A century of evolution between La Guerre des Boutons and Harry Potter

I'd like to share the notes I wrote about a fascinating French book:
De la Guerre des Boutons à Harry Pottter by Jean-Marie Gauthier and Roger Moukakou.

In this book, two psychiatrists connect the novel of Louis Pergaud, La Guerre des boutons (English: "War of the Buttons") written in 1906 with the best seller of Joanne K Rowling (1997-), Harry Potter. The authors present a century of evolution in the teenagers’ life: their space/time structure, their relationship to a group of peers, and their appropriation of the land. The authors analyze the progression from developing concrete skills (close to the ones of adults) to an imaginary virtual world. Based on these two influential novels, a repository for this evolution, they illustrate their clinical analysis with real life scenarios of teenagers.

VS

You can read on La Guerre des Boutons flyer: “Il y a des guerres qui durent des années, celle-ci doit se terminer avant le diner” which stands for “There are wars that last for years, this one needs to be over before diner”. For the ones who do not know this French novel, I am posting some screenshots from a movie interpretation of La Guerre des boutons made in 1962 by Yves Robert.

An excerpt from the movie can be found ->here<-

Notes from: De la Guerre des Boutons à Harry Pottter by Jean-Marie Gauthier and Roger Moukakou.

Essais anthropologiques

The authors observed that the ones who usually have difficulties to talk and show some reserve towards socialization, tends to spend a long period of time on internet for remote communication. With the computer, the relationship between distance and proximity, direct communication, corporeal and indirect, mediated is transformed. It is as if these teenagers privilege a communication in which the body is absent. The authors propose that this transformation induces difficulties in sharing and exchanging across generations and difficulties in the position that parents take place in the growth of their children.

The relationship to the body
- Rhythm of lives is different. We neglect the sun’s motion in our lives! Before the industrial revolution, a rhythmic life was imposed due to the constraints of working in the field, outside! Now we eat at unstable hours, find abnormal quantity of food anytime of the day, forgetting that meals can have a social function. The social function of meals is replaced by their nutritional function.

- The physical constraints related to transportation have been transformed. We walk less, thus transforming our relationship to time and space as well as our relationship to the body: feelings, feeling tired, cold/heat or being well.
At the time of “la guerre des boutons”, children were progressively learning how to build toys, hunting equipment, using the wheelbarrow under the grand father’s supervision! Now we can be a champion in Karate without moving a finger! The measure of each gesture (cause and effect) goes through an iterative process usually explored by gathering in locations & spaces.



The Land
Play is key for social & individual development, a way to measure personal skills in comparison to others at the same time than measuring one’s body, a necessary step imposed by the life as an adult.





Urban concentration has reduced the children’s possibility to gather outside. The space for play and collective experience is disappearing. Not only that but the parents themselves lost their everyday corporeal connection, their craftsmanship and their personal space. These transformations impact our ability to measure the consequences of our actions; this can explain a come back of the magical thought in a world where the relationship between causes and effects is more and more uncertain. Not only the quantity of available land has changed but also its quality has decreased. Before one could close his house with doors and windows, now it is completely impossible. The house walls not only did become porous, but the family remains in communication with the entire world through telecommunication, TV, internet, mobile phone… thus interrupting the paternal order of things!
Distinguishing between the inside and the outside world is harder (this relationship becomes more and more ambiguous). Distinguishing between private, individual, internal and external realities becomes very hard.

The Group
Children have a predisposition to form groups in which learning by imitation is very important. This helps children leave the exclusive parental relationship to enter a more complex form of socialization: creating an identity and functional skills. In La Guerre des Boutons one practices his skills by crating weapons for hunting while in Harry Potter to compete with one another the children use magical formulas.
In psychoanalysis, authors such as Leroi-Gourhan, Winnicott, Mendal, Montagner, Gibbs show the importance of a psychic construction that needs to connect to the outside world, necessarily going through gesture and object manipulation. Playing without using the body, without manipulating objects is very different.





Creating relationships between children is a considerable advantage as it allows children to realize early on the human’s fundamental destiny: a social being (De Waal, F. 2005). It also allows kids to find modes of learning outside of the parental relationship. The authors remark that we need to think of this child’s pleasure to group and learn in a group and reevaluate the quality of learning that can happen within the group. It is not impossible that behind this pleasure of the group, kids can rediscover values of solidarity probably essential to our humanity and that were still very present at the beginning of industrialization but that are disappearing.

