“When the software detects synchronous or compatible dream sleep, it attempts to pair [it] with either a predesignated user over the internet or automatically to an available user within the Sleep Talker social network. In group mode, multiple users can form dream clusters defined by specific criteria, or a single user can designate their feed as ‘broadcast-only’ for others to listen to.”

“…radio is one-sided when it should be two-. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes.”

It’s easy to make the connection between that imagined network of pipes and our various radio-like devices that are both receptive and communicative. But the appearance of the iPad interface has caused most tech critics to complain that it’s merely for content consumption, not for those who want to do the serious work of content creation. It’s a step backward from the Brechtian vision, a fancy gadget made only to passively read, purchase, play.

Without a keyboard or mouse, after all, it seems like the pad is a blunter tool for the subtleties of digital content. How can you manipulate images, edit video, or even type fast with a touch screen?

But software developer Duncan Wilcox asks us to reconsider our assumptions about the mouse and trackpad model we now accept as “natural.” It’s possible that the directness of the pad’s form will eventually be seen as a virtue:

Below you’ll see screenshots of new iPad applications—adaptive communication apps—interspersed with excerpts from Brecht’s essay. Turns out that this (accidental?) adaptation may create more inclusive, two-way access and move all of us along a path to better computer-interaction.

Brecht: “[The radio would know how] to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him.”

(iCommunicate for iPad)

(Autism xPress)

“On this principle the radio should step out of the supply business and organize its listeners as suppliers. Any attempt by the radio to give a truly public character to public occasions is a step in the right direction.”

(iConverse for iPad)

“As for the technique that needs to be developed for all such operations, it must follow the prime objective of turning the audience not only into pupils but into teachers.”

(Proloquo2Go)

The increasing concentration of mechanical means and the increasingly specialized training—tendencies that should be accelerated—call for a kind of resistance by the listener, and for his mobilization and redrafting as a producer.”

(MyTalk Mobile)

source credit: Gadget DNA shows 10 iPad apps for autism’s common challenges.

Montreal’s Compagnie Marie Chouinard‘s 2005 work, bODY_rEMIX/gOLDBERG_vARIATIONS employs ten dancers who

“execute variations on the exercise of freedom. Often, the dancers appear on points: on one, two, and even four at a time. In a spectroscopy of the gesture, we also see them using different devices – crutches, rope, prostheses, horizontal bars, and harnesses – which at times liberate their movements, at others fetter it, and at still others create it.” You can see a video of the work on the company site.

Thanks, Lakey Goff, for this.

The Wiicane by Touch Graphics: “a system for promoting proper use of the long cane in orientation and mobility training for young children and others. WiiCane uses Wii motion tracking technology to provide real-time feedback as users walk up and down a 30′ long indoor course. By practicing with WiiCane, some users may learn to walk straight without veering, potentially leading to safer independent travel.”

Here’s a news clip with in-use footage:

via Peter Meijer, SeeingWithSound

They call it a “modular public park.”

via PSFK.

This collar by German designer Frederik Podzuweit creates music for deaf people—through skin vibration. Apparently the transmission of electricity through the device to the neck, collarbone and shoulders creates a very rich experience of music—triggering the same parts of the brain, adapted for those who don’t hear with their ears—as those used for normative aural experience.

Gizmodo writes that “it’s even possible, in certain cases, that deaf people experience music more powerfully because they can’t hear; as Oliver Sacks tells it in Musicophilia, the auditory cortex might become extra-sensitive when hearing slips.”

Cousteau was a storyteller, and only able to gather support for his projects as long as he was able to ignite the interest of collaborators. “I am not a scientist,” Cousteau told The Christian Science Monitor in 1986. “I am, rather, an impresario of scientists.”

“Whether he wanted to or not,” Goldberg writes, “Cousteau turned the explorer from a man giving answers into a person looking at the world with questions, and then finally looking inward with those questions.”

via Bobulate.

Rebecca Horn‘s Finger Gloves, from 1974. I’ve included a video of the gloves in action below; you only need to watch the beginning to get a sense for how they work.

In Barcelona as a young artist in the early 1960s, Horn was working with glass fiber without a mask. Unaware of any harm, Horn used the material routinely before becoming very ill. She spent a year recovering in a sanatorium, and it was in her hospital bed that she began to make body-centric sculptures. Here, the gloves extend and alter the normal sense of touch: sensation is mediated, but available in ways it wouldn’t otherwise be.

Horn’s work has been wide-ranging since this project, but I keep coming back to its elegance and provocation—both distancing and intimate at the same time.

Thanks to DesignAbilities for pointing me to this work.

More gadgetry that wasn’t created as adaptive tech, but could be used to extend accessibility for motor-impairments. I think we’ve seen this idea in the movies; these prototype gloves look promising:

“A pair of lycra gloves — with 20 irregularly shaped patches in 10 different colors — held in front of a webcam can generate a unique pattern with every wave of the hand or flex of the finger. That can be matched against a database of gestures and translated into commands for the computer. The gloves can cost just about a dollar to manufacture, say the researchers.”