Casey Reas (USA/IT)
Reactive Systems
Casey Reas started his lecture by presenting the context in which he developed his interaction design approach and skills. He talked extensively about work done by his peers at the MIT Media Laboratory's Aesthetics and Computing Group. Casey's goal as an interaction designer has been the exploration into the capabilities of the computer as media and the development of objects that are unique to the media.
From grid to system
Aesthetics and Computation Group
Not yet meaningful
Experimenting with reactive systems
Programming
Demo or die!
Casey Rea's lecture at UIAH, Helsinki 14.12.2001. Notes by Jokko Korhonen.
"Build the obvious first"
From grid to system
Casey Reas is an Associate Professor at the interaction design institute, IVREA. He was offered the position after graduating from the MIT Media Laboratory's Aesthetics and Computation Group lead by John Maeda.Casey's favorite interactive work and also the work which inspired him to study interaction design is John Maeda's Reactive Square, 1995. The work is a virtual book in which each page contains an interactive graphical element that changes form in reaction to user input. The behavior of each element is different as is the way the user can interact with it. For example, on one page the square "shivers" in tune with the user's voice or other continuous sound input. For Casey the Maeda's work is an exploration into the computer as a unique medium.
While Maeda first got a degree in computer science and then went on to develop his visual design skills, Casey Reas started out as a graphic designer. The shift from graphic design to interaction design has meant relinguishing control over the visual outcome of the work. The reactive systems developed by Casey stress this fundamental difference between the two design professions. While a graphic designer has complete control over the layout and elements of his work down to the millimeter, in the reactive systems Casey creates, control is divided between designer, user and the system itself. The transformation from graphic designer to interaction designer has meant for Casey a paradigm shift from grid (=page) to system (=environment).
Aesthetics & Computation Group - explorations in interactive systems
Casey studied three years at the MIT Media Laboratory's Aesthetic & Computation Group. The group originates from a Visual Language workshop organized by book designer Muriel Cooper. The original workshop explored the temporal aspects of book design in the computer environment. For Muriel Cooper book design was system design and her interest lay in translating book design systems for the computer.
Professor John Maeda followed in the Muriel Cooper's footstep and developed the workshop into the Aesthetics & Computation Group. The early work of the ACG concentrated on using the computer to develop new ways of presenting information and words. The work has subsequently expanded to explore the use of gesture and sound in human computer interaction.
David Small
The navigable information landscapes designed by David Small tackle the task of comparing and contrasting large data sets. David has created 3D environments for (or out of ) analyzing words in Shakespears' texts and changing viewpoints to financial information by navigating around and through the data.
Jared Shiffman
Jared has conducted research into what he calls the primitives in interaction. By giving behavior to computer based objects he has raised the question of who is in control? Human or Computer? Jared's objects behave as if they are subject to the laws of gravity. The objects are attracted to the cursor and become deformed when touched by it. Their color changes according to the pressure applied by the user with the cursor.
Golan's work treats the computer medium as a substance and surface and not just a grid with pixels. He has conducted experiments into how gesture can be personified and how audio can be visualized. The two interests are combined in the "instruments" Golan has developed.
Ben's work could be called organic information design. He has created information structures and visualizations that mimic nature. The objective of the work has been to give an impression of what large data sets are doing over time. The work is based on the inherent human ability to recognize visual patterns.
With a few exceptions like techniques used by David Small for creating viewpoints to financial information the experiments in presenting information and words conducted the Media Lab have not made into commercial software. The application of the techniques has been impeded by usability concerns and the emergence of the Internet. The landscapes are difficult to navigate which narrows the potential user base to expert users and increases the time required to learn how to use them. Moreover, the Internet where a spatial representation of data could be very practical, restricts the presentation of information: the page metaphor drives the development of Internet software.
Experimenting with reactive systems
The overall aim of Casey's work is to explore what new kinds of forms can exist on the computer alone. Casey's exploratory approach to interaction design has lead him to develop reactive systems which harness the computational power of the computer to create in real-time visual worlds that respond to user input. Often the main task of the user is to figure out how the system works; interaction is the content. The systems are often created with simple rules however, the emergent behavior appears complex. At times the systems begin to exhibit surprising emergent behavior or "secondary properties". Discovering such secondary properties drives Casey's research into reactive systems.
Casey bases the architecture and behavior of the systems he creates on algorithms developed in the fields of physics and artificial intelligence. The saturated geometric visual style of Casey's works is also a result of programming. The vector graphic visuals which characterize Casey's work are generated in real-time by the computer.
Since graduating from the ACG Casey begun to devote more time to physical interactive sculpture. Already at MIT Casey's works Plane Modulator and the group work Pod where inspired by ambient and kinetic sculpture. Currently at IVREA he conducts research into wearable computing. As with the screen based systems interacting with Casey's interactive sculptures is a challenge. For example, in one sculpture the user has to stay in rhythm with the kinetic object. The general principal is the same: the audience changes the work of art.
Casey believes that the interaction designer should be both the conceptualizer and the engineer. His philosophy for learning interaction design is "There are no short-cuts". The interaction designer must learn to program in order to be able to develop meaningful interactive systems. The system is most reactive and the user gets the most out of interaction when the behavior and appearance of the system are both generated in real-time from code. He realized this when his interest shifted from how things look to how they work. Before applying to the ACG Casey taught programming to himself.
Casey does not consider programming very intuitive. The process of programming is linear yet the outcome is often non-linear. Writing code excludes the temporal and multi-dimensional aspects of the screen. Furthermore, the context shifts during programming from the environment in which the code is written, to the environment in which the code is compiled and finally to the environment in which the program is used.
Casey hopes programming will be more intuitive in the future. He is actively working on opening up the possibilities of programming to visual designers. Casey was part of the ACG team that developed the Design By Numbers a visual programming environment. He has continued this work with Ben Fry and together they have created a more powerful and practical visual programming language called Proce55ing.
Programming has influenced the visual style of Casey's systems where the graphical elements are often primitives such as points, lines squares, circles and triangles. All the graphics in the systems are generated by the computer in real-time from the written code. In using primitives Casey saves time and effort. The more complex the element the more code you have to write, the simpler it is the less code is needed.
Casey calls his works "sketches". They are not refined in a high design sense nor are they complete in an engineering sense. There is nothing final about them according to him. This is the typical way of working at the ACG where the students create demos mainly for themselves and their peers. Once the program achieves what it was meant to do the student moves onto another project. Extensive debugging, documentation and visual refinements is not necessary given the objectives of the work. The 20/80 rule of software design is ingraned in the Media Lab way of working.
Casey begins challenging projects by first making an initial study. He visualizes and then creates prototypes of a core aspect or functionality in the system before he begins working on the system as a whole. He draws an analogy with his way of working and that of an architect who sketches and then builds models. Both rely on a feedback loop to refine and improve the design.
Chris Hales (UK)
Juha Huuskonen (FIN)
Turkka Keinonen (FIN)
Casey Reas (USA/IT)
Bill Gaver (UK)