Gahyun Kim

time capsule video note

to me, in 10 years.

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Thank you!

3 Images

My home, where I invite travellers from all around the globe.

An elaborately detailed tea room in Osaka from my latest trip to Japan this month. The minimal, modern Japanese details embody the aesthetics and values of Japanese culture that I have been fascinated by.

My dog Mono, my world per se. I love her more than anything in the world.

Surgical technology require several interface design in its procedures. But as the paper highlights, surgical technology comes with a foremost premise: sterility, which has kept the surgical interface design to its traditional limitations for long.

While improved technical basis such as machine-learning based algorithms and differing touchless alternatives to touch-based input system such as voice recognition software and gesturing, the holistic picture of this technology is much more complicated than sterility and operative procedures.

There was a recurring discourse upon all the readings we went through so far:

How do humans optimize technology and vice versa?

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reading8

Golsteijn, VoxBox: a Tangible Machine that Gathers Opinions from the Public at Events

What if surveys or so called “satisfaction checks” you’re asked to fill in during social events less intrusive, more relevant and interactive?

Tangibility seems to be the keyword in designing such prototype. The tangible interaction would have to be; intuitive(usable without any instruction or background knowledge/technique), visible(especially of user progress), and encouraging!

While my initial consideration put emphasis on only the tangible, recreative actions that require short and easy motions, using verbal answers(through “gathering answers to open questions by enticing people to speak their answers into a phone”) also worked as an effective tool with the VoxBox data collection.

But could VoxBox’s approach could really be validated even apart from the slightest privacy issue? Does it really “show much promise at getting people from all walks of life to voice their opinions”? I personally think that cognitive perceptions and perspectives of the target users at these events toward the machine(or any questionnaire procedure) would have to been taken accountable in advance.

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reading 1

Munmun De Choudhury, Moon Phrases: A Social Media Faciliated Tool for Emotional Reflection and Wellness

We all know emotional wellness is important. We also know that there needs to be sufficient quality and quantity of outlet for our emotions often related to stress. Most of our generation—the millenials—choose to use Social Media as the ultimate outlet. Easily accessible, great affordability. Social Media has for sure changed the behavioral pattern of the whole generation in both online and offline basis.
In line with this, Moon Phrases aims to serve as a web-based tool for analogical visualizations of emotions and the influence by tracking down the usage of social media.

So how do we consume social media? Can the premise behind using social media—Twitter in this case—for cognitive pattern analysis be validated?
I think this may be easily applicable from a hyper-active social media user’s perspective, given that the user actively and willingly records the daily ups and downs of his/her emotions, events, interests, thought trails, and etc.
There may be countless changes of emotions, language use accumulated over time. Mining this data, identifying the states of each element, category of the data and presenting it on visual cues may result in a “behavioral fingerprint” of the individual.

The visual representation of Moon Phrases follow the analogy of moon phases. By utilizing the official API of Twitter, a user’s posts will be archived and interpreted in the illumination of a moon on a daily basis, the illuminated portion representing the degree of positivity of each day.
Again, this can be validated presumably because of the general usage of social media in that it is done in a daily, natural manner. This in turn may project moods, thoughts and so on based on the user’s “social environments”.
But at the same time, this validates the tool’s limitation in that there are varying types of usage of social media. One could keep it as a detailed and elaborate journal while one might use it as a dashboard of only the “happy” moments of his/her highlighted life.

Overall, as an active user of social media myself, I doubt that my own “social environment” could realistically represent my personal states or cognitive changes. On the other hand, Moon Phrases may hold in itself its own value proposition in that it potentially deals with a new behavioral culture of social media. I believe that the tool could be utilized specifically for that purpose.

How then, could it possibly be more credible, overcome the limitations such as the manipulative traits of social media?

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reading 2

Yohanan and MacLean, The Haptic Creature Project: Social Human-Robot Interaction through Affective Touch

We are familiar with the intensity and influence of affective touch between human interaction. We are also used to the sensical strength of affective touch between human and the commonly domesticated four-legged animals such as my dog sleeping on my lap right now.

