blog.plugimi.com ( Sascha Pohflepp )

New work from Design Interactions and pretty much everyone else, massive show – Monday, 28th January from 18.30h at the RCA, Kensington Gore right next to Royal Albert Hall.

(Related brief: The future of money)

During the credit crunch of 2007, banks were facing the loss of a great deal of trust–both the trust of other banks but also that of their private customers. Those small-scale clients, in many cases probably for the first time, realized that they do not only deposit their money with their bank, but that they are actually investing it in the global economy. They thus subject it to the complex movement of the markets as well as to inherent systemic risks. In the face of this shock of recognition, Northern Rock’s customers withdrew two billion British pounds in just a few days, leaving the bank in a precarious financial situation.

In order to regain the trust of customers, this project proposes a kind of asset which alludes to bonds and stocks of the past which through illustration and text gave their owners a rich idea of what they were related to. In a similar fashion, this asset shows its current monetary value and related news on itself, using e-ink technology to create a dynamic document. More important, however, is that it plugs into a proprietary wall-socket provided by the bank to connect itself to the global economy. However, the customer decides how deeply the plug fits into the socket , thus determining how risk-averse he or she wants to deal with the market. Should there be a major rupture in the financial system, the more cautiously plugged-in assets will physically disconnect from the socket and be retracted from the market. The document goes blank with nothing but the name of the owner and its current value remaining, effectively becoming a cheque that can be cashed in or re-connected if so desired.

While this design acknowledges that it is impossible to fully disconnect from the economy because the overall systemic risk always remains, it aims at the same time re-gain customer trust by providing them with a sense of domestic control over their assets–which at the same time are in fact roaming across the globe.

(Related brief: Radio)

Our Spaceship Earth is spinning around itself while it circles the Sun. This means that one side is being exposed to light and energy from the Sun while the other is dark and energy is being consumed to brighten up the night.

Recent improvements in solar cell technology suggest that it would be possible to design devices which actually generate power from the sunlight rather then either being a consumer or off.

The Sunlight Exchange proposes a network of light-emitting devices which, employing methods not unlike Nikola Tesla’s vision of wireless energy transmission, power each other over great distances and thus effectively send sunlight from one side of the planet to the other.

During the first term at Design Interactions, we have already worked on and presented three projects, even though often they often are rather sketches than completely finished scenarios. With the upcoming Work-in-Progress show at the end of the month, I will have to select and refine one of them. Let me know which one in your opinion is the most promising one–

Turky, that smart little robot (Related brief: 54p7)

As computers grew ever more powerful, the area of artificial intelligence continued failing to show significant progress in basic skills like the understanding of language and making any kind of subjective judgment–tasks which pose no problem to the most poorly educated human.

As a consequence, individuals are increasingly being integrated in the process of the computed management of the world, making the decisions at which the otherwise highly efficient machines get stuck.

This system, which is also in widely used by what used to be called Job Centre Plus put people back into employment, uses a technology which is not unlike what Amazon Inc. launched as Mechanical Turk in the early 2000s. It was, however, a toy company that make the idea an enormous commercial success when they launched “Turky, that smart little robot”, a product which, while seeming entirely autonomous and almost intelligent to millions of kids, was in fact remotely guided by equally many so-called turkers around the world.

Blogging far and between, promise to improve, especially on what’s happening at the college. Two projects already finished (Turky, that smart little robot and The Sunlight Exchange) and somewhat waiting for proper write-ups as well as for a bit of documentation and alterations. Current one is about “The Future of Money”, a topic which I find immensely interesting (see earlier posts) but unfortunately there’s not much time. Here are a few thoughts as of Monday, will hopefully evolve significantly until next Tuesday–

“Wall Street, Half Past 2 O’Clock” by James Cafferty and Charles Rosenberg, depicting the moment when NY’s upper-class realize that they have lost everything they had deposited with their banks.

