Artificial Intelligence – Seminar

Today, Martin Crowley, Mayuk Sengupta and Sushmita Hegde presented the seminar that I had been looking forward to for some time as it was surrounding the topic of Artificial Intelligence (AI). A subject that it hard to avoid if you follow any tech related news source in the past couple of years. I had also caught a glimpse of the guys preparing for the workshop during the past week and the sight of the Alexa speaker definitely sparked my interest.

The groups presentation included a number of areas relating to the topic of AI, how it is used today and how it could effect society as a whole in the future. The topics covered were embodied and disembodied AI, the effect of AI on human endeavor and AI in the field of art and design. Many of the examples shown were ones which I was quite familiar with but having them all presented in front of me made me truly realise how much this technology has grown in recent years, as growth that is unlikely to slow down anytime soon.

For the workshop, we participated in four different activities all surrounding the area AI and how it is implemented in our current technologies. The first activity required us to split up into three teams and have a go at Google Draw, a neural network that is meant to learn and recognise specific objects based upon a collection of peoples doodles. You are given six objects to draw and the aim is to get the machine to recognise the object you are drawing within twenty seconds. It was a really fun activity and the overly sensitive mouse combined with the machine spitting out crazy guesses only made it better. I was also surprised as to how many we got correct, I think I may have been the only one to have failed with one of my drawings, apologies to Google Draw robot but I still blame the mouse.

I happily played the guinea pig role for the second activity, in which I was blindfolded and had to hover a phone over a number of objections. Using an mobile application, the idea was to find a remote control via image recognition and a talkback feature, this was done quite easily but the accuracy was not great overall as the AI seemed to believe there were number of light switches on the table.

We then had to make a chatbot for the second activity through the use of the program Pandorabots. For this, we had to split into groups of two and me and Emma decided to make a chatbot by the name of ’Shady Bot’, basing the majority of the answers on the sassy character Titus Andromidon of the tv show Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. This required a little bit of hacking away at code to set up but I think we did quite a good job in the end. Saying I’m proud of the bot might be a little bit of an overstatement though.

Finally, the time I had been waiting for. For the final activity, we got to participate in a really fun activity with the Amazon Alexa speaker. To begin, we surrounded Alexa as if we were around a campfire. Each person was then given clues with the idea of asking Alexa questions based upon those clues. This would then result in us discovering a connection with someone else in the group and pairing up with them. Unfortunately but to the amusement of everyone on the room, Alexa didn’t really want to play nice and didn’t respond properly to many of our queries, she was being sassier than Shady Bot and it didn’t exactly scream ‘intelligence’.

However, we prevailed in the end and I was paired up with Martin for the final task of designing something useful for Alexa. After asking her a few questions, we discovered that she likes coffee. “But how does she drink coffee?” we asked, which lead us to making Alexa a lovely pair of hands and a mouth, the coffee would be extra. It was great to see the accessories that everyone made for Alexa after it all, including a stylish hat, a wig, a dress and a car. She was spoiled!

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Urban Games – Seminar

The group seminar this week was surrounding the topic of Urban Games and was hosted by my colleagues, Palash, Sreeju and Maja. Given the unprecedented success of Pokemon Go in recent times, the subject of urban games has continued to grow in popularity. The guys first presented on the history of urban games and how they were designed, describing a number of examples, such as ‘Can you see me now?” by Blast Theory, Ingress by Niantic and more modern concepts such as Father.IO. I found this to be one of the most memorable presentations we’ve had so far as it got me thinking of the future of gaming and how future technologies could impact it.

For the workshop, the guys had already told us to prepare by wearing suitable clothing for running around, not your usual workshop. The reason for this is because we were going to be participating in a game set within the CSIS building called Nemesis. The basic premise of the game was that the players would search for hidden treasures in the building and then have to try and eliminate each other by stealing their name tag.

The core rules of the game were as follows:

• The game will be an hour long.
• You will all play as individuals and will be each other’s opponents.
• Each player will have their name tag stuck on their back, 3 wristbands on any one of their wrists and will have a phone with the Nemesis group chat open at all times during the game. There are 50 treasure cards hidden throughout the building.
• You must take the tag off of someones back to eliminate them.
• Attacker will lose a wristband if the targeted player turns and takes a picture of the attacker and sends it to the Nemesis group chat. The moderator then decides if the attacker is to lose a wristband. If a player loses all wristbands, they get eliminated.
• For each tag collected except their own, a player gets +4 points. Each treasure card carries +1 points.
• There are 2 ways of winning this game, to collect the most points or to be the last person standing which means you have to eliminate each other.

Honestly, this game was a fantastic experience and the best way to spend a Thursday morning. Everyone seemed to have fun and took the game quite seriously. I also got to discover areas of the CSIS building that I had never seen before and I’ve been frequently in and out of this building for the past six years. At the end of the game, Gabriela suggested that we bring something like this outside during the summer which everyone appeared to be up for and I hope comes to fruition. Hats off to Palash, Sreeju and Maja for coming up with and being bold enough to carry out this game.

 

 

 

 

UX to Behavior Management

It was our opportunity to run our own seminar and design workshop today. The topic that was chosen by myself, Emma and Yuan was ‘From User Experience Design to Behaviour Management’. This was a really interesting experience as the onus was on us to keep our colleagues interested in the topic at hand, something I think we managed to do by picking engaging and thought provoking content.

