Interaction Theory Blog Post #3

"Can an intelligent house fall in love with the house next door? Can they have baby houses? Is an architect a trained "womb" for houses, or more crudely, is an architect how a house makes another house? Does an architect feel like she/he is violating fundamental forces of evolution if she/he does not include the latest new technology in the house she/he next gives birth to? Do you believe in progress? Is a suburban house of today better than a row house in London in 1850 which was better than a thatched country cottage in 1700 which was better than teepees and mud huts that Columbus found in the New World? Is the house that Donald Trump lives in better than the house you live in? If you were an architect and you designed an intelligent house, would the house's own happiness matter to you? If the couple that bought the house you designed got a divorce, do you think you should be libel for damages?"  from HOW SMART DOES YOUR BED HAVE TO BE, BEFORE YOU ARE AFRAID TO GO TO SLEEP AT NIGHT? by Rich Gold

The beginning of this particular set of questions appealed to me because it genuinely made me laugh out loud. What an absurd thought, that two house could fall in love. However, isn't that the point of this series of questions? To make you think about what really is absurd in regards to technology and the home and what is actually not absurd sounding at all upon further reflection? When this article was discussed in my interaction topic studio class, I mentioned that it brought to my mind the short science fiction story by Ray Bradbury entitled "The Veldt". In this story, a brother and a sister use a nursery of the future in a "smart home" to kill their parents. It is not the most utopian scenario to mention while discussing intelligent homes, but Gold's series of questions led me to think of the worst possible outcome of living in a smart house, which is being killed by your own home.


This week's reading however, particularly the Moggridge piece on Bill Graver, made me think of the truly whimsical yet seemingly banal aspects of the home that Graver's "history tablecloth" explores. The "tablecloth" remembers what has been laid upon it, gathering information for a unique story. Graver explains "...understanding the potential for designing interactions as a complete physical environment, you are quickly drawn into the possibility of objects conveying information that is full of associations and emotional qualities." This idea and Bradbury's imagined dystopia point out that no matter how we imagine a house's capabilities, we all recognize that there are emotions evoked by the home, good and bad, that pervade our lives. Graver's exploration is obviously a more positive one, but Bradbury's skepticism is also important. Gold is asking us to contemplate on what it means for technology to be a ubiquitous presence in our lives and how it will affect us, positively and negatively, in our most intimate and private environments, which is usually our homes. Will the home become something that is no longer intimate and private? And does that matter?

Interaction Theory Blog Post #2: Pattie Maes

Blog Topic: Select a key figure in interaction design to research further. What made them tick? What was important about their contributions to the field? Where would we be now without their contributions?

Perhaps this is not exactly following the Blog Topic at hand, but my interaction design figure of choice is Pattie Maes, head of the Fluid Interfaces Group at the MIT Media Lab. According to her TED Biography,

"Pattie Maes was the key architect behind what was once called 'collaborative filtering' and has become a key to Web 2.0: the immense engine of recommendations -- or 'things like this' -- fueled by other users. In the 1990s, Maes' Software Agents program at MIT created Firefly, a technology (and then a startup) that let users choose songs they liked, and find similar songs they'd never heard of, by taking cues from others with similar taste. This brought a sea change in the way we interact with software, with culture and with one another."

She's also kind of a rock star. She was named one of the "100 Americans to watch for" in 2000 by Newsweek magazine; the World Economic Forum honored her with the title "Global Leader for Tomorrow" and randomly, Maes was listed in People Magazine's annual 50 Most Beautiful People feature in 1997. In the movie The Social Network, I felt that in a strange way, programmers were being portrayed like rock stars. Whether that's good or bad or true or not, I think that people like Pattie Maes and Mark Zuckerberg are bringing a lot of awareness to the computing world, and ultimately interaction design. Perhaps that is something that will be discussed during our class entitled "When everyone thinks they're an interaction designer."

In "From Computing Machinery to Interaction Design," Terry Winograd writes 
"Today's popular press plays up efforts like those of Pattie Maes and her research group at the MIT Media Laboratory, where thy have produced agents to help people brows the web, choose music, and filter email. In fact, a notable indicator of the current trajectory is the ascendancy of MIT's Media Lab, with its explicit focus on media and communication, over the AI Laboratory, which in earlier days was MIT's headline computing organization, one of the world centers of the original AI research."

Maybe Maes' most significant contribution is making certain areas of computing seem sexy but I have to admit, I think this TED video that highlights some of the research that is happening at the Fluid Interfaces Group is pretty awesome.