Alongside her visit to Louvain-la-Neuve for the awarding of her doctor honoris causa on the theme of Responsible Data Science for Human Development, Molly Wright Steenson honors us by answering a few questions about the relationship between fields of architecture and artificial intelligence from a historical point of view.

Hand-based gestural interaction in augmented reality (AR) is an increasingly popular mechanism for spatial interactions. However, it presents many challenges. For example, most hand gesture interactions work well for interactions with virtual content and interfaces, but seldom work with physical devices and users’ environment. To explore this, and rather than inventing new paradigms for AR interactions, this paper revisits Zigelbaum, Kumpf, Vazquez, and Ishii’s 2008 project ‘Slurp’ [72] - a physical eyedropper to interact with digital content from IoT devices. We revive this historical work in a new modality of AR through a five step process: re-presecencing, design experimentation, scenario making, expansion through generative engagements with designers, and reflection. For the designers we engaged, looking back and designing with a restored prototype helped increased understanding of interactive strategies, intentions and rationales of original work. By revisiting Slurp, we also found many new potentials of its metaphorical interactions that could be applied in the context of emerging spatial computing platforms (e.g., smart home devices). In doing so, we discuss the value of mining past works in new domains and demonstrate a new way of thinking about designing interactions in emerging platforms.

Feral data visualization is a posture offering theories and practices for designing data visualizations for collaborative survival in the midst of ecological and social turmoil. Feral data visualization demands an embrace of situated, embodied, vegetized, and feral forms of visual pattern making that might allow us to take up the task of building livability in our surrounding ecologies and communities. We demonstrate how these imperatives might unfold in practice through Tsuga Convictio, a research through design project. Feral data visualization calls designers to action, outlining three paths for crafting data visualizations for the feminine, vegetal, and embodied.

In this work, we ask about the relevance of medieval automata in modern culture, and about what we can learn from imagined robots in the distant past about the future design of robots. Using an iterative and critical making process, we plan to reconstruct "The Alabaster Chamber", or "Chambre de Beautes", a room-sized robotic structure that was described in Le Roman de Troie in the beginning of the 12th century. By prototyping and tangibly introducing this robotic space among multi-disciplinary scholars in the fields of human-computer interaction, human-robot interaction and digital humanities, we set out to provoke discussion about alternative interactions and experiences with technology that we may or may not want to consider.

We present a novel gestural interaction strategy for multi-device interactions in augmented reality (AR), in which we leverage existing physical affordances of everyday products and spaces for intuitive interactions in AR. To explore this concept, we designed and prototyped three demo scenarios: pulling virtual sticky notes from a tablet, pulling a 3D model from a computer display, and 'slurping' color from the real-world environment to smart lights with a virtual eyedropper. By merging the boundary of digital and physical, utilizing metaphors in AR and embodying the abstract process, we demonstrate an interaction strategy that harnesses the physical affordances to assist digital interaction in AR with hand gestures.

A good data visualization opens up space for good conversations. That is, a data visualization is a starting point in a discussion of a shared understanding of the world, a way for us to know together. Consequently, our practices as data visualization designers-through collecting data and portraying them visually-create (or reinforce) ways we can understand the world, and thus move through it-it's ontological. Alarmingly, there is an emerging sense among new media artists and scholars that our practices of collecting and visualizing data can create rigid, harmful understandings of the world; ontologies of control. In particular, D'Ignazio and Klein argue in their book, Data Feminism, that our current practices of data science can lead to the “silencing, extraction, monetization, or invisibility” of people (or other living things) that the data represent [9]. In response to this violence, they assert that we need to make visible those who are creating the data, and those who are represented by the data. In other words, we need to “bring back the bodies.” This research interrogates how we might recenter the embodied, situated nature of data through the design of Tsuga Convictio, an experimental data collection process and a data visualization to support the conversations critical to our future-the reflective community conversations that help us belong to our human and ecological communities. By designing for these conversations, we discovered fluid, feminine, and embodied ways to create-and (re)enchant data visualizations. Along the way, we begin to answer some of the fundamental questions designers implicitly (and explicitly) answer when they make data visualizations. Most profoundly, we (re)imagine what visualizations can do-data visualizations are more than just tools of control; they are tools for imagination and transformation.

