The Beauty Of Interaction
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Lecture/Conference
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:16
I'm Patricia Marti from University of Siena in Italy.
00:21
Before starting my talk, I would like to say just a few words about my university and my department. We started in 1992, and in Italy, my department, it is communication science, was quite an experiment at that time.
00:41
Because we decided to mix people from communication, psychology, technology, design, and so engineering, and we work all together, so still work all together, and I will show you some of the
01:02
results of our work, of our projects. But for me, it's important to say that this multidisciplinary is a value for us, so we really want to mix and to share and to exchange, and I'm available to do this for you today,
01:22
so even after my talk, if you want any information, I'm very happy to stay here with you. So the title of my talk is beauty of interaction, so I will try to say something about beauty,
01:40
what is beauty for me, and before starting, I would like to say that this work is, was started a few years ago in collaboration with other groups, in particular, to explain what beauty is, beauty in interaction is for me.
02:05
I would like to start quoting Keis Overbeck, who was professor at the technical university Eindhoven and very sadly passed away a few months ago, but I'm very happy to share
02:21
with you the work that I did with him, and this is also a way to continue his dreams and his activity. So speaking about beauty and interaction, Keis used to say that design is about people.
02:41
It's about our way of living, our hopes, our dreams, our loneliness and joy, our sense of beauty and justice. It's about the social and the good. It's about being in the world. And in this context, it's a very poetic approach to the design of interactive technologies.
03:09
We were and we still are convinced that meaning is in action, meaning is in interaction. It's not that we find, something that we can find in the world, that's something
03:22
that we can teach to our students, it's something that we construct together. So this is the main vision of this talk and the approach. And instead of explaining this in word, I would like to start with two videos, and
03:44
these videos will be commented just afterwards. So this is a lamp, an interactive lamp that was designed by a Ph.D. student at the Technical
04:08
University Eindhoven. And this is Phillips Rose. And you see the lamp, you don't see any switch, and the lamp just invites you to explore,
04:21
to touch, to stroke. And sometimes the lamp doesn't know exactly what to do, so it has to be in a sense reassured about what to do, where to direct the light, and you will see in a while there are different
04:53
ways of interacting with this lamp, mainly stroking, and the material of this lamp is
05:04
extremely pleasurable to stroke and to touch. So it's a learning process. The lamp and the user are interactive to learn user preferences.
05:25
So what is really needed at the time to have a good experience of reading. And now let me show another one.
05:43
Another lamp, again, this is another student project, this is a master project. This is a different kind of lamp. Again, you interact with the lamp, there are no switches around, and you try to adapt
06:04
the way to use it, but then you see sometimes the lamp doesn't want to collaborate at all. So maybe you have to try again and try to convince. No, there is no way.
06:24
Okay, so why? Why people should buy a lamp like this? A lamp that maybe doesn't do what is expected to do. And the reason for this, I thought that this was a good example for this concept
06:46
of beauty of interaction, because these lamps are about opening their functionality to the action of the user. They are about exploring. They are about trying things.
07:02
So they are open to our perceptual motor skills. But they are also about reading, and they are also about feeling good about beauty, reading a good book, maybe. So they are about emotional skills.
07:20
As I said, they are about reading. So the cognitive is there. And they are also about values. Values are personal, but values are social. So they are about social skills. And this is what beauty of interaction is about, is a combination of these.
07:41
And these lamps are physical hypotheses that show what is the value behind design for beauty in interaction. And this is something that we try to teach to our students. And so I want to show you other videos and other projects from the students.
08:03
But before having a look at these videos, I would like to say that having the beauty in mind means that the designers have to create a context for an experience, first of all.
08:21
And so they don't have just to design a good product. They have to offer a context to enjoy whatever, a film or to work, sharing, staying together. But it is important to do this in a beautiful way.
08:44
So using all our skills in a very natural way. And it is important that technology is embodied. So we use our body to interact with interactive technologies.
09:03
And first of all, it's important that technology is experiential and respectful. Let me explain what I mean by respectful. And try to imagine this situation.
09:24
You are in a shop. And the shop assistant threw the biscuit at your feet, just doing this. And you bend down, and you begin to pick up the crumbs. And after some fiddling, you manage to get your change out of his fist.
09:48
So could you ever accept a behavior like this in a shop? Never, of course. But this is exactly what we accept when we use a vending machine.
