Encoding data into physical objects with digitally fabricated textures

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2013.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 125-128).This thesis presents and outlines a system for encoding physical passive objects with deterministic surface features that contain identifying information about that object. The goal of such work is to take steps towards a self-descriptive universe in which all objects contain within their physical structure hooks to information about how they can be used, how they can be fixed, what they're used for, who uses them, etc. By exploring modern manufacturing processes, several techniques for creating these deterministic textures are presented. Of high importance is the advancement of 3D printing technologies. By leveraging the rapid prototyping capabilities such machines offer, this thesis looks at how personalized objects and draft models may be encoded with data that allows annotations, ideas, and notes to be associated with physical points across that object. Whereas barcodes, QR codes, and RFID tags are often used to associate a single object with a single piece of data, this technique of encoding surfaces will allow for many points of identification to be placed on a single object, enabling applications in learning, group interaction, and gaming.by Travis Rich.S.M

Toward New Ecologies of Cyberphysical Representational Forms, Scales, and Modalities

Research on tangible user interfaces commonly focuses on tangible interfaces acting alone or in comparison with screen-based multi-touch or graphical interfaces. In contrast, hybrid approaches can be seen as the norm for established mainstream interaction paradigms. This dissertation describes interfaces that support complementary information mediations, representational forms, and scales toward an ecology of systems embodying hybrid interaction modalities. I investigate systems combining tangible and multi-touch, as well as systems combining tangible and virtual reality interaction. For each of them, I describe work focusing on design and fabrication aspects, as well as work focusing on reproducibility, engagement, legibility, and perception aspects

Electronic Imaging & the Visual Arts. EVA 2019 Florence

The Publication is following the yearly Editions of EVA FLORENCE. The State of Art is presented regarding the Application of Technologies (in particular of digital type) to Cultural Heritage. The more recent results of the Researches in the considered Area are presented. Information Technologies of interest for Culture Heritage are presented: multimedia systems, data-bases, data protection, access to digital content, Virtual Galleries. Particular reference is reserved to digital images (Electronic Imaging & the Visual Arts), regarding Cultural Institutions (Museums, Libraries, Palace - Monuments, Archaeological Sites). The International Conference includes the following Sessions: Strategic Issues; New Science and Culture Developments & Applications; New Technical Developments & Applications; Cultural Activities – Real and Virtual Galleries and Related Initiatives, Access to the Culture Information. One Workshop regards Innovation and Enterprise. The more recent results of the Researches at national and international level are reported in the Area of Technologies and Culture Heritage, also with experimental demonstrations of developed Activities

An aesthetics of touch: investigating the language of design relating to form

How well can designers communicate qualities of touch? This paper presents evidence that they have some capability to do so, much of which appears to have been learned, but at present make limited use of such language. Interviews with graduate designer-makers suggest that they are aware of and value the importance of touch and materiality in their work, but lack a vocabulary to fully relate to their detailed explanations of other aspects such as their intent or selection of materials. We believe that more attention should be paid to the verbal dialogue that happens in the design process, particularly as other researchers show that even making-based learning also has a strong verbal element to it. However, verbal language alone does not appear to be adequate for a comprehensive language of touch. Graduate designers-makers’ descriptive practices combined non-verbal manipulation within verbal accounts. We thus argue that haptic vocabularies do not simply describe material qualities, but rather are situated competences that physically demonstrate the presence of haptic qualities. Such competencies are more important than groups of verbal vocabularies in isolation. Design support for developing and extending haptic competences must take this wide range of considerations into account to comprehensively improve designers’ capabilities

Big Data and the Digitalizing Society in China

This thesis investigates the development of big data and the smart city, and the relationship between humans, digital technologies, and cities in the context of China. Contributing to the emerging interest of human geography in how big data and other digital technologies reshape the urban space and everyday life, the thesis presents a distinct data story about a digitalizing society of China. In a big data era, accompanying the ubiquity of digital devices and technologies is the lack of consciousness of their socio-political consequences, which nonetheless constitute an important productive aspect of society. Engaging with the discussions in human geography and beyond about the relationships between digital technologies and Deleuzian ‘societies of control’, Maurizio Lazzarato’s work on the production of subjectivity and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s conception of the machine and the organism, I argue for further understandings of the coexistence of control and discipline as distinct yet dependent modes of social control. I place specific emphasis upon the coexisting processes of dividualisation and individualisation in the operation of big data and other digital technologies. The thesis further illustrates this through the empirical analysis of the development of two smart urbanism projects, the City Brain and the Health Code, and of short video platforms in China, which for me represent two different aspects of everyday life influenced by big data that concern two different political relations, that is, biopolitics, as understood by Michel Foucault, and noopolitics (i.e., politics of the mind) as understood by Lazzarato. In order to de-fetishize big data, the thesis proceeds to discuss its technicity by characterising big data as mnemotechnics, a real-time technology, and a cosmotechnology respectively through the work of philosophers Bernard Stiegler and Yuk Hui. This intervention is also a proposal to rethink and reinvent the relations between humans and digital technology. Turning to Foucault’s ‘aesthetic of existence’, the thesis discusses the possibility of alternative ways of life in a big data era and drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s work, proposes ‘becoming a digital nomad’ as a methodology to live with digital technologies, explore new possibilities and events, embrace unplanned encounters, and make new, temporary connections in the big data era