Imagine a case where a physician can receive visual aid and up-to-date information for treating any trauma without having to step aside from the immediate contact with the patient. Augmented reality (AR) could provide people with such and many other life-improvement options. It is an environment where computer generated images are overlaid on top of real-life imagery in real time and displayed through a screen. Such technology has found many applications across different fields, for example, Ikea catalogues that enable you to see how a piece of furniture would look like in your house before buying it, the Pokemon GO app that became a sensation all around the world as well as many other uses. In this paper, I wish to argue that AR will only become more common as the tech becomes more seamless and user-friendly, therefore, enabling humans to interact with the world in a way that transcends the current possibilities. Nevertheless, I also want to raise the alarm that equipping the environment with AR could leave physical objects at jeopardy and neglect as AR would provide a look on the reality that real life elements could not match.

According to an app on my phone that tracks my phone usage, I use it for 3.5 hours every day. This is a number I’m almost too embarrassed to admit. Nevertheless, acknowledging this number helps me with my goal of decreasing how much I use my phone. With this goal in mind, I figured I would use my “rewire” experience to find a way that would complicate the way I use my phone so that my usage time would drop. Therefore, I attempted to only use my left hand when using my phone to make my user experience less seamless. Regardless to say, I am a righty (as my name implies; pun intended).

It was weird to use all the apps with my left hand. I found it somewhat tiresome and inconvenient. Truth be told, old habits die hard and I often remembered about my goal only after having spent some time on my phone, using both of my hands. Nevertheless, when I did remember about it, my experience on my phone got a lot more complicated. Especially when texting. This made me stop my sessions on my phone faster, but I believe the main reason for that was not the inconvenience. Rather, whenever I remembered about the necessity to use the left hand, I also remembered about my goal to stop using my phone without a purpose, which then made me end the session on the phone. Therefore, I believe this “rewire” experience was a success. Nevertheless, I suspect that over time using my left hand would have become normal and I might have returned to my old habits.

On top of that, I was also curious to see if I will notice if some apps have a bias for right handed people. By this I mean, that I was trying to pay attention whether some apps are objectively easier to use if a person is right handed – similar to how regular scissors are meant for right handed people. I found that:

• Swiping FB stories further is inconvenient as the thumb stretches across the screen and blocks the view of the stories,
• Editing options for Instagram photos are all located on the top right corner of the screen making them impossible to reach only using the left hand.
• Messenger and Whatsapp have placed people’s names and photos on the left side of the screen which means that swiping the screen with my left hand blocks all the names and pictures, making it more difficult to find the person I would be looking for.

These might be small details, but it is clear the apps were designed for right handed people. I found it interesting to observe this as I would normally not pay attention to this.

When reading the assignment, I thought I would be visiting a new site that I had not seen before. Only after noticing the design of the page I understood that I had read Stack Exchange already without knowing what the name of the site was. I had stumbled upon it when looking for answers to problems I couldn’t solve for my engineering classes. Nevertheless, I somehow always perceived it as a weird forum, where people do not provide each other with legitimate answers. Therefore it was a surprise to see how swiftly people answered my question.

The question I asked incorporated some real life advice I need right now. As for the past couple of days especially Solar Decathlon has taken most of my time, I asked a question relevant to our project and one issue we are facing. 

I knew the answer would be that filing is not the solution before I asked the question. Nevertheless, at this moment I do not have a better plan, therefore I hoped that someone would approve my idea. Unfortunately, the community deemed that my solution is not great (which I totally agree with).

After using Stack Exchange I am still slightly confused for why people leave very extensive comments to questions that random people have posted. Is it just a good deed they are doing? I am more than confident that I will use this site again in future to at least gauge answers to simple questions. I am curious how accurate the answers are for more sophisticated questions, but that I am yet to explore

Dainas – folk songs, but not really

Dainas, usually four-line poetic texts, have been a part of the Latvian culture for more than a thousand years. Many of them have no authors as Dainas are considered to have risen from people and spread from person to person, therefore losing any association with one single creator. Because of that, they capture the collective mentality of the daily routine of people from all levels of society and embodies the Latvian spirit throughout. They were all combined in the so-called “cabinet of songs” over a 25-year long period by a single man during the late 19^th century. The cabinet holds 268 815 individual pieces of paper each containing from 4-8 Dainas (internet was not a thing back then)! These had been obtained by travelling the country and learning about all of them from people directly. Dainas carried a specifically important role during the occupation of Latvia by the Soviet Union after the Second World War. In that period freedom of speech was limited and pro-Latvian ideas were censored. At the same time, people kept on singing Dainas that helped to keep the national identity alive. In fact, the movement through which Latvia regained its independence is called the “Singing Revolution”. The significance hasn’t diminished now and Dainas are still commonly used in national traditions (summer solstice, national song and dance festival, etc.) that find their roots in pagan celebrations that originated before the spread of Christianity.

References: http://www.latvia.eu/traditions-lifestyle/latvian-folksongs-dainas

VEF radio and electronics company.

VEF used to be the largest producer of telecommunication technology in the Soviet Union. Although it originated in 1887 under a different name, it reached its industrial peak during the 1960s. It provided the entire Soviet Union with communication equipment like radios and even produced airplanes. At one moment two thirds of all phones in the Soviet Union were created by VEF. One of its most famous achievements was the production of the first portable radio that was able to pick up shortwave frequencies. VEF has solidified itself into the history as one of the greatest and most successful factories Latvia has ever had. Streets, a bridge, a basketball team and other frequently heard of things are still named after VEF even though it went bankrupt shortly after the regain of independence in 1991. However, it is interesting how while researching for this post I learnt that VEF was heavily involved in creating tech for the military, spies, etc. As I think about it now, it makes a lot of sense understanding what the regime was and how important VEF used to be. Nevertheless, I find that the Latvian community has forgotten about that and only sees VEF as one reason why to be proud about ourselves. I think this would be an interesting topic to explore.

