Ted Goranson - Personal Blog

You can read more about Kūkai’s goals, being no less than gifting an entire people with a new written language extended from an older one but based on fluidity of hand and breath.

Today’s interface technology and hardware are ready for a similar change. In public, we can aim for something as mundane as better communication, built on the written word but unbound by the restrictions of ink, paper and binding. If done properly, we should see deeper art.

I’m not sure where this will go, and what will be abandoned in the process, but I am certain that what will be kept is the idea of the hand and the expressive stroke — I am truly certain of this. Our Kutachi project has this as a central tenet, and in our user interface studies we have placeholders for something that is fluid, that can be created and manipulated by hand and which reflects the kinematics of an emotive hand. It can be seen as a component of a context and individually as a collection of discrete ‘words.’

Running Script

This also is inspired by (mostly) Chinese calligraphy where the cursive running script of a poem can be viewed as a whole to convey the being of the poet at that moment, and the characters that are drawn giving words of a poem that comes from that state.

The important thing here is that there are two presentations: one is a situation, as soft as they come but readily understandable even to a novice westerner. The other are words that more or less could be conveyed in other print media, and often are. Our specific need is to reintroduce this representation of situation.

And this brings me back to the birthright brush. We only get to do this once and it should be both precious and a meaningful tool. The default process is to cut in Virginia and send the tousles to a Japanese barber shop our nanny knows. He would produce something in an elaborate display box, either using the blond silky hair as is or supplement it with Asian hair to make the brush nominally useful. We have cut the hair and will almost certainly do this.

The Locks

(Image) The shorn hair moments after cutting.

But either choice seems unsatisfying, a crying shame to waste such an opportunity to produce the burden of a dead thing, a souvenir.

What If

What if we designed a brush to be useful in the ordinary way: ordinary ink on ordinary paper but also for the extraordinary future we imagine? What would such a brush look like? That’s what this post is about.

If you don’t know the current Asian calligraphy tools, a standard kit includes a soft brush that is perfectly round. A skilled calligrapher presents the brush to the paper perpendicularly, so that the flow from the brush perfectly conveys the movement of the body. The fingers move very little and simply hold the brush; the arm, shoulder, back and even hips move the hand in a plane over the paper with the fingers controlling the touch and release of the ink.

An Example Brush

(Image) A typical brush showing the upright posture.

This allows the word to be a dance of the whole body with the hand deciding when to enter the page; in this exercise the page is the world and body being all the combined agents that can influence the world.

I’d like to do something different in designing a tool for digital and well as physical use. In part this is determined by constraints in our screen — we don’t have the whole body to work with. Pretty much our hand does all the moving with digital styli; our arm is just a derrick. We might even want the wrist to rest on the contact plane and have the arm do almost nothing. That is, with our future screen-and-paper-centric brush we have to fit into the scenario of Western pen calligraphy rather than Eastern brush calligraphy.

An Example Pen Nib

(Image) Expression with the pen is different.

Good calligraphic pens also have some flex, but you can’t roll them (as you might a drafting pencil). You can’t do a sexy dance across the page as you can with a brush. We need something that is held like a pen, behaves like a brush and conveys expressive kinematics of the artist better than either.

It should work with ink on paper, stylus on a virtual two dimensional screen and allow three dimensional sense and display. Such a brush would amplify subtle emotions of the hand and expand the range of motion the hand allows. Ideally, the motions and handle could be used for other tools.

What we need is a handle that changes shape according to the position of the hand plus the immediate history of movement. And we need to couple this with an arrangement of bristles that changes the flow of ink (in several ways) according to the way it contacts and changes shape with the drawing surface. (We have some thoughts about soft, dynamically permeable and three dimensional surfaces elsewhere, in the Kutachi Essays.)

Hair

We'll take the bristles first because that is constrained by the hair we have to work with.

I'll approach this the way we deal with the boys generally. They are us, remixed and with more introspective parenting; and we are dealing on both ends of this equation within our own limits. The challenge when they are in our care is to work with those limits to create poetic urge with enough agency to create great poetry.

One boy has dark blond hair, thick and straight.Hiswhorl is counterclockwise; his current poetry is in the beauty of motion; repetition matters. The other has thin light blond hair. Where his brother's is the same all over, his varies according to placement: frizzy in some areas and tenaciously curled in others. That whorl goes in an opposite direction; the beauty he seems to see is in object and environment.

Both are right handed, intense. Each head would make a distinct brush.

The Heads We Have.