With La Guerre des Boutons one would constitute a group that opposes itself to another one, but today individuals are pushed towards being identical. Solidarity as a value is the most compromised, while individuation is assimilated to the general identical. Consumer society can only live if it destroys values of sharing and solidarity benefiting individualization ...

Time and space
Important for rational thinking, time and space are constituted and function via intuition. These intuitive forms of representation are constructed progressively while the child uses his corporeal skills. Corporeal exercise has a direct influence on the essential cognitive functions (Gibs, Gauthier, Montagner).
With a computer, one can be in contact with the entire world without having moved from the parent's house. The computer is the perfect compromise between the teenager’s necessity to go outside to become independent and the necessity to keep the protection and security of the parent’s house.





While in the 20th century, kids were riskily gathering outside, creating groups, risking their identity confronting others, now kids can just stay home while contacting the external world, protected by their parents. According to the Oedipian complex, teenagers have to develop their personal lives outside of the family environment [Winnicott & Mendel], the computer seem to be the perfect compromise as children avoid the risks of the foreign while being closely connected to this outside world. The teenagers can also escape their fears related to their own body in comparison to the severe criticisms induced by co-located peers! The narcissistic image remains idealized. The teenagers will not quit their bedrooms and will remain dependent on their parents, because this context does not offer a way to move physically away from the family house.

Speech
Communication technologies modified our relationship to space and time and this cannot be left without consequences on the development of thoughts. Instead of confronting peers using a verbal exchange, communication is now guided with icons that one needs to only “clic” in order to be projected in the other side of the globe. The relationship to speech in which the exchange is contrary to the magical icon formula, is a relationship of time.
This modification of the general relationship to space/time can explain the modification of our potential to take time to share thoughts. Language is more and more stereotypical and univocal (close to the marketing discourse) which appears in the political speech today (Chomsky, 1986, 1998).
The dialog with the computer is a series of keywords and reveal the transformation of the structure and use of language in our occidental society. Harry Potter is truly a hero of our time!

Transmission
To separate themselves from their parents, children need to be a minimum aggressive to distant themselves. At the same time, children need to identify to their parents.
However, parents are questioning their role models and hesitate to propose them as references to their children. So the entire reproduction of behavior and models is questioned. Speed, technological progress and the fact that children possess higher skills in tech fields such as IT, all contributed to this change in the parental role. Harry Potter and his adventures confront us to tendencies and forces, that are modified both in the parental and social space.

The hunting land and the exploration space are restricted. It is now rather difficult to find resources outside of the parental home, parental home from which one of the two parent is usually absent. Grand parents are usually distant geographically. Living conditions have changed so much that there is an unbalanced between our human potentials and the environment in which we evolve. This can explain largely the developmental difficulties of the children. The authors question how socially we can address the educational needs of children considering that we cannot go back in time!
The conditions for education have changed because parents have changed. It happened before, but this time it happened extremely rapidly and the educational methods have not evolved as much. Harry Potter raises interesting questions on how the individual maturation of a teenager is a complex and uncertain process, because of the uncertainties that rest on the transmission mechanism across generations.
Most probably the teenagers need to rediscover the joy of living in a group, the values of solidarity and the belonging to a group of peers. Wouldn’t that be what these novels of youth are demanding from adults?

Posted by Cati Vaucelle @ Architectradure

Talk at Simon Fraser University

The Faculty of Business Administration at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, invites me to talk for the Anniversary Speaker Series: 3 Campuses, 3 Speakers, 3 Themes, 3 Important celebrating two significant milestones: 25 years as the Faculty of Business Administration and 40 years since the launch of Canada’s first Executive MBA.

Theme Innovation
When? May 2, 2008, 10:30am
Where? Simon Fraser University Surrey Campus, Westminster Savings Credit Union Theatre, Room 2600.
Sign up here! ($25, free for SFU students + Alumni)

Talk summary Cati Vaucelle, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab will present two recent projects developed for the Media Lab's Tangible Media Group focused on Gesture Object Interfaces.

