Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2011. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 170-173). / This dissertation describes the research, development and reasoning behind a family of musical instruments called Exertion Instruments. They use inline electrical generators to run a synthesizer and an amplifier while eliminating the need for batteries. Efficient acoustic design minimizes the power requirements while optimized generator and ergonomic design maximize power generation. As such, they combine the convenience of acoustic instruments with the flexibility of electronic instruments. Also, through new generator designs, nuances of player charging movements become as important to expression as the overall intensity of their playing. The player treats the generator like a typical physical resonator such as a string, using musical instrument playing gestures. Yet they manipulate audio electronically, enabling practices like sampling, synthesis and modulation. During development, a modular approach using amateur-friendly materials was taken to empower future instrument builders to customize and improve the instrument. In addition to technical criteria based on measurements, Exertion Instruments are evaluated through player and builder experiences in a series of technical workshops and realworld performances. / by Noah Vawter. / Ph.D.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2002. / This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 88-95). / School curricula are designed with the expectation that students achieve literacy. They usually support the acquisition of language by encouraging students to learn how to decode information within a sentence. In this thesis it is suggested that literacy skills in children five to seven years of age can be obtained with a broader understanding of language and its representation. Oral storytelling is presented as a way to develop metacognitive skills with a focus on character-based narrative where children must create the perspectives of the characters. The ability to tell stories is common to children from every community and can help them in school performance. Children should therefore be encouraged to express their understanding of character perspectives in oral storytelling. This thesis presents a tangible interface that allows children to practice pre-literacy skills using oral language. It introduces Dolltalk, a system that facilitates children's ability to take narrative perspectives through the mechanism of reporting speech. The toy presented works by asking children to tell stories and by playing back the stories to the child using narrative features. The ability to express the way the characters think and feel in a narrative and what motivates them to act has been shown to be predictive of academic competence among preschool children. A user study was conducted to understand the short-term effect of Dolltalk on children's elaboration of internal states of story characters. The results show that playing with Dolltalk encourages children to introduce their characters in the story and to express the internal states of their characters much more than with the use of a simple tape recorder. The results also show that playing with the current version of Dolltalk or with Dolltalk in tape-recorder mode encourages children to provide spatial and temporal information in their stories much more than they would without hearing any playback of their stories. This thesis presents significant results (p =.04) that indicate the current version of Dolltalk encourages children to express the internal states of their characters. / by Catherine N. Vaucelle. / S.M.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2007. / This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 121-124). / The major promise of computational technology for learning is in making discovery and acquisition of knowledge accessible to a wider range of people. The protean expressive and constructive nature of computational technology facilitates more powerful and effective learning methodologies. Enabling multiple forms of representation through computational approaches to thinking about various phenomena not only potentially opens new domains of knowledge, but also permits a re-structuration of domains by rethinking content and activity. This thesis provides an exemplar of this potential through children learning about Balance Control in Dynamic Systems (BCDS), which adds a particular value given that BCDS is considered too complex for young learners. A Balance Control Microworld was created to help learners think about how to program physical robots to perform balancing acts, such as balancing an inverted pendulum, based on the observations of their own body motions. A Spatial Computing Paradigm (SCP) was developed to allow learners to carry out various control operations using familiar 2D properties of on-screen objects. The physical robots have a dual-mode ability that allowed learners to record and observe motions while controlling the robots manually by hand as well as under program control. The study involved two groups of learners, ages 13 to 15, over twelve months. BCDS concepts that emerged include the role of speed, creating predictions, managing system states, and analyzing system's stability. Moreover, powerful ideas in computational and mathematical thinking helped enable thinking and understanding in BCDS as well as reflection over the whole process. The evolution of the Microworld was guided by a practice of applied epistemological anthropology. / (cont.) An iterative process was used to identify important themes as they emerged during the course of the fieldwork. The resulting themes, as reflected in the case studies, come in three flavors: One focuses on ideas in BCDS that were learned by youth and could lead to deeper understanding in that rich field; the second shows how the tools and approach evolved to better support the learner along with the role of the researcher in the learning process; the third discusses the learning implications of a technology-enhanced Microworld by demonstrating common learning assumptions that need careful reconsideration. / by Arnan Sipitakiat. / Ph.D.