Wiping as interaction

In my last blog I imaged to use remote to control how clear you want to reveal yourself. Acturally, at beginning I was thinking of using wipping to interact with the system. Imagine a glass window covered with vapor, so it is kind of blur. If you want to make it clear, you wipe it. I know it is a weird idea. But I decided to post it here anyway.

balance using transparency

In the field of Ubiquitous Computing, we are facing a lot of embarrassments. We bring computers into everywhere, but we are concerned about our privacy. We try to make computers more intelligent, but we don't want to lose control. We would like to share more over the network, but we're not always sure whether we share too much. In a word, where is the balance?

For some reason, I have been playing with the idea to use tranparency, or degree of blurness, to find this balance. One application in my mind is a background screen for a community, a project team or whatever. An example is shown in the picture below.


(balance using transparency)

So the grey rectangle represents such a screen, on which each small icon is a live video of a room, and the largest one is my own room, which could be a meeting room, a lab, or an individual's office. The black gadget below is something like a remote for users to control the degree of blurness, the transparency or the volume or whatever, kind of let the user control how clear he would like to reveal himself and his environment.

A possible scenario goes like this: we are a department, and we install this screen in each of our rooms for us to keep aware of some activities around. I participate in this community, so I have one screen in my office too. For example, A is a meeting room, there are always some presentations there. For a presentation, I am not sure whether I'd like to join. If the presentation is totally public, then the video is very clear, so I can see who are there, how many people are there, which helps me decide whether it is a good one or whether it is relevant or not based on the attendence. If it is a meeting, but not public, the meeting people can make it kind of blur, we can only see there is meeting there, but have no idea who are in the meeting, and what the meeting is. If the room is a lab I am working with, it is public to me, I can always see what's going on there. For instance, if I see my teammates are getting together, discussing, I probably would go there to join them, or increase the volume of that video to get some sense of what's going on. I would also be able to see my teammate's offices, and they can see me too. It is always reciprocal, you know. I can control how much I'd like to reveal my office to them. If I am reading, and I don't want to be bothered, I make my video very blur, meaning I am having my private time but still let them know I am at office. If I am working on my project, I would like to be very clear, meaning I am public now and let them know I am working on that, so if we have questions, we can discuss right awa. I can also control what to show, and in which angle the video should be taken. All the controls are done with the remote.

Several characteristics with this specific application:
1. I control the degree of clearness and volume of sound to control how much I want to reveal myself
2. it is at my background, most of time, it is quiet, and especially after I get used to it. Once in a while, a glimpse of it can give me some information of my environment and keep me current about what's going on in my department and have control about how much I'd like to get involved. If nothing special, i go back to my own business. If I find there are a lot of people in a room, and it is very clear, I can choose to increase the volume of that, and to get some sense of what's going on, and decide what I should do in that case.
3. So it is about sharing, and we can choose how much to share, because we can see ourselves on the screen too. It is reciprocal, so according to the screen we know who are able to see me, which helps me to decide how much I'd like to share.
4. The system just bring the information to me, it is me to notice something, analyize and control how much I'd like to invovle if something special happens. I am in control!

Part of this idea is from my own experience. Sometimes, I'd like to study in a chair, with TV on, but without sound. So the TV is not intrusive at all. Once in a while, I look up from my own books, make a glimpse of the TV, if I see something unusually, I'd increase the volume of the sound, and listen to it. If some Ads come up, I decrease the volume and go back to my own study. With this practice, I can keep current with the news with not so much cost. It is very simple, just to use remote change the volume. The information keeps flowing into my living room, and I am in control how much I'd accept it. I works very well for me at least.

I came across a vedio sort of close to the idea to control the degree of clearness:
http://www.ralphammer.de/hp/flash/Berlin_engl.html

As for research, what potential things I can get out from it:
1. to explore the idea of design for experience. It is not to make some tasks easier or efficient. It is an experience for users. It is concerned about how users reveal themselves and get involved in the community, with the change of sense of spatiality by the system.

2.to explore the idea of holistic design. Since users are important part of the system, in the sense they themselves are the information, they control how to present the information, and they also analyze and make sense of the information with social practice(join the meeting, go to have chat with teammates. )and users' s social behavior based on the information. How such a system should be designed? How should the designers work with users? What elements should we take into account to design such a system? What methods, artifacts and social practices should be used to design such a system?

3. It could be used as a testbed to study privacy issues, attention practices and community.

The issues with this idea is:
1. Why would users pay extra effort to control the clearness?

2. Is it true that less tranparent, or less clear, then less privact information?
3. what are the privacy concerns with this setting? Is it 1 or 0 case? That means if I agree to use video, I don't have privacy concern. Or else I won't use vedio at all.

I don't know!