At the Media Lab, the future is lived, not imagined. In a world where radical technology advances are taken for granted, we design technology for people to create a better future.The Lab comprises rigorous research and graduate degree programs, where traditional disciplines get checked at the door. Future-obsessed product designers, nanotechnologists, data-visualization experts, industry researchers, and pioneers of computer interfaces work side by side to tirelessly invent-and reinvent-how humans experience, and can be aided by, technology.

On May 2nd, come and explore innovative ways to design seamless interfaces between people, digital animation, and physical environments. Discover "tangible bits" which give physical form to digital information and computation. Learn about user interfaces that employ physical objects, surfaces, and spaces as tangible embodiments of digital information exploiting the human senses of touch and kinesthesia and analyze ambient media as reflections of digital activity at the periphery of human awareness.


Posted by Cati Vaucelle @ Architectradure
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Transitional objects

Filet From the series Hommage au Sol - accesoires de prolongement du corps, objets transitionels de perception
1989-1994

Marie-Claire Bevar works with textiles, transforms them, adds all kinds of other materials to them, turns them into objects which has been her passion and necessity since childhood.

After collaborating both in trade and in theater, she decided to create objects as part of a personal introspection expressing itself through propositions evolving around the theme of the body. Both in Hommage au Sol and in L'Avant-Bras, Le Lien, Le Trait d'Union on one side and in Artextilabo, a laboratory of experimentations.


Doré

Hommage au Sol focuses around the foot and its relation to the ground. It includes accessories extending the body, transitory objects of perception, photos, videos and written documentation.


Venise

L'Avant-Bras, Le Lien, Le Trait d'Union is a work in progress. First she experimented with materials and techniques proper to the theme. A first series of objects were created, and now the artist is reflecting on them, furthering her research and figuring out how to stage them and present them to the public.

Chatting with Paulina on transitional objects made me revisit its classical roots. And what a pleasure to re-read Jerome Singer and his wife Dorothy's -authors of the awesome house of make believe book- fascinating journal paper from which I quote:

One possible route to the beginnings of the creation of miniaturized virtual realities by the very young may emerge in the course of older babies’ or toddlers’ manifestations of what the psychoanalyst, Winnicott (1971), termed involvement with “transitional objects.” Early on many children become attached to a soft cloth or to some combination of an old crib blanket and a “plush” toy, a cloth bunny rabbit, bear, or lamb. The well-known Peanuts’ cartoons’ youngest character, Linus, carries a worn blanket around all day and clings to it tenaciously. Such behavior generally meets those criteria of play developed in the research of Smith and Vollstedt (1985), nonliteralness and associated positive affect. Actually, one might propose that the tenacity with which children cling to these objects even as they fade in color, shrink or become ragged, may reflect the very beginnings of an experience of autonomy (“my blankie”) and personal ownership, a primordial expression of our nearly universal adult sense of private property upon which whole societies and legal systems are constructed.

In Singer, Jerome L. & Singer, Dorothy G. (2006). Preschoolers' imaginative play as precursor of narrative consciousness. Imagination, Cognition and Personality 25 (2):97-117.

By Architectradure

Making Things Talk

I cannot wait to read Making Things Talk, Tom Igoe's new book on Practical Methods for Connecting Physical Objects. It seems a lovely source of cute projects with ready-to-use technical resources. NearField opened a few pages of the book for us.

After taking classes in sensors and electronics at MIT, this semester I take Physics 123 at Harvard University. I recommend this class for any mechanical/electrical/software engineer, designer and researcher who wants to get a deeper understanding of physics related to electronics and to develop an intuitive relationship to electronics. It is the equivalent of 3 full time classes, because two days of the week and the week end are devoted to the class laboratories and assignments. Intensive but productive! This is one of the most valuable class I took in a long time. I hope after that class that all my things will talk!

"A lab-intensive introduction to electronic circuit design. Develops circuit intuition and debugging skills through daily hands-on lab exercises, each preceded by class discussion, with minimal use of mathematics and physics. Moves quickly from passive circuits, to discrete transistors, then concentrates on operational amplifiers, used to make a variety of circuits including integrators, oscillators, regulators, and filters. The digital half of the course treats analog-digital interfacing, emphasizes the use of microcontrollers and programmable logic devices (PLDs)."

Visualizing Audio Cues

Today at Interact 2007 I discovered the work of Tony Bergstrom who happens to be Karrie Karahalios's student. He presented today the Conversation Clock table.

