MITPressLog

A New Car on the Block

MIT’s Smart Cities research group is out to change the way we think about cars (and the way we move around in urban areas).  The group, headed by William J. Mitchell, author of books including Placing Words: Symbols, Space, and the City and Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, has put many of the ideas in these books to work in the world.  They have designed a car which could transform vehicle technology.  Smart Cities will deliver their concept (with style input from architect Frank Gehry) for the car to General Motors, who will produce a prototype in early 2006.

Mitchell and the Smart Cities group are hoping the MIT concept car will help minimize some of the problems that go along with driving in cities—parking, traffic, and pollution.  Science writer Alok Jha recently spoke with Ryan Chin, an architect and engineer working with Mitchell on this project, about the project for an article in The Guardian:

"We have to think of city cars as not just small-footprint vehicles that can squeeze into tight spaces but ones that can work in unison and also be almost like a parasite that leeches on to mass-transit systems," says Mr Chin. While Smart changed the way people think about parking and size, the MIT engineers felt that, as it had not been widely adopted and congestion and pollution problems had got no better, its success had been limited.

So the MIT team started from scratch to come up with their own concept: a stackable, shareable, electric, two-passenger car. "Imagine a shopping cart - a vehicle that can stack - you can take the first vehicle out of a stack and off you go," says Mr Chin. "These stacks would be placed throughout the city. A good place would be outside a subway station or a bus line or an airport, places where there's a convergence of transportation lines and people."

The entire article can be read here.
Image: Franco Vairani/MIT Department of Architecture

Thoughts on Game Design from an Expert Game Designer

Last month, X Media Lab hosted a conference on successful computer games in Singapore.  The conference was organized to bring together some of the world's best and most successful game creators and technologists in an effort to discuss projects, ideas, and the future of computer gaming.  Among them was Katie Salen, a game designer, animator, and the Director of Graduate Studies in Design and Technolgy at Parsons School of Design.  She’s also coauthor (with Eric Zimmerman) Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals.  Animation ‘xpress reporter Anand Gurnani had a chance to speak with Katie about game design, interactivity, play, and about Rules of Play, which Gurnani says is “one of the first comprehensively written primers on the subject of game design.  Here is an excerpt from Gurnani's article: 

Are Game Designers pushing technology to come up with better game-play or is it the other way round? Also your comments on role of technology?
I just wrote an article on this for Adobe and what I discovered in interviewing a lot of different game designers was that the design-technology equation must be approached in a lot of different ways. For some designers, technology creates a particular social or interactive context that they can respond to, as in the case of mobile technologies and alternate reality games like I Love Bees, or Uncle Roy All Around You. For others, technology is something to be exploited, invented, or simply modified. The history of the first person shooter is the story of programmer John Carmack inventing new technologies for games id software wanted to make. So technology always creates a context for game design. Understanding the limits and possibilities of the medium are ways that designers exploit any particular technology's strength or weakness.

Could you share some of your experiences while writing 'Rules of Play'? How did the idea to do such pioneering work come about and how has it been?
The book was a true collaboration between Eric Zimmerman and myself and was quite important in helping us both to explore ideas we had been working with for some time in teaching game design and making games. It was tough to write, as we wanted to try and write in a way that was approachable, but at the same time begin to establish a theoretical framework for thinking about the design of games. We have gotten a lot of good feedback on the book, and just put together an accompanying anthology called The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology, which contains a lot of really excellent essays by writers, designers, researchers, and players. So those were two big projects we are proud of.

Designed in the USA

If you look on the bottom of your iPod, you’ll likely see the phrase: “Designed in the USA, built in China.”  How does this phrase help the global success of Apple?  And what does this mean for the global competition between the US and countries such as India and China?  In an article in today’s BusinessWeek, Niti Bhan looks at the important strides that lawmakers are proposing in an effort to compete with the increasingly more capable and innovative Asian nations.  Bhan praises the recently introduced National Innovation Act 2005, which would increase our investment in basic research and in improving US science and technology talent—but fears that it is not enough.  What about design?  Are we underestimating the value of design and should we be placing some of our research dollars toward design-led innovation?  Many countries are investing heavily in design and forming design councils and task forces.  If we don’t take this more seriously, Bhan wonders, should we worry about other nations who are taking design more seriously than we are?  She talked about this with John Thackara, design guru and author of In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World.  Thackara, who serves on the design task force in Hong Kong said: “As my own visit last week to South Korea confirmed, what’s impressive about emerging economies is not where they stand today, but the scale of their commitment to knowledge-intensive industries, including design, in the near future.”  Thackara’s statement confirms Bhan’s fear that perhaps we cannot survive on advances in technology and in increased funding for research in science and math alone. 

