the//////// evolution ---of >>>>>>>>>>human ******interaction;

From looking at how human interaction has evolved with the introduction of networked societies I have set about creating

something that encourages us to think about the consequences of the new online lifestyle choices we have made.

My focus has been on how public we are becoming with our information and our awareness as to how it can be used.

Many of us tick the box allowing twitter to use our location; unaware of the invasion it actually has on our privacy. I was astonished when I was shown the nearby feature on a twitter

application that allowed you to zoom in to local twitter users in such great detail, you could see whereabouts in the street they were tweeting from.

Even more disturbing on some applications you could even get a google street map view of the building.

As i embarked on this project, i realised it was greatly current and important as many people are so unaware of the extent their privacy can be invaded. Default to Public broadcasted tweets in a window of Germany which caused alot of commotion, people whos tweets were broadcasted expressed a great

feeling of invasion. Everyone is happy to tweet honestly behind a computer screen,

however when someone broadcasts it to the public, realisation hits.

1. we are still unaware of the consequences that come with new media

2. we need a greater understanding of the need to protect ourselves online

3. once you press enter you cannot take it back, even if you press delete - it still exists

Default to Public is a project by Jens Wunderling dealing with the

discrepancy between peoples feeling of privacy on the web

and the physical world. It consists of an ongoing series of objects and interventions linking the physical world to the online

world in unexpected and narrative ways to create

awareness for self-exposure.Currently there are three

projects, Status Panel, Tweet-Screen and Tweetleak.

Status Panel enhances the well known interface and the doorbell

providing a small LCD panel displaying someones twitter status along with the name.

Additionally the status panel has its own Twitter Account and then

the button is pressed it re-tweets ones current tweet.

Tweetscreen is a networked projection/installation in public

space showing tweets which have been written near its own

physical location on a large projection screen. The twitter users whose tweets have been

chosen receive a reply message aling with the photo taken by a

webcam.

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Another interesting piece, although not twitter art from the same design team is a tool for armchair activists, a machinefor remote rants and protests. It can be strapped to lampposts in front of pro-eminentbuildings like the house of parliament, or other institutional buildings in front of which many protests occur. Thanks to its embedded mobile telecommunication device, the machine is able to receive incoming sms messages and speak them out loud through its powerful megaphone, thus allowing the armchair activist to shout out its rants and protests in the comfort of his sitting room. Tool for armchair activists offers a modern alternative to the speaker corner, and saves you the hassle of sitting in the rain, waiting for your favourite MP to pass by.

Twitlol.com is a site that allows you to browse thousands of twitter jokes and easily retweet the funniest ones. I thought it was a great example of simple but well presented things that can be done with twitter.

Nearbytweets is essentially what i have attempted to create via sound. However using a speech software on a website that has a constantly updating feed is not possible without someone constantly highlighting the text to be spoken, therefore i had to design software to be created that would pull local tweets and read them aloud without human interaction after it had been activated

A new study from Carnegie Mellon University shows that analyzing data from Twit-ter yields the same results as conducting a public opinion poll.And what's more, it takes less time and annoys fewer people, as well.A CMU team from the computer science department looked at sentiments expressed in a billion Twitter messages between 2008 and 2009. The researchers then use simple text analysis methods to filter out updates about the economy and politics and determine if the overall sentiment of the update was positive or negative. The CMU team found that people's attitudes on consumer confidence and presidential job ap-proval were similar to the results generated by well-reputed, telephone-conducted public opinion polls, such as those conducted by Reuters, Gallup and pollster.com.For at least some topics, CMU Assistant Professor Noah Smith thinks this kind of passive information gathering could work. With seven million or more messages being tweeted each day, this data stream poten-tially allows us to take the temperature of the population very quickly, Smith said. 'The results are noisy, as are the results of polls. Opinion pollsters have learned to compensate for these distortions, while we're still trying to identify and understand the noise in our data. Given that, I'm excited that we get any signal at all from social media that correlates with the polls.' The CMU researchers did notice that Twitter sentiments had much more day-to-day variation compared to data gathered from traditional polling data. To compensate, the team averaged the Twitter results over a number of days; at that point, the results were generally quite similar to polling data.For example, on Twitter as in life, consumer confidence slumped in 2008 and started to revive last spring. And Twitter updates showed the same general decrease in presidential job performance approval through 2009 as was seen in traditional polls. There were a few discrepancies enough that the CMU folks don't recommend us-ing Twitter to poll for election results just yet. Still, researchers hope that better natural language processing (NLP) techniques will make Twitter and other social media a valuable source of public opinion information in the future.

