The play's the thing

For very understandable reasons phenomenological approaches predominate in the field of sensory urbanism. This paper does not seek to add to that particular discourse. Rather it takes Rorty’s postmodernized Pragmatism as its starting point and develops a position on the role of multi-modal design representation in the design process as a means of admitting many voices and managing multidisciplinary collaboration. This paper will interrogate some of the concepts underpinning the Sensory Urbanism project to help define the scope of interest in multi-modal representations. It will then explore a range of techniques and approaches developed by artists and designers during the past fifty years or so and comment on how they might inform the question of multi-modal representation. In conclusion I will argue that we should develop a heterogeneous tool kit that adopts, adapts and re-invents existing methods because this will better serve our purposes during the exploratory phase(s) of any design project that deals with complexity

The play's the thing

For very understandable reasons phenomenological approaches predominate in the field of sensory urbanism. This paper does not seek to add to that particular discourse. Rather it takes Rorty’s postmodernized Pragmatism as its starting point and develops a position on the role of multi-modal design representation in the design process as a means of admitting many voices and managing multidisciplinary collaboration. This paper will interrogate some of the concepts underpinning the Sensory Urbanism project to help define the scope of interest in multi-modal representations. It will then explore a range of techniques and approaches developed by artists and designers during the past fifty years or so and comment on how they might inform the question of multi-modal representation. In conclusion I will argue that we should develop a heterogeneous tool kit that adopts, adapts and re-invents existing methods because this will better serve our purposes during the exploratory phase(s) of any design project that deals with complexity

Rules for Responsive Robots: Using Human Interactions to Build Virtual Interactions

Computers seem to be everywhere and to be able to do almost anything. Automobiles have Global Positioning Systems to give advice about travel routes and destinations. Virtual classrooms supplement and sometimes replace face-to-face classroom experiences with web-based systems (such as Blackboard) that allow postings, virtual discussion sections with virtual whiteboards, as well as continuous access to course documents, outlines, and the like. Various forms of “bots” search for information about intestinal diseases, plan airline reservations to Tucson, and inform us of the release of new movies that might fit our cinematic preferences. Instead of talking to the agent at AAA, the professor, the librarian, the travel agent, or the cinema-file two doors down, we are interacting with electronic social agents. Some entrepreneurs are even trying to create toys that are sufficiently responsive to engender emotional attachments between the toy and its owner

The Future of Humanoid Robots

This book provides state of the art scientific and engineering research findings and developments in the field of humanoid robotics and its applications. It is expected that humanoids will change the way we interact with machines, and will have the ability to blend perfectly into an environment already designed for humans. The book contains chapters that aim to discover the future abilities of humanoid robots by presenting a variety of integrated research in various scientific and engineering fields, such as locomotion, perception, adaptive behavior, human-robot interaction, neuroscience and machine learning. The book is designed to be accessible and practical, with an emphasis on useful information to those working in the fields of robotics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, computational methods and other fields of science directly or indirectly related to the development and usage of future humanoid robots. The editor of the book has extensive R&D experience, patents, and publications in the area of humanoid robotics, and his experience is reflected in editing the content of the book

Traces on the Walls and Traces in the Air: Inscriptions and Gestures in Educational Design Team Meetings

Designers from various domains have relied extensively on the use of drawing and sketching to communicate their design ideas. Domains such as architecture and engineering design have well-established and refined visual languages. In these areas significant research is dedicated to the study of drawing and sketching. One design area that is lagging behind others is educational design. Very little is known in this field about how participants in teams use drawing and sketching to support their communication in design meetings. This study draws on an applied ethnomethodological perspective to investigate how participants in educational design meetings interact with each other, and with objects in their environment, while creating and attending to drawings. Two case studies involving four separate groups of designers were analysed. The first case involved the design of an educational blog and the second the design of an educational game. The meetings were conducted in the Design Studio, a purpose-built room for conducting research on educational design at the University of Sydney. The studio features two writable walls, which were widely used by the majority of participants in the study. The participants in this study created various types of inscriptions. Inscriptions are defined here as all types of drawings, sketches, and visual marks created in support of design activity. Inscriptions entail a shift from mental representations to social activity. A face-to-face design session often involves multimodal resources thus requiring the analysis of other modes such as gestures. In this study gestures were often used as an additional communicative channel. They functioned as complementary representational means through which the participants made sense of the inscriptions. Understanding the nuances involved in the way designers interact with inscriptions is a necessary step for building better tools, which may support more effective communication between experienced designers, and help novices as they learn to negotiate the design process. This thesis contributes to our understanding of multi-modal communication in educational design team meetings and has implications for the functioning of next-generation design tools and design environments, as well as for the training of educational designers

Becoming a redwood: a genealogy of expression in Dana Gioia’s poetry and Lori Laitman’s song cycle

Meaning in art song transforms from poet to composer to performer to listener. Together, various layers of meaning form a genealogy of expression. In this paper, I articulate a theory of expression genealogy, using the song cycle Becoming a Redwood, poems by Dana Gioia (b.1950) and music by Lori Laitman (b. 1955). I argue that a rich and credible performance depends upon awareness of this genealogy. I investigate the process of transforming Gioia's poetry into art song and how knowledge of that process informs performance and listener response. The study provides a methodology for performance that may be applied to other vocal music. To demonstrate the transformation of meaning in the multi-layered creative process, I employ several methods, including personal interviews with the composer and the poet, close readings of the four poems, and analysis of the musical settings

Authoring Multi-Actor Behaviors in Crowds With Diverse Personalities

Multi-actor simulation is critical to cinematic content creation, disaster and security simulation, and interactive entertainment. A key challenge is providing an appropriate interface for authoring high-fidelity virtual actors with featurerich control mechanisms capable of complex interactions with the environment and other actors. In this chapter, we present work that addresses the problem of behavior authoring at three levels: Individual and group interactions are conducted in an event-centric manner using parameterized behavior trees, social crowd dynamics are captured using the OCEAN personality model, and a centralized automated planner is used to enforce global narrative constraints on the scale of the entire simulation. We demonstrate the benefits and limitations of each of these approaches and propose the need for a single unifying construct capable of authoring functional, purposeful, autonomous actors which conform to a global narrative in an interactive simulation

Real-Time Storytelling with Events in Virtual Worlds

We present an accessible interactive narrative tool for creating stories among a virtual populace inhabiting a fully-realized 3D virtual world. Our system supports two modalities: assisted authoring where a human storyteller designs stories using a storyboard-like interface called CANVAS, and exploratory authoring where a human author experiences a story as it happens in real-time and makes on-the-fly narrative trajectory changes using a tool called Storycraft. In both cases, our system analyzes the semantic content of the world and the narrative being composed, and provides automated assistance such as completing partially-specified stories with causally complete sequences of intermediate actions. At its core, our system revolves around events -â?? pre-authored multi-actor task sequences describing interactions between groups of actors and props. These events integrate complex animation and interaction tasks with precision control and expose them as atoms of narrative significance to the story direction systems. Events are an accessible tool and conceptual metaphor for assembling narrative arcs, providing a tightly-coupled solution to the problem of converting author intent to real-time animation synthesis. Our system allows simple and straightforward macro- and microscopic control over large numbers of virtual characters with diverse and sophisticated behavior capabilities, and reduces the complicated action space of an interactive narrative by providing analysis and user assistance in the form of semi-automation and recommendation services