E-puzzle at IDSA IDEA 2007

Discovered on Gizmodo, the BusinessWeek/IDSA IDEA 2007 Awards Gallery presents the E-puzzle designed by Peter Chen. The pictures appeared to be self explanatory.

At first I wandered what the e-puzzle could do, because it seems like a child is moving pieces around on a most probably "interactive map". What could it do? Play "bip bip" sounds? tell a winnie the poo story... in any case, from the picture it did not seem great. Just e-something.

However it is more innovative than that, even if improbable for quite a while, the concept idea is to use e-paper that parents could download patterns to and that children could endlessly discover and assemble. The idea to play with tangible pieces using unlimited digital information is fascinating.
Now how interesting is the project for children? For parents? It seems it can save space (less puzzle at home), money (10000 puzzles into one), offer control (my child will play with a family picture and not a winnie the poo!) ...

Transformable Toys

It started with transformable sculptures: The “expanding geodesic dome” from 1991 at the Liberty Science Center in New Jersey - Via Pingmag

Last time I visited her in San Francisco, my friend Kimiko Ryokai gave me this awesome toy. A ball that changes its shape and color when flipped in the air! This tricky toy was invented by the famous kinetic sculptor Chuck Hoberman. An interview on Pingmag recently covers his background, creations and inspirations.



Switch Pitch by Chuck Hoberman. Image from Educational Innovations

Hottness is always the tiebreaker

Everything you wanted to know about creativity and the design process. I stole this video from Marc Rapps' blog that I enjoy reading. This short movie is just so funny and well done.

Enjoy!


More on Perfect People Make Perfect Design

Music videos: after the e-baby ...

E-baby Produced by Pleix / Chased by Cowboys. Music: Bleip. 2003.


Beauty kit Produced by Pleix. Music: Bleip. 2001.

Music videos that mainly deal with the question of the influence of technology on our lives such as biotechnology, media and plastic surgery, etc ... Pleix is a virtual community of digital artists -3d, musicians, graphic designers- based in Paris. I like their progression from the beauty kit, the e-baby: how to order a baby online, to birds as flying dogs: the imagery is stunning, to the complete human assimilation of freaky gigantic robotic-plastic rabbit.


Birds Produced by Pleix / Blink. Music: Vitalic. PIAS. 2006.

All their videos.
Check also Régine Debatty's report on Pleix's talk.

E-baby video

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.

Eco-friendly robots

Picture of Theo Jansen work found on Myninjaplease.

I am fascinated by the giant kinetic sculptures of Dutch artist Theo Jansen, always elegant, massive and impressive with their ability to be eco friendly at the same time than resembling apocalyptic robots.

Scarf with electrically operated massager

Scarf with electrically operated massager United States Patent 6537235, by Connor, Clara (Fountain Valley, CA, US) and Busto, Ernest J. (Cypress, CA, US), March 2003.

A combination massager and scarf assembly having a number of electrical motors secured in a flexible casing, which flexible casing is removably secured in the interior of the scarf. The scarf is wrapped around the flexible casing and the motors in the casing are electrically connected to a control box having an A.C. or D.C. power supply to actuate the electrical motors. The control box includes a knob to regulate the speed of vibration of the motors.

The next step for Tangible Media research

Photography by Jean-Yves Lemoigne

Elisabeth Sylvan: the Sharing of Wonderful Ideas

Dr Elisabeth Sylvan

Today I attended the thesis defense of my friend Elisabeth Sylvan, now Dr Elisabeth Sylvan, from the Lifelong Kindergarten research group at the MIT Media Laboratory. Her dissertation is entitled the Sharing of Wonderful Ideas: Influence and Interaction in Online Communities of Creators.

At her dissertation committee: Mitchel Resnick, Alex P. Pentland and Peter Gloor

Abstract
This thesis presents a new framework for understanding how communities of creators share work, influence one another's creative processes, and learn from one another. I introduce the concept of Online Communities of Creators (OCOCs), which are online communities where the core activity is sharing personal creations. Using a mixed-methods approach of ethnography and social network analysis, I study two specific OCOCs: the Computer Clubhouse Village and the Scratch online community.

I analyze how ideas spread through OCOCs using the framework for diffusion of innovation developed by Everett Rogers. I map specific behaviors in OCOCs to Roger's five stages of adoption of innovation: awareness, interest, evaluation, trial and adoption. Within OCOCs each of these stages represent deepening understanding of other community members' work. The last two stages can be seen as members learning from each other. I report on how different social and project-related activities support the communities. I analyze which community members and which projects are most commonly in the trial and adoption stages. Finally I describe what creator and project factors predict influence in OCOCs.

Even though developed for two specific communities, her framework could be re-applied to the understanding of the sharing of creations within another community. It would be interesting to research on the mechanism of creation through blogs, or social communities.

Throughout her research, she analyzes the forms of participation, the mechanism of adoption of ideas and how ideas spread within the community, and finds ways to predict influence. For instance, prediction for download of user's projects happens:
1st- when the project is featured by administrator of the community
2nd- when the creator of the project has many projects already
3rd- when the creator of the project comments on projects
4th- when the creator of the project has uploaded projects recently
5th- when the creator of the project has friends, etc...

By observing a specific community, she studies how the learning happens socially.
Community members spontaneously filled in surveys that her software uses as data to generate a network visualization. She noticed that community members were developing popularity and skills that went beyond the community itself and could motivate users to later do something on the internet.

Elastic visualization

A cluster within my delicious' tags visualized with 6pli

I discovered 6pli, a beautiful and useful tool for delicious tag visualization and navigation. The 6pli system connects to your delicious database and uses the bundles to bridge between very different content. I find this tool amazing; it is finally an answer to my struggle in navigating among my delicious catalog.
You can contact the creator of the tool, Santiago Ortiz, to create your own account.
More about his work.

Santiago --What is nice about order is that is very difficult to keep (because of the god entropy), so there is always eccentric posts, as the image shows: