Beyond Productivity Information Technology, Innovation, and Creativity (2003) / Chapter Skim
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4. The Influence of Art and Design on Computer Science Research and Development
4. The Influence of Art and Design on Computer Science Research and Development
Pages 96-117
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From page 96... ...
It also involves rethinking CS in ways that many computer scientists would find nontraditional. · ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ BEYOND TOOLS TH E I N FORMATION ARTS Writing in 1993 during the take-off of the wired boom of the l990s, veteran commentator Stewart Brand pondered whether "technology has swallowed art, and so is art gone now?
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From page 97... ...
For Alvy Ray Smith, the prominent computer graphics expert, artists are most valuable as "explorers at the edge of our culture," and he looks to them to "tell the rest of us what [computation] really iS."4 Thus, the information artist functions as an archetypal knowledge worker: someone able to "penetrate conventional organizations to which their continuing attachment to an 'external' knowledge community represents a valuable asset."5 ITCP 2See Stephen Wilson, 2001, Information Arts, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
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From page 98... ...
In this sense, the reach of the information artist extends beyond product design to process design.
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From page 99... ...
The shared frame may be only a transient phenomenon the disciplines may come into contact, engage in some fruitful exchange, and then continue to develop separately and move apart, as contrasted with the multidisciplinary approach sketched in Figure 4.1a. In transdisciplinary research,8 the point is not just application of given methodologies but also implication a result of imagining entirely new possibilities for what disciplines can do.
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From page 100... ...
/. I 1 ,4..~;' / {b} Transdisciplinary Model: New Context of Application Transaction space requires understanding of own and other disciplines · New common space created specifically from interpenetration of disciplines · Boundaries are shown as perturbed, and they adjust to accommodate the reflection from other circles · Intensity of communication between disciplines becomes context for implication expansion beyond context of immediate application to Anticipatory vision" of future possibilities · Transaction space may be transient, leaving separate circles reconstituted based on a single transaction or sustained over time, leading to a durable merging FIGURE 4.1 Models of the relationship between information technology and the arts and design: Multidisciplinary versus transdisciplinary.
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From page 101... ...
Engaging in a fruitful exchange requires conversations to identify those needs and to determine how computer scientists can best fulfill Through the sponsorship of the Rockefeller Foundation, their collaboration continues as of this writing: The "Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen: Listening Post" exhibition is running at the Whitney Museum of American Art from December 17, 2002, through March 9, 2003; see |
From page 102... ...
, in order to design systems that better fit into the lives of human users. Simultaneously, the connections have deepened between HCI and the design community, which approaches human-computer interaction in more open-ended ways.~4 These shifts in HCI as a field bring it closer i2See Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council, 1992, Computing the Future: A Broader Agenda for Computer Science and Engineering, Juris Hartmanis and Herbert Lin, eds., National Academy Press, Washington, D.C.
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From page 103... ...
, for example, there has recently been a focus on lifelike computer characters or believable agents, with a great deal of interest in incorporating approaches from drama and the arts into agent design. The development of algorithms for information retrieval on the Web has underscored the need to combine theoretical i5See, for example, recent publications of the ACM Press, including the proceedings from the CHI 2002 Workshop on Funology, the HCI 2002 Workshop on Understanding User Experience: Literary Analysis Meets HCI, and the CHI 2003 Workshop on Designing Culturally Situated Technology for the Home; also Bill Gaver and Heather Martin, 2000, "Alternatives: Exploring Information Appliances Through Conceptual Design Proposals," pp.
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From page 104... ...
For example, Robert Coover developed "Cave Writing," a course at Brown University that brought together English students, artists from the Rhode Island School of Design, and computer scientists from the Brown CS department. They explored the creative potential of the Cave, a high-end virtual reality environment for text and related digital media elements of sound and image in virtual space.
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From page 105... ...
Messages are deleted by recycling the marble in the machine. The marble answering machine speaks to humans' physicalye25 Approaches to mixed reality include tangible media and augmented reality.
