Office Plant #1: Intimate Space and Contemplative Entertainment

Böhlen, Marc; Mateas, Michael

doi:10.2307/1576593

Cited by 21 publications

(9 citation statements)

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“…When using alien presence as a design strategy, it is no longer necessary for a system to fully understand the domain of human activity which it is addressing in the way humans would, since it is intended to be apparent to users that the system has its own forms of understanding. For example, Mateas and Böhlen's interactive sculpture Office Plant #1 [13] is a robotic office plant that changes shape based on its current reading of the social and emotional content of its users' email. Its output is enigmatic and ambiguous; its changing form suggests that the social and emotional tone of email matters, but is not a directly readable meter of social and emotional tone; because of this, the system does not need to be able to understand this tone in a way which corresponds directly to human understanding).…”

Section: Consequences For Ubicompmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interactionist AI and the promise of ubicomp, or, how to put your box in the world without putting the world in your box

Leahu

Sengers

Mateas

2008

Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing

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In many ways, the central problem of ubiquitous computing -how computational systems can make sense of and respond sensibly to a complex, dynamic environment laden with human meaning -is identical to that of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Indeed, some of the central challenges that ubicomp currently faces in moving from prototypes that work in restricted environments to the complexity of real-world environments -e.g. difficulties in scalability, integration, and fully formalizing context -echo some of the major issues that have challenged AI researchers over the history of their field. In this paper, we explore a key moment in AI's history where researchers grappled directly with these issues, resulting in a variety of novel technical solutions within AI. We critically reflect on six strategies from this history to suggest technical solutions for how to approach the challenge of building real-world, usable solutions in ubicomp today.

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Section: Consequences For Ubicompmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interactionist AI and the promise of ubicomp, or, how to put your box in the world without putting the world in your box

Leahu

Sengers

Mateas

2008

Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing

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“…We have been inspired and influenced by interactive and generative art works as well. We take special inspiration from Cohen's Aaron, a generative painting system [11], American Varietal (US Population, by County, 1790County, -2000 [16], a public artistic depiction of census Bureau data, and Office Plant #1, a kinetic sculpture that moves through transformations based on the emotional tone of an individual's email exchanges [4].…”

Section: Aesthetic Emphasismentioning

confidence: 99%

Living with tableau machine

Pousman

Romero

Smith

et al. 2008

Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing

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We present a longitudinal investigation of Tableau Machine, an intelligent entity that interprets and reflects the lives of occupants in the home. We created Tableau Machine (TM) to explore the parts of home life that are unrelated to accomplishing tasks. Task support for "smart homes" has inspired many researchers in the community. We consider design for experience, an orthogonal dimension to task-centric home life. TM produces abstract visualizations on a large LCD every few minutes, driven by a set of four overhead cameras that capture a sense of the social life of a domestic space. The openness and ambiguity of TM allow for a cycle of co-interpretation with householders. We report on three longitudinal deployments of TM for a period of six weeks. Participant families engaged with TM at the outset to understand how their behaviors were influencing the machine, and, while TM remained puzzling, householders interacted richly with TM and its images. We extract some key design implications for an experience-focused smart home.

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“…Expressive AI, introduced by Mateas [8], proposes that by simultaneously treating the design and evaluation issues in art practice and advances in artificial intelligence and as first class research questions, new research agendas are opened up in both AI and humancomputer interaction. Examples of Expressive AI systems are Office Plant #1 [9], Petit Mal [10], Giver of Names [11], and Façade [12]. Some examples of generative art systems are Cohen's Aaron [13] and Lioret's being paintings [14].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We suspect a three dimensional work will be more evocative and more readily considered as an alien intelligence in the home. Eventually we will move outside of the home environment to other spaces that are ripe for defamiliarization and have their own distinct social character, such as outdoor public spaces, sports arenas, bars, and offices [9]. Though these spaces are qualitatively different, we would like to test activity characterization over a wider range of human experiences.…”

Section: Future Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Alien presence in the home: the design of Tableau Machine

Romero

Pousman

Mateas

2007

Pers Ubiquit Comput

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We introduce a design strategy, alien presence, which combines work in human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, and media art to create enchanting experiences involving reflection over and contemplation of daily activities. An alien presence actively interprets and characterizes daily activity and reflects it back via generative, ambient displays that avoid simple one-to-one mappings between sensed data and output. We describe the alien presence design strategy for achieving enchantment, and report on Tableau Machine, a concrete example of an alien presence design for domestic spaces. We report on an encouraging formative evaluation indicating that Tableau Machine does indeed support reflection and actively engages users in the co-construction of meaning around the display.

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Office Plant #1: Intimate Space and Contemplative Entertainment

Cited by 21 publications

References 0 publications

Interactionist AI and the promise of ubicomp, or, how to put your box in the world without putting the world in your box

Interactionist AI and the promise of ubicomp, or, how to put your box in the world without putting the world in your box

Living with tableau machine

Alien presence in the home: the design of Tableau Machine

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