588 research outputs found
Alternative Presents and Speculative Futures: Designing fictions through the extrapolation and evasion of product lineages.
The core question addressed by this invited keynote and conference paper is how fictions are designed to negotiate, critique and realise the multiplicity of possible new technological futures. Focusing on methods, processes and strategies the presentation initially describes how things/technologies become products, employing the perspective of domestication to describe the transition from extraordinary to everyday. This development suggests a product history, a traceable lineage that goes back through generations, each one a small iteration of the previous. By modelling this lineage, design fictions can do two things:
1. Project current emerging technological development to create Speculative Futures: hypothetical products of tomorrow.
2. Break free of the lineage to speculate on Alternative Presents.
These fictions effectively act as cultural litmus paper, either offering vignettes of how it might be to live with the technology in question or challenging contemporary applications of technology through demonstrable alternatives.
The presentation focused on how these two types of fiction are created, how they differ from science fiction, other modes of future thinking and technological critique - more specifically how both methodologies utilise designed artefacts. What informs the development, aesthetics, behaviour, interactions and function of these objects? Once created, how and where do they operate? How can we gauge and understand their impact and meaning?
As a consequence of the presentation Auger was invited to run workshops and projects in Basel (Hochschule fĂŒr Gestaltung und Kunst) and HEAD (Haute Ă©cole dâart et de design), Geneva and is advising on the design of a new masters programme at the Basel Hochschule
Identification of the Isotherm Function in Chromatography Using CMA-ES
This paper deals with the identification of the flux for a system of
conservation laws in the specific example of analytic chromatography. The
fundamental equations of chromatographic process are highly non linear. The
state-of-the-art Evolution Strategy, CMA-ES (the Covariance Matrix Adaptation
Evolution Strategy), is used to identify the parameters of the so-called
isotherm function. The approach was validated on different configurations of
simulated data using either one, two or three components mixtures. CMA-ES is
then applied to real data cases and its results are compared to those of a
gradient-based strategy
Alternative timelines: Counterfactuals as an approach to design pedagogy
Counterfactual histories modify the outcome of a historical event and then extrapolate an alternative version of history. In literature, imaginaries based on a counterfactual history can offer thought-provoking insights on contemporary life:  Itâs America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. The few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names. In San Francisco the I Ching is as common as the Yellow Pages. All because some 20 years earlier the United States lost a war and is now occupied jointly by Nazi Germany and Japan. (Dick, 1992)  The Man in the High Castle describes the consequences of one popular starting point for counterfactual histories, Germany winning World War II. Historians tend to focus on military "decision points" at which events could have taken another path (Bernstein, 2000), or they imagine the absence of powerful individuals to speculate on how things might have been different. Since history is âoften written by the victors, it tends to âcrush the unfulfilled potential of the pastâ, as Walter Benjamin so aptly put it. By giving a voice to the âlosersâ of history, the counterfactual approach allows for a reversal of perspectivesâ (Deluermoz & SingaravĂ©lou, 2021). A counterfactual approach offers much potential as a methodology for practice-based design research and pedagogy â designers typically design for the world as it is rather than as it could be (Dunne & Raby, 2013). Design happens within entrenched systems whose foundations in many cases were laid centuries ago. Systems of economy, infrastructure and popular culture inform and constrain design methods, motivations and approaches to the evaluation of designed artefacts. Technological advances are applied via these rules, facilitating the iterative development of products and providing a neat lineage from the past and, more importantly, into the future (Auger et al, 2017). This version of design is increasingly being revealed as fundamentally flawed â highly successful in placating shareholders, it is not fit for purpose where ethical or environmental issues are concerned.  Counterfactuals provide an almost surreptitious method of combining design theory with practice. Through a rigorous analysis of history, the designer identifies key elements that are problematic when viewed through a contemporary lens. The approach can expose dominant structures of power and the influence these have on design culture and metrics: for example, the influence of legacy systems and how they limit the imagination and reveal the hidden or unexpected historical events that influenced the timeline. In A New Scottish Enlightenment, Mohammed J. Ali proposes a different outcome to the 1979 Scottish independence referendum (Debatty, 2014). A âyesâ vote leads to the creation of a new Scottish government, whose ultimate goal is the delivery of energy independence and a future free from fossil fuels. The project was exhibited shortly before the 2014 referendum. This starting point (a yes or no vote) resonates because it vividly presents a life that could have been. It makes us think about the power of our vote and the potential implications of a âbad choiceâ. The second aspect that gives the project wider relevance is the agenda used to drive extrapolation from its fictional starting point â a simple paradigm shift on energy generation and distribution. By defining energy independence as a national goal, it becomes possible to outline the ways this might happen. Important earlier examples of a counterfactual approach to design include Pohflepp and Chambers (Auger, 2012; Dunne & Raby, 2013).  