Last week saw the first of a series of talks on robots, artificial-intelligence and design at London’s Royal Institution, curated by Ben Hammersley. Our friend Alex Deschamps-Sonsino presented the work of the EU-funded LIREC project in a talk called ‘Emotional Robots’.
I took a bunch of notes which were reactions rather than a recording, and my thoughts will hopefully bubble up here soon…
If the conversations we’ve had about it are any guide, it should be a corker. There are still tickets available, so hopefully we’ll see you there on Wednesday and for a bot-fuelled beer in the RI bar afterward.
Matthew has introduced a blog rota, which means I have been handed the WordPress keys for a couple of posts! This kind of post is called a weeknote.
The best and most conspicuous thing to happen this week is the introduction of James Darling. He is awesome fruit from this month’s human harvest. He has brilliant hair and is notoriously fashionable. By the end of Monday he was committing code. He brings a great presence to the practice and I look forward greatly to seeing where he takes things. We went for some mini boozing with him and our friends from RIG in our local pub the Kings Head. It’s brilliant to have these people around.
Tom A is our outlying satellite, polluting the west coast with his weapons-grade thinking. He is visiting our awesome friends at Stamen for their Data and Cities conference, we await blog posts from beyond the Atlantic and daring tales of battles with data.
Jones went to Glasgow for an afternoon to tell students some facts and he has been working hard on presentations and developing a big project with a big company. Two new things have begun this week. I’m working on the early stages of project Haitsu, and Matt Brown, Alex Jarvis and James have kicked off another project whose codename I’ve forgotten. Several wheels have found traction and have begun to kick in at once. Exciting times.
Yesterday, two awesome meetings happened around our internal product development. Partners and contractors visited the studio to discuss their developments. As the meetings overlapped, design thinking venned with system development, each party peeking over the others shoulder. It’s a fantastic feeling to see hardware prototypes, circuit diagrams and software architectures spring up on whiteboards and through milling machines as we move closer to production.
As the mother of a two-year-old, I, like just about every other parent, often think about what I can do to aid my child’s development. And as someone (like all of us here at BERG) who’s passionate about design and rather fond of sci-fi, I’m keen that my daughter is introduced to those things and hopefully will enjoy them too. (Incidentally, what’s the right age for an introduction to Star Wars: A New Hope? Seven? Eight? In any case, we have a few years.)
Right now my daughter is starting to be able to identify letters, and they are coming fast and furious. We already have a number of ABC books around, but I’ve recently discovered a few more that I think are must haves for a very small geek-in-training:
Charley Harper’s ABC – Beautiful illustrations that will no doubt be more appreciated by parents than by toddlers, but hey, may as well expose them to lovely design early on, right?
ABC 3D – Pop-up books are always cool, and this one is beautiful as well.
The City ABC Book – A lesson in Looking Around You and Noticing Things.
Dr Seuss’s ABC – For sheer fun, silliness and inventiveness, it’s hard to beat Dr Seuss. “Oscar’s only ostrich oiled an orange owl today,” and “Many mumbling mice are making midnight music in the moonlight… mighty nice!”
And finally, Nerdy ABC Flashcards – A is for Atom! B is for Binary Code! N is for Neuron! U is for Uvula! Brilliant.
Any other suggestions? Please leave them in the comments!
Ben Hammersley is curating a series of three lectures at the Royal Institute of Great Britain during February. The RI is a 200-year-old research and public lecture organisation for science. Much of Faraday’s work on electricity was done there.
You’ll need to book if you want to come, so get to it!
My talk is going to build on a few themes I’ve been exploring recently at a couple of talks and on my personal blog.
Botworld: Designing for the new world of domestic A.I.
Back in the 1960s, we thought the 21st century was going to be about talking robots, and artificial intelligences we could chat with and play chess with like people. It didn’t happen, and we thought the artificial intelligence dream was dead.
But somehow, a different kind of future snuck up on us. One of robot vacuum cleaners, virtual pets that chat amongst themselves, and web search engines so clever that we might-as-well call them intelligent. So we got our robots, and the world is full of them. Not with human intelligence, but with something simpler and different. And not as colleagues, but as pets and toys.
Matt looks at life in this Botworld. We’ll encounter a zoo of beasts: telepresence robots, big maths, mirror worlds, and fractional A.I. We’ll look at signals from the future, and try to figure out where it’s going.
We’ll look at questions like: what does it mean to relate emotionally to a silicon thing that pretends to be alive? How do we deal with this shift from ‘Meccano’ to ‘The Sims’? And what are the consequences, when it’s not just our toys and gadgets that have fractional intelligence… but every product and website?