On the Conversation Clock table, lapel microphones monitor conversation while the visualization of history is projected in the center. The Conversation Clock provides a visual history of interaction and communication. Each contribution displays bars colored to indicate the speakers’ identities. The lengths of these bars indicate the degree of participation, measured by volume. As a conversation progresses, a history is built with concentric rings reminiscent of the rings on a tree.

The Conversation Clock displays various conversational cues such as turn taking, interruption, conversational dominance, silence, agreement, aural back-channels, mimicry, time spans, rhythm and flow. If an individual has not been speaking, their lack of aural contribution is made clear in the rings. Of course, if individual is speaking at length and dominating the conversation, one can easily observe this as well. Aspects such as interruption, silences, and argument also make visual impressions on the table.

As a result, the Conversation Clock allows people to interpret their role in interaction. The visualization of audio allows people who speak the most to regulate their speech and speak less and the persons who speak the less to speak more.
"Live visualization of audio through social mirrors can provide influential cues for
individual participation in conversation. Participants alter themselves in order
to equalize the contribution of individuals."

Paper to download

Video modeling

Two papers on video modeling. One for pretend play with toys, one for perspective taking, both for autism. Video modeling is a way for children to observe, imitate and learn the skills and behaviors of their peers.

Using video modeling and reinforcement to teach perspective-taking skills to children with autism by Linda A LeBlanc, Andrea M Coates, Sabrina Daneshvar, Marjorie H Charlop-Christy, Caroline Morris, and Blake M Lancaster (2003)

Abstract
We evaluated video modeling and reinforcement for teaching perspective-taking skills to 3 children with autism using a multiple baseline design. Video modeling and reinforcement were effective; however, only 2 children were able to pass an untrained task, indicating limited generalization. The findings suggest that video modeling may be an effective technology for teaching perspective taking if researchers can continue to develop strategies for enhancing the generalization of these new skills.

Paper

Using video modeling to teach pretend play to children with autism by Rebecca MacDonald, Michelle Clark, Elizabeth Garrigan, Madhuri Vangala.

Abstract
Children with autism often fail to develop the rich repertoires of pretend play seen in typically developing children. Video modeling is a teaching methodology that has been shown to produce rapid acquisition of a variety of skills in children with autism. The purpose of the present study was to use video modeling to teach thematic pretend play skills to two preschool children with autism. Scripted play scenarios involving up to 17 verbalizations and 15 play actions by toy figurines were videotaped using adult models. A multiple probe design within child across play sets was used to demonstrate experimental control. Children were shown the video model two times and no further prompting or reinforcement was delivered during training. Results indicated that both children acquired the sequences of scripted verbalizations and play actions quickly and maintained this performance during follow-up probes. These findings are discussed as they relate to types of play and the development of extended play repertoires in young children with autism

Paper

The next UI breakthrough, physicality?

The Design of Future Things by Donald A. Norman

A discussion by Donald A. Norman on the passage from Graphical User Interfaces, especially command line based, to Tangible User Interfaces, in particular motion based interfaces.

Introduction
In my previous column I discussed the reemergence of command line language. Once these were the ways we used our operating systems and applications. Now they are reemerging within search engines. They are hidden and not easy to learn about, but I expect them to grow in power and, over time, become the dominant means of interaction.

In this column I will talk about a second trend, one that also has much earlier origins: the return to physical controls and devices. In the theoretical fields that underlie our field, this is called embodiment: See Paul Dourish’s book, Where the Action Is. But the trend is far more extensive than is covered by research on tangible objects, and somewhat different from the philosophical foundations implied by embodiment, so I use the term “physicality.”

Physicality: the return to physical devices, where we control things by physical body movement, by turning, moving, and manipulating appropriate mechanical devices.

Reference
Norman, D. A. 2007. The next UI breakthrough, part 2: physicality. interactions 14, 4 (Jul. 2007), 46-47.

Column on Command Line Interfaces available online

Full paper available at the ACM digital library

Video, toys and perspective taking

I discovered this fabulous experimental research on perspective taking by developmental psychologist Masuo Koyasu.

Masuo Koyasu's web site (in Japanese only).