Here is a rough summary of a counterfactual design methodology:  1.   The approach begins with the choice of subject â what is to be designed and the creation of a detailed and diverse timeline of its history. 2.   The identification of key moments that have led to the state of things; in particular the elements that could be critiqued from alternative value systems. 3.   The creation of a counterfactual timeline based on numerous possibilities â this is the key difference in method between historiography and design. The approach facilitates the creation of new value systems, motivations, rules and constraints that can be applied in practice. 4.   The design of things along the new timeline; it can be furnished at key moments with artefacts informed by the alternative rules.  A recent Masterâs project at the Ăcole normale supĂ©rieure Paris-Saclay followed this brief. Themes included rethinking approaches to aging based on the elimination of the royalist doctrines of 18th century France; a counterfactual history of agriculture with the tool acting as intermediary between the person working and their environment; and the archive â an examination of the modalities for a deployment of queer, feminist and trans-feminist archive design forms in everyday life. With its focus on underrepresented groups and unrealised possibilities, this last concept resonates with a broader discourse about decolonising design. What alternative value systems and approaches to design might have emerged if 20th-century design history had not been defined by the works of Morris, Dreyfus, Bel Geddes, Gropius, Rams, Starck, Ives, Dyson, and the rest?  Taking up Benjaminâs point about âthe unfulfilled potential of the pastâ, the most vital use of counterfactuals in design is to allow different voices to emerge that were drowned out by dominant or âstandardâ narrative(s). Recognising alternative histories can open up valuable future paths and create space for new possibilities and imaginaries to flourish. Works Cited  Auger, James (2012). Why Robot? Speculative design, the domestication of technology and the considered future. PhD thesis, Royal College of Art, London.  Auger, James, Hanna, Julian and Encinas, Enrique (2017). Reconstrained Design. Nordes, Oslo, 2-4 June 2017. ISSN 1604-9705.  Bernstein, R. B. (2000). Review of Ferguson, Niall, ed., Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals. H-Law, H-Net Reviews. http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=3721  Chambers, James (2010). Artificial Defence Mechanisms. https://jameschambers.co.uk/artificial-defense-mechanisms  Debatty, RĂ©gine (2014). A New Scottish Enlightenment. We Make Money Not Art. https://we-make-money-not-art.com/a_new_scottish_enlightenment/  Deluermoz, Quentin & Pierre SingaravĂ©lou (2021). A Past of Possibilities: A History of What Could Have Been. Yale University Press.  Dick, Phillip K. (1992). The Man in the High Castle. Vintage.  Dunne, Anthony & Fiona Raby (2013). Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. MIT Press.  Pohflepp, Sascha (2009). The Golden Institute. http://cargocollective.com/saschapohflepp/Work/The-Golden-Institut
Counterfactual and alternative histories as design practice
The version of design that was shaped and perfected during the 20th Century played a huge role in the making of the modern (global northern) world. Whilst designâs potential as a contributor to the making of worlds is clear, its methods, metrics and purposes have led to a world that is increasingly revealed as fragile, broken and unsustainable. In other words, design today is complicit in the breaking of the world â this essay describes a practice-based design research approach to the making of other worlds. Borrowing from the literary approaches of counterfactual and alternative histories and imaginative fiction, it aims to facilitate the development of new approaches to design, informed through alternative ideologies, methods and motivations.The counterfactual approach allows us to imagine other ways to be, in this case through the application of alternative value systems, a non-additive approach to technology and a removal of the constraints imposed by history. The approach can be summed up as follows: 1. Definition of the theme followed by a broad mapping of its related systems.2. The creation of a counterfactual timeline based on a different outcome of one or more of the events identified on the real timeline.3. The design of things along the new timeline: hypothetical products, advertising campaigns, images, texts â evidence of the new value system in action.The most vital use of counterfactuals in design is to allow different voices to emerge that were silenced by the dominant, hegemonic or âstandardâ narrative(s). As we argue in this essay, illustrated with examples from past and current student projects, alternative histories can open up valuable future paths and create space for rich new imaginaries to flourish
Afterlife Project.
As our lives are increasingly mediated by advances in science, engineering and technological interventions, the After-Life project raises the issue of our increasing faith in technology and the Westâs decreasing belief in organized religion.
With this in mind the afterlife project offers a technologically mediated service that offers a tangible expression of afterlife for those who have become spiritually disconnected, or require hard evidence in some form of life after death.
