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CVOCR: Context Vision OCR
No full textOptical Character Recognition (OCR) technologies are crucial for automated information extraction across various domains. However, the intricate layouts and diverse text properties often found on different products can complicate accurate data retrieval and categorization. This paper introduces Context Vision OCR (CVOCR), a versatile framework designed to address the proposed challenges using advanced image processing and text analysis techniques. While CVOCR is applicable to any OCR-related application, this paper focuses on pharmaceutical items as a case study due to the stringent accuracy requirements and the complexity of medicine packaging. The CVOCR algorithm is developed based on the integration of the Fast Super-Resolution Convolutional Neural Network (FSRCNN) for enhanced image clarity, LayoutLMv2 for spatial layout understanding, Tesseract OCR for robust character recognition, and GPT-Neo for advanced contextual analysis. The strategic integration of these components form a cohesive system that significantly improves text detection and interpretation accuracy. We demonstrate the efficacy of the CVOCR system through testing on various pharmaceutical products, where it consistently outperforms Tesseract OCR
Sentences on magic (after Sol LeWitt) (2009)
No full textThis text work was written for inclusion on the catalogue to accompany The Dark Monarch: Magic and Modernity in British Art at Tate St Ives. It continues my interest in the relationship between conceptual art and ritual, most especially those forms widely studied by anthropology, such as magic. Here, Sol LeWitt's seminal work ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’ (1969) is altered so that every original reference to ‘art’ is replaced with one to ‘magic’, ‘artist’ to ‘magician’ similarly. A couple of other minor changes were also necessary. Despite the fact that the sentences now refer to a quite different activity, they still make sense and offer new insights. At the Plymouth Arts Centre, the text was installed as a large wall text using vinyl lettering; as the vinyl was the same colour as the wall upon which it was placed, it could not be read directly but only at an angle, thereby appearing and disappearing with the actions of the reader, as if a spell. The text was also included in Magic (Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art, 2021), edited by Jamie Sutcliffe
Automated usability and user experience assessment for smart products
Get PDFThe ever-increasing demand for user-centred smart products has driven the need for automation methodologies in product design processes, particularly for assessing usability and user experience (UX). Traditionally, practitioners construct functional (software) or physical (hardware) product prototypes to enable usability and UX assessments. Constructing a prototype followed by human testing are both time consuming and expensive activities. If virtual models and automated methods can replace some components of these activities, the time and cost of smart product development could be reduced while continuing to generate useful and beneficial products. In this paper, we survey the literature related to automated assessment methods for designing user-centric smart products. We identified five key activities on which to focus related to the testing or the design cycle: design thinking, design ideation, prototype creation, user data collection, and data analysis. The review methodology consisted of comprehensive search queries tailored to each activity to encapsulate automation methods pertinent to smart product development in research articles published from 2000-2023. Over 100 relevant articles were identified across engineering, human-computer interaction, human factors, industrial design, and other disciplines. This review highlights the effectiveness and limitations of various automation methods, benchmarked against traditional practice, providing valuable insights and practical recommendations for researchers and designers seeking to optimize smart product design processes for broad usability concerns. We are particularly interested in designing assistive mobility and rehabilitation devices. Development time and resources are often limited yet usability and UX directly impact important outcomes including perceived function, stigma, and device adoption. Improving these requires a transdisciplinary approach
Housing for good: Catalysing ecological citizen(s) a method of designing ‘sustainable conditions’