10:04
When we use a vending machine, we insert coins, and sometimes we have to take the photos doing something like that, put our hands in dirty holes, and, okay, I have quite
10:21
an example of really unacceptable vending machine that we use every day. So starting from this example, we asked our students to design new vending machines having beauty in mind. And this is what they did.
12:00
First of all, the vending machine tries to attract your attention, the machine, the
12:06
accounts follow the movement of the person, and then also they were very much focused on the way in which the machine opened. Because this is something that is really bad sometimes with some vending machines.
12:26
And, again, everything, also the gestures are extremely natural. I want that. I don't have to type numbers, for example, because typing is, of course, something that
12:41
can lead to errors. And, again, you can waste your money and so on and so forth, but the way in which the experience was reinterpreted by the students was quite interesting to see. And then there were, of course, other examples of you couldn't call these vending machines,
13:06
but let me show what they tried. They tried to have a kind of expressive interaction with a machine that tries to give you something. And the first example is a machine that is a bit nervous and maybe scared about your
13:25
touch, so the machine doesn't know exactly what to do, but at the end it gives small nuts. And the other one is very poetic and beautiful.
13:58
This is the second one.
14:38
It's not very convinced. So there is a way of having expressive technologies and a very simple, natural way to interact
15:03
with such technologies. And everything should be extremely embodied. So we don't need necessarily interfaces that we design just to interact with the technologies.
15:20
We can use our body, and we can use the environment as it is possible to see from this example. This was another project from a master student who designed this system to listen music.
15:51
So this is the context of the work that I'm doing at the University of Siena, and these
16:57
are some of the examples from the students' project.
17:02
But what I'm trying to do now is to try to challenge this approach in different domains. And one of these, an extremely challenging domain for applying the beauty of interaction is the health care, so the rehabilitation and care in general.
17:27
So what is beauty in therapy and care? To me, this is really the experience of use that lead to a feeling of engagement and
17:42
also to the hope of the recovery. We all know that when doing rehabilitation, for example, physical rehabilitation is extremely boring. You have your problem, and you have to repeat again and again the same movement.
18:02
And people don't want to do this. And in particular, children don't want to do this. They get bored, and that's it. And so why don't we try to make also rehabilitation a beautiful experience, an engaging experience?
18:21
The other point is that rehabilitation tools manifest disability. They are awful, awful to wear, awful to touch, and they immediately manifest disability. So is there anything that we can do to avoid this?
18:43
Is there anything to make them playful, engaging, surprising, nice to use, beautiful to use? And the other point to me that is very important is that rehabilitation usually focuses
19:01
on impaired perceptual motor skills. And so what I'm trying to do is to recombine the other skills that are still intact in people who have, for example, physical or cognitive problems, and then to use them in
19:22
combination without focusing on the disability itself. So this is the context. And when I try this work, it is not easy to read the first question, but the question
19:41
was, it is possible to design with, to have an aesthetically-minded design to develop rehabilitation tools. And yeah, there are some attempts.
20:01
These are nice examples that I saw, that I found on internet. And the first one, these are crutches that are made by ceramic. They are very nice to wear and to touch. They are very elegant.
20:21
And these are other examples of these kind of tools that are like a bit fashion. But to me, what is important here is that the beauty is not only in appearance.
20:41
The beauty is in interaction. So how can we design rehabilitation tools that are pleasurable to use? I started a few years ago, as I said, with this topic that I explored in different projects. In particular, I used and I'm still using robots for autistic children, for example,
21:10
for elderly people, and other kind of interactive tools. I will show you some examples of these. And this is the first example.
21:25
I worked for a few, I would say a couple of years in homecares with elderly people. And in particular for people affected by dementia.
21:40
And the problem they have in particular is isolation. It's the isolation. They don't communicate very much. They sit most of the day waiting for lunch and dinner mainly. And they sit. And it's extremely difficult for them to get in contact with other people, to
22:02
communicate with other people, because the language is impaired. And so since they in some way realize this, they refuse to communicate with other people. So I had a team at that time that was an international team of designers.
22:28
And we started this project. And we developed what we call the rolling pins. They are cylinders and plastic tubes mainly that can communicate with each other.
22:42
And they can produce different kind of feedbacks. Sounds, light, and vibrations. And what is interesting is that the system that these rolling pins are used in two or
23:00
three people at least. So when you shake or you roll one of your rolling pin that is a cylinder like this, the output of your action is reflected on the other pins. And whenever the two person make exactly the same kind of movement, the pins vibrate.
