Lorelei Kelly

Still busy making things! Haven't really been able to work on my knitting, but maybe I will be able to get in some time with the grumpasaurus this weekend...

Writing cover letters is sort of a weird experience for me. On the one hand, I am deeply uncomfortable with bragging about myself the way they require, and also more than a little neurotic. I spend more time and energy than I ought to worrying that some tiny mistake that I have missed in my painstaking revisions will spell doom for my entire application...

Alas, I have neglected my blog. To be honest for a few days there I was sort of in denial about my life and beyond the bare essentials of schoolwork all I did was cook and make houses in The Sims 3. And listen to audiobooks while I made houses in The Sims. But then I ordered an Arduino starter kit, bought some new yarn, got myself back into gear and have been busy making things. Here is a list of them...

So, Mattel is having an internet campaign for people to vote for Barbie's next career, and one of the choices is "computer engineer." Being in a computing field, and knowing many people concerned with the participation of women in computing, I've heard a lot about. And I'm seeing two reactions: enthusiastically encouraging people to vote for computer engineer, and sarcasm about Barbie convincing girls to become computer engineers...

I read the Keepon and Shadowplay articles first, and then I read the article about Robovie. And I found, while reading that third article, that I kept thinking about a quote from one of my classmates, talking about his experience interning at the interaction design consulting firm Adaptive Path. Many companies have big plans for all the kinds of things they want their software to do, but not the time or resources to successfully do them for the first version they release. The metaphor they use at Adaptive Path is that of making a cake: the company wants to make a whole cake, but they can't the first time around. So what most companies do is they make cake batter and give it to the users and say "we'll bake it for you later." But what they should be doing is trying to make cupcakes: identifying a smaller-scale version of that final goal that also offers a complete and useful experience. That metaphor really struck me as a great way to explain what a lot of companies get wrong in early versions of software, and I think it is applicable to these robots, too...

I was just about to report that my computer seems to have reached a stable point OS-wise, when my screen blinked a few times and I got a notification that my display driver had momentarily stopped working...

(this is a response to Chapter 2 of The Design of Future Things by Donald Norman)

I had all sorts of plans for interesting things to do and witty things to say, but mainly my weekend has been consumed by more computer issues. I decided it was time to try Windows 7, and preparing for installing a new OS and then dealing with the aftermath has been a laugh a minute. Plus I'm pretty sure my laptop's power cord is about to die. I'm certainly seeing the symptoms that preceded my last power cord's death, last April...

I've been so bad about posting lists! In my defense I have not had a real good week, including several untimely computer near-disasters. I love computers!!! Actually I'm pretty sure the best reason to go into HCI is because computers drive you crazy...

I was interested to see a concrete definition of embodiment as related to robots. I'm still thinking about what makes something a robot and not some other sort of computer. I have in my head, of course, an idea of a "typical" robot, but it's based on fictional portrayals of robots and not what actual machines have historically been called "robots." Embodiment seems to be an important part of it, but not the only part. And of course, embodiment means different things in different contexts. I'm familiar with talking about human embodiment from a psychological perspective, which is in many ways a very different idea than what people mean when they call robots "embodied." So I appreciate seeing a definition that is clear and that I can apply directly to specific devices, like the example of "smart houses" we talked about a little in the very first class. Maybe it's not so much that there are robots and non-robots, as there are devices with differing degrees of "robot-ness." And of course, as the rest of the article discusses in such detail, there isn't just one kind of robot, and maybe not even just one standard of "robot-ness." The social robots discussed in the article don't have very much in common with industrial robots....