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Developing Support Technologies Integrating Multiple Perspectives to Create Assistance that People Really Want Athanasios Karafillidis

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Developing Support Technologies Integrating Multiple Perspectives to Create Assistance that People Really Want Athanasios Karafillidis Developing Support Technologies Integrating Multiple Perspectives to Create Assistance that People Really Want Athanasios Karafillidis Developing Support Technologies Integrating Multiple Perspectives to Create Assistance that People Really Want Athanasios Karafillidis

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Developing Support Technologies Integrating Multiple Perspectives to Create Assistance that People Really Want Athanasios Karafillidis download https://textbookfull.com/product/developing-support-technologies- integrating-multiple-perspectives-to-create-assistance-that- people-really-want-athanasios-karafillidis/ Download full version ebook from https://textbookfull.com
Biosystems & Biorobotics Athanasios Karafillidis RobertWeidner Editors Developing Support Technologies Integrating Multiple Perspectives to Create Assistance that People Really Want
Biosystems & Biorobotics Volume 23 Series editor Eugenio Guglielmelli, Campus Bio-Medico University of Rome, Rome, Italy e-mail: e.guglielmelli@unicampus.it Editorial Board Dino Accoto, Campus Bio-Medico University of Rome, Rome, Italy Sunil Agrawal, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA Fabio Babiloni, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy Jose M. Carmena, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA Maria Chiara Carrozza, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa, Italy Paolo Dario, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa, Italy Arturo Forner-Cordero, University of Sao Paolo, São Paulo, Brazil Masakatsu G. Fujie, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan Nicolas Garcia, Miguel Hernández University of Elche, Elche, Spain Neville Hogan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA Hermano Igo Krebs, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA Dirk Lefeber, Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium Rui Loureiro, Middlesex University, London, UK Marko Munih, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia Paolo M. Rossini, University Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Rome, Italy Atsuo Takanishi, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan Russell H. Taylor, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MA, USA David A. Weitz, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA Loredana Zollo, Campus Bio-Medico University of Rome, Rome, Italy
Aims & Scope Biosystems & Biorobotics publishes the latest research developments in three main areas: 1) understanding biological systems from a bioengineering point of view, i.e. the study of biosystems by exploiting engineering methods and tools to unveil their functioning principles and unrivalled performance; 2) design and development of biologically inspired machines and systems to be used for different purposes and in a variety of application contexts. The series welcomes contributions on novel design approaches, methods and tools as well as case studies on specific bioinspired systems; 3) design and developments of nano-, micro-, macrodevices and systems for biomedical applications, i.e. technologies that can improve modern healthcare and welfare by enabling novel solutions for prevention, diagnosis, surgery, prosthetics, rehabilitation and independent living. On one side, the series focuses on recent methods and technologies which allow multiscale, multi-physics, high-resolution analysis and modeling of biological systems. A special emphasis on this side is given to the use of mechatronic and robotic systems as a tool for basic research in biology. On the other side, the series authoritatively reports on current theoretical and experimental challenges and developments related to the “biomechatronic” design of novel biorobotic machines. A special emphasis on this side is given to human-machine interaction and interfacing, and also to the ethical and social implications of this emerging research area, as key challenges for the acceptability and sustainability of biorobotics technology. The main target of the series are engineers interested in biology and medicine, and specifically bioengineers and bioroboticists. Volume published in the series comprise monographs, edited volumes, lecture notes, as well as selected conference proceedings and PhD theses. The series also publishes books purposely devoted to support education in bioengineering, biomedical engineering, biomechatronics and biorobotics at graduate and post-graduate levels. About the Cover The cover of the book series Biosystems & Biorobotics features a robotic hand prosthesis. This looks like a natural hand and is ready to be implanted on a human amputee to help them recover their physical capabilities. This picture was chosen to represent a variety of concepts and disciplines: from the understanding of biological systems to biomechatronics, bioinspiration and biomimetics; and from the concept of human-robot and human-machine interaction to the use of robots and, more generally, of engineering techniques for biological research and in healthcare. The picture also points to the social impact of bioengineering research and to its potential for improving human health and the quality of life of all individuals, including those with special needs. The picture was taken during the LIFEHAND experimental trials run at Università Campus Bio-Medico of Rome (Italy) in 2008. The LIFEHAND project tested the ability of an amputee patient to control the Cyberhand, a robotic prosthesis developed at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa (Italy), using the tf-LIFE electrodes developed at the Fraunhofer Institute for Biomedical Engineering (IBMT, Germany), which were implanted in the patient’s arm. The implanted tf-LIFE electrodes were shown to enable bidirectional communication (from brain to hand and vice versa) between the brain and the Cyberhand. As a result, the patient was able to control complex movements of the prosthesis, while receiving sensory feedback in the form of direct neurostimulation. For more information please visit http://www.biorobotics.it or contact the Series Editor. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/10421
Athanasios Karafillidis • Robert Weidner Editors Developing Support Technologies Integrating Multiple Perspectives to Create Assistance that People Really Want 123
Editors Athanasios Karafillidis Laboratory of Manufacturing Technology Helmut Schmidt University/University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg Hamburg, Germany Robert Weidner Laboratory of Manufacturing Technology Helmut Schmidt University/University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg Hamburg, Germany and Chair of Production Technology University of Innsbruck Innsbruck, Austria ISSN 2195-3562 ISSN 2195-3570 (electronic) Biosystems & Biorobotics ISBN 978-3-030-01835-1 ISBN 978-3-030-01836-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01836-8 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018957639 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgements This book is one of the many outcomes of a project that started in the end of 2014 at Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg. The general objective of the project has been to gather expertise and knowledge for building technical support systems that people really want. This included a particular interest in physical support and the desire to overcome the predominant idea that automation and robotics unavoidably lead to a substitution of human labor. The proposal to fund interdisciplinary competence in the field of human– machine interaction to face demographic change by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) provided an occasion to think different about technology development and its future challenges. In effect, the project smartASSIST was established with the generous support of the BMBF (grant no. 16SV7114). The project executing organization VDI/VDE Innovation + Technik GmbH took care of the necessary formal frame and helped to build up a network of collegiate research groups that emerged out of this research grant. The scientific advisors of our project, Klaus Henning and Philine Warnke, provided many helpful comments and encouraged the whole team to flesh out our conceptual and tech- nological ideas. We are particularly indebted to Jens Wulfsberg, who hosts this project in his Laboratory of Manufacturing Technologies (Laboratorium Fertigungstechnik—LaFT), for providing the necessary research environment and for his steady trust in what we do. The idea to publish this volume harks back to the second transdisciplinary conference on “Support Technologies that People Really Want” held at Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg in December 2016. This book is a result of many discussions and exchange that happened during this conference (and beyond). We thank the university for supplying the necessary facilities and in particular the researchers, the staff, and all the other people who helped in one way or another to make it such a wonderful event. The process of compiling the book involves different dynamics, of course. Nothing of this work could have been done without all the authors who committed themselves to contribute to this volume. All of them are exceptional scholars, and we are grateful to have them in this book. v
Andreas Argubi-Wollesen gave helpful comments on the introduction(s) and the last chapter. Also, we appreciate the courage of Springer to publish this uncon- ventional book that spans multiple disciplines and perspectives. Interdisciplinarity depends essentially on finding the right people to build up an exceptional culture of collaboration. This is a substantial experience we made in the course of this project. Therefore, we owe special thanks to Andreas Argubi-Wollesen, Jonas Klabunde, Christine Linnenberg, Bernward Otten, Tim Schubert, and Zhejun Yao of smartASSIST who bring this kind of collaboration to life each day. Finally, we want to thank our families. All the research on support systems would not have been possible without these beautiful sociocultural and biophysical support systems that we both really want. Athanasios Karafillidis Robert Weidner vi Acknowledgements
Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Athanasios Karafillidis and Robert Weidner Part I Demands and Expectations Sociotechnical Assistance Ensembles. Negotiations of Needs and Acceptance of Support Technologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Peter Biniok Context-Integrating, Practice-Centered Analysis of Needs . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Kristin Paetzold Acceptance Through Adaptation—The Human and Technology in the Philosophical and Scientific-Historical Context of “Sinnfälligkeit”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Kevin Liggieri Biomechanical Analysis: Adapting to Users’ Physiological Preconditions and Demands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 Andreas Argubi-Wollesen and Robert Weidner Mass Survey for Demand Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Alexander Mertens, Katharina Schäfer, Sabine Theis, Christina Bröhl, Peter Rasche and Matthias Wille The Burden of Assistance. A Post-phenomenological Perspective on Technically Assisted World Relations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Bruno Gransche Part II Constructing and Construing Distinguishing Support Technologies. A General Scheme and Its Application to Exoskeletons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Robert Weidner and Athanasios Karafillidis vii
On Building Responsible Robots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 Janina Loh (née Sombetzki) Psychological Issues for Developing Systems for Older Users. . . . . . . . . 109 Rebecca Wiczorek Attention Models for Motor Coordination and Resulting Interface Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 Bettina Wollesen, Laura L. Bischoff, Johannes Rönnfeldt and Klaus Mattes The Challenge of Being Self-Aware When Building Robots for Everyday Worlds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 Andreas Bischof Engineering Collaborative Social Science Toolkits. STS Methods and Concepts as Devices for Interdisciplinary Diplomacy . . . . . . . . . . . 137 Peter Müller and Jan-Hendrik Passoth Part III Forms and Contexts of Deployment Support Technologies for Industrial Production. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 Robert Weidner, Bernward Otten, Andreas Argubi-Wollesen and Zhejun Yao Assistance Systems for Production Machines in the Textile Industry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Yves-Simon Gloy Interests and Side Effects in the Technicization of Geriatric Care . . . . . 163 Jannis Hergesell and Arne Maibaum Mobile Augmented Reality System for Craftsmen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 Kathrin Nuelle, Sabrina Bringeland, Svenja Tappe, Barbara Deml and Tobias Ortmaier Comprehensive Heuristic for Research on Assistance Systems in Organizational Contexts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 Daniel Houben, Annika Fohn, Mario Löhrer, Andrea Altepost, Arash Rezaey and Yves-Simon Gloy Human Motion Capturing and Activity Recognition Using Wearable Sensor Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 Gabriele Bleser, Bertram Taetz and Paul Lukowicz Soft Robotics. Bio-inspired Antagonistic Stiffening . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207 Agostino Stilli, Kaspar Althoefer and Helge A. Wurdemann viii Contents
Part IV Values and Valuation Musculoskeletal Simulation and Evaluation of Support System Designs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219 Jörg Miehling, Alexander Wolf and Sandro Wartzack Space-Game: Domestication of Humanoid Robots and AI by Generating a Cultural Space Model of Intra-action Between Human and Robot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229 Oliver Schürer, Christoph Müller, Christoph Hubatschke and Benjamin Stangl ROS-Based Robot Simulation in Human-Robot Collaboration. . . . . . . . 237 Paul Glogowski, Kai Lemmerz, Alfred Hypki and Bernd Kuhlenkötter User Acceptance Evaluation of Wearable Aids. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247 Christina M. Hein and Tim C. Lueth Extended Model for Ethical Evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257 Karsten Weber Legal Responsibility in the Case of Robotics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265 Susanne Beck Prospects of a Digital Society How Artificial Intelligence Changes the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277 Klaus Henning Support in Times of Digitization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285 Athanasios Karafillidis and Robert Weidner Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297 Contents ix
Contributors Andrea Altepost Institute for Textile Engineering, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany Kaspar Althoefer School of Engineering and Materials Science, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK Andreas Argubi-Wollesen Laboratory of Manufacturing Technology, Helmut Schmidt University/University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany Susanne Beck Faculty of Law, Leibniz University Hanover, Hanover, Germany Peter Biniok Sociologist, Berlin, Germany Andreas Bischof Junior Research Group “Miteinander”, Media Informatics, University of Technology Chemnitz, Chemnitz, Germany Laura L. Bischoff Institute of Human Movement Science, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany Gabriele Bleser Department of Computer Science, University of Kaiserslautern, Kaiserslautern, Germany Sabrina Bringeland Institute of Human and Industrial Engineering, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany Christina Bröhl Institute of Industrial Engineering and Ergonomics, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany Barbara Deml Institute of Human and Industrial Engineering, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany Annika Fohn Institute for Sociology, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany xi
Paul Glogowski Chair of Production Systems, Ruhr-University of Bochum, Bochum, Germany Yves-Simon Gloy Institute for Textile Engineering, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany Bruno Gransche Institute of Advanced Studies FoKoS, University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany Christina M. Hein Micro Technology and Medical Device Technology, Technical University of Munich, Garching, Germany Klaus Henning IMA/ZLW & IfU, P3 OSTO, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany Jannis Hergesell Department of Sociology, DFG Graduate School “Innovation Society Today”, Technical University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany Daniel Houben Institute for Sociology, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany Christoph Hubatschke Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria Alfred Hypki Chair of Production Systems, Ruhr-University of Bochum, Bochum, Germany Athanasios Karafillidis Laboratory of Manufacturing Technology, Helmut Schmidt University/University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany Bernd Kuhlenkötter Chair of Production Systems, Ruhr-University of Bochum, Bochum, Germany Kai Lemmerz Chair of Production Systems, Ruhr-University of Bochum, Bochum, Germany Kevin Liggieri Institute for Philosophy I, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany Janina Loh (née Sombetzki) Department of Philosophy, Philosophy of Technology and Media, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria Mario Löhrer Institute for Textile Engineering, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany Tim C. Lueth Micro Technology and Medical Device Technology, Technical University of Munich, Garching, Germany Paul Lukowicz German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Kaiserslautern, Germany xii Contributors
Arne Maibaum Department of Sociology, DFG Graduate School “Innovation Society Today”, Technical University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany Klaus Mattes Institute of Human Movement Science, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany Alexander Mertens Institute of Industrial Engineering and Ergonomics, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany Jörg Miehling Engineering Design, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen- Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany Christoph Müller Department for Architecture Theory and Philosophy of Technics, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria Peter Müller Munich Center for Technology in Society/Digital Media Lab, Technical University of Munich, München, Germany Kathrin Nuelle Institute of Mechatronic Systems, Leibniz University Hanover, Hanover, Germany Tobias Ortmaier Institute of Mechatronic Systems, Leibniz University Hanover, Hanover, Germany Bernward Otten Laboratory of Manufacturing Technology, Helmut Schmidt University/University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany Kristin Paetzold Institute for Technical Product Development, University of the Federal Armed Forces Munich, Neubiberg, Germany Jan-Hendrik Passoth Munich Center for Technology in Society/Digital Media Lab, Technical University of Munich, München, Germany Peter Rasche Institute of Industrial Engineering and Ergonomics, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany Arash Rezaey Institute for Textile Engineering, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany Johannes Rönnfeldt Institute of Human Movement Science, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany Katharina Schäfer Institute of Industrial Engineering and Ergonomics, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany Oliver Schürer Department for Architecture Theory and Philosophy of Technics, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria Benjamin Stangl Department for Architecture Theory and Philosophy of Technics, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria Contributors xiii
