Artificial Intelligence is a Character? Exploring design scenarios to build interface behaviours

The paper aims to illustrate the qualitative results of the first phase of the scenario research about voice interfaces, examining whether it is possible to design them as if they were a theatrical or cinematographic character. The research field intersects interaction design with character design, intended as the narrative construction of a character, and theatrical performances. The experimentation takes advantage of theatre workshops that aims to show, and understand, which are the main characteristics of a vocal interface and how to design them according to a performance approach. The paper ends illustrating how design can address actual opportunities and criticalities about emerging technologies, following a relations-based approach

Interaction and Verisimilitude. How Narration Can Foster the Design Process

The role of narrative in the construction of an interaction design project is relevant since the very beginning of the discipline, when scholars in the 1990s pointed out how the whole dialogue between human and computer was developed like a theater work. Actually, the use of narrative was, and still is, focused on the unfolding of the user experience with a product/service, following the story arc and using analysis and prediction tools like journey maps. If this approach corresponds to the state of the art for many scholars and practitioners, there is a large debate on in the process that involves storytelling techniques, especially during the concept generation and the branching of the interactions between people and artifacts’ system. In particular, design fiction and speculative design give a strong relevance to the creation not only of a story line but, above all, of the world building, where people and artifacts interacts inside a sketched out future scenario, letting the audience free to speculate, for example, on impacts on the society, ethical issues, acceptance levels. In this situation the narrative approach can be included into the interaction design process during all the phases, in order to foster designers to generate futureable artifacts strictly connected to Personas depicted as they were characters, placed in verisimilitude-based worlds. The paper will describe the results of this methodological experimentation focusing on the differences occurred to two different projects: basic research, research for a company

Environmental Atmospheric Turbulence at Florence Airport

We present an analysis of a time series of a wind strength measurements recorded at Florence airport in the period October 2002 - March 2003. The data were taken simultaneously by two runway head anemometers, located at a distance of 900 m, at a frequency of 3.3 10-3 Hz. The data show strong correlations over long time spans over a few tens of hours. We performed an analysis of wind velocity as it is usually done for turbulence laboratory experiments. Wind velocity returns and wind velocity differences were considered. The pdfs of these quantities exhibit strong non-Gaussian fat tails. The distribution of the standand deviations of the fluctuations can be successfully reproduced by a Gamma distribution, while the Log-normal one fails completely. Following Beck and Cohen superstatistics approach, we extract the Tsallis entropic index q from this Gamma distribution. The corresponding q-exponential curves reproduce with a very good accuracy the pdfs of returns and velocity differences.Comment: 6 pages. Talk presented by S.Rizzo at the 8th Experimental Chaos Conference 14-17 June Florence, Italy. To be published in the conference proceedings by AI

Neutron stars with submillisecond periods: a population of high mass objects?

Fast spinning neutron stars, recycled in low mass binaries, may have accreted a substantial amount of mass. The available relativistic measurements of neutron star masses, all clustering around 1.4 M_sun, however refer mostly to slowly rotating neutron stars which accreted a tiny amount of mass during evolution in a massive binary system. We develop a semi-analytical model for studying the evolution of the spin period P of a magnetic neutron star as a function of the baryonic mass load M_{ac}; evolution is followed down to submillisecond periods and the magnetic field is allowed to decay significantly before the end of recycling. We use different equations of state and include rotational deformation effects, the presence of a strong gravitational field and of a magnetosphere. For the non-magnetic case, comparison with numerical relativistic codes shows the accuracy of our description. The minimum accreted mass requested to spin-up a magnetized 1.35M_sun-neutron star at a few millisecond is 0.05 M_sun, while this value doubles for an unmagnetized neutron star. Below 1 millisecond the request is of at least 0.25 M_sun. There may exist a yet undetected population of massive submillisecond neutron stars. The discovery of a submillisecond neutron star would imply a lower limit for its mass of about 1.7M_sun.Comment: To appear in the Astrophysical Journal, June 199

