An electronic architecture for mediating digital information in a hallway fac̦ade

Ubiquitous computing requires integration of physical space with digital information. This presents the challenges of integrating electronics, physical space, software and the interaction tools which can effectively communicate with the audience. Many research groups have embraced different techniques depending on location, context, space, and availability of necessary skills to make the world around us as an interface to the digital world. Encouraged by early successes and fostered by project undertaken by tangible visualization group. We introduce an architecture of Blades and Tiles for the development and realization of interactive wall surfaces. It provides an inexpensive, open-ended platform for constructing large-scale tangible and embedded interfaces. In this paper, we propose tiles built using inexpensive pegboards and a gateway for each of these tiles to provide access to digital information. The paper describes the architecture using a corridor fa\c{c}ade application. The corridor fa\c{c}ade uses full-spectrum LEDs, physical labels and stencils, and capacitive touch sensors to provide mediated representation, monitoring and querying of physical and digital content. Example contents include the physical and online status of people and the activity and dynamics of online research content repositories. Several complementary devices such as Microsoft PixelSense and smartdevices can support additional user interaction with the system. This enables interested people in synergistic physical environments to observe, explore, understand, and engage in ongoing activities and relationships. This paper describes the hardware architecture and software libraries employed and how they are used in our research center hallway and academic semester projects

Diffracting Artistic Intervention: A Transdisciplinary Approach to Understanding Creative Process in Art Education

Pedagogical possibilities for teaching and learning are uncovered through a propositional approach to inquiry that entangles recent findings in the neuroscience of creativity research with arts-based theory and practice. The transdisciplinary potential for creative dispositions to inform education and mobilize knowledge in new ways makes emergent findings regarding creativity- priming important for art educators. This research diffractively investigates the artistic experience of two arts-related groups engaging in creative activities, particularly those involving the planning, design, and artistic communication of ideas, to examine metacognition of the interoceptive (mindfulness) and exteroceptive (priming) influences asserted in the neuroscience of creativity. Assemblages of data are diffracted and read-through one another to illuminate congruences in the lived experience and creative processes of student artists, art educators, and artist-scientists, leading to transdisciplinary pedagogies and ecologies of practice

Generating Mobility and Power Through Art

This paper explores ideas of mobility and power using the case study Pedalpower for Bybrua, commissioned for ‘Stavanger 2008’ – Capital of Culture. Three pedal powered generators were made available to the community of Pedersgata - during daylight hours these devices were located in a number of public sites and situations - during nighttime, the stored energy was released as part of a pedestrian lighting system installed beneath the City Road Bridge ‘Bybrua’. This paper will focus on the only mobile generator; Bridgit – so called for it’s capacity to offer transit from one side of the bridge to the other. In an oil rich nation what would it mean to introduce more modest forms of energy production? How would the installation of a human powered lighting system change the way people perceived the underpass space? How might ‘human power’ change human behavior? What might the social, economic and environmental benefits be? This project demonstrates a number of practical interventions inspired by the critical writings of Ivan Illich and Henri Lefebvre. These sculptural devices allow the problems of contemporary mobility to be seen as generative opportunities – both in terms of dialogue and energy

Mapping the Current Landscape of Research Library Engagement with Emerging Technologies in Research and Learning: Final Report

