Helping students connect: architecting learning spaces for experiential and transactional reflection

Given the complex and varied contexts that inform students’ consciousness and occasion their learning, learning spaces are more than physical and virtual spaces. Learning spaces are also a range of situations sedimented in our continuum of experiences that shape our philosophical orientations. As such, this article, written from the perspectives of two faculty members in an English department at a four-year public university, describes our efforts to do the following. First, to draw upon models of instructional design we have experienced in our own educational backgrounds; and equally importantly, to develop learning spaces that support learning that is continuous, situated, and personal. Specifically, we critique the ways in which learning has been segregated from the rest of our life contexts for us throughout our educational histories. The irony is that this de-segregation has motivated us to create diverse learning spaces that provide our students with a more realistic set of tools and techniques for integrative life-long learning

Cartographic Interfaces for Hybrid Spaces: Communication Design in the Spatial turn.

Marco Quaggiotto Research Fellow Politecnico di Milano Italy [email protected] Giovanni Baule Full Professor Politecnico di Milano Italy [email protected] The paradigm brought by the Spatial turn and its merging of material and immaterial spaces in a new hybrid space, together with the widespread use of geolocalisation, establishes a deep connection between everyday actions and their immediate and constant geo-spatial positioning. In this context, Communication Design is required to provide access to a hybrid territory that mixes physical locations with the immaterial qualities of context and information. Maps, as interfaces to the spatial dimension, provide tools to represent, narrate, access and act on the complexity of the territory. As narratives, maps are able to address the complexity of space providing shared abstractions and virtual spaces of interpretation. As tools, maps build synthetic spaces for action, which allow manipulating virtual territories that merge real and abstract qualities for specific purposes. As containers, maps reveal accumulations of hidden resources, making implicit contents readable. In a scenario in which digital tools drive design actions toward the design of representation processes, the need is that to supply methods and tools capable of managing narrative and instrumental components of cultural artefacts. Digital cartography, from a Design perspective, is not only about portraying the complexity of space, but also about designing interfaces to provide access to hybrid spaces

Automatic Structural Scene Digitalization

In this paper, we present an automatic system for the analysis and labeling of structural scenes, floor plan drawings in Computer-aided Design (CAD) format. The proposed system applies a fusion strategy to detect and recognize various components of CAD floor plans, such as walls, doors, windows and other ambiguous assets. Technically, a general rule-based filter parsing method is fist adopted to extract effective information from the original floor plan. Then, an image-processing based recovery method is employed to correct information extracted in the first step. Our proposed method is fully automatic and real-time. Such analysis system provides high accuracy and is also evaluated on a public website that, on average, archives more than ten thousands effective uses per day and reaches a relatively high satisfaction rate.Comment: paper submitted to PloS On

The Art of the Interface in Mixed Realities: Predessors and Visions

The approach of this paper is broad and historical; it attempts to expand a narrow technical view by looking at historic art media together with contemporary media art. By focusing on recent art against the backdrop of historic developments, it is possible to better analyze and grasp what is really new in media art and, using cornerstones from the history of media of illusion and immersion, it is a material and theoretical contribution to a new, emerging discipline: the science of the image. Where and how does the new genre of virtual art fit into the art history of illusion and immersion in the image, that is, how do older elements continue to live on and influence this contemporary art? What part does this play in the current metamorphosis of the concepts of art and the image

Moveable worlds/digital scenographies

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ Intellect Ltd 2010.The mixed reality choreographic installation UKIYO explored in this article reflects an interest in scenographic practices that connect physical space to virtual worlds and explore how performers can move between material and immaterial spaces. The spatial design for UKIYO is inspired by Japanese hanamichi and western fashion runways, emphasizing the research production company's commitment to various creative crossovers between movement languages, innovative wearable design for interactive performance, acoustic and electronic sound processing and digital image objects that have a plastic as well as an immaterial/virtual dimension. The work integrates various forms of making art in order to visualize things that are not in themselves visual, or which connect visual and kinaesthetic/tactile/auditory experiences. The ‘Moveable Worlds’ in this essay are also reflections of the narrative spaces, subtexts and auditory relationships in the mutating matrix of an installation-space inviting the audience to move around and follow its sensorial experiences, drawn near to the bodies of the dancers.Brunel University, the British Council, and the Japan Foundation

A Smartphone-Based System for Outdoor Data Gathering Using a Wireless Beacon Network and GPS Data: From Cyber Spaces to Senseable Spaces

