Emotion and Technology
The media lab at MIT have been releasing videos about the work that the media lab are involved in. This video shows Design and the Elastic Mind, an exhibit at the MoMA, NYC featuring works by MIT Media Lab affiliates and I feel it is well worth a watch to view exhibition such as the powered ankle-foot prosthesis and the XO laptop from the one laptop per child scheme.
You can view the video at the LabCAST website.
Something I wish I’d thought of because it’s a great idea. Taking inspiration from Jonathon Harris and Sep Kamvar’s we feel fine and feeding in data from summarize, Twistori shows the emotions that run through Twitter. Categories to choose from include Love, Hate, Think, Believe, Feel and Wish, and with a simple clean design, you could happily sit and read the filtered twitters for hours on end.
View it at Twistori
Another interesting article from New Scientist where Mitja Back and colleagues at the University of Leipzig in Germany have discovered that your email address may reveal your real personality. They tested 100 students to guess the personalities of 600 teenagers just from viewing their email address.
“The panels’ guesses agreed most with a personality survey the teenagers had completed when it came to qualities like openness, conscientiousness and narcissism, and diverged most on the trait of extroversion.” It seems that personal traits can find their way into anything we do.
You can access the paper from Science Direct.
A great summartive article by New Scientist about the new emotional robots.
I thought the case study about Roomba vacuum cleaning robot was interesting, where the survey research conducted by Ja-Young Sung and Rebecca Grinter, who research human-computer interaction at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, noted emotional behaviour towards the robot such as giving its a name or gender. Sung notes “people want their Roomba to look unique because it has evolved into something that’s much more than a gadget.”
US soliders serving in Iraq also showed the same kind of emotional attachment to Packbots and Talon robots which are used to deactivate bombs and the soliders felt a loss when the robots were destroyed in bomb explosions.
Researchers led by Frank Heger at Bielefeld University in Germany are trying to find out what kind of robot will stimulate emotional responses from people. They have started by scanning the brains of people as they interact with robots. “The team starts by getting humans to “meet” four different “opponents”: a computer program running on a laptop, a pair of robotic lego arms that tap the keys of a laptop, a robot with a human-shaped body and rubbery human-like head, which also taps at a laptop, and a human. Then the volunteers don video goggles and enter an MRI machine. While inside the machine, a picture of the opponent they must play against flashes up inside their goggles.”
The team found that the more human-like their opponent was, with the human triggering the most activity in this region, followed by the robot with the human-like body and head. The team suggest that a human’s interaction with a robot would be affected by how it looked.
Finally I want to add the idea of a gender-specific robot. Cognitive scientist Paul Schermerhorn and colleagues at Indiana University in Bloomington asked 24 men and 23 women to cooperate with a machine-like robot on solving a mathematical problem and filling in a survey form. The robot consisted of two cameras that looked like eyesand a voice synthesiser allowing it to communicate. The team found that men thought of the robot as “more human-like”, women felt socially aloof and described it as “more machine-like”.”
“People might prefer to interact with robots that exhibit characteristics of their gender, or of the opposite gender,” says Schermerhorn. “This could lead to tailoring of the robot’s characteristics to the [gender of the] human in future interactions.”
Vanessa Evers of the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, together with researchers at Stanford University in California have found that US volunteers of European descent perceive robots differently to people raised in China who lived elsewhere for less than six years. They asked their volunteers how they would react if a robot had the responsibility of saving them in an emergency. It turned out that the US participants were more willing to trust the robot’s decisions than the Chinese participants.
I found this interesting article at New Scientist where Toshiyuki Shiwa and colleagues at the ATR laboratories in Kyoto, Japan asked a group of 38 students to order robots to perform domestic chores which took between 0 and 5 seconds to respond. Interestingly the student would have liked only a 1 second delay with 2 seconds being their limit. In most human to human interaction, either a person immediately responds to a task or will communicate back mostly with fillers words like hmm or err. It’s not surprising to hear that the students would grow impatient if the robot sits there processing for a few seconds. I think the first line of the New Scientist article sums this up nicely, “ROBOTS of the future may have to learn to make small talk if humans are to accept them.” Humans will feel an emotional attachment to a robot if they mimic human characteristics rather than remain ‘computer-like’.
The full article can be read at New Scientist.
I’d like to highlight the work of Christian Nold today as I was reading about his work within Emotional Systems, a exhibiton exploring the relationship between the contemporary artist, the artwork and you, the viewer, in the light of the latest discoveries in the neurological sciences about the human brain and its effects on the emotions, running from 30 November 07 to 3 February 08. I first came across Nold’s work when exploring mapping for my masters project. Nold has developed a device which measures the wearer’s perspiration, a simple form of recording the levels of a wearer’s emotional arousal. This device will also record a wearer’s geographical location using GPS. When this information is fed into a computer, it creates an Emotion Map, showing high and low points of wearer’s emotional arousal. And with some fanstatic results if you look at examples such as the Greenwich Emotion Map and the San Francisco Emotion Map. For the Emotional Systems exhibition, Nold was invited with the artist community to create an emotion map of Florence.