ELECTRIC VEHICLE AND SUSTAINABLE MOBILITY: AN INNOVATIVE INTERFACE

The paper presents a concept of an innovative interaction structure for a digital electric vehicle (EV) dashboard. The structure connects interactions between vehicle, driver and traffic infrastructure, in order to help users driving in a conscious way, informing them about their performances and providing tools able to modify driving behaviour. Through the Systemic Design approach, it is possible to move from a quantitative configuration (set on consumption) to a new one set on resource optimization. The achievement is a new layout for the information visualization system designed for an electric vehicle able to communicate to the driver the environmental impact of its drive style

Territorial innovation, tourism and sustainability

There are several reasons why it is important and necessary to concern about Travel & Tourism today, one of those is evident, it is one of the world’s largest economic sectors (WTTC, 2019) and generates prosperity across the world. Despite this sector favors regional development, on the other hand, it has led to a range of sustainable issues in destinations and systems (Saarinen, 2008). By 2030, UNWTO forecasts international tourist arrivals to reach 1.8 billion, to tackle this considerable flow and maintain the sustainability of complex tourism system will necessary for policymakers to take fast and integrated decisions (Jakulin, 2017). Technology will play an essential role in the organization of the tourism systems, for example it already contributed to the flourishing of sharing economy, offering to travelers to access a wide range of products and services with more competitive price (Shaheen, S.A. Mallery, & Kingsley, 2012), enabling more contact between tourists and locals (Molz, 2013; Tussyadiah & Pesonen, 2015) and contributing to employment and local economy (Fang, Ye, & Law, 2015). According to the many possibilities to generate a positive impact through technology in Travel and Tourism sector, our research aims to explore the capabilities of design to use technology as a political tool, to mitigate impacts and diversify the tourism experiences more sustainably. Our strategy tries to use technological and analogical tools to relate things, people, stories, cultures and much more in order to generate design-results that open scenarios and opportunities so far unexplored by more traditional tourism. The project discussed in this paper focuses on tourism in short distance, principally as a means to strengthen the connection of people with their territory and reduce the impact of Travel & Tourism in long distance, in a scenario where travelers and tourists increase exponentially every year

New relationship between Visual Communication Design and Interaction Design

In the future of interaction design relies on movement recongnition rather than haptic/vocal/muscle/brain interfaces, how will visual communication be able to guide people to perform tasks? Researchers and teachers have a very complex challenge ahead of them: on the one hand, they must follow continous and daily updates to acquire and give a proper overview about the state of the art and future scenarios; on the other hand, the university must re-think design guidelines from a holistic viewpoint, avoiding fractures between product design, visual communication design and interaction design

Una nueva relación entre el diseño de comunicación visual y el diseño de interacción

Si el futuro de interacción reside en el reconocimiento de movimiento, y no en las interfaces hápticas/vocales/musculares/cerebrales, ¿cómo podrá la comunicación visual orientar a las personas para ejecutar tareas? Investigadores y docentes tienen ante sí un reto muy complejo: por un lado, deben estar al día de las actualizaciones, continuas, diarias, para adquirir y proporcionar una perspectiva adecuada de las últimas evoluciones y las que están por venir; por otro, la universidad debe replantearse las líneas directrices del diseño desde un punto de vista holístico, y evitar las fracturas entre el diseño de producto, el diseño de comunicación visual y el diseño de interacción

Mergers and Acquisitions Between Mutual Banks in Italy :An analysis of the effects on performance and productive efficiency

The paper is aimed at testing the hypothesis that the M&A wave over the past ten years has increased the level of efficiency of co-operative credit banks (CCBs), both in terms of overall performance and productive efficiency. The logical development is hinged on two steps: 1) an explorative analysis which is based on the observation of balance sheet ratios by quantiles, 2) a DEA application for estimating productive efficiency scores. The analysis refers to 94 CCBs which have been involved in M&As over the period 1995-1998 and is carried out on both merged and non-merged banks, either before concentration or in the subsequent years.