By anaid (February 18, 2009) (ambient intelligence,sensor networks,week 4 reading response)

1. the four scenarios are really interesting. The first one in particular  points out to the needs of nomadic lifestyle with sensors making it easier to do automated tasks. in the process it reduces significantly (and points out quite proudly) human interactions. Which does point out to a special machine sensibility but also seems to miss the point, at least for me. this interactions that make life easier are supposed to make for more and better communication with other humans and that is the emphasis for me much more so than the lack of need for a human interaction.
Some of the things they point out seem outdated, like the constant emailing in the middle of coffee or the possibility of video telepresence. It also mentions profiling as well as other smaller details like the pre-arranged called tone for a specific caller or the hands free calling on the car.
As for the one’s that are still relevant, im particularly interested in the aided driving for safety and also the ambient intelligence.
2. this is a really interesting subject. I probably need more research on IPSO to make a fair call but open spime seems to me more about objects that have a story to tell, where they are or where they´ve been is relevant (I´ve read Bruce Sterling´s book as well). IPSO seems to talk more about protocols and specific hardware issues than the objects that they are connecting. i;m interested more in why they want to connect them than in the specifics of the devices.

3. I found the Blogject manifesto incredibly important. The author is concerned with the reasons that this objects have to be blogging or on the web and not so much with the protocols. I´ve always wanted to experiment with food brought over from different parts of the world and make the cost be visualized. This is because it seems ot me like the cost we see is very shallow information. It´s a number put there by a retailer that entirely disconnects us from the actual process of making the object or what the object means to the makers. It makes consumerism possible and dumps things in the market disguised as sales or overstock. it´s simply not satisfactory to me. Yes, a locally grown organic tomato is more expensive but it´s also less expensive when taken into consideration the transportation and the carbon footprint a tomato from Ecuador carries with it. But maybe we want to support the people in that area because of a specific incident or political situation. I´m very interested in more informed purchasing decisions and blogging objects point towards this possibility.

4. Cybernetics
the mechanism and history of language.
Communication models are essential to design. Weiner points out the many possibilities of communication to different beings (people, animals, machines) and gets us thinking about the point of view of the machine. Specially since language poses very important questions to the communication diagrams, where there’s a possibility that exactly the same as got sent gets recieved but this is highly unlikely since in the process there’s codification, translation, interpretation and assimilation of information. Interesting to note he ends his chart with the information being “dissipated” and not gained. There are many levels to language: the physical (ear), the semantic and the behavioral. What ultimately happens in a communication cycle is that the message gets abstracted into ideas.

language, confusion and jam
communication takes effort.
The annoyance armor brings us back to all this concepts as they interfere. the Geese project is fascinating in this way since there’s a possibility to learn from all this different reactions the geese have to a given cue. And they take it one step further, trying to document it properly and make interpretations from the information they collect from it.

5. robots and antropomorphization.
Etiquette for robots, making them into simulated personalities. this is interesting because it changes out interaction with them. what if the computer told you a joke every time you had to wait for a download? taking traits that are expected only in humans and putting them into robots could help the way we relate to them. Wowee has great examples, where they make the fact that they are robots a little bit more discreet. In the tinkerbell toy for example, they made the wings change “when she is tired”. the helpless robot idea exists in this realm as well. Giving it certain traits, and little functunality in this case, changes what we expect robots to be doing. Personality becomes a design tool and making a robot seem like a child or a puppy, allows for more tolerance to mistakes. This reminded me of Kacie Kinzer’s tweenbots. In the case of Blendie, it gets called “machine therapy”.