And yes, we all agree with the positive power of affective touch, but it is not always accessible, which is where the robotic touch takes part. In line with this, the project from this excerpt aims to “investigate the use of affective touch in the social interaction between human and robot”, from responsive analysis of the display, recognition, influence and the actual boost of the sense of companionship.

Resembling a cat or a dog, the Haptic Creature, the robot, interacts with the user(human) through touch. It can be differentiated from other human interactive robots in that it is socially interactive, interacting through a mutually compatible approach, touch. As mentioned in the excerpt, a ‘touch’ directly contacts the skin, the largest organ in the human body and a major sense organ.

“Affective touch” seems to be of a deeper level of touch in that it induces communication or emotions, which can be realized with less burden and zero spoken words in the commonly observed human-animal bond.

While the modality of touch for affect display and the amorphous shape(zoomorphism) being the major characteristics of the mentioned Haptic Creatures—Huggable, Paro, Aibo and such—the extent of these distinctive elements are also put into consideration in cognitive terms through differing prototypes.

My question is, what could be the elements that could generate a sense of commonly agreeable realistic affection in human-animal robot interaction?

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reading 3

Jorda, The Reactable Tangible and Tabletop Music Performance

When asked of the definition of ‘design’, yes the big old cliché question that pops up at the beginning of every design-related class, I figured out that the answer should most likely begin with putting an emphasis in making intangible ideas into tangible visualization.

In line with this, Reactable seems to have started from a design perspective in interpreting music. As pointed out in the excerpt, I think that music has indeed been tangible to an extent, with all sorts of methodological expressions that appeal to the general senses of the audience. And it was the digital tabletop interfaces that made this tangibility a step further, reinforcing music per se with the capability of generating tangible interaction.

While my interpretation of the ‘interaction’ here was naturally limited to the sensible process between these digitally produced music and their audience, the author points out the relation between the instrument and the instrumentalist in the context. Compared to the traditional music production, this trendy, systemically designed interface endows the producer with higher control over the process as a whole, like a control tower, while the system itself “self-autonomously” manages the meticulous details.

Within this context, the interactive relation is active and engaging, the instrument “responses to performer stimuli”, which would in turn give the performer more freedom and versatility —‘shared performance’.

However, these interactive music controllers have their limitations in that they were derived, extended originally from the “traditional instrument paradigm”.

The correlation between the tracking of control objects and projection techniques of the table surface serve as the quintessence of tabletop TUI for the combination allows a direct, intuitive visual feedback, making the interaction stronger and more integrative.

Reactable takes in a similar system, but the effect of the visualization of the ‘pucks’ seems to be more intense, tangible and ‘instant’, simply because all the connections and in-between processes are significantly VISIBLE, adding to the performance value of the music. The modular blocks and the tracking system adhesively work as a logical cue in distinguishing each of their roles and relations. And as mentioned in the excerpt, the ‘pucks’ are adding to its usability and affordance as well, by expanding its potential range of usage to multiple purposes and performance simultaneously with minimal restriction in scalability.

Personally, the fact that a musical flow can be generated at a touch(physical movement) and represented with visible cues was the most fascinating aspect of Reactable. This type of interface would also work in varying platforms. How and where?

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reading 4

Steptoe, ISMAR, Presence and Discernability in Conventional and Non-Photorealistic Immersive Augmented Reality

Discernability: “a user’s ability to correctly distinguish between objects that are real and objects that are virtual.”

Presence: “the perceptual illusion of non-mediation”

“NPR applies transformation filters to modify the appearance of an image.”

AR technology has been a massive influence these days, we have come to the point where we encounter the technology within our daily life from simple kids’ toys to educational gadgets. But yes as the excerpt points out, it remains and limits itself to the potential of that little handheld device.

While the basic objective of the technology would be to seamlessly integrate reality with the virtual world/content, “in such a way that they are visually indistinguishable”, current AR technology/devices that we are used to have been rather obviously ‘distinguishable’.