Agostino Stilli Department of Computer Science, University College London, London, UK Bertram Taetz Department of Computer Science, University of Kaiserslautern, Kaiserslautern, Germany Svenja Tappe Institute of Mechatronic Systems, Leibniz University Hanover, Hanover, Germany Sabine Theis Institute of Industrial Engineering and Ergonomics, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany Sandro Wartzack Engineering Design, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen- Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany Karsten Weber Institute for Social Research and Technology Assessment (IST), Ostbayerische Technische Hochschule (OTH), Regensburg, Germany Robert Weidner Laboratory of Manufacturing Technology, Helmut Schmidt University/University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany; Chair of Production Technology, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria Rebecca Wiczorek Department of Psychology and Ergonomics, Technical University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany Matthias Wille Institute of Industrial Engineering and Ergonomics, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany Alexander Wolf Engineering Design, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen- Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany Bettina Wollesen Institute of Human Movement Science, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany Helge A. Wurdemann Department of Mechanical Engineering, University College London, London, UK Zhejun Yao Laboratory of Manufacturing Technology, Helmut Schmidt University/University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany xiv Contributors
Introduction Developing. Support. Technologies. Athanasios Karafillidis and Robert Weidner The relationship of humans and technology has changed significantly during the last two decades. It has become closer and multiplex—that is, technology has moved closer to the human body and their interconnections have become entangled and diverse. In this vein, technology is envisioned as being able to support or assist human beingsmoreprofoundlythaneverbefore.Thischangehasoccurredincrementallyand is still in progress. It has led to a diversification of possible application areas, a shift in the landscape of innovation projects, and a different perception of technological possibilities in general. The reasons for this change are manifold. Big societal trends like globalization, individualization, disruptive technological innovations, and demographic pressures are no doubt important for explaining the change in human–technology relations. All of them push political agendas and channel research funds. But when it comes to an understanding of these transformations, they only yield a universal interpre- tive frame. The recently enforced closeness and multiplexity of human–technology relations are much better understood when taking into account the expanding con- nectivity, the distribution and increase of computational power, and the plummeting costs of material components and production. Their combination has a high impact on further technological possibilities, but also on the perceptions, needs, and expec- tations related to technology. However, this is still only a part of the story. The shift of the relevant relationships is not only a response to such technical or social pressures outside of innovation projects. It is also an inside job. The myriad micro-processes unfolding in the world’s A. Karafillidis (B) · R. Weidner Laboratory of Manufacturing Technology, Helmut Schmidt University/University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany e-mail: karafillidis@hsu-hh.de R. Weidner Chair of Production Technology, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria e-mail: robert.weidner@hsu-hh.de © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018 A. Karafillidis and R. Weidner (eds.), Developing Support Technologies, Biosystems & Biorobotics 23, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01836-8_1 1
2 A. Karafillidis and R. Weidner engineering laboratories, in thousands of projects, and in the corporations’ research and development departments day by day bring forth different and new relations of humans and technologies. Political claims, technological possibilities, funding interests, scientific progress, legal regulations, cultural images, or market-driven demands no doubt influence them deeply. But societal expectations and demands with regard to technology are themselves profoundly shaped by the very form of organization, the underlying beliefs, and the approaches used in the relevant projects. Thus, the internal reason, as it were, for the observable shift is the advent of a different style of developing technology. This book will argue that the idea of support dwells at the center of this shift. It has spawned technological devices that are conceptualized and built with the explicit intention to serve the needs of individuals at work and in everyday life. The objective of this volume is to expound how this is done in detail and what needs to be considered to be able to proceed in a successful as well as responsible way. Usually, this is considered as the domain of human–machine interaction (HMI). Yet this approach is not equipped to handle the practical, ethical, social, and also technical issues involved. The main lines of this classic program are confined to the interaction of separate units—albeit we are dealing with different forms of entan- glement already that blur habitual boundaries and give rise to hybrid entities. Thus, the crucial difference made by a technology that is expected to support, assist, or help people remains obscure when simply seen through the lens of HMI. In contrast, conceiving any human–machine or human–computer interaction and collaboration as support relation gives way to a new approach that certainly draws on the rich tradition of HMI but advances beyond its limitations. Up to now, discussions about support technologies—from autonomous robots to monitoring systems, wearables, and implants, both in forms of simple tools and complex gadgetry—are preoccupied with engineering issues. It is supposed that if the invented devices are intended to support people, they will do so automatically. This is misleading. No engineering and no design can stipulate the purpose of a device uniquely and unequivocally. A technical invention has to be understood as only one part of a wider support system that also comprises organizational, physical, ethical, legal, and cognitive components. Therefore, the future challenge in research, construction, implementation, and deployment of such systems is twofold. On the one hand, theories and concepts have to be developed accordingly in order to generate fresh, diverse, and surprising perspectives on the relevant problems. On the other hand, newmethods andforms of collaborationandevaluationarerequiredtointegrate and implement these ideas—in other words, to provide the requisite contexts in which they might grow and get the chance to be cherished and become successful. This book brings together scholars from heterogeneous disciplines and research fields like biomechanics, engineering, social science, psychology, law, and philoso- phy to meet this twofold challenge. It integrates both different conceptual perspec- tives and issues of interdisciplinary development in one volume and sometimes even within single chapters. Since it tries to account for the complex and intertwined tech- nical, social, cognitive, and ethical contexts of technology development and design, this volume gives an idea of how responsible research and innovation is currently
Introduction 3 realized in developing support technologies. Strictly speaking, the whole endeavor is not about bringing technology to the people. It is about finding ways to design and evaluate technology in tune with the people so that it finds its way to the them in the course of the process—and vice versa. *** “Developing Support Technologies” is not just some title for this book but rather signifies a research program in a nutshell. The following explanation of the ideas and associations of this title will unfold its main characteristics and substantiate the book’s main purpose as well as some of its contents and contentions. 1 Developing—A New Field, a Form of Design/Construction, and Transdisciplinarity “Developing Support Technologies” has a double meaning that must be considered. On the one hand, “developing” has an active meaning in the sense of bringing tech- nologies forth by designing/constructing, building, and evaluating them. This refers to the setting that there are teams of developers, mostly within departments of profit or non-profit organizations, who work on the implementation of concrete techni- cal solutions for certain specified applications and are preoccupied with managing technical uncertainties [Moh17, Ger15]. On the other hand, “developing” refers to a developing field, a new and therefore necessarily incomplete and sometimes fragile strand of technology and its accompanying societal and organizational uncertainties. This refers to support technologies as a developing area within society in general and engineering in particular [Ois10, Bin17]. The twofold understanding of the title unites the two scientific cultures of engi- neering on the one hand and the social sciences and humanities on the other. Depend- ing on their scientific background, people read the title in one of these two different meanings. The observable division of work between them does also transpire roughly along these lines. Social science and humanities are more focused on the develop- ing field or certain parts of it and ascertain the accompanying structures and their societal embeddings, while engineering pays more attention to finding feasible and reproducible technical principles that lead to viable, reliable, and tangible material results. Although this kind of division of labor and interest with regard to technol- ogy exists, these two groups of disciplines have been getting closer recently since it became obvious that support technologies need to function technically as well as socioculturally. A device that does not work in a technical sense will not be accepted, but a device that triggers fear or requires specialized knowledge or clothing will not “work” either—or will only be accepted under certain conditions or by particular groups. To be sure, this holds for any technology, but the advent of support tech- nologies (also called assistance technologies prematurely) has altered the relevant
4 A. Karafillidis and R. Weidner perspectives. The sociocultural embedding of technology has now become explicit. It is not only accounted for in hindsight but before and during development. The social sciences and humanities are now considered as an important part of the development process more frequently—many remaining obstacles notwithstanding [Vis15]. To develop technology proper has been and still is, to be sure, the work of engineers. They conceive, design, construct, test, and improve composite devices, machines, and systems until they meet the defined requirements. But when it comes to support technologies, this classic form of development is expanded. First, the focus on people with their impression on what counts and their expression of demands alters the technical search for suited materials, proper joints, or adequate program- ming and favors quickly adaptable devices and simple, intelligible controls. However, the requisite requirements can not be defined once and for all. They are refined and redefined during development on many levels [Suc07, p. 278]. Second, the sequence of development from conception to implementation is not fixed or linear anymore but supplanted by parallel and circular processes. Classic waterfall models of project management have not disappeared, but they fulfill a different function: They provide a rough orientation and legitimize the approach vis-à-vis third parties, like investors and funding agencies. Yet progress in the actual everyday work of research and devel- opment is not achieved by sticking to some plan. Mixing up the diverse structures and managing their dissonance allows for an organizational responsiveness [Sta09] that is part and parcel of developing support systems. Third, an augmentation of classic development occurs simply because many more diverse people are involved than before—with various disciplinary backgrounds but also without any academic inter- est: especially potential users, corporate groups, businesses, social media publics, and further stakeholders. In short, developing support technologies involve/involves participation, interdis- ciplinarity, and new organizational forms [Bro15]. The true concept for this threefold augmentation of classical development processes is transdisciplinarity: New forms of collaboration have to be found between various scientific disciplines and also between them and potential users, interested citizens, and project partners. To sum up, speaking of developing support technologies entails a double perspective and transdisciplinary approaches to collaboration. 2 Support—Different Forms, Structural Properties, and Antithesis to Substitution The term “support” might sound a little odd in times when most technologies in this vein are labeled as “assistive.” Most of the time these two are used synonymously, but their difference matters. In our conception, support is the generic term. Assistance and help are particular subcategories of support that require distinctive situational structures [Kar17]. Assistance occurs when a task is divided into subtasks and the situationally participating entities, e.g., human individuals and technical devices,
Introduction 5 are assigned different subtasks in a complementary fashion. Think of the assistant of a CEO or the assistant devices built into modern cars as examples of such a complementary form of support. A tool, in contrast, does not “assist” its user. Even just saying it sounds awkward. Yet there is no doubt that a tool provides support. Also, a mother does not “assist” her children but supports or even helps them wherever possible. Whether a gadget assists or helps is negotiable and proves to be crucial for its design and acceptance. An exoskeleton enabling a movement that otherwise would be impossible does not assist the individual but rather helps, because it is granted the control over the activity to constitute the movement after all—when help is understood as a form of support that passes the control of the activity in question to the helping entity. When a different exoskeleton is designed to decrease musculoskeletal stress, it supports an activity that could also be performed without it. In this case, neither exactly “help” nor “assistance” do apply for a proper characterization of the unfolding process. Still, it is providing support. Two general structural properties of support situations (comprising assistance and help) are observer dependence and asymmetric relations. If technology development is attentive to human needs and societal acceptance, it must not ignore that the provi- sion of support lies in the eye of the beholder. This concerns questions about who or what is supporting whom but also whether somebody is assigned support or rather asks for it. Interests, interpretations, and contextual conditions of the observing agen- cies (i.e., individuals, groups, organizations or other social systems, maybe robots) might lead either to a fierce rejection or to a passionate use of the support system. The other point in case is asymmetry. The development of support technologies must be aware that any support introduces some asymmetry between the supporting and the supported unit, which cannot simply be programmed and settled purposefully in advance [Suc07, pp. 268–269]. Which form of asymmetry prevails in the end can only be identified in frequent field tests and painstaking observation of real use cases in the wild. Often, the time factor of development projects thwarts such a thorough investigation. Yet, first steps into this direction can be clearly recognized. The impor- tance of iteration and external feedback for constructing both responsibly according to human demands and successfully with respect to acceptance has already been realized indeed—albeit there is still way to go for a wider acknowledgment. In addition to the distinction of different forms of support and the structural properties of support situations, there is a third significant aspect of the “support” component in the book title. Support is, as it were, the antithesis to substitution. Until recently, the sometimes hidden but mainly overt curriculum and objective of technology development has been automation, that is, the substitution of human workforce by machines. The reasons were economic in most cases, like increased productivity, effectivity, and efficiency but also better product quality, less mistakes, improved ergonomic conditions, and not least, to be sure, honorable ambitions to spare humans doing dangerous, risky, and strenuous work. Many positive effects of automation could be enumerated, and the downsides are also well known [For15, Car14]. It remains a moot point, whether the positive and negative aspects of automation balance each other or not. However, there is an
6 A. Karafillidis and R. Weidner intriguing issue that is more constructive in nature than any debates about loss or gain of jobs. It concerns less the paradoxes, glitches, or unintended effects of automation but rather its pragmatic and practical limits. Certainly, there are a lot of engineers and entrepreneurs who expect that someday any task and activity can be automated. Maybe they will be proven right some day, but this is not the case in point at all. The crucial question is, how we should invest our time and resources to find adequate solutions for the limits and problems we currently face. Engineering research in automation remains important and will no doubt con- tinue. But it should not happen in expense of finding solutions that integrate the skills and awareness of humans with suitable technology. It is important to note that this “integration” exceeds the ideas of interaction and collaboration prevailing in automation engineering. Investing in support technologies receives rightly more attention because when it comes to developing new technology, the substitutionalist paradigm has reached certain limits. Many tasks and activities will not be amenable to automation for a long time to come. For example, anybody who has experienced existing robots for elderly care does immediately recognize this. By implication, human beings will remain pivotal for value creation in plants as well as other for- mal organizations. Physical skills and human awareness will become even more important in future value chains. Whatever the hopes projected into some indetermi- nate future: with respect to complex assembly tasks, evaluation, sensorimotor skills, judgment, discretion, the recognition of opportunities, diversity, quick adaptabil- ity, heedful perception of weak signals, or situational awareness human beings will remain indispensable. In short, developing support technologies is/are contingent on a closer inspection of the structural conditions of support and their subtle nuances. Support is the proper answer to the practical limits of automation and to the substitution of human work. To sum up, developing support technologies entails to realize that the creation of value and values as well as the evaluation of situations and opportunities cannot abstain from cognition, that is, both awareness and sensorimotor skills. 3 Technologies—Innovation, Customization, and Modularity Support systems transcend mere technological devices that are devised to assist or support human activities. Yet, the focus on developing support technologies is crucial. Having a techno-material structure available or at least imagining some materially tangible device allows to summon all interested participants effectively [Sta89]. It provides a powerful pretense to think about the sociotechnical design of support systems. Other existing forms of support in society—like neighborhood help, emotional and financial support, or assistive functions in hierarchies—lack this summoning material “thing.” Presumably, this corresponds to the lack of studies that examine the internal structure of support situations more closely. Studies of “social
