By looking at how we coerce technologies to suit our ideals and beliefs, how we manipulate data, and how we design objects, we may be inspired to create systems, services, and objects where we create ambiguity and mystery -- and ultimately, preserve our humanity.
Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, 2011
The availability of mobile and distributed networked devices dramatically increased over the past decade in both private and business environments. They are covering a wide spectrum from passive RFID tags up to personal computer like “all-in-one” devices. This current infrastructure of “digital things” is already connecting the internet to a certain scale, facilitating communication and access to information, including business as well as technology related challenges to realise business benefits (Sundmaeker, 2011). There are roughly 1.5 billion Internet-enabled PCs and over 1 billion Internet-enabled cell phones. The present "Internet of PCs" will move towards an "Internet of Things" in which 50 to 100 billion devices will be connected to the Internet by 2020. Some projections indicate that in the same year, the number of mobile machine sessions will be 30 times higher than the number of mobile person sessions. If we consider not only machine-to-machine communications but communications among all kinds of objects, then the potential number of objects to be connected to the Internet arises to 100,000 billion (Rafi Haladjian, 2009). Several countries have recognised the importance of the Internet of Things for future economic growth and sustainability. The IoT is expected to include everything from simple RFID tags and sensors of everyday objects like cars and fridges to intelligent devices with high computing power. One of the main challenges of the IoT is to handle the complexity of the huge number of heterogeneous devices interacting in these environments, which cannot be envisioned by the developers of these devices (Neeli R. Prasad, 2011).
Intelligent objects will have a range of behaviours they will be able to enact, through interaction with other objects, command-control systems, and people. Even if this range of behaviours is limited an ensemble of intelligent objects can exhibit complex emergent behaviours.
By displacing informations from its traditional urban contexts, new-media technology is functioning as an equalizer of places. Access to information is closing the knowledge gap which once distinguished the metropolis from the small town or rural farm. If earlier technologies made the landscape more accessible to the city, the tel-computer is in effect making the city more accessible to the landscape (Campanella, 2002).
How the world of everyday objects and places will be augmented with information processing (while at the same time exploiting the affordances of real objects in the real world)?
In the real world interface is as essential as infrastructure and architecture when it comes to connectivity with people and things. We are entering a land where the environment has become the interface. We must learn anew how to make sense. Making sense is the ability to read data as data and not noise (Rob van Kranenburg, 2008).
We live in a world now where data has become a new form of currency, and the word "communication" has become absorbed into a technologized and socially mediated stage (Mortimer, 2012). In ‘performance societies’ human decision-making blends into the power of algorithms, the Algocracy. Individuals, groups and societies delegate the establishment of links between things to algorithms that are not of their own making. The IoT is the new chimera of an automated sociality (Ippolita, 2013).
The ability to read data as data is what makes new beginnings.
These societies have been made possible by the constant improvement of measurement systems and the massive dissemination of real-time data integrated into a comprehensive system of information management.
In this data-driven era, the ability to make timely decisions based on data is crucial. Visualization will help solve challenges of big data—will become an increasingly effective tool for presenting information and driving complex analyses (Arroyo, 2011). In Separating and containing people and things in Mongolia, Rebecca Empson writes: "[...] the doing involved in making things visible or invisible makes relations. In this sense 'vision' becomes the tool by which relations are created."
Goal: turning information into knowledge through the design and production of a taxonomy that provides a systematic classification of visualization techniques of data.
Visualizing data is just like any other type of communication: success is defined by your audience’s ability to pick up on, and be excited about, your insight (Fry, 2008). The current generation of computer hardware and software gives access to a broadened range of design options: three-dimensionality, time (animation), interactivity, and sound. Sound - used alone or in tandem with two-or three-dimensional abstract space, the visual variables, time, and interactivity - provides a means of expanding the representational repertoire of visualization (Krygier, 1994).
The benefits of using the auditory system as a primary interface for data transmission are derived from its complexity, power, and flexibility. Humans are equipped with a complex and powerful listening system (while the field of vision is limited to approximately 120 degrees in front of the viewer, listeners can detect sounding objects 360 degrees around the head). The act of identifying sound sources, spoken words, and melodies, even under noisy conditions, is a supreme pattern recognition task that most modern computers are incapable of reproducing (Hermann, 2011). We can perceive and identify “auditory objects” within a particular auditory scene, interpret sounds using multiple layers of understanding, learn and improve discrimination of auditory stimuli. Nonetheless, the use of spatial information in auditory display is increasing. Advances in technology and our knowledge of how the auditory system processes spatial information has led to the emergence of virtual environments that realistically recreate 3-dimensional spatial auditory perception (Neuhoff, 2011).
Sonification sets a clear focus on the use of sound to convey information, something which has been quite neglected in the brief history of computer interfaces. Sound of Things (as sonification) is a rendering of data to sound with the purpose of allowing insight into the data and knowledge generation about the system from which the data is gathered.
* * Space tuning (video) (Pe, Musetta, Bovio, 2014)
Function of auditory displays:
1. alarms, alerts, and warnings (refer to sounds used to indicate that something has occurred, or that are intended to convey the occurrence of a constrained class of events);
2. status, process, and monitoring messages (sound takes advantage of the listener’s ability to detect small changes in auditory events or the user’s need to have their eyes free for other tasks);
3. data exploration (encode and convey information about an entire data set or relevant aspects of the data set);
4. art, entertainment, sports, and leisure.
Auditory display based model:
1. Realistic sound
This assumes the content and meaning of the language used in a narration is unproblematical, which is, of course, an oversimplification. The use of vocal narration in visualization displays opens up interesting possibilities for investigating the relations between spoken and visual languages.
2. Earcon or mimetic sound
Nonverbal audio messages
used in the user-computer interface to provide information to the user about
some object, operation, or interaction.
3. Abstract sound
Sound of things is the way for visualizing data from "digital things":
SoT explores the compromises between quantifying and qualifying data that can aid listeners’ interpretation of sounds. The different kinds of accuracies that may be applied in the creation of sonic representations.
These accuracies are often connected with listeners’ perceptions of where they are located within this landscape: that skillful use of sonification and mapping techniques can deepen and intensify listeners’ experiences of a local landscape.
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Author(s): Alessandro Musetta, Stefano Bovio