Monday, February 12, 2007
research agenda + proposal - park, scheel, shelley
- Our focus will be input. We will use voice recognition software to generate output that demonstrates personal adaptability.
- We will take advantage of the multilingual environment of Columbia University to make our system respond in culturally relevant ways to different languages. One possibility is to “teach” our system the same word in different languages.
- Several possible outputs may reflect specific cultures through space, color, or customs, but the output will have a kinetic component.
- A variance of the size of perceived “personal space”
- Color symbolism (what color is mourning?)
- Furniture heights and styles respond to cultural rituals
- Bodily perceptions and acceptable levels of exposure
- The output that most interests us at this point is the deformation of a reflective surface that acts as a customizable mirror and responds to different languages according to the ideal body image of specific cultures.
- Our initial research will focus both on the possibility of “teaching” the sensor language recognition and specifics about cultural perceptions of space and beauty. Also, we need to research feasible methods of deforming a reflective surface with flexinol wires.
Research Proposal
We propose to take advantage of the personal adaptability of voice recognition software to create linguistically responsive systems. Different cultures have different perceptions of space and the meaning of space. We think this is significant because much of kinetic architecture is not responsive to individuals on a personal level. Most of the examples we have studied only show responsiveness to the physical presence of people and don’t address any inherent qualities of different people. In addition, voice recognition sensors are relatively inexpensive and easily integrated with our existing systems. Finally, our proposal allows us to study kinetic systems that not only respond to individual users, but also bring awareness to different cultural values, resulting in a project that transcends the novelty of kinetic systems by engaging intangible ideals of space and beauty.
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