Dynamic Interactive Aesthetics

Abstract

In this paper, I independently build on an earlier collaborative effort with Dr. Cynthia Breazeal (MIT Media Lab) to integrate social and cultural theory and applied graphic design theory and practice into the participatory design process of a socially intelligent robot prototype called Kismet. My objective is to explore the feasibility of facilitating audience interaction in the graphic design process of this robot prototype-”potentially a mass-produced consumer product-”through the appropriation of a simple, communication convention: an email message. Steinhauer's (2000) Interactive Aesthetics (IA) is applied with the creation and distribution of an electronic survey that informs the target mass audience of an interdisciplinary design project underway and canvasses responses from the members of the mass audience regarding the aesthetic design of Kismet the robot prototype. The empirical results this paper reports supports the author's hypothesis that graphic design conventions, techniques, and strategies can facilitate interaction between the target mass audience (especially the global mass audience) and other professional participants in a participatory design process. However, further analysis of these results uncovers a need for a differentiation between static and dynamic communication artifacts. While Interactive Aesthetics works for static two-dimensional communication artifacts, an integration of a more dynamic interactivity is necessary in a participatory design process that involves a communication artifact like a three-dimensional robot prototype, which has the ability to display non-verbal communication-”fluid emotive facial expressions-”when it communicates with another human being in a given public space. Most communication frameworks assume that emotional expression should be understood in terms of the exchange of socially assigned static symbols. While written or spoken linguistic communication is indeed accurately portrayed as a series of physically arbitrary, static symbols, much emotional expression (such as paralinguistic intonation in speech, expressive facial dynamics, emphatic gesture, etc.) is better described as analog representation. That is, rather than encoding information in physically arbitrary, static symbols, analog representation embeds information in a physical dynamic which is structurally analogous to the information it represents. What is the implication for the participatory design process? Whether mere images on a screen (e.g. an avatar) or a full-scale socially intelligent robot (e.g. Kismet), the aesthetic design of a dynamic form requires simulations through analog parameters. Dynamic Interactive Aesthetics is a term introduced here to describe the facilitation of audience input through simulated analog parameters to achieve the aesthetic design of a dynamic communication artifact. By adopting Dynamic Interactive Aesthetics, I can elicit feedback from the target audience that becomes the basis for determining the 'form and function' of a dynamic design. Audience input regarding the design for a dynamic, affective prototype based on analog simulation is better able to respond to the audience's aesthetic preferences. The critical vernacular that creative design professionals use to modify and edit static symbols that represent information becomes simplified for the target audience through the use of conventional, user-friendly control devices that modify simulated analog parameters. As a result, the vernacular of applied design criticism that includes the application of varying aesthetic treatments to static symbols needs to be mathematically translated into digital signals with continuous intensities of measurable aesthetic properties. By allowing the target audience to directly modify these analog parameters (e.g. the ratio between simulated mouth curvature and a simulated happiness parameter) the target user(s) can generate a customer-specific (or culture-specific) affective interface. By offering users a series of such expressive parameters, professional designers can collaborate with a target audience to create an affective synthetic interface that responds to a wide variety of aesthetic and functional needs.