CHS: Medium: Design Tools for Physical Computing Objects

随着计算机成本的下降和交互计算逐渐远离桌面，计算可以采用各种物理形式。目前，新的计算机界面的创建仅限于已有的格式，如智能手机，即使到那时也仅限于相对简单的计算机界面。未来的计算将超越台式机、笔记本电脑、平板电脑和智能手机，进入我们生活的方方面面。但要做到这一点，需要能够迅速使计算适应不同物理形式和任务需求的设计工具。该项目将研究用于开发交互式物理对象的工具包。该项目将提高国家在发明和开发计算新用途方面的竞争力，并使在野外而不是在实验室进行丰富和多样化的可用性研究成为可能。创建物理计算对象将允许更大比例的社会以符合其工作要求的方式使用计算机，从根本上说是新的方式。这种设备的快速设计和创造将为消费者计算打开新的市场。这些目标是通过三个相互关联的努力实现的：(1)用于创建传感器/执行器系统的可插拔工具包，这些系统构成了此类对象的计算基础。这个工具包将是独一无二的，因为当这些组件连接在一起时，不仅形成了设备的初始原型，而且自我揭示了它们的物理和计算特征，以自动支持其他设计工具。用这个工具包构建的原型将固有地包含足够的信息来驱动它自己的制造。通过将原型插入在一起，我们的工具将自动知道如何以易于部署的尺寸执行电子产品的定制制造。(2)通过3D打印开发物理形式，使物理形状、传感器和致动器与软件和电子设备集成，从而容易地制作出完整的物理/计算对象的原型。一个目标是抑制机械设计的挑战，这样设计师就可以专注于形状和可用性。(3)将创建交互式机器学习技术，以容易地开发(由传感器检测到的)人类活动与软件识别之间的映射。众所周知，将人类置于机器学习的训练循环中会改变训练集的构建方式。将开发出既适应并利用这种行为的算法。这个项目将产生新的概念知识，这些概念在创建物理计算对象时对设计师来说是最困难的。

As computers decline in cost and interactive computation moves off of the desktop, computation can assume a variety of physical forms. At present, the creation of new computer interfaces is limited to already-available formats, such as smartphones, and even then is constrained to relatively simplistic computer interfaces. Computing in the future will push beyond desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones into objects that fit into every part of our lives. But for this to happen, design tools are needed that can rapidly adapt computing to different physical forms and task needs. This project will study toolkits for the development of interactive physical objects. The project will increase national competitiveness in the invention and development of new uses of computation, and make possible rich and diverse usability research with physical computing objects in the wild rather than in the lab. Creating physical computing objects will allow a greater proportion of society to use computers in ways that fit their work requirements in fundamentally new ways. The rapid design and creation of such devices will open new markets for consumer computing.These ends are achieved through three interrelated efforts: (1) A pluggable toolkit for creating sensor/actuator systems that form the computational basis for such objects. This toolkit will be unique in that the components when plugged together not only form an initial prototype of the device but self-reveal their physical and computational characteristics to automatically support the other design tools. A prototype constructed with this toolkit will inherently contain sufficient information to drive its own fabrication. By plugging together the prototype our tools will automatically know how to perform a custom fabrication of the electronics at a size that can be readily deployed. (2) Development of physical form via 3D printing such that the physical shape, sensors and actuators integrate with the software and electronics so as to easily prototype a complete physical/computational object. One goal is to suppress the challenges of mechanical design so that designers can focus on shape and usability. (3) Interactive machine learning techniques will be created to easily develop the mapping between human activities (as detected by sensors) and their recognition in software. It is known that putting humans in the training loop for machine learning changes the way training sets are built. Algorithms will be developed that both adapt to and exploit this behavior. This project will produce new knowledge of the concepts that are most difficult for designers when creating physical computational objects.