Colab Blog Mika

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Trickster - Exhibition Space

This is the final exhibition space for our trickster story. The space itself plays quite heavily into the story being told and in a way is the second part of the narrative started by the video.

Overall I am extremely happy with the final state of the exhibition space, I believe it communicates very well the main message it is supposed to and further inspection reveals a lot which can be speculated about or reflected upon by the audience.

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As I am currently searching for my first full time position and showing my digital portfolio to employers I felt that showing my trickster work, which is very far removed from the kind of work I usually do, may be unwise. 

As a compromise I have completed the webpage and taken two screenshots which I have then stitched together.

The screenshot contains a gallery of images of the exhibition space and an uploaded version of the video which I will be making public following exhibition. In addition there are a few paragraphs of text which broadly explain the project.

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Studio: Exhibition space

For studio we are attempting to make our exhibition space as it would be set up by the trickster in reality, a proud display by a child for their parents. We will have a large TV setup on a table with our poster beneath it and several toy chairs if possible lined up in front of it. On the chairs will be a number of stuffed animals and the two in the middle will have “Reserved for Mom” & “Reserved for Dad”. On top of this we will be attempting to surround our space with Police/caution tape to make the space as a whole look like a crime scene.

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Studio: Film Editing in Character

For this trickster short film I have had to spend a good amount of time editing but as a result of the trickster being the one to “produce” the work I have had to spend time defining each edit as either “in-character” or “out-of-character”.

The in character edits include things that the trickster has put in the film personally and represent a standard of editing that is not my best. These will mainly be bombastic colour changes and other large noticeable effects, the kind of thing that the trickster would add to the video because they believe it improves it.

The out of character edits are things such as the green screen work, these are things the trickster would not have to do during their production but we have to fill in. These are done to the best of our ability and made as difficult to notice as possible.

This is the first time I have had to do this kind of editing and I found it very interesting to have moments where I would work the effect to look the best I can only to then work it to be noticeable/uncomfortable. Overall however I think we’ve done a good job separating these and creating the flow of effects we aimed for.

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Studio: Defining our Trickster

Our Trickster plays a very large roll in our choices for production, being almost a director of sorts. This has meant we have needed to constantly think about how we are defining, thinking about and implementing choices pertaining to the trickster. In a few cases we have made changes to the trickster’s character followed by sweeping revisions of past editing choices or changes in choice of footage used. 

Nearing the end of our research stage we really nailed down what our trickster is, this included: goals. issues, strengths, perspectives and the things we were taking creative licence with. We have always wanted to have the trickster be a character whose physical actions were realistic but whose mental state/justifications are not sound. On top of this we decided that the manner in which the Trickster suffers from certain mental conditions will not be realistic in every case in order to improve the effectiveness of certain parts of the film and we made sure to research each condition to ensure this was a choice on our part.

Our trickster is physically a male between 25-30 who exhibits the personality/mental faculty of a young girl around 8-12 years old. As a result of this the trickster perceives their actions entirely differently than an outside perspective might and they have the design sense that we attribute to children with a definite lack of subtlety or self-reflection.

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Emerging Practices 7: Initial Synthesis

My initial plan for synthesis is to mainly discuss the purpose of having the robot in the first place. The initial thoughts I have for improvements are primarily geared towards replacing the robot entirely with some other kind of system entirely. I intend to breakdown the initial problem that is being solved by the incorporation of the robot in order to create a concept for an improvement.

Synthesis so far has been a difficult process as simply creating a more efficient version of the robot would be extremely difficult to realistically justify. My analysis of the robot & it’s advertising led me to believe that it exists to free up the time of specialists doing unspecialised labour in order to save value/time that the hospital could otherwise put to more efficient use. Knowing this I have started to focus on concepts that accomplish the same goal as the robocourier in a different way or concepts that enhance the functionality of the existing platform.  If my concept for a social robot could save more value/time for the hospital I would consider it a successful iteration. This goal could also lead to concepts that work in tandem with the original platform such as one that eliminates the need for manual loading/unloading which was one of the biggest contributors to wasted time in my evaluation experiments.

