Design and semantics of form and movement (DeSForM 2006)

Design and Semantics of Form and Movement (DeSForM) grew from applied research exploring emerging design methods and practices to support new generation product and interface design. The products and interfaces are concerned with: the context of ubiquitous computing and ambient technologies and the need for greater empathy in the pre-programmed behaviour of the ‘machines’ that populate our lives. Such explorative research in the CfDR has been led by Young, supported by Kyffin, Visiting Professor from Philips Design and sponsored by Philips Design over a period of four years (research funding £87k). DeSForM1 was the first of a series of three conferences that enable the presentation and debate of international work within this field: • 1st European conference on Design and Semantics of Form and Movement (DeSForM1), Baltic, Gateshead, 2005, Feijs L., Kyffin S. & Young R.A. eds. • 2nd European conference on Design and Semantics of Form and Movement (DeSForM2), Evoluon, Eindhoven, 2006, Feijs L., Kyffin S. & Young R.A. eds. • 3rd European conference on Design and Semantics of Form and Movement (DeSForM3), New Design School Building, Newcastle, 2007, Feijs L., Kyffin S. & Young R.A. eds. Philips sponsorship of practice-based enquiry led to research by three teams of research students over three years and on-going sponsorship of research through the Northumbria University Design and Innovation Laboratory (nuDIL). Young has been invited on the steering panel of the UK Thinking Digital Conference concerning the latest developments in digital and media technologies. Informed by this research is the work of PhD student Yukie Nakano who examines new technologies in relation to eco-design textiles

The Unsupervised Acquisition of a Lexicon from Continuous Speech

We present an unsupervised learning algorithm that acquires a natural-language lexicon from raw speech. The algorithm is based on the optimal encoding of symbol sequences in an MDL framework, and uses a hierarchical representation of language that overcomes many of the problems that have stymied previous grammar-induction procedures. The forward mapping from symbol sequences to the speech stream is modeled using features based on articulatory gestures. We present results on the acquisition of lexicons and language models from raw speech, text, and phonetic transcripts, and demonstrate that our algorithm compares very favorably to other reported results with respect to segmentation performance and statistical efficiency.Comment: 27 page technical repor

Extended Cognition, The New Mechanists’ Mutual Manipulability Criterion, and The Challenge of Trivial Extendedness

Many authors have turned their attention to the notion of constitution to determine whether the hypothesis of extended cognition (EC) is true. One common strategy is to make sense of constitution in terms of the new mechanists’ mutual manipulability account (MM). In this paper I will show that MM is insufficient. The Challenge of Trivial Extendedness arises due to the fact that mechanisms for cognitive behaviors are extended in a way that should not count as verifying EC. This challenge can be met by adding a necessary condition: cognitive constituents satisfy MM and they are what I call behavior unspecific

Supporting public participation through interactive

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Information Management, specialization in Geographic Information SystemsCitizen participation as a key priority of open cities, gives citizens the chance to influence public decision-making. Effectively engaging broader types of citizens into high participation levels has long been an issue due to various situational and technical constrains. Traditional public participation technologies (e.g. public hearing) usually are blame for low accessibility by the general public. The development of Information Communication Technology brings new methods to engage a broader spectrum of citizens in deeper participation level during urban planning processes. Interactive public displays as a public communication medium, hold some key advantages in comparison to other media. Compared to personal devices, public displays make public spaces into sociable places, where social communication and interaction can be enriched without intentionally or unintentionally excluding some groups’ opinions. Public displays can increase the visibility of public events while it is more flexible and up-to-date regarding showing information. Besides, they can also foster a collective awareness and support group behavioral changes. Moreover, due to the public nature of public displays, they provide broad accessibility to different groups of citizens. Public displays have a great potential in bringing new opportunities to facilitate public participation in an urban planning process. In the light of previous work on public displays, the research goal is to investigate a relatively new form of citizen participation known as Public Display Participation. This participation form refers to the use of public displays for citizen participation in the context of urban planning. The main research question of the thesis is how public displays can be used for facilitating citizen consultation in an urban planning process. First, a systematic literature review is done to get an understanding of the current achievements and gaps of research on public displays for public participation. Second, an elicitation study has been conducted to design end user centered interactions with public displays for citizens’ consulting activities. Finally, we run a usability to evaluate the usability of public displays for citizen consultation and their user experience. The main contributions of this thesis can be summarized as: (1) the identification of key challenges and opportunities for future research in using public displays for public participation in urban contexts; (2) two sets of user-defined gestures for two sets of user-defined phone gestures and hand gestures for performing eleven consulting activities, which are about examining the urban planning designs and giving feedback related to design alternatives, are also identified. (3) a new approach for using public displays for voting and commenting in urban planning, and a multi-level evaluation of a prototypical system implementing the proposed approach. Designers and researchers can use the contributions of this thesis, to create interactive public displays for supporting higher public participat i.e. citizen collaboration and empowerment

Cross-device gaze-supported point-to-point content transfer

Within a pervasive computing environment, we see content on shared displays that we wish to acquire and use in a specific way i.e., with an application on a personal device, transferring from point-to-point. The eyes as input can indicate intention to interact with a service, providing implicit pointing as a result. In this paper we investigate the use of gaze and manual input for the positioning of gaze-acquired content on personal devices. We evaluate two main techniques, (1) Gaze Positioning, transfer of content using gaze with manual input to confirm actions, (2) Manual Positioning, content is selected with gaze but final positioning is performed by manual input, involving a switch of modalities from gaze to manual input. A first user study compares these techniques applied to direct and indirect manual input configurations, a tablet with touch input and a laptop with mouse input. A second study evaluated our techniques in an application scenario involving distractor targets. Our overall results showed general acceptance and understanding of all conditions, although there were clear individual user preferences dependent on familiarity and preference toward gaze, touch, or mouse input