In the 1980s, I was interested in studying the development of perspective-taking in young children. Piaget's "three mountains task" had demonstrated that children find it difficult to understand how something looks to a person who is in a different position from themselves. In fact, younger children exhibit a strong tendency to choose their own view when asked to indicate how an object looks to someone in another position, a tendency that Piaget called "egocentrism." I thought there are three dimensions of egocentrism (up and down, front and back, and left and right), and that children's difficulty in understanding different perspectives might be because they do not receive feedback about other people's perspectives. To test this hypothesis, I conducted a series of experiments with kindergarteners.


Figure 1. Experimental Situation
A:Child,B:Experimenter,C:Sample Photos,D:Place to put toy animal(s),E:Three toy animals,F:Still camera or video camera

The task in the first experiment was to face a camera set up across from them and then to arrange one to three toy animals in a way that would produce a photograph like the sample (Figure 1). Forty-three percent of the four-year-olds exhibited front and back egocentrism by placing the toy animals' backs to the camera. That tendency had mostly disappeared among the five-year-olds and six-year-olds, but it became clear that hardly any of the four- to six-year-olds could position two or three toy animals in the correct left-to-right order. In a second experiment, I used a video camera instead of a still camera and provided video feedback, showing an image of the toy animals as viewed from the opposite side on a color CRT monitor. In the control group, which was shown only the CRT monitor, the children were able to correct their front-back egocentrism on their own but were not informed of their errors. Even in the experimental group, which received instruction and practice in correcting left-right egocentrism, the effect on their post-test results was clearly small (Figure 2).


Figure 2. Mean number correct in each condition

Until the age of about seven, most children facing a teacher who says, "Let's raise our right hands" while raising his or her own right hand will raise their left hands.
Incidentally, research into perspective-taking abilities has traditionally focused on investigating how children understand other people's viewpoints, but I have noticed a serious limitation in the paradigm commonly used to study this. In the case of the "three mountains task," even if children can't directly guess the viewpoint of a person in another position, they can solve the problem by conducting a mental simulation in which they imagine that they have gone to the other person's position, or by a type of mental rotation, in which they imagine that the object has been placed on a lazy Susan and rotated to the correct position. The lack of methodological distinctions in the perspective-taking paradigm was a major problem. As I was worrying about how to think about this problem, I encountered research into "theory of mind." In particular, I spent ten months as a visiting scholar in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford from 1994 to 1995, where I had the opportunity to come into contact with the front lines of British research into cognitive development. After returning to Japan, I began studying "theory of mind," but at that time, hardly anyone else in the country was doing so. Without intending to, I have had to carry out the role of "missionary" in the field of "theory of mind" in Japan.
The most famous experiment in "theory of mind" is the false belief task (the so-called "Sally and Anne task") of Josef Perner and his colleagues. "Sally puts a doll in a basket. While Sally is away, Anne takes the doll out of the basket and puts it into a box nearby. Sally then returns and the child is asked where Sally will look for her doll." In general, three-year-olds can't pass this task, but they become able to do so between the ages of four and six. It has also been demonstrated that even high-functioning autistic children can't pass this task. It is odd that most young children are easily deceived by this task, which is no problem at all for adults. I have been observing the daily lives of children at a Kyoto kindergarten once a week for three years, as well as conducting developmental research, including the false belief task. As a result, I have obtained longitudinal data on "theory of mind" (Figure 3).


Figure 3. Results of a longitudinal study of "theory of mind"

The data presented in this figure began with 15 children, with 4 more children transferring in at the ages of four and five, for a total of 19 children at the end. Only one child regressed from being able to pass the task to failing it, but he was a boy who became extremely nervous and made mistakes in the testing situation at age five and six. The fact that I was conducting experiments on children with whom I was in contact on a daily basis made me feel that I could interpret the results more broadly.

Why Toys Shouldn't Work "Like Magic"

Mark D. Gross, Michael Eisenberg, "Why Toys Shouldn't Work "Like Magic": Children's Technology and the Values of Construction and Control," digitel, pp. 25-32, The First IEEE International Workshop on Digital Game and Intelligent Toy Enhanced Learning (DIGITEL'07), 2007

abstract
The design and engineering of children's artifacts-like engineering in general-exhibits a recurring philosophical tension between what might be called an emphasis on "ease of use" on the one hand, and an emphasis on "user empowerment" on the other. This paper argues for a style of technological toy design that emphasizes construction, mastery, and personal expressiveness for children, and that consequently runs counter to the (arguably ascendant) tradition of toys that work "like magic". We describe a series of working prototypes from our laboratories-examples that illustrate new technologies in the service of children's construction and we use these examples to ground a wider-ranging discussion of toy design and potential future work.

