10:00 - 12:30 Open Frameworks Expo
12:30 - 13:00 Lunch
13:00 - 17:00 Creative Science
What if we were the founding fathers of a new institute for Creative Science at an imaginary university. The university has strong a reputation in the area of science (physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology and life sciences), a med school, economics, social science & psychology, computer science & AI and philosophy; less so in the arts themselves. The new institute is going to use creative research and nmnt approaches to in cooperation with or inspired by these areas of research.
We are at an offsite and we are going to use the afternoon to brainstorm new research themes and potential project proposals for our institute. We will do this through a couple of rounds.
· Round 1: Orientate
o We will self-organize into groups that will focus on a high level research area
o To kick start the process we have listed some ideas below and we will have ‘tables’ that represent a certain research area
o Visit some of the tables that match your interests and see if this is a group you want to work further with; we are not stuck with the particular number or types of tables or research areas, new groups can form
o To qualify as creative science, the goal needs to be to contribute to research in terms of new theory, answers or questions, using nmnt or creative research concepts, approaches and end results –art/nmnt is a means not an end
· Round 2: Generate
o Within each research group you will come up with one or more research themes, plus a number of projects that would fit the theme.
o Research themes should be focused enough to not be generic but open ended enough so that you could fit in future projects into this as well
o Research themes and project proposals need to be forward looking, ambitious and novel, but also grounded in related work (literature on the problem domain, perhaps similar but different prior work), and have a relationship to the other research at the university
o The exact approach doesn’t necessarily need to be worked out into minute detail, you can also suggest research questions that the projects need to answer
o Create a sub page for your research group listing themes and projects
o Decide who can best pitch the theme and proposals. If you want you can include a so called domain expert from outside the institute in the presentation
o If you are lacking some inspiration, have a look at institutes such as the MIT Media Lab, the Leiden University science departments, Creators and Projects, some of the quoted books etc
· Round 3: Test
o Each group presents their research theme(s) and project proposals
o We will vote (using the whiteboard) on the top proposed projects and themes (cast your top n votes)
o We will update the web pages with the number of votes
Inspirational Examples:
· Physics
o Tangible theoretical physics. The issue with theoretical physics is that is hard to visualize, take string theory, the uncertainty principle, quantum states or entanglement for example. What would be ways to visualize/sensify theoretical physics? How can we ensure it is interactive, so includes (re)action not just perception? And in what ways could this not just be an educational tool to explain theoretical physics to the general public, but actually act as a discovery tool to lead to new insights for physicists.
· Computer Science & AI
o Gaming as universal problem solving. In computer science certain problems may be characterized as problems belonging to a particular category (traveling salesman problem, multi objective optimization problem, etc). Would it be possible to use audience participation through gaming as a universal problem solver by using these abstract problems as an interlingua? Play the equivalent of angry birds but solve completely different problems by doing this? And apart from solving these problems, can we mine the heuristics that gamers would use to solve these problems?
· Economics and Psychology
o Behavioral economics studies how people and organizations make choices and decisions. Classical economics typically assumes that people are rational agents. Under the influence of developments in cognitive science this view changed. Herbert Simon introduced the concept of bounded rationality, arguing that people go for choices that they expect will deliver good enough, satisfactory outcomes. Tversky and Kahneman identified a number of heuristics (rules of thumb) that people use to make decisions, and that these heuristics lead to biases. A recent book by Dan Ariely, predictably irrational, explores this concept further, and argues that human decision making is often irrational, but predictably once the heuristics are understood. Persuasion design also exploits these heuristics. However even though heuristics can lead to biases, these are not ‘stupid’ rules as they have certain evolutionary fitness. Would it be possible to design interactive experiments that emphasize when these heuristics actually have value as opposed to introducing biases?
· Biology
o A recent paper by Lamers and van Eck (see http://evostar.dei.uc.pt/2012/programme-2/evoapplications/) provides an overview of games between humans and animals and look at the benefits for the game designer, human player and animal. There are certainly benefits for the animals in certain cases, which poses the question whether it would make sense to introduce human to animal games on a grand scale, for example between say pigs and cows in agriculture industry, or even better, between animals and animals to improve animal welfare and quality of life in agriculture, which should be evaluated through thorough biological studies.