One of the main questions raised by Nold through his work is how concepts of community and environment change when we become aware of our own and each others intimate body states.
For a full profile of his work at Emotional Systems, visit the website and to learn more about Christian Nold, visit his website SoftHook.
I felt it was relevant to post about this article is in Seed Magazine about The Blue Brain project. This project is an ongoing attempt to model the human brain on an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer and Henry Markram, director of the project, wants to develop this system to simulate what that brain experiences resulting in a consious computer.
It consists of an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer with individual microchips each programmed to act like a single neuron. The computer simulates a single neocortical column, a minuscule slice of brain tissue that consisting of 10,000 neurons and their 30 million interconnections. Researchers at the Swiss university that partnered with IBM on the project used painstaking research to discover and model how the real neurons in a neocortical column in a two-week old rat work. It’s fairly astonishing and nifty that when they had one neuron accurately modeled and put together a 3D structure of 10,000 neurons, the thing started behaving like an actual neural circuit.
This article leaves me excited and worried at the same time. After researching about robotics and AI, I’m always interested in ways that technology could learn from humans and adapt their uses but I find myself thinking about I Robot and V.I.K.I who’s intelligence became so developed that she started to question the laws set by her makers and concluded that she knew better. When does adaptiveness become self intelligence? When does artificial intelligence comprise humanity? I think these are questions we should be asking now rather than later, when we’ve created something that we don’t understand how to stop. I don’t really want to be chased by a terminator in 2030.
If you want a perfect example of an ‘emotional web’ Jonathon Harris and Sep Kamvar’s exploration into human emotion across web has been fascinating.
I am an avid fan of We Feel Fine, an application that ‘harvests’ new posts from blogs that include the phrases “I feel” or “I am feeling”. It can identify the feeling within the sentence (e.g. happy, sad) and also age, gender, location and weather. The interface is a self-organizing particle system, each particle representing a feeling posted by one user. Particles come in different colours, sizes, shapes and opacity, mirroring the nature of the feeling. When you click on a particle, it reveals the sentence or photograph. In Madness mode, the particle fly about the screen in a wild fashion, mimicking a person’s true emotions. Other modes include murmurs where blog entries filter down from the top of the screen, montage where photographs associated with blog entries appear in a grid, mobs where five smaller movements configure shape, colour, distribution and physics to output feeling, gender, age, weather and location, metrics displays the most representative traits of the sample population, along five axes: feeling, gender, age, weather, and location and mounds which displays every feeling in the database, scaled and sorted in order of frequency.
Also released on the same date, May 8 2006, Lovelines turns your attention to the exploration of human desire.
“Lovelines illuminates the topography of the emotional landscape between love and hate, as experienced by countless normal humans keeping personal online journals.”
Lovelines examines thousands of blogs every few minutes to find expressions of love and hate. Similar to We Feel Fine, it saves age, gender and location of the blogger and presents this information along with the post. At the bottom of the application, a slider runs from Love to Hate, with a draggable heart that becomes scratched out to the point of illegibility as the heart approaches “Hate”. As the slider is pulled through Love, Like, Want, Indifference, Dislike, and Hate, words and pictures appear above to represent the chosen state of desire or despair.
Lovelines also provides movements: “Words”, “Pictures”, and “Superlatives”.
“Words and Pictures iteratively present individual examples of human desire, while Superlatives provides a daily zeitgeist of the most loved, wanted, liked, and hated things. Interactive timelines represent the changing magnitude of love and hate over time, and allow navigation into the past.”
Their latest piece of work, I Want You to Want Me was released on 14th February 2008 for New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s Design and the Elastic Mind show. This project explores chronicles the world’s long-term relationship with romance, across all ages, genders, and sexualities, gathering new data from a variety of online dating sites every few hours. Harris explains that
“The data is presented as an interactive installation, displayed on a 56” high-resolution touch screen, hung vertically on a wall in a dark room. On screen is an interactive sky, whose weather (sunny, cloudy, rainy, snowy, etc.) can be controlled by the viewer. Through the sky float hundreds of blue (male) and pink (female) balloons, each representing a single dating profile. The brighter balloons are younger people; the darker balloons older. Trapped inside each balloon is one of over 500 video silhouettes, showing a solitary person, engaged in any number of activities (yoga, jumping jacks, nose-picking, air guitar, etc.). The viewer can touch any balloon to select it, causing its photo to dangle from a string and its sentence to appear in a thought bubble overhead. Touching any balloon a second time pops it. The balloons move through the sky along different paths and at different speeds, bumping up against each other, sometimes traveling together for a time, but only ever getting so close, as each silhouette is ultimately confined to its own balloon.”
