Sensing Places

http://www.sensingplaces.com/

Our Mission

In our view architecture is no longer concerned merely with designing appealing containers for people and things. In combination with Perceptual Intelligence modeling techniques and state-of-the-art sensing technology, we endow architectural spaces with the ability to sense, respond and adapt to the way peopleexperience, interact with and use them.

We create living, sensitive people-driven spaces that are at once engaging, entertaining and elegant. Spaces that will also make an invaluable contribution to the definition of a new concept of architecture for the third millennium.

The Weirdest People in the World?

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1601785

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world’s top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re‐organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.

Belkin’s Conserve

With a remote switch – save all the standby powers!

http://www.belkin.com/conserve/

Ambient Device Wattson for Sale

Check out the Wattson by DIY Kyoto

Here is an intro video – http://www.diykyoto.com/uk/wattson/about

Let me show you how much electricity your home is using

Read more about it at http://www.diykyoto.com/uk

Open Structures

Can we design hardware like how we design software?

check out

http://blog.openstructures.net/pages/blog

and http://intrastructures.net/Intrastructures/Concepts.html

Natural Gas

Here is a very cute and “warm” commercial for Natural Gas with knitting!

Check out the making of it – don’t ever underestimate the power of stop motion video!

misc

1. last year’s end of semester open house – we will do it this year, April 27 6-8 pm at the Aware Home

http://www.healatgt.org/

2.  a procedural drawing program – try it out

http://mrdoob.com/blog/post/689

3. professor ban laptops in class

World Wide Web of Distraction!

How Millennial are you?

The Pew Center called the 149-page study — “Millennials: Confident. Connected. Open to Change” — the most ambitious examination to date of the age group. The study dubbed the young adults history’s first “always connected” generation, treating phones and other shiny handheld devices almost like body parts.

Executive Summary

http://pewresearch.org/millennials/

full report is here Full Report (PDF)

08.Emotion and Interaction

• dialogues with colorful personalities of early AI, http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/dialogues.html

• Winslow Burleson and Rosalind W Picard, Evidence for Gender Specific Approaches to the Development of Emotionally Intelligent Learning Companions,” IEEE Intelligent Systems, Special issue on Intelligent Educational Systems – Jul/Aug ’07, [pdf] also [here]

• John Zimmerman (2003) Exploring the role of emotion in the interaction design of digital music players, in DPPI ’03: Proceedings of the 2003 international conference on Designing pleasurable products and interfaces, 152-153 [pdf] also [here]

• Interface carpet info [V730S-D13P52A HF Library Label Manual.pdf], [UHF Tag Spec AD833.pdf], [HF Inlays.pdf], [carpet-uhf-rfid-test.pdf]

07.Ubicomp at Home & Context

Pick 3 papers!

* Mario Romero, Zachary Pousman, Michael Mateas: Alien presence in the home: the design of Tableau Machine. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 12(5): 373-382 (2008) pdf at ACM Digital Library

or

* Zachary Pousman, Mario Romero, Adam Smith, Michael Mateas: Living with tableau machine: a longitudinal investigation of a curious domestic intelligence. UbiComp 2008: 370-379 pdf

* Pieter Jan Stappers: Creative connections: user, designer, context, and tools. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 10(2-3): 95-100 (2006) pdf

or

* Pieter Jan Stappers, H. van Rijn, S. C. Kistemaker, A. E. Hennink, Froukje Sleeswijk Visser: Designing for other people’s strengths and motivations: Three cases using context, visions, and experiential prototypes. Advanced Engineering Informatics 23(2): 174-183 (2009) pdf at Science Direct (same trick of putting gt library in the URL)

* Bill Gaver, Tony Dunne, Elena Pacenti, Design:Cultural probes, Interactions, Vol 6 (1) 21-29 (1999) pdf

or

* Katherine Isbister, Kristina Höök, Jarmo Laaksolahti, Michael Sharp: The Sensual evaluation instrument: Developing a trans-cultural self-report measure of affect. Int. J. Hum.-Comput. Stud. 65(4): 315-328 (2007) pdf