Toshirō Mifune
Kid makes an informative video on how to make “Hot Dr Pepper”
Rashida Jones Remembering a Conversation with Tupac Shakur
protect yourself and have supplies.
(Source: The New York Times)
Bonnefon and co are seeking to find a way through this ethical dilemma by gauging public opinion. Their idea is that the public is much more likely to go along with a scenario that aligns with their own views.
So these guys posed these kinds of ethical dilemmas to several hundred workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to find out what they thought. The participants were given scenarios in which one or more pedestrians could be saved if a car were to swerve into a barrier, killing its occupant or a pedestrian.
At the same time, the researchers varied some of the details such as the actual number of pedestrians that could be saved, whether the driver or an on-board computer made the decision to swerve and whether the participants were asked to imagine themselves as the occupant or an anonymous person.
The results are interesting, if predictable. In general, people are comfortable with the idea that self-driving vehicles should be programmed to minimize the death toll.
-If I designed a self-driving car and you were riding in it and the car ended up in a life or death situation–where you die or a pedestrian dies– would you want me to base what the default mode is (kill you or kill pedestrian) based on what a few hundred people on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk thought?
I’m almost certain the answer to that question should be “No,” but, you know, think about it.
This rad looking class pointed me toward this video about deep learning. if you want to get excited about it, check out this vid.
The device pictured in the image you see above might look a bit primitive, but it’s actually a prototype built to showcase technology that may very well be the future of touchscreens. Researchers from Technische Universität Berlin in Berlin, Germany built the device, which offers a brilliant solution for touchscreens by giving them real physical buttons that appear temporarily when you need them, and then vanish when you don’t.
The cyborg sensorium is possible because, as it turns out, the human brain is quite happy to accept whole new forms of peripherals. Neuroplasticity, we now know, is the natural state of the brain; we’ve only just developed the technology to properly take advantage of it. It’s like we were always meant to merge completely with the machine world. To fuse into a new kind of organism.
also a link to a Bruce Sterling talk on alien aesthetics at the beginning of that article, so…
Just Design
This weekend I read a bunch about Carnegie Melon’s new design program, Transition Design. I’m, honestly, unsure about whether or not I’d be interested in attending in the program anymore. Not that I was planning to…right?
In my research, I focused mostly on Cameron Tonkinwise, the head of Carnegie Melon’s Phd program. I also read this essay he wrote about various “types” of designs (speculative, critical, design fiction…). One of his main points is that these separate things are all design–that they should not be broken off from “just design”, that doing so implicitly (and wrongly) suggests that “just design” doesn’t include speculation, critique, fiction-creation. And that the X design and design X’s “only benefits the artificial ecosystem” of academic discussions about design.
So I think I understand this viewpoint, or at least what he says in the essay. But, geez if it’s not challenging. I feel like only when I think of this as being a comment from within the academic world (to the academic world) does it really completely make sense (that it exists).
As an interaction design worker, the “should”-ness, the “command form” of the essay feels, well, bad. Would I like to incorporate more speculation, critique, fiction-creation into my work? Yes! Do I do that already? Well, kinda…in a really formal sense, yes, but not in ways that I would consider “on par” with what I consider great CD, Speculative Design, etc. That said, I think Tonkinwise is more criticizing the industry as a whole rather than one particular actor within it. But it’s difficult to really know what to do with the essay, then. And is my current wanting to do CD just…well…meaningless?
He goes on to say in a comment:
Doing future fiction critical design, etc, is easy, if not indulgently privileged, outside of commercial (or live sociololitical contexts) practice.
Which makes me worried even more–is my project outside of commercial practice in the way he describes? Geez, I hope not. I don’t think it is..I think I’m engaging w/ my “sociololitical context” [sick!], but it’s difficult to know for sure. I know I’m not being flippant about it, about the subject matter, the process, or the work itself. It doesn’t feel like the interaction design equivalent of “lickable interfaces” on Dribbble, etc. Or the Eli Schiff of artifact making. It’s not going to be my best work ever, but it feel like I’m learning a lot of important things and that the final product will be meaningful.
But then again I was able to afford taking a couple months out of working in order to even learn what Critical Design was. Is that “indulgently privileged”? If so, that is kinda Catch-22-ish…By doing only “just design” I would never have heard of Speculative or Critical Design and I wouldn’t have been able to ”come up with” Critical Design on my own, or seen how critique could be a part of my practice (that is, interaction design) in such a meaningful way.
So I guess (”In conclusion…”) I’m, like, happy to read the essay. But I don’t know how instructive it is, for me in my practice (which, let’s be honest, it has no responsibility of being that at all) or, as an artifact of contemporary academic writing from within the design world, in my decisions about/investigation into figuring out what the heck I should be doing w/ my free time/life.

