Documentary: last in class!

Via my research lab, I heard about this ongoing documentary-making on the "last in class!". The documentary will be a light-hearted look at our culture's growing obsession with achievement as explored through the profiles of several people who finished at the bottom of their college (and in some cases, also high school) class and the somewhat unexpected, often ironic, lives they have lived since.

Check out the web site as they are looking for these exceptional low profiles!



The call:
1. We already have a number of possible people to profile for the film
(from a country music star to a serial entrepreneur and beyond) but are
always interested in hearing from, and about, more. If you know of anyone
who might fit the bill, please send them our way (info [at] lastinclass [.] com).

2. As you will see from the website, as part of this project, we are also
putting together a companion piece of truly memorable report cards and
report card comments, in particular. If you have any you would like to
share, please do.

3. Finally, please pass this email along to your friends and colleagues.
We know that those who finished last are just as rare as those who finished
first but we know that they are out there and probably the source of far
better stories to be told.


Posted by Cati Vaucelle @ Architectradure
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Small, mobile, clever humanoid robots

The Personal Robots Group at MIT media lab is developing mobile humanoid robots that possess a novel combination of mobility, moderate dexterity, and human-centric communication and interaction abilities. The small footprint of the robot -roughly the size of a 3 year old child- allows multiple robots to operate safely within a typical laboratory floor space.

Social affective touch for robots

My past research on psychohaptics and taptap at the Tangible Media Group, MIT Media Laboratory, involved studying the perception of touch, and how people relate affectively to haptic sensations. Today, Dr Cynthia Breazeal who leads the Robotic Life research group at the MIT Media Laboratory addressed the question of social affective touch. Her main theme is to build cooperative machines that work and learn in partnership with people.
Today at the h2.0 event -new minds, new bodies, new identities- she presented her latest research including the robotic companion. The robotic life group explores social affective touch and develops machine learning algorithms to categorize various sense of touch, from pleasant to annoying ones. Exploring the sense of touch and interpretation of touch by robots is a new area of research.
The robot is designed in the form of a bear, the bear being a universal symbol of comfort. The robot itself is covered of silicone skin to not feel like a machine when hugged. In their first experiments, the robot had local intelligence, local sensing and response, coordination. An operator could communicate with the bear to a 3d bear model on a screen.

Applications behind this work could be for family members to be able to play from everywhere, to bridge the usual generation gap between grandparents and grandchildren, to allow people to remain in contact while separated. This is especially important when a child is spending a day at the hospital alone and what it means for the parents to be able to stay with the child remotely.
Another high vision for this work is to allow collaborative partnership using a remote tutor. Cynthia mentioned that eventually the bear could be highly trained and could offer high quality education to the ones who usually are not exposed to such education.

Guitar hero becomes guitaroke

Aurelius Prochazka, a big fan of Guitar Hero, developped a Guitaraoke Revolution game. Apparently an amazing guitar and ear workout, he offers how to play the Guitaroke Revolution using a simple hack. Basically, "splice your Karaoke Revolution microphone so that the microphone ends in a plug and the USB converter end has a jack" ...
More details on .apb.

Tangible Programming in the Classroom

Tern: Wooden blocks shaped like jigsaw puzzle pieces

Created by Michael Horn and Robert J.K. Jacob at Tufts University, Tern is a tangible programming language for middle school and late elementary school students. Children connect the tailored wooden blocks to form physical computer programs, which may include action commands, loops, branches, and subroutines.

Download Tern's paper for Chi'07


Quetzal

Prior to designing Tern, the authors created Quetzal (pronounced ket-sal), a "tangible programming language designed for children and novice programmers to control LEGO MINDSTORMS robots. It consists of over one hundred interlocking tiles representing flow-of-control structures, actions, and data. Programmers arrange and connect these tiles to define algorithms which can include loops, branches, and concurrent execution."

Also Oren Zuckerman from the MIT Media Lab created Systems Thinking Blocks for children to model and simulate dynamic systems.


Flow Blocks for children "to create 3D structures in space, that look like common structures in life"

Flying video-taking pet?

