CONVIVIO%20-%20Housekeeping

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CONVIVIO - Housekeeping

• Michael Smyth
• Local Organiser - Napier University
• E m.smyth_at_napier.ac.uk
• W www.soc.napier.ac.uk/michael/home.html

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Student Information

• WiFi form for connection to Napier Wireless
  Network.
• Dietary Requirements - please let me know before
  Tuesday 15 Aug.
• Bus Tour of Edinburgh - depart 2.00pm Merchiston,
  return 3.30pm approx.
• Meet with Ateliers at 3.30pm.

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Artefacts, Places and Interaction Design
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Introduction

• Just why is interaction design so important?

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Introduction

• A typical 15 second drawing of a computer.

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Introduction

• A typical 15 second drawing of a computer circa
  1960

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Understanding Media

• The medium is the message
• Marshall McLuhan
• The medium that we choose to express/convey
  ideas, concepts, information etc is intimately
  bound to how that information is received
  interpreted and understood.

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Examples of Visual Media
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Examples of Visual Media
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Understanding Media

• The medium is the frame of mind
• Bryan Lawson
• Our choice of media influences the way we think
  about the nature and process of problem solving.

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Study of Creative Practice

• Focus on Architectural Practice as an example of
  creative practice.
• Tool based approach - focus on the
  interdependencies between freehand drawing,
  physically modelling and Computer Aided Design
  (CAD).
• Visualisation and engagement were both critical
  during the conceptual phase of the design
  process.
• In particular the importance of physical models.

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Study of Creative Practice
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Study of Creative Practice
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Study of Creative Practice
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Study of Creative Practice
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Study of Creative Practice
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Study of Creative Practice

• Physical models were characterised as enabling
  the consideration of the design problem in the
  context of the whole building, rather than the
  more limited views provided by freehand drawings
  and CAD.
• Physical models enabled the designer to
  manipulate through touch a 3D representation of
  the building space.
• Designer characterised as
• thinking with their hands.

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The Body and Cognition

• Experientialism in particular the work of Lakoff
  and Johnson (1999) Philosophy in the Flesh.
• Argue that a fundamental part of cognition is the
  development and usage of base metaphors that are
  built up through the experience of the physical
  object.
• In the context of architecture, the feeling of
  buildings and our sense of dwelling within them
  are more fundamental to our architectural
  experience than the visual sensation that the
  building provides.
• What does this mean for the design of software
  tools to support creative practice?

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The Body and Cognition
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The Body and Cognition
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Luminous Table

• A triangulation between multiple forms of
  representation - drawings, physical models and
  digital models.

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Luminous Table
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Luminous Table
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The Body and Cognition
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The Body and Cognition
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Understanding Media

• How we as interaction designers conceptualise the
  nature and role of media will profoundly
  influence the essence of future information
  artefacts that are designed.

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The Body and Design
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References

• Franck, K. (1998) It I Bodies as Objects,
  Bodies as Subjects, Architectural Design, Vol 68,
  No 11/12, 16-19.
• Pallasmaa, J (1996) The Eyes of the Skin
  Architecture and the Senses, Academy Editions.

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Introduction

• How do we make sense of the world in which we
  inhabit?
• Are we active or passive users of the
  environment?
• What might the answers imply for the design of
  information artefacts?

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Design and the Body

• Seeing is believing but it is touch that
  determines reality.
• Touch is both physical and emotional.
• In pursuit of the digital world the sense of
  engagement that touch offers has been largely
  sacrificed.
• Interaction has lost its grounding in physicality.

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A Technological Perspective

• Technology will become more personal.
• Form and function are inextricably linked to the
  affordances conveyed by these new artefacts.

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The Body and Touch

• Touch will play an important role in how we
  interact with these new technological artefacts.
• What is less well understood is how such haptic
  qualities play a role in the creation of a sense
  of engagement and a linkage with the body that
  underpins much of our learning.