The generation, dissemination, and analysis of digital information is a significant driver, and consequence, of technological change. As data and information stewards in physical and virtual space, research libraries are thoroughly entangled in the challenges presented by the Fourth Industrial Revolution:1 a societal shift powered not by steam or electricity, but by data, and characterized by a fusion of the physical and digital worlds.2 Organizing, structuring, preserving, and providing access to growing volumes of the digital data generated and required by research and industry will become a critically important function. As partners with the community of researchers and scholars, research libraries are also recognizing and adapting to the consequences of technological change in the practices of scholarship and scholarly communication. Technologies that have emerged or become ubiquitous within the last decade have accelerated information production and have catalyzed profound changes in the ways scholars, students, and the general public create and engage with information. The production of an unprecedented volume and diversity of digital artifacts, the proliferation of machine learning (ML) technologies,3 and the emergence of data as the “world’s most valuable resource,”4 among other trends, present compelling opportunities for research libraries to contribute in new and significant ways to the research and learning enterprise. Librarians are all too familiar with predictions of the research library’s demise in an era when researchers have so much information at their fingertips. A growing body of evidence provides a resounding counterpoint: that the skills, experience, and values of librarians, and the persistence of libraries as an institution, will become more important than ever as researchers contend with the data deluge and the ephemerality and fragility of much digital content. This report identifies strategic opportunities for research libraries to adopt and engage with emerging technologies,5 with a roughly fiveyear time horizon. It considers the ways in which research library values and professional expertise inform and shape this engagement, the ways library and library worker roles will be reconceptualized, and the implication of a range of technologies on how the library fulfills its mission. The report builds on a literature review covering the last five years of published scholarship, primarily North American information science literature, and interviews with a dozen library field experts, completed in fall 2019. It begins with a discussion of four cross-cutting opportunities that permeate many or all aspects of research library services. Next, specific opportunities are identified in each of five core research library service areas: facilitating information discovery, stewarding the scholarly and cultural record, advancing digital scholarship, furthering student learning and success, and creating learning and collaboration spaces. Each section identifies key technologies shaping user behaviors and library services, and highlights exemplary initiatives. Underlying much of the discussion in this report is the idea that “digital transformation is increasingly about change management”6 —that adoption of or engagement with emerging technologies must be part of a broader strategy for organizational change, for “moving emerging work from the periphery to the core,”7 and a broader shift in conceptualizing the research library and its services. Above all, libraries are benefitting from the ways in which emerging technologies offer opportunities to center users and move from a centralized and often siloed service model to embedded, collaborative engagement with the research and learning enterprise

Occlusion: Creating Disorientation, Fugue, and Apophenia in an Art Game

Occlusion is a procedurally randomized interactive art experience which uses the motifs of repetition, isolation, incongruity and mutability to develop an experience of a Folie àDeux: a madness shared by two. It draws from traditional video game forms, development methods, and tools to situate itself in context with games as well as other forms of interactive digital media. In this way, Occlusion approaches the making of game-like media from the art criticism perspective of Materiality, and the written work accompanying the prototype discusses critical aesthetic concerns for Occlusion both as an art experience borrowing from games and as a text that can be academically understood in relation to other practices of media making. In addition to the produced software artifact and written analysis, this thesis includes primary research in the form of four interviews with artists, authors, game makers and game critics concerning Materiality and dissociative themes in game-like media. The written work first introduces Occlusion in context with other approaches to procedural remixing, Glitch Art, net.art, and analogue and digital collage and décollage, with special attention to recontextualization and apophenia. The experience, visual, and audio design approach of Occlusion is reviewed through a discussion of explicit design choices which define generative space. Development process, release process, post-release distribution, testing, and maintenance are reviewed, and the paper concludes with a description of future work and a post- mortem discussion. Included as appendices are a full specification document, script, and transcripts of all interviews

State Funded Research Annual Report FY05

The University of Maine System is required to submit in January of each year an annual report on the utilization of state research appropriations for operations and state research capital bonds. The report is to cover the most recently completed fiscal year

CANDID PRIMER: Including Social Sciences and Humanities scholarship in the making and use of smart ICT technologies

publishedVersio

ICS Materials. Towards a re-Interpretation of material qualities through interactive, connected, and smart materials.

The domain of materials for design is changing under the influence of an increased technological advancement, miniaturization and democratization. Materials are becoming connected, augmented, computational, interactive, active, responsive, and dynamic. These are ICS Materials, an acronym that stands for Interactive, Connected and Smart. While labs around the world are experimenting with these new materials, there is the need to reflect on their potentials and impact on design. This paper is a first step in this direction: to interpret and describe the qualities of ICS materials, considering their experiential pattern, their expressive sensorial dimension, and their aesthetic of interaction. Through case studies, we analyse and classify these emerging ICS Materials and identified common characteristics, and challenges, e.g. the ability to change over time or their programmability by the designers and users. On that basis, we argue there is the need to reframe and redesign existing models to describe ICS materials, making their qualities emerge