Pile - pure wool, finger deep

Unity the Hand Held Best Friend

The Concept

ììIt is a magic world that allows good to come from bad, îGrace said in a quiet soothing voice to Hope. Grace continued to stroke Hopeís hair ìjust imagine all the things you would never have learnt if you hadnít made mistakes.î She took a breath; ìwe are like beautiful coloured flowers that can only bud and open if the earth that we are planted in is full of dead and discarded matterî. Hope looked up at Grace and through her blurred teary eyes could just make out a flower from Graceís face.î

Unity is a digital hand held best friend. She rings you up on your birthday, she tells you stories when you are sad, she gives you advice about good recipes when you are hungry. Fitting neatly and comfortably in the palm of your hand, she is made from a soft synthetic material in the shape of a heart which opens up to reveal a small Liquid Crystal Display portraying animated lips. With a soft voice, a wicked laugh and a wisdom and practicality all of her own Unity is possibly the next best thing to a real best friend a person could have.

***

The Reality

As she exists, Unity is a program written using Visual Basic for a PDA (personal digital Assistant like an Ipaq) running Pocket PC as an operating system. At the moment she is just the basic outline of what I envisage the application to run like. However, even just the basic program got an excellent response form the delegates of the Creativity and Cognition 2002 conference held in Loughborough, UK in October of 2002. I am hoping to have a web version of the program up and running with a more complicated program so that she is more accessible.

Here's what I wrote for the conference:

When I first learnt of the possibility of doing a residency in the CCRS studios, I was most interested in devising something that challenged the way in which people commonly responded to computers. This stemmed from my theoretical interest in artificial intelligence. I am fascinated in the way that artificial intelligence research attempts to copy real life by studying physiological aspects of humans and the material world, such as neural networks. In doing this there is an attempt to create a program that is as close to real life as is possible. I think attempting to create something that mirrors neural networks is extremely valuable, but I hope to offer an alternative to this approach. I began from the premise that most computer user frustration stems from a high expectation of the application being used. The faster and the more utilitarian computers become the more our expectations of what they can do, and how fast they can do it, increase. Making computers more intuitive and consistent, whilst increasing usability, helps to feed this high expectation of computer usefulness and therefore the ensuing frustration as the computer inevitably disappoints the user. Rather than basing my project on the material world, I turned instead to human relationships. Given the lack of predictability of individual human behaviour, and the difference of each individual personality, friendships exist in an environment that is seemingly most unconducive to optimisation of satisfaction, and yet we still have friends and are a friend. I believe that what holds friendships together is a sense of kinship, love and compassion. In defining a personal relationship I think that compassion is the key, as without it we would be unable to forgive our friends their faults and therefore the friendship could no longer exist. From this I set about devising a way in which a computer program could be written that instilled a sense of compassion in the user and therefore allowed forgiveness and a lowering of expectations. Enter Unity: the Hand Held Best Friend.

In order for the Hand Held Best Friend to be successful it would have to have a defined, friendly and helpful personality. But in order to lower expectations it also had to be unpredictable, slightly petulant, and a little demanding. These were aspects I was quite clear on when I first arrived at Loughborough. I did not want it to be confused with utilitarian applications normal Personal Digital Assistants (PDAís) had, so it was important to me that it was a separate entity from a PDA. I liked the idea of it being mobile so that it would be on hand for that unpredictable crisis. I was also sure that it had to have some telecommunication ability as it is quite important that the Hand Held Best Friend would be able to contact the user of its own accord. Having no computer programming experience I was not sure of the form of programming this project would take. After intense discussions with Mike Quantrill regarding the software and Colin Machin regarding the hardware, I was to write specifications for a program to be developed for a PDA. After more discussions and decision making with Sandra Pauletto, the initial program was written by Sandra, and then subsequently by Ray Fong. My original concept has not changed, although details of it have, such as limiting conversation and not using voice synthezisation. I have also been made aware of some useful technology, such as developing the program onto the web, so as to allow for further development of the character/s which I will be able to incorporate into further developments. I have been surprised at how long the whole process has taken so far and I have had to become realistic about the current level of success. There is a long way to go. I still canít wait for it to vibrate when it laughs!