Read about Buckminster Fuller – architect, inventor, innovator, designer, futurist.

Evolution at work Bacteria make major evolutionary shift in the lab.

User Designer has been very quiet because I was on holidays and attending the Advanced Visual Interfaces 2008 conference, where I presented Perceptual Usability: Predicting changes in visual interfaces & designs due to visual acuity differences. Yet again AVI was an enjoyable conference with lots of friendly faces. Unfortunately its only on every two years.

While in Italy I headed to Pompeii and unexpectedly stumbled upon a 2000 year old bistable optical illusion mosaic in The House of the Faun. Wow. I hadn’t realised the Romans and Greeks used optical illusions in their art. Below is a photo of the mosaic:

Learn about traffic waves. You’ll never be bored sitting in traffic again. (found at Population of One)

May be worth a read Why Some Like It Hot: Food, Genes, and Cultural Diversity

Read about electronic chips implanted in the eye for restoring sight – Seeing the light.

We can simulate you. Out Of The Blue is an engaging article about whether a supercomputer can be used to simulate a biologically accurate brain. Sounds like they’re getting real results.

Nanoscale pretty.

We can model you and you and you and everyone. Use Geosimulation to model urban panic. Pruned (a neat blog) has a good writeup on Paul Torrens related research.

What would happen if your toothbrush could mate with another toothbrush?

Would you end up with an even better toothbrush – the best of both toothbrushes? How about if your toothbrush mates with 5, 10 or 15 different toothbrushes, with each new toothbrush in turn mating with another new toothbrush?

If you could decide which toothbrushes get to breed would you eventually end up with a toothbrush that’s perfect for you? Its form and function, its colour, feel and shape all bred into the toothbrush children generation by generation. The toothbrushes you dislike don’t breed so don’t pass on their “Form & Function DNA” to the next generation.

How would you tell a toothbrush to mate? Maybe to start the mating process you exchange design DNA by physically rubbing your toothbrush against another toothbrush. After that your smart malleable material toothbrush turns into a lump, which then self-forms into lots of little baby toothbrushes. To decide which mini-toothbrushes breed you crush the ones you don’t like, and rub the ones you do like off each other. Then repeat again and again, till eventually you have a baby toothbrush that you stretch into full size and begin using as your day-to-day toothbrush.

The method I’ve described for breeding toothbrushes is a Genetic Algorithm (GA) search. GAs are very powerful for exploring a large search space. In this case our search space is the potential designs for toothbrushes. Seeing each design generation could be a great way of helping people explore and imagine design possibilities.

Dryad, from Stanford Virtual Worlds Group, is a related example of software for exploring the design space around 3D trees. You can cross breed different kinds of 3D trees. Dryad is freely available for Windows and Macs, go play.

It’s easy enough to speculate about reshaping toothbrushes by cross breeding them, but what about more complex artifacts. Such as doors that slide or TV remote controls. How would you control the cross breeding of what a button does? Functionality is more abstract than form. For example if you cross breed two door handles where one door handle works by turning and the other by pulling…you could end up with a nightmare child door handle that works by turning, then pulling, then turning again.

How can the person doing the cross breeding place limits on what forms and functionality are explored? Maybe by only cross breeding one specific part of an artifact at a time, e.g. only cross breed the handles on the toothbrushes.

For artifact cross breeding to be possible objects and artifacts will need some kind of DNA. At the most abstract level the DNA would encode form, functionality and the relationship between both. Or putting it another way: malleable objects and artifacts need to be self-describing.

Smart Lego (New Scientist article), from CMU’s Computational Design Lab, is an example of a physical / virtual artifact that is able to self-describe. Also for many years various computer languages have been capable of different amounts of self-describing, which in computer science is called Reflection.

Of course now I’m wondering what would happen if you cross breed a door handle with a toothbrush?

Lovely overview about The History Of Visual Communication.

A bunch of interviews with User Experience pioneers.

Can you touch it? Workshop on designing multi-touch interaction techniques for displays (thanks Aaron). Invent a new interaction technique for the likes of Microsoft’s Surface and the DiamondTouch.

Can you sing it? World’s First HCI Rap

Chill out and sketch a personal kaleidoscope. Interactive realtime feedback on how your design changes over time.

To those of you who voted in the poll about HCI tutorials, thank you. To those who didn’t bother (there’s still time) I mutter a future curse: May all your solar panels develop self-awareness and go on strike.

Anyhow, previously I touched upon the idea of objects and tools that enable us to more easily create physical objects (How To Make (almost) Anything), or allow us to more easily reshape existing objects (Shape A Seat, aka Don’t Forget Me). In both cases we do the creating and reshaping, we give objects their physical structure, we are the shapers.

How can the physical structure of an object or artifact reshape itself?

Imagine while drinking a coffee you rush out the door to catch a bus. As you run to the bus stop the coffee cup changes into a sealed heat preserving flat container that easily slips into your back pocket. No more splashing coffee everywhere and your coffee is still hot. Then while standing in the packed bus the flat coffee container runs a straw from your pocket to your mouth so you can continue drinking coffee.

