IFTF's Future Now

Bonding with robots

New Scientist reports on a project by Georgia Tech researchers Ja-Young Sung and Rebecca Grinter that examines how people interact with Roomba:

"Dressing up Roomba happens in many ways," Sung says. People also often gave their robots a name and gender, according to the survey (see Diagram) which Sung presented at the Human-Robot Interaction conference earlier this month in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Kathy Morgan, an engineer based in Atlanta, said that her robot wore a sticker saying "Our Baby", indicating that she viewed it almost as part of the family. "We just love it. It frees up our lives from so much cleaning drudgery," she says.

Sung believes that the notion of humans relating to their robots almost as if they were family members or friends is more than just a curiosity. "People want their Roomba to look unique because it has evolved into something that's much more than a gadget," she says. Understanding these responses could be the key to figuring out the sort of relationships people are willing to have with robots.

Until now, robots have been designed for what the robotics industry dubs "dull, dirty and dangerous" jobs, like welding cars, defusing bombs or mowing lawns. Even the name robot comes from robota, the Czech word for drudgery. But Sung's observations suggest that we have moved on. "I have not seen a single family who treats Roomba like a machine if they clothe it," she says. "With skins or costumes on, people tend to treat Roomba with more respect."

So as they move from environments that we don't like into places that are more familiar, and from doing work we hate to work we just dislike, two things happen to our perception of robots: their social status goes up, and they become more familiar. But this doesn't just happen with robots who are doing "dull, dirty and dangerous" jobs: humans who are doing those jobs can develop bonds with those robots, too.

US soldiers serving in Iraq and interviewed last year by The Washington Post developed strong emotional attachments to Packbots and Talon robots, which dispose of bombs and locate landmines, and admitted feeling deep sadness when their robots were destroyed in explosions. Some ensured the robots were reconstructed from spare parts when they were damaged and even took them fishing, using the robot arm's gripper to hold their rod.

Figuring out just how far humans are willing to go in shifting the boundaries towards accepting robots as partners rather than mere machines will help designers decide what tasks and functions are appropriate for robots. Meanwhile, working out whether it's the robot or the person who determines the boundary shift might mean designers can deliberately create robots that elicit more feeling from humans. "Engineers will need to identify the positive robot design factors that yield good emotions and not bad ones - and try to design robots that promote them," says Sung.

Architecture of the future? Probably not

Some of the most famous images of the future are architectural. Buckminster Fuller's 1967 Montreal Expo dome, for example, was hailed as a vision of the future; conversely, some of the first images that come to mind when you think of "the future" are things like the Jetsons' house.

Slate architecture critic Witold Rybczynski, however, argues that avant-garde architecture like Fuller's, which is often described as "'experimental,' 'innovative,' or 'cutting edge'"-- and thus a preview of what everyone will be designing in years to come-- is actually a pretty unreliable guide to the future:

the term architectural avant-garde is an oxymoron, since an architect, unlike a painter, is able to experiment only within relatively narrow bounds. Buildings are expensive, and they are intended to last a long time, so the people who build them tend to be risk-averse.... Even if a building succeeds in breaking the mold, that is no guarantee that it is showing the way, for innovative buildings rarely anticipate the future. There have been exceptions. Frank Lloyd Wright's first Usonian house, built in 1936, with its one-story living, open plan, carport, and low-slung roof, did foreshadow the ranch houses of the '50s and '60s, and Mies van der Rohe's novel Lake Shore Drive apartment towers in Chicago, completed in 1951, were the first example of the steel-and-glass-curtain wall that would dominate commercial architecture for the next two decades....

The truth is that buildings belong firmly to their own time. This is especially true of architecture that self-consciously attempts to predict the future. That's why the settings of old sci-fi movies are often so funny; the future never turns out the way people imagine. Most buildings have a shelf life of 20 to 30 years; that is, it takes 20 to 30 years before they are perceived as "old-fashioned." This doesn't mean that the buildings are ugly, or not useful, or not cherished—simply that they now represent the past. That's not necessarily a bad thing—it would be disorienting to live in an environment that never aged (actually, it would be like living in Las Vegas).