My plan for the report is to hopefully have concept sketches to support my description of my new concept robot.

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Studio: Editing Considerations & Stylised Choices

While producing this film we have tried to personify the trickster in our production techniques from costume, resources all the way to presentation for exhibition. However in some cases it is necessary or more convenient to not limit ourselves in order to create a more effective story. The main example I have had while working on editing was the green screen color keying & color correction. In the case of these they are not done by the trickster, in the context of the film all the green screened shots are “actually” done on-site, hence no need to implement these effects “badly” or not to the full extent of our ability as with costume & prop design.

Working in a way that is not to the full extent of my skills is significantly more difficult than I had originally believed. I do however believe that the end product will be more effective for having visible signs of lower effort/skilled work. We have dedicated a significant portion of time to working out exactly what should be completed to these different standards and if done in the way we envision the viewer should be unable to tell.

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Trickster studio: Character, Style  & Realism

The core concept of our film is that the trickster is producing a film. In order to understand what that means we have had to very strongly define our trickster character as they represent not only an actor in our story but an overall primary stakeholder. Our research looked into the storytelling of tricksters in general as well as the more focused academic researching into the traits that we choose for the trickster.

Generally the trickster archetype represents a character that does not conform, though whether this is in the form of a loose/changing gender identity, multiple personalities, the ability to defy universal rules, a physiology that defies the norm or general inability to fit in depends entirely on the context of the story in question. Our trickster exists in the real world and as such is “limited” by realistic rules. The nonconformity of our trickster exists in the story telling that the character performs, as they depict themselves as a small girl with the ability to seemingly overpower much larger people as well as complete tasks that would be otherwise extremely difficult or impossible for a child. This also leads into the fact that the trickster is misleading the audience about who they are and what has happened. From the trickster’s point of view this is a method for them to get more attention, which is a common and characteristic goal of those suffering from gender dysphoria or multiple personality disorder. The trickster suffers from gender dysphoria and multiple personality disorder believing he is a young girl and as such our entire production is built on the idea of attempting to think as a young girl would about creating a short film about something that happened to her. On top of this we have tried to limit ourselves to the resources available to a child producing a home film. The vast majority of stylistic choices have been as a result of the childish nature of the trickster and our installation and poster design feature this heavily.

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Emerging Practices 6: Evaluation Study

During the last week I completed a roleplay of a robotic courier versus a human courier using the AUT city campus as a location. In this experiment when roleplaying as a human I was able to essentially traverse any obstacles like stairs while as  a robot I was unable to do so while also staying on main thoroughfares. Additional considerations to aspects of the robot such as the amount of goods the robot could carry (approx 60kgs) and it’s inability to load it’s own cargo were taken into consideration in discussion.

On average the “robot” took around 2.24 per delivery while the human took 2.05 on average. This is typical of the patterns observed in the papers I looked at while researching the design of this evaluation and aligns with my initial prediction. 

In terms of time taken to travel between locations for deliveries the human was faster. This was a result of the shorter routes taken by the human but also in part due to the decreased loading and unloading time since the human was able to prepare as they approached the location. This set of data however has no compensation in the form of additional time per delivery to account for breaks taken by humans for any reason during a normal shift. 

In terms of efficiency in the form of items moved vs time taken the robot is significantly better as long as the robot is carrying more than 10% extra cargo when compared to the human courier with consideration to the fact that the robot is able to carry around 3 times the amount that a human courier can. 

This means that the robot will likely significantly outperform a human courier during extremely busy periods while only slightly underperforming during slow periods.

While performing the roleplay I found that the robot took a significantly increased time to load or unload cargo and relied upon the person to go faster during loading. The human being able to unload/sort cargo as well as learn the individuals that they deliver to in order to minimize the time spent loading cargo. In addition the larger amount of cargo the robot would handle would possibly necessitate the addition of an internal system that could sort the cargo out ahead of time.

In conclusion the idea of a robotic courier to replace a human one in an institution style building is a viable idea but would be less efficient unless said institution typically needs to move a large volume of items or items heavier than what would be viable for a human to carry. In a hospital environment demand for couriered goods typically fluctuates enough to allow the robot to be more efficient than it’s human counterpart as well as the building typically already being designed for acceptable wheeled access.

