Lee discusses the emphasis of stories in our valuation of objects and points to the importance of audio in this process. The author affirms this even given objects that are ostensibly non-aural in nature (the concept of photographs as placeholders for storytelling from memory is a particular example). The author questions the techniques and heuristics used to evaluate sound formally in search of relevance and value.

The historical value of objects is discussed, mainly as pertains to historically relevant persons (notably, ourselves). The author encourages design decisions to be made on the basis of considered use of the object in question over time.

In the visual arts, the author brings a lively discussion of provenance and its importance to art collectors, and characterizes and classifies different types of changes/uses that affect an object: (some annotated, some not) [33-34]

• Transactions of Utility: How am I being used?
• Transactions of Equal Standing: How are we doing today?
• Transactions of Memory: How is my life changing?
• Transactions of Emotion: How do we feel about each other?
• Transactions of Time: Do you believe in me?

The author goes on to consider human expectations given sound artifacts and how various systems have manipulated these for various effects.

In considering design as a whole, the author discusses the ability for objects to communicate their utility, and transitions into a transactional model for denoting the expected inputs and outputs of a designed object. The granularity of recordings is discussed as it pertains to the various methods of material perception employed (highly relevant to interface questions).

Interfaces, of course, are the interactive layer between designed objects and their employing agents. Lee attempts to anthropomorphize the experience from the perspective of the tool or object, with reference to the various systems enabling knowledge visualization and perceptibility developed at the media lab and in analogous communities.

The author conducted a number of brainstorming workshops to determine perceptions of time, and identified narrative as the connective tissue in this fabric. The project they implemented was a constructed bench that attempted to computationally model the human evaluation of temporal events into a coherent narrative through various algorithms, and played back its ‘condensed’ series of events for comparison with those experienced by the participating human.

The project seems severely limited in scope and rather absurdist in conception. The bench is not designed with long term effects of environment in mind, but is rather an extremely temporary installation piece, leaving much of their earlier analysis fallow. The results are interesting but seem to be more relevant algorithmically than aesthetically or specifically.

Lee, Hyun-Yeul, 1974- Storied objects: design thinking with time / by Hyun-Yeul Theresa Lee. c2007.

The authors describe in mathematical rigor a computer simulation system for the stroke of a calligraphic brush. The examples provided are extremely accurate to the traditionally created analogues they attempt to render.

The key innovations of their simulation system, beyond the shape drift of the brush ellipse given changes in pressure over the course of a stroke are their simulation of ink uptake and release by the brush, and their ability to simulate the brush’s splitting under realistic pressure and ink level conditions.

They include a number of example images that they created with their tool, showing largely traditional chinese artwork and characters.

They reference
C.J. Curtis, S.E. Anderson, J.E. Seims, K.W. Fleischer, D.H. Salesin, Computer-generated
watercolor, Proc. SIGGRAPH 97 (1997) 421–430,
another very thorough system for simulation of watercolor, though it is far more paper/ink interaction based rather than brush focused.

The interfaces for all these systems are very software focused; the control is not manual but rather on cumbersome software settings; ultimately the mouse and keyboard are all that are used to control the movement of the brushes.

This indirect control enforces a rather extreme time commitment for very basic results; there is very little motivation to use the tool over its physical inspiration.

The cohesion of the various fibers of the calligraphic brush given purpose through ink is a rich material phenomenon that parallels the unity ideal that forms a strong thread within the oriental aesthetic. It motivates tracing the evolution of calligraphy over time.

Canonically, though, this software is more enabling to the automation of calligraphy-like imagery than it is to the continuation of traditional calligraphic forms into the digital age. What computer data might we transliterate into this newly manipulable medium? What kind of information begs representation in the fractured but coherent strokes of a calligraphic pen?

The authors use a 6-dimensional simulation state machine for the brush: are all of these dimensions transparently encoded in the output? Are they responsible for our attribution of complexity to the brush strokes?

Songhua Xua, b, Min Tanga, Francis C. M. Lau, and Yunhe Pana. Virtual hairy brush for painterly rendering, sciencedirect.com 2004.