Week 18
The Media Equation, Helen's work on love, keeping habits of people who aren't around anymore, Stig's graphic design practice, Jefferson Han and some Google Trends deep dive.
It’s been an eventful week. It is Sunday night as I write this, in a mad chase to not be late again like the previous week.
I love how involved all of you have become in this newsletter. Last week, I posted late and I posted a half-assed article. I was pleasantly surprised at the number of people who reached out to me and pointed that out. I’ll always remember what Alisha (a friend of mine) said: “It was Sunday morning, I was on my bed and I was refreshing your newsletter page but nothing was coming. I kept wondering where the heck is Week 17?!”
A big thank you to all of you, who’ve been ardent readers of this weekly endeavour. What originally began as a platform for myself has now turned into a small little community. I’m elated to be connected to all of you, through this. I hope we all grow together.
Anyhoo, here is a summary of my learnings & experiences over the past week:
[Learnings] [Behaviour Science] The Media Equation
This week, as part of a chatbot project that I’ve been working on at TinkerLabs, I read a pretty interesting paper titled, “How Do You Want Your Chatbot? An Exploratory Wizard-of-Oz Study with Young, Urban Indians”, written by 5 researchers working at Microsoft India.
The paper involved the execution of a Wizard of Oz testing study to understand the most desirable identity for a chatbot that Microsoft was developing. The paper is quite interesting and has a bunch of real conversations that participants had with 3 different simulated chatbots.
In the paper, there was an expansion of a communication theory known as “The Media Equation” which I found quite interesting. The Media Equation claims that people tend to assign human characteristics to computers and other media, and treat them as real social actors. For example, a person would respond to a computer as if they’re responding to another person (by being polite, cooperative, attributing personality characteristics such as aggressiveness, humour, expertise, and even gender).
This got me thinking about the chatbot that we’ve been developing, over at TinkerLabs. Adolescents, because of the Media Equation, might not even realise that they’re chatting with a bot; especially if the bot is on a platform like WhatsApp. Moreover, if the creators of a chatbot make the bot feel like a human being, there are more chances of the bot being interpreted as a human and being subject to conversations that it isn’t equipped to handle.
The Media Equation also says that the tendency to attribute human characteristics to a computer is automatic, unavoidable and happens more often than people realise. Therefore, this attribution is out of any creator’s control. People do tend to assign human characteristics to a computer, no matter how they’re made.
It makes me wonder what it takes for something to be considered human, i.e separate from a machine. I find it amusing that you wouldn’t attribute human qualities to a calculator, but you’re more likely to do so for your laptop, and even more likely to do so for your voice assistant (Siri, Alexa and the likes).
[Interesting Talks] Why we love, why we cheat
This week, I wondered a lot about ‘love’. I thought there must be someone who studied the topic academically and after some scouring of the internet, I found one.
Helen Fisher is an American anthropologist and human behaviour researcher who, through her work, has become one of the leading experts on the biology of love & attraction. She’s given two TED talks (Why we love, why we cheat & The brain in love) that discuss her research on ‘love’. They’re both fascinating talks.
In the first one, Why we love, why we cheat, I found her elaboration on the factors of falling in love to be extremely insightful. While initial attraction is more instinctual, staying in love is a more thought-about decision. Factors such as world-views or even proximity could come into the picture, once the initial phase has worn off.
Very interestingly, I realised that during my time at the Science Gallery Bengaluru, I’d facilitated a discussion around love on the SGB’s Discord servers as part of an informal event. I had used a lot of Helen’s research to communicate the science behind falling in love and, for a long time after the event, I couldn’t recall her name.
Finally, I’ve found her work again. Anthropology is beginning to interest me quite a bit now.
[Personal Experiences] [Thoughts] How we keep habits of people who aren’t around in our lives anymore
This thought has been inside my way for quite a while now. I’ve also discussed this with one other person and finally, today, I took some time to write about it.
Think about some of the activities that you do, smaller habits that you don’t necessarily have a logical backing for. For example, I cut boiled eggs and prepare them in a way that my father used to, back when he was around in my life. I didn’t know why I used to do it until it hit me that it’s probably one of my ways of feeling like I’m connected to him.