Notes:

All times are given in the format of (minutes).(seconds)  This also means that    1.00 = 0.60

The routes that each role took are approximately identical in terms of distance traveled and when they had to travel identical routes the human always came first by around 10-20 seconds.

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Emerging Practices 5: Evaluation  research/ planning

Over the past week I’ve looked at a number of papers surrounding practical evaluation of the effectiveness of autonomous mobile robots in order to understand how to evaluate aspects of the robocourier. Of two main papers I am using to model my evaluation the first is a study that constructed three full scale arenas to test the ability of a robot to perceive their environment and complete an objective by navigating through the maze [1]. This system developed in this study judges robots that participate objectively based on their completion of objects along with time taken. The second used a mathematical/simulation approach in which the researchers attempted to model every aspect of a robotic courier’s operation in order to compare them with human couriers in a hospital environment [2]. From these I am hoping to be able to create a role-played test that shows the difference between a human and robot performing the same courier role within a limited environment.

The initial design for my evaluation testing is to designate 8 points within aut and take “goods” between each while rolling a dice to determine which point to go to next and recording travel time and units of goods moved. I would firstly do the test for half an hour roleplay as a human meaning I can use stairs, unload myself but only carry half of the robot’s maximum load at any one time. After the human half hour I would repeat the test roleplaying as a robot meaning I have to have someone else load/unload my cargo, limited to elevators or accessible areas at all times but I’ll be able to carry twice as many “units” as compared to the human test. 

The test is designed to evaluate the efficiency of each party by comparing the number of units of goods moved vs time taken overall and per route to help determine which one is more efficient as well as which was more efficient per route. My expectation is that in terms of time taken per delivery the human will be better but overall will not be able to compete with the robot’s ability to carry twice as many goods at a time which will lead to overall more deliveries.

Notes:

I will be refining and then putting this test into action over the next week and will post a finished detailed plan as part of my next evaluation blog post.

Sources: [1] Jacoff, A., Messina, E., & Evans, J. (2002). Performance evaluation of autonomous mobile robots. Industrial Robot: An International Journal, 29(3), 259-267. http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1108/01439910210425568 (Direct Link to .pdf)

[2]Rossetti, M. D., & Selandari, F. (2001). Multi-objective analysis of hospital delivery systems. Computers & Industrial Engineering, 41(3), 309-333. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360835201000584 (Link to page with .pdf download)

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Studio: Final Concept summary

After more development we have finally settled on a coherent idea of what we are going to produce. Essentially we will be producing a video as if it has made by the trickster to explain their actions. As we produce the video we will be trying our best to break the rules in terms of what would usually produce a good quality video without creating something that does not convey our story as well as try our best to use methods that would be in the range of the trickster’s persona.

Our decision to change media repeatedly is a reflection of how the trickster views their actions and perceives the world. Their fractured personality with extreme cases of both age & gender dysphoria leads them to assume a personality that they believe exemplifies a young girl.

Since we have always seen in examples that the trickster fails in some way or causes themself problems we have decided that the trickster will try to convince the viewer of their view of a series of events. As the viewer watches however the issues in how they tell the story should allow the viewer to piece together the real story of what happened revealing the trickster as a deranged serial killer.

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Emerging Practices 4: Further Analysis and User Experience

The more I look at the robocourier from an analytical perspective the more I feel it does very little in the grand scheme of hospital operations. The robot fills a very small amount of the overall workload of hospital staff, filling an unskilled role but one that is critical to the correct operation of the facility. I feel the robot is designed to specifically take a task that would very often be pressured to be as efficient as possible and a target of cost-reduction exercises. In this way swisslog have done an excellent job finding a niche to fill by targeting the unskilled but necessary work currently being completed by staff that have valuable skills, the robocourier allows these to be used elsewhere allowing the hospital to get more value from their time. The hospital staff interacting with the robot will mainly be receiving goods from the robot, then filling it with something and sending it to it’s next stop.   The Robocourier is a generally effective solution when put into action and given the limited scope of the robot’s interactions and workload the most catastrophic accident situations such as falling over are highly unlikely to be as a result of the robot’s actions. 