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and mobile devices are deeply influencing all facets of life, directly affecting the way people experience space and time. ICTs are also tools for supporting urban development, and they have also been adopted as equipment for furnishing public spaces. Hence, ICTs have created a new paradigm of hybrid space that can be defined as Senseable Spaces. Even if there are relevant cases where the adoption of ICT has made the use of public open spaces more “smart”, the interrelation and the recognition of added value need to be further developed. This is one of the motivations for the research presented in this paper. The main goal of the work reported here is the deployment of a system composed of three different connected elements (a real-world infrastructure, a data gathering system, and a data processing and analysis platform) for analysis of human behavior in the open space of Cardeto Park, in Ancona, Italy. For this purpose, and because of the complexity of this task, several actions have been carried out: the deployment of a complete real-world infrastructure in Cardeto Park, the implementation of an ad-hoc smartphone application for the gathering of participants’ data, and the development of a data pre-processing and analysis system for dealing with all the gathered data. A detailed description of these three aspects and the way in which they are connected to create a unique system is the main focus of this paper.This work has been supported by the Cost Action TU1306, called CYBERPARKS: Fostering knowledge about the relationship between Information and Communication Technologies and Public Spaces supported by strategies to improve their use and attractiveness, the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the ESPHIA project (ref. TIN2014-56042-JIN) and the TARSIUS project (ref. TIN2015-71564-C4-4-R), and the Basque Country Department of Education under the BLUE project (ref. PI-2016-0010). The authors would also like to thank the staff of UbiSive s.r.l. for the support in developing the application

Spatio-Temporal Patterns act as Computational Mechanisms governing Emergent behavior in Robotic Swarms

open access articleOur goal is to control a robotic swarm without removing its swarm-like nature. In other words, we aim to intrinsically control a robotic swarm emergent behavior. Past attempts at governing robotic swarms or their selfcoordinating emergent behavior, has proven ineffective, largely due to the swarm’s inherent randomness (making it difficult to predict) and utter simplicity (they lack a leader, any kind of centralized control, long-range communication, global knowledge, complex internal models and only operate on a couple of basic, reactive rules). The main problem is that emergent phenomena itself is not fully understood, despite being at the forefront of current research. Research into 1D and 2D Cellular Automata has uncovered a hidden computational layer which bridges the micromacro gap (i.e., how individual behaviors at the micro-level influence the global behaviors on the macro-level). We hypothesize that there also lie embedded computational mechanisms at the heart of a robotic swarm’s emergent behavior. To test this theory, we proceeded to simulate robotic swarms (represented as both particles and dynamic networks) and then designed local rules to induce various types of intelligent, emergent behaviors (as well as designing genetic algorithms to evolve robotic swarms with emergent behaviors). Finally, we analysed these robotic swarms and successfully confirmed our hypothesis; analyzing their developments and interactions over time revealed various forms of embedded spatiotemporal patterns which store, propagate and parallel process information across the swarm according to some internal, collision-based logic (solving the mystery of how simple robots are able to self-coordinate and allow global behaviors to emerge across the swarm)

Fortnight

Fortnight is a two-week long, fully immersive, experience based in the interactions and communications of daily life. Up to 200 participants sign up to receive messages that are sent to their mobile phones, email, and home address; these messages contain a series of poetic nudges that encourage those participating to question their sense of place. Participants also receive daily invitations to visit locations throughout their city where they can pause to reflect on what it means to be here now. Fortnight enables the experience of “theatre” to penetrate beneath a seemingly brittle aesthetic surface of performance, deep into the consciousnesses of our participants as they begin to interact with and perceive world around us as the performance itself; the place where we act out our own daily lives. In Fortnight, the spectator becomes participant; the journey becomes narrative. Fortnight therefore subverts the notion of an audience, in which each spectator’s perspective is forced to examine not the situation and setting of performers on a stage, but rather the situation and setting of our own sense of place and the meaning we apportion to our everyday lives. Fortnight uses various forms of ubiquitous technology such as: Radio Frequency Identification (aka, RFID tags of the type contained in key fobs), which are used in badges sent to each participant that allow them to interact with real-world “portals” to trigger certain effects in their surroundings; QR technology (in the form of barcodes on posters that reveal additional hidden messages, should the participant choose to delve further; SMS messages; email; and, Twitter. Alongside this, older modes of communication such as handwritten letters, give Fortnight a decidedly low-fi aesthetic. Throughout Fortnight, participants are encouraged to explore the creative possibilities of pervasive and communicative media without reverting to mere technological fetishism. In Fortnight, each mode of communication is used not only for its functionality but also as symbols that bind the project and the participant together, rooting them to the here and now with the everyday tools of modern society. The mediated messages within Fortnight lead participants down a living, breathing rabbit hole where the familiar becomes unfamiliar and reality distorts. The project becomes an experience for the participant that is as immersive as their own life; creating an alternative reality, that not only co-exists alongside their own everyday realities, but also merges with them.This is a performance with shared responsibilities, reflecting the actions and consequences of our daily lives: what we put in, we get out