Read the entire BusinessWeek article here.

The Beauty Theory

In our final look at the 50th Anniversary of Daedalus, Susan Sontag contemplates beauty.  Originally published in 2002, "An Argument about Beauty" looks at the history of beauty—finding that there is no real definition of “beauty” in a strict sense.  Sontag tackes physical beauty, beauty in art (Gertrude Stein said that “to call a work of art beautiful means that it is dead.”), beauty-lovers in literature like Oscar Wilde and Shakespeare, Pope John Paul II’s use of the work beauty in his comments on the abuse scandals in the Catholic church, the politics of beauty, the debate between that which is beautiful and that which is interesting, and even a look at the un-beautiful.  Sontag ultimately finds that we look to what we think is beautiful to remind us of the vast world around us—and our place within that world:

Responding at last, in April of 2002, to the scandal created by the revelation of innumerable cover-ups of sexually predatory priests, Pope John Paul II told the American cardinals summoned to the Vatican, “A great work of art may be blemished, but its beauty remains; and this is a truth which any intellectually honest critic will recognize.” Is it too odd that the Pope likens the Catholic Church to a great–that is, beautiful–work of art? Perhaps not, since the inane comparison allows him to turn abhorrent misdeeds into something like the scratches in the print of a silent film or craquelure covering the surface of an Old Master painting, blemishes that we reflexively screen out or see past. The Pope likes venerable ideas. And beauty, as a term signifying (like health) an indisputable excellence, has been a perennial resource in the issuing of peremptory evaluations. Permanence, however, is not one of beauty’s more obvious attributes; and the contemplation of beauty, when it is expert, may be wreathed in pathos, the drama on which Shakespeare elaborates in many of the Sonnets. Traditional celebrations of beauty in Japan, like the annual rite of cherry-blossom viewing, are keenly elegiac; the most stirring beauty is the most evanescent. To make beauty in some sense imperishable required a lot of conceptual tinkering and transposing, but the idea was simply too alluring, too potent, to be squandered on the praise of superior embodiments. The aim was to multiply the notion, to allow for kinds of beauty, beauty with adjectives, arranged on a scale of ascending value and incorruptibility, with the metaphorized uses (‘intellectual beauty,’ ‘spiritual beauty’) taking precedence over what ordinary language extols as beautiful–a gladness to the senses.

More information about the 50th Anniversary issue of Daedalus can be found here.

Stock-ing Stuffers

It is the time of year when holiday shoppers rush around to try to get last minute gifts for friends and family.  Nothing is more frustrating than navigating the partking lots and crowds and lines in the malls and grocery stores only to find the item you want - the video game or the roast you planned to cook for dinner - is out of stock.  Remember all the disappointed children when the stores ran out of Cabbage Patch Dolls in the 1980s?  According to Alison Maitlands recent article (subscription) in the Financial Times, this year's hot item is Microsoft's Xbox 360 game - which sold out in November in the US and just after it's December release in the UK.  The game is so popular that it is reportedly getting nearly three times the retail price on ebay.

How can stores and manufactures minimize these shortages?  And are the companies that produce popular products not predicting demand properly or are they creating a shortage themselves in order to increase popularity?  Maitland spoke with Yossi Sheffi, a supply chain expert and author of The Resilient Enterprise: Overcoming Vulnerablity for Competitive Advantage about the shortcomings of supply chain systems:

A company that has concurrent production processes - performing many development tasks in parallel - can react faster to changing demand. "This also means that it can recover faster from a disruption because its business processes are concurrent and the various functions are accustomed to co-operating with each other," he says. A responsive supply chain depends on good communication and co-operation between all its participants. "It is only as strong as the weakest link. That is why it is so difficult."

Companies that do it well have an in-built culture of flexibility, with a free flow of information, says Prof Sheffi. "Toyota displays continuous production reports in its plants. Dell updates managers hourly on production. UPS keeps the vast reaches of its network in constant cellphone communication."