23:27
So this means that you can perceive the perception of the other person. And when you tune each other, when the person tune each other, you can feel that you are
23:41
doing exactly the same. And for the therapist, this is quite important when you are able to tune with another person, because this means that you are able to read the mind of another person. And this is something that people with dementia cannot do.
24:00
So this is, let me show you the system, how it works. Okay, so I tried this system with elderly people in this home care.
24:50
And we did an experiment. We divided the people in two groups, and one group worked or tried the system in a
25:02
condition where the two rolling pins didn't communicate each other. And the other group worked with the system in the condition where the rolling pin communicated each other. So this means that the person could feel the perception of the other one.
25:21
So making the same kind of movement. And you can see the result of the, on the right, you have the therapist. And this is the first condition when the rolling pin don't communicate each other. You see the person doesn't do anything.
25:41
She refused to put the hands on the rolling pin. But this is the condition in which the rolling pin communicate.
26:48
These videos with the therapist and the doctors, and what is interesting to see is that they interpreted the different movements, the choreographies of movement in a very
27:05
specific way. They said that this is a kind of non-verbal dialogue where you express a kind of relaxation when you do something like that. So it's a very easy movement or anxiety and effort when they did the rotations.
27:30
So it was a way to communicate with the therapist about their internal state. And again, you can see here a combination of sensory motor skills and perceptual skills
27:46
and visual and cognitive skills and social skills. So it's really a way to get in touch and to try to also to involve in the activity
28:02
skills that usually are not very much practiced by these persons. So this system was really successful. It is still in use in this home care in the north of Italy. This is another example.
28:21
It's another system for children with cognitive and physical disabilities. The system is called active surfaces. And the idea here and the beauty here was to work in the water because the water is really a fantastic context for the rehabilitation.
28:46
In water, even people with physical disabilities can move autonomously. So children with physical disabilities can play with other children. They don't need any other support.
29:00
They can move. And also, children with cognitive disabilities can play in this kind of environment, because the water is extremely relaxing. So it helps to maintain the focus of attention during the activity.
29:20
And so before this system was developed and tried out in a real context, I asked my student to think about, to develop concept of this kind of systems, having this idea of the beauty of interaction in mind.
29:41
And you can see what they did and the very sophisticated techniques that we use for prototyping ideas.
32:31
So this is more or less the way in which we prototype ideas and we work with the doctors and the therapist. It's extremely easy to develop concept and to show to the people.
32:45
So just to be sure that what you are going to develop is exactly what people need as something that they can use and they want to experiment. And so also this system was developed in a final system. And it was developed in the form of floating files instead of working
33:06
on the floor of the swimming pool. And again, there are modules, there are tiles that communicate each other, and you can do different kinds of games. And like the Scrabble games or sequence games or matching colors and these kind of things.
33:25
When you put the tiles in the right sequence, the configuration at the end lights up. So again, this is an example of combination of physical and cognitive skills.
33:42
And also children really love to play these kind of games. And it is a way to continue the therapy. Again, this is still in use in a swimming pool in Siena. The second context in which I'm trying to challenge the idea of beauty of interaction
34:04
is education. And of course, this is extremely important for us because if you don't train people in designing with this idea, you don't have, I mean, prototypes and system to try out.
34:25
And there is no way to have a societal impact if you don't develop system like that. So to see if this idea of beauty of interaction can really have an impact on the society.
34:41
And this is an example of a project that we did last year. It was a module, it was a design school, an international design school that was called Light Through Culture. And in this, the idea was to wave technologies, light technologies,
35:03
and to introduce them in a very rich cultural context. With the idea to learn together how to use light technologies to express meanings about history.
35:20
And we didn't do the module at the university, but we did the module in a museum in Siena. That is a special place because it was an hospital, and now it is a museum. It's a very big building.
35:40
And we gave them a very difficult design brief. So we actually asked them to design an experiential route, trying to explore the fact that this museum is built on the Via Francigena. Via Francigena is a pilgrimage route that was used by pilgrims from France and UK to go to Rome.
36:12
And Siena was one of the places where the pilgrims stopped to rest a bit,
36:21
and then to continue their path towards Rome. And so the questions that we asked the students to respond were, are the tourists the new pilgrims? What do they look for when they start a pilgrimage like this?