Why? Mainly because the AR-created imagery, its virtual world, is not realistic enough. Realistic as in; not perfectly aligned with its users—humans—sensory perception and cognitive image. The virtual imagery would have to be both physically and cognitively measured to be inexplicitly immersed with the perspective of reality.

But apparently, this “appearance acquisition approach” is not the most efficient method in aligning all the little augmented details in perfect match with the real objects and their traces—shades, lighting, illumination, etc., which is where “stylized rendering” steps in, distributing the burden to both real and virtual content.

AR-Rift is a step-up from the traditional NPR environment, and this research was also about exploring “discernibility and presence” of varying rendering modes—conventional, stylized, and virtualized—of immersive head-mounted video see-through AR in the perspective of their impact on discernability and presence, for each mode would result in differing results in the level of the two criteria.

In the end, the stylized mode resulted in the most stable discernability out of the three rendering modes, and the level of judgment accuracy of it also suggests that NPR can be “effective in unifying the appearance of an environment in immersive AR”.

As stated, efficiently realistic and low-cost AR tech such as the AR-Rift would soon be commercialized to consumer level access, allowing a much more elaborated level of detail and application of it in our daily life. I hope it can soon be applied to educational purposes!

my new Pinterest account 🙂

reading 1

Norman, excerpt from <Affordance, Conventions, and Design>

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The fact that there needs to be “just the right” extent, direction of afforadance(s) for a design is an insightful principle. In that it pursues to eliminate any cues or signals that may fit in the boundary of ‘affordance’ but not when they are within the righteous process of utilising the design.

As mentioned in the excerpt, even the most efficient affordances may not be fully utilised if a common ground for required cultural conventions are not settled yet within the community/society the users are based in.

Real and perceived affordances topped with conventions may be the easiest criteria for an approachable design, both logically and culturally intuitive.

While the conventions in the reading are largely limited to computer-related physical actions like clicks, drags, typing, etc., we are rapidly going into the new phase of technical interactions.

Which naturally brought me to the idea of the now commercialised AI devices -Siri, Alexa, Google, Genie, etc. that are just getting recognised of their “daily values”. As a person who lived through the introduction and normalisation of these services, I was learnt of their affordances and conventions mainly through sales promotions and user reviews; observance and comprehension. And once I had physical access to them, through practice.

I think it is yet to be perceived as a ‘natural’ convention, to call out “Genie-ya~” to turn on your tv. We still have TVs that can be turned on only with the physical action of clicking the right buttons, which leaves a user like me dumbfounded at a hotel, unconsciously calling out “Genieya~” to turn a TV that doesn’t have Genie’s magical assistance.

There is still yet to be a clear definition for affordances or conventions, which I believe is what dilutes the boundary between the two concepts. While a crisp scissor-cut distinction may not be possible, we would have to adapt ourselves to the expanding interactive options and their conventions to enable the most efficient set of compatible affordances.

reading 2

Gaver, excerpt from <Technology Affordances>

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Affordances can be perceived in varying perspectives. The process of different perspectives being interpreted into specific perceptions can lead to recognising the relevant affordances, and vice versa. Which implies that the concept of affordances is a mutual relationship, it mainly relies both on the attributes of the object and the user.

This also indicates that the design/service should be mapped out systemically, since the lack of systemic values may lead to the users to rely on cultural constraints rather than actual affordances. As mentioned in the excerpt, the concept of affordances is a mutual relationship, relying both on the attributes of the object and the user.

In line with the first reading, we as both designers and users would have to be adapted to differing relationships of affordances and actions between each medium. ‘Sound’ for one, is a relatively new medium -the “Genie” example mentioned above- to me as a user, and it is a medium in which the interactive process is yet to be distinguished intuitively.

We are not only encountered with visual information such as the pivoting door handle case, different sensical cues collaborate and supplement in forming proper affordances, influencing the user actions.

So the question remains, how should we be adapting to these “newer” interactions?