In: A. Lugmayr & P. Golebiowski (2007) (eds.). Interactive TV: a shared experience – Adjunct Proceedings of EuroITV 2007. TICSP series #35 (pp. 37-39), Tampere International Center for Signal Processing, Tampere, Finland.
Ambient Culture: A Possible Future for Entertainment Computing Matthias Rauterberg Department Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
[email protected]
and Kluckhohn (1952) compiled a list of more than 156 different definitions for culture. One of the most popular definitions of culture in the field of anthropology is “a complex web of shifting patterns that link people in different locales and that link social formations of different scales”. Culture is the integration of human behaviour that includes attitudes, norms, values, beliefs, actions, communications and groups (ethnic, religious, social, etc.). Cultural computing is more than integrating cultural aspects into the interaction. It is about allowing the user to experience an interaction that is closely related to the core aspects of his/her culture. In a way that let him/her engage with an augmented reality using the values and attributes of his/her own culture. As such it is important to understand one's cultural determinants and how to render them during the interaction. In this paper we will focus on two cultural computing projects, one from the Eastern World (prevailing in Japan) and one from the Western world (prevailing in England). Over the last 3000 years the peoples of four distinct regions of the civilized world created the religious and philosophical traditions that have continued to nourish humanity into the present day: (1) Confucianism and Daoism in China; (2) Hinduism and Buddhism in India; (3) monotheism in middle east; and (4) philosophical rationalism in Greece. ‘Monotheism’ and ‘philosophical rationalism’ is the religious and cultural foundation of the occident. An important expansion of cultural theories can be discussed as falling into four focal areas (Keesing, 1974): (1) cultures as adaptive systems, (2) cultures as ideational systems, (3) cultures as socio-cultural systems, and (4) cultures as symbolic systems that are cumulative creations of mind. Conceiving culture as an ideational subsystem within a vastly complex system, biological, economical, social and symbolic, and grounding our abstract models and theories in the creation and usage of artefacts should make it possible to deepen the understanding of ourselves and our future. Whether the concept of culture has to be refined, radically reinterpreted, or progressively extinguished will probably not matter in the long run, unless we can not find a way to ask the right strategic questions, identifying connections that would otherwise be unseen, and therefore to enable us finding the best answers for our cultural development. Therefore ambient culture focuses nowadays on the development of open
Abstract We provide an overview over cultural differences between East and West, as starting point for the development of entertainment technology towards cultural transformation. We argue for the importance of future entertainment technology to contribute to cultural transformation processes in the large. We introduce and discuss the ZENetic Computer for the East and the ALICE project for the West. Our concept of Kansei Mediation is supposed to guide the development of theories and frameworks in the context of ‘ambient culture’. 1. Introduction Westerners and East Asians perceive the world, think about it and act in it in very different ways (Nisbett and Masuda, 2003; Hu and Bartneck, 2005). Westerners pay primarily attention to some focal object, analyzing its attributes and categorizing it in an effort to find out what determinate its behaviour. Determinates used mainly formal logic. Causal attributions tend to focus exclusively on the object and are therefore often mistaken. On the other side, East Asians pay primarily attention to a broad perceptual and conceptual field, noticing relationships and changes and grouping objects based on familiarities rather than categories. They relate causal attributions to the context instead of objects. Mainly social factors are directing the East Asians’ attention. They live in complex social networks with determined role relations. Attention to the context is more important than to objects for effective functioning. Westerners live independently in less constraining social worlds and attend to the object and their goals with respect to it. Physical ‘affordances’ of the environment can also influence perception but is assumed less important. The built environments of the East are more complex and contain more objects than do those of the West. In addition, artistic products of the East emphasize the field and deemphasize objects. In contrast, Western art renders less of the field and emphasizes individual objects and people (Nisbett and Masuda, 2003). 2. What is Culture? The word ‘culture’ has been defined and used in many ways throughout different contexts. Kroeber
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Western culture, the main value dealt with is enlightenment, but in different ways. Utilizing on modern technology Nakatsu, Rauterberg and Salem (2006) try to give a new direction in form of ‘Kansei Mediation’ to enable societies transforming towards enlightenment (see also Rauterberg, 2004). Salem and Rauterberg (2005) discuss the relationship of cultural computing and entertainment.