Could Twitter Data Replace Opinion Polls?<<<<<<

CRITI-CALDESIGN

101

CRITI-CALDESIGN

Critical design is a form of design that challenges preconceptions and expectations.The product and the pro-cess of designing & viewing it provokes a reflection on existing values of modern culture. Critical design has been popularised by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby who are considered the experts in this field.

<< In 2007 Dunne & Raby created a series of household robots.

Critical Design F.A.Q.s1. What is Critical Design?Critical Design uses speculative design proposals to challenge narrow assumptions, preconceptions and givens about the role products play in everyday life. It is more of an attitude than anything else, a position rather than a method. There are many people doing this who have never heard of the term critical design and who have their own way of describing what they do. Naming it Critical Design is simply a useful way of making this activity more visible and subject to discussion and debate.

Its opposite is affirmative design: design that reinforces the status quo.

2. Where did it come from?Design as critique has existed before under several guises. Italian Radical Design of the 1970s was highly critical of prevailing social values and design ideologies, critical design builds on this attitude and extends it into todays world.

During the 1990s there was a general move towards conceptual design which made it easier for non-commercial forms of design like critical design to exist, this happened mainly in the furniture world, product design is still conservative and closely linked to the mass market.

The term Critical Design was first used in Anthony Dunnes book Hertzian Tales (1999) and later in Design Noir (2001). Since then many other people have developed their own variations.

3. Who does it?Dunne & Raby and their graduate students from the Royal College of Art (RCA) such as James Au-ger, Elio Caccavale and Noam Toran, are probably the most well known, but there are other designers working in a similar way who would not describe what they do as critical design: Krzysztof Wodiczko, Natalie Jeremijenko, Jurgen Bey, Marti Guixe ...

4. What is it for?Mainly to make us think. But also raising awareness, exposing assumptions, provoking action, sparking debate, even entertaining in an intellectual sort of way, like literature or film.

5. Why is it happening now?The world we live in today is incredibly complex, our social relations, desires, fantasies, hopes and fears are very different from those at the beginning of the 20c. Yet many key ideas informing mainstream design stem form the early 20c.Society has moved on but design has not, Critical Design is one of many mutations design is undergo-ing in an effort to remain relevant to the complex technological, political, economic and social changes we are experiencing at the beginning of the 21c.

6. What role does humour play?Humour is important but often misused. Satire is the goal. But often only parody and pastiche are achieved. These reduce the effectiveness in a number of ways. They are lazy and borrow existing formats, and they signal too clearly that it is ironic and so relieve some burden from the viewer. The viewer should experience a dilemma, is it serious or not? Real or not? For Critical design to be suc-cessful they need to make up their own mind.Also, it would be very easy to preach, a skilful use of satire and irony can engage the audience in a more constructive away by appealing to its imagination as well as engaging the intellect. Good politi-cal comedians achieve this well. Deadpan and black humour work best.

7. Is it a movement?No. It’s not really a field that can be neatly defined. Its more about values and an attitude, a way of looking at design and imagining its possibilities beyond the narrow definitions of what is present-ed through media and in the shops.

8. What are its main relatives?ActivismCautionary TalesConceptual DesignContestable FuturesDesign FictionInterrogative DesignRadical DesignSatireSocial FictionSpeculative Design

Critical Design F.A.Q.s

9. What are the biggest misconceptions?That it is negative and anti-everything.That it is only commentary and cannot change anythingThat it is jokeyThat it is not concerned with aestheticsThat it is against mass-productionThat it is pessimisticThat it is not realThat it is art

10. But isnt it art?It is definitely not art. It might borrow heavily from art in terms of methods and approaches but thats it. We expect art to be shocking and extreme. Critical Design needs to be closer to the ev-eryday, thats where its power to disturb comes from. Too weird and it will be dismissed as art, too normal and it will be effortlessly assimilated. If it is regarded as art it is easier to deal with, but if it remains as design it is more disturbing, it suggests that the everyday as we know it could be different, that things could change.

