us off with a history of products and technology, Dunne then moves into Hertzian space. The idea of Hertzian space is that all of our electronic devices radiate radio frequencies (RF) as part of their operation, and that is a new space for us to explore and observe. It’s usually not a device’s task to generate RF, it’s merely a side-effect of it being electronic. RF Interference (RFI) from all this radiated energy is enough of a problem that most nations have some sort of legal restrictions on how much RF can be emitted (or “leak”) from a device. In the US, turn over just about anything that uses batteries or plugs into a wall and look for the legalese about “FCC Part 15 compliance”. That’s the manufacture declaring that they’ve followed any rules that relate to how much RF is leaked from the device.

It’s not just radios, computers and mobile phones generating RF, it’s pretty much every technological component of our society. If electrical power runs through it, from the transformers on power poles to the alternator in your car’s engine to the washing machine in the basement or your wireless doorbell and garage door remote, it generates some sort of RF. (If you’re interested in learning more about RF interference or radio theory in general, check out amateur radio websites like the ARRL or EHAM.)

What Dunne asks us to think about is, What can we learn about ourselves from looking at the Hertzian space? What tools do we need to develop or use to look at this space? The book finishes with documentation of a couple of Dunne’s projects in this area, both at the personal/object level and at the city level.

In the end, the book is a kind of conceptual design project in and of itself — it lays out a bunch of information, takes you through a line of reasoning, and then chucks you off a cliff with a bunch of unanswered and open-ended questions about what you’ve just read. Dunne doesn’t make any claims to having answers, he just points you in the same general direction he’s headed and gives you a gentle shove.

Which is probably the sort of book I like reading the most these days. I’m tired of people telling me their answers, I want them to make me ask more questions. Even if you don’t agree with his opinions or like his projects, Dunne will leave you with more questions than answers.

(Edit: Anthony Dunne, on “design for debate” and a Bruce Sterling talk on speculative/science fiction interaction design.)

Anthony Dunne, hertzian tales. MIT Press, Cambridge, 2005.

Technorati Tags: Dunne, design, hertzian space

If you’ve been living under the same rock I hang out under, you might have missed that John Maeda is now President of RISD.

Yes, that John Maeda and that RISD.

So, pretty cool, huh?

What’s even cooler, is that Maeda is blogging regularly about RISD-related stuff at “Our RISD“.

I’ve never met Maeda and I’ve little desire to go to RISD at the moment, but I appreciate the opportunity to reading the thoughts of someone whose work I respect and admire and get a behind-the-scenes look at a major design school.

Technorati Tags: academia, blogging, maeda, risd