What happens to the money we have stored as information in our bank accounts–or basically all assets which virtually represent a certain value–when something really bad happens? Really bad means system-shattering, something which will potentially render what was formerly highly valued almost worthless, either through inflation or general collapse of the monetary exchange system as we know it. I am currently thinking about something that closely resembles flight data recorder (aka “black box”, even though they are usually bright red) and might be attached to a wall or hidden in a closet. In an exceptional situation like a desaster or any other kind of mishap, the owner can chose to detach it from the wall in which case it will freeze the assets and either contain them for future use or transform them into something more useful. That something might be of immediate use, for example items which are tradeable like nutritious food or cigarettes, but it might also be something that is as abstractly valuable as the original money, for example information about how to leave the city or such which might also become a commodity under such circumstances.

By the way – We have an open day on Friday the 7th, please come around the studio at the RCA if you got the time. And I live in Bethnal Green now, anyone up for a pint at one of the seedy pubs around, please come forward.

So I moved to London to attend the Royal College of Art’s Design Interactions program with Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby, Brendan Walker, James Auger, Nina Pope and a host of very different, motivated and bright students. The feel of the school is pretty different to UDK, probably because (even though it is in central London) it operates more of a campus which includes most facilities you would need throughout the day, including a fun bar. This way, people are being exposed to each other all the time, bonding them together much more strongly than I am used to and facilitating constant exchange between them. I actually prefer it this way, I believe.

Bruce Sterling came over for a talk on Monday and this also launched our first project, the brief of which is titled 54p7. It is about re-imagining robots and it is very open to interpretation. What really struck me in Bruce’s talk was his emphasis on how the idea of the holistic robot has proven to be a failure, with machines still struggling to understand basic language, let alone understand their surroundings. What arises from this is the image as the robot/computer as a somewhat disabled entity, maybe rather autistic because they tend to have what is often called splinter skills, such as extreme precision, speed or obviously computation.

To me this makes clear that machines, at least in the nearer future, will be highly dependent on human reasoning for most things outside their area of expertise. Humans (if you exclude actually autistic individuals) however, tend to be the opposite. Very good at subjective decisions (“I like”), but rather bad at moving around car bodies with precision or crunching PI. Consequentially, an interesting thing to propose might be a symbiosis between the human and the computer which, if you want, would result in a kind of much more powerful robot. Of course you could argue that this already exists in the form of different machines which extend one’s power, etc. but I am actually more thinking of an exchange between two separate entities.

I’ve been thinking hard about how this exchange might exactly work, and also tried to re-evaluate the general relationship man/machine for a second. The classic 20th century idea of a roboted life would mostly include a paradise with the machines doing all the work and humans having a good time in the park. From today’s perspective and our experiences with increasingly globalized work-processes, this prospect seems less promising as machines put people with replaceable jobs out of work due to their greater economical efficiency. Today’s ideal (in the western world) is the all-brain society which just thinks up great concepts and sends them to either the machines or South-East Asia for completion. Yet, there will hardly ever be enough clients or such jobs in general to cater to the 700+ million of, for instance, Europe. At some point, we might actually need machines to generate work for people in order to keep them alive or at least busy. So what I am thinking of right now, would be the perversion of the original idea of the robot towards a machine which rather produces work, especially tasks that it cannot perform itself, such as value assessments, moral judgements, aesthetic decisions, etc. I am currently figuring out the mechanics of that relationship, but a scenario could look like this:

An individual gets fired by his or her company because his or her (probably manual) job has been cut or moved to somewhere cheaper. He or she goes to the local employment center and after assessing skills and finding out that there’s nothing currently available in that sector, gets offered to participate in a companion program. This program consists of a little computer which easily could be fit onto (into?) one’s body and is so energy efficient that it can actually be powered by body heat and/or movement. The person wears that machine and every time it would get stuck and needs human input, he or she logs on to a service very much like Amazon Mechanical Turk and completes a few tasks as outlined above for which he or she will be payed in return. As said, I’m still trying to figure out the exact nature of this symbiotic relationship, but the prospect of commenting on social issues by inverting the paradigm of the robot itself seems kinda promising.