I feel that these applications show an exciting and clever way of showing that emotion can survive in the detached environment of the Internet. Harris and Kamvar have recognised the tools that allows the development of these emotions and show it in an interactive and aesthetically pleasing way.
Researching into PhD projects in Ireland opened my eyes to just how many areas can come under emotion and design particularly within the field of computing. Starting into such a widely discussed area can be daunting but I feel for myself and maybe others, it would be good to note down fields that would be useful to know about. Once you know the keywords, you start to understand where to look!
If, like me, you are interested in the computer side of emotional design, Human Computer Interaction or HCI (Norman, 1986) would be the place to start. This will be the foundation to springboard off into ‘emotional computing’. This is to improve the relationship between humans and computers so that computers are more receptive to a user’s needs.
One methodology which came from this was User Centred Design (UCD) where users requirements are considered right from the initial stages and then throughout product development, testing and release. This is moving in the direction of emotional design where the user’s experience is as important as the functionality of the product. For example, a person could create an application that functioned correctly but aesthetically wasn’t pleasing or easy to use. As Norman state ‘Attractive things work better’.
Along this vein is User Experience Design (UX) which has been a buzz word in web design for a while now. Its a term to describe the overall user experience as a result of Interaction Design (IxD). This sort of design incorporates many multi-disciplinary fields including psychology, graphic design and industrial design. I feel a user’s experience is essential to emotional design as a user’s experience with something can determine a positive or negative emotion.
User experience leads us to affective computing as headed by Professor Rosalind Picard of MIT. This type of computing works in the recognising, interpreting and processing emotions and is a branch of Artificial Intelligence (AI). This is really the cornerstone of emotional design as the computer is able to detect emotional information by a user’s physical state or behaviour. Technologies used include facial expression recognition, emotional speech recognition and body gestures.
One of the exciting prospects of this research is the design of computers having either minimal emotional capabilities or capable of simulating emotions. The result of this is a computer system that can interact with humans, the next level of HCI.
Another prospect is a machine with the ability to detect an emotion from a human and then adapt. The result of this machine would be that it could understand the information received from the user and stimulate an appropriate response. I feel computers may have a hard time with this one as everyone seems to get angry at their computer at some point.
One thing I have learnt from being on a multi-disciplinary course if that there is no point in limiting which fields you research. I have looked into robots particularly the writings of Asimov, wearable technology especially the work of Cute Circuit and reactive fabrics in fashion,theoretical texts such as Walter Benjamin and psycological books such as Donald Norman and Daniel Goleman. This will not only help you understand where these methods have come from but also make you a well-rounded researcher/developer.
This week I’m reading :
Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman
Things that make us smart by Donald Norman
I thought that today I would post people and places that inspire me to research into this field. They have been a big help to me and hopefully will be to others aswell.
Design & Emotion - Run by Marco Van Hout of Monito, this website provides information on design, experience design and the emotional side of our experiences of products, brands and services. It provides news, interviews and personal columns.
LEMTool - The LEMTool has been developed by building on scientific research by Monito in collaboration with the University of Twente. It’s a web based measurement tool to measure emotions during interactions with websites. The tool is running at a second transparent layer - above the website. The tool is tracking the user’s movements and will at given moments ask the user for information. The user is also able to communicate his observations autonomously to the tool. The tool is as invisible as possible to the user; trying to avoid influence over the user experience.
It was developed by Kevin Capota, a MSc student Industrial Design Engineering at the University of Twente, for his project and his thoughts and development were recorded in his blog which is interesting reading.
Design and Emotion Society - Established in 1999, the Design & Emotion society raises issues and facilitates dialogue among practitioners, researchers, and industry, in order to integrate salient themes of emotional experience into the design profession. The society offer a platform where professionals meet. Besides occasional initiatives, we organise the biannual International Conference on Design & Emotion as well as Design & Emotion workshops. This year the conference will be held in Hong Kong on October 6-9. For more information, visit the website.
Affective Design - affectivedesign.org is run by Trevor van Gorp and dedicated to exploring and understanding the “heart” of design; the effects of design on the emotional affect created by products, brands and services. He updates his blog regularly and writes about interesting topics ranging across design and emotion.
Affective Computing at MIT - The MIT Affective Computing Lab is run by Rosalind Picard and develops new technologies and theories that advance basic understanding of affect and its role in human experience. They “aim to restore a proper balance between emotion and cognition in the design of technologies for addressing human needs.” Their projects page is well worth a look and it’s something I can inspire to.
Donald Norman - Norman’s book ‘Emotional Design, Why we love (and hate) everyday things’ was my introduction to the world of emotional design. He also formed the Nielsen Norman group with Jakob Nielsen in 1998 to help companies create better products, services, and websites
