The Tablet Newspaper: A Vision for the Future in 1994
"The Knight Ridder Information Design Lab is developing a newspaper interface for the tablet device. The tablet newspaper draws on the strengths of print and on the strengths of electronic forms. It is both browsable and searchable, both broad-reaching and customizable. It offers pages with story abstracts linked to more detailed stories, background material, photos, sound, and video. People can ran read as deeply or as casually as they want. Stories are no longer limited to 'news hole,' the space allotted to editorial content after press configurations and advertising have been considered.
The tablet newspaper includes editorial content and advertising, both important components of a local information package. Like editorial content, advertising can have many layers, and can be searched and sorted, as well as browsed. Additionally, ads can have transaction hooks, so that readers can make reservations or purchases."
(Teresa Martin, 1995, CHI Conference Proceedings [http://www.sigchi.org/chi95/])
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
2010 IMPACT!: the 5th Dimensional Camera
"'With their evocative multidimensional camera, the designers have attempted to embody Hugh Everett's many-worlds theory in an object that adds to the cinematic tradition of The Matrix (1999), Lost (2004-10), Fringe (2008-ongoing), and Source Code (2011), to name just a few.
With researchers working to harness the the peculiar workings of our subatomic world, we, as designers, were given an opportunity to explore the implications of one of its more concrete and immediate applications: quantum computing.
Working with EPSRC, NESTA, the RCA, and a group of scientists from the Quantum Information Processing Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration (QIPIRC), the 5th Dimensional Camera was produced for the 2010 IMPACT! exhibition as a metaphorical representation of quantum computation - a fictional device capable of capturing glimpses of parallel universes."
(Superflux Ltd.)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Sonic City @ Future Applications Lab
"In order to determine how people might use Sonic City in everyday life, we have conducted a short-term user study with a variety of people using the prototype in their own familiar environments. Focusing on considerations of musical performance, embodied interaction as well as engagement and control, this study helped us to understand how people approach Sonic City and interact musically with the city, revealing emerging urban behaviours and music creation processes integrated into everyday life.
Process: the study took place during winter of 2003-04. It consisted of observing how a set of participants used the prototype in their own everyday environment during a limited period of time, and in collecting their feedback about it.
The study participants had various backgrounds, activities, ages, music tastes, and perceptions of the city of Göteborg.
In order to gain insight into their everyday environments, the type of path they would take, and their perception of them, we started by giving them cultural probes (individual self-contained small packages handed-out to users in order to gather information about their everyday life) prior to the testings. This also helped determining where the test sessions would be conducted, as they had to take place in the users' everyday environments. Participant were each given a cultural probe for a few days, with instructions to only open it and proceed when taking a path they would have taken anyway. The probes contained the assignment of documenting a single everyday path with a digital still camera, taking pictures of obstacles, resources and what would catch their attention. Then, they would write down answers to both clear and ambiguous questions about their path, draw their own map of it, put stickers where the pictures had been taken, and locate themselves on a larger city map (see user pages - links below user pictures in results' part).
Eventually, we let each participant use the prototype in the documented area. The users were told how the system worked but not where to walk or how to behave. Each user was video-filmed in action and the music produced recorded on a MiniDisc. This enabled a close study of paths and behaviours during use. Each session was completed with in-depth interviews about the experience.
We then synchronised the videos with corresponding sounds for analysis purposes. This allowed us to get a deeper understanding of the details of interactions by linking interactions with musical results, and repeating playbacks. The videos were first watched together with each user in order to collect their own comments and analysis of the sessions, and followed by complementary interviews. By synchronising these comments with the videos, we could compare the users' feedback with an objective analysis of their behaviours, while avoiding misunderstandings about their intentions.
Results: the study showed that mobility could indeed become a musical interaction between a user and her urban environment, enhancing her perception of and engagement with these everyday settings.
The study also opened the question of how to improvise and adapt one's musical interaction when confronted to a lack of control due to unpredictable and uncontrollable factors encountered in urban environments. The city was perceived to be more in control of this interaction than the user. However, she was able to actively influence how the music was created through different tactics and through situated interventions, all of them related to how the system was designed, what it highlighted and thus how it encouraged her to act.
In terms of interaction, the users were engaged on the level of the global path and of local interactions. Both levels were managed in an ad hoc, rather improvised way. Paths were most often planned in advance by the users but were sometimes randomly or intentionally modified during the course of a session in order to look for more interesting contexts and test how they would sound (e.g. a noisy construction site for [A.S.], a dark corner next to an electricity chamber for [D.R.]). Participants looked around themselves to seek local interactions opportunities, which they also found by accident (e.g. metallic objects). Some had favourite inputs, such as human voices for [M.K.] or noisy traffic for [F.M.].
On a local level, the users actively directed sensors with their body. In order to produce input, they often got closer to fixed artefacts at hand such as metal or walls. They also turned their body and thus the sensors towards or against diffused sources of input in order to amplify respectively shadow them, thus modulating the city's input. [D.R.] turned his back on traffic to reduce the impact of the sound level for example. Paths could thus be considered as a score articulated by ad hoc local bodily interactions."
(Future Applications Lab)
6). Gaye, Lalya, Mazé, Ramia, Holmquist, Lars Erik (2003). Sonic City: The Urban Environment as a Musical Interface. In Proceedings of the 2003 International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME-03). Montreal, Canada: 109-115 [http://www.ears.dmu.ac.uk/spip.php?page=artBiblio&id_article=1973].
Sonic City is a collaboration between Future Applications Lab (Viktoria Institute) and PLAY Studio (Interactive Institute), in Göteborg, Sweden. Project members include: Lalya Gaye (FAL) - engineering, electroacoustics, Ramia Mazé (PLAY) - interaction design, architecture, Margot Jacobs (PLAY) - product & interaction design, Daniel Skoglund (ex-8Tunnel2) - sound-art. Lalya's supervisor at Future Applications Lab: Lars Erik Holmquist. Participating Master's students (IT-University Göteborg): Magnus Johansson (HCI / interaction design) + Sara Lerén (cognitive science). This project is funded by the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research (SSF) through the Mobile Services project, by the European Union IST program through the Smart-Its project, and by VINNOVA through the IT+Textiles project.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Nina Wenhart's blog on the prehysteries of new media
"this blog is nina wenhart's collection of resources on the various histories of new media art. it consists mainly of non or very little edited material i found flaneuring on the net, sometimes with my own annotations and comments, sometimes it's also textparts i retyped from books that are out of print.
it is also meant to be an additional resource of information and recommended reading for my students of the prehystories of new media class that i teach at the school of the art institute of chicago in fall 2008.
the focus is on the time period from the beginning of the 20th century up to today."
(Nina Wenhart, 26/06/2008)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Technoetic Arts: a Journal of Speculative Research
"The journal aims to provide a forum for the presentation of new ideas, projects and practices arising from the confluence of art, science, technology and consciousness research. It has a special interest in matters of mind and the extension of the senses through technologies of cognition and perception. It will document accounts of transdisciplinary research, collabora- tion and innovation in the design, theory and production of new systems and structures for life in the twenty-first century, while inviting a re-evaluation of older world-views, esoteric knowledge and arcane cultural practices. Artificial life, the promise of nanotechnology, the ecology of mixed reality environments, the reach of telematic media, and the effect generally of a post-biological culture on human values and identity, are issues central to the journal’s focus. It welcomes speculative and anticipatory approaches to research, and the unorthodox expression of ideas whenever the topic justifies such innovation. It aims to communicate to an international non-specialist readership. "
(Roy Ascott)
Roy Ascott ed. (2008) Technoetic Arts: a Journal of Speculative Research, Volume 6, Issue 1. Intellect Ltd. [http://www.scribd.com/doc/18815754/Technoetic-Arts-a-Journal-of-Speculative-Research-Volume-6-Issue-1]
Fig.1 "Urban Digital Narratives"
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
