Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, February, 2020 / "February 2020." Cataloged from the official PDF of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 102-111). / Renowned designer Kenya Hara writes: "Creativity is to discover a question that has never been asked". These questions are commonly discovered early in the design process; an often ambiguous and liminal experience where new information is explored and considered in non-obvious ways to reveal unexpected associations. 'Intelligent' digital technologies such as machine learning are increasingly employed in tools used in the early phases of the design process. These computational techniques undeniably surpass humans at quickly generating numerous designs and calculating 'optimised' responses, but their average-driven approaches are limited when it comes to embracing the serendipity that can inspire creative breakthroughs. How can we develop digital tools to augment this liminal period of the creative process and help designers discover unexpected ideas? / This dissertation explores this question through three new 'Beyond Average' systems that integrate ambiguity and serendipity into digitally-enabled design tools: the Reframe creative prompt tool that juxtaposes language from a designer's notes in surprising ways to provoke new associations between concepts in their project; the Looking Sideways inspiration exploration tool that presents a diverse range of content for each search query and suggests connections between the concepts discovered; and the digitally-augmented Design Daydreams ideation table and post-it note that seamlessly connects the physical and digital content that designers use in their creative processes. These systems were informed by field research and interviews with expert designers and their impact on the design process was evaluated through several interventions in which creative practitioners, entrepreneurs and technologists used the Beyond Average tools to inspire new ideas for their projects. These interventions highlighted that the creative disruptions these tools provoke cannot exist alone; they must be situated in a larger creative process that accommodates for serendipitous interjections and unanticipated ideas. Overall, this research demonstrates how embedding liminality into digital tools creates a space within the design process for serendipitous inspiration and helps designers apply these innovative ideas, pointing towards new questions to consider as we design the future of our creative work. / by Philippa Mothersill. / Ph. D. / Ph. D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, February, 2021 [for thesis before June 2021] / Cataloged from the official PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 97-99). / Workflows in Digital Fabrication require coordination across heterogenous computing systems, from the design tools used to describe component geometries to the embedded control systems used to interact with the physical world in order to produce those components. In the state of the art, workflows are typically static and opaque, especially within embedded controllers themselves. This makes them difficult to modify or develop, and places barriers between high level computing and low level control. An opportunity exists to develop an open platform for interoperability and reconfigurability that spans low- and high-level workflow components, that could collapse much of the heterogeneity found in these systems into cohesive representations. To do so, this thesis develops a systems architecture based on reconfigurable graphs of dataflow objects. It embeds virtual dataflow graphs of modular software elements within physical dataflow graphs of modular hardware elements, recasting heterogenous systems as cohesive graphs all the way down. The architecture is reduced to practice across high-level browser computing and low-level embedded control, through mixed networking links. It is deployed on two machine systems: one that collapses path planning and path execution for a small milling machine, marking a departure from the historic use of G Codes, and another that aligns computer vision based measurement with low-level motor control and sensor acquisition, to open access to materials measurement. / by Jake Robert Read. / S.M. / S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2016. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 77-80). / The ability of humans to accumulate knowledge and information across generations is a defining feature of our species. This ability depends on factors that range from the psychological biases that predispose us to learn from skillful and prestigious people, to the development of technologies for recording and communicating information: from clay tablets to the Internet. How do these communication technologies affect the size and composition of our human collective memory? Here we use two datasets on historical characters to present empirical evidence documenting how communication technologies have shaped human collective memory. We show that changes in communication technologies, including the introduction of movable type printing and shorter forms of printed media-such as newspapers, journals, and pamphlets-were accompanied by sharp changes (or breaks) in the per-capita number of memorable biographies from a given time period found in 'current online and offline sources. Moreover, changes in technology, such as the introduction of.printing, film and radio, and television, coincide with sharp changes in the occupations of the individuals present in these biographical records. These two empirical facts provide evidence in support of theories arguing that communication technologies are more consequential to society than the messages transmitted through them. Finally, this thesis contributes an update to the Pantheon dataset that includes historical geocoded data. We hope this updated version of the Pantheon dataset will enable future work documenting the effect of new communication technologies in ancient and modern civilizations. / by Cristian I. Jara-Figueroa. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2016. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 63-65). / We present Sensei, the first system designed to understand social interaction and learning in an early-childhood classroom using a distributed sensor network. Our unobtrusive sensors measure proximity between each node in a dynamic range-based mesh network. The sensors can be worn in the shoes, attached to selected landmarks in the classroom, and placed on lessons. This data, accessible to teachers in a web dashboard, enables teachers to derive deeper insights from their classrooms. Further, the anonymized data can be used in large-scale research in early childhood. Sensei is currently deployed in three Montessori schools and we have evaluated the effectiveness of the system with teachers. Our user evaluations have shown that Sensei helps discover insights that would have otherwise been lost. / by Nazmus Saquib. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2017 / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 121-126). / This thesis uses machine learning methods to construct emotional arcs in movies, calculate families of arcs, and demonstrate the ability for certain arcs to predict audience engagement. The system is applied to Hollywood films and high quality shorts found on the web. We begin by harnessing deep convolutional neural networks for audio and visual sentiment analysis. These models are trained on both new and existing large-scale datasets, after which they can be used to compute separate audio and visual emotional arcs for any video. We then crowd source annotations for 30-second video clips extracted from highs and lows in the arcs in order to assess the micro-level precision of the system. Precision is measured in terms of agreement in polarity between the system's predictions and annotators' ratings. The final model combining audio and visual features achieves a precision of 0.894. Next, we look at macro-level characterizations of movies by investigating whether there exist 'universal shapes' of emotional arcs. In particular, we develop a clustering approach to discover distinct classes of emotional arcs. Finally, we show on a sample corpus of short web videos that certain emotional arcs are statistically significant predictors of the number of comments a video receives. These results suggest that the emotional arcs learned by our approach successfully represent macroscopic aspects of a video story that drive audience engagement. Such machine understanding could be used to predict audience reactions to video stories, ultimately improving our ability as storytellers to communicate with each other. / by Eric Chu. / S.M. / S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, May, 2020 / Cataloged from the official PDF of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 204-217). / Digital technology holds many promises for supporting early literacy development. To stimulate both l earning achievement and children's interest in literacy, i t i s beneficial f or a l earning activity to be playful, support children's agency and self-efficacy, and meaningfully connect to their life. However, nearly all current literacy technology, designed within the instructionist paradigm, lack these qualities. This work attempts to address this issue by exploring the design space of technology that is: ( 1) "child-driven" -- allowing initiative and ideas to come from the learner; ( 2) expressive -- fostering the creation of messages or artistic artifacts; and ( 3) scaffolded -- / assisting the child, in real time, in accomplishing his/her self-selected goals. Several forms of scaffolding were explored: ( 1) direct guidance routines with input from the child, ( 2) facilitating invented spelling, and ( 3) phoneme-based building blocks aimed at eschewing the orthographic complexities of English. The exploration was conducted through two apps, primarily aimed at phonological awareness development -- / minimalistic SpeechBlocks I and scaffolded SpeechBlocks II. They were evaluated in four exploratory studies, both in classrooms and homes. The following was l earned: ( 1) The media sparked intrinsic motivation, supported agency and self-efficacy, and allowed f or non-trivial expression; ( 2) They were used i n markedly different ways: from chaotic, impulsive exploration to sophisticated imaginative play; ( 3) The media encouraged literacy-oriented social play; ( 4) Real-time, built-in scaffolding was essential i n supporting the meaningful participation of early literacy learners. I t allowed children to engage i n high-level creativity, while simplifying the necessary l ow-level routine; ( 5) Different scaffolding types fulfilled different functions, such as responding to children's specific requests and facilitating the search f or ideas; ( 6) The distinction between letter and phoneme blocks was ultimately less important than originally thought. / However, onomatopoeic mnemonics ( designed f or phoneme blocks) were helpful or a certain category of children; ( 7) Initial phonological awareness and executive function appear to be moderators in how productive children's engagement was with the media. This work can provide insights to researchers, educators, and designers on how to combine children's agency with supportive guidance. / by Ivan Sysoev. / Ph. D. / Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, September, 2020 / Cataloged from student-submitted PDF of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 189-197). / The language and formalization of mathematics historically evolved as an interplay between abstractions and their grounding in real world objects and events. The embodied mathematics philosophy posits that our mathematical capabilities are centered around our embodied experiences, and abstract math concepts are layers of metaphors that are based on simple arithmetic capabilities such as categorizing objects, subitizing, and part-whole analysis. Unfortunately, current practice of abstract math often requires us to memorize rules of manipulation, which are cognitively arbitrary, severed from intuitive grounding, and have mechanics and metaphors of their own. While journeying into mathematics, many of us therefore lose the intuitive underpinnings of abstractions. In this dissertation, I develop a design framework and an interactive sketch interface to combine computer algebra algorithms with layers of sketched, visually interpretable compositions. / The framework reimagines some abstract mathematical activities to sketching manipulable structures and performing actions that utilize our natural arithmetic capabilities, enabling the user to form personalized, embodied mathematical representations. The framework solves the challenge of defining a mapping between sketching, iconic objects, symbol algebra, and functions. It converts the symbolic representations of computer algebra to three kinds of sketched