(Image) Photos of the boys' hair.

Flows, Inks and Bristles

Let's assume that we will use three kinds of ink. One would be the ordinary black ink you can buy today. Another would be an ink to be invented, perhaps by us. It would consist of particles that interact with each other in a non-heterogeneous way. At least, they would have local multiviscosity, meaning the fluid flows differently depending on different pressures, brush geometries and other local influences. Among these different geometries might be how different bristle textures rub against each other.

A third kind of ink will be virtual ink that has the same properties plus thecolloids might have some agency, forming tiny associative groups on their way to create strokes.

A candidate brush might have a geometry where the bristles are not parallel as they are in a conventional brush. The ink would not applied by dipping. A usual brush has to be designed to support dual capillary action, so that the ink gets drawn up by the same means it gets drawn down. Our new brush would flow only in one direction.

Well, we don’t have the time and energy to build the reactive handles I designed some time ago. And for certain reasons, I cannot describe them here in detail. The idea is that he handle is not rigid, but a supple thing that is programmed to respond to motion signals from your hand to perform certain actions. These actions will likely have to be personalizable, but they will be of two kinds. One will be to sense signals in the direction that the wrist does not allow and emphasize that motion. The idea is to extend the expressive kinematic vocabulary but in a way that we already know how to read.

The other is to sense counterclockwise motion of the hand (if the user is right handed) and produce a unique form — unique to each user. This is expected to produce a subtle effect and to work with other muscle memory to give a personal form behind the expression.

In other words, moving the hand clockwise and up (the directions of restricted motion) are amplified in some ways to increase expressive power. Motion in the opposite direction/rotation is as usual but with less visible imposition of a personal glyph.

We've built some devices using a novel technology that is passive, having the programming in the nature of the material rather than any electronics and mechanisms. We'll report on that when we can. Our initial idea was that a user would become familiar with the motions (and train the device) by also using the handle (actually a sibling of the handle) as a fork.

A Fork

Yes, I know this is probably starting to read as very crazy. But stick with me a bit and start with one of the Kôyasan practices. The idea here is that to be a master calligrapher, everything you do must be calligraphy — every motion of any part of your body but especially those that involve an instrument in the hand.

Key things such a monk will perform are writing and eating. Writing (in this notion) is the practice of catching the motions of mouth through the hand; eating is the symmetric partner. There should be a balance in action, each as practiced. The way chopsticks are used (in this way of thinking) influences the way the brush will be, and the other way around.

So we started thinking about what motions of a fork you might need and how they would collaborate with the motions used to draw/write. In this, we did not at the time consider that most of the world is not particularly forkfriendly.

The motions such a fork must support are a bit different, less need for expression and more need for efficacy. But the need is much the same: the hand is limited in what it can easily do. The tines of a fork are fairly restrictive in what they can do and an assistive fork would help with certain motions. In both writing and eating you are interacting with a plane on a table.

We will write more about this in a separate post. The point here is that we have thought about articulated, responsive handles and how they could expand our expressive and functional needs. These could influence the design of a future stylus.

Within that context, we could engineer behavior that was position and motion-specific. Today's brush is perfectly symmetrical. What if we engineered the hair to have grain, go in different directions, rub up against each other differently depending on position and motion and deliver ink differently according to these?

What if the design were influenced by the nature of the hair: its physical properties, even its chemical makeup?

Brushes with Alternate Physics

On a parallel track, we are designing user interfaces to work with today’s tools. So we need applications that will give us something like what we need. This needs to be more than a placeholder but less than something we would require of users. It would be for internal use, and generation of examples.

The closest we have come in everyday work are a few iPad applications and the use of a finger. (We'll have a post about the apps we are using to experiment.)

But what if instead of worrying about building physical things right now (and in particular my kids' birthright brushes) what if we did it all in software and had a simple stylus be the only physical item?

Why then we could mix real world physics with artificial physics. We already are committed to this in our user interactions as described (or will be) in the Kutachi project section. The idea there is that the world inside the machine has a physics that is something like ours but not exactly. Things behave in a theatrical way.

Creating in this world and Interacting with objects will use the behavior I have been describing.

What We Will Do

Our plan is to send the hair off to create a traditional birthright brush. The tradition is beautiful and following it closely has its own beauty.

Independently, we are developing advanced user interface conventions for our project, and this will use something like the brush/stylus I have been describing. When it comes to the specifics, the actual physics and behavior of the bristles involved, I will use my boys' hair. After all, it is what I understand best.