Pillow-ing

Talking about fashion, this garment is absolutely awesome. Pillowig by Joo Youn Paek.

"Pillowig" is hand made wearable pillow comforting trieness of people in daily lives, enabling users to sleep comfortably whenever and whenever they’d like. When user test is done in public spaces - subway, airplane, library, class room and laundromat, viewers commented: “I would like to have it for my trip.”, “Very funny.” “This is practical, but a laugh, too." I made 50 limited editions and sold 47 pieces at the exhibition of the work and gained “Pillowig” fans. Two months later fans did a group performance piece at the Old Palace, Seoul.

Digital, mechanical and eletronic fashion show

Amanda Parkes just gave me the booklet she designed for Unravel, a technology-driven fashion event at Siggraph 2007 this year. A premiere. I am so lucky to share an office with the curator and fashion chair of this event!

"Unravel" brings together the works of international designers and artists to present innovative and interactive works in computational and conceptual couture, socially conscious fashion, science-inspired from, and new technologies in textiles.

If you attend the event in San Diego, California, you will see:

· Solar Bikini by Andrew Schneider. A solar film bikini that charges your iPod! (With a USB connection!) The suit is a standard medium-sized bikini swimsuit retrofitted with 1" x 4" photovoltaic film strips sewn together in series with conductive thread. The cells terminate in a 5 volt regulator into a female USB connection


Solar Bikini

· Walking City and Index of Indifference by Yin Gao, projects that I particularly love! Dresses respond to their physical and acoustical environment, the ethereal garments just breath ...


Walking City

· Intimate Controllers by Jenny Chowdhury. A platform where video games are played by couples touching each others.

· Smoking Jacket by Fiona Carswell. The jacket has a built-in pair of lungs on the front. As the wearer smokes, the lungs fill up with the exhaled cigarette smoke and begin to gradually darken over time.


Smoking Jacket

· Hacking Couture, a web portal that allows the launching of new fashion aesthetics by the continuous contribution of users of the site, giving an exploratory spin to the traditional design process in fashion, allowing a collective collaboration in means of self-expression and the enhancement of creativity by the application of the concepts of Open Source.

· Self-Sustainable chair by Joo Youn Paek, a conceptual garment that motivates users to consistently switch between walking and sitting as a loop behavior on the street. The balance between exercise and rest would be maintained by wearing this suit.


Self-Sustainable chair

· Muttering Hat & Talk to Yourself Hat by Kate Hartman.
Muttering Hat A pair of muttering balls are tethered to the hat. They may be stuck to your ears, so that all other noise is obstructed by the mutterings, or they may be detached, providing the opportunity to escape from the mutterings or to share them with a friend.
Talk to Yourself Hat Through the use of a communication system embedded in the hat, you may speak outloud to yourself while retaining the right to a somewhat private conversation.


Muttering Hat

· Knitter's Tapestry by Daniela K. Rosner and Kimiko Ryokai.

An experimental dress knit with recordable magnetic tape that travels with the knitter and captures the knitter's experience as she knits.


Knitter's Tapestry


Knitter's Tapestry - detail

· Solar vintage, we will become silhouettes by Elena Corchero, a collection of accessories for the eco-fashion-minded in which technology meets tradition.


Solar Vintage

· Jacket Antics by Barbara Layne and Studio subTela, that feature unique texts and designs scrolling through the LED array on each of the backs.

· Kameraflage(TM) by Connor Dickie, a display technology that is invisible to the naked eye, yet is visible when imaged with a digital camera.


On this picture, the thunder-cloud has a lightening-bolt appear in the photograph

· Negociation by Daniela Kostova, Galina Kumanova, Olivia Robinson, a wearable interactive video system that combines textiles and technology to explore concepts of identity creation, presence and absence, integration and estrangement in different political and cultural environment. The wearers of the suit merge with the visual environment they inhabit.


Negociation


Negication' still during a performance: The persons seem to disappear.

· Cherry Blossoms: When War Comes Home by Alyssa Wright addresses the disparity between human suffering and perception of that suffering.

A mapping technology that transports one into the world of another, Cherry Blossoms gives witness to the tragedy of war. A backpack is outfitted with a small microcontroller and a GPS unit. Recent news of bombings in Iraq are downloaded to the unit every night, and their relative locations are superimposed on a map of Boston. If the wearer walks in a space in Boston that correlates to a site of violence in Baghdad, the backpack detonates and releases a compressed air cloud of confetti, looking for all the world like smoke and shrapnel. A technology for empathy, Cherry Blossoms honors the human cost of war.