Matt digs into history and sci-fi to find lessons on how to think about and recognise Botworld, how to design for it, and how to live in it.
I’ll be going to Alex’s and Ben’s too. I hope to see you there.
I’m going to be attending the Data & Cities conference that our friends at Stamen are organising this week (on the 10th and 11th of February). I’ll be writing some notes from it whilst I’m there, with any luck. It’s set to be a great event.
And also: my first time in San Francisco! Looking forward to it a lot.
Sticky Light is an installation that projects a laser that sticks to lines and solid objects. There’s no camera – just a laser and a photodector. It’s incredibly responsive, and completely captivating. The dot of light takes on a surprising amount of personality, darting around, occasionally getting lost and confused, and then suddenly slipping away to explore its surroundings when released.
That such a nuanced impression of character could be formed from such a seemingly simple actor reminded me of Ken Perlin’s Polly: a prism that walks around a surface. That may not sound like much, but once you start playing with the various animation loops programmed into it, you might well change your mind. “Dejected” is heartbreaking. And yet: it’s a triangular prism. Marvellous.
Two pieces of graphic design that caught my eye. First, via Paul Mison, a spread from Marie Neurath’s Railways Under London. There’s a bit more on the output of the Isotype Institute, and some lovely examples of their work for children, over at the Science Project blog.
Finally, two music videos with interesting visual treatments. Firstly, Echo Lake’s Young Silence, which used a Kinect’s depth camera to film the band. It’s not a raw output, of course. There’s a lot of visual processing, and compositing of co-ordinates that’s followed up, but it makes the video very striking – and much like a low-budget take on Radiohead’s House Of Cards video, filmed on LIDAR.
And, to end, Chairlift’s Evident Utensil. This came up in discussion in the studio when we were talking about the aesthetics unique to video in the digital age, such as stabilisation, or as in these videos, what happens when keyframe data goes missing. The answer to the latter can be seen in the Chairlift video – and in several other examples of Datamoshing.
This defined sense of the object’s limited-life reinforces it’s narrative.
The thing is a clock.
It’s beginning, middle and end will be marked.
And indeed, the object itself asks you to record the beginning…
…and to do right by it’s end.
This is planned obsolescence with conviction – and as a result it involves you with the object, it’s materiality and your use of it to a greater degree than most mass-produced goods.
I haven’t run in them yet.
I’m waiting for just the right moment to start the clock on their life, and take my first steps in them – towards their end.
UFO On Tape (iTunes link) is a game for iOS that simulates tracking a UFO with a video-camera. The magic is in the game’s total commitment to an aesthetic: the grainy, fuzzy simulated video; the panicked advice from a girl next to you; and, best of all, the way the iPhone embodies the video camera – it is, after all, also a camera itself – as you fling it around, oblivious to the real world, tracking an imaginary flying saucer. Good stuff.
Last week, Matt J gave a crit to final-year students in Wassim Jabi’s ‘Digital Tectonics Studio’ at the Welsh School of Architecture. He shared this footage of a model by Tom Draper, exploring the idea of a mechanical screen in front of a building that would cast shadows similar to a dragon curve fractal. In order to explore what this might work like – what it’d feel like to experience those shadows, how you might mechanically create those shadows out of rods – he had to build. Thinking through making. There are also some lovely photos of the model.
Line Block by Korean designers Junbeom So, Lee Ji Eun, Yi-Seo Hyeon, Heo-Hyeoksu and Jeong Minhui proposes an alternative to cable tangles: power cables that can be joined together through tongue-and-groove rubber. I also liked that, in the cross-section, the cable is a surprised little fella. (via Yanko Design)
These links are a bit late because last Friday I was at The Design Of Understanding – a day-long conference at the St Bride Library. It was a cracking event, with lots to chew over – I’ll see if I can get my notes up soon.
Friend-of-Berg Chris Heathcote talked about New New Media – a swift overview of ubicomp and other aspects of situated computing. One highlight was when he took apart the common example of coffee shops offering you a discount as you walk by, asking:
…what ratted on you? Your Nike+ talking shoes, using a credit card nearby, your car number plate being recognised, your phone reporting your location, or your Oyster card informing the system that you’ve just come out of Oxford Circus tube?
The whole example is good – but I liked the idea of ubiquitous computing devices tattling on you, like naughty children; Chris’ use of “ratted” reminds us that such behaviours can be as much a hindrance as a help. The full talk is definitely worth your time.
Paste Magazine recently published their list of the 40 Best Robots of All Time (Fictional and Real). Interesting to see what a non-tech oriented publication came up with. I wonder how the list would be different if you queried us BERG-ians about our favourite robots?