11. Isn?t it a bit dark?Yes, but not for the sake of it. Dark, complex emotions are ignored in design, nearly every other area of culture accepts people are complex, contradictory and even neurotic, but not design, we view people as obedient and predictable users and consumers.

One of critical Design’s roles is to question the limited range of emotional and psychological experi-ences offered through designed products. Design is assumed to only make things nice, its as though all designers have taken an unspoken Hippocratic oath, this limits and prevents us from fully engag-ing with and designing for the complexities of human nature which of course is not always nice. It is more about the positive use of negativity, not negativity for its own sake, but to draw attention to a scary possibility in the form of a cautionary tale.

12. And its future?A danger for critical design is that it ends up as a form of sophisticated design entertainment: 90% humour 10% critique. It needs to avoid this situation by identifying and engaging with complex and challenging issues. Areas like Future Forecasting would benefit from its more gritty view of human nature and ability to make abstract issues tangible. It could also play a role in public debates about the social, cultural and ethical impact on everyday life of emerging and future technologies.

“critical design has a

way of critising the way we are”

thescience museum

Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin's Listening Post uses real-time text fragments mixed with exhibited by text and sound. The fragments are sampled from thousands of live, unrestricted internet chatrooms, bulletin boards and other online public forums. They are uncensored and unedited. The artists' starting place for Listening Post was wonderment at what the voice of the internet would sound like and what might it say?The piece responds to a special moment in history. At no other time since the birth of communications technologies have ordinary people had the opportunity to exchange views so immediately and on such a large scale.The patterns identified by the artists allow Listening Post to build up a multi-sensory 'portrait of chat'. Some of its movements concentrate on the most common first words of new postings - 'I am...', 'I like...', 'I love...' - which themselves speak volumes for the ways in which we choose to identify ourselves online. Others list least-used words or work in topic clusters, arranging selections from thousands of simultaneous conversations by content and revealing emerging topics of the day, the hour, or indeed the moment. From the profound to the frivolous or personal, from the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center to the disappearance of British toddler Madeleine McCann, Listening Post presents us with whatever is occupying our collective thoughts right now.Through Listening Post Hansen and Rubin provide us with insights into the vast scale of online social activity, and the gradations of human expression which exist within it. Our assertions, opinions, hopes and dreams, extracted from their original contexts but otherwise unaltered, are given sharper, different and wider meanings which range from the poignant to the absurd. Mark Hansen's computer programmes collect, sample and process thousands of live online public conversations which are then sorted by theme, while Ben Rubin's voice-synthesiser tones and sound effects respond to shifts in the data streams, carefully building up the musical score. Together these activities go beyond simple redisplay or reinterpretation of data patterns, to create something 'that expresses the meaning of data gathered from the internet'.the point of source rather than the point of encounter. It is itself as much a voyeur as the gallery audiences to whom it performs its findings. Listening Post has a finite life span. The messaging phenomena that it feeds upon were enabled by the evolution of networks and mass access to continual bandwidth over HTML bulletin boards and internet relay chat (IRC). Changes to the text-based nature of these environments - the proliferation of video, graphics and animation - are in turn bound to radically change the content sources that Listening Post relies on, perhaps even rendering it silent one day.

A friend of mine asked what I would do if people found the device/learnt about it and started spamming it with tweets containing rude words etc.

After reading about critical design and gaining a better understanding of it i now feel that if this were to happen, it would only mean it could be critical design in another context; it says something about our society if we find something where our honest thoughts can be read aloud to strangers and we choose to waste it with profanities.

twittertalk

twittertalk

Initial programming tests

summary: im trying to create a sound installation that picks up nearby tweets and reads them aloud, sounds simple but this technical world is so new to me i dont know where to start

>>

^^so i went to the professionals at freelancer.com

>>

”

I would like to start by describing the current state and asking you some initial questions about details of the functionality and design.

1) There are two ways that you can use to search tweets by location: by specifying a location such as London or British Museum, or by directly specifying latitude/lon-gitude. In addition to using to either of those, you will specify the search radius in miles or kilometers.