Technorati Tags: architecture, culture, future

Amigo

Recently I came across a video overview of the Amigo project, which is developing "ambient intelligence for the networked home environment." It's a pretty standard day-in-the-life-of-the-home-of-the-future video.

Like many of these videos, the point is to give readers a sense of what life in the networked, infomated future would be like. The challenge you always have with these videos is that there's a tension between highlighting the technology-- which is all about novelty-- and focusing on the people and how they live-- which is probably not going to be so very different. As a result, some of these videos inadvertently make the home of the future look as appealing as a PC, because they choose to foreground the interactions people will have with their smart doors or mirrors in their hallways.

Technorati Tags: smart_home, video

Check

Atul Gawande has a terrific article in last week's New Yorker on an information technology that, after several years' testing, looks like it could transform intensive care. It's mainly been used in the reduction of line infections, which Gawande explains are

so common that they are considered a routine complication. I.C.U.s put five million lines into patients each year, and national statistics show that, after ten days, four per cent of those lines become infected. Line infections occur in eighty thousand people a year in the United States, and are fatal between five and twenty-eight per cent of the time, depending on how sick one is at the start. Those who survive line infections spend on average a week longer in intensive care.

This new technology was developed a few years ago by Johns Hopkins professor Peter Pronovost. After the first trial using it in a hospital,

The results were so dramatic that they weren’t sure whether to believe them: the ten-day line-infection rate went from eleven per cent to zero. So they followed patients for fifteen more months. Only two line infections occurred during the entire period. They calculated that, in this one hospital... [it] had prevented forty-three infections and eight deaths, and saved two million dollars in costs.

For years we've heard that information technology could solve some of the most tractable problems with our health care system, and this seems to make that promise true. So what is this technology?

A checklist.

Not a gigantic database, or RFID tags in unconscious patients, or steerable needles (which boffins at UC Berkeley are now working on); but pieces of paper listing the steps you're supposed to take when doing something. You know what they are.

So why are they good-- good to the point of being able to save lots of lives and millions of dollars in an average hospital? Checklist offer

two main benefits, Pronovost observed. First, they helped with memory recall, especially with mundane matters that are easily overlooked in patients undergoing more drastic events. (When you’re worrying about what treatment to give a woman who won’t stop seizing, it’s hard to remember to make sure that the head of her bed is in the right position.) A second effect was to make explicit the minimum, expected steps in complex processes. Pronovost was surprised to discover how often even experienced personnel failed to grasp the importance of certain precautions. In a survey of I.C.U. staff taken before introducing the ventilator checklists, he found that half hadn’t realized that there was evidence strongly supporting giving ventilated patients antacid medication. Checklists established a higher standard of baseline performance.

Tools like checklists aren't just accidental media containing information; when you look at how they're used, they turn out to be aids to memory, objects that help standardize what can be chaotic practices. Under some circumstances, they're tools for diffusing practices and raising standards.

The power of checklists rests in their simplicity, particularly the simplicity of their use. Documents behave predictably. That predictability, I would argue, in turn is important for its incorporation into work practices. With a checklist, you can easily see that steps have been followed: it's a bit like how strips of paper in air traffic control centers serve as tools for tracking who has responsibility for a plane.

How do you select user innovations?

Tuesday I went to a reception at the Innovation Center Denmark, an outfit on Page Mill Road that helps Danish tech companies interested in doing stuff in the States. They're a small but very interesting group, and the evening featured a talk by architect and industrial designer Frederik Andersen. Andersen cofounded a small design firm, Goodmorning Technology (what an optimistic name).

A good bit of the talk was about user reinvention, and its increasing importance in the design and innovation process. For me, the talk brought up a question: how do you figure out which user innovations are worth paying attention to? If the great virtue of user-driven innovation is that-- to borrow the language of evolutionary biology-- its a mechanism for generating a lot of mutations, what's the selection mechanism? Ultimately, of course, useful mutations will be more widely adopted than others; but most companies would like a way to detect the most promising ones before then.

Frederik's answer was that, at this stage, the selection process is still largely intuitive; which I suspect is the answer most people would give.

