Abstract:

The goal of “Physical SimCity” is to study the possibility of applying networked technology to support the communication on urban environmental design among people [expert and non-expert] who work together in different locations. Plus, for this project, a research will be conducted about the combination between virtual reality and physical objects as well.

- Rough diagram for this project.

This week reading assignment is about products which are designed for the location identification.

Yeah, even though I am not sure that it useful for me or not, I like it (especially, GPS Locator for children.) Personally, if I know where persons who I am worrying about are in the city, it's great enough for me.

One of my everyday concerns for the past five years is where my grandparents are. Basically, they do not want anyone to go out with them, between Monday-Friday, they need to go to everywhere personally (in fact, I think they just do not want anybody spend time with them too much.) So I tried to teach them using cell phone. And they always use it just for receiving the others call. So, when each of them goes to outside alone, they usually had never called to anyone by that cell phone. Actually they are kind of digital interface phobia person. (Maybe they need the old fashion circle dial interface for their cell phone.)

So, if I have enough money (or ability to make product like this by myself) I need to give it to my grandparents.

On the other hand, I am not sure that person who uses it will feel comfortable or not, if his/her subconscious realizes all the time that someone can figure out where they, a person who use this product, are. I mean, it would be great if person who I love bring it to everywhere, but if someone gave me this product, I don't like it. : )

Almost 10 years ago, one of the assignments in my undergrad school was to design “Intelligent Building in 2010”. In that assignment, students had to design the intelligent building (assume that we live in 2010) by using the driving forces from that moment.

At that time, my friend and I started to research, from physical library, about applying interactive technology to support the semi-private space in the public environment (my project was about the music production studio in the forest, which was a resort at the same time!!!) A lot of ideas of that project were driven by technology and science fiction which I could reach at that time.

And the result was, except the aesthetic and design parts, this project sucked…

One of the ridiculous things in this project was that we used 6 projectors to create virtual space inside a recording room, for musician who want to change the mood of the environment in relation to sound that they want to play. And we also used tracking technology to track the position/moving of visitors and clients in the building to create sound environment in the living room (for what?). And the funny thing is my partner from this project started his own record company after graduated from university. And then we realized that ‘professional musician' do not care about the environment at all, if they are real professional!! And we always laugh every time when we talk about this project. And actually we want to forget about it.

In fact, almost all of those ideas, in our design processes, we did not think about responsibility to the macro scale of the social or environmental problems in the long term at all… we did that just because those technologies could do that, so we just put them into our project as cool as we could.

And it was very fun… because everyone knew that we didn't really need to build that building to the real world; it was just an experimental student project.

The reading assignment for this week reminds me about my good old days in university. I did not need to worry anything in real world; just make something new, cool, as much as technology and our brain could do at that time. And when finishing each project, we just went drinking or playing soccer with a lot of nice friends. (Huh, I need time machine.)

For the smart house projects, I found that there are two rough types of products, secured product and time-saver product. I quite like secured product because they have a make-sense function by itself. However for time-saver product, I am not interested much.

I am not sure that we, everyone, are pushing the future towards the right direction, if the meaning of smart house will be, using the technology to support the vision of the science fiction in 50 years ago (pre-internet + industrial era + before the failure of modernism) like the examples from those web site. In my opinion, sometimes the “not too bad” solution is just good enough for some situation, however, it pushes people towards the wrong direction, and most of people will overlook to develop the “good solution” in the right direction at all.

Personally, the favorite activity for me in my home is to take a time to cook some food with my grand mother. In my opinion, the quality of living is opposite from working, good living is relate to slowness, good working is relate to fastness.

Anyway, I am trying to be an optimistic person. Although I do not appreciate in the direction of technology development for the living space right now, I hope I could use them in the direction that I want. We have choices.

Note:

(Actualy I have many things to write about this reading assignment, but I am not sure whether they are useful for you or not.)

I found this article is very useful for me to learn about cell phone from the beginning.

Actually, generally, I am not interested in these projects very much. These projects are about using networked technology to express the individual feeling in the public. I think they are some of the experimental ways to use technology in the public. Anyway, I am interested in the Street-level interactive displays from BBC which is designed by IDEO. In fact, I am interested in this project just because of IDEO, not this project itself. I just want to know the research and survey behind design process of this project; I wonder if BBC really needed to do this or they just knew that there is a technology that can do this.

I do not know much about this kind of technology (live chat via television) however, I have a lot experiences with technology similar to this as an audience, in news and real-time talk shows television program in Thailand . And, just in my case, I really hate it … This kind of interface made me feel very annoyed because I have only 14” screen in my bed room, It's tiny enough. I felt a little bit bored when I have to share my screen which sponsors logo and message form other people. And most of information, contents and messages from the audiences sucks. I mean some opinions from the audiences are very valuable, but 90% suck. So, from my experience, people who have good opinions do not always use SMS to send message to the public. There are good enough places for people to share their useful ideas and make it real. Most of the messages that were sent to the awkward section (with the logo of sponsor) on the television interface, were always from teenagers and person who want to show off, or want to express their feeling without logic. And the people who get the most benefit from this technology are the phone companies and the television itself. They get a lot of money per one television program which use this technology. So I really want to know the research about target user and the audience experiences from the project like this in the different culture from my experience so much. What is their real goal?