Introduction 7 support” [Hou88] have been preoccupied with structural conditions and individual effects of providing support and less with the inner functioning and patterning of support situations proper. Considering support from the perspective of technology urges new perspectives on structure and process of support in general. Technologies transcend isolated devices. They involve networks of people, skills, material things, certain knowledge, and particular stances to the world [Mac99]. The technical devices in these networks seem like reliable islands of functioning causality that are intimately integrated in a scaffolding of unreliable components. Thus, the concept of “techno-logy”—and not simply: “technics.” The Greek word logos implies a specific form of reason that accompanies the technics (though not necessarily philosophical reason as a universal). There is always a peculiar logic that pervades technical gadgets and their causal functioning. Next to this “grammar” of technology, there is also a pragmatic knowledge. The term techno-logy indicates that knowledge about construction principles, interaction, and handling is an integral part of its functioning. Finally, technologies are surrounded by a particular wording before, during, and after their development: for example, by justifications and poli- cies, the engineering and design parlance, or the typical marketing vocabulary. In this vein, techno-logy incorporates the syntax, pragmatics, and semantics of a causally constructed material structure that is expected to produce certain determined effects repeatedly and reliably [Ram07, p. 45]. Exactly this societal embedding of technologies also distinguishes mere inven- tions that constantly pop up in laboratories, garages, and institutions on the one hand and durable, accepted, and disseminated structures called innovations on the other [Ram10]. Any path to innovation needs to be paved through the muddy grounds of society. Previously, this has been done unconsciously and in passing. In devel- oping support technologies, this aspect is brought to mind explicitly and allows to account for it from the outset. This is not a guarantee for innovation and success but nonetheless gives new design options and some leverage in a process that has been considered stochastic so far. Technologies are both about products and production. To develop support tech- nologies means to develop products that people and organizations really want. At the same time, it means to develop technologies that are deployed in the production of products and become part of value chains and production processes—not only in the conventional sense of industrial production but also in the unconventional, generic sense of production, which includes the production of services and private DIY production. The switch to the idea of support tightens the intimate connection of these two aspects. One of the most salient effects of the support paradigm is the approaching of the human body by technology [Vis03]. This makes any technical product also acces- sible, deployable, and potentially beneficial for production processes, which are transformed in consequence. From there, new forms of technical products and even innovations can arise. The distant machine hall in which products are produced far removed from everyday life is losing the importance it had since the industrial rev- olution. The German term “Industrie 4.0,” cyber-physical systems, sociotechnical systems, or digitization of production are all expressions of this transformation. Cit-
8 A. Karafillidis and R. Weidner izen science, the democratization of production, or the character of the “prosumer” characterize the same issues from the opposite side. The same smart gadgets that are used in daily life are now integrated into organized work processes and production plants. An exoskeleton might help the residents of a nursing home to maintain some autonomy but can also be used by the personnel to manage their work load and reduce physical strain. Theproceeding(mass)customization of products canlikewisebelinkedtotheidea of support. The major response to customization demands is no doubt automation. Today, it is possible to specify the own preferences for a product online and to thereby trigger an automated process in some machine park to produce the desired product that is then automatically packaged and dispatched. Three issues are important in this scenario. First, support technologies need not necessarily operate in the proximity of human individuals. They can be distributed over time and space. Second, support does not necessarily preclude substitution. In the described case the customer is supported to design its own product (within certain limits) while the corporation substitutes human workforce. Third, there are moments in this automated process, for example, quality control, that are difficult to automate. Furthermore, there are also sectors where customization depends completely on human skill, for example, the construction and adaptation of prostheses, many forms of surgery, haircuts, all forms of nursery, or most products of construction industry, especially the completion of the interior. The people involved in such customization procedures are already supported by proper software or (smart as well as classical) tools but there is much more potential, in particular with respect to physical support. A last facet of this unfoldment of the volume title is the necessary plural of “technologies” in connection to support. It should have become clear that support itself cannot be automated. It is the customized product per se because it involves and generates hybrid entities that merge certain activities, human bodies, techni- cal devices, perceptions, norms, and social situations. That is, there will always exist many suitable support solutions for diverse activities and contexts—but also for seemingly identical activities and contexts. The latter points to another crucial engineering challenge in developing support technologies: to achieve adaptability and modularity. Since the hybrid combination of the human body, its perceptional capabilities, and technical equipment has to be considered as unique in every situa- tion, the standardization prospects are disappointing. Support technologies are thus drivers of devising new forms of technical adaptability to bodies, perceptions, and situations with the objective to form one integrated system. This adaptability can also be achieved by inventing modular solutions. Modular- ity, however, also refers to a more intriguing, though very challenging, aspect: the modularity and customization of support that is achieved by coupling different tech- nical systems which in turn requires the construction, standardization, and design of compatible interfaces for different components of support systems. That is, for example, various interfaces for signal and information transfer, energy transmission, physical contact surfaces, or handling and control. Both variability within interfaces and between interfaces are highly relevant.
Introduction 9 In short, support technologies are embedded in a whole apparatus of non-technical components and rely on them to function properly. Innovations come from finding a proper fit between all of these components. To sum up the consequence, developing support technologies pose/poses some challenges for engineering. They compel the profession to rethink the connection of products and production, to reconsider the relation of automation and customization, and to develop adaptable and modular systems as well as relevant interfaces that make them compatible. *** The contributions in this book display the diversity of the people, disciplines, and topics in this field of research. Not all of the above aspects of the presented research program are discussed in this publication. However, the diversity is explicit, and its management is not an easy task. This includes the editing of the book. We selected distinguished scholars that are not only experts in their respective field but who additionally have some experience with participatory and interdisciplinary research projects regarding technology development for support. As editors we had a general concept for the book in mind and targeted the relevant researchers to send us articles treating a particular subfield, presenting subject-specific views on support systems, or reporting about deployment contexts from the perspective of their expertise. The chapters that made it into the book are grouped into four major parts: “De- mands and Expectations,” “Constructing and Construing,” “Forms and Contexts of Deployment,” and “Values and Valuation.” They are followed by two concluding chapters that discuss some prospective further developments of (support) technolo- gies. The four parts represent main clusters of research activities in developing sup- port technologies. They seem to form a sequence, but this is owed to the book format only. More likely, they set up a circular process. Starting with a demand analysis seems natural, but there are already valuations in place or earlier prototypes that lead to certain demands. Furthermore, all of these activities run concurrently in relevant projects and permanently influence each other. This implies that none of these dis- crete yet interfaced “stages” is ever completed as long as the project unfolds. Demand analysis is an ongoing concern in the development of support technologies as are valuation, construction, and deployment. The main ideas framing each subsection and short introductions to the individual chapters are given in brief introductory notes at the beginning of the book parts. Due to the just mentioned circularity and simultaneity of the empirical processes, there are overlaps. Some of the articles could appear in more than one subsection. Yet there are good reasons to arrange them this way. One of the editorial decision premises in this respect has been to demonstrate the multiplicity of perspectives within each research cluster as represented by the subsections of this volume. We have decisively refrainedfrommakingspecialsectionsfor,e.g.,science,engineering,andhumanities. There are no leading disciplines in any of the research areas for developing support technologies. ***
10 A. Karafillidis and R. Weidner The papers collected here come from many different disciplines. The volume contains inputs from biomechanics, engineering, information science, philosophy, psychology, and the social sciences—to name only the most generic denominations and sparing the internal specializations. Each of the chapters cherishes its own ter- minology and quirkiness. All of them, however, can also be read by researchers who are not familiar with the subject-specific debates of the disciplines. The language they use is generally intelligible. Despite that, no article is able to deny its origin and background. Such a denial or disguise of disciplines would have been detrimental to the idea of this book. A seminal reference between disciplines is only possible when the difference between them is retained and accepted. Certainly,tosomeextentthisbookdisplaysthepersonal,regional,andinstitutional networks of the editors and their research group. But this Central European bias is not simply accidental. The transdisciplinary research community on technical support systems is actually prevalent in Central Europe. This may be due to research policy decisions or some other factors not yet explored. In the end, it may be just our ignorance. But there is no doubt that an international publication putting the common thread of these multiple perspectives on developing support technologies into focus is overdue. In this respect, this book is also an appeal asking for further international communication and collaboration in this developing research field—and also an appeal to prove us wrong that the form of transdisciplinary research on support technologies as expounded in this introduction is mainly happening in Europe (see, however, [Ois10] and [San14] with similar ambitions). Any further information and suggestions are welcome by the editors as well as all of the contributors. This collection and arrangement of research papers is not the classic “how to” book. It contains reflections and descriptions of the different processes that accom- pany any development of support technologies. Its effect is a change in perspective and this generates, then again, we hope, a plethora of ideas how to approach and implement one’s own projects. Therefore, it is a book of research in two respects. First, it allows to observe and thus research how support technologies are developed; and second, it gives some leverage to do research based on these suggestions and experiences from others. References [Bin17] Biniok, P., & Lettkemann, E. (Eds.). (2017). Assistive Gesellschaft. Multidisziplinäre Erkundungen zur Sozialform “Assistenz”. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. [Bro15] Brown, R. R., Deletic, A., & Wong, T. H. F. (2015). How to catalyse collaboration. Nature, 525, 315–317. [Car14] Carr, N. (2014). The glass cage. How our computers are changing us. New York: W. W. Norton. [For15] Ford, M. (2015). Rise of the robots. Technology and the threat of a jobless future. New York: Basic Books. [Ger15] Gerke, W. (2015). Technische Assistenzsysteme. Vom Industrieroboter zum Roboterassis- tenten. Berlin et al.: Walter de Gruyter.
Introduction 11 [Hou88] House, J. S., Umberson, D., & Landis, K. R. (1988). Structures and processes of social support. Annual Review of Sociology, 14, 293–318. [Kar17] Karafillidis, A. (2017) Synchronisierung, Kopplung und Kontrolle in Netzwerken. Zur sozialen Form von (technischer) Unterstützung und Assistenz. In P. Biniok & E. Lettkemann (Eds.), Assistive Gesellschaft (pp. 27–58). Wiesbaden: Springer VS. [Mac99] MacKenzie, D. & Wajcman, J. (Eds.). (1999). The social shaping of technology (2nd ed.). Buckingham: Open UP. [Moh17] Mohammed, S., Park, H. W., Park, C. H., Amirat, Y., & Argall, B. (2017). Special issue on assistive and rehabilitation robotics. Autonomous Robots, 41(3), 513–517. [Ois10] Oishi, M. M. K., Mitchell, I. A., & Van der Loos, H. F. M. (Eds.). (2010). Design and use of assistive technologies. Social, technical, ethical, and economic challenges. New York et al.: Springer. [Ram07] Rammert, W. (2007). Technik – Handeln – Wissen. Zu einer pragmatischen Technik- und Sozialtheorie. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag. [Ram10] Rammert, W. (2010). Die Innovationen der Gesellschaft. In J. Howaldt & H. Jacob- sen (Eds.), Soziale Innovation. Auf dem Weg zu einem postindustriellen Innovationsparadigma (pp. 21–51). Wiesbaden: VS Verlag. [San14] Sankai, Y., Suzuki, K., & Hasegawa, Y. (Eds.). (2014). Cybernics. Fusion of human, machine and information systems. Springer Japan. [Sta89] Star, S. L., & Griesemer, J. R. (1989). Institutional ecology, ‘translations’ and boundary objects: amateurs and professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–1939. Social Studies of Science, 19, 387–420. [Sta09] Stark, D. (2009). The sense of dissonance. Accounts of worth in economic life. Princeton: Princeton UP. [Suc07] Suchman, L. (2007). Human-machine reconfigurations. Plans and situated actions (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge UP. [Vis03] Viseu, A. (2003). Simulation and augmentation: Issues of wearable computers. Ethics and Information Technology, 5, 17–26. [Vis15] Viseu, A. (2015). Integration of social science into research in crucial. Nature, 525, 291.
Part I Demands and Expectations Technology is pervaded by narratives that justify the effort of their development. A permanent feature of such inevitable narratives is the presentation of technical solutions as responses to some demand or need. This feature is reflected, for example, in the “motivation” of engineers or in the well-known requirement specifications. Yet it makes a difference where the recounted demands come from. Most ideas still emerge out of what is technically feasible and then look for external demands to which they appear as an answer. To be sure, this does not mark a problem per se. Such a technology-driven practice has its own edge. But starting with an analysis of situated and domain-specific demands, no doubt makes a dif- ference—in particular when acceptance is an issue. Developing technical systems in response to demands is the first and crucial step to increase the probability of their acceptance. Demands of potential users and stakeholders can be surveyed by observing people and practices, body movements and task environments, routines and interactions. Various methods exist to get the requisite observations, e.g., diverse interview techniques, experimental setups in the laboratory, participant observation, field tests, or ethnographies. To yield an expedient input for engineering, the gathered data is used to reconstruct the multiple conditions of work and life, in which the contrived technology is to be integrated. Potentials, possibilities, and risks of a support technology entering the users’ worlds can be induced from there. Although demand analysis is rightly understood to mark the beginning of some project, it is also important to realize that it is an ongoing accomplishment. Demands and needs are not stable but shift in time. They change when a prototype comes into play, when technology is utilized or deployed in other contexts, or after it is evaluated and further optimized. All in all, demands—including needs, acceptance, and usability issues—repre- sent the expectations in the relevant field and explain its dynamics. The expecta- tions of stakeholders are heterogeneous and do often differ from those of the prospective users, and both in turn differ from those of the involved journalists, managers, or politicians. Any analysis of demands (and thus acceptance) is
Discovering Diverse Content Through Random Scribd Documents
Chapter 20 GHOST VOICES Roger’s mind was more at ease. He had seen Mr. Clark pocket the gem for which they substituted their Eye of Aum. Outside the rock door as they emerged from the fissure leading down from the temple, he had seen the man’s hand pull it from his pocket and fling it away. “That’s no good,” the jeweler helping Doctor Ryder had chuckled. Definitely, in Roger’s mind, Potts had found that cast- away imitation. He had not gone back through the tunnel! “Exonerated,” he said, cheerfully, and they brushed a finely pulverized compound over the note, seeking to bring into relief the possible finger-prints thereon. Several faint smudges showed, and Potts made a photographic exposure, also using chemicals, with other takes, to bring up possible marks, erasures and so on. Roger left him at his work, at a call from Astrovox, the scientific student of planetary vibration who had been a side-show astrologer. Joining the plump, bald-headed little man, close to sixty, whose deep-set, shaggy-browed blue eyes twinkled with
132 inward cheerfulness, Roger helped him rig up his seemingly crazy idea of a vibra-spectra-telegraph-o- scope. That was what Roger mentally named it. The man wanted to catch the possible vibrations of higher and lower frequencies than light range. He also wished the various colors showing in a star ray to tell whatever spectrum bands it might contain. Besides, he had to hold this apparatus trained on a desired planet or star, by use of a mechanical movement that enabled him, through a transit’s hairlike “sight” to follow a star as the earth revolved. Furthermore, he wished photographs and a sort of seismographic tape recording of vibration frequencies. The nine-power telescope he had to be satisfied with was set up to poke its outer lens up through the skylight over the supply room. All around the smaller, adjoining, partitioned place formerly made notable because of the vanishing rats and the strange voices, he had cages of mice, squirrels and rabbits, under rays from electrical, and other forms of vibration. In hot-house “frames” or small beds under glass he kept living plants, with color-filters straining the light playing on them, to test reaction to heat, light and color. One bed, under a brownish glass, Roger noticed, had thin, stringy, sickly vegetation in it. In one under a short-wave irradiation treatment, plants thrived. In tiny flat, glass-protected trays, specimens of cell- cultures in tubes, and sections of living plant tissue were being exposed.
