Seven – Dhairya

As opposed to full blown AR implementations like the upcoming glasses and the otherwise vision of full AR, it was a good break reading about something that was partial and location based AR games. Although AR was responsible for the overlay and display in the mobile games, I think the reason for their success is that the system is PLAYFUL! People actually go out and explore, emotions are evoked, people are engaged, in such a situation I feel even with limited AR and display in terms of mobile, the outdoor aspect of it more than compensates for it. There was also an interesting take in the other paper regarding ubiquitous learning – the benefits – especially the fact that the previous learning profile is always continued – the persistency and the situatedness of the aid. I am not fully convinced that a mobile is a good platform for learning, even for that matter the AR glasses – I mean, they can give you information – they can give you knowledge, facts – but so much of learning is doing, being, and more importantly SENSORY. Visual being just one of those senses. And the success of the apps mentioned in the reading is attributed to the multimodal nature of their use – although only the visuals were digital, rest was ANALOG.

My big takeaways from the reading was that PLAYFULNESS and MULTIMODAL (DIGITAL + ANALOG) play as much an important role in learning as JUST IN TIME and CONTEXTUAL.

Three – Dhairya

I found some interesting insights mostly relating to the psychology and the ergonomics of a wearable display and a just in time system. I hope to use these in my thinking process.

-Factors of a context aware system: physical, temporal, information
-Users of a wearable system (henceforth called ‘wusers’) use more of the same information than a user who has no convenient way of accessing that information
-Present information to wusers in ways that can be ignored but is accessible
-Proactively queried information can be more distracting than suggestively queried information
-Zipf’s Principle of Least Effort: People will try to minimize their total future work, given their best estimates at the time and chooses the strategy with the best cost/benefit trade-off.
-More than two seconds of response delay is unacceptable and will result in fewer uses of a particular tool, even at the cost of decreased accuracy
-Focused attention and divided attention
-Proximity compatibility principle: High display proximity (similarity) helps in tasks with similar mental proximity, and where information is related and needs to be treated together
-’Ramping interface’ where information is conveyed in stages.

Assignment One – Dhairya

#Mastery and Mimicry

I found Sep’s article an inspiring manifesto for how our tools should be.

##Self-Limitation
His first section about Self-Limitation, was ideologically empowering for me. I have always pondered what happens when our life is so full of technology that we loose control, how much is enough, should we the technologists start imposing ethical reasoning on our work. This self-debate has led me to a cyclic argument of ‘it will be when it will be’. With his examples of the bacteria and the body, I found a beautiful analogy to technology and humans – that in chaos peace will find its way. Having rested this argument with myself, I can move on.

##Accessibility
This section talked to me of the ripple effects our tools can have outside of their intended use. Specifically his example of Gandhian DIY loom and its effects on the socio-political mindset of Indians was interesting, partly because thats is my heritage and more so because I could find some similarity in my past project – ThinkerToys – which started out as a hack but had educational and environmental impact. It was a good reminder about the nature of tools I should keep building – upstream and accessible.

##Cyclicity
Particularly his argument about metrics struck me, how I should re-evaluate my work and re-measure it in terms of its qualified purpose and not its quantified goal. Lots of learning here for me.

##Heart and Head
Oh my god, this was poetry, I was tripping through each word. Sep doesn’t paint an ideal unachievable vision but rather dissects into the heart of a builder. I am still trying to soak in parts of this. I found beautiful his idea of what our tools should serve – connection, intuition, gift, purpose. I feel like taking longer walks, getting back to analog photography, sketch with charcoal more, and write more poems – connect to myself to make the tools in my most pure image.
#Augmenting Human Intellect

This was a rather heavy read an interesting one in terms of its historical perspective. Overall I found Doug’s motivations for augmenting human intellect still valid today, although written in the 70s, many of the things he envisions aren’t a functional reality today. I liked his approach by proposing his H-LAM/T model of an operating system-like workings of the mind. Having established his model made it much easier to then digest his proposal. Something I felt we do less often today, there is less ground theories that aid our explorations, mostly hunches. Yes discovering by doing is good and more often leads to breakthroughs; but having a model to go by is more systematic wandering. I still haven’t made complete sense of his proposal, but to me when I build tools I now would like to spend more time investigating the problem from a psychological and evolutionary perspectives.