An Investigation into Perspective Taking Skills

"Children believe that animals understand them and that they can share some of their problems with animals. Animals unconditionally love children without judging them so children can easily share their daily problems with animals"

An Investigation into the Perspective Taking Skills of 6-Year-Old Children in Terms of Pet Feeding and Gender Variables by Aysel Koksal Akyol and Vuslat O uz. In Humanity & Social Sciences Journal 2 (1): 08-13, 2007

Paper available online.

Abstract This research has been designed in order to investigate the perspective taking skills of 6-year-old children in terms of the variables ‘pet feeding at home’ and ‘gender’. 100 six-year-old children attending nursery schools participated in the research. Data were collected through a “Personal Information Form” and the “Perspective Taking Test”. In analyzing the data, t-test was applied. As a result of the analysis, it has been determined that the status of pet feeding has an impact on the perceptional perspective taking skills of children (p<0.05) and the gender of the child has an impact on the cognitive perspective taking skills (p<0.01). Consequently, some recommendations have been made.

Overview
This paper presents the potential of a pet, as a companion for a child, transitioning from stuffed animals to communicating with others and supporting the child's emotional development. Communication with pets can be mainly non-verbal so that children with communication difficulty progress with pets. Also a study demonstrated the important correlation between the level of the relationship of children with their pets and their level of empathy.

The authors present a comprehensive definition for perspective taking
Perspective taking skills are formed from perceptional (to be aware of what another person sees), cognitive (to be aware of what another person thinks) and emotional (to be aware of how another feels) elements(...) Perspective taking is also defined as the emotional reactions shared in the experience of the child against the emotional reactions of the other person. Perspective taking includes both cognitive understanding of another person’s experience (playing a role) and the emotional understanding of another person’s emotional situation (experiencing). A person with the perspective taking ability can feel the other’s emotions after defining his emotion and perspective partially

Study
The study in this research involved 100 and 6-year-old children. Children take the “Perspective Taking Test (Perceptional Perspective Taking Test, Cognitive Perspective Taking Test, Emotional Perspective Taking Test)” and parents take the Personal Information Form and the Empathetic Skills Scale. In the results, the empathy points of pet feeding children are higher. In children’s interaction with animals, their being able to put themselves in the animal’s place is important for them to understand whether the animal is hungry or not, whether they are hurt or not, or else whether they want to be taken care of or not. The perceptional perspective skills of pet feeding children may have resulted high for this reason.

They conclude that the communication skills of pet feeding children improve and their perspective taking skills are affected positively. They propose that parents support the love and interest of their child to their pet. Children’s love for animals can be developed through visual mass communication tools and the media, by allocating more space for animal related publications and broadcasting.
Based on this result, I wander if children playing with Tamagotchi perform better at empathy, unless the attribution of feelings to a character that is virtual kind of mix the cards ...

I am particularly interested in the subject of perspective taking. Studying perspective taking in discourse structure as well as social perspective, I designed from 2000-2002 a computational toy to enhance narrative perspective-taking. The most fascinated finding in the part of this research on social perspective taking, is that children benefited from the technological toy in reflecting on their hypothesis about their environment, about people, about their personal experiences. I discovered there was a huge potential in computing toys for comforting children in their natural discoveries. Technology cannot replace human or pets interrelationship, but it has the advantage to be neither of these and just offer children fun, authorship and feedback on their creation. In this process a mechanism can be designed to reinforce a particular cognitive skill.

I later designed video systems for children to share creations with one another using video game controllers in a public museum space. Computational tools for adults and children to perform videos in real time using their video database, as well as sms'ing in the public space using a community video database, and a tangible system for remote communities to create, edit, perform and share video creations.
The power of video is immense, it is the witness of an event. I am now researching on the relationship with perspective taking between personal video and personal voice using tangible materials.