Definitions of interfaces engender the thinking about systems and intelligence of their moment. A term initially coined in 1884 to refer to the boundaries between fluids, by the early 1960s "interface" referred to ways to interact with a system, whether through organizations or devices. This chapter traces a history of intelligent interfaces, taking as a point of departure Douglas Engelbart's 1962 proposal for Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework and his 1968 legendary demonstration of human-computer interfaces, "A Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect," known colloquially as "The Mother of All Demos." It expands to consider several other factors for interfaces, including homeostasis, symbiosis, dialogue and learning, and embodiment in the work of figures such as W. Ross Ashby, J.C.R. Licklider, Warren Brodey and Nilo Lindgren, Nicholas Negroponte, the MIT Architecture Machine Group and Mark Weiser. Ultimately, we land at interfaces that we reside within and that provide no exit. What might that mean today for our notion of intelligence—and for our definition of interfaces?

What do architecture and AI have to do with each other? Quite a bit, it turns out, and it is a history that goes back to the origins of AI.

“What is the architecture part of information architecture?”1 This is a question that Dan Klyn's University of Michigan students in the School of Information frequently asked him. Although Klyn was trained as a library and information scientist, he found himself turning to architecture to answer that question. “Most folks understand that if you want to build something remarkable, yet inhabitable and usable, the person that you call is an architect,” Klyn said in a video, “Explaining Information Architecture.” His starting point, when he teaches gradu ate students, is Richard Saul Wurman (he's become a biographer of Wurman) and Christopher Alexander. Klyn also introduces information architects and user experience designers to his love of architecture—guiding them on walking tours during conferences and encouraging them to build bridges of their own from their digital worlds outward, to the built environment and the history of architecture—and, above all, to his interest in Wurman and Alexander, for the foundations and inspiration they set in place for the practice of information architecture.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, in cooperation with Stanford University's Department of Computer Science, presented the 2018 Spring Symposium Series, held March 26–28, 2018, on the campus of Stanford University. The seven symposia held were AI and Society: Ethics, Safety, and Trustworthiness in Intelligent Agents; Artificial Intelligence for the Internet of Everything; Beyond Machine Intelligence: Understanding Cognitive Bias and Humanity for Well‐Being AI; Data‐Efficient Reinforcement Learning; The Design of the User Experience for Artificial Intelligence (the UX of AI); Integrated Representation, Reasoning, Learning, and Execution for Goal‐Directed Autonomy; Learning, Inference, and Control of Multiagent Systems. This report, compiled from organizers of the symposia, summarizes the research of the symposia that took place.

“Technology is the answer, but what was the question?” asked British architect Cedric Price (1934–2003) in a lecture he gave by that title in London in January 1979—a question that is one of the best lenses for both understanding his work and framing its relevance. The iconoclastic architect argued that the point of architecture should not be to lock people down, but rather to open them up: “to ease up the choice, to free the opportunities of the individual user as to what they would do next,” he told his audience.1 How might architectural proj ects “generate new thoughts” in the minds of the people who interact with them?2 How might architecture and technology work together, not for clarity and usability, but for some dif fer ent purpose that the architect or technologist didn't predetermine? “I feel that the real definition of architecture is that which through a natu ral distortion of time, place, and interval creates beneficial social conditions that hitherto were considered impossible,” Price said.3 He concluded the lecture saying that “it's worth mentioning that with the advent of the micropro cessor and the silicon chip more and more people are going to be in the situation where they themselves, have to decide what to do. Society, economic circumstances, will make no demands on their time, but they'll live just as long, unless they kill themselves through boredom.”4