Challenge 3 - Mike's comments
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

As someone returning periodically to Lancaster from the USA it never ceases to impress me how creative and innovative is the research work done in the Department. This whole scrapheap challenge over three weeks really illustrates how talented you all are. Alan last week talked about comparison with European projects, so this week I'd like to say that the ideas and innovations I've seen seem to me to be at least as intriguing as the work coming out of hugely wealthy US universities and research corporations.

It really is astonishing how much you all achieve in just a day, and that these things that are built can so easily be used as springboards for thinking about new lines of inquiry in the design and use of computational technology. Seeing a real thing in front of you is really concentrates the mind compared to talking in the abstract of all the things you might do with input, processing and output. Lots of interesting issues arise in terms of CSCW awareness, privacy, rapid prototyping, rapid design, rapid evaluation, creativity, idea generation and the educational process for PhD students.

This challenge was much vaguer than the other two. In theory that gives the groups more leeway in what to produce. In practice it maybe creates too much freedom, so it is harder to concentrate on a particular goal to aim for. What I was wondering was whether the groups would come up with something that might eventually turn into an artifact that you could look at with interest for a few minutes while waiting in a foyer. I had no idea that there would be three working systems, all of which seem to have a hypnotic quality. With any of these in the foyer, Id quite happily stare at it for at least 5 minutes.

In the challenge I mentioned story-telling around artifacts. What particularly amused me was after the presentations as we were breaking up, various friends and family came to the lab, and spontaneously group members switched from presenting their competition entry to the judges and instead to telling a story about the artifact to a guest. So the artifacts do indeed work as conversation pieces.

Sons of Sensor - hat
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Overall aesthetic: magic, Harry Potter, squishy, not at all computer-science looking.

The most impressive part of this creation is that it gives the sense of being complete. Obviously it could be extended in various ways, but it already feels like a polished product. That really is incredible in just a few hours.

The input-processing-and-output create a sense of unity that normally only comes after a lot of refining of an initial prototype. Of course behind the scenes it may be all tied together with duct tape, but it definitely gives a sense of robustness.

The integration and combination of two different kinds of activity information (sound and movement) is very neat and pleasing. People move a lot - it moves a lot. People talk a lot - the star pattern gets noisier. I think the patterns arising from the sound input are really interesting. I'm not sure how much are happenstance, but definitely with 1 speaker you get a sense of pulses of conversational activity. With the sensors nearby, it is a bit more interactive than the other two, and that does have a positive engagement effect.

Rectifier - body
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Overall aesthetic: modern art video installation. This one definitely wins the award for 'most likely to appear on show in the Tate Modern and be bought by Charles Saatchi for a hundred thousand quid'. It was definitely the funniest too.

It think this is the most controversial one, raising ethical issues that the group noted about the desirability of considering and representing 'the average student'.

But some modern art is deliberately provocative. At least you did not use a sliced professor pickled in formaldehyde. Makes me think if Alan's anti-interface thought experiments could be productively extended by building controversial demo apps that force people to stand round and argue exactly why they don't like it.

Other issues include contributions to affective computing and the meaningfulness of certain averaging actions (as distinct from the ethical considerations just noted). An average student name is a wonderful idea to throw at people to force them to consider if their number crunching makes any sense at all. The high speed data gathering and crayon power-point presentation again re-emphasise how in normal work we dither around when we might get some good-enough to get going data really fast

.:thePooch:. - cone
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Overall aesthetic: 50s sci-fi movies. Brave white-coated (computer) scientists will save the world from the evil brain sucking aliens from the planet Communismo.

The choice and use of input sources was particularly impressive in this creation. Four very different sources of activity information integrated into the cone display. What the resulting display means is more subtle than in the other projects, but you really do get to see something like a pulse of the Department flowing up over the cone. The periodic nature of when or indeed if you are going to see a particular rarer colour appearing adds to the interest and to the potential for initiating conversations if say a blue band suddenly appears.

As Simon pointed out, it would be interesting to see how a frequent 'user' of the artifact gradually gets a sense of different levels of activity from day to day.

The printer data source was truly a data amalgamation, in all other cases, for the purposes of the demo we had single data sources with ideas and sometimes mechanisms for how multiple data sources might in the future be aggregated. Peter noted the unexploited potential of accessible printer data to create different kinds of awareness.