Picture extracted from my thesis Dolltalk: A computational toy to enhance narrative perspective-taking. Thesis available online

Dolltalk (2000)
I created DollTalk to help young children take different perspectives during storytelling play. The child tells his/her story to an animated computer character, using two stuffed animals as props while their story is recorded. The stuffed animals contain accelerometers that monitor the movement of those toys; statistical analysis of children's play with props allows the system to assume that if a toy is being shaken, then the child is narrating a story segment associated with that toy. The system also computes different types of motions, from a single toy being shaken, to multiple ones and their frequencies over time. In parallel, the system analyzes the speech of the child. The combination of sound and gestural parameters analysis allows Dolltalk to determine the structure of the narration: from a dialog to a narrator voice, this to offer adequate interaction. In Dolltalk "easy mode", when the child is done telling a story, the recorded audio is played back with two different pitches to signify the stuffed animal that was speaking at the time. In a more "advanced mode", the story is played back using a narrator voice and offers different understandings for the same story using the storyline of the child.

An inventory of effects

Re-reading and re-discovering an old edition from 1967 of the Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan, I spent quite a long time on this quote, trying to position the context in which this has been said, in which it is re-contextualized through the book, and how it applies today and what I can learn from it.

The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves...You give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be heroes of many things, and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing.--Socrates, "Phaedrus"

Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg is the first producer of free electronic books (ebooks). Project Gutenberg reached the following milestones as per dates:

1 eBook in 1971
10 eBooks in 1991
100 eBooks in 1994
1,000 eBooks in 1997
10,000 eBooks in 2003
100,000 eBooks in 2006


Don't miss the science-fiction bookshelf!


Illustration from Ullr Uprising by H. Beam Piper

Visual Communication bible

The bible in visual communication Grid Systems in Graphic Design by Josef Müller-Brockmann.

A Visual Communication Manual for graphic designers, typographers and three dimensional designers. Considered by most to be the definitive book on grid systems. This book is a must for any designer. From concept to instructional, this book covers typography through grid systems used in design both 2D and 3D.

Augmenting our collective IQ

Augmenting our collective IQ by Doug Engelbart, invited by MIT.

Abstract
Throughout human history, new artifacts and the training and culture associated with them have served to augment human capabilities. In recent years, the computer and Web have played a central role in the enhancement of human capabilities. This discussion will explore what we can do next to facilitate the human and tool co-evolution to augment our collective capability to serve humankind.

Speaker bio
Doug Engelbart is the inventor of the computer mouse and led research teams at Stanford Research Institute that developed hypertext, networked computing, and early graphical user interfaces. At the 1968 Fall Computer Conference in San Francisco, he presented what became known as the mother of all demos. For a Wired article on this demo, see http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.01/mouse_pr.html. Engelbart is a recipient of the Lemelson-MIT Prize, the Turing Award, and the 2000 National Medal of Technology.

Also available online, mp3 of "Collective IQ and Human Augmentation", Interview with Douglas Engelbart, April 4, 2007.

Douglas Engelbart's definition of augmentation: "everything we have done to increase our capabilities (...) from the tool to clothing".

Inspiring book : the Prosthetic Impulse

The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future, by Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra, eds. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2006.

The prosthesis is not a mere extension of the human body; it is the constitution of this body qua “human.”
—Bernard Steigler,Technics and Time

With every tool man is perfecting his own organs, whether motor or sensory, or is removing the limits to their functioning. . . . Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God.When he puts on all his auxiliary organs, he is truly magnificent; but these organs have not grown on to him, and they still give him trouble at times. . . . Future ages will bring with them new and probably unimaginable great advances in this field of civilization and will increase man’s likeness to God still more. But in the interests of our investigations, we will not forget that present-day man does not feel happy in his Godlike character.
—Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

The first chapter can be downloaded here

Culturally embedded computing and HCI challenges

At Chi 2007 I met with Lucian Leahu, researcher from the culturally embedded computing group at Cornell University. The group researches on affective computing by considering the cultural context in which people are in while interacting with computers.

We analyze, design, build, and evaluate computing devices in cultural context. We analyze the ways in which technologies reflect and perpetuate unconscious cultural assumptions, and design, build, and test new computing devices that reflect alternative possibilities for technology. We are part of a community of critical technical practices [as coined by Phil Agre], or practices that integrate technical system-building with cultural, philosophical, and critical reflection on technical practice. We have a focus on reflective design, or design practices that help both users and designers reflect on their experiences and the role technology plays in those experiences. We work with collaborators in the Affective Presence coalition to develop an approach to affective computing in which the full complexity of human emotions and relationships as experienced by users in central to design (rather than the extent to which computers can understand and process those emotions) (...)

