Machine Learning for Designers’ workshop

On Wednes­day Péter Kun, Hol­ly Rob­bins and myself taught a one-day work­shop on machine learn­ing at Delft Uni­ver­si­ty of Tech­nol­o­gy. We had about thir­ty master’s stu­dents from the indus­tri­al design engi­neer­ing fac­ul­ty. The aim was to get them acquaint­ed with the tech­nol­o­gy through hands-on tin­ker­ing with the Wek­ina­tor as cen­tral teach­ing tool.

Photo credits: Holly Robbins
Pho­to cred­its: Hol­ly Robbins

Background

The rea­son­ing behind this work­shop is twofold. 

On the one hand I expect design­ers will find them­selves work­ing on projects involv­ing machine learn­ing more and more often. The tech­nol­o­gy has cer­tain prop­er­ties that dif­fer from tra­di­tion­al soft­ware. Most impor­tant­ly, machine learn­ing is prob­a­bilis­tic in stead of deter­min­is­tic. It is impor­tant that design­ers under­stand this because oth­er­wise they are like­ly to make bad deci­sions about its application. 

The sec­ond rea­son is that I have a strong sense machine learn­ing can play a role in the aug­men­ta­tion of the design process itself. So-called intel­li­gent design tools could make design­ers more effi­cient and effec­tive. They could also enable the cre­ation of designs that would oth­er­wise be impos­si­ble or very hard to achieve.

The work­shop explored both ideas.

Photo credits: Holly Robbins
Pho­to cred­its: Hol­ly Robbins

Format

The struc­ture was rough­ly as follows: 

In the morn­ing we start­ed out pro­vid­ing a very broad intro­duc­tion to the tech­nol­o­gy. We talked about the very basic premise of (super­vised) learn­ing. Name­ly, pro­vid­ing exam­ples of inputs and desired out­puts and train­ing a mod­el based on those exam­ples. To make these con­cepts tan­gi­ble we then intro­duced the Wek­ina­tor and walked the stu­dents through get­ting it up and run­ning using basic exam­ples from the web­site. The final step was to invite them to explore alter­na­tive inputs and out­puts (such as game con­trollers and Arduino boards).

In the after­noon we pro­vid­ed a design brief, ask­ing the stu­dents to pro­to­type a data-enabled object with the set of tools they had acquired in the morn­ing. We assist­ed with tech­ni­cal hur­dles where nec­es­sary (of which there were more than a few) and closed out the day with demos and a group dis­cus­sion reflect­ing on their expe­ri­ences with the technology.

Photo credits: Holly Robbins
Pho­to cred­its: Hol­ly Robbins

Results

As I tweet­ed on the way home that evening, the results were… interesting. 

Not all groups man­aged to put some­thing togeth­er in the admit­ted­ly short amount of time they were pro­vid­ed with. They were most often stymied by get­ting an Arduino to talk to the Wek­ina­tor. Max was often picked as a go-between because the Wek­ina­tor receives OSC mes­sages over UDP, where­as the quick­est way to get an Arduino to talk to a com­put­er is over ser­i­al. But Max in my expe­ri­ence is a fick­le beast and would more than once crap out on us.

The groups that did build some­thing main­ly assem­bled pro­to­types from the exam­ples on hand. Which is fine, but since we were main­ly work­ing with the exam­ples from the Wek­ina­tor web­site they tend­ed towards the inter­ac­tive instru­ment side of things. We were hop­ing for explo­rations of IoT prod­uct con­cepts. For that more hand-rolling was required and this was only achiev­able for the stu­dents on the high­er end of the tech­ni­cal exper­tise spec­trum (and the more tena­cious ones).

The dis­cus­sion yield­ed some inter­est­ing insights into men­tal mod­els of the tech­nol­o­gy and how they are affect­ed by hands-on expe­ri­ence. A com­ment I heard more than once was: Why is this con­sid­ered learn­ing at all? The Wek­ina­tor was not per­ceived to be learn­ing any­thing. When chal­lenged on this by reit­er­at­ing the under­ly­ing prin­ci­ples it became clear the black box nature of the Wek­ina­tor ham­pers appre­ci­a­tion of some of the very real achieve­ments of the tech­nol­o­gy. It seems (for our stu­dents at least) machine learn­ing is stuck in a grey area between too-high expec­ta­tions and too-low recog­ni­tion of its capabilities.

Next steps

These results, and oth­ers, point towards some obvi­ous improve­ments which can be made to the work­shop for­mat, and to teach­ing design stu­dents about machine learn­ing more broadly. 

  1. We can improve the toolset so that some of the heavy lift­ing involved with get­ting the var­i­ous parts to talk to each oth­er is made eas­i­er and more reliable.
  2. We can build exam­ples that are geared towards the prac­tice of design­ing IoT prod­ucts and are ready for adap­ta­tion and hacking.
  3. And final­ly, and prob­a­bly most chal­leng­ing­ly, we can make the work­ings of machine learn­ing more trans­par­ent so that it becomes eas­i­er to devel­op a feel for its capa­bil­i­ties and shortcomings.

We do intend to improve and teach the work­shop again. If you’re inter­est­ed in host­ing one (either in an edu­ca­tion­al or pro­fes­sion­al con­text) let me know. And stay tuned for updates on this and oth­er efforts to get design­ers to work in a hands-on man­ner with machine learning.

Spe­cial thanks to the bril­liant Ianus Keller for con­nect­ing me to Péter and for allow­ing us to pilot this crazy idea at IDE Acad­e­my.

References

Sources used dur­ing prepa­ra­tion and run­ning of the workshop:

  • The Wek­ina­tor – the UI is infu­ri­at­ing­ly poor but when it comes to get­ting start­ed with machine learn­ing this tool is unmatched.
  • Arduino – I have become par­tic­u­lar­ly fond of the MKR1000 board. Add a lithi­um-poly­mer bat­tery and you have every­thing you need to pro­to­type IoT products.
  • OSC for ArduinoCNMAT’s imple­men­ta­tion of the open sound con­trol (OSC) encod­ing. Key puz­zle piece for get­ting the above two tools talk­ing to each other.
  • Machine Learn­ing for Design­ers – my pre­ferred intro­duc­tion to the tech­nol­o­gy from a design­er­ly perspective.
  • A Visu­al Intro­duc­tion to Machine Learn­ing – a very acces­si­ble visu­al expla­na­tion of the basic under­pin­nings of com­put­ers apply­ing sta­tis­ti­cal learning.
  • Remote Con­trol Theremin – an exam­ple project I pre­pared for the work­shop demo­ing how to have the Wek­ina­tor talk to an Arduino MKR1000 with OSC over UDP.