Pelle Braendgaard has blogged the talk more extensively.

Technorati Tags: denmark, design, innovation

Evolutionary algorithms, and design vs. understanding

This week's New Scientist has an article on evolutionary algorithms (sometimes also called genetic algorithms) and debates over their use. Put simply, EAs "mimic the processes of natural selection and random mutation by 'breeding,' selecting and re-breeding possible designs to produce the fittest ones." They might start with two current designs for an antenna, and generate a number of offspring that borrow characteristics from both. The offspring are tested; most fail to work and are discarded, while the survivors are matched up, and the cycle is repeated-- a few thousand times. The result is a new antenna design that is better than any of its ancestors.

Some of the biggest successes with EA (or evolutionary design, or artificial design, take your pick) have been with technologies where the scientific foundations aren't very firm, or don't work as well as you'd expect. Antenna design, for example, has had some notable successes with EA, in part because, as NASA scientist Jason Lohn notes, "Maxwell wrote down the four equations which govern all of wireless communication.... They describe the physics, but the weird thing is, you never use them. In practice, this field is so squirrely, the only way to learn is through trial and error. It's the school of hard knocks."

These methods have been around for a while, but they seem likely to become more widely accessible soon:

[Traditionally, EAs have required] ultra-fast computers, both to breed the thousands, or even billions, of generations and to simulate the results to select those offspring that are fit for re-breeding. This has limited their use to a few niche applications.

That is now changing with the availability of ever more powerful computers, the advent of distributed computing "grids", which pool the resources of thousands of PCs, and the emergence of multicore chips, which suit EAs because it's easy to divide up the tasks between cores. As a result, designs can now be evolved in days rather than months or years and EAs are going mainstream.

As one evolutionary designer recalled in 2004, "When I started doing this, I was running my simulations on a single Pentium 66 [MHz] PC.... That meant I had to be real careful with how large my problems were and how long it took things to run. Now, you can brute-force things a lot more easily."

So why if these methods work, and are becoming more accessible, why are they controversial? Here's where things get really interesting.

Proponents of EAs say they could replace traditional methods in many fields from designing exotic new types of optical fibre and USB memory sticks to more aesthetic computer-generated art. Critics argue that the technique may lead to designs that can't be properly evaluated since no human understands which trade-offs were made and therefore where failure is likely....

Essentially, some worry that these designs might perform better, but if we can't understand them, we won't know know what hidden costs or disadvantages they carry-- until it's too late. NASA scientist Lohn puts it a different way: he sees EA as forcing people into one of two schools of thought.

"One school of thought says you need a black box that does X, Y and Z. If I use evolution to get something that does X, Y and Z, I don't care what's in it as long as it works."

And the other school? "That one says, 'I need to understand what's in there,'" Lohn says. "Those are the people we can't really help, because a lot of times, we don't know what's in there."

So ultimately, the question isn't whether these designs work, but whether it's important for us to understand why they work.

Technorati Tags: design, evolution

Back to the Future

I love the ridiculousness of this waterproof wrist camera I found on ThinkGeek. Especially their claim that it "lies flat on your wrist."  It's actually clunkier than Dick Tracy's wrist videoconferencing device - but I don't know if Dick Tracy could get 3 megapixels or dive to 100 feet.

Manufacturing and the end of cyberspace

I have an essay on rapid prototyping, personal fabrication, and the future of manufacturing in the latest issue of Samsung DigitAll Magazine. Here's the opening:

The transformation of the factory from a vast machine into a creative, knowledge-intensive space is a development few could have seen. Are you ready for the next industrial revolution?

For many people, the word “factory” conjures up images of William Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” or Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. They imagine landscapes of machinery, consuming men and raw materials, blackening skies and destroying lives. Whatever they produce, factories are inhuman and unnatural. Certainly such factories still exist; but companies that aren’t trying to win the race to the bottom are taking different paths. The outsourcing movement, and more recent attention to product design, have eclipsed a quiet transformation of the factory from a vast machine into a more knowledge-intensive, even creative, space. In surprising ways, the factory is now following a path blazed by the design studio and modern office: it’s becoming more knowledge-intensive and flexible, even as it grows more tightly connected to markets and suppliers.

