Experiments in Communication

For the first Networked Objects assignment we had to choose a thing, an action, and a response from a list and improvise. I choose "caress", "cup" and "color" and made a cup that changes color when caressed.
The circuit is really simple. There are two photo cells on the surface of the cup, each of which is connected to one of the G and B pins of an RGB LED. As you cover each of the photocells with your fingers, the color of the LED changes from turquoise to a bluer or a greener tint. It also dims if you cover both of the photocells at once.

Here is a video of the cup in action (double-click to play):

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I was assigned to make an object that expresses a principle of Cognitive Science. I thought of the basic principles of cognitive science (as I remember them at least): modularity, information encapsulation and I am sure others I couldn't remember off hand without my notes for class. I thought these were a bit too abstract to work with. I then thought of inattentional blindness, one of the most fascinating things I learned in my cog sci classes. Basically we often don't see what is in front of our eyes, if for whatever reason we are not paying enough attention. I couldn't really think of an obvious way to illustrate this, so I moved on to the linguistics, the subject I took most of my classes in.

Modularity and Informational Encapsulation reveals itself in Linguistics: Syntax and Semantics are two separate, distinct modules in the brain, located in different areas of the brain and operating somewhat independently of each other. Depending on which area of the brain is damaged, there are stroke patients with different linguistic problems: Wernicke's aphasia patients speak very fluently, but most of what they say is nonsense, while Broca's aphasia patients speak extremely slowly, with a lot of effort, using mostly verbs and nouns, and almost no "linking words" (to, and, if, etc -- words with not much semantic content).

Noam Chomsky coined a famous sentence to illustrate the disconnect between syntax and semantics: "colorless green ideas sleep furiously." I used this sentence as a template for a sentence structure that will always yield a syntactically correct sentence. I made a template out of styrofoam with 5 spaces (adjective, adjective, noun, verb, adverb). I created many different pieces with words that can be used to fill out the template -- each part of speech has a specific size (and the sizes of the spaces in the template correspond to the size of the part of speech that should be used in the particular space). Randomly chosen words form sentences where syntax and semantics are independent of each other (the syntax is correct, but the meaning might not be).

As people in class were presenting their projects, I kept thinking that their project could also satisfy the requirements of my own assignment, because cognitive science is all about studying human behavior and systematically describing the principles that govern it. For example, Alex's project with the lights reveals how we tend to perceive causal relationships (and/or animacy) even when the stimulus is just a blinking light.

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For my sister's wedding I made little LED pins for the bartenders and waitresses to wear, to make their white outfits little more interesting. I made flowers for the waitresses, and pins with my sister and her husband's initials for the bartenders. My sister had chosen green as the color for the wedding, so I used green LEDs, and white tulle for the flowers, and white ribbon for the pins. I used needlepoint canvas as a flexible surface on which to attach and arrange the LEDs, and I used white ribbon to hide the canvas.

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