2) As an optional field, you can input any other search parameters that could be used in any Twitter search: http://search.twitter.com/operators

3) Were you satisfied with the voices in the sample that I sent? If not, you can choose one of the CMU Arctic voices and I will import it to my project: http://fes-tvox.org/cmu_arctic/ . Since there is no way of determining the gender or age of a Twitter user, I have it currently set to randomize. If you want, I can include a set-ting to allow you to choose a particular set of voice parameters.

4) While I will always get the full text of a Tweet, there is a sort of limitation of the amount of information I can get about each Tweet that this programs finds; this is not by me, it is actually limits set by Twitter. I can essential do almost as many Twitter SEARCH calls as I want per hour; the limit number is really large. *How-ever*, the amount of user information that I get from a SEARCH call is limited to the following information: screen name, screen name of person it was sent to, profile image.

5) You can run multiple instances of the program at the same time, effectively get-ting an interesting cacaphony of voices.

6) The program, written in Java, is currently a stand-alone application. you would need to just double click the program to run it, as long as you have Java on your machine; this is likely if you have looked at a website that uses Java.

_____the programmer

“

”

It took a long time to work with Henry as this was something new both for him and i, with very little reference of projects similar. The majority of my time in this project was spent with us working long and awkward hours ruthlessly testing and tweaking. It still has a long way to go however i am pleased with the software we have finally created for my submission. The interfact i desgined for it is simple and easy to use for a person of any computer experience.

I sourced a vintage radio from ebay after many trips to charity shops and carboot sales. This one is a working one however its appearance needs work. If at any time the radio stops working, the insides can be removed & a small speaker that can be plugged into the computer running twittertalk will be used instead.I am using craft project paints in blues to re-vamp the appearance and go with the twitter theme.

The idea of twitter radio came from the initial idea of a sound installation that would pick up the tweets from surrounding areas of wherever the installation was. As so many people tweet unprotected, the idea is at the exhibition people will be tweeting their honest thoughts and opinions, probably what they think would be anonymously. However the Twittertalk software would pick up these tweets and read them aloud along with the username and read aloud, giving the same shocked feeling of intrusion that default to public did, however it would be more instant and experienced in public

Instructions:If on a mac pull twittertalk file to desktop/applicationsright click command file and select get info to check location (e.g. /Users/hannahvickery/Downloads/TwitterTalk/TwitterTalkMac.command)using the file extension, open Terminal and enter; chmod a+x /Users/hannahvickery/Downloads/TwitterTalk/TwitterTalkMac.command Now the program will work. Simply double click on the application.If you have any problems please check your java settings, that you have the latest download and it is at the top of the list in utilities.

Ultimately twitterradio is a culmination of investigation into how we com-municate news and views now compaired with the early twentieth century.

In 2010 Twtitter is the place we go to get news and opinions on the lastest news in real time. In the early tentieth century, the radio was the centre point of every home. It was something that was accesible to every family

and it provided up to date news. Twitterradio would provide every house a piece of technology that would

provide local news and gossip. It has the potential to be adapted for events, broadcasting news in public

or even for up to date news to be broadcasted for deaf people.

Alternatives

Currently the twittertalk software is set to alternate between a male and female voice, however it is easy to set it to the voice of one gender. A great way of exhibiting this feature and the content it pulls would be for twittertalk to be running twice, creating a conversation with opposite words; i.e male voice & keyword hate and a female voice with the keyword love.

Alternative ways of exhibiting twittertalk

LOVE

HATE

Currently the twittertalk software is set to alternate between a male and female voice, however it is easy to set it to the voice of one gender. A great way of exhibiting this feature and the content it pulls would be for twittertalk to be running twice, creating a conversation with opposite words; i.e a male voice using tweets with the keyword hate and a female voice broadcasting tweets with the keyword love.

Currently the twittertalk software is set to alternate between a male and female voice, however it is easy to set it to the voice of one gender. A great way of exhibiting this feature and the content it pulls would be for twittertalk to be running twice, creating a conversation with opposite words; i.e male voice & keyword hate and a female voice with the keyword love.

Alternative ways of exhibiting twittertalk

LOVE

HATE

Another option for this software could be an auduio guestbook. As guests left our exhibition they could tweet an advertised hashtag with their comments. These tweets could then be picked up by twittertalk and read aloud in the gallery

to be contiued>>>>>hannahlouisegdnm.tumblr.com