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2011. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [48]-49). / Going for a run is a great way to get exercise and feel rejuvenated, but it can also get repetitive and boring. In contrast, digital games can be very engaging and addictive but traditionally force players to be physically inactive. This project is a mobile phone application that transforms a run into an immersive game by presenting a series of story-based running tasks to motivate the player. Requiring that the game be played while running constrains the design both in terms of input and output, and this system demonstrates ways to manage those constraints while still providing a compelling experience. A six person evaluation validates the concept and offers useful design feedback. / by Matthew Donahoe. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2012. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 52-56). / Creative usages of graphics to encode information date back to at least the beginnings of the industrial revolution. It is also around that same time that a gap between the wealthiest of nations and least begins to develop. How can we use techniques of visualization complimented with vast amounts of data to provide a lens by which we may understand economic development? The amount of computing power and data available at our finger tips is increasing everyday. This thesis will introduce The Observatory as a tool that combines big data with interactive visualizations as a means for discerning the patterns found in economic development over the past 50 years. The tool draws on influences from other interactive visualizations tools as well as theory and literature from the field of complexity economics. The impact of this tool has already begun to emerge with its proliferation online and usage by experts in the field of development economics. / by Alexander James Gaspar Simoes. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2008. / This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 89-92). / Numerous applications, from high-performance scientific computing to large, high-resolution multi-touch interfaces to strong artificial intelligence, push the practical physical limits of modern computers. Typical computers attempt to hide the physics as much as possible, running software composed of a series of instructions drawn from an arbitrary set to be executed upon data that can be accessed uniformly. However, we submit that by exposing, rather than hiding, the density and velocity of information and the spatially concurrent, asynchronous nature of logic, scaling down in size and up in complexity becomes significantly easier. In particular, we introduce "asynchronous logic automata", which are a specialization of both asynchronous cellular automata and Petri nets, and include Boolean logic primitives in each cell. We also show some example algorithms, means to create circuits, potential hardware implementations, and comparisons to similar models in past practice. / by David Allen Dalrymple. / S.M.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2012. / This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [163]-172). / We have long assumed that being face to face is the best environment for social interaction. But is "being there" the best we can aspire to? One common approach to improving face-to-face contexts is to add new communication channels - a strategy often described as creating "backchannels." In my work, I use a series of novel complementary communication systems to show how adding communication platforms to collaborative situations can be useful while also arguing for a new conceptual model of a main stage and a side stage (in the Goffman sense) that contrasts with the traditional model of backchannels. I describe a series of projects that embody this approach and explore its limits. My work covers virtual world meetings and presentations, an audience interaction tool for large groups (backchan.nl), a tablet-based system for small group discussions (Tin Can), and a platform for connecting huge distributed audiences (ROAR). In each of these projects I trace my three major research themes: understanding how conversational grounding operates in these environments, how non-verbal actions complement text-based interaction, and how people make decisions about how to manage their attention in environments with multiple simultaneous communication channels. / by Drew Harry. / Ph.D.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2010. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 115-119). / Visions of ubiquitous computing describe a network of devices that quietly supports human goals, but this may also add complexity to an already frustrating relationship between humans and their electronic objects. As we move from vision to reality, there is an opportunity to rethink how we interact with our objects and networks of objects, and close the communication gap between man and machine. 