“These are a collection of images of what Brixton could be like if it were to develop as a disregarded area inhabited by London’s new robot workforce. Built and design to do all the task humans no longer want to do. The population of brixton has rocketed and unplanned cheap quick additions have been made to the skyline.

Why do I blog this? designing of an urban environment (fictional or not) to accomodate robots seems to be a rather interesting brief. Surely some good design fictions can be built from there to reflect the possibilities of the future(s). The project blog is full of interesting material.

The Institute For The Future (IFTF) has just released an interesting map [PDF] of signals and forecasts about robotics:

“After decades of hype, false starts, and few successes, smart machines are finally ready for prime time. (…) This map, and the associated series of written perspectives, are tools to help navigate the coming changes. As we scanned across ten application domains, seven big forecasts emerged. In the process, we also identified three key areas of impact where the robot renaissance will change our lives over the next decade.

In each domain we focus on three levels of impacts: (1) Robots helping humans understand ourselves (2) Robots augment human abilities (3) Robots automate human tasks“

Why do I blog this? Both because I am working on a project about robotics and due to my interest in how technologies fail and re-appear on a regular basis. I am not sure about the term “renaissance� and do not necessarily agree with some of the trends but there are some interesting aspects in this anyway. Above all, what I am interested in here is:

• The variation in terms of shape/forms and what is considered here as a “robotâ€�,
• The assumpttions made about humans needs and desires,
• The mix between engineering projects, quotes from sci-fi movies and pictures,
• The rhetorical tricks (present tense, “from XXX to XXXâ€�, “Riseâ€�, “Every machineâ€�, “self-manageâ€�.

Les Editions Volumiques finally launched their website showing plenty of curious and original products based on mixing paper and digital technologies:

“Here are the first pieces of les évolutions dynamiques following research on both volume and interactivity, playfully mixing paper and computation. By allowing interactivity and gameplay in the page (for example with the Duckette project) or between the pages (in The book that turns its own pages, or Labyrinthe), we try to bring new life to paper. We then pushed physical behavior to paper and ink (the book that disapears). There, the paper is no longer only the frame for representation, but at the same time the field of a real physical experience. We also played with the volume and perspective of book and content (paradoxales, Meeting-Zombies). And then, we tried to combine paper with this little computer-object almost of us all carry everywhere: our cell phone (the night of the living dead pixels, (i) pirates).“

Why do I blog this? I find these projects fascinating and love the idea of mixing digital tech with paper to create compelling user experiences. The examples showed on the picture (see more on their website) are stunning and show the future of books go far beyond boring reading machines. The use of playful metaphors and game mechanics in the work of Bertrand and Etienne are also highly intriguing for those interested in inspiring ways to renew the reading experience.

Besides, if you’re interested in this type of “paper computing�, be sure to check the Papercomp 2010 workshop at Ubicomp. Organized by friends from EPFL, it’s based on similar ideas:

“Paper is not dead. Books, magazines and other printed materials can now be connected to the digital world, enriched with additional content and even transformed into interactive interfaces. Conversely, some of the screen-based interfaces we currently use to interact with digital data could benefit from being paper-based or make use of specially designed material as light and flexible as paper. In a near future, printed documents could become new ubiquitous interfaces for our everyday interactions with digital information. This is the dawn of paper computing. “

The paper “Making the Social Hold: Towards an Actor-Network Theory of Design” by Albena Yaneva is an interesting contribution to the role of Actor-Network Theory in design.

It basically shows how various ANT concepts can be relevant and insightful in the context of designing artifacts. Relying on notions such as scripts or delegation of action to objects the author examines various mundane artifacts (stairs, handrails, elevator buttons, etc.) and show how the way they have been designed triggers “specific ways of enacting the social“.

Some excerpts I found interesting:

“If you follow me for a moment, again, in my trajectory, you will witness how the objects from my university mornings (my key, the door lock of the resource room, the elevator buttons, the staircase handle, the conference room arrangement) do not stand for social forces and divisions, nor do they symbolically represent the university’s order, hierarchy or divisions of labor; rather, they perform the social as we use them, and connect us in a new way with fellow colleagues, students and university administrators.
(…)
expanding the project of ANT to the field of design requires mobilizing this method’s persistent ambition to account and understand (not to replace) the objects of design, its institutions and different cultures. This means we must understand the designerliness of design objects, networks and artifacts, instead of trying to provide, by all means, a stand-in (social, psychological, historical or other) explanation of design, i.e. a psychological explanation of the creative energies of the inventor, a psychoanalytical explanation of the client–designer–user relationship, a historical explanation of the social contexts of design.
(…)
An ANT approach to design would consist in investigating the culture and the practices of designers rather than their theories and their ideologies, i.e. to follow what designers and users do in their daily and routine actions. (…) we should study the experiences of both users and designers, as well as the numerous connections that this research would reveal.“

Why do I blog this? collecting material about ANT and design, a hot topic lately. What I find interesting here is that there the move from sociology to design is similar to the one we have seen in the 80s from psychology. At the time, cognitive psychology moved from explaining individual behavior by internal factors (the brain, a cognitive system bound to the individual) to explaining it with external factors (artifacts in our environment, the importance of context, the situated character of action). This led to the emergence of Situated Action or Distributed cognition. Conversely, sociology moves from the “social” to artifacts (non-humans) and show how social is inscribed in objects.

Another important point of this article is the proposition that Yaneva makes as a research agenda: instead of investigating the influence of external factors (be they economical, cultural, political) on design, the idea is to describe the design process itself by capturing “the movements of artifacts and designers in the design studio“.

Yaneva, A. (2009). Making the Social Hold: Towards an Actor-Network Theory of Design. Design and Culture, Volume 1, Number 3, November 2009