133 “Guess we’ll have to clean out the far corner,” Astrovox suggested, “I dumped all the wrappings there. Might start a fire.” Approaching to help, he finished his sentence with a chuckle. Roger nodded, and gathered up the papers, making a fine rattle in the process. A glow-bulb lighted in the interconnected tell-tale panel as a small bell rang. Roger, glancing at the panel, saw that the summons was from the electrical division downstairs. He went to the head of the steps. “Want me?” “Yes,” answered the voice of Professor Millman, electrical engineer. “We’re going to make a flat-table recording. I don’t just see where we get power for the motor from.” “Right down close under the recording machine table,” Roger called down his information. “You’ll see an outlet set into the floor.” “Oh—thanks, yes. I see.” Roger went back to help Astrovox. “Can’t risk it, with all the chemicals, and combustible stuff,” he answered the former phrases of the old astrologer. “Not with Neptune, the planet, in opposition to Saturn and with Mars opposing Uranus,” the old man chuckled.
134 Roger looked as if he did not see the point. “In our belief that the planetary positions influence chemical reactions—and all life is chemical, or, at least electro-chemical,” he was told, “we use the known planets as symbols for forces of nature. Saturn, you might say, stands for cohesion—or, better, say for crystallization, because Saturn makes gravity possible, makes density in our earth by cohering its quintrillions of atoms. “Mars we could say is a symbol for the combustion engendered by fire, the same as Uranus is, in a way, a symbol of explosiveness, and Neptune seems to represent a sort of disintegration, diffusion and slow separation of atoms, not by explosion but by attrition.” To Roger it was all pretty much like Egyptian hieroglyphics but the man seemed to be talking what he considered sensible phrases. “Let us say that we place a pellet of putty between two machines, one engendering a force like repulsion; the other giving quick, and very high-frequency stabs of current toward the other. The answer might be that the pellet would explode or fly into its atoms. “But,” the old man went on, “The force of cohesion would hold our earth together in such an experiment, though the volume or size of the tiny pellet would be too little for it to act on sufficiently to keep the form together. That, in a way, is what so many people misunderstand when they talk about astrology. Properly used, correctly interpreted, it enables us to understand our reactions—emotions——”
135 Roger was in the next room, loading the papers on the dumb-waiter to send to the cellar. As he came back, gathering up more, Astrovox, as if he had ranted along on his favorite topic without ceasing, said: “—fire.” He stood up. “Where were you? I was telling about Mars and Uranus exploding things and starting fires.” “I have to work.” “Yes, that’s so. Well, this is your last load.” Roger gathered the great heap of heavy wrapping paper, and left him shifting one bed of plants from under a deep ruby glass so that they would be exposed to a pale green color filtration. Going down to remove the papers from the dumb- waiter, Roger saw Mr. Millman finish recording the multitude of gyrations of a sparking motor shaft which Mr. Ellison was photographing with his camera. “We are going to count the sparks,” he told Roger, “just to check up on the speedometer attached to the flywheel, which Millman says is off-count by hundreds of revolutions to the minute.” “I’ll take the record up and have it made ready for a slow playback. I’m going up anyway.” He turned it over to Potts as the note had been thoroughly revealed in all his exposures, and had shown no identifying finger-marks. Roger went back to Astrovox, and became deeply interested in the latter’s plans for night study of the
136 spectra of stars. “I wonder if your cousin would arrange for one of his men to stay part of the night with me, to take down my data?” “We can set up a dictograph, and let you talk it onto a record.” “That would do.” “Or—we could mike down from here to one of our magazine-recorders that puts a new record on the spindle of the turntable when the other has been used up. That would run you for hours, if you’d stop it in between dictating periods.” The thing was arranged and Roger, before going home, demonstrated the mechanism and was sure the old man understood its operation. Because of the threat implied in the forged note, Grover gave Potts instructions to transfer from Doctor Ryder’s rooms the mechanisms he wanted to have installed for Roger’s protection. With a changed switch operated only from inside the room, the former ease of operation by others, he thought, was eliminated. Roger, tired by celebration and resuming work, retired early, being sure that his switch was set, his room theoretically a sealed place. Sleep came. Rest, though was disturbed by weird dreams. Sometimes, he knew, dreams had outward causes stimulating them, as happens if a draft on exposed
137 limbs makes one dream of riding on a sled and falling into a snow bank in howling wind. His dream of a burglar, as he awakened and looked rather fearfully around, made him grin, though. That room had been sealed by no one other than himself! But a low, humming whine made him certain that machinery was in operation—the hum of the recorder motor. He located it. Proved it. Shutting off the device in case some jar had started it, he went to test his door. But he recalled that the motor still ran. To his dismay, the door was not merely unsealed. It stood ajar. Suddenly, startlingly, from behind him, his table radio spoke, in a thin, strained, bizarre cry. “Fire!” and he heard, faintly, the crackle of flames. Then an uncanny silence, dreadful by contrast, came. He spied around the hall. It, too, was silent. He tiptoed down to the library, telephoned the laboratory, and got no reply. Once again—something was wrong—in two places! He must go to that laboratory. Grover should have answered—or Tip—or Astrovox!
Chapter 21 TRAGEDY! Half way to the laboratory, Roger pulled up in his stride, half ready to laugh at his stupidity. A joke? Of course. Potts, on Grover’s instructions, had made the room installation. To “get back” at his chum for the suspicion about the Eye of Om, the handy man could have made that “Fire” cry on a record, could have known how to break a light beam. He, alone, could have prepared the impregnable place so that it might be entered, it seemed to Roger. A recording, he also knew, was the other end of a reproduction. To print a sound-track on a disk, one used a microphone; its diaphragm sent vibrations through a selenium cell and other apparatus until it actuated the recording diamond: to play it back, the process was reversed. The use of the diamond, instead of a smooth reproducing needle on a hardened surface, could cause that high, thin, scratchy voice. “But Cousin Grover was not at home,” his mind prompted, “and the door was open, and the light would not work. The lab. telephone was dead, too!”
138 Perhaps Potts had tried a joke; but it seemed as if it had turned into a warning, a summons; because, when he reached the building, the door was not secured, no protective beam had been set; and in the main office, he smelt the sharp, acrid odor of burned powder. A gun must have been fired in there, he reasoned. By whom? For what? His mind raced to terrifying impressions. Explosion! Shot! The place was jet-dark. As he investigated he decided that odor was strongest close to the interviewing desk, pungent enough to choke him. Into the larger main room he made his way, finding the powder odor was less strong beyond the main office as he switched on lights and took broader observations. On the large desk used for interviewing visitors he saw that the framed photograph of his aunt, Grover’s sister, had been knocked down, and lay on its face. An inkwell, in a pool of black on the floor beyond the desk, was shattered into large fragments, and tiny bits. He stood still, and shouted. “Tip! Tip! Potiphar Potts! Tip!” Getting no answer he raced across the chemical section to the man’s small quarters. The bed had been used, its covers had been thrown back, as if in haste. No Potts, as once before, stood tied to the bedpost. The room was empty.
139 He shouted for Astrovox, feeling a strange desire to laugh at the sound of the name when it was shouted. “Astro—vox!” He called for his cousin. Then, with every light going, in spite of queer terrors, Roger made a thorough search of the lower floor. That brought no result. Nothing seemed to have been moved and as far as he could tell the safe was all right and the device that now made it sink into a channel in the cellar, so that a steel plate could slide over and make it impregnable, seemed to be in working condition. Reluctantly, forcing his dragging feet, he crept upstairs. No one was in sight. The old star-gazer was gone also! Roger stood, uncertainly glancing around. Had this been tragedy? A shot? At whom? Where were the rest? Of a sudden the threat in the note became his uppermost thought. Had someone—or something!— drawn the rest away, and lured him there? Roger, nervously, glanced around him. The innocent squirrels and rabbits and mice curled up in their temporary respite from the ray-baths. The machines set up earlier hummed quietly, recording, slowly moving the telescope, casting spectra of a star’s light in bands of greenish-brown, yellow and indigo on a flat paper-table. Everything seemed innocent enough.
140 But where, he mused, had the scientific star-student gone to? Where was Cousin Grover? And, above all, where was Tip, one out of all of them who ought to have been on duty, if not asleep. Roger glanced up at the clock. Not five, but two, was the hour toward which the smaller hand was dropping as the minute hand marked the quarter-of. It had been “fire” that his record had screeched at him. But there was no fire here! Roger began to feel somewhat like a person flying in an airplane for the first time, seeing everything else swinging beneath him, and feeling no movement himself. It made him sickish. “Am I out of my mind?” he asked himself. “Is this a dream?” There must be some loose end of this amazing situation that he could get hold of, to reel in the story and steady his rapidly failing sense of reality. The sound-camera! It had been running perhaps, till its roll of non-flam film was done. It might tell him something. Feverishly he got pyro, acid and the sodas into the developing water. He did not stop even for distilled
141 water but took tap fluid. He immersed the hurriedly rubber-wrapped celluloid. As it stayed the required fifteen or eighteen minutes, he went over the lab. again, finding no more than before. He took out the roll, dipped it into hypo-acid fixing solution, and impatiently watched its opaque yellowish high-lights slowly dissolve and lose the un-needed silver salts, to clear into transparency as grays and blacks became more evident. Hastily washing the film, he unreeled an end, held it up under a light, to see if the sound-track at one side carried any shadows. There was a recording! Feverishly, forgetting his terrors, he raced to the projector in the screening room. Carefully in spite of haste he threaded the wet “stock” over the sprocket, down through the film gate, over another sprocket and clipped the end to the take-up reel. He snapped on the light. At proper speed, and sorry that he must harm the wet emulsion, but eager to hear its story, he ran his find. The picture was that of the upper room, narrowed down onto the various activities of the old star-reader. The first was a take of his rabbits as they scampered about under a change of ray-lamps. Then came the brief time-exposures of tabulations, preserved thus.
142 But nowhere, except for natural sounds, the squeak of mice when a movement of a high-frequency ray cast it upon them—the chatter of the squirrels—ordinary lab. sounds of moving feet and muttered words by the old man, did Roger hear what he sought—enlightenment. He was near the end of the reel, about to give up, when his ears sent a message that snapped his muscles into taut tension. “Hear me. I am The Voice of Doom!” He saw, in the picture, the astrologer wheel and stare. He saw him turn and run out of view. Then, with scream subsiding in moan, the Voice of Doom repeated its earlier moaning, ending in the grind and sudden cessation. The film, unnoticed, ran out of the gate, and the magazine clicked to the slap of its still revolving free end. Roger let it run on. He had discovered a strange clue! Once coming from a deserted room, and once spoken on a record that had been considered blank, and then a third time from a record that had been set to catch sound in Doctor Ryder’s home, had come that same Voice of Doom, the identical moaning and grating. In reality, in the heart of Tibet, Roger had also heard that sound. And in Tibet, the rock that cut off the sound had made no noise as its counterweight allowed it to shut out the wind that made the moans as it howled across the
Himalayas and up through tunnel and whistling Buddha’s hollow cavities! Even as he made his startling realization, Roger heard a bell. It came from the office telephone. He dashed down the stairs, cutting out the projector as he ran by. “Hello!——” A voice came, thin with distance. “That you, Rog’?” “Yes. Tip—at the lab. Where are you?” “Hunting Grover.” “Where did he go?” “To find the star-man.” “And why did he leave?” “He was—took!” “Do you—does Grover—think he was—was in danger— hurt?” “We don’t know. You stay there. I’ll keep in touch.” The connection broke off sharply. From behind him a voice addressed Roger.
143 “Follow me—and be silent!” There stood the Lama from the Tibetan lamasery. Two others, also. Wordless, helpless, Roger moved: they closed in behind him. The night swallowed the quartet.
144 Chapter 22 WHAT HAPPENED TO THE EYE OF OM They allowed Roger to lock up the laboratory; but he had not been permitted to re-set the rays or other protective devices. That did not concern him overmuch. Roger knew that the safe protection was a separate circuit from those he had cut out when he had unfastened the door on arriving. Besides, he told himself triumphantly, he had recalled the camera fixed in the small decorative panel over the interviewing chair, so arranged that it would photograph a short time exposure of the office and of anyone there. Used to make records of visitors on their arrival with new propositions, as well as a night protection and recorder for the office, it had been operated by Roger, with good presence of mind, when his captors had entered. Whoever came there later would be able to develop the picture he had left recorded. He had not used the continuous mechanism, but his one photograph would reveal him and the Tibetan trio. A taxi, taking them to some unknown district, was further cause for triumph. The taxi, from a nearby stand, had been used before by the laboratory people. Its driver knew him, though he gave no sign.
