Week 03 | External Computation and Representation | Proxemic Interaction

Monday, January 22, 2023

We start in Room G203

Lecture Slides #

For the last two weeks we have been exploring in general some different ways that humans interact with technology (and each other). Today we try to go deeper into understanding this topic of Embodied Interaction that has been approached from many directions by different people.

Specifically, we are going to focus on how the space around you and the objects in that space can become part of your thinking.

Mark Weiser called his ideas Ubiquitous Computing in 1988 in the form of computational, networked devices embedded to our surroundings and everyday objects in three different sizes: tabs, pads and boards.

Hiroshi Ishii and the Tangible Media Group call their vision Tangible Bits and Radical Atoms since the 1990s. As an example, a more physical or experimental version of the idea of Ubiquitous Computing was explored in the ambientROOM project.

Saul Greenberg has investigated Proxemic Interaction that builds on Proxemics by Edward T. Hall and many of the ideas above.

Bret Victor and collaborators are hoping to create a more humane representation of thought. The first prototype was called Dynamicland or Realtalk. Originally developed at the Dynamicland space and right now at UCSF.

This talk was your homework:

This is what Dynamicland looked like:

This is what he is doing with it now:

Homework #

Watch #

Continue with the video lectures by Jelle van Dijk. This time about External representation and computation.

Additionally, watch the Proxemic Interactions presentation from Nicolai Marquadt.

Read #

Greenberg, Saul, Nicolai Marquardt, Till Ballendat, Rob Diaz-Marino, and Miaosen Wang. 2011. “Proxemic Interactions: The New Ubicomp?” Interactions 18 (1): 42–50. https://doi.org/10.1145/1897239.1897250. Access it through Aalto library.