Communication between buyers and sellers can help companies avoid the "bullwhip effect", whereby minor variations in consumer demand create bigger and bigger fluctuations in orders and inventory levels further up the supply chain. This can be caused, say, when a company does not inform a supplier that an order increase is due to temporary disruption at another supplier. The first supplier assumes customer demandis growing and overreactsby increasing capacity or ordering more from its own suppliers in anticipation.

Setting Knowledge Free

Does information really want to be free?  Or a better question might be, should it be free?  Or how can we circulate knowledge as broadly and efficiently as possible?  The internet affords us the opportunity to share our ideas quickly and to reach a much broader audience than traditional paper publications.  But what are the ramifications—both economically and for the credibility of scholarship?  John Willinsky, Director of Canada's Public Knowledge Project and author of The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship has devoted his career to promoting the free exchange of information.  Willinsky recently discussed open access, scholarly publishing practices, econonomic models, and the quest for tenure with Inside Higher Education reporter Scott Jaschik:

Q: What economic models could allow those who publish journals to embrace the access principle? How can costs be covered?

A: First, there are now open access approaches that call for no change to the current financial models that most journals follow: There are journals, as I noted, whose policies permit authors to self-archive the final version in their library or on their Web site, while other journals grant open access six months or more after the initial publication of their otherwise subscription-controlled content. Then, too, there are new economic models for open access publishing based on the reduced costs afforded by online systems, which is where my Public Knowledge Project comes in, with its open source software (Open Journal Systems) for managing and publishing journals that significantly reduces costs. As societies and publishers move to online editions, and away from print — in the face of libraries canceling print editions when they have a choice — the reduced publishing costs can enable forms of open access, through author fees, society subsidies and institutional support. I would add that there can be no sense of fixed costs that need to be met in scholarly publishing as long as journal subscription prices range, as they currently do, from hundreds of dollars to, in at least one case, over $20,000.

[snip]

Q: In academe, the quest for tenure is a huge motivating factor for young faculty members. Do you think the biases of the tenure system (in favor of more established journals, for example) hinder the spread of the access principle?

A: Because even major commercial publishers, such as Elsevier and Springer, as well as the leading societies, permit authors to self-archive — and as Oxford, PLoS, and others offer open access journals — faculty members can chase the prestige titles and still contribute to the access principle. In fact, studies now show that who do self-archive achieve a 25-250 percent increase in the number of citations to their work, depending on the field. The higher citation rate following on open access is certainly a boon for anyone making the case for tenure and promotion.

Q: How do you think scholarly publishing will be different five years from now?

A: The scholarly publishing of journals will move increasingly online, with print editions eventually disappearing, and, and thanks to the efforts of open access advocates, this move will lead to a far greater proportion of the literature available through some form of open access, in what can only be called a mixed knowledge economy. The resulting increase in global and public access may well prove to be the best thing that has happened to research and scholarship in some time.

The entire interview with Willinsky (along with comments from Inside Higher Education readers) can be read here. Peter Suber also posted a portion of Jaschik's interview with Willinsky on his blog, Open Access News. 

Constructivist Criticism

The seemingly endless stacks of T-shirts folded neatly on storefront tables or toy store shelves lined with perfectly packaged Barbie dolls will usually stir up some kind of emotion within us -- good and bad. Are these feelings simply a desire to possess these objects? Can we ever hope to have a more meaningful relationship with mass-produced commodities than extreme possessiveness? In an article in the Ideas section of the Boston Globe, Joshua Glenn posed this question to Christina Kiaer, author of Imagine No Possessions, a new book that explores the efforts of the Russian Constructivists, a group of avant-garde artists in the 1920s who were determined to create mass-produced objects that were more like comrades than slaves:

In her new book, Kiaer, an associate professor of art history at Columbia, closely analyzes the designs -- for textiles, clothing, household items, packaging, and ads -- created in the early to mid-1920s by Aleksandr Rodchenko, Liubov Popova, and other Constructivists. A poster for Red October cookies by Rodchenko and the revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, for example, shows a train of cookies jostling their way into the mouth of a girl with a flapper-style haircut. The image can be read, writes Kiaer, as a metaphor for the way objects could act as comrades in the effort to transform modern Russia into a social collective.

Read the entire article here.

