2006/10/15

Mobile and Pervasive Technology in the Urban Space

Author: Diogo Terroso
University: The Bartlett School of Graduate Studies


Abstract: The convergence of enabling technologies for mobile and portable connectivity has widespread potential and presents us unforeseen challenges. As such devices become commonplace and link-up wirelessly, the urban space emerges as a responsive surface, where streams of invisible data flow into and from our mobile devices.
Proximity based networks, like Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, enable people to deliver and exchange rich media between mobile phones and other wireless devices. Developments in the technological infrastructure of such networks have been continuous but have mostly focused on implementation rather than integration. Consequently, most applications have failed to provide interface solutions for experiencing proximity media and context-aware networks in meaningful ways. Instead, they have consistently added to the accumulation of intrusive and redundant information, reinforcing the information pollution of our days.
By following the presumption that the urban space has now become a responsive surface. Is it possible to design an intelligent user interface for mobile devices that enable a satisfactory experience of proximity media services? What are the fundamental design and architecture principles that such model should follow?
This research recognizes interaction design as central to the proposition of new interface development for proximity-based networks. It explores the possibility of retrieving information by context, or according to the user's current location, therefore enabling perhaps new forms of local dynamics.
Ultimately this project aims at changing our perception of the invisible, pervasive stream of data coming from wireless networks.

(paper available as pdf)

2005/04/09

Mixed Reality - Towards a Dynamic Reality

Author: Diogo Terroso
University: The Bartlett School of Graduate Studies

Abstract: Mixed reality research is taking the integration between physical and virtual worlds even further. New developments in technology are challenging some of its conventional definitions.
The first part of this paper focuses on the sometimes rigid dichotomy between real and virtual. It begins by challenging the Cartesian model and it presents reality as a multi-dimensional model, it then follows by proposing virtuality as a dynamical system. The second part of the paper explores the relation between artificial systems and nature, the emergence of hybrid models. It is argued that the virtual may put us, in many ways, closer, and not further to nature. Through MR we might be more close to nature than from our unique view of reality.
The final part of the paper, presents some emerging technologies, such as mobile and pervasive technology, that are now radically changing our social space, redefining materiality and pushing practitioners to create new metaphors.

(paper available as pdf)

2004/10/21

CODE != LIFE * LIFE = HARDWARE

Author: Diogo Terroso
University: The Bartlett School of Graduate Studies

Abstract: Over the past decade, emerging from post-modernism and the shadows of the "designer as an author" , programming has ascended into central stage. Software companies are now providing textual scripting consoles to extend the functionalities of their software. Apple introduced Unix (a command line-centric OS) as the foundations of their new operating system. And the open source democratic movement, together with the vehicle of the Internet, is now coming of age.
Artists have finally embraced code, culminating with the world's leading electronics art festival Ars Electronica (2003), being held under the theme: "Code = Language of Our Time". This new level of significance represents a challenge for artists and designers. It re-opens the debate about the duality between humans and computers, the digital versus the physical. In particular, it questions the meaning of programming, and the role of the designer, in the process of creation. How and where does aesthetics take place, we might ask.

By shaping a discourse around some of these issues, this essay will first demonstrate that the underlying model of computation conditions the way humans create. Subsequently will present "nature" as a model of convergence, and finally, it will state that ultimately the hardware, and not the software, will play a significant part in the evolution of art.

(paper available as pdf)

2000/09/09

Virtual Environments - Merging of New Science and Web Design

Author: Diogo Terroso
Degree: Master of Arts - Communication Design (Multimedia)
University: Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design - University of the Arts London

Abstract: In the last decades we have continuously seen critical designers incorporating sign-theory, structuralism, post-modernism and deconstruction into design practicability, we are now witnessing the emergence of the politics of science. Current investigations and research of the new sciences are based on complexity and dynamic living systems. How then does it relate to design? In what extend can we apply such knowledge to unfold conceptual, structural and philosophical principles for the development of online virtual environments. The framework is what possible relation, can we establish between new science and the Internet.

(paper available as pdf)

2000/01/26

Issues on Artificial Intelligence

Author: Diogo Terroso
Degree: Master of Arts - Communication Design (Multimedia)
University: Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design - University of the Arts London

"Perhaps the greatest significance of the computer lies in the impact on man’s view of himself...his picture of the universe and his place and goals in it" - Boden

With Galileo´s discovery of the earth movement around the sun and Darwin’s discovery of the connections of humans to other species, humanity’s ego has suffered a blow.
The last rampart of pride is that at least we possess something magical in our capacity to think. If AI were to be successful in providing entities capable of thought, we could witness a further blow to our ego.
The difference lies in whether computers can simulate rather than just imitate intelligence, which depends on whether the processes that produce the intelligence are themselves mechanical (computational).

Are humans essentially different from machines?
Can machines fit into existing concepts of what it is to be human?
What is the difference between imitating and simulating the human brain?
Is there humanlike behaviour without consciousness?

1. What is AI? What are we afraid of?
2. Small History of AI
2.1 Consciousness, the self, identity
2.2 "Can a machine think?" - Our brain is a special purpose computer
3. Current approaches to AI
3.1 Exponential evolution
3.2 Intelligence Architecture vs. Software of intelligence
4. Future concerns regarding AI
4.1 "Will it be conscious? " - Artificial Consciousness
4.2 Social and psychological consequences

(complete report available as pdf)

1999/05/13

Cyber Reality

Author: Diogo Terroso
Degree: Master of Arts - Digital Arts
University: Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Issue: Fusion between technology and the human, the real and virtual dimension.

"Somewhere the world has stopped. The houses, the streets, motels, restaurants, gas-stations remained in a degraded desolation, which extended itself to the productive harness, to factories and to labour conditions. Somewhere, people no longer wanted to change reality, possibly run-out the capacity to process all the germanian and silicons microchips, the screens, hearers, helmets and holograms performance and started to use organic substance to build processors, with neurons as the conductor material and the body itself as the receptor, furnished as any Bioports peripheric, directly applied in the vertebral spine, which will be connected by an umbilical cable to the most overwhelming, hallucinatory source: virtual reality."

(paper available as pdf)

1999/02/09

Media>Body

Author: Diogo Terroso
Degree: Master of Arts - Digital Arts
University: Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Issue: The Mediatization of the Body

The materialization behind all technology creates the world in which our conscience inhabits. Is matter the language of our actual technology?

(paper available as pdf)

1998/12/03

Post Magazine

Author: Diogo Terroso
Degree: Master of Arts - Digital Arts
University: Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Language: Portuguese
Issue: A ascenção da revista contemporânea.

Enquanto o texto de um livro clássico é uma corrente contínua de palavras de um único autor, o conteúdo de uma revista é produzido por editores, designers e publicitários assim como numerosos escritores trabalhando independentes uns dos outros. A revista é o precedentente do texto e imagem Pós-modernista: críticos falam frequentemente da fragmentação, do equívoco, da ideia subjectiva como expressão da individualidade, e da mistura livre de altas e baixas referências culturais como marcas inovadoras que rejeitaram a hegemonia formal da comunicação convencional modernista. Existiu sempre, por exemplo, incorporado á ideia da revista o princípio do discurso plural, tão querido á linguagem contemporânea. (...)