Get PDFThe UK is tackling crises in: climate change, living costs, social inequalities, rocketing housing prices and a disengagement from our natural world. These factors impact: human health, wellbeing, societal cohesion, accessible and equitable opportunities. Sustainable design interventions are interconnected, complex, place-based and culturally contextual. Sustainable proposals should be embedded into our lives, equitably and accessible to all citizens. In contemporary times, it is also sadly notable that humans are not formally given the knowledge, or resources, to look after ecosystems homosapiens rely on for life. This often leaves sustainable practices polarised, draconian or seen as a luxury. Society needs new ways to navigate: socially equitable, accessible and designed models that are financially stable, catalysing sustainable action(s). Relationships with nature must be built into our: communities, lives and homes. Authors believe social constructs live alongside pro-active rejuvenation of the natural world, with overlapping co-benefits to humans and more-than-humans. Buckton et al, The Regenerative Lens states societies must “transform their dynamics to support the flourishing of life. [As] there is increasing interest in regeneration, but also limited cohered understanding of what constitutes regenerative systems at social-ecological scales” (2023). Authors introduce Ecological Citizenship (EC): activities establishing and catalysing sustainable practice(s) addressing ecological inequalities (Phillips et al, 2024). The Ecological Citizen(s) Network is intent on catalysing transitions with communities by providing autonomy, accessibility to design, initiating sustainable conditions and open pro-social possibilities. The Housing for Good (HFG) concept, perceives preferable futures where thousands of people can catalyse communities inclusively empowered by: affordable housing, time, accessible space and security. HFG is an ambitious initiative providing highly affordable housing to citizens in exchange for their contributions in making communities healthier, greener, stronger and joyful. The design-led HFG connects design practice(s), social constructs and philanthropic finances, requiring lived experience and expertise to navigate. HFG explores social inequalities, while exploring contemporary and future designers roles in city transformation, through tangible examples. The article's main argument: unpacks an accessible housing opportunity, benefiting nature, citizens and communities, engaging 30+ citizens in two UK locations with transferable lessons and insights. The work trialed more inclusive and accessible strategic design methods. Our intention supports climate positive post-participatory design, with citizens, providing a repeatable internationally applicable framework, for place-based application contexts. The Ecological Citizen(s) Network is UKRI funded and mandated to prioritise the UK. Authors are against imposing colonialism, hence the work's focus is UK centric in practice, whilst unpacking a scalable international concept. Other parties can build on HFG, as place-based contextual nuances and cultural understanding is paramount. Resilience signifies moving beyond governmental systems and establishing citizen legacies. Authors are intent on designing beyond generations and believe co-designing to benefit people and nature concerns nurturing community autonomy with the means to become Ecological Citizen(s). The UK has endured 14 years of self-interested political rule (Knight, 2024 & Elledge, 2024) … Citizens deserve more resilient, nature aligned approaches
Introduction: Out of curiosity
Get PDFThis conversation situates the editors of Curious firmly in the present. Their revisiting of conversations from two decades earlier is not an act of nostalgia, but part of a process of re-assessing an entire discourse and its evolution. They underline that the process of re-editing for this volume demonstrated that curating has never been a homogeneous area of practice, despite the prevalent linear tracing of a specific range of exhibitionary forms. Instead, individual temporal and geographical circumstances resulted in very different trajectories, nurtured by a range of questions and concerns, and a diverse set of actors and agents, which these re-edits amplify
She still wears kohl & smells like roses
No full textBut She Still Wears Kohl and Smells like Roses retells the story of a collection of glass vessels from the V&A collection that were excavated in Palestine and Syria. The replicas were produced in Palestine with local artisans, the Twam family, and an anonymous family that works in the black market to make and sell forgeries. The original vessels in the glass gallery are replaced with tomb cards that narrate the violence of exhuming bodies to retrieve the "grave goods" and illustrate the power of the female body in the history of archaeology. The installation was accompanied by an experimental film that stitches personal histories with the history of glass
My bodily remains: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation
No full textTai Shani premiers in Portugal a film that is a poetic meditation on the emancipatory power of love and pleasure as catalysts for radical change. After the screening, there is a talk with Shani and the artist and researcher Bianca Chu. In My Bodily Remains, Your Bodily Remains, And All The Bodily Remains That Ever Were, And Ever Will Be (2023) Tai Shani creates a fantastical series of filmic tableaux drawing from various genres, ranging from horror to technicolour cinematic dreams. It features four protagonists: two characters called ‘Them who Love’, whose relationship is unclear and speak of love in an almost spiritual way; ‘The Ghost for Revolution’, who recounts somatic histories of fascism; and ‘The Reader of The Book of Love’, who reads historical quotes from individuals or groups that were involved in non non-violent action. The artist was inspired by classic works of literature such as ‘Destroy, She Said’ by Marguerite Duras, by the writings of scholars such as Jackie Wang, and by works of filmmakers such as Jacques Rivette. The film is a poetic meditation on various historical resistance movements and groups, on anti-supremacism, intersectional queer feminism, communism and revolutionary thinking. My Bodily Remains includes digital animations by Shani’s long-term collaborator Adam Sinclair. It features an original score developed to incorporate gamelan instruments, composed by Maxwell Sterling, also a long-term collaborator of the artist, and by Richard Fearless, from the band ‘Death in Vegas’
'Everything she touched she owned’: Kathy Acker’s sick clothes and kleptomaniac close writing
No full textThrough original, feminist methods of autotheory and creative-critical life writing, the article examines the gender and sexual politics of Kathy Acker’s performative self-image and embodied writings of illness and lovesickness. Attending to author-portraits and the illness narrative “The Gift of Disease” (1997), it argues for a reparative re-writing of her pathologised garments and medicalised body by newly foregrounding—via the feminist and queer scholarship of Apter, Sedgwick, and Ahmed—the perverse pleasures and political vitalities of self-fashioning during lived and aesthetic experiences of sickness. The article proposes in turn that Acker’s approach to clothing was intimately entangled with her performative life-writing combining purloined autobiographical materials (diaries, letters) and stolen canonical texts. In novels like Don Quixote (1986), Acker crafted what this article newly theorises as a feminist strategy of “kleptomaniac close writing”, wherein the conceptual practices of theft, collage, and cut-up letter-writing challenged aesthetic hierarchies and pathologising narratives to highlight the sensual and sexual complexities—its lovesick, autoerotic angles—of desire, embodiment, sickness, and writing
Colour that lasts
Get PDF"Colour That Lasts" is a collaboration between RCA and the University of Manchester, which explores sustainable structural colouration in textiles. The team worked with a nature-derived biopolymer, a cellulose derivative (HPC) extracted from plants. HPC can form liquid crystalline forms in water solutions, creating a highly malleable material. By fine-tuning the temperature, composition, and fabrication conditions, we can achieve a full-colour palette ranging across the whole visible spectrum. Our artwork "Wings of Light" showcases a series of 3d printed HPC sequins embroidered onto textiles, revealing the interaction of light with different microscopic orders. A short video is produced for the installation piece displaying the production process and our interpretation behind the creation of "Wings of Light" will accompany the exhibited tangible materials meets design research
De-anthropocentrising ocean object relations
Get PDFThe ocean can be seen as a hard-to-reach place for human empathy and tangible connection for inspiring behaviour changes to reduce climate change impacts. A healthy ocean is crucial for essential human activities ranging from transport, food, oxygen, CO2 absorption, recreation, and tourism. For a long time, designers have been engaged with designing for the ocean primarily through recreational and industrial equipment for fishing, tourism, transportation, and leisure. A new climate critical role for design is emerging which requires a strategic systems-based approach combined with more traditional design solutioning methods. We conducted a design research experiment using an AI sensor package installed on a ship to geolocate and identify objects across the Atlantic Ocean on a 6,070 nautical mile voyage between Kangerlussuaq in the Arctic Circle in Greenland and Poole in Dorset, UK. The motivation was to conduct a broad cross-sectional object identification scan using 4k cameras to capture ‘everything that isn’t the ocean’ to begin connecting the intangible ocean for co-designing solutions. The focus of this research is to identify theories and concepts of object-network relations that go beyond anthropocentric concerns to include more diverse stakeholders and multi-species representation and communication in future design work. We examine a range of theories from Actor Network Theory, Boundary Objects, Suffixscapes and Object Oriented Ontology to compare pre- and post-theorising with applied fieldwork to draw insights around liberating conceptual models. We conclude by discussing how we can enhance inclusive representation of ‘others’ into climate sensitive research and design driven decision-making processes