Bosch have enhanced the night vision system system in cars, so that it provides smartly enhanced high contrast images of the road ahead at night. Clever but would you trust it to properly identify which parts of the road are critical for highlighting?

For the last few years I’ve been using and really liked Sony’s eBook Reader, the PRS500. Yup, I was an early adopter and altogether unsure whether I wanted to give up paper books! Recently there’s been an explosion of electronic readers, lead by Amazon’s Kindle. Within the next few years we’re going to see bendable, foldable and colourful electronic paper. For those of you who are design minded and interested in using E-Paper to invent new kinds of interactive visual displays and devices, here’s a handy guide for learning more about E-Paper technology.

Fascinating The Secret History of Silicon Valley – just over an hour long but well worth watching.

How aesthetically beautiful are your photos? Try out Acquine, an Aesthetic Quality Inference Engine. Welcome to the brave new world of computational aesthetics!

Clever – video of evolving a human face using a genetic algorithm. A face detector is used for the fitness function.

Time to start gaming for mental health?

Haunting and beautiful sand art “animation” – very neat and worth the 9 minutes.

Florian Kräutli has designed and created malleable magnetic curtains that retain their shape. Clunky elegance.

Embodied Cognition “is a growing research program in cognitive science that emphasizes the formative role the environment plays in the development of cognitive processes.” Learn more about this increasingly important area from this website. (via MindHacks)

Gimme gimme one of the Emotiv Brain-Computer Interface headsets. No contact gel required. Of course you could always build your own based on designs from the OpenEEG project.

Neat video of a time fountain optical illusion. Looks like water is running backward defying gravity and hanging in mid-air.

Break out the champagne. Today User Designer is 1 year old!

I’m happy with how the blog has developed over the first year. Though it took a while to settle into writing weekly. Two posts a week has become my regular rhythm. For the 2nd year my posting target will continue to be one post a week featuring research analysis and synthesis, and a second weekly post packed with stimulating and fun links.

Of course not forgetting :) Thank you all for reading and for your great suggestions. Over the last month more than 2000 visitors, or 2500 depending on which counter I believe, came to the website. The feed subscriber count is now between 200 to 300 regular readers and its increasing faster each month.

Anyway…wanna collaborate?

I’m delighted to announce I’m looking for a talented undergraduate student to spend their summer in Ireland on a 3 month paid scholarship working on a new research project. The project is very relevant to User Designer – it is exploring the intersection of individual customization with presence.

The project title is Ambient Jewelry: Be part of your friend’s desktop – Individually designed presence avatars for social connectedness. Prof. Paddy Nixon and myself (Mike Bennett) will be supervising. This project is part of the ODCSSS (Online Dublin Computer Science Summer School) summer research internship which is part funded by an Undergraduate Research Experience and Knowledge grant (UREKA) from Science Foundation Ireland.

Visit the ODCSSS website for more details. There are 15 other funded projects in this years program, all around the theme of Technologies for Social Connectedness. In previous years we had talented and enthusiastic students from all around the world. If you’re interested, or know someone who might be, the application process is now open. If you have any questions about this project you can contact me directly via the contact form.

Project outline:
Ambient Jewelry seeks to explore the intersection of individual customization with presence. The aim is to enable the creation of more personal and richer forms of presence, with the aspiration that this will allow us to more deeply connect with our friends and family in a non-intrusive manner.

Presence is an important part of our day to day lives. Often we will have a sense of who is around us and what they are doing by the sounds of doors closing, cupboards banging, footsteps on floors, voices vaguely heard through walls, etc. In digital spaces, such as GUI desktops, presence enhances our sense of connection with geographically separate friends and colleagues. For example when you use an Instant Messaging (IM) client you see which friends are currently online or away, and when engaged in IM chat you are also told whether the people in the conversation are typing. On social network sites, such as Facebook, presence has a more explicit form. We are told what the people in our social network did, e.g. Mark joined the Ireland network, Eimear and Mike are now friends, etc.

As of yet presence tools don’t enable us to control how our presence is represented. We don’t have little coloured jewels (ambient presence avatars) spinning on our friends’ desktops to show how fast we’re typing, nor do we have a flower opening and closing in the jewel when we move the mouse, etc.

The outcome of this project should be parts of a framework that easily lets people create and share their presence avatars. There will be a desktop client like an IM client. The client watches whether you type, move the mouse, open windows, close windows, play music, etc. The specifics of what you type aren’t recorded, instead your activity is used to update a presence avatar / Ambient Jewel. Your jewel updates, changes and transforms based on your actions. For example imagine everytime you open a window a flower blooms in your Ambient Jewel.

Ambient Jewels are tiny. You share your ambient jewel with your friends. When you get a jewel from a friend you can hang it off your mouse pointer, use it to decorate your GUI windows, place them on the side of your screen, etc. Groups of friends are able to work together to group their jewels into larger jewels, and they can then coordinate how the collaborative jewel looks and behaves based on what they do on their desktops.

The core functionality is:

- Ambient Jewels (presence avatars) encode action
- people can create relationships between jewel transforms and their actions
- people can share these jewels with their friends
- jewels can be used to personalize GUI desktops

Potentially the jewels could be shared on people’s blogs, websites and social network profiles.

Some research questions that arise:

1) Does enabling people to personalise the presence avatars affect the importance and value people place on sharing their presence?
2) How should the interface be designed for simplifying the process of creating relationships between user actions and how the avatars update?
3) Does enabling people to decorate their desktops with their friends’ ambient jewels make desktops less socially isolated? By turning them into shared private spaces?

Previous coding / hacking experience writing GUI’s and networking code is desirable. Candidates should be interested in learning about research in Human-Computer Interaction and Interaction Design. A creative streak, whether technical or artistic, is also useful.

Are you a hacker (maker) or a painter? Or both? Or neither? Which of C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures do you belong to? Paul Graham’s essay on Hackers and Painters may be of interest.

Fascinating talk given by Professor Mark Reed from Yale talking about The Next Frontier: Bioelectronic Interfaces (video).

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?

On Donal Reddington’s excellent MadeForOne.com website Mass Customization is defined as “enabling a customer to decide the exact specification of a product or service, and have that product or service supplied to them at a price close to that for an ordinary mass produced alternative”. This definition is elaborated upon in the article What is Mass customization?. Donal’s MadeForOne blog is definitely worth checking out.

Mass Customization & Open Innovation News is a very interesting blog from Frank Piller, who has spent many years thinking about Customization. One of his blog posts particularly stands out for me User Manufacturing: Amazon’s Next Twist: Will the Online Retailer Become a Key Enabler of User Manufacturing? In this post he discusses the relationship between Mass Customization and User Manufacturing (a.k.a. User Designer).

There is a treasure trove of content in todays links, enjoy.

A very funny spoof paper discussing “The Etiology & Treatment of Childhood“. Found via Mind Hacks.

ThinkCycle: Open Collaborative Design is a small follow up related to yesterdays post about Personal Fabrication. Its a community based around sharing designs usable in personal fabs. We’ll probably see a lot more like-minded communities over the coming years?

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.