Understand experience by reading "Technology as Experience"

I have been reading John McCarthy's book called "Technology as Experience". I found I really appreciate John Dewey and Mikhail Bakhtin's approach towards experience. I always go like "exactly". The ideas that keep resonated in my mind are:

1. It (Experience) is more inclusive than knowledge because it tries to encapsulate a person's full relationship - sensory, emotional, and intellectual - with his or her physical and social environment.

-Exactly. That explains why some background knowledge of a piece of art can help us appreciate it more, because the background helps us understand the art more and get us intellectually involved. Furthermore, if we personally have the similar experiences, it will get us emtionally envolved. So experience is more than feeling, more than knowledge. It is the irreducible totality, and we should struggle for richness in our experience.

2. According to Dewey, therefore, experience is constitued by the relationship between self and object-by concerned, feeling people acting and the maertials and tools they use.

He (Bakhtin) thought that totalizing systems worked by alienating people from the most meaningful quality of everyday experience, the particular response formed in relaiton to and with others from which a sense of self emerges....Thus although experience always occurs in cultural, historical, and material contexts, meaning engagement depends on the event or action being felt, known, and valued in unique way. This is also the kind of meaningful engagement that transforms people and systems.

-Exactly. Experience is about individual discovering and making sensing about himself, through interactions with the world, to answer questions like what he is interested in, what are his potenticals, and how unique he is... It is very personal, and can't fully represented by types.
It is also about growing, development and changing.

3. (About Aesthetic experience as a paradigm of experience) In turning to aesthetic experince, Dewey brings to the fore the rythms of life, the tenseion and release of engagment, and the feelings of vulnerability or the face of our own needs and desires.

-Exactly. Again and again, I encountered this concept of rhythm, which always makes me feel things are so beautiful, from music, from pictures, and even from everyday life. I guess it has something do with our own heart beating and life cycle. When the rhythm goes fast, we feel heigh, passionate and energetic, wheras when it goes slow, we feel peace, calm, relaxing, and quiet. Hmm, Rhythm is very beautiful, and it is kind of sensory beauty, a good way to organize things.

4. For pragmatits, creative action is always embedded in human situated freedom...This suggests a view of the world as an open, unfinalized, and unfinalized place where every person and thing is always a dynamic process of becoming, always open to future.

-Exactly. Where are those new ideas coming from? I have been asking this question since forever, and it is also the answer from my own experience. I believe the firm connection between freedom/openess and creativity. I also believe it should work together with the dance of rhythm in our life. One one hand, we need to accumulate knowledge and experience the world to acquire ideas, thoughts and concepts, on the other hand, we need to relax, let the ideas play in your head - and here comes new ideas, that is called creativity.

5. The emotions at work in an experience belongs to a self engaged in a situation and concerned with the movement of events toward an outcome that is desired or disliked. ... in a more recent treatment by Martha Nussbaum, who argues that emotion views the world from the perspective of our goals, needs, desires, and values... We do not perceive an objective, representation of the world; rather, we perceive a unique version colored by our unique desires and vlaues as experienced in the situion we are engaged.

-Exactly. Whether the outcome makes your happy or not largely depends on your expectations, or your desires or needs. Sometimes, I think the key to make ourselves happy is "Don's expect too much". A quote from a Chinese Cartoon - "I am not happy is not because I don't own anything, I just don't have the feeling of owning them until I lose them". Sadly, only after we lose something, you start to lower your expectations and appreciate what we currently have.

6. Faced with the potential arbitrariness of experience, a meaning-making creature or culture may try to bring a meaningful quality to experience. The doing that we engage in can be mindless or mindful. The more we attend to that doing, the more likely our experience is to be meaningful and value ot use. We can also make decisions about the beginnings and the ends of experiences, which would dissolve some f the arbitrariness. Jackson (1998) calls this "framing experience". By framing our experiences and giving ourselves as fully as possible to those experiences that we have diliberately framed, we begin to bring structure and meaning to them.

-Exactly. The world itself could be very rich and very meaningful, but to fully perceive that, or appreciate that, we still need to work one that - that is called sense-making, which I think is what I have been doing. So to be creative, open is good. But to avoid arbitraness, and make the ideas we create more meaningful, we need some frames, like some high level ends "to make something fun" or "to make people think" or "to make people feel connected".

7. One of the main distinguishing characteristics between understanding and interpretation is whether the meaning making involved is linguistically mediated or not. ... Our sense of any particular situations depends on previous experience and reflection....As meanings developed through reflection are absorbed by the object or situation, the sense of that sicuation changes.

-Exactly. It is about how we can make sense of our experience, how we can do reflection - by linguistic articulation, by composing music, or by painting? I think the more ways for you to express, the better chance it is for you to get meaning from the experience and become more senstive to your environment.