primitives and two key interactions. To evaluate the framework and interface, I present examples from the Common Core curriculum, demonstrating how the primitives and the interactions cover a wide range of exercises from Kindergarten to 8th Grade. Qualitative findings from playtesting studies in Bangladesh and USA are then compared to point out the strengths and weaknesses in the design. / An online drawing experiment is also presented that evaluates user preferences for drawing descriptive forms for the proposed mathematical compositions. Next, I describe collaborations with scientists and mathematicians (in astrophysics, neuroscience, and epidemiology) that explore how the proposed methods can reimagine some advanced mathematics, such as numerical integration and differentiation. The ability to do symbol algebra on iconic representations opens up opportunities for doing mathematics with a wide range of physical objects and media. Such affordances are demonstrated through examples. I finish the dissertation by discussing future research opportunities in mathematics, scientific computing, and HCI, and how the landscape of abstract mathematics can adapt embodied mathematics. / by Nazmus Saquib. / Ph. D. / Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, September, 2020 / Cataloged from the official PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 104-115). / This thesis proposes the vision of Venous Materials which intends to explore the idea that fluid can be considered and manipulated as a tangible digital-physical element for interaction design. Venous Materials suggests a new approach to design interactive materials with means of designing fluidic channels inside deformable materials. These materials are demonstrated as a new type of interactive material that acts as embedded analog fluidic sensors by responding to human input (such as pressure and bending) and by utilizing the flow in an enclosed mechanism for display and color change. This thesis demonstrates the design space and its utilities through several applications, and presents how Venous Materials can be implemented as a tangible interactive tool to augment everyday scenarios. In order to increase the accessibility of Venous Materials for researchers and designers to utilize, a software platform and user interface was built to allow users a simple way to control, predict, and program the fluidic mechanisms. It serves as a design tool that allows users to design the geometry, input mechanical force, and simulate the flow results dynamically. Furthermore, this thesis presents the fabrication process that was developed for Venous Materials, which was documented and demonstrated in a hands-on workshop. Finally, this thesis will discuss the future developments and opportunities of Venous Materials towards Interactive Fluidic Mechanisms. / by Hila Mor. / S.M. / S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, May, 2020 / Cataloged from the official PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references. / Emergence, when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own, is an awe inducing phenomenon seen within nature, complex organization theory, physics, art, and philosophy. Humans can experience emergence or interdependence, a perhaps less potent version of emergence, when they come together, transform, connect, and grow in a way they could not alone through co-creation, playing games and sports, and telling stories. As such moments are scarce, cultures and groups ancient and new have developed technologies (in the sociological sense meaning techniques, processes, and material objects to produce goods, provide services, and connect people) to help groups reach those moments more easily, technologies I define as ancient social technologies (ASTs). Some ASTs, such as narrative coaching, circle practice, and dialogue across differences, have been developed for decades, even generations, to help groups reach emergence together in person. / Now, as computational social technologies like video conferencing and social media have been ground breaking by connecting across distance, many facilitators have shown great creativity and resourcefulness as they use these platforms to implement ASTs online. Yet, computational social technologies do not scaffold or ease the implementation of key AST components that are deemed essential to the practice, making virtual AST use challenging. I present in this thesis Keeper, a tool designed to augment virtual communication by scaffolding the use of ancient social technologies within modern computational social technologies. With a design informed by a deep investigation into four ancient social technologies, Keeper visualizes and mediates online, synchronous, audio and video conversations. Keeper challenges a traditional two dimensional interface through use of "space" and tone. / The tool scaffolds ASTs with features like a talking stick and guidelines, but retains key affordances of the digital medium by incorporating private messaging and conversation data visualization. Keeper fosters socially beneficial group dynamics by making visible conversation measures to promote equitability, and it prompts reflection and learning by offering visual maps of a conversation over time. The reception of this tool through experiments and interviews is discussed, and reflections on future work offered. / by Margaret Hughes. / S.M. / S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2016. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 75-79). / We present Amphibian, a simulator to experience scuba diving virtually in a terrestrial setting. Amphibian is novel because it simulates a wider variety of sensations experienced underwater compared with to existing diving simulators that mostly focus on visual and aural displays. Users rest their torso on a motion platform to feel buoyancy. Their outstretched arms and legs are placed in a suspended harness to simulate drag as they swim. An Oculus Rift head-mounted display (HMD) and a pair of headphones delineate the visual and auditory ocean scene. Additional senses simulated in Amphibian are breathing-induced motion, temperature changes, and tactile feedback through various sensors. Twelve experienced divers compared Amphibian to real-life scuba diving. We analyzed the system factors that influenced the users' sense of being there while using our simulator. We present future user interface improvements for enhancing immersion in Virtual reality diving simulators. / by Dhruv Jain. / S.M.