Apparently, through my conversations with other people, I realised that this happens a lot. You naturally have a way of doing a certain thing which hasn’t exactly been passed down to you by someone in your life but you’ve somehow acquired it from them and it has stayed with you. You continue to do it without ever realising that it’s a point of connection for you & that other person, even if they aren’t in your lives anymore. The brain works funnily.
I once had a friend who loved water. That friend isn’t around in my life anymore. Somehow, I’m more drawn to water now than I was ever before.
The brain not only works funnily, but is so out of our control.
[Cool People & Projects] Stig Møller Hansen
I’ve followed Stig’s work for quite a while now.
Stig is a senior associate professor at the Danish School of Media and Journalism. He has a very interesting graphic design practice. He takes old graphic design pieces, say for example magazine covers, and then attempts to recreate them using code on Processing. He refers to the original pieces that he uses as a starting point with the term, Objects To Think With. I found this very interesting.
By doing this, he’s exercising both sides of the creative process. First, he analyses the original object by understanding the piece, breaking it down, and essentially, reverse engineering it’s creation process. Then, he has to creatively reimagine it in a different medium and, therefore, add a little bit more to the original piece because of the power / limitations of the new medium.
Another plus point, he can technically never run out of inspiration.
[Cool People] Jefferson Han
I came across Jefferson Han’s work while looking at the Surface Hub 2S, developed by his company, Perceptive Pixel (which is now bought by Microsoft). The Surface Hub 2S is essentially a really big computer with multi touch sensing; all in all a whiteboard that also has computational abilities.
Very interestingly, when the Surface Hub 2S was launched, I had worked on a very similar project called Thinker for my speculative design course in college.
Anyway, Jefferson Han is quite a visionary-type person. He was one of the main developers who created multi-touch sensing, something that is at the core of the Surface Hub 2S and many of the devices that we use today.
There’s also some very cool work on his no-longer-maintained NYU page.
[Disturbing Realisations] Google classifying pregnancy as an illness and anti-rape devices
For the past week, I’ve also been extracting data from Google in order to understand online search behaviour of people in Madhya Pradesh. In order to explain what bothered me with the data, let me give you a short explanation of how Google (or any other natural language processing software works).
Anything that allows open-ended user input (a chatbot, a search engine, etc) works on a concept called intent mapping. Basically you type in a statement and the algorithm tries to understand the ‘intent’ behind your search. One of the elements that is used here is called an entity.
An entity is a specific term that has been clubbed into a larger term in the backend. For example, your statement may read “How to make a nice burger” and my backend may have specified that burger means food and how to make means instructions. Now, the computer will look for information in the instructions umbrella and, more specifically, look for the instructions inside food. Entities are basically tags that you see on blogs. Assign a tag for it to be considered a part of a larger group, in order to make information retrieval more efficient.
What bothered me specifically on Google was how they classify pregnancy as a sickness. Sure, I understand the practical aspects of it where it is clubbed under a larger category of something concerning a person’s health has happened and some tips/diagnosis have to be given/done. But just to see it like that was quite disturbing.
In an attempt to also obtain information on related topics around sexual & reproductive health, I stumbled upon a thing called an “Anti Rape device”. Just to look at it, the name and the device, was such a downer. Can you imagine that a woman doctor (Sonnet Ehlers) came up with it because a victim said that she wished she’d have “teeth” down there?
After its launch, the device faced a lot of backlash and was also termed “medieval” due to its violent nature. Ehlers responded by saying: A medieval deed deserves a medieval consequence. The full story is here.
When I first saw the design of a device, which serves its intended purpose quite well, I wondered just how far we’ve reached. And no, I don’t mean this in a good way. What have we come to as a collective specie when women have to employ such means to keep men away? Why have things become so bad and so much, that we’ve been pushed to resort to the extremes?
Looking at this was so disturbing and the worst part is that the search wasn’t even intentional. Just by-products of my job, I guess, to be exposed to hardships like these and understand just how grave a particular problem might have become.
The worst part? I can do nothing with this knowledge. Yet.
I wish that something comes out of my life that helps alleviate human life, even if it’s just by a 0.1%. There needs to be movement in the right direction, not in the wrong one. We can’t fall more. Please, I pray that we don’t fall more.
It's amusing on how brain works. Its so true that brain works primarily on survival instinct. It'll do anything and everything to help the person exist and live. Another example that comes to my mind rn is how sometimes people suffering from depression experience loss of memory of the incident that may have started the domino effect. Thank you for writing consistently !