145 Roger meant to act in such a way that the man, discharging his fare and being paid, would suspect something wrong, return to the laboratory, or consult the police. At a quiet, small hotel, the machine stopped. Roger, with hands clasped behind his back, made gestures; waggling his fingers to attract the taximan’s notice, then touching himself and clenching his fist. “Thanks, feller,” the man took his fare, and added, to show Roger he was “wise,” “That science place brought me a good tip. Guess I better go back and see about more good fares there.” Instead of causing a commotion as they passed the drowsy office clerk, Roger let things stand as they were, and was taken up to a quiet suite where the two guards placidly watched him while the Lama telephoned from another room. After a while, returning, the man ushered in—Grover. “How did you come here?” cried Roger. “So they got you.” “But you shouldn’t——” “I didn’t exactly walk into a trap, Roger. The Chief of Police knows where I came in answer to a note handed me while I was trying to trace Astrovox. If I do not telephone within an hour, somebody will come to see what’s what.” He explained what Roger had not known (after hearing the strange events of the opened door, the screeching
146 table radio and seeing the smoke-filled office). “I stayed to watch Astrovox make spectra-graphs of color bands,” Grover explained, “sending Tip here to be on guard. An excited call seeming to come from him brought me to the house just as a note he got started him to the laboratory. We passed, not knowing. I found your safeguards apparently working, and returned. Potts was trying to reassure the star-gazer who had heard that Voice of Doom. But Tip was frightened also. We sent the astrologer to lie down on Tip’s bed, while we investigated. He came back to us after a few minutes saying he was too much upset to stay there. He thought the Tibetans had involved him in some manner.” Tip, it appeared, had agreed to go along to be sure the man got going and reached home safely. Tip had bidden him wait, in the chemical section, while he went to his own room to get a weapon for safety’s sake. “I suppose he must have heard something or started into the office, Roger. At any rate, suddenly, we heard the shot. I was down those stairs in a bound, and beat Tip by ten feet getting in where the smoke still hung in the air.” “It was strong when I got there.” “But the office was empty. I told Potts to stay, and ran out. A man, strolling, had stopped. I asked if he had seen a man go out and he pointed up the street, and like most of those night-prowlers he tried to avoid the light and hid his face with his hat brim. He was fairly short and stoutish, but it wasn’t Astrovox. I ran, and thought I saw the star-gazer further along; but it was
not our man. I suppose Tip, worried, came to look for me. You say the wires were silent.” He was stopped by the arrival of Tip who had been lured, as he had, by a note delivered by a boy; and almost on his heels came Clark and Doctor Ryder, fuming and puzzled and anxious. They were given no time to exchange words. The Lama spoke: “We want the sacred relic, the Eye of Om.” “It is in the Buddha’s head,” Roger said earnestly, “I saw this man put it there.” “He tells the truth,” Clark declared. “To prove it,” Roger hurried on, “the prongs work open when you press the Buddha’s third left finger straight in and then back.” The Lama stared. “And to furthermore prove it and make it inadmissible ——” “Incontrovertible, Tip means,” said Grover. “—I went back, later, to take wedges out of the lower lever, after we beat your trick tunnel, and picked up the Imitation that Rog’ tells me Mister Clark throwed away. I carried it as far as Bombay, and figured it wasn’t worth anything anyhow, so I left it in the waste-basket in the hotel room.” The Tibetan lama stared at him sternly.
147 “That was but an imitation. It was the one taken out that I demand, from the boy who must know where it is.” “But—I tell you!” Roger was earnest, “I saw Mister Clark exchange the false one. And he dropped the one taken out into his coat, and when we got out of the tunnel and closed the rock, he threw it away, saying it wasn’t any use. Tip, here, found that!” The lama shook his head. “The Eye of Om is not in its socket!” A sudden thought came to Mr. Clark. With a cry of dismay he told them his startling idea. “It must be that in the excitement, meaning to exchange the imitation for the real—to put back what rightfully belonged there and protect my friend, Doctor Ryder, I must have mixed the gems, and instead of replacing the false one with the real one, I must have put the false one back, and really threw away the true Eye.” “Then—I throwed it away in Bombay.” The lama considered the statement made by Tip. “If any of you speak falsely,” he said, slowly, “you who speak so shall hear the Voice of Doom and shall feel the Wrath of the Hand of Doom.” With that threat he bade them depart.
148 Chapter 23 THE ACID TEST “Oh, no you don’t,” Grover spoke for the first time during the interview, “there is a matter of a vanished scientific student of the stars, a shot prior to his disappearance, and other things.” The lama turned toward his aides. Grover, as Roger and Potts sidled close, smiled. “An hour and ten minutes has elapsed since I arrived,” he remarked, pleasantly, cool and slightly triumphant, “I would not be surprised—yes, there they are.” The police car, sent by the Chief of Police, brought two patrolmen and as a frightened clerk ushered them in, the lama shrugged. Captor became prisoner, and with his pair of native aides, the lama was taken to the laboratory by the interested officers. There, as Grover’s car discharged its crowd of former captives, Roger was able to reward the taximan who had faithfully read his signal and who was waiting with a patrolman to be assured that all was well there before going to the address the taximan had noted.
149 “I knew this joint was lucky,” the taximan chuckled, pocketing a pleasing tip, “Hope all stays well—but if it doesn’t—I’ll be handy.” While Tip was sent to develop camera films from various devices which had been set off during the exciting developments, Roger was busy assembling the ingredients for an experiment which Grover meant to conduct, in order to learn which of the people there had held the pistol that might have harmed old Astrovox— that had certainly been fired in the office. To their surprise as they brought together the necessary chemicals and Roger got out plaster-of-Paris from his stock-room, with highly refined paraffin, the star electrician, Ellison, arrived. “What brings you here at five in the morning?” Grover stared at him with a degree of suspicion. “I have been working out theories about our queer situation,” declared the electrical specialist, “I could not sleep, because Clark had told me all about his experiences with Roger in Tibet, and I was of the opinion that Roger might be in danger.” “I told him how they had captured you,” Clark said, as Roger recalled that they had worked together in India on power-construction, so that there was nothing to fix suspicion on them in thus having a reunion after Clark’s return. “I went to your home,” he told Grover. “Roger’s room was open, his aunt was greatly disturbed because you were also absent.” Naturally, he had come to the laboratory.
150 While he softened the paraffin, Roger told him their adventures. “Now,” Grover told the absorbed patrolmen, and a detective who had come, by Police Chief’s order, from Headquarters, “here is a dodge that some police departments have tried, and it will interest you.” Roger assembled on the interviewing desk his heater for a great lot of the wax, held in a crucible over the electric stove. In a large glass container he mixed, according to a formula dictated by Grover, nitric acid and other chemicals, which discretion suggests should not be mentioned here. “The purpose of this experiment,” Grover said, “is to learn which hand, if any among us, held, and discharged the weapon. That seems to be the simplest way to narrow down investigation. Once we know our culprit, he must reveal where Astrovox is, what happened.” The very modern experiment, the police saw, was based on the fact that the charges used in modern pistol projectiles form, during combustion, gases which leave marks on any hand discharging the bullet. Grover explained his procedure. “The gases blow back sufficiently to mark the hand,” he stated. “If our test is made within five days after such an occurrence, the test will reveal it. “I will be first. Roger will take the wax, properly softened, and at a temperature around one hundred and fifteen degrees, Fahrenheit, not hot enough to
151 scald, will pour it over and will mould it around my hand.” Roger carried out the action as it was described. “The paraffin, now cooling, at a point where it is hard enough to hold its shape, is taken off.” This, also, Roger carried out carefully, securing a sort of cast with the shape of the hand moulded inside it. This, as Grover talked, Roger carefully placed in the chemical solution, and they all watched in absorbed attentiveness. “If my hand has discharged any weapon or in any other way has gotten the peculiar gases of powder combustion on it, within the past five days, the acid and solution will bring up the stains as bluish discolorations on the wax.” No such spots appeared. Although a tedious operation to carry out for the Tibetan trio, and then, by their own insistence, for Doctor Ryder, Clark, Tip and Roger, the results in each case held them in suspense until there was clear exoneration of all. “But Ellison hasn’t submitted yet,” said Tip, suddenly. “Because I have handled chemicals in my work that may come out in the reaction,” Ellison frowned. Nevertheless, though he declared that his work had brought out the stains that showed as small blue spots and smears within his mould, everybody felt that he
ought to know what he declared he did not—where was the star-scientist?
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  • 1. Developing Support Technologies Integrating Multiple Perspectives to Create Assistance that People Really Want Athanasios Karafillidis download https://textbookfull.com/product/developing-support-technologies- integrating-multiple-perspectives-to-create-assistance-that- people-really-want-athanasios-karafillidis/ Download full version ebook from https://textbookfull.com
  • 2. Biosystems & Biorobotics Athanasios Karafillidis RobertWeidner Editors Developing Support Technologies Integrating Multiple Perspectives to Create Assistance that People Really Want
  • 3. Biosystems & Biorobotics Volume 23 Series editor Eugenio Guglielmelli, Campus Bio-Medico University of Rome, Rome, Italy e-mail: e.guglielmelli@unicampus.it Editorial Board Dino Accoto, Campus Bio-Medico University of Rome, Rome, Italy Sunil Agrawal, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA Fabio Babiloni, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy Jose M. Carmena, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA Maria Chiara Carrozza, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa, Italy Paolo Dario, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa, Italy Arturo Forner-Cordero, University of Sao Paolo, São Paulo, Brazil Masakatsu G. Fujie, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan Nicolas Garcia, Miguel Hernández University of Elche, Elche, Spain Neville Hogan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA Hermano Igo Krebs, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA Dirk Lefeber, Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium Rui Loureiro, Middlesex University, London, UK Marko Munih, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia Paolo M. Rossini, University Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Rome, Italy Atsuo Takanishi, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan Russell H. Taylor, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MA, USA David A. Weitz, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA Loredana Zollo, Campus Bio-Medico University of Rome, Rome, Italy
  • 4. Aims & Scope Biosystems & Biorobotics publishes the latest research developments in three main areas: 1) understanding biological systems from a bioengineering point of view, i.e. the study of biosystems by exploiting engineering methods and tools to unveil their functioning principles and unrivalled performance; 2) design and development of biologically inspired machines and systems to be used for different purposes and in a variety of application contexts. The series welcomes contributions on novel design approaches, methods and tools as well as case studies on specific bioinspired systems; 3) design and developments of nano-, micro-, macrodevices and systems for biomedical applications, i.e. technologies that can improve modern healthcare and welfare by enabling novel solutions for prevention, diagnosis, surgery, prosthetics, rehabilitation and independent living. On one side, the series focuses on recent methods and technologies which allow multiscale, multi-physics, high-resolution analysis and modeling of biological systems. A special emphasis on this side is given to the use of mechatronic and robotic systems as a tool for basic research in biology. On the other side, the series authoritatively reports on current theoretical and experimental challenges and developments related to the “biomechatronic” design of novel biorobotic machines. A special emphasis on this side is given to human-machine interaction and interfacing, and also to the ethical and social implications of this emerging research area, as key challenges for the acceptability and sustainability of biorobotics technology. The main target of the series are engineers interested in biology and medicine, and specifically bioengineers and bioroboticists. Volume published in the series comprise monographs, edited volumes, lecture notes, as well as selected conference proceedings and PhD theses. The series also publishes books purposely devoted to support education in bioengineering, biomedical engineering, biomechatronics and biorobotics at graduate and post-graduate levels. About the Cover The cover of the book series Biosystems & Biorobotics features a robotic hand prosthesis. This looks like a natural hand and is ready to be implanted on a human amputee to help them recover their physical capabilities. This picture was chosen to represent a variety of concepts and disciplines: from the understanding of biological systems to biomechatronics, bioinspiration and biomimetics; and from the concept of human-robot and human-machine interaction to the use of robots and, more generally, of engineering techniques for biological research and in healthcare. The picture also points to the social impact of bioengineering research and to its potential for improving human health and the quality of life of all individuals, including those with special needs. The picture was taken during the LIFEHAND experimental trials run at Università Campus Bio-Medico of Rome (Italy) in 2008. The LIFEHAND project tested the ability of an amputee patient to control the Cyberhand, a robotic prosthesis developed at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa (Italy), using the tf-LIFE electrodes developed at the Fraunhofer Institute for Biomedical Engineering (IBMT, Germany), which were implanted in the patient’s arm. The implanted tf-LIFE electrodes were shown to enable bidirectional communication (from brain to hand and vice versa) between the brain and the Cyberhand. As a result, the patient was able to control complex movements of the prosthesis, while receiving sensory feedback in the form of direct neurostimulation. For more information please visit http://www.biorobotics.it or contact the Series Editor. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/10421
  • 5. Athanasios Karafillidis • Robert Weidner Editors Developing Support Technologies Integrating Multiple Perspectives to Create Assistance that People Really Want 123
  • 6. Editors Athanasios Karafillidis Laboratory of Manufacturing Technology Helmut Schmidt University/University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg Hamburg, Germany Robert Weidner Laboratory of Manufacturing Technology Helmut Schmidt University/University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg Hamburg, Germany and Chair of Production Technology University of Innsbruck Innsbruck, Austria ISSN 2195-3562 ISSN 2195-3570 (electronic) Biosystems & Biorobotics ISBN 978-3-030-01835-1 ISBN 978-3-030-01836-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01836-8 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018957639 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
  • 7. Acknowledgements This book is one of the many outcomes of a project that started in the end of 2014 at Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg. The general objective of the project has been to gather expertise and knowledge for building technical support systems that people really want. This included a particular interest in physical support and the desire to overcome the predominant idea that automation and robotics unavoidably lead to a substitution of human labor. The proposal to fund interdisciplinary competence in the field of human– machine interaction to face demographic change by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) provided an occasion to think different about technology development and its future challenges. In effect, the project smartASSIST was established with the generous support of the BMBF (grant no. 16SV7114). The project executing organization VDI/VDE Innovation + Technik GmbH took care of the necessary formal frame and helped to build up a network of collegiate research groups that emerged out of this research grant. The scientific advisors of our project, Klaus Henning and Philine Warnke, provided many helpful comments and encouraged the whole team to flesh out our conceptual and tech- nological ideas. We are particularly indebted to Jens Wulfsberg, who hosts this project in his Laboratory of Manufacturing Technologies (Laboratorium Fertigungstechnik—LaFT), for providing the necessary research environment and for his steady trust in what we do. The idea to publish this volume harks back to the second transdisciplinary conference on “Support Technologies that People Really Want” held at Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg in December 2016. This book is a result of many discussions and exchange that happened during this conference (and beyond). We thank the university for supplying the necessary facilities and in particular the researchers, the staff, and all the other people who helped in one way or another to make it such a wonderful event. The process of compiling the book involves different dynamics, of course. Nothing of this work could have been done without all the authors who committed themselves to contribute to this volume. All of them are exceptional scholars, and we are grateful to have them in this book. v
  • 8. Andreas Argubi-Wollesen gave helpful comments on the introduction(s) and the last chapter. Also, we appreciate the courage of Springer to publish this uncon- ventional book that spans multiple disciplines and perspectives. Interdisciplinarity depends essentially on finding the right people to build up an exceptional culture of collaboration. This is a substantial experience we made in the course of this project. Therefore, we owe special thanks to Andreas Argubi-Wollesen, Jonas Klabunde, Christine Linnenberg, Bernward Otten, Tim Schubert, and Zhejun Yao of smartASSIST who bring this kind of collaboration to life each day. Finally, we want to thank our families. All the research on support systems would not have been possible without these beautiful sociocultural and biophysical support systems that we both really want. Athanasios Karafillidis Robert Weidner vi Acknowledgements
  • 9. Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Athanasios Karafillidis and Robert Weidner Part I Demands and Expectations Sociotechnical Assistance Ensembles. Negotiations of Needs and Acceptance of Support Technologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Peter Biniok Context-Integrating, Practice-Centered Analysis of Needs . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Kristin Paetzold Acceptance Through Adaptation—The Human and Technology in the Philosophical and Scientific-Historical Context of “Sinnfälligkeit”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Kevin Liggieri Biomechanical Analysis: Adapting to Users’ Physiological Preconditions and Demands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 Andreas Argubi-Wollesen and Robert Weidner Mass Survey for Demand Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Alexander Mertens, Katharina Schäfer, Sabine Theis, Christina Bröhl, Peter Rasche and Matthias Wille The Burden of Assistance. A Post-phenomenological Perspective on Technically Assisted World Relations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Bruno Gransche Part II Constructing and Construing Distinguishing Support Technologies. A General Scheme and Its Application to Exoskeletons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Robert Weidner and Athanasios Karafillidis vii