For instance, their ongoing Fear Reflector project aims to support emotional self-reflection of people while they expect to confront their fears. Using a combination of biometry and camera input, it takes pictures of situation in which the user "fears". People are then given the possibility to reflect on these "fear" contexts.

The group had a few papers being presented at Chi 2007. I attended a very impressive talk from their group How HCI Interprets the Probes. They discuss the research techniques of Bill Gaver called Cultural probes that uncover people's values and activities. They discuss how the HCI community craving for flexible design methods adopted and adapted the probes in their research. By Kirsten Boehner, Janet Vertesi, Phoebe Sengers, and Paul Dourish (from Irvine), How HCI Interprets the Probes.
.Pdf of the Paper.
Also a nice interview of Bill Gaver on Designing Interactions for reference.
Another very inspiring take on HCI is to look at Situationist art practice. The authors specify how the Chi community can be relunctant to consider these methods, or by reducing them to comform to Chi's ones instead of using the richness of these methods.
.Pdf of the Chi'07 paper by Lucian Leahu, Phoebe Sengers, Claudia Pederson, Jennifer Thom-Santelli and Pavel Dmitriev.
Of course, nice references on situationism with video and sound recordings of Guy Debord on Ubu. The most famous and studied book-movie of Guy Debord being Society of the Spectacle.

Another book

Books I bought today ...



Sagmeister: Made You Look by Peter Hall, Booth-Clibborn publisher.



Envisioning information by Edward Tufte


Curious Boym: Design Works The discreet charm of the ordinary by Constantin Boym, Peter Hall, Steven Skov Holt

An history on interactive design

Etienne Mineur was my graphic design professor at Paris VIII, now he is swimming in praise!

He just finished the interactive graphic piece for Issey Miyake and now he is about to travel around the world with his family to document on graphic designers, game designers, fashion designers. His focus will be Asia, so if you are extremely talented in design, live in Asia, and willing to spend some time with French people, you should contact him.



He regularly presents an history on interactive design. The last one was for les arts deco de Paris, l'ENSAD. I think he should be in this presentation, but in any case it is a very interesting document that he shares online.
Pdf of the presentation

Upgrade! Boston - Turbulence talk

Jo-Anne Green, Co-Director of Turbulence invited me to give a talk. So April 12th at Art Interactive I will present some of my work. There is a rumor that Dr Yasmine Abbas might also be available to share her latest findings on the neo-nomads.

See you there!

Design and Intuition

Designing interactions book

Few weeks ago, I asked my advisor Hiroshi Ishii to lend me the Designing interactions book from 2007 in which he presents multisensory interaction design. I particularly liked the organization of the book in a form of a small encyclopedia of interviews illustrated by successful examples from the first PC prototypes to the existential design of the RCA interaction design department.
The book can be discovered online with streamed interviews and samples of work.

Video interviews

Video interview of Hiroshi Ishii

Video interview of John Maeda

Today, Hiroshi invited Bill Moggridge, co-founder of IDEO, to talk about "Design and Intuition" at the MIT Media Lab and to introduce his book.

abstract of the talk
Interactive technology is everywhere, seeping into every crack and cranny of our lives. It's not just the mouse that we use for pointing and clicking, plus the desktop and windows on our screens. It's the TV we watch, the iPods that help us enjoy music, video games, digital cameras, phone services, Palmtops, plus the aesthetic, social and cultural interventions that we experience. Bill Moggridge will describe a design process that is common to these examples. He will show how design opportunities can be identified by discovering people's latent needs, behaviors, and desires, and by creating new ways to serve and support them. He will demonstrate how designers can visualize new products, services, spaces, media and software-based interactions, and bring them to life by prototyping. He will discuss the values inherent to Design Thinking and the processes that can help to harness the power of intuition in designing interactions.

bio of Bill Moggridge
Bill Moggridge is cofounder of IDEO, independently ranked by business leaders as one of the most innovative companies in the world. A Royal Designer for Industry, Bill designed the world's first laptop computer. He pioneered interaction design and is one of the first people to integrate human factors into the design of software and hardware. He has been a visiting professor in interaction design at the Royal College of Art in London, lecturer in design at the London Business School and a member of the steering committee for the Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea, Italy. He is currently consulting associate professor in the joint program in design at Stanford University. His book Designing Interactions is available from The MIT Press.