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The Body and Touch
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The Body and Touch

• Hug Chair, Yoshi Saito (2002)

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Phenomenology

• Provides a philosophical rationale for the
  importance of the body in learning.
• Merleau-Ponty proposed the concept of being in
  the world, which emphasised the importance of
  the body.
• Placed the body at the centre of our relationship
  with the world.

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Phenomenology

• Proposed the idea of Embodied Vision
• .our body is both an object among objects and
  that which sees and touches them
• The body is interpreted as having a central role
  in how we engage with and learn about the
  environments we inhabit.

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Phenomenology
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Phenomenology
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Design for the Body

• Emphasis on the visual sense in Western culture.
• Level of indirection introduced by the use of CAD
  technology during the design process has resulted
  in
• designs which housed the intellect and the eye,
  but have left the body and the senses, as well as
  our memories and dreams, homeless
• Pallasmaa (1996)

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Design for the Body
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Design for the Body
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Design for the Body

• Buildings are encountered, they are not merely
  observed.
• It is argued by Franck (1998) that the
  introduction of technology into the design
  process has increased the propensity to
  disconnect form from everyday use and for vision
  to be the only sense that is attended to.
• Does this lead to an increased experience of
  alienation, detachment and solitude?

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Design for the Body

• Such demarcation has the potential to impact not
  only on the nature of buildings which are
  created, but also on the nature of the design
  process through which they are created.
• Buildings as cool and distant or stage sets
  for the eye.

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Design for the Body

• Thanks to CAD, elaborate drawings, rendered
  objects and virtual reality walkthroughs can be
  created with the movements of one hand.
• Reduced physical manipulation of material or
  tools.
• Physical models enable the designer to walk
  around, handle and touch its surfaces and immerse
  themselves in the representation.

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The Body and the Environment
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Reference

• Borden, I. (2001) Skateboarding, Space and the
  City - Architecture and the Body, Berg, Oxford
  and New York.
• Dogtown and the Z-Boys (2001) - Stacy Peralta
  (Dir) Columbia Tristar.

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Found Space - From Wave to Pave

• One of skateboardings central features is the
  adoption and exploitation of a given physical
  terrain in order to present skaters with new and
  distinctive uses other than the original function
  of that terrain.
• 1960s - 70s skateboarders were commonly surfers,
  who skated when the surf was flat.
• Skating was a re-enactment of surfing.
• Skateboarding was about surface and gentle
  curvature.

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Found Space - From Wave to Pave

• Skaters from this era rode upright or, more often
  crouched with arms outstretched as a parallel
  gesture to the flatness of the ground beneath.
• Movement was important, skateboarders seeking to
  experience through the moving body the expansive
  stretch of tarmac in all directions the body
  and the skateboard operated as a floating
  mirror.

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Found Space - From Wave to Pave
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Found Space - From Wave to Pave
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Found Space - From Wave to Pave

• Mid 1970s saw a move to more banked locations -
  school yards in California, housing estates in
  Europe - this enabled the incorporation of new
  manoeuvers and cities obtained ocean like forms.
• The modernist space of suburbia was found,
  adopted and reconceived as another kind of space,
  as a concrete wave.

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Found Space - The Pool

• In the search for more demanding terrains skaters
  moved in the mid to late 70s to drained swimming
  pools.
• Typically pools were sculptural, oval and kidney
  shaped.
• Skaters rode the walls of suburban LA pools like
  latter day wall of death riders.

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Found Space - The Pool
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Found Space - The Pool

• Skaters engaged with the pool wall through its
  pure surface, in particular its tactility or
  materiality smoothness as a texture - a
  mathematically complex curve.
• The micro architecture of the surface grain,
  cracks and ripples become evident, translated
  into body space through judder, slide and grip.
• Also noise - the sound of hard wheels passing
  over blue ceramic tiles.

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Found Space - The Pool
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Found Space - The Pool

• Space is listened for - that hearing mediates
  between the spatial body and the world outside it
  - it is not only in cathedrals that space is
  measured by the ear.
• In 1976-77 skateboarders attitude to the
  relationship with the ocean began to change.
• New moves began to explore both the boundaries of
  the surface on which they skated and also the
  space beyond.