  • 10. On Building Responsible Robots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 Janina Loh (née Sombetzki) Psychological Issues for Developing Systems for Older Users. . . . . . . . . 109 Rebecca Wiczorek Attention Models for Motor Coordination and Resulting Interface Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 Bettina Wollesen, Laura L. Bischoff, Johannes Rönnfeldt and Klaus Mattes The Challenge of Being Self-Aware When Building Robots for Everyday Worlds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 Andreas Bischof Engineering Collaborative Social Science Toolkits. STS Methods and Concepts as Devices for Interdisciplinary Diplomacy . . . . . . . . . . . 137 Peter Müller and Jan-Hendrik Passoth Part III Forms and Contexts of Deployment Support Technologies for Industrial Production. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 Robert Weidner, Bernward Otten, Andreas Argubi-Wollesen and Zhejun Yao Assistance Systems for Production Machines in the Textile Industry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Yves-Simon Gloy Interests and Side Effects in the Technicization of Geriatric Care . . . . . 163 Jannis Hergesell and Arne Maibaum Mobile Augmented Reality System for Craftsmen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 Kathrin Nuelle, Sabrina Bringeland, Svenja Tappe, Barbara Deml and Tobias Ortmaier Comprehensive Heuristic for Research on Assistance Systems in Organizational Contexts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 Daniel Houben, Annika Fohn, Mario Löhrer, Andrea Altepost, Arash Rezaey and Yves-Simon Gloy Human Motion Capturing and Activity Recognition Using Wearable Sensor Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 Gabriele Bleser, Bertram Taetz and Paul Lukowicz Soft Robotics. Bio-inspired Antagonistic Stiffening . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207 Agostino Stilli, Kaspar Althoefer and Helge A. Wurdemann viii Contents
  • 11. Part IV Values and Valuation Musculoskeletal Simulation and Evaluation of Support System Designs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219 Jörg Miehling, Alexander Wolf and Sandro Wartzack Space-Game: Domestication of Humanoid Robots and AI by Generating a Cultural Space Model of Intra-action Between Human and Robot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229 Oliver Schürer, Christoph Müller, Christoph Hubatschke and Benjamin Stangl ROS-Based Robot Simulation in Human-Robot Collaboration. . . . . . . . 237 Paul Glogowski, Kai Lemmerz, Alfred Hypki and Bernd Kuhlenkötter User Acceptance Evaluation of Wearable Aids. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247 Christina M. Hein and Tim C. Lueth Extended Model for Ethical Evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257 Karsten Weber Legal Responsibility in the Case of Robotics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265 Susanne Beck Prospects of a Digital Society How Artificial Intelligence Changes the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277 Klaus Henning Support in Times of Digitization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285 Athanasios Karafillidis and Robert Weidner Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297 Contents ix
  • 12. Contributors Andrea Altepost Institute for Textile Engineering, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany Kaspar Althoefer School of Engineering and Materials Science, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK Andreas Argubi-Wollesen Laboratory of Manufacturing Technology, Helmut Schmidt University/University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany Susanne Beck Faculty of Law, Leibniz University Hanover, Hanover, Germany Peter Biniok Sociologist, Berlin, Germany Andreas Bischof Junior Research Group “Miteinander”, Media Informatics, University of Technology Chemnitz, Chemnitz, Germany Laura L. Bischoff Institute of Human Movement Science, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany Gabriele Bleser Department of Computer Science, University of Kaiserslautern, Kaiserslautern, Germany Sabrina Bringeland Institute of Human and Industrial Engineering, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany Christina Bröhl Institute of Industrial Engineering and Ergonomics, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany Barbara Deml Institute of Human and Industrial Engineering, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany Annika Fohn Institute for Sociology, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany xi
  • 13. Paul Glogowski Chair of Production Systems, Ruhr-University of Bochum, Bochum, Germany Yves-Simon Gloy Institute for Textile Engineering, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany Bruno Gransche Institute of Advanced Studies FoKoS, University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany Christina M. Hein Micro Technology and Medical Device Technology, Technical University of Munich, Garching, Germany Klaus Henning IMA/ZLW & IfU, P3 OSTO, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany Jannis Hergesell Department of Sociology, DFG Graduate School “Innovation Society Today”, Technical University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany Daniel Houben Institute for Sociology, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany Christoph Hubatschke Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria Alfred Hypki Chair of Production Systems, Ruhr-University of Bochum, Bochum, Germany Athanasios Karafillidis Laboratory of Manufacturing Technology, Helmut Schmidt University/University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany Bernd Kuhlenkötter Chair of Production Systems, Ruhr-University of Bochum, Bochum, Germany Kai Lemmerz Chair of Production Systems, Ruhr-University of Bochum, Bochum, Germany Kevin Liggieri Institute for Philosophy I, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany Janina Loh (née Sombetzki) Department of Philosophy, Philosophy of Technology and Media, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria Mario Löhrer Institute for Textile Engineering, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany Tim C. Lueth Micro Technology and Medical Device Technology, Technical University of Munich, Garching, Germany Paul Lukowicz German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Kaiserslautern, Germany xii Contributors
  • 14. Arne Maibaum Department of Sociology, DFG Graduate School “Innovation Society Today”, Technical University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany Klaus Mattes Institute of Human Movement Science, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany Alexander Mertens Institute of Industrial Engineering and Ergonomics, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany Jörg Miehling Engineering Design, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen- Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany Christoph Müller Department for Architecture Theory and Philosophy of Technics, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria Peter Müller Munich Center for Technology in Society/Digital Media Lab, Technical University of Munich, München, Germany Kathrin Nuelle Institute of Mechatronic Systems, Leibniz University Hanover, Hanover, Germany Tobias Ortmaier Institute of Mechatronic Systems, Leibniz University Hanover, Hanover, Germany Bernward Otten Laboratory of Manufacturing Technology, Helmut Schmidt University/University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany Kristin Paetzold Institute for Technical Product Development, University of the Federal Armed Forces Munich, Neubiberg, Germany Jan-Hendrik Passoth Munich Center for Technology in Society/Digital Media Lab, Technical University of Munich, München, Germany Peter Rasche Institute of Industrial Engineering and Ergonomics, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany Arash Rezaey Institute for Textile Engineering, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany Johannes Rönnfeldt Institute of Human Movement Science, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany Katharina Schäfer Institute of Industrial Engineering and Ergonomics, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany Oliver Schürer Department for Architecture Theory and Philosophy of Technics, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria Benjamin Stangl Department for Architecture Theory and Philosophy of Technics, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria Contributors xiii
  • 15. Agostino Stilli Department of Computer Science, University College London, London, UK Bertram Taetz Department of Computer Science, University of Kaiserslautern, Kaiserslautern, Germany Svenja Tappe Institute of Mechatronic Systems, Leibniz University Hanover, Hanover, Germany Sabine Theis Institute of Industrial Engineering and Ergonomics, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany Sandro Wartzack Engineering Design, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen- Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany Karsten Weber Institute for Social Research and Technology Assessment (IST), Ostbayerische Technische Hochschule (OTH), Regensburg, Germany Robert Weidner Laboratory of Manufacturing Technology, Helmut Schmidt University/University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany; Chair of Production Technology, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria Rebecca Wiczorek Department of Psychology and Ergonomics, Technical University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany Matthias Wille Institute of Industrial Engineering and Ergonomics, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany Alexander Wolf Engineering Design, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen- Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany Bettina Wollesen Institute of Human Movement Science, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany Helge A. Wurdemann Department of Mechanical Engineering, University College London, London, UK Zhejun Yao Laboratory of Manufacturing Technology, Helmut Schmidt University/University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany xiv Contributors
  • 16. Introduction Developing. Support. Technologies. Athanasios Karafillidis and Robert Weidner The relationship of humans and technology has changed significantly during the last two decades. It has become closer and multiplex—that is, technology has moved closer to the human body and their interconnections have become entangled and diverse. In this vein, technology is envisioned as being able to support or assist human beingsmoreprofoundlythaneverbefore.Thischangehasoccurredincrementallyand is still in progress. It has led to a diversification of possible application areas, a shift in the landscape of innovation projects, and a different perception of technological possibilities in general. The reasons for this change are manifold. Big societal trends like globalization, individualization, disruptive technological innovations, and demographic pressures are no doubt important for explaining the change in human–technology relations. All of them push political agendas and channel research funds. But when it comes to an understanding of these transformations, they only yield a universal interpre- tive frame. The recently enforced closeness and multiplexity of human–technology relations are much better understood when taking into account the expanding con- nectivity, the distribution and increase of computational power, and the plummeting costs of material components and production. Their combination has a high impact on further technological possibilities, but also on the perceptions, needs, and expec- tations related to technology. However, this is still only a part of the story. The shift of the relevant relationships is not only a response to such technical or social pressures outside of innovation projects. It is also an inside job. The myriad micro-processes unfolding in the world’s A. Karafillidis (B) · R. Weidner Laboratory of Manufacturing Technology, Helmut Schmidt University/University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany e-mail: karafillidis@hsu-hh.de R. Weidner Chair of Production Technology, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria e-mail: robert.weidner@hsu-hh.de © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018 A. Karafillidis and R. Weidner (eds.), Developing Support Technologies, Biosystems & Biorobotics 23, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01836-8_1 1
  • 17. 2 A. Karafillidis and R. Weidner engineering laboratories, in thousands of projects, and in the corporations’ research and development departments day by day bring forth different and new relations of humans and technologies. Political claims, technological possibilities, funding interests, scientific progress, legal regulations, cultural images, or market-driven demands no doubt influence them deeply. But societal expectations and demands with regard to technology are themselves profoundly shaped by the very form of organization, the underlying beliefs, and the approaches used in the relevant projects. Thus, the internal reason, as it were, for the observable shift is the advent of a different style of developing technology. This book will argue that the idea of support dwells at the center of this shift. It has spawned technological devices that are conceptualized and built with the explicit intention to serve the needs of individuals at work and in everyday life. The objective of this volume is to expound how this is done in detail and what needs to be considered to be able to proceed in a successful as well as responsible way. Usually, this is considered as the domain of human–machine interaction (HMI). Yet this approach is not equipped to handle the practical, ethical, social, and also technical issues involved. The main lines of this classic program are confined to the interaction of separate units—albeit we are dealing with different forms of entan- glement already that blur habitual boundaries and give rise to hybrid entities. Thus, the crucial difference made by a technology that is expected to support, assist, or help people remains obscure when simply seen through the lens of HMI. In contrast, conceiving any human–machine or human–computer interaction and collaboration as support relation gives way to a new approach that certainly draws on the rich tradition of HMI but advances beyond its limitations. Up to now, discussions about support technologies—from autonomous robots to monitoring systems, wearables, and implants, both in forms of simple tools and complex gadgetry—are preoccupied with engineering issues. It is supposed that if the invented devices are intended to support people, they will do so automatically. This is misleading. No engineering and no design can stipulate the purpose of a device uniquely and unequivocally. A technical invention has to be understood as only one part of a wider support system that also comprises organizational, physical, ethical, legal, and cognitive components. Therefore, the future challenge in research, construction, implementation, and deployment of such systems is twofold. On the one hand, theories and concepts have to be developed accordingly in order to generate fresh, diverse, and surprising perspectives on the relevant problems. On the other hand, newmethods andforms of collaborationandevaluationarerequiredtointegrate and implement these ideas—in other words, to provide the requisite contexts in which they might grow and get the chance to be cherished and become successful. This book brings together scholars from heterogeneous disciplines and research fields like biomechanics, engineering, social science, psychology, law, and philoso- phy to meet this twofold challenge. It integrates both different conceptual perspec- tives and issues of interdisciplinary development in one volume and sometimes even within single chapters. Since it tries to account for the complex and intertwined tech- nical, social, cognitive, and ethical contexts of technology development and design, this volume gives an idea of how responsible research and innovation is currently
  • 18. Introduction 3 realized in developing support technologies. Strictly speaking, the whole endeavor is not about bringing technology to the people. It is about finding ways to design and evaluate technology in tune with the people so that it finds its way to the them in the course of the process—and vice versa. *** “Developing Support Technologies” is not just some title for this book but rather signifies a research program in a nutshell. The following explanation of the ideas and associations of this title will unfold its main characteristics and substantiate the book’s main purpose as well as some of its contents and contentions. 1 Developing—A New Field, a Form of Design/Construction, and Transdisciplinarity “Developing Support Technologies” has a double meaning that must be considered. On the one hand, “developing” has an active meaning in the sense of bringing tech- nologies forth by designing/constructing, building, and evaluating them. This refers to the setting that there are teams of developers, mostly within departments of profit or non-profit organizations, who work on the implementation of concrete techni- cal solutions for certain specified applications and are preoccupied with managing technical uncertainties [Moh17, Ger15]. On the other hand, “developing” refers to a developing field, a new and therefore necessarily incomplete and sometimes fragile strand of technology and its accompanying societal and organizational uncertainties. This refers to support technologies as a developing area within society in general and engineering in particular [Ois10, Bin17]. The twofold understanding of the title unites the two scientific cultures of engi- neering on the one hand and the social sciences and humanities on the other. Depend- ing on their scientific background, people read the title in one of these two different meanings. The observable division of work between them does also transpire roughly along these lines. Social science and humanities are more focused on the develop- ing field or certain parts of it and ascertain the accompanying structures and their societal embeddings, while engineering pays more attention to finding feasible and reproducible technical principles that lead to viable, reliable, and tangible material results. Although this kind of division of labor and interest with regard to technol- ogy exists, these two groups of disciplines have been getting closer recently since it became obvious that support technologies need to function technically as well as socioculturally. A device that does not work in a technical sense will not be accepted, but a device that triggers fear or requires specialized knowledge or clothing will not “work” either—or will only be accepted under certain conditions or by particular groups. To be sure, this holds for any technology, but the advent of support tech- nologies (also called assistance technologies prematurely) has altered the relevant
  • 19. 4 A. Karafillidis and R. Weidner perspectives. The sociocultural embedding of technology has now become explicit. It is not only accounted for in hindsight but before and during development. The social sciences and humanities are now considered as an important part of the development process more frequently—many remaining obstacles notwithstanding [Vis15]. To develop technology proper has been and still is, to be sure, the work of engineers. They conceive, design, construct, test, and improve composite devices, machines, and systems until they meet the defined requirements. But when it comes to support technologies, this classic form of development is expanded. First, the focus on people with their impression on what counts and their expression of demands alters the technical search for suited materials, proper joints, or adequate program- ming and favors quickly adaptable devices and simple, intelligible controls. However, the requisite requirements can not be defined once and for all. They are refined and redefined during development on many levels [Suc07, p. 278]. Second, the sequence of development from conception to implementation is not fixed or linear anymore but supplanted by parallel and circular processes. Classic waterfall models of project management have not disappeared, but they fulfill a different function: They provide a rough orientation and legitimize the approach vis-à-vis third parties, like investors and funding agencies. Yet progress in the actual everyday work of research and devel- opment is not achieved by sticking to some plan. Mixing up the diverse structures and managing their dissonance allows for an organizational responsiveness [Sta09] that is part and parcel of developing support systems. Third, an augmentation of classic development occurs simply because many more diverse people are involved than before—with various disciplinary backgrounds but also without any academic inter- est: especially potential users, corporate groups, businesses, social media publics, and further stakeholders. In short, developing support technologies involve/involves participation, interdis- ciplinarity, and new organizational forms [Bro15]. The true concept for this threefold augmentation of classical development processes is transdisciplinarity: New forms of collaboration have to be found between various scientific disciplines and also between them and potential users, interested citizens, and project partners. To sum up, speaking of developing support technologies entails a double perspective and transdisciplinary approaches to collaboration. 2 Support—Different Forms, Structural Properties, and Antithesis to Substitution The term “support” might sound a little odd in times when most technologies in this vein are labeled as “assistive.” Most of the time these two are used synonymously, but their difference matters. In our conception, support is the generic term. Assistance and help are particular subcategories of support that require distinctive situational structures [Kar17]. Assistance occurs when a task is divided into subtasks and the situationally participating entities, e.g., human individuals and technical devices,