My reading this week has led me to believe that the introduction of robotic workers has both a positive and negative effect on their human co-worker’s especially when it comes to motivation. The positive effects come as increased productivity in valuable or knowledge necessary areas, which comes at the cost of motivation. The main way for an employer to counter this would be to increase human resources spending.

Notes:

The Swisslog Robocourier’s Dimensions are approximately: length of 70 cm, width of 56 cm with a height of 132.1 cm ( 4 ft 4 in ). The unit itself weighs 95 kg and can carry a full load of 30 kg, each sliding shelf (up to 3) can hold up to 10 kg each. 

Over the last week I have looked into getting into contact with healthcare professionals working at Auckland hospital but have been unable to get into contact so far. Sources:

The Impact of Robotics on Employment and Motivation of Employees in the Service Sector, with Special Reference to Health Care  http://ac.els-cdn.com/S2093791114000511/1-s2.0-S2093791114000511-main.pdf?_tid=0cb69c9a-681f-11e6-abca-00000aab0f6c&acdnat=1471839504_3746c67c6358acfc6e865b5379137df3 A Framework for Rebuilding Trust in Social Automation Across Health-Care Domains http://hcs.sagepub.com/content/4/1/201.full.pdf+html

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Studio: Advancing our ideas

During our prototyping phase for set building over the last week we decided that our choice of medium would be inadequate due to being: cost-prohibitive, difficult and not contributing thematically or philosophically. As a direct result we created a number of different ideas with better connections to themes in our trickster story. Mainly we focused on hunger or consumption with use of food props while at the same time maintaining our work on subverting expectations. Overall this change is hopefully going to lead to a more accomplishable and interesting end product.

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Emerging Practices 3: Analysis of robot presentation.

The primary marketing of the Robocourier is a three minute long video released on Oct 24, 2014. The video is an advertisement which presents the problem “There will soon be a shortage of physicians & hospital staff” and asserts that the robocourier would free up physician time to allow them to work on more personalised health care for patients. Majority of the video simply shows the robot completing tasks or activating specific features as they are mentioned though these don’t really give a full view of the robot in action and there are often small cuts in the video which could possibly hide issues or weaknesses in the robot’s operation.

The video presents the main problem it’s trying to address by showing a small excerpt from a healthcare projection paper which shows a projection for a large shortage of healthcare professionals by 2025. This is somewhat disingenuous as the robocourier would would only ever make a minor impact in the kinds of issues the healthcare projection paper presents, such as dissatisfaction in the workforce or increase in care necessary for patients due to population aging. On top of this the video does not properly address the problem it presents with a solution and evidence to support it, the video only leads the viewer to believe it has done so.

The secondary materials for the Robocourier include a number of brochures and a case study that details a small amount of it’s operation at a children’s hospital. The brochures simply re-present the information given about the robocourier’s operation and specifications in written form with visual aids however there are several brochures which detail different models in the series and their more specific functions. These brochures do not detail any of the weaknesses or shortcomings of the system either.  The case study is a four page document which consists of several paragraphs quickly detailing the problems the hospital had and how the automated material delivery robot helped to solve them. Personally I feel that the videos released by the company that show the robocourier in operation are genuine, with the robot actually able to complete these tasks in a dynamic environment. However the initial presentation of the problem the robocourier is supposedly solving is somewhat misleading using a short show of statistics relating to health care workforce shortages to lead into its sales pitch about providing more personalised health care options. Notes: -All the statistics about health care are related to the U.S.A. where the company is based. -The primary video is a remade version of another one from 2010 about an earlier automated material delivery robot created by the same company. Sources: Swisslog Advertising video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDmzcN7teu0

Healthcare shortage paper mentioned during the robocourier video: https://assets1.csc.com/health_services/downloads/CSC_US_Healthcare_Workforce_Shortages_Caregivers.pdf Main Information page: http://www.swisslog.com/robocourier Case Study (.PDF Download): http://www.swisslog.com/-/media/Swisslog/Documents/HCS/RoboCourier_Autonomous_Mobile_Robots/Case_Studies/AMR_300_Childrens_Mercy_Hospital.pdf Primary Brochure (.PDF Download): http://www.swisslog.com/-/media/Swisslog/Documents/HCS/RoboCourier_Autonomous_Mobile_Robots/Brochures/AMR_100_AMR_Overview.pdf