Technorati Tags: design, manufacturing, pervasive computing, ubicomp, Web 2.0

Synthetic Gecko

The gecko must be one of the most-studied animals in the world today, thanks to its ability to climb virtually any surface. A number of engineers are working on making synthetic gecko tape, which would adhere strongly to a surface, without leaving adhesive residue. British company BAE Systems recently announced that it had created Synthetic Gecko, a reusable polymer "covered in millions of tiny mushroom-like hairs."

Future applications could include an adhesive to repair aircraft, skin grafts or even a Spiderman-style suit.

"It would mean that your local window cleaner could dispense with his ladders and climb up the side of your house," says Dr Sajad Haq, a principal research scientist at the company's Advanced Technology Centre in Filton, Bristol....

It is manufactured by a modified version of a technique known as photo-lithography, commonly used to make silicon chips.

The technique uses light to etch three-dimensional patterns into a material.

"The processes we use are modifications of standard electronic fabrication processes," says Dr Haq. "They're cheap, well known, well understood and can be scaled up to very large areas cheaply."

Technorati Tags: biomimicry

Yahoo! Design Expo

Yesterday I went to the Yahoo Design Expo, an event bringing together bright design students from the U.S., England, and Brazil.

The exhibit had a number of demos or performance art-like pieces, which ranged from a bit weird (but I'm not very avant-garde) to fun to pretty compelling. Peter Merholz is right that Aaron Koblin's work is mighty cool, but I thought that the expo overall exhibited a few interesting themes. First, as Larry Tesler pointed out, they all played with a few big themes:

• Tangible interfaces;
• Collaborative/social media things;
• Geolocation;
• Wacky performance art stuff.

Okay, the last one might have been mine. (And for anyone who was there, yes, I'm the one that nearly destroyed the project with the spitballs and the ship's wheel. And yes, I hate art that much. I truly do.)

I talked for a few minutes with Joy Mountford, who has been organizing this expo every year since 1990, and got Yahoo to sponsor it after she joined the company as a senior designer. Joy is one of those Silicon Valley interface design types who's made the pilgrimages to all the storied, hot but unstable, or interesting places-- she founded Apple's International Interface Design Project, worked at Interval Research in the 1990s, and now it at Yahoo-- and taught here and there. (This ACM Ubiquity interview is a good intro to her work.) It's the kind of career path that's like a river. To visitors it seems meandering. Those more familiar it can decipher its logic and know its more picturesque turns. And the river itself is absolutely determined to get somewhere.

We talked about how the expo has evolved over the years. In particular I wanted to know when the tangible interface stuff-- which connects with my own work on the end of cyberspace-- started showing up, and when people started trying to move interface design beyond the WIMP interface. She said that there had always been such projects, but they'd become more prominent in the last few years, and now were commonplace: everyone in design and UI circles takes for granted that this is the future.

But the most interesting thing she said was that while in the Olden Days, students had to do a lot of fudging and improvising-- using magnets instead of sensors, or doing videos that showed how something would work if the technology were available-- today, the sensors, RFID tags, and just about everything else you need to make a working prototype are within an intelligent student's reach. At least four of the projects were using Max, a high-level programming language that makes it pretty easy to build simple systems combining sensors, logic, and actuators.*

As Larry Tesler put it, an exhibit like this is worth putting on at a place like Yahoo for two reasons: first, it gets Yahoo people thinking outside the box; and second, art students are a group that's regularly thinking about things that everyone else thinks about a few years later. As William Gibson might put it, they have an unusually high concentration of the future.

My instinct is that this is true for the tools they use, as well: just as CAD has gone from an exotic expensive thing to something that you play with in Second Life, and robotics is now as accessible as Lego, If design students are able to build M.A. projects with this stuff, when my daughter is in high school she'll be building anti-sibling detectors to keep her younger brother and his various robots (which he will have also built) out of her room.

Technorati Tags: Yahoo, design, digital-physical, geoweb, prototyping