36:41
Do they look for hope, for silence, for enlightenment? So again, it was a very poetic way of thinking about the history of this place. So as I said, we asked them to design this experiential route, and we tried to address their craftsmanship
37:03
and their different cultural and educational background. We had six students from Eindhoven and six students from Siena with different background, and they took the full responsibility to design this path.
37:25
And the school was organized in three phases mainly. The first phase was about opening sensitivities. So we asked them to go around and to be inspired about the space. So about the smell, the gloom, the darkness.
37:43
Just really stay there. The module lasted two weeks, and in two weeks they had to design and develop the installation, and then we opened the exhibition to the public. And then they started about, we had part of the module was dedicated to the history of the place,
38:06
and then the students split in groups, and they started making, just playing with technologies, light technologies, and try to see how to use Arduino boards and sensors and actuators to build different installations.
38:23
And the third phase was about the reflection. So opening the exhibition to the public and try to involve visitors in discussions about what they visited, what they understood, which kind of experience they had from visiting the museum.
38:45
And they did actually quite a good work. This is the path in the museum. So there were five different installations in the space. And I want to show the first one, that is this one, 0.0.
39:02
And this is the introduction to the space.
39:48
So this is the first space that is a quite interesting space. This was the morgue of the old hospital.
40:02
And when people died, they stayed there for 24 hours before dispensing the blessing. And since there were no scientific instruments to establish the death with certainty, the doctors were used to put a bell attached to the ankle of the corpses.
40:27
So if in 24 hours they didn't see any sound, people were dead. And this was the way in which they treated people.
40:41
And this is the interpretation of the students of this space. That was called the room of uncertain death. It is called like that.
41:50
So the space is fully interactive. And also the next one that is called the washing facility of the wet nurses. This is a washing facility that dates back to the medieval age.
42:05
And the water were collected in these basins, this washing facility, and were used by the wet nurses to wash the clothes of the orphans that were hosted in this place.
42:22
And the students interpreted this space in this way. So this is one of the corridors. They simulate the water leaking from the walls with the light. Everything is simulated with the light. And they simulated the water inside the washing facility with a smoke machine.
42:47
And everything is interactive. So the idea is that if you pretend to wash clothes, then when the clothes are clean, the water changes the color.
43:05
So they reproduce also the sound of the space. There is a shadow of the wet nurse.
43:43
So if you are interested in having a look at the video of the whole exhibition, the video is accessible there. And I want to finish my presentation going back to the vision of this work. And as I said, this was basically the idea of working with the beauty of interaction
44:09
came from exploring and trying to develop a theoretical framework. And then now, after a few years,
44:21
is something that we are really using and challenging in specific application domains. And the ambition is to create in our labs, in our universities, an innovation space where creativity can melt with research and development.
44:41
And also as a way to develop new methodologies to teach and to learn and to design, to understand human activity in the world. So this is really the vision. And there are some central themes.
45:02
I'm sorry you cannot read this, but first of all, the focus of our work is the human activity. We don't work in the lab. We work in the real context of use. Sometimes the contexts are also quite challenging,
45:21
working in the hospitals, in the schools, with people with different problems also in their life. Everything is, all the technologies are really embodied. The interaction is embodied. The interaction is extremely natural without any kind of interface
45:44
rather than the body and the environment. Engagement is a key word. So we want to engage people. We want to create space for opportunities and for experiences for them.
46:02
And interaction is the key point. So we see interaction as a narrative activity where people can put their meaning inside. And interaction is multimodal in the sense that it has to incorporate several sensory modalities.
46:28
And technology here is interpreted as augmentation. So we don't want to view technology as a way to model us,
46:44
to understand our needs. But we want to develop these needs and the support in interaction, during the interaction. So the very closing slide of my talk is this one.
47:03
I really like this piece from Asaito and Moray. And I would like to read this with you to close my speech. And it says that an individual's overall capacity to judge things changes completely,
47:20
depending on whether he possesses a sense of pathos of things, sensitivity to beauty, and compassionate empathy. These things change one's whole caliber as human beings. And this is the reason why we believe that design can really help
47:41
in trying to compose this view and this framework. And I hope that we can also try with our students to bring this idea of the beauty of interaction for developing their design skills.
48:07
Thank you very much for your attention.