  • 20. Introduction 5 are assigned different subtasks in a complementary fashion. Think of the assistant of a CEO or the assistant devices built into modern cars as examples of such a complementary form of support. A tool, in contrast, does not “assist” its user. Even just saying it sounds awkward. Yet there is no doubt that a tool provides support. Also, a mother does not “assist” her children but supports or even helps them wherever possible. Whether a gadget assists or helps is negotiable and proves to be crucial for its design and acceptance. An exoskeleton enabling a movement that otherwise would be impossible does not assist the individual but rather helps, because it is granted the control over the activity to constitute the movement after all—when help is understood as a form of support that passes the control of the activity in question to the helping entity. When a different exoskeleton is designed to decrease musculoskeletal stress, it supports an activity that could also be performed without it. In this case, neither exactly “help” nor “assistance” do apply for a proper characterization of the unfolding process. Still, it is providing support. Two general structural properties of support situations (comprising assistance and help) are observer dependence and asymmetric relations. If technology development is attentive to human needs and societal acceptance, it must not ignore that the provi- sion of support lies in the eye of the beholder. This concerns questions about who or what is supporting whom but also whether somebody is assigned support or rather asks for it. Interests, interpretations, and contextual conditions of the observing agen- cies (i.e., individuals, groups, organizations or other social systems, maybe robots) might lead either to a fierce rejection or to a passionate use of the support system. The other point in case is asymmetry. The development of support technologies must be aware that any support introduces some asymmetry between the supporting and the supported unit, which cannot simply be programmed and settled purposefully in advance [Suc07, pp. 268–269]. Which form of asymmetry prevails in the end can only be identified in frequent field tests and painstaking observation of real use cases in the wild. Often, the time factor of development projects thwarts such a thorough investigation. Yet, first steps into this direction can be clearly recognized. The impor- tance of iteration and external feedback for constructing both responsibly according to human demands and successfully with respect to acceptance has already been realized indeed—albeit there is still way to go for a wider acknowledgment. In addition to the distinction of different forms of support and the structural properties of support situations, there is a third significant aspect of the “support” component in the book title. Support is, as it were, the antithesis to substitution. Until recently, the sometimes hidden but mainly overt curriculum and objective of technology development has been automation, that is, the substitution of human workforce by machines. The reasons were economic in most cases, like increased productivity, effectivity, and efficiency but also better product quality, less mistakes, improved ergonomic conditions, and not least, to be sure, honorable ambitions to spare humans doing dangerous, risky, and strenuous work. Many positive effects of automation could be enumerated, and the downsides are also well known [For15, Car14]. It remains a moot point, whether the positive and negative aspects of automation balance each other or not. However, there is an
  • 21. 6 A. Karafillidis and R. Weidner intriguing issue that is more constructive in nature than any debates about loss or gain of jobs. It concerns less the paradoxes, glitches, or unintended effects of automation but rather its pragmatic and practical limits. Certainly, there are a lot of engineers and entrepreneurs who expect that someday any task and activity can be automated. Maybe they will be proven right some day, but this is not the case in point at all. The crucial question is, how we should invest our time and resources to find adequate solutions for the limits and problems we currently face. Engineering research in automation remains important and will no doubt con- tinue. But it should not happen in expense of finding solutions that integrate the skills and awareness of humans with suitable technology. It is important to note that this “integration” exceeds the ideas of interaction and collaboration prevailing in automation engineering. Investing in support technologies receives rightly more attention because when it comes to developing new technology, the substitutionalist paradigm has reached certain limits. Many tasks and activities will not be amenable to automation for a long time to come. For example, anybody who has experienced existing robots for elderly care does immediately recognize this. By implication, human beings will remain pivotal for value creation in plants as well as other for- mal organizations. Physical skills and human awareness will become even more important in future value chains. Whatever the hopes projected into some indetermi- nate future: with respect to complex assembly tasks, evaluation, sensorimotor skills, judgment, discretion, the recognition of opportunities, diversity, quick adaptabil- ity, heedful perception of weak signals, or situational awareness human beings will remain indispensable. In short, developing support technologies is/are contingent on a closer inspection of the structural conditions of support and their subtle nuances. Support is the proper answer to the practical limits of automation and to the substitution of human work. To sum up, developing support technologies entails to realize that the creation of value and values as well as the evaluation of situations and opportunities cannot abstain from cognition, that is, both awareness and sensorimotor skills. 3 Technologies—Innovation, Customization, and Modularity Support systems transcend mere technological devices that are devised to assist or support human activities. Yet, the focus on developing support technologies is crucial. Having a techno-material structure available or at least imagining some materially tangible device allows to summon all interested participants effectively [Sta89]. It provides a powerful pretense to think about the sociotechnical design of support systems. Other existing forms of support in society—like neighborhood help, emotional and financial support, or assistive functions in hierarchies—lack this summoning material “thing.” Presumably, this corresponds to the lack of studies that examine the internal structure of support situations more closely. Studies of “social
  • 22. Introduction 7 support” [Hou88] have been preoccupied with structural conditions and individual effects of providing support and less with the inner functioning and patterning of support situations proper. Considering support from the perspective of technology urges new perspectives on structure and process of support in general. Technologies transcend isolated devices. They involve networks of people, skills, material things, certain knowledge, and particular stances to the world [Mac99]. The technical devices in these networks seem like reliable islands of functioning causality that are intimately integrated in a scaffolding of unreliable components. Thus, the concept of “techno-logy”—and not simply: “technics.” The Greek word logos implies a specific form of reason that accompanies the technics (though not necessarily philosophical reason as a universal). There is always a peculiar logic that pervades technical gadgets and their causal functioning. Next to this “grammar” of technology, there is also a pragmatic knowledge. The term techno-logy indicates that knowledge about construction principles, interaction, and handling is an integral part of its functioning. Finally, technologies are surrounded by a particular wording before, during, and after their development: for example, by justifications and poli- cies, the engineering and design parlance, or the typical marketing vocabulary. In this vein, techno-logy incorporates the syntax, pragmatics, and semantics of a causally constructed material structure that is expected to produce certain determined effects repeatedly and reliably [Ram07, p. 45]. Exactly this societal embedding of technologies also distinguishes mere inven- tions that constantly pop up in laboratories, garages, and institutions on the one hand and durable, accepted, and disseminated structures called innovations on the other [Ram10]. Any path to innovation needs to be paved through the muddy grounds of society. Previously, this has been done unconsciously and in passing. In devel- oping support technologies, this aspect is brought to mind explicitly and allows to account for it from the outset. This is not a guarantee for innovation and success but nonetheless gives new design options and some leverage in a process that has been considered stochastic so far. Technologies are both about products and production. To develop support tech- nologies means to develop products that people and organizations really want. At the same time, it means to develop technologies that are deployed in the production of products and become part of value chains and production processes—not only in the conventional sense of industrial production but also in the unconventional, generic sense of production, which includes the production of services and private DIY production. The switch to the idea of support tightens the intimate connection of these two aspects. One of the most salient effects of the support paradigm is the approaching of the human body by technology [Vis03]. This makes any technical product also acces- sible, deployable, and potentially beneficial for production processes, which are transformed in consequence. From there, new forms of technical products and even innovations can arise. The distant machine hall in which products are produced far removed from everyday life is losing the importance it had since the industrial rev- olution. The German term “Industrie 4.0,” cyber-physical systems, sociotechnical systems, or digitization of production are all expressions of this transformation. Cit-
  • 23. 8 A. Karafillidis and R. Weidner izen science, the democratization of production, or the character of the “prosumer” characterize the same issues from the opposite side. The same smart gadgets that are used in daily life are now integrated into organized work processes and production plants. An exoskeleton might help the residents of a nursing home to maintain some autonomy but can also be used by the personnel to manage their work load and reduce physical strain. Theproceeding(mass)customization of products canlikewisebelinkedtotheidea of support. The major response to customization demands is no doubt automation. Today, it is possible to specify the own preferences for a product online and to thereby trigger an automated process in some machine park to produce the desired product that is then automatically packaged and dispatched. Three issues are important in this scenario. First, support technologies need not necessarily operate in the proximity of human individuals. They can be distributed over time and space. Second, support does not necessarily preclude substitution. In the described case the customer is supported to design its own product (within certain limits) while the corporation substitutes human workforce. Third, there are moments in this automated process, for example, quality control, that are difficult to automate. Furthermore, there are also sectors where customization depends completely on human skill, for example, the construction and adaptation of prostheses, many forms of surgery, haircuts, all forms of nursery, or most products of construction industry, especially the completion of the interior. The people involved in such customization procedures are already supported by proper software or (smart as well as classical) tools but there is much more potential, in particular with respect to physical support. A last facet of this unfoldment of the volume title is the necessary plural of “technologies” in connection to support. It should have become clear that support itself cannot be automated. It is the customized product per se because it involves and generates hybrid entities that merge certain activities, human bodies, techni- cal devices, perceptions, norms, and social situations. That is, there will always exist many suitable support solutions for diverse activities and contexts—but also for seemingly identical activities and contexts. The latter points to another crucial engineering challenge in developing support technologies: to achieve adaptability and modularity. Since the hybrid combination of the human body, its perceptional capabilities, and technical equipment has to be considered as unique in every situa- tion, the standardization prospects are disappointing. Support technologies are thus drivers of devising new forms of technical adaptability to bodies, perceptions, and situations with the objective to form one integrated system. This adaptability can also be achieved by inventing modular solutions. Modular- ity, however, also refers to a more intriguing, though very challenging, aspect: the modularity and customization of support that is achieved by coupling different tech- nical systems which in turn requires the construction, standardization, and design of compatible interfaces for different components of support systems. That is, for example, various interfaces for signal and information transfer, energy transmission, physical contact surfaces, or handling and control. Both variability within interfaces and between interfaces are highly relevant.
  • 24. Introduction 9 In short, support technologies are embedded in a whole apparatus of non-technical components and rely on them to function properly. Innovations come from finding a proper fit between all of these components. To sum up the consequence, developing support technologies pose/poses some challenges for engineering. They compel the profession to rethink the connection of products and production, to reconsider the relation of automation and customization, and to develop adaptable and modular systems as well as relevant interfaces that make them compatible. *** The contributions in this book display the diversity of the people, disciplines, and topics in this field of research. Not all of the above aspects of the presented research program are discussed in this publication. However, the diversity is explicit, and its management is not an easy task. This includes the editing of the book. We selected distinguished scholars that are not only experts in their respective field but who additionally have some experience with participatory and interdisciplinary research projects regarding technology development for support. As editors we had a general concept for the book in mind and targeted the relevant researchers to send us articles treating a particular subfield, presenting subject-specific views on support systems, or reporting about deployment contexts from the perspective of their expertise. The chapters that made it into the book are grouped into four major parts: “De- mands and Expectations,” “Constructing and Construing,” “Forms and Contexts of Deployment,” and “Values and Valuation.” They are followed by two concluding chapters that discuss some prospective further developments of (support) technolo- gies. The four parts represent main clusters of research activities in developing sup- port technologies. They seem to form a sequence, but this is owed to the book format only. More likely, they set up a circular process. Starting with a demand analysis seems natural, but there are already valuations in place or earlier prototypes that lead to certain demands. Furthermore, all of these activities run concurrently in relevant projects and permanently influence each other. This implies that none of these dis- crete yet interfaced “stages” is ever completed as long as the project unfolds. Demand analysis is an ongoing concern in the development of support technologies as are valuation, construction, and deployment. The main ideas framing each subsection and short introductions to the individual chapters are given in brief introductory notes at the beginning of the book parts. Due to the just mentioned circularity and simultaneity of the empirical processes, there are overlaps. Some of the articles could appear in more than one subsection. Yet there are good reasons to arrange them this way. One of the editorial decision premises in this respect has been to demonstrate the multiplicity of perspectives within each research cluster as represented by the subsections of this volume. We have decisively refrainedfrommakingspecialsectionsfor,e.g.,science,engineering,andhumanities. There are no leading disciplines in any of the research areas for developing support technologies. ***
  • 25. 10 A. Karafillidis and R. Weidner The papers collected here come from many different disciplines. The volume contains inputs from biomechanics, engineering, information science, philosophy, psychology, and the social sciences—to name only the most generic denominations and sparing the internal specializations. Each of the chapters cherishes its own ter- minology and quirkiness. All of them, however, can also be read by researchers who are not familiar with the subject-specific debates of the disciplines. The language they use is generally intelligible. Despite that, no article is able to deny its origin and background. Such a denial or disguise of disciplines would have been detrimental to the idea of this book. A seminal reference between disciplines is only possible when the difference between them is retained and accepted. Certainly,tosomeextentthisbookdisplaysthepersonal,regional,andinstitutional networks of the editors and their research group. But this Central European bias is not simply accidental. The transdisciplinary research community on technical support systems is actually prevalent in Central Europe. This may be due to research policy decisions or some other factors not yet explored. In the end, it may be just our ignorance. But there is no doubt that an international publication putting the common thread of these multiple perspectives on developing support technologies into focus is overdue. In this respect, this book is also an appeal asking for further international communication and collaboration in this developing research field—and also an appeal to prove us wrong that the form of transdisciplinary research on support technologies as expounded in this introduction is mainly happening in Europe (see, however, [Ois10] and [San14] with similar ambitions). Any further information and suggestions are welcome by the editors as well as all of the contributors. This collection and arrangement of research papers is not the classic “how to” book. It contains reflections and descriptions of the different processes that accom- pany any development of support technologies. Its effect is a change in perspective and this generates, then again, we hope, a plethora of ideas how to approach and implement one’s own projects. Therefore, it is a book of research in two respects. First, it allows to observe and thus research how support technologies are developed; and second, it gives some leverage to do research based on these suggestions and experiences from others. References [Bin17] Biniok, P., & Lettkemann, E. (Eds.). (2017). Assistive Gesellschaft. Multidisziplinäre Erkundungen zur Sozialform “Assistenz”. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. [Bro15] Brown, R. R., Deletic, A., & Wong, T. H. F. (2015). How to catalyse collaboration. Nature, 525, 315–317. [Car14] Carr, N. (2014). The glass cage. How our computers are changing us. New York: W. W. Norton. [For15] Ford, M. (2015). Rise of the robots. Technology and the threat of a jobless future. New York: Basic Books. [Ger15] Gerke, W. (2015). Technische Assistenzsysteme. Vom Industrieroboter zum Roboterassis- tenten. Berlin et al.: Walter de Gruyter.
