Vignettes exploring the dual capacities of software and medicine to heal and hurt. Food for thought, by Jonathan Harris

I just checked my email and was pleasantly surprised to find a link to the Modern Medicine vignettes, created by Jonathan Harris to explore and compare software and medicine. 


The following topics are included in this work:
Social Engineers 
Urges & Outcomes 
The Ethics of Code 
Healers & Dealers 
The Problem of Advertising 
A Staging Ground for the Future 
Medicine Men 
Crazy Times 
A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy


I especially like this quote:

"As engineers, we can ask ourselves some basic questions:  Will we feel accountable for the behavioral outcomes of the software we introduce to the world? Will we recognize our responsibility to our fellow human beings to build them decent, useful, powerful, and ethical tools? Will we make things that trick and seduce, or things that nourish and teach? Will we optimize for page views and profit, or for social impact and beauty?"

Jonathan Harris "makes projects that re-imagine how humans relate to technology and to each other".

I missed this one! Design and the Elastic Mind - the Interactive Data Visualization Exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, 2008 (Johnathan Harris and Sep Kamva)

The installation, "I want you to want me", is an exploration of the search for love and self in the world of online dating.  It was created by Johnathan Harris and Sep Kramvar, for the 2008 Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. The installation has several movements that focus on the following themes:  


Who I Am, What I Want, Snippets, Matchmaker, and Breakdowns.  The result is a moving  glimpse into what it is like to be human and looking for a relationship in the digital age:  




RELATED
"I Want You to Want Me" website
We Feel Fine interactive website, by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar

In March of 2008, I spent some time digging deep into We Feel Fine website. I uploaded screen shots of photos and text to Flickr, which are displayed in the slideshow below:



Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

The following is a link to a post I wrote in January of 2009, highlighting some of Jonathan Harris's work:
Digital Storytelling Platforms and Multiple Perspectives: A look at the work of Johnathan Harris - Food for Thought for Interactive Timeline Design

SOMEWHAT RELATED
I came across the link to this information from Anne Helmond's New Media Research blog, which addresses the fact all of the information we generate publicly on the web through our blogs, Facebook comments, and tweets, is readily available for data mining and storing. Here's the beginning of her post:

"A few hours ago the following tweet by @librarycongress appeared in my timeline  “Library acquires ENTIRE Twitter archive. ALL tweets. More info here http://go.usa.gov/ik4”"

All your tweets are belong to us

Digital Storytelling Platforms and Multiple Perspectives: A look at the work of Jonathan Harris - Food for Thought for Interactive Timeline Design

I'm in the process of creating an interactive timeline, and as I revisited my links and bookmarks, I came across a link to a video of Jonathan Harris discussing his ideas regarding digital storytelling, overlapping threads, and multiple perspectives.

Jonathan explores real-life stories and celebrates the interconnections between events, ideas, feelings, and people. Linear narrative and linear time lines do not do justice to the richness and complexities of human experience.

"Combining elements of computer science, anthropology, visual art and storytelling, Jonathan Harris designs systems to explore and explain the human world."

@ Yahoo! Video

"Jonathan Harris is redefining the idea of what it means to tell a story. Take a ride through an arctic whale hunt and plunge headfirst into the feelings Harris finds running rampant in cyberspace as he describes what he calls “storytelling platforms.” "

Below are links to two story-telling platforms described in the presentations. The Whale Hunt is organized so that the user can explore the story through a variety of perspectives and interfaces, and at different points in time.

The first screenshot shows how the user can select one of the "cast" members to see how the story unfolds from that person's point of view.

The Whale Hunt

"Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved...The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions..."

Jonathan Harris also presented at the December 2007 EG Conference. The video and related information can be found on the TED website.

Jonathan Harris: The art of collecting stories

If you have some time on your hands, explore Jonathan's Universe project:

This photo depicts the nine stages of the Universe environment.

"Universe is a system that supports the exploration of personal mythology, allowing each of us to find our own constellations, based on our own interests and curiosities. Everyone's path through Universe is different, just as everyone's path through life is different. Using the metaphor of an interactive night sky, Universe presents an immersive environment for navigating the world's contemporary mythology, as found online in global news and information from Daylife. Universe opens with a color-shifting aurora borealis, at the center of which is a moon, and through which thousands of stars slowly move. Each star has a specific counterpart in the physical world — a news story, a quote, an image, a person, a company, a team, a place — and moving the cursor across the star field causes different stars to connect, forming constellations. Any constellation can be selected, making it the center of the universe, and sending everything else into its orbit."

Universe was created using Processing, which is an open-source software that is used by people from all sorts of disciplines to create interesting interactive information visualizations and more. The data used in Universe is from Daylife. For more information about Daylife, visit the Daylife Labs.

Sidenote:
Jonathan Harris collaborated with Sep Kamvar on the We Feel Fine project. Sep Kamvar teaches classes like "Social Software" and "Computational Methods in Data Mining" at Stanford University. Sep is part of the Stanford Human Computer Interaction (HCI) Group.

Stanford's HCI group's weekly seminars highlight a variety of interesting speakers. Current and previous talks are available via Stanford OnLine. You can link to current presentations and videos from the Human Computer Interaction Seminar website. If you are curious, past presentations/abstracts can be accessed on-line alphabetically or by date, going as far back as 1990.

Dan Saffer, author of Designing Gestural Interfaces, presented "Tap is the New Click" on January 23rd, 2009 at Stanford.  You can access the video directly.

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