References: http://www.laikmetazimes.lv/2014/05/26/vef-latvijas-lepnums-1dala-pirmas-brivvalsts-laiks/

       

I interpreted the prompt in two ways. First, by “hometown” I understood my home country Latvia and I tried to create two emojis that would reflect the values important to it. Following this idea, I created the “LV 100” emoji that is dedicated for Latvia’s centennial which takes place this year. At the same time, I wanted to create an emoji that would share some of the Latvian values with others. For that reason I created the face emoji, which reflects the traditional Latvian summer solstice celebrations. Many interesting festivities take place during that time, but the ones reflected are the tradition of men wearing headbands made out of oak leaves as well as the fact that cheese is at the forefront of every meal during the solstice.

My other interpretation for “hometown” was something that only me and my closest friend group from home can relate to. I chose to create a pack of yogurt that we not only love, but also for some weird reason joke about a lot.

To create the emojis I considered drawing them by hand but realized that it would be difficult for me to edit them. On top of that, I feel like sharing emojis on paper is not common (or rather even a little weird). I used Inkscape which is a great open source tool. Only after having finished most of the emojis I realized that I also could have used the drawing screens in the library, which would have been an interesting experience.

I sent my emojis to the two friends from the friend group that I referred to before only saying that I require their feedback for a class assignment. First they evaluated the face emoji. They said that the face was too yellow, which to me was a little surprising because I had obtained the RGB values for the face from Google’s face emojis. He probably said that because messenger (which is the platform I used to communicate with them) does use a little darker emojis and is probably the most used platform for emoji communication. Learning from messenger emojis I also introduced a color gradient to the face. Asides that, my friends were the ones who came up with the cheese idea.

When evaluating the “LV100” and the yogurt emoji my friends raised a problem of how specific these emojis are. That is, “LV100” could only be used this year and the yogurt emoji by default is only understandable to us. I took this criticism into account and changed the “LV100” emoji to just “LV”. As the yogurt emoji was meant to be an inside joke, I did not follow up on that criticism. However, my friends also pointed out that it is a little difficult to understand that the emoji is reflecting a yogurt pack, which is fair because I found it difficult to draw it. In my initial version I had not included a cap from which one could drink the yogurt, therefore I added that after the conversations with my friends.

I find several parallels between my detox experience, overall observations of my tech-usage habits and the readings. In this reflection I will mention two. First, I often make the excuse to keep a hold of my phone for emergency cases (that never occur) and, second, I have gotten used to the flaws of tech that I only realize when I isolate myself from tech.

I frequently tell myself that I must keep my phone of me in case there is an important conversation that cannot be postponed. I understand that a side effect to this is that I will also use the phone for procrastination, but the idea that I would make someone wait on my response or not be able to reach out myself when I need to, alarms me. For this reason, my phone was next to me during the detox as well. However, I believe I have assigned very incorrect weights to how many non-reschedulable conversations I have versus how much time I spend procrastinating. That is, I barely ever have communications over phone that are of a must-respond-now type. This thought resonated with me when reading the paragraph about the father who always took his phone with him when going for the newspaper together with his child from “Reclaiming Conversation”. “The real emergency may be parents and children not having conversations or sharing a silence between them that gives each the time to bring up a funny story or a troubling thought” (26. I realize that by worrying about potentially missing out on something I opt-in to miss out on daily communications every day.

Second resolution I have stems from how Vashti from “The Machine Stops” “did not notice the noise” (6) of the machine anymore as she had lived with it for so long. Similarly, I believe I do not notice the bad effects tech has on me, at least until I have stepped away from tech for a while. The detox might have been too short for me, but from my previous experiences (hiking for a week with no constant access to phone), the feeling is truly liberating. However, when I get back to tech, I tend to again forget about the benefits I experienced with no tech.

In his book “The information” James Gleick points that written communication “comes into being to retain information across time and space” (31). While certainly technology only increases the place for storage of information with its vast databases, the question must be asked whether it also allows us to obtain that information easily.

The obvious answer seems yes – without internet we could not learn about events that happen across the oceans in seconds, we could not get our hands on curated content so easily and we would certainly not be able to see what our friends have for lunch every now and then through their Instagram posts. However, at a moment when all information in the world is at our fingertips due to the web and its many search engines, remembering information becomes seemingly unnecessary. We become better at finding what we need to know, but worse at studying and remembering it. Arguably, this still propels human innovation and the spread of ideas, yet it seems we have, to a certain extent, become better at finding where the information lies, rather than remembering what it says. Is that what knowing things means? 

This argument is supplemented by James Gleick when he notes that “The power [of conveying information] lies not just in the knowledge, preserved and passed forward, valuable as it is, but in the methodology: encoded visual indications, the acts of transference, substituting signs for things” (32). Because of the vast information around us and the many channels by which we can obtain it our attention spans have decreased. This has made us more repulsive towards sources of information that require dedication and time to go through, like books. Curated content can be seen as boring when compared to click-bite worthy titles and the pleasing belief that a sophisticated topic can be fully understood from a 5 minute video. Presentation of information has become, to a certain extent, more important that the content being presented, which in my mind undermines the reason why we wish to share and obtain information.