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Emerging Practices 2: Initial selection of solution w/reasoning

I will be focusing on the Swisslog RoboCourier which is designed to transport goods between areas in environments like hospitals and laboratories without the use of a secondary positioning system such as GPS or navigation markers.  My initial criteria I used when searching for and selecting my solution was operation in a complex environment with a large amount of flexibility and autonomy. I was especially impressed that the area of operation for the RoboCourier is within Hospitals, which can be very active environments with large amounts of through traffic of different sizes with varying hall sizes in addition to having multiple floors. In addition the lack of need for a secondary navigation system such as GPS meant that this robot could function in a new environment with very little initial setup. I found the flexible and efficient mobility of the system to be an elegant solution worth analysing further.

The secondary characteristics of the RoboCourier such as it’s ability to have an RFID locked door attached for security or the ability to autonomously navigate elevators, indicate it was designed with the hospital requirements from the beginning. I felt if I chose a design which had a very specific requirements that it would be easier to compare as the number of similar designs would become smaller. This in turn would hopefully lead to more relevant comparisons for later analysis with the option to expand to broader examples if relevant.

My personal interest in the emergent practices paper/robotics stems mainly from the social and ethical concerns that arise when robots begin to replace tasks normally performed by humans, ranging from the vast economic issues to social deprivation problems. Though I am personally more interested in the effect a lack of face to face social interaction that would arise if the RoboCourier was implemented in a hospital, for instance would a situation arise where the lab technicians become overworked/stressed due to not having the downtime of transporting samples, etc. I don’t really believe that in particular would be an issue but it is often unexpected things that cause problems because they are unaccounted for. I believe that robotics in general at the moment has quite a few hidden pitfalls that haven’t been identified due to the lack of widespread implementation.

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Emerging Practices 1: Social/Service Robotics

Social/Service robot refers to a machine which can complete tasks with a degree of autonomy using either pre-programmed instructions or reacting to environmental factors using weak AI. However, digitally based autonomous programs do not fall under this definition, only those with a degree of physical presence can be classified as robots.

Official definitions for Social and Service robots are very loose at the moment as for the moment the concept of these kinds of robots are still being explored and the boundaries for classification being created.

The theme for this paper seems to be about understanding and exploring the applications of Social/Service robots. My hope is that I will be able to learn more about the future direction of social robotics as well as the commercially successful existing projects and what makes them successful. My general reading focused on the ethics, direction and definition of social/service robotics. I also touched upon the commercially successful roomba to help understand the extent to which it was a viable product. Forlizzi, J., & DiSalvo, C. (2006, March). Service robots in the domestic environment: a study of the roomba vacuum in the home. In Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCHI/SIGART conference on Human-robot interaction (pp. 258-265). ACM.

Duffy, B. R. (2006). Fundamental issues in social robotics. International Review of Information Ethics, 6(12), 2006.

International federation of robotics, IFR. (2016). Definition of Service Robots. Retrieved 23 July, 2016, from http://www.ifr.org/service-robots/

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Studio Blog 1: Trickster first steps

This semester I am going to be working with Mathias Bachmann, Thomas Louden and several out of AUT people to create a trickster inspired stop-motion video project. The main trickster aspects we’re aiming to hit include: subversion of expectations, absurdity, reflection and breaking out of pre-defined roles. 

Our initial ideas for the project involve making several short video stories each with a different story and inspiration. The current plan for a production schedule is to spend a good amount of time planning to completely work out what kinds of themes/story/characters/ideas each story would contain as well as how we would approach them both technically and philosophically.

To facilitate planning/pre-production we have created a trello page which should help us to organise the different aspects of video production into tasks each member can work on individually and then return what they have made to the central space.

In order to better our themes we have taken to generally reading about tricksters in hopes of finding usable inspirations and furthering our understanding of the themes we aim to incorporate.