Would you like a flying video-taking pet that follows you around? Here is a fun visionary video on the future of mobile technology for teenagers by Microsoft found on RoomWare


Video: Career in Computer Science - MS Research

video-cards

Children playing with Moving Pictures

Tangible artifacts have been linked to video as a way to support collaborative exploration of a video collection. More recently, Labrune and Mackay designed the TangiCam, a tangible camera made of two cameras on a circular frame to capture both the child and the video of the child. Researchers have worked on token-based access to digital information. See also pioneer research done by Hiroshi Ishii and Brygg Ullmer.

A broad range of interactive table-tops have been designed for collaboration. From Yumiko Tanaka’s Plable, a traditional looking table under which children can build an imaginary world, to the DiamondTouch table that allows the collaboration and coordination of multiple users at the same time, designers developed a new concept for movie editing to help children understand the process of editing. In Moving Pictures, children arrange tokens on a table, guided by a GUI, in order to create and visualize the storyboard of a movie.



Plable

The Plable web site has awesome videos both of the process and the final project.

This interesting concept started to take a more "card shape" with Mika Miyabara and Tatsuo Sugimoto, the Movie cards, a set of printed cards that can be re-arranged in any order. Their bar code is used to identify them on a digital screen. Regine Debatty gives more details about this very interesting project.
Also, TVS explores the manipulation of digital video clips using multiple handheld computers.



Movie Cards

Recently, Dave Merrill and Jeevan Kalanithi created the Siftables, a set of small displays that can be physically manipulated as a group to interact with digital information and media. I bet that these miniature video cards will lead to very interesting projects ...
Paper on the siftables.



The siftables

Philips Design developed Pogo, a system that allows replaying visual sequences using tangible objects with a stationary computer for capturing and associating media to objects. Even though these systems invite capture and editing of the movie segments, they donnot propose the publication of the final movie created and the possibility to share it with peers remotely. For this reason, Moving Pictures integrates a videojockey mode to allow children to perform a final movie as much as inviting them to revisit the movie impact.


Pogo

Allowing authorship as a design principle in most Tangible Interfaces is rare. It is probably due to the fact that it requires a very flexible interface and a software architecture that takes care of data management. This design principle can allow children to become active participants instead of simply observers. In Moving Pictures, tangible media containers can easily be integrated in mobile technology and also be combined for performance using a video jockey platform. Maybe a new version could use the potential of the siftables ;)

Interaction Design and Children

Jabberstamp? It is for adults to understand that a work of art is not a hat, but a boa digesting an elephant! - Yasmine Abbas



I teamed with Hayes Raffle to work on his Jabberstamp invention.

This is the first time I work on a project on which I am not the inventor. This collaboration is refreshing through the distance allowed by not being the actual initiator. It brings critical insights on the interaction design. Hayes asked me to join him, because of my background in toy design for children, especially the design of toys for emergent literacy. Out of the technology available, I tried to understand what could children do with the simple mechanism of associating sounds to drawings. Hayes and I end up testing the system, improving elements of the design and discussing its contribution. A pilot evaluation with children confirmed our hypothesis about the type of narrative children explore with such technological system.

We submitted a video for Siggraph'07, educator program and Jabberstamp was elected for being demoed and exhibited during the conference, the 5-9 of August 2007, San Diego, California.

A full paper Hayes and I wrote together on Jabberstamp got accepted to the Interaction Design and Children conference. The focus of the conference is on children’s role in the design and evaluation of interactive technologies. So we hope to see you in June 6-8, 2007, Aalborg in Denmark!

Abstract We introduce Jabberstamp, the first tool that allows children to synthesize their drawings and voices. To use Jabberstamp, children create drawings, collages or paintings on normal paper. They press a special rubber stamp onto the page to record sounds into their drawings. When children touch the marks of the stamp with a small trumpet, they can hear the sounds playback, retelling the stories they have created. We describe our design process and analyze the mechanism between the act of drawing and the one of telling, defining interdependencies between the two activities. In a series of studies, children ages 4-8 use Jabberstamp to convey meaning in their drawings. The system allows collaboration among peers at different developmental levels. Jabberstamp compositions reveal children’s narrative styles and their planning strategies. In guided activities, children develop stories by situating sound recording in their drawing, which suggests future opportunities for hybrid voice–visual tools to support children’s emergent literacy.