If a smart self-reshaping cup is going to be possible we need malleable materials that can change shape anytime we want. Or even better, they change shape when they realise that’d make life easier, e.g. your soup spoon turns into a straw so you can suck up the last drops from a bowl of soup. These kinds of self-reshaping and self-assembling materials are commonly envisioned as the result of nanotechnology research and development.

Now have a look at this video showing a shaping-shifting robot forming from a magnetic swarm (New Scientist article). The research into programmable material shown in the video is part of Carnegie Mellon and Intel’s Claytronics project. Neat ain’t it – yep, its still a young research area but online you can find a bucket load of research into self-reconfiguring modular robots. If the robots where made small enough then millions of them working together could become self-reshaping materials.

Xerox PARC’s Lattice is another example of interesting early stage research into modular robots for smart materials (esp. Proteo). If you have a chance play around with the Proteo RDSim (Rhombic Dodecahedron Self-Reconfiguration Simulator). The researchers who created the simulator were trying out different techniques for enabling lots of small robots to form themselves into different shapes.

To play with the simulator your web browser needs to run Java. When the simulator loads click on “New Goal”, then select “Disk”, set the Radius to 4, click “OK”, then click “Start Run”. In the main area you’ll see a flat disk form out of the white cubes. The white wireframe is the target shape the cubes are to self-organise into. If you’re feeling brave you can new try another “New Goal” of a Cup, try with a Radius of 6.

Another more recent simulator, which I haven’t tried yet, is DPRSim: the Dynamic Physical Rendering Simulator from Intel Research. DPRSim is a platform on which Researchers can develop and test new distributed algorithms for large ensembles of Catoms. Catoms are tiny robots with no moving parts that have internal computation and magnetic actuation.

Finally, if you want a quick review of previous modular robot research have a read of the review paper Design of a Modular Self-Reconfigurable Robot.

Tune your ears (listen) to Donald Norman, deep thinker about the implications of cognitive psychology for usability / HCI / design, getting interviewed by Peter Merholz. (found at putting people first)

Flybot – read about Harvard University’s microrobotic fly. Visit Prof. Robert Wood’s Harvard Microrobotics Lab website. (thanks to Baz for the suggestion)

5 Alternative Ways to Browse Amazon. Yep, more information visualisations that might be useful, but may well be utterly useless but ever so pretty.

Lots of tiny little builders = massive house. Watch this video showing myrmecologists figuring out how big an ant colony is. If you’re short on time just jump in 4 min 4 seconds for images of the ant colony structure. Tis amazing and beautiful!

You can find out more about their research at the LEURRE project website, where they wrote about their work experimenting with Artificial Life Control in Mixed Societies.

Separately MIT’s Rodney Brooks and others have been speculating about controlling insects and other creatures via brain implants Can cyborg moths bring down terrorists?

There are also examples where social behaviours, such as altruism, occur in other species Ape Aid: Chimps share altruistic capacity with people.

Now imagine designing a living space, a house, where tiny robot (overlords) carry out constant pest control. Not pest control practiced in an aggressive kill-everything-that-isn’t-human manner. Instead take a subtle holistic approach, which may be more sustainable and environmentally sounder than spraying all kinds of chemicals into our living spaces.

Pest control could be carried out by having the robots exert peer pressure on the insects. Reshaping / redesigning the behaviour of the insects by fooling them into doing what we want, i.e. have a set of tiny ant robots create Follow Me trails that lead away from inside your house. Or get spiders with robotic brains to encourage other spiders to build webs around your porch light. So at night moths are snagged in spider webs rather than swarming into your house when you open the porch door.

There are lots of other possibilities of adapting / redesigning group behaviours by controlling and influencing a few individuals in a group. For example encourage swarms of fish to swim into waiting nets, or encourage animals to eat food waste from dumps so the waste gets “recycled naturally”.

Of course there are negative implications, such as potentially throwing the ecological balance out. Or it’d become possible to literally send a plague of locusts to attack your annoying neighbour’s farm.

Insects and their behaviours as design materials!?

You could also wander around the Fab Labs Out Reach website, which details efforts to bring “prototyping capabilities to under-served communities that have been beyond the reach of conventional technology development and deployment.”

There’s never enough time for reading BUT you might want to dig into the deeply related “Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata” by John Von Neumann. Or Gershenfeld’s book “Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop — from Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication”.

All this work on personal fabrication makes me drool. It brings together the fundamental tools people are going to need to design, shape and build anything to meet their needs and wants. Without this kind of basic research we cannot hope to have a future where everything is malleable.

I hope and expect that over time less technical knowledge and skills will be required to build. A lot of the tools mentioned in the personal fab space are complex – though not so complex they’re beyond people’s abilities to learn. Easy building tools are important because lots of people will want to build things that enable them to achieve something else. They won’t be inherently interested in the act of building.