'This thesis defines social and super-mechanical affordances for products which may consist of many physical and digital objects. These new objects will not look like stripped-down contemporary computers, but augmented ordinary objects that are focused on input and output, exposed on Twitter. Apps in the cloud use Twitter to marshall the appropriate objects to execute human tasks. Using a social network as transport allows apps and their owners to manage a large network of computing objects with the same constructs that we use to manage many human relationships. From this direction, we take a step toward a consumer-amenable implementation of ubiquitous computing. / by John Anthony Kestner. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 67-69). / This thesis presents c@t, a language for programming distributed embedded systems that are composed of thousands (even millions) of interacting computing devices. Due to the improvements in fabricating technologies, it is becoming possible to build tiny single-chip devices equipped with logic circuits, sensors, actuators and communication components. A large number of these devices can be networked together to build Massively Distributed Embedded Systems (MDES). A wide variety of embedded control applications are envisioned for MDES: responsive environments, smart buildings, wildlife monitoring, precision agriculture, inventory tracking, etc. These examples are compelling, however, developing applications for MDES remains complex due to the following issues: MDES consist of large number of resource constrained devices and the number of potential interactions between them can be combinatorially explosive. Systems with the combined issues of such scale complexity, interaction complexity and resource constraints are unprecedented and cannot be programmed using conventional technologies. Accordingly, this thesis presents cut, a language that employs the following techniques to address the issues of MDES: 1. To address the scale complexity, c@t provides tools for programming the system as a unit. 2. c@t offers a declarative style network programming interface so that network interactions can be implemented without writing any low-level networking code. 3. The applications developed using c@t are vertically integrated. That is, the compiler customizes the runtime environment to the suit the application needs. Using this integrated approach, efficient applications can be developed to fit the available resources. This thesis describes the design, features and implementation of c@t in detail. A sample application developed using c@t is also presented. / y Devasenapathi P. Seetharamakrishnan. / S.M.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 171-178). / This thesis explores spin manipulation, fabrication techniques and boundary conditions of electromagnetism to bridge the macroscopic and microscopic worlds of biology, chemistry and electronics. This work is centered around the design of a novel electromagnetic device scalable from centimeters to micrometers called a microslot. By creating a small slot in a planarized waveguide called a microstrip, the boundary conditions of the system force an electromagnetic wave to create a concentrated magnetic field around the slot that can be used to detect or produce magnetic fields. By constructing suitable boundary conditions, a detector of electric fields can be produced as well. One of the most important applications of this technology is for Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR). As demonstrated experimentally in this thesis, microslots improves the mass-limited detectability of NMR by orders of magnitude over conventional technology and may move us closer to the dream of NMR on a chip. / (cont.) Improving sensitivity in NMR may lead to a dramatic increase in the rate and accessibility of protein structural information accumulation and a host of other applications for fundamental understanding of biology and biomedical applications, and micro/macroscopic engineering. This microslot structure was constructed at both 6.9mm and 297 [mu]m in order to understand the properties as a function of scale. The 297 [mu]m structure has the best signal to noise ratio of any published planar detector and promises to have higher sensitivity with decreasing size. The detector has been used to analyze water and a relatively simple organic molecule with nanomole sensitivity. 940 picomoles of a small peptide was analyzed and a 2D correlation spectra was obtained which allowed identification of the amino acids in the peptide and could be further used to determine structure. This 297 [mu]m microslot probe was constructed using conventional printed circuit board fabrication and a laser micromachining center. A homebuilt probe was made to house the circuit board. Since this geometry is simpler than previously demonstrated techniques, fabrication can be automated for arrays and is inherently scalable to small sizes (less than 10 [mu]m). / (cont.) The planar nature of the device makes it ideal for integration with microfluidics, transceivers and applications such as cell/neuron chemistry, protein arrays, and HPLC-NMR on pico to nanomoles of sample. Furthermore, this work suggests that a physically scalable, near-field device may have a variety of further uses in integrated circuit chip diagnosis, spintronic devices, nanomanipulation, and magnetic/electric field imaging of surfaces. / by Yael Gregory Eli Maguire. / Ph.D.