Asking the Right Questions

Do the questions we ask about what we design and use limit the answers and innovations we come up with?  According to Michele Tepper, senior design analyst at Frog Design, “good design is as much about asking the right questions as it is about whatever you create, and making it easier for users to answer those questions themselves.”  In a recent essay on the blog Gizmodo, Tepper looks both software and physical products to see how both users and manufacturers are working together in order to create new products and customize existing ones  to help provide better, more usable  products and services and to try to answer some of the questions that haven’t been asked yet:

Think about the mountain bike. As Eric von Hippel points out in his book Democratizing Innovation, this multi-billion dollar market grew out of a small community of young bikers who wanted to ride off-road. Their bicycles couldn’t handle the terrain, though, so they ended up having to hack together bikes they called “clunkers” out of the materials at hand. It took another decade for mountain bikes to reach the mass market in 1982, and even today, the (ahem) cycle of user innovation and new products continues as extreme-sports riders use their bikes in more and more complicated stunts and jumps. The riders ask new questions of their bikes — and sometimes parlay their answers into second careers as bicycle designers. 

[snip]

Custom hardware tinkering isn’t for everyone, of course, anymore than most people want to hand-code their own blogs or write video-game levels. Eric von Hippel calls these tinkerers “lead users” — people like the would-be mountain bikers who have needs that aren’t met by the product on the market and who have the motivation to do the work to create the precise thing they want. But lead users’ creations can be important for the users who follow them, in the same way that plug-ins get added to new releases of Movable Type, or Counter-Strike began as an amateur mod for Half-Life — just ask anyone who’s ridden a mountain bike lately

Thomas Pynchon, offering advice to aspiring writers, said that “as a corollary to writing about what we know maybe we should be getting familiar with our ignorance.” Pynchon’s advice resonates not just for writers but for thinkers and creators of all sorts. Getting familiar with our ignorance as product designers should mean, among other things, that we accept that our creations will wind up as the answers to questions that haven’t been formulated yet, and that we find ways to let users write what they know on our creations as well.

Read the entire Gizmodo article here. 

On Religion in America

A hot-button issue in American culture is religion and the role of religious ritual and expression in our daily lives.  Should we pray in public schools?  Can we secularize Christmas?  Do we have a national faith?  Today, these issues are debated by everyone from politicians to parents, but the questions and controversies aren't new.  As we can see in Robert N. Bellah's 1967 Daedalus article, "Civil Religion in America", we have been trying to fit religion into our culture for some time.  Bellah's article has been reprinted in the current issue of Daedalus, as part of a survey of the scope of the journal as it celebrates its 50th anniversary:

While some have argued that Christianity is the national faith, and others that church and synagogue celebrate only the generalized religion of “the American Way of Life,” few have realized that there actually exists alongside of and rather clearly differentiated from the churches an elaborate and well-institutionalized civil religion in America. This article argues not only that there is such a thing, but also that this religion–or perhaps better, this religious dimension–has its own seriousness and integrity and requires the same care in understanding that any other religion does. (1) Kennedy’s inaugural address of January 20, 1961 serves as an example and a clue with which to introduce this complex subject. That address began: We observe today not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom–symbolizing an end as well as a beginning–signifying renewal as well as change. For I have sworn before you and Almighty God the same solemn oath our forebears prescribed nearly a century and three quarters ago.

More information about the 50th Anniversary issue of Daedalus can be found here.

Blue Skies

We’ve all looked up at the sky and wondered why it is blue.   But we’re not the only ones perplexed by this question—thinkers throughout history—Aristotle, Leonardo da Vinci, Einstein and Johannes Kepler, to name a few, have wondered why the sky is blue.  For his column in The Boston Globe Josh Glenn spoke with Peter Pesic, a physicist from St John’s College in Santa Fe who has a new book, Sky in a Bottle, about this very subject:

IDEAS: Why do children ask why the sky is blue?

PESIC: Because, I suspect, it's such a striking and amazing phenomenon that we see all the time-and because the color seems to be so distinctive. As far as we know, though, thousands of years of human history passed before someone wondered about the sky's color. Neither the [pre-Platonic] Greeks nor the ancient Chinese wrote about it.

IDEAS: When did scientists begin to ask the question?

PESIC: The question emerges for the first time in a treatise attributed to Aristotle, one that presciently suggests that the color of skylight has something to do with an interaction between the air and outside influences-that is, the surrounding darkness. But why blue, as opposed to another color? No one asked themselves this question until Descartes. He attributed the color of the sky to particles floating and spinning in something later called ''ether," and which turned red or blue depending on whether they were spinning more or less rapidly. But this was, of course, sheer speculation.

Read the entire interview with Pesic here.