Cherry Blossoms, a cloud of confetti, each confetti showing the name of a civilian who died in the Iraq war and the circumstances of his/her death.

· Shutters by Marcelo Coelho and Steve Helsing, is a soft kinetic membrane for environmental control and communication.

It is composed of actuated louvers (or shutters) that can be individually addressed for precise control of ventilation, daylight incidence and information display. By combining smart materials, textiles and computation, Shutters builds upon other façade systems to create living environments and work spaces that are more energy efficient, while being aesthetically pleasing and considerate of its inhabitants’ activities.

· Bracelets and Reconfigure, two projects by Leah Buechley.

Each bracelet, woven on a traditinoal bead loom out of beads, conductive thread and surface mount LEDs, is a 5x10 display matrix that can be programmed with animations like cellular automata and scrolling text. I strove to make the bracelets lovely with the electricity on as well as off; the most recent versions are almost as thin and flexible as traditional beaded jewelry, controlled with surface mount electronics and soft circuitry and powered with flexible Lithium-ion batteries.

Reconfigure is a platform for interactive performance. A reconfigurable costume consists of a torso piece and an assortment of sensing appendages that can be snapped to the torso. Sensors in the appendages include muscle flex sensors, accelerometers, bend sensors and touch sensors. Sensor data is relayed to a computer, via a bluetooth module embedded in the torso, where it can be used to control or generate music, video and other multimedia content.

· Peau d'Âne by Valérie Lamontagne. Peau d'Âne, a fairy tale from Charles Perrault, is reinterpreted by giving life to the 'impossible' dresses that a young princess orders her stepfather to thwart marrying him.


Peau d'Âne

Technical diagram of Peau d'Âne.

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

Creepcakes by designers!

AIGA 2006 presents creepcakes for Halloween, a use of everyday cupcakes transformed into aliens, monsters, spiders and mummies!
Clever design and great imagination is always extremely inspiring ...

The SynchroMate

The SynchroMate fits snuggly in the palm of one's hand (...) it encourages serendipitous synchronous interaction by indicating when a message is being composed for you by a distant companion through gentle vibrations and pulsing concentric circles of lush colors on the display

SynchroMate: A Phatic Technology for Mediating Intimacy, by Martin R. Gibbs, Steve Howard, Frank Vetere, Marcus Bunyan (2006)

Abstract
By and large interaction design has been concerned with information exchange - technologies for the collection, processing and transmission of informational content. This design sketch discusses preliminary ideas about an alternative way to think about interactive technologies - phatic technologies - that are less concerned with capturing and communicating information and more about the establishment and maintenance of social connection. Drawing on insights and inspiration gleaned from a recent field-based study of the role of interactive technologies within intimate relationships we outline our preliminary ideas concerning technologies to support phatic interaction. Using materials collected during our fieldwork as design inspirations, we developed design sketches for phatic technologies intended to support playful connection between intimates. One of these sketches - SynchroMate - is presented. SynchroMate is a phatic technology designed to mediate intimacy by affording serendipitous synchronous exchanges.


Full case study

Selling ad space via computer etching

Leah paid for her new MacBook Pro by selling ad space on her laptop to sponsors.

Soon you will receive a parking ticket for leaving your computer too long on a campus table. Soon you will etch ads on your body to have unlimited plastic surgery, soon you will become an ad to survive!

But I wonder, are stickers over yet? Spreading throughout the internet, the hip idea for a few years now is to etch the cover of your laptop.

I saw beautiful work out there, but never dared attacking the cover of my mac book. I prefered not following any trends, and stuck to my stickers! Among all this craft work, I chose this one from 2006 (see picture above) that is particularly interesting by Buzz Andersen.

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.

Kinetic vs electric toys

Odo by Sony

We change our habits and we design accordingly. In the era of socially responsible design, a new business model is emerging. Discovered on Idealist, Odo by Sony is a generation of toys that takes advantage of user-generated kinetic energy. As mentioned in Sustainable Day: "there are a lot of conceptual solar powered cell phone prototypes and hand cranked chargers popping up in response to the strong consumer interest in more environmentally responsible products but in general consumer electronics usually lag behind in the development of green alternatives."




Odo Spin N'Snap

In 2005, I co-designed Playpals, a set of figurines with their electronic accessories that provide children with a playful way to communicate between remote locations. In our first prototype, the figurines were activated using the child-generated kinetic energy. We tried to find a branch of alternative to electrical by using reverse motors.

Playpals movie