Sarah Minney in residence at C&CRS 2002
An extract from Sarah's description of her residency during the Summer of 2002 (taken from: Candy, L. and Edmonds, E., The COSTART Exhibition at C&C2002. in Creativity & Cognition 2002. Loughborough, UK, 2002. LUSAD Publications, p11-22.)
When I first learnt of the possibility of doing a residency in the C&CRS studios, I was most interested in devising something that challenged the way in which people commonly responded to computers. This stemmed from my fascination with the way artificial intelligence research attempts to copy real life by studying physiological aspects of humans and the material world. With neural networks for example, there is an attempt to create a program that is as close to real life as is possible. I hope to offer an alternative to this approach. I began from the premise that most computer user frustration stems from a high expectation of the application being used. The faster and the more utilitarian computers become, the more our expectations of their speed and ability increase. Making computers more intuitive and consistent, whilst increasing usability, helps to feed this high expectation of computer usefulness and the ensuing frustration as the computer inevitably disappoints the user. Rather than basing my project on the material world, I turned instead to human relationships. I believe that the essence of friendship is a sense of kinship, love and compassion. In defining a personal relationship, compassion is the key, as without it we would be unable to forgive our friends their faults and therefore the friendship would no longer exist. From this, I set about devising a way in which a computer program could be written that instilled a sense of compassion in the user and therefore allowed forgiveness and a lowering of expectations. Enter Unity: the Hand Held Best Friend.
When I first learnt of the possibility of doing a residency in the C&CRS studios, I was most interested in devising something that challenged the way in which people commonly responded to computers. This stemmed from my fascination with the way artificial intelligence research attempts to copy real life by studying physiological aspects of humans and the material world. With neural networks for example, there is an attempt to create a program that is as close to real life as is possible. I hope to offer an alternative to this approach. I began from the premise that most computer user frustration stems from a high expectation of the application being used. The faster and the more utilitarian computers become, the more our expectations of their speed and ability increase. Making computers more intuitive and consistent, whilst increasing usability, helps to feed this high expectation of computer usefulness and the ensuing frustration as the computer inevitably disappoints the user. Rather than basing my project on the material world, I turned instead to human relationships. I believe that the essence of friendship is a sense of kinship, love and compassion. In defining a personal relationship, compassion is the key, as without it we would be unable to forgive our friends their faults and therefore the friendship would no longer exist. From this, I set about devising a way in which a computer program could be written that instilled a sense of compassion in the user and therefore allowed forgiveness and a lowering of expectations. Enter Unity: the Hand Held Best Friend.