Jabberstamp is a MIT Media Lab project developed in the Tangible Media Group with Dr Hiroshi Ishii.

News (update)
July 23 07 Digital inspiration by Amit Agarwal.
July 23 07 Article in Discovery Channel by Tracy Staedter.
June 29 07 Article in Digital experience by Jonas Petersen.

Previous post on Jabberstamp.


IDC logo

Marisa Jahn

Artist Marisa Jahn gave a talk at the MIT Media Lab, in the Tangible Media Group.

Her work explores ways to engage people in gaining knowledge, from literacy, to environmental literacy. She designed tools and methods to invite people in a comparative analysis of information and self-reflective process. She collaborates frequently with Steve Shada and Natalie Jeremijenko.

Interested in how human interact and communicate with each others, she designed wearable musical instruments.
video



For her master thesis in the visual studies department at MIT, she designed a game called Set. Elements of the set can be regrouped, labeled and organized and shared within the players.
video

Project most easily understood through direct engagement, boxSET is a game played as an intervention into any existing collection of objects (archives, record albums, a heap of junk—anything). Involving multiple players, some of whom may not have any prior relationship with the objects to be sorted, the game asks players to develop categories that describes a grouping of objects. However, the creation of order occurs simultaneous with disorder: a player may choose to remove an object from another player's collection in order to place it in his/her grouping. This rapid taxonomic metabolism encourages players to narrate out loud (or 'show-and-tell') their categories with the anticipation that it may soon disappear. Further, through taxonomically engaging with different kinds of objects, players become aware of what kinds of objects (data) are better for certain kinds of analyses (formal, textual, psychoanalytic, etc.). As the game evolves, players become aware of the difference in interpretation, the subjectivity of order, and the contingent production of knowledge.

She created throw-n-Sow a new way for people to think about and engage with their environment. Frisbees deposite seeds while in the air...

Throw-n-Sow is a flying disc toy similar to a Frisbee that uses the centripetal force generated in the act of throwing to distribute seeds into the environment. Manufactured as a toy made from environmentally-friendly, biodegradable plastics, Throw-n-Sow consists of a main body and a separate container that slides and locks under the disc. This container contains adjustable holes of different diameter to accommodate variant seed sizes. In other words, Throw-n-Sow is a literally empty container into which individuals and communities emplace selected seeds.
Throw-n-Sow is interactive eco-art project that engages diverse communities in each step of the project (manufacturing, seed-selection, site-selection, plant stewardship, art education), Throw-n-Sow raises questions about the expanded field of drawing, indigenous ecologies vs. selective human cultivation, landscape evolution and succession, ethnobotany, agronomy, etc. Throw-n-Sow ultimately aims to valorize distributive intelligence and interdisciplinary learning.
Throw-n-Sow is the kind of art that literally passes between two or more individuals. Leaving behind a trail of seeds as it sails through the air, Throw-n-Sow essentially imprints moments of play into the landscape. Individuals carrying the Throw-n-Sow disc from one place to another develop an affective relationship to the toy and to the sites in which it is deployed.

Jabberstamp

I team up with Hayes Raffle to work on his invention Jabberstamp a tool that allows children to synthesize their drawings and voices.

Jabberstamp is the the first tool that allows children to synthesize their drawings and voices. To use Jabberstamp, children create drawings, collages or paintings on normal paper. They press a special rubber stamp onto the page to record sounds into their drawings. When children touch the marks of the stamp with a small trumpet, they can hear the sounds playback, retelling the stories they have created.

Children ages 4+ can use Jabberstamp to embed names, narratives, characters’ voices and environmental sound effects in their original drawings. Children’s compositions help them communicate their stories with peers and adults, and allow them to record and situate stories in personally meaningful contexts to share with others, before they have mastered writing.

Update about Jabberstamp ...



Jabberstamp's video