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From page 106... ...
in Karlsruhe, Germany, to see the heart of the building, overlaid with labels explaining what is done on the different floors: reality plus.26 Both augmented reality and tangible media have their roots in Mark Weiser's vision of ubiquitous computing.27 Technical issues in mixed reality include the maintenance of correspondence between real-world and virtual objects, standards for interobject communication, perception (including vision processing, video tracking of objects, plan recognition, and integration of multiple forms of sensory data) , spatial reasoning, and learning and adaptation.
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From page 107... ...
They are developing applications to support tours of Atlanta's historic Auburn district, in which "ghosts" from Auburn's past appear superimposed over the landscape and address users with their stories.28 At the MIT Media Laboratory, Hiroshi Ishii's Tangible Media group integrates art, design, and human-computer interaction to generate pre-market speculative applications such as music bottles that can be uncorked to release the music inside and "curlybots" that record and play back physical gestures.29 A playful, speculative design approach is taken at the Computer-Related Design program at the Royal College of Art (London) , home of Bishop's marble answering machine and whimsical applications ranging from a telepathic Tamagotchi30 to a bird feeder that use principles of reinforcement learning to teach songbirds new tunes.
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From page 108... ...
These questions raise various issues for a number of computer science fields, including information retrieval, database management, and computer graphics, to name a few though such questions are not purely CS ones, but rather questions that are truly transdisciplinary. There is evidence that CS is beginning to address some of these questions (e.g., see the special issue "Game Engines in Scientific Research" in the Communications of the ACM, January 2002~.33 NARRATIVE ~ NTELLIGENCE In the early 1990s, a group of graduate students at the MIT Media Lab formed a new reading group, which they called narrative intelligence (NI)
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From page 109... ...
The group flourished, exploring issues in the philosophy of mind, media theory, HCI, psychology, social computing, constructionism, and AI, developing theories and applications in all these areas, influencing the direction of the doctoral program at the Media Lab, and connecting to a wider network of researchers who joined in the group's discussions over email. Narrative intelligence as a field was born.
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From page 110... ...
Researchers are developing systems to support human storytelling, as in the case of plush toys that children can program to tell their stories to families and friends.37 Databases of stories allow people to search for and share stories pertinent to their experiences.38 Stories can be automatically generated, perhaps in response to input from human users. Interactive digital video allows video sequences to be generated interactively, telling 37Marina Umaschi, 1997, "Soft Toys with Computer Hearts: Building Personal Storytelling Environments," pp.
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From page 111... ...
43See Philip E Agre, 1997, Computation and Human Experience, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K.; also Phoebe Sengers, 1998, Anti-boxology: Agent Design in Cultural Context, Ph.D.
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From page 112... ...
To achieve these goals will likely require a fundamental rethinking of the notion of user tests, as well as other evaluations. In an early example of what such work might look like, artist-designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby evaluated the Placebo project, electronically enhanced furniture that makes users aware of activity in the electromagnetic spectrum, through open-ended interviews with users combined with photographic portraits of users with their devices.47 Such techniques allow designers to do evaluation in a form that is to some extent recognizable and understandable to HCI practitioners, while exploring issues that matter to artists, such as the subjective nature of user experience, the stories that give devices not only functionality but also meaning in human context, and the messages that information technologies intentionally or unintentionally communicate to users.
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From page 113... ...
Their work often explores issues at the intersection of product design and social issues. For example, the 2002 show of the Interaction Design program at the Royal College of Art included Pedro Sepulveda's architectural designs responding to fears and anxieties about cell phone radiation.
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From page 114... ...
The Domestic Environments project of the Equator research collaboration,52 funded by the U.K. Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, is one model of how computer scientists collaborating with artistdesigners and social scientists can develop appliances that are interesting both technically and socially.
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From page 115... ...
On the one hand, Chapter 3 looks at the use of information technology as a medium for art and design practices, suggesting that computer science can support ITCP. On the other, Chapter 4 looks at ways in which art practice and design and computer science can become fused, leading to new fundamental insights into the nature of computer science itself.
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From page 117... ...
This danger exists when any practice is digitized in the absence of an appropriate model, as for example in arts education when young people have become wedded to the prescripted options of packaged applications and are only capable of creating PhotoShop art. What Paul David and his co-authors fear would become "cut-price research motels" in scientific research55 corresponds closely to the degeneration of artistic quality that is possible where electronic art forms (or media art or the modish "new media")
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