systems that understand and support the rituals of our living and adapt themselves to people through time and space (Marzano, 2006). 3. What is Kansei Mediation? Naktasu, Rauterberg and Salem (2006) described a form of communication that could be used for lifelong learning as contribution to cultural computing. We called it Kansei Mediation. It is a multimedia communication concept that can cope with nonverbal, emotional and Kansei information. We introduced the distinction between the concepts of Kansei Communication and Kansei Media. We then developed a theory of communication (i.e. Kansei Mediation) as a combination of both. Based on recent results from brain research the proposed concept of Kansei Mediation was developed and discussed. The biased preference towards consciousness in established communication theories was critically reviewed and the relationship to pre- and unconscious brain processes explored. There are two tenets of the Kansei Mediation communication theory: (1) communication based on connected unconsciousness, and (2) Satori as the ultimate form of experience. Salem, Rauterberg and Nakatsu (2006) presented an extension of Kansei mediated communication in the field of entertainment. They proposed to do so by implementing Cultural Computing concept and enriching it with Kansei Mediated Interaction. They related their work to the Western and to the Eastern world. Thus they used cultural examples from England, France, Japan and China. Finally, they proposed as a new direction for ambient culture, cultural computing with its related paradigm they called Kansei Mediated Interaction. Finally they proposed Kansei Mediated Entertainment as a direction merging of Kansei and entertainment. From a users’ perspective entertainment is based on enjoyment in using these products or services. How and which cultural differences between eastern and western cultures are influencing enjoyment and the design of entertainment technology is described in Rauterberg (2004). In particular the underlying religious structures were discussed and compared. We have investigated illustrative stories that are well known, accessible, classical in their culture and relevant from the point of view of cultural computing. We primarily looked for narratives that would be helpful in the understanding of the essential aspects of both Japanese and English cultures. To this effect, we have selected the story of ‘ZEN Buddhism’ attributed to a Boddidharma (circa 500 AC), and ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ by Lewis Carroll (1865). Both are examples either to help understand the underlying cultural value (i.e., Zen) or question it (i.e., Alice). For the Eastern and
4. Ambient Culture and Kansei Mediation Nakatsu, Rauterberg and Vorderer (2005) introduced a new framework for entertainment. Based on already existing models and concepts the different links and relationships between enjoyment, flow, presence, and different forms of experiences are shown and their contributions to the new framework reviewed. To address the more fundamental and theoretical issues regarding entertainment, we have to utilize existing theories in information processing, enjoyment (Rauterberg, 2004) and flow theory. Some already possible and probably important conclusions for the design of new entertainment system are drawn. Hu and Bartneck (2005) conducted a cross cultural study to test the influences of different cultural backgrounds on the user’s experience of presence in interacting with a distributed interactive movie. In addition they investigated in the effects of embodied interaction on presence. The influence of culture background could be confirmed: Chinese participants perceived more presence than Dutch participants in all conditions. The results also show that interaction methods (direct touch against remote control) had no influence, while embodiment (robot against screen agent) had mixed effects on presence. Tosa and Matsuoka (2006) presented ZENetic Computer as a means of cultural translation using scientific methods to represent essential aspects of Japanese culture. Using images (i.e., derived from Buddishm and other Asian concepts, e.g. sansui paintings, poetry and kimonos) to establish a style of communication developed by Zen schools over hundreds of years into an exotic interactive installation that users can explore. Throughout this experience the user is constantly challenged to confirm his or her self-awareness for purposes of the story (Tosa et al., 2005). Based on a short overview over the different paradigms for human computer interaction I introduced and discussed the most recent paradigm of cultural computing (Rauterberg, 2006a). Cultural computing addresses underlying and almost unconscious cultural determinants that have since ancient times a strong influence on our way of thinking, feeling and worldview in general. Different cultures worldwide will have different approaches to address their par-
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ticular cultural determinants. In the East, the project ZENetic Computer is a first and very promising approach for cultural computing addressing Eastern cultural determinants. In the West, we propose an interactive experience based on the narrative ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ (Carroll, 1865) to address the main characteristic of the Western culture: analytical reasoning based on formal logic. The effects on the user’s self conception might be measurable via the mandala introduced as cultural archetypes by C.G. Jung. Kooijmans and Rauterberg (2006) explored an application for a novel direction in human computer interaction named ‘cultural computing’ (Rauterberg, 2006b, 2006c) which aims to provide a new medium for cultural translation. The main objective of this ALICE project is to create an interactive experience that encourages people to reflect on their self-concept. In Western culture the selfconcept is generally based on conscious perception of the self. The story ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ (Carroll, 1865) survived for over centuries, and therefore seems to be a promising narrative to address this issue. The user in the role of Alice will go through the interactive experience and meets a Caterpillar, who questions the participant’s whereabouts of his/her self-concept. To determine the effect of this experience, we discuss a method that measures changes in a person’s implicit selfconcept for we predict that the experience will have an unconscious effect towards individual metamorphosis. The ‘implicit association test’ (IAT) seems to be a promising measure for unconscious transformation processes.
ICEC'06 (pp. 5-8). Microsoft Research Ltd, Cambridge, UK. Kroeber, AL. & Kluckhohn, C. (1952). Culture: A critical review of concepts and definitions. Peabody Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Marzano, S. (2006.). Ambient culture. In: E. Aarts & J. Encarnação (Eds.) True visions- the emergence of ambient intelligence (pp. 35-52). Springer. Nakatsu, R.; Rauterberg, M. & Salem, B. (2006). Forms and theories of communication: From multimedia to Kansei mediation. Multimedia Systems, vol. 11(3), pp. 304-312. Nakatsu, R.; Rauterberg, M. & Vorderer, P. (2005). A new framework for entertainment computing: from passive to active experience. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 3711, pp. 1 – 12. Nisbett, R.E. & Masuda, T. (2003). Culture and point of view. PNAS, vol. 100(19), pp. 1116311170. Rauterberg, M. (2006a). From personal to cultural computing: how to assess a cultural experience. In: G. Kempter & P. von Hellberg (eds.) uDayIV -Information nutzbar machen (pp. 13-21). Lengerich: Pabst Science Publisher. Rauterberg, M. (2006b). How to assess the user’s experience in cultural computing. In: T. Bosenick, M. Hassenzahl, M. Müller-Prove, M. Peissner (Eds.): Usability Professionals 2006 (pp. 12-17). Fraunhofer Informationszentrum Raum und Bau. Rauterberg, M. (2006c). Usability in the future – explicit and implicit effects in cultural computing. In: AM. Heinecke & H. Paul (Eds.): Mensch & Computer 2006: Mensch und Computer im StrukturWandel (pp. 29-36). München, Oldenbourg Verlag.
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