Just in my opinion, in the past I was very sad when I heard the news everyday. Most of them are sad and non-solution news. Right now, I stop reading/watching the everyday news already, not because the sad news itself, but the opinions from people who send message to the news website or television; it made me sad rather than news.

This is the connection between "Serial"-"Hex 7404"-"X port" on my breadboard. Umm.. I spent more than half a day to realize that, actually I only needed to connect Xport to the Hex 7404 as instructed in the last paragraph of this page.

For the first time, I just followed this instruction (3. getting start) from Lantronix to make sure that my X port connection is not mistaken. And then, just follows Tom's tutorial in this page .

Yeah!!!, from Tom's tutorial, finally I can do this (without understanding about configuration at all.)

Note:

-According to the instruction from Lantronix, when connecting with the hyper terminal, you should set the flow control to be “None” as well.

- In my opinion, setting up the X port configuration with Telnet is a little bit easier than Hyper Terminal because I don't need to hold x button while turning the power off and on.

Konrad Tollmar, Stefan Junestrand, Olle Torgny, Virtually Living Together

This paper is about the conceptual/functional prototypes study based on media communication design. There are many useful data from interviewing, observation, case study and the example of the concept design prototypes which are synthesized from the research in the first half of this article .

Virtual Living Together is very different from many articles about media technology which I had read, especially since I studied at ITP. This is a research that based on a design method! From the content in this article, it is very interesting for me that the ideas and directions in this research are not driven by new technology like many articles, but by the combination of the different paradigms of the digital media, (the authors call person-tool-media.)

Moreover, Emotional communication is also one of the interesting parts in this article, they wrote about some natures of media which are not designed for serving in purely practical purpose. Although, for myself, in present time, the modernism has failed already, and it is very difficult to accurately identify the meaning of “practical” like in the romantic modernism word. It seems to me that this research used the structure of the modernist to invent something a little bit postmodern (for example, the Personal Portraits project, the logic seems to base on function however, the result is a little bit “For What?”) By the way I really like this article.

Network Layer

-Physical

-Datalink

-Network

-Transport

-Session

-Presentation

-Application

It seemed not too difficult when I read the introduction about network layer from this article; however, I am still not sure that I understand it clearly. I might need to use and play with x port and network (what is it?) before imagination to any metaphor. Sometime, metaphor' is a trap for me.

Marc Weiser, The Coming Age of Calm Technology

In “The Coming Age of Calm Technology”, the authors, Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown, were presenting the explanation about the relationship between human and technology via the idea of ubiquitous computing. The technology/information environment which is able to present itself in different levels of attention (in this article they used center, and periphery.) The authors also gave us some good examples about the calm technology which can shift the level of attentiveness (from periphery to center and then go back to periphery) in relation to its function of the technology and the interaction from human.

Actually this article is very interesting for me, especially, in parts of the examples (inner window). However, it seems to me that the direction in this article, which presents the relationship between human and technology, base on technology rather than human. I am not quite sure about my idea, but I think, if we pay more attention on human intuition, we have the automatic function which would be similar to the calm technology already.

NYC subway is a good example of the awareness system in human brain. From one of the researches about human brain, most of people who just start to use the NYC subway for one week would be able to aware the environment in almost every place while taking/using the subway very well. Because the open planning of the seat in the train, crowded people, complex layer in each station, human brain will work hard to become aware of the complex environment like in the subway system in NYC. However, after people familiarly took the subway in the same direction in everyday life, our brain will diminish the awareness system continually. In general, people will recognize the environment just when the trains almost reach their destinations only (two or three stops before the user destinations). Their sensation would focus just the “world” that they feel comfortable. The memory of subway spaces in human brain would shift to a different thing as quickly as another interesting thing enters the brain.

Actually this article also reminds me about the research about the technology in submarine, which is designed in the reverse side of the calm technology because a lot of the extremely important information/controllers, the users (crews) had to concentrate in the technology environments all their working time. However, in practice, the position of crews has to change every few years because those submarine crews, who live in the submarine everyday/night, always automatically become familiar with the information technology environment in submarine as close as their homes. The awareness system in their brains does not work well like it does during the first month at all. Those awareness technologies little by little become their calm technology for the crews. And this situation will be one of the causes of the negligent eventually.

Personally, I think the idea of calm technology would be stronger and more useful (for me) if we also have more enough researches in the part of the humanity as well. If we have the balancing knowledge of both sides (technology and humanity), we might be able to create the new type of the design system which closely base on the relationship between the technology and human soon.