Hi, y’all!
Welcome to my new subscribers! I hope you enjoy the weekly updates and thoughts.
As always, let’s briefly look back at last week’s activities and things I learned or noticed. Two teams had their final delivery of the Next Level Engineering course in the new master students of The Hague University of Applied Sciences working on Wijkbot for Afrikaanderwijk. Working with the urban robotic prototype platform, they did some nice real-world testing, discovering the interactions and interventions. In all the projects we have been doing, you might draw the conclusion that there is more space for robots as partners than autonomous self-focused ones.
Triggered thought
Back in the days when the internet started to become more the goto place for services, and especially when personalisation became a standard strategy in the design of user dashboards, and the ultimate user experience design was one that doesn’t make you think, design for friction became a topic of discussion. Would it not be better to be able to understand what you are experiencing, or should everything be as smooth as possible?
This is, of course, more relevant than ever in the era of AI-supported actions. The conscious interactions are ruled out in predictive systems. In a blog post, Matt Webb explores different forms of relationships we will have with AI in the context of the new hardware products. Earlier, he wrote about AI’s ubiquitous presence in everything we use. “Insane AI, planetary compute, used for really, really mundane things.”
This seems indeed inevitable. And that results again in wondering what friction we need to be able to interact in a responsible way. This is more defined in relation to the interaction. In the research for Cities of Things a master student looks into an engaging neighbourhood hub for last mile mobility and social community services, we are looking into different attitudes, from helpful concierge to PA to reserved filter. This will not be straightforward and will adapt to situations; not only will the AI learn from the interactions to create response strategies, but so will we humans…
Find the events to track, Notions from the news, and paper for the week, via the newsletter.
See y’all next week!
I will be busy starting up a new proposal and finding time to update my service offerings… Wijkbot will be part of an exposition, and I will definitely check it. And also that same afternoon, the Robot symposium. Tec Art and IFFR are also still running in Rotterdam. Stuffed week…
Have a great week!
target is new 