GeoCoin:supporting ideation and collaborative design with location-based smart contracts

Design and HCI researchers are increasingly working with complex digital infrastructures, such as cryptocurrencies, distributed ledgers and smart contracts. These technologies will have a profound impact on digital systems and their audiences. However, given their emergent nature and technical complexity, involving non-specialists in the design of applications that employ these technologies is challenging. In this paper, we discuss these challenges and present GeoCoin, a location-based platform for embodied learning and speculative ideating with smart contracts. In collaborative workshops with GeoCoin, participants engaged with location-based smart contracts, using the platform to explore digital `debit' and `credit' zones in the city. These exercises led to the design of diverse distributed-ledger applications, for time-limited financial unions, participatory budgeting, and humanitarian aid. These results contribute to the HCI community by demonstrating how an experiential prototype can support understanding of the complexities behind new digital infrastructures and facilitate participant engagement in ideation and design processes

Designing new socio-economic imaginaries

This short paper recovers the term ‘imaginaries’ which is often used in the social sciences to describe a meaning system that frames individuals lived experience of an inordinately complex world. The paper goes on to reflect on the extent to which design has the capability to disrupt imaginaries through the development of products in order for people to construct new ones, or whether the discipline is perpetuating old models of the world. The paper uses a workshop method to explore socioeconomic models in order to better balance the multiple imaginaries that participants hold with the opportunity to design disruptive and critical propositions. Reflections upon the workshop and the concept of imaginaries allows the authors to identify a challenge for design in which it must accept its role as mediator and exacerbator. <br/

Patterns of Design

In a straightforward meta-level shift of focus, we use design patterns as a medium and process for capturing insight about the process of design. We survey mainstream design genres, and draw conclusions about how they can help inform the design of intelligent systems

FinBook: literary content as digital commodity

This short essay explains the significance of the FinBook intervention, and invites the reader to participate. We have associated each chapter within this book with a financial robot (FinBot), and created a market whereby book content will be traded with financial securities. As human labour increasingly consists of unstable and uncertain work practices and as algorithms replace people on the virtual trading floors of the worlds markets, we see members of society taking advantage of FinBots to invest and make extra funds. Bots of all kinds are making financial decisions for us, searching online on our behalf to help us invest, to consume products and services. Our contribution to this compilation is to turn the collection of chapters in this book into a dynamic investment portfolio, and thereby play out what might happen to the process of buying and consuming literature in the not-so-distant future. By attaching identities (through QR codes) to each chapter, we create a market in which the chapter can ‘perform’. Our FinBots will trade based on features extracted from the authors’ words in this book: the political, ethical and cultural values embedded in the work, and the extent to which the FinBots share authors’ concerns; and the performance of chapters amongst those human and non-human actors that make up the market, and readership. In short, the FinBook model turns our work and the work of our co-authors into an investment portfolio, mediated by the market and the attention of readers. By creating a digital economy specifically around the content of online texts, our chapter and the FinBook platform aims to challenge the reader to consider how their personal values align them with individual articles, and how these become contested as they perform different value judgements about the financial performance of each chapter and the book as a whole. At the same time, by introducing ‘autonomous’ trading bots, we also explore the different ‘network’ affordances that differ between paper based books that’s scarcity is developed through analogue form, and digital forms of books whose uniqueness is reached through encryption. We thereby speak to wider questions about the conditions of an aggressive market in which algorithms subject cultural and intellectual items – books – to economic parameters, and the increasing ubiquity of data bots as actors in our social, political, economic and cultural lives. We understand that our marketization of literature may be an uncomfortable juxtaposition against the conventionally-imagined way a book is created, enjoyed and shared: it is intended to be

Argumentation Theory for Mathematical Argument

To adequately model mathematical arguments the analyst must be able to represent the mathematical objects under discussion and the relationships between them, as well as inferences drawn about these objects and relationships as the discourse unfolds. We introduce a framework with these properties, which has been used to analyse mathematical dialogues and expository texts. The framework can recover salient elements of discourse at, and within, the sentence level, as well as the way mathematical content connects to form larger argumentative structures. We show how the framework might be used to support computational reasoning, and argue that it provides a more natural way to examine the process of proving theorems than do Lamport's structured proofs.Comment: 44 pages; to appear in Argumentatio

Lichtsuchende

Lichtsuchende is an interactive installation that investigates relations between humans and robots. It consists of a group of robotic sunflowers that use light as a form of communication. It was created by Murray-Rust in collaboration with the design researcher Dr Rocio von Jungenfeld. It has been exhibited at nine international venues, including Edinburgh’s Hidden Door Festival (2014), the New Technology Art Awards, Ghent (2014) and GLOBALE: ExoEvolution (2015), curated by media theorist Peter Weibel, at the Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany – an important international venue for technological art. The work has reached audiences in excess of 40,000.Lichtsuchende was awarded the 2019 Lumen Prize, the British Computing Society Award for Artificial Intelligence and Art, which celebrates the best work created annually using art and technology from across the globe

The Declaratron: Semantic specification for scientific computation using MathML

Abstract. We introduce the Declaratron, a system which takes a declarative approach to specifying mathematically based scientific computation. This uses displayable mathematical notation (Content MathML) and is both executable and semantically well defined. We combine domain specific representations of physical science (e.g. CML, Chemical Markup Language), MathML formulae and computational specifications (DeXML) to create executable documents which include scientific data and mathematical formulae. These documents preserve the provenance of the data used, and build tight semantic links between components of mathematical formulae and domain objects—in effect grounding the mathematical semantics in the scientific domain. The Declaratron takes these specifications and i) carries out entity resolution and decoration to prepare for computation ii) uses a MathML execution engine to run calculations over the revised tree iii) outputs domain objects and the complete document to give both results and an encapsulated history of the computation. A short description of a case study is given to illustrate how the system can be used. Many scientific problems require frequent change of the mathematical functional form and the Declaratron provides this without requiring changes to code. Additionally, it supports reproducible science, machine indexing and semantic search of computations, makes implicit assumptions visible, and separates domain knowledge from computational techniques. We believe that the Declaratron could replace much conventional procedural code in science.

(Un)making AI Magic: A Design Taxonomy

This paper examines the role that enchantment plays in the design of AI things by constructing a taxonomy of design approaches that increase or decrease the perception of magic and enchantment. We start from the design discourse surrounding recent developments in AI technologies, highlighting specific interaction qualities such as algorithmic uncertainties and errors and articulating relations to the rhetoric of magic and supernatural thinking. Through analyzing and reflecting upon 52 students’ design projects from two editions of a Masters course in design and AI, we identify seven design principles and unpack the effects of each in terms of enchantment and disenchantment. We conclude by articulating ways in which this taxonomy can be approached and appropriated by design/HCI practitioners, especially to support exploration and reflexivity