I stopped by the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum today for the National Design Triennial 2006, a rambling, bombastic exhibit on three floors that covers the design of just about everything: architecture, media, advertising, software, lighting, fashion, ceramics, furniture, fabrics, tools, maps and packaging. It’s a hit-or-miss jumble and on the second floor at least, there’s a slew of commercial filler: Nike sneakers, Apple’s iPod, an ad campaign for Court TV and more. Next to enlarged screenshots of some Google sites (including the new Google Picasa, which gets no explanation at all), an earnest placard notes that “‘google’ has become a widely accepted verb found in dictionaries.” Wow, really?
A centerpiece of the show was Sgt. John Blackwell, a life-sized digitally animated character that processes questions asked of it and responds verbally. The placard explains the U.S. Army joined forces with Hollywood to develop the serviceman to substitute for a human during training or informational sessions, which is a fine idea in concept.
Dressed in helmet and fatigues, the sergeant hovers directly in front of you behind a glass pane in a semidarkened open-backed booth. His numerous polygons shift slightly as he waits for your input, for which you hold down a red button while speaking your question into a microphone. He replies with a prerecorded response ideally appropriate to your question. When I arrived at the booth, there was a dad there with a very young girl who he got to “speak” into the microphone as he struggled to mash the button while holding her to the mike.
- Girl:
- Gigaablagh.
- Blackwell:
- You wanna know how I’m talking to you right now? Just ask me.
- Girl:
- Hurnablahjk. Dit dit.
- Blackwell:
- You wanna know something about my technology? Why don’t you ask me?
- Girl:
- Palatalata dommmm. Bbb bbb bbb.
- Blackwell:
- [leans forward testily] Why don’t you just Google it?
- Girl:
- [looks confused, taken aback]
So what you’re most likely to hear is one of the sergeant’s pat responses when he doesn’t understand you or have an answer in his library of responses. The avatar “learns” and although that process isn’t explained, I assume it involves recording the keywords and questions the system doesn’t understand, then having a human filter through them to potentially provide software recognition and a response. I’d love to be the peon charged with reviewing those tapes.
To help cut down on unanswered questions, there’s a list of leading questions posted near the sergeant’s microphone, along the lines of “What is your name?” and “How does your technology work?” At its heart, the sergeant is a much more expensive version of the classic text-input psychologist computer program, ELIZA.
Despite his stunted conversational skills, a lot of people wanted to chat with the sergeant so I didn’t have as much face time as I’d have liked. He did tell me that he’s been in the army five years and joined after seeing Saving Private Ryan, a movie I would have guessed deters enlistment. Having warmed him up, I asked him his position on gays in the military. He offered a random canned response, so I asked again in case he was dodging the question or lost in thought about his technology. He responded, “Not to be cocky, but I’m programmed to help my flesh and blood brethren at war and in peacetime.” You heard it here first: no more of this “don’t ask, don’t tell” crosstalk—Sgt. Blackwell and the U.S. Army are gay friendly and not adverse to some cocky shenanigans.
A slightly less interactive exhibit that caught my fancy at the Triennial was an installation by Electroland that wraps along the inner wall of the museum’s grand staircase in a long white acrylic lightbox. As you ascend or descend, evenly spaced vertical fluorescent tube lights mounted in the lightbox “follow” you, fading in and out as you move, while the system plays an ascending or descending musical scale. It gets cacophonous when there are a lot of people on the stairs at the same time.
Some other cool stuff that would have been even cooler had it been operational was the transparent kayak that weighs only 26 pounds and folds to fit into a backpack, as well as the underwater robotic lobster that can gauge pollution, locate mines and liberate its crustacean cronies from restaurant holding tanks.1
Comparing the Triennial to the ITP Winter Show I attended in December, the latter exhibition boasted a scrappy youthful exuberance, many more hands-on or active exhibits and not a whiff of commercialism, making it the larger success.