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Found Space - The Pool
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Found Space - Beyond the Pool

• As well as pools, whose usage was transient at
  best also skated were drainage ditches and even
  full pipes which could be worked from side to
  side.

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Found Space - Beyond the Pool
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Found Space - Beyond the Pool
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Constructed Space
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Constructed Space
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Constructed Space
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The Body and the Artefact
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Reconnecting the Body to the Artefact

• An artefact that utilises touch was a prototype
  camera, produced by Ross Lovegrove, for Olympus
  and entitled The Eye.
• The camera was constructed out of a soft latex
  rubber and produced an extremely tactile object.
  
• This sense was further enhanced during the use as
  the camera was operated by squeezing its body
  rather than pressing a button.

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Reconnecting the Body to the Artefact

• Lovegrove, originally quoted in Martin (1998)
  states that The Eye camera was originally
  designed to be touched and to acquire meaning
  from the way it related to your hand, the way you
  squeeze it and the way you stroke it.
• Sensuality therefore becomes a medium for
  aesthetic experience (aisthesis). This quote
  refers to the important reflexive quality of
  touch in that it forms a connection both to and
  from an object with the individual.

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Reconnecting the Body to the Artefact
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Reconnecting the Body to the Artefact

• The next example is also a domestic light
  entitled The Bubble Light and produced by
  Mathmos.
• The light is an 8cm diameter sphere, constructed
  from latex rubber and, in a similar fashion to
  the camera, is operated by squeezing.
• The light has been designed to fit the palm of
  the hand, is highly portable and is powered by
  re-chargeable batteries.

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Reconnecting the Body to the Artefact
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Reconnecting the Body to the Artefact

• Airswitch TC, Mathmos (2005)

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Reconnecting the Body to the Artefact
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Reconnecting the Body to the Artefact

• The White Stone (Tollmar, K et al, 2002) - Used
  heat and touch to convey a sense of emotional
  presence between two people.

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Reconnecting the Body to the Artefact

• The Kiss Communicator (IDEO) - A concept built to
  explore ways of using technology to communicate
  with another person in a subtle, sensual way.

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Tune Me

• e1, Interaction Design Institute, Ivrea (2005)

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Tune Me
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Reconnecting the Body to the Artefact

• Floating Numbers, ArtCom

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Reconnecting the Body to the Artefact

• The Famous Grouse Experience, Landesign.

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Tower of Winds

• Toyo Ito - Tower of Winds (1986), a structure
  located in Yokohama, that filters the air and
  sounds of the city, transforming them into light.
  An architectronic object, rooted in its place,
  contextual but subject to change as the air,
  light and sounds around it are never the same.

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Tower of Winds

• This project is a conversion of the invisible
  rhythm and colour of the city, which our bodies
  are subconsciously aware of, into a variable
  pattern of light. It is in that sense like an
  environmental music.
• Toyo Ito talking about the Tower of Winds

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Reconnecting the Body to the Artefact

• Each of these artefacts was designed to be
  touched and to be operated through touch. It is
  instinctive to touch an object that attracts or
  perplexes.
• Touch is a display of tenderness and it is
  contended that technologies which seek to avail
  of touch should also exhibit such tenderness in
  terms of design, implementation and deployment.

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Reconnecting the Body to the Artefact

• Such tenderness should be manifest in how the
  technology handles both its communication and
  expression.
• Expression need not be overt, sometimes it must
  be subtle, private and only accessible to those
  with whom an existing history already exists.

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Reconnecting the Body to the Artefact

• This expression, coupled with the value placed on
  emotional connections, is indicative of new rôles
  for technologies within our personal lives (Gaver
  and Martin, 2000).
• Touch is a means of conveying such expression and
  intimacy.

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Artefacts, Places and Interaction Design

• Michael Smyth
• Napier University
• Edinburgh, UK
• E m.smyth_at_napier.ac.uk
• W www.soc.napier.ac.uk/michael/home.html