Marc Böhlen

Office Plant #1: Intimate Space and Contemplative Entertainment

Walk into a typical high-tech office environment and among the snaking network wires, glowing monitors, and clicking keyboards, and one is likely to see a plant. Unfortunately, this plant is often dying; it is not well-adapted to the office environment. Here the authors discuss their work Office Plant #1, an exploration of a technological object adapted to the office ecology that fills the same social and emotional niche as a plant. Office Plant #1 monitors both the ambient light level and its owner’s email activity. Its robotic body, reminiscent of a desert plant in form, responds with slow, rhythmic movements and quiet ambient sound. Office Plant #1 is a new instantiation of our notion of intimate technology, that is, technologies which address human needs and desires as opposed to technologies which meet exclusively functional task specifications.

Second order ambient intelligence

This text attempts to describe an imagined future of ambient intelligence. It assumes that one day most of the current issues within ambient intelligence will be solved and that a second order ambient intelligence will be formulated, one with new research agendas. It describes several topics and ideas that might be part of this agenda and surmises on the prerequisites for this change.

Ambient Intelligence in the City Overview and New Perspectives

Ambient intelligence has the potential for improving urban life specifically and the commonwealth in general. As artists and architects working in and with ambient intelligence, our hopes and anxieties towards ambient intelligence are not primarily in the technical domain. Our interest lies in re-making urbanity with pervasive technologies as a means to invigorate urban life. For this we need to take a break, after almost two decades of ambient intelligence related research, and recalibrate all instruments.

Garden variety pervasive computing

Unseen, a knowledge-sharing experience machine for outdoor public spaces, continuously collects real-time data on plants, insects, and animals through a multicamera vision system. Unseens interpretation and sharing of this data invites visitors to reconsider and question their preconceptions about wildlife. We describe the conception, implementation, and evaluation of a knowledge-sharing system for outdoor spaces. Like a nature interpretation center, our fully automated, machine vision-based outdoor installation shows visitors interesting facts about the area they are visiting.

Prototyping Ubiquitous Biosensing Applications through Speculative Design

Biosensing technologies, under development since the 1960s, are now moving into the mainstream IT domain. It is only a matter of time before biosensors become as ubiquitous as mobile phones. While biosensing is inherently a technical domain, the acceptance of biosensing technologies into everyday life will more likely be determined by social and cultural factors. In order to imagine how such acceptance (or the opposite thereof) might occur, we have designed an online resource on biosensing and related topics. We then asked students of media design and architecture to speculate on future biosensing scenarios with the help of this resource. This experiment was performed at three universities, one in the United States, one in Canada and one in Indonesia. This paper describes results from this experiment and considers implications for the design procedures of ubiquitous sensor systems in general.

A different kind of information appliance: fridge companion

A prototype device is described that allows a user to understand and contemplate the inner workings of a common home applicance, the refrigerator. The device monitors select physical properties of its host and displays scheduled graphic presentations on the hosts principles of operation. Fridge Companion is a device designed to make domestic life not easier but deeper.A prototype device is described that allows a user to understand and contemplate the inner workings of a common home appliance, the refrigerator. The device monitors select physical properties of its host and displays scheduled graphic presentations on the host’s principles of operation. Fridge Companion is a device designed to make domestic life not easier but deeper.

Ambient Intelligence at the Beach

We describe an experimental public resource monitoring system that combines sensor data and human input to create a new descriptor of ambient water conditions. We call this new metric the swimming pleasure measure. We give an overview of how it is composed, how it relates to existing public water health monitoring efforts and how it is shared with the public.

When code is content: experiments with a whistling machine

The Universal Whistling Machine (U.W.M) senses the presence of people in its vicinity and attracts them with a signature whistle. Given a response whistle, U.W.M. counters with its own composition, based on a time-frequency analysis of the original.

Killer Robots as cultural techniques

In October 2012 a group of non-governmental organizations formed a Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. The aim of this campaign was to preemptively ban fully autonomous weapons capable of selecting and engaging targets without human intervention. The campaign gained momentum swiftly, leading to different legal and political discussions and decision-makings. In this article, we use the framework of cultural techniques to analyze the different operational processes, tactics, and ethics underlying the debates surrounding developments of autonomous weapon systems. From reading the materials of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots and focusing on current robotic research in the military context we argue that, instead of demonizing Killer Robots as such, we need to understand the tools, processes and operating procedures that create, support and validate these objects. The framework of cultural techniques help us to analyze how autonomous technologies draw distinctions between life and death, human and machine, culture and technology, and what it means to be in control of these systems in the 21st century.

Another Day at the Beach: Combing Sensor Data with Human Perception and Intuition for the Monitoring and Care of Public Recreational Water Resources

We present a new approach to monitoring public recreational beach waters and describe a prototype system that collects data from sensors and from people and combines those to create a novel metric of water resource quality and appreciation. We present an evaluation of the system and consider some consequences for IT-enabled smart environments that monitor shared resources in general.