The presentation itself began by covering the background of UX design, a process of creating products that provide meaningful experiences, of course, this was done with a little help from Don Norman. This lead onto examples of what could be considered good UX design, something which was more difficult to discover than we thought. We then stretched out into persuasive design, a design practice that focuses on influencing human behavior, providing and describing both morally positive and negative examples of this. Ending on a positive note, we introduced calm technology, which takes technology out of the spotlight, only using it to amplify the best of humanity and technology. All the slides can be viewed below:

Following the lecture, we invited the class to participate in a redesign challenge. This challenge required the class to split into three groups, with each group being given a product that was very clearly ethically questionable. Their goal was to redesign, repackage and sell the product to the rest of the class.

Team one decided to alter the packaging of cigarettes by incorporating sunglasses in the design, attempting to make them appear “cool” to the consumer by rebranding them as a high end product, something you would be proud to open in front of your friends.

 

Team two took their 0% alcohol product to an interesting place by marketing it towards young males who want to be just like their father with the slogan ‘Man up’. I was surprised by the packaging and marketing of this product as the team made no attempt to hide their intentions, clearly conveying why a child would want this product through an in your face message.

Team three made their study pills to be an attractive option for students, distributing the product in different forms of packaging, such as sachets of powder and tic-tac like boxes. They clearly had the student in mind during the design process and the Owl they chose as a mascot was a decision that only continued to convey the fun and friendly aspect of the product. An interesting point to make about this design was how the team decided to ignore the negative effects of taking the pills, a very different approach to team two.

After this challenge, we split the class into two groups in order to debate an article that we had already asked the team to read. This article was about an experiment that Facebook had conducted with a number of users, one which sparked much criticism from members of the public due to the moral and ethical decisions behind the experiment. I wasn’t very confident that this debate would be very successful as I knew that many members of the class were in favour of the public, so much so that we had to draw straws for who would take what side. To my surprise, the debate was very successful as very member contributed, in spite of their true beliefs.

 

Circular Design

Today, Craig and Zhiyuan ran a seminar on Circular Design. I was really looking forward to see what the guys had prepared as I find this concept to be really interesting on a personal level.

Circular design is an ideation for a sustainable future that operates without waste, a future where every product is designed for multiple cycles of use, and manufacturing cycles are carefully aligned so that the output of one process always feeds to another. Traditionally, Designers are part of a linear ‘take-make-dispose’ economy, creating products from raw materials that would eventually end up in a landfill after they had been used. A new system that implements a circular design would combat this issue, as the products and materials could be reused in closed loops. This way, we can create a healthy economy that is inspired by and in balance with nature.

During the workshop, we delved into an activity that was created by the people at IDEO, in order to encourage corporate leaders to interconnect their business models. IDEO have been at the forefront of the trying to bring the transition to a circular economy into the mainstream.

For this activity, we split into groups of four, each person in the group were to imagine themselves as a company representative, this company could have been made up on the spot or taken from the real world.

Once we had chosen our companies, each representative had to pinpoint their companies assets and what they waste. The representatives would then collaborate with one another, finding ways for their companies to interconnect and create a new system that might make use of one or of the companies wasted materials, transforming them into useful assets for what may be seen as a sub-company.

The four companies represented in ur group were Uber, Microsoft, X Film (Video Creators) and EditFX Studios (Video Editors). The challenge facing the group was feedback loops (How might we make use of each other data to create new service offerings that improve the circularity of materials?’) As we had quite a diverse set of companies, in terms of size and assets, there was an interesting opportunity for collaboration.

What we came up with was a new educational system that allowed Uber partners to up skill in their downtime. This made use of the time that Uber partners spent without receiving a trip, the training video making skills of X Film, the spare equipment that EditFX Studios had at their disposal and the partners could develop skills and earn Microsoft accredited certificates. Their is not usually a shortage of Uber partners in signing to their platform, this system could allow their partners to develop their career in the path that they want, moving on to better things. The success of certain partners could then lead to more people wanting to partner with Uber in future, but not just for the means of making money.

Overall, I really enjoyed this seminar, it must have been quite daunting for Craig and Zhiyuan as they were first up out of the class, especially given that they were a person shorter than other groups. The pressure didn’t seem to effect them at all though as everything went off without a hitch, they even acted as participants during the workshop whist being facilitators.

Wearables Workshop

The focus was on Wearables for our Interactive Media workshop today.

We were tasked with building a rough wearable prototype for a persona that we came up with, using the wide variety of fabrics and tools at our disposal.

Our users name was Harry, a male in his twenties who works in tech support. He was quite an active individual before injuring his lower back whilst training. It’s been a while but now he’s looking to get back to the fitness level that he was once at.

What we built was an electronic back-brace prototype. This brace used a combinations of motors, vibrations and haptic feedback to support a number of purposes throughout Harry’s road to recovery.

Firstly, the brace would use motors to ensure that Harry was lifting weights correctly, positioning his back correctly. This feature could also be used in the workplace to encourage better posture during the workday.

The brace would also use sensors to measure the users body fat and provide them with biometric data that would hopefully help the user keep on the right track. As an extra, the brace could also use it’s motors to massage the users lower back, helping with the rehabilitation process.

The world of wearable and what they can offer us in our everyday lives is growing day by day and it was a great experience to not only build this prototype but also to discuss the possible design iterations that we could develop. Of course, we settled on a back brace but this was after considering a number of options such as an interactive top that would cover all areas of the persons torso or we could have also made multiple bands for different parts of the body, providing a more diverse set of use information.