The grieving process from an atheistâs perspective can be problematic with the concept of afterlife or other place, by definition being discounted. Fundamental to most religions is a concept of some other state or heaven, offering comfort to the faithful. What then is there for the atheist with regard to reassurance or comfort after the death of a loved one?
Using a Microbial Fuel Cell we are able to capture the chemical potential of a dead loved one to create a small electrical current and store it in a battery.
This battery may then be placed in a range of electronic products.
This may be interpreted as a form of afterlife especially in the context of batteries, which are often described in terms of life, extra life, and now afterlife.
Accepting this electronic state as life after death we are provided with a tangible proof of life after biological expiry
Blueprint for fault-tolerant quantum computation with Rydberg atoms
We present a blueprint for building a fault-tolerant universal quantum computer with Rydberg atoms. Our scheme, which is based on the surface code, uses individually addressable, optically trapped atoms as qubits and exploits electromagnetically induced transparency to perform the multiqubit gates required for error correction and computation. We discuss the advantages and challenges of using Rydberg atoms to build such a quantum computer, and we perform error correction simulations to obtain an error threshold for our scheme. Our findings suggest that Rydberg atoms are a promising candidate for quantum computation, but gate fidelities need to improve before fault-tolerant universal quantum computation can be achieved
Reconstrained Design: A Manifesto
This manifesto marks the first anniversary of a project, Reconstrained Design, launched explicitly to challenge the state of design: its narrowing pathways, prevailing assumptions, and corporate agendas. Our manifesto takes the form of a preamble which outlines the history of the manifesto genre and its origins in the historical avant-garde of a century ago, followed by a list of 12 tenets that put forward specific design challenges (each based on or challenging a thought-provoking quotation). With this text we aim to pry open new discursive and imaginative spaces, to force new ideas into the public view, to promote engagement with politics, technology and other facets of everyday life, and to upset the status quo of design thinking. It is written in an appropriately polemical style in order to take at its word the call to provocation. We hope this manifesto will establish our project's aims while encouraging important discussions between conference participants
Fault-tolerance thresholds for the surface code with fabrication errors
The construction of topological error correction codes requires the ability
to fabricate a lattice of physical qubits embedded on a manifold with a
non-trivial topology such that the quantum information is encoded in the global
degrees of freedom (i.e. the topology) of the manifold. However, the
manufacturing of large-scale topological devices will undoubtedly suffer from
fabrication errors---permanent faulty components such as missing physical
qubits or failed entangling gates---introducing permanent defects into the
topology of the lattice and hence significantly reducing the distance of the
code and the quality of the encoded logical qubits. In this work we investigate
how fabrication errors affect the performance of topological codes, using the
surface code as the testbed. A known approach to mitigate defective lattices
involves the use of primitive SWAP gates in a long sequence of syndrome
extraction circuits. Instead, we show that in the presence of fabrication
errors the syndrome can be determined using the supercheck operator approach
and the outcome of the defective gauge stabilizer generators without any
additional computational overhead or the use of SWAP gates. We report numerical
fault-tolerance thresholds in the presence of both qubit fabrication and gate
fabrication errors using a circuit-based noise model and the minimum-weight
perfect matching decoder. Our numerical analysis is most applicable to 2D
chip-based technologies, but the techniques presented here can be readily
extended to other topological architectures. We find that in the presence of 8%
qubit fabrication errors, the surface code can still tolerate a computational
error rate of up to 0.1%.Comment: 10 pages, 15 figure
On the influence of statistics on the determination of the mean value of the depth of shower maximum for ultra high energy cosmic ray showers
The chemical composition of ultra high energy cosmic rays is still uncertain.
The latest results obtained by the Pierre Auger Observatory and the HiRes
Collaboration, concerning the measurement of the mean value and the
fluctuations of the atmospheric depth at which the showers reach the maximum
development, Xmax, are inconsistent. From comparison with air shower
simulations it can be seen that, while the Auger data may be interpreted as a
gradual transition to heavy nuclei for energies larger than ~ 2-3x10^18 eV, the
HiRes data are consistent with a composition dominated by protons. In Ref. [1]
it is suggested that a possible explanation of the observed deviation of the
mean value of Xmax from the proton expectation, observed by Auger, could
originate in a statistical bias arising from the approximated exponential shape
of the Xmax distribution, combined with the decrease of the number of events as
a function of primary energy. In this paper we consider a better description of
the Xmax distribution and show that the possible bias in the Auger data is at
least one order of magnitude smaller than the one obtained when assuming an
exponential distribution. Therefore, we conclude that the deviation of the
Auger data from the proton expectation is unlikely explained by such
statistical effect.Comment: To be published in Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physic
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