  • 26. Introduction 11 [Hou88] House, J. S., Umberson, D., & Landis, K. R. (1988). Structures and processes of social support. Annual Review of Sociology, 14, 293–318. [Kar17] Karafillidis, A. (2017) Synchronisierung, Kopplung und Kontrolle in Netzwerken. Zur sozialen Form von (technischer) Unterstützung und Assistenz. In P. Biniok & E. Lettkemann (Eds.), Assistive Gesellschaft (pp. 27–58). Wiesbaden: Springer VS. [Mac99] MacKenzie, D. & Wajcman, J. (Eds.). (1999). The social shaping of technology (2nd ed.). Buckingham: Open UP. [Moh17] Mohammed, S., Park, H. W., Park, C. H., Amirat, Y., & Argall, B. (2017). Special issue on assistive and rehabilitation robotics. Autonomous Robots, 41(3), 513–517. [Ois10] Oishi, M. M. K., Mitchell, I. A., & Van der Loos, H. F. M. (Eds.). (2010). Design and use of assistive technologies. Social, technical, ethical, and economic challenges. New York et al.: Springer. [Ram07] Rammert, W. (2007). Technik – Handeln – Wissen. Zu einer pragmatischen Technik- und Sozialtheorie. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag. [Ram10] Rammert, W. (2010). Die Innovationen der Gesellschaft. In J. Howaldt & H. Jacob- sen (Eds.), Soziale Innovation. Auf dem Weg zu einem postindustriellen Innovationsparadigma (pp. 21–51). Wiesbaden: VS Verlag. [San14] Sankai, Y., Suzuki, K., & Hasegawa, Y. (Eds.). (2014). Cybernics. Fusion of human, machine and information systems. Springer Japan. [Sta89] Star, S. L., & Griesemer, J. R. (1989). Institutional ecology, ‘translations’ and boundary objects: amateurs and professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–1939. Social Studies of Science, 19, 387–420. [Sta09] Stark, D. (2009). The sense of dissonance. Accounts of worth in economic life. Princeton: Princeton UP. [Suc07] Suchman, L. (2007). Human-machine reconfigurations. Plans and situated actions (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge UP. [Vis03] Viseu, A. (2003). Simulation and augmentation: Issues of wearable computers. Ethics and Information Technology, 5, 17–26. [Vis15] Viseu, A. (2015). Integration of social science into research in crucial. Nature, 525, 291.
  • 27. Part I Demands and Expectations Technology is pervaded by narratives that justify the effort of their development. A permanent feature of such inevitable narratives is the presentation of technical solutions as responses to some demand or need. This feature is reflected, for example, in the “motivation” of engineers or in the well-known requirement specifications. Yet it makes a difference where the recounted demands come from. Most ideas still emerge out of what is technically feasible and then look for external demands to which they appear as an answer. To be sure, this does not mark a problem per se. Such a technology-driven practice has its own edge. But starting with an analysis of situated and domain-specific demands, no doubt makes a dif- ference—in particular when acceptance is an issue. Developing technical systems in response to demands is the first and crucial step to increase the probability of their acceptance. Demands of potential users and stakeholders can be surveyed by observing people and practices, body movements and task environments, routines and interactions. Various methods exist to get the requisite observations, e.g., diverse interview techniques, experimental setups in the laboratory, participant observation, field tests, or ethnographies. To yield an expedient input for engineering, the gathered data is used to reconstruct the multiple conditions of work and life, in which the contrived technology is to be integrated. Potentials, possibilities, and risks of a support technology entering the users’ worlds can be induced from there. Although demand analysis is rightly understood to mark the beginning of some project, it is also important to realize that it is an ongoing accomplishment. Demands and needs are not stable but shift in time. They change when a prototype comes into play, when technology is utilized or deployed in other contexts, or after it is evaluated and further optimized. All in all, demands—including needs, acceptance, and usability issues—repre- sent the expectations in the relevant field and explain its dynamics. The expecta- tions of stakeholders are heterogeneous and do often differ from those of the prospective users, and both in turn differ from those of the involved journalists, managers, or politicians. Any analysis of demands (and thus acceptance) is
  • 28. Discovering Diverse Content Through Random Scribd Documents
  • 29. Chapter 20 GHOST VOICES Roger’s mind was more at ease. He had seen Mr. Clark pocket the gem for which they substituted their Eye of Aum. Outside the rock door as they emerged from the fissure leading down from the temple, he had seen the man’s hand pull it from his pocket and fling it away. “That’s no good,” the jeweler helping Doctor Ryder had chuckled. Definitely, in Roger’s mind, Potts had found that cast- away imitation. He had not gone back through the tunnel! “Exonerated,” he said, cheerfully, and they brushed a finely pulverized compound over the note, seeking to bring into relief the possible finger-prints thereon. Several faint smudges showed, and Potts made a photographic exposure, also using chemicals, with other takes, to bring up possible marks, erasures and so on. Roger left him at his work, at a call from Astrovox, the scientific student of planetary vibration who had been a side-show astrologer. Joining the plump, bald-headed little man, close to sixty, whose deep-set, shaggy-browed blue eyes twinkled with
  • 30. 132 inward cheerfulness, Roger helped him rig up his seemingly crazy idea of a vibra-spectra-telegraph-o- scope. That was what Roger mentally named it. The man wanted to catch the possible vibrations of higher and lower frequencies than light range. He also wished the various colors showing in a star ray to tell whatever spectrum bands it might contain. Besides, he had to hold this apparatus trained on a desired planet or star, by use of a mechanical movement that enabled him, through a transit’s hairlike “sight” to follow a star as the earth revolved. Furthermore, he wished photographs and a sort of seismographic tape recording of vibration frequencies. The nine-power telescope he had to be satisfied with was set up to poke its outer lens up through the skylight over the supply room. All around the smaller, adjoining, partitioned place formerly made notable because of the vanishing rats and the strange voices, he had cages of mice, squirrels and rabbits, under rays from electrical, and other forms of vibration. In hot-house “frames” or small beds under glass he kept living plants, with color-filters straining the light playing on them, to test reaction to heat, light and color. One bed, under a brownish glass, Roger noticed, had thin, stringy, sickly vegetation in it. In one under a short-wave irradiation treatment, plants thrived. In tiny flat, glass-protected trays, specimens of cell- cultures in tubes, and sections of living plant tissue were being exposed.
  • 31. 133 “Guess we’ll have to clean out the far corner,” Astrovox suggested, “I dumped all the wrappings there. Might start a fire.” Approaching to help, he finished his sentence with a chuckle. Roger nodded, and gathered up the papers, making a fine rattle in the process. A glow-bulb lighted in the interconnected tell-tale panel as a small bell rang. Roger, glancing at the panel, saw that the summons was from the electrical division downstairs. He went to the head of the steps. “Want me?” “Yes,” answered the voice of Professor Millman, electrical engineer. “We’re going to make a flat-table recording. I don’t just see where we get power for the motor from.” “Right down close under the recording machine table,” Roger called down his information. “You’ll see an outlet set into the floor.” “Oh—thanks, yes. I see.” Roger went back to help Astrovox. “Can’t risk it, with all the chemicals, and combustible stuff,” he answered the former phrases of the old astrologer. “Not with Neptune, the planet, in opposition to Saturn and with Mars opposing Uranus,” the old man chuckled.
  • 32. 134 Roger looked as if he did not see the point. “In our belief that the planetary positions influence chemical reactions—and all life is chemical, or, at least electro-chemical,” he was told, “we use the known planets as symbols for forces of nature. Saturn, you might say, stands for cohesion—or, better, say for crystallization, because Saturn makes gravity possible, makes density in our earth by cohering its quintrillions of atoms. “Mars we could say is a symbol for the combustion engendered by fire, the same as Uranus is, in a way, a symbol of explosiveness, and Neptune seems to represent a sort of disintegration, diffusion and slow separation of atoms, not by explosion but by attrition.” To Roger it was all pretty much like Egyptian hieroglyphics but the man seemed to be talking what he considered sensible phrases. “Let us say that we place a pellet of putty between two machines, one engendering a force like repulsion; the other giving quick, and very high-frequency stabs of current toward the other. The answer might be that the pellet would explode or fly into its atoms. “But,” the old man went on, “The force of cohesion would hold our earth together in such an experiment, though the volume or size of the tiny pellet would be too little for it to act on sufficiently to keep the form together. That, in a way, is what so many people misunderstand when they talk about astrology. Properly used, correctly interpreted, it enables us to understand our reactions—emotions——”
  • 33. 135 Roger was in the next room, loading the papers on the dumb-waiter to send to the cellar. As he came back, gathering up more, Astrovox, as if he had ranted along on his favorite topic without ceasing, said: “—fire.” He stood up. “Where were you? I was telling about Mars and Uranus exploding things and starting fires.” “I have to work.” “Yes, that’s so. Well, this is your last load.” Roger gathered the great heap of heavy wrapping paper, and left him shifting one bed of plants from under a deep ruby glass so that they would be exposed to a pale green color filtration. Going down to remove the papers from the dumb- waiter, Roger saw Mr. Millman finish recording the multitude of gyrations of a sparking motor shaft which Mr. Ellison was photographing with his camera. “We are going to count the sparks,” he told Roger, “just to check up on the speedometer attached to the flywheel, which Millman says is off-count by hundreds of revolutions to the minute.” “I’ll take the record up and have it made ready for a slow playback. I’m going up anyway.” He turned it over to Potts as the note had been thoroughly revealed in all his exposures, and had shown no identifying finger-marks. Roger went back to Astrovox, and became deeply interested in the latter’s plans for night study of the
  • 34. 136 spectra of stars. “I wonder if your cousin would arrange for one of his men to stay part of the night with me, to take down my data?” “We can set up a dictograph, and let you talk it onto a record.” “That would do.” “Or—we could mike down from here to one of our magazine-recorders that puts a new record on the spindle of the turntable when the other has been used up. That would run you for hours, if you’d stop it in between dictating periods.” The thing was arranged and Roger, before going home, demonstrated the mechanism and was sure the old man understood its operation. Because of the threat implied in the forged note, Grover gave Potts instructions to transfer from Doctor Ryder’s rooms the mechanisms he wanted to have installed for Roger’s protection. With a changed switch operated only from inside the room, the former ease of operation by others, he thought, was eliminated. Roger, tired by celebration and resuming work, retired early, being sure that his switch was set, his room theoretically a sealed place. Sleep came. Rest, though was disturbed by weird dreams. Sometimes, he knew, dreams had outward causes stimulating them, as happens if a draft on exposed
  • 35. 137 limbs makes one dream of riding on a sled and falling into a snow bank in howling wind. His dream of a burglar, as he awakened and looked rather fearfully around, made him grin, though. That room had been sealed by no one other than himself! But a low, humming whine made him certain that machinery was in operation—the hum of the recorder motor. He located it. Proved it. Shutting off the device in case some jar had started it, he went to test his door. But he recalled that the motor still ran. To his dismay, the door was not merely unsealed. It stood ajar. Suddenly, startlingly, from behind him, his table radio spoke, in a thin, strained, bizarre cry. “Fire!” and he heard, faintly, the crackle of flames. Then an uncanny silence, dreadful by contrast, came. He spied around the hall. It, too, was silent. He tiptoed down to the library, telephoned the laboratory, and got no reply. Once again—something was wrong—in two places! He must go to that laboratory. Grover should have answered—or Tip—or Astrovox!
  • 36. Chapter 21 TRAGEDY! Half way to the laboratory, Roger pulled up in his stride, half ready to laugh at his stupidity. A joke? Of course. Potts, on Grover’s instructions, had made the room installation. To “get back” at his chum for the suspicion about the Eye of Om, the handy man could have made that “Fire” cry on a record, could have known how to break a light beam. He, alone, could have prepared the impregnable place so that it might be entered, it seemed to Roger. A recording, he also knew, was the other end of a reproduction. To print a sound-track on a disk, one used a microphone; its diaphragm sent vibrations through a selenium cell and other apparatus until it actuated the recording diamond: to play it back, the process was reversed. The use of the diamond, instead of a smooth reproducing needle on a hardened surface, could cause that high, thin, scratchy voice. “But Cousin Grover was not at home,” his mind prompted, “and the door was open, and the light would not work. The lab. telephone was dead, too!”
  • 37. 138 Perhaps Potts had tried a joke; but it seemed as if it had turned into a warning, a summons; because, when he reached the building, the door was not secured, no protective beam had been set; and in the main office, he smelt the sharp, acrid odor of burned powder. A gun must have been fired in there, he reasoned. By whom? For what? His mind raced to terrifying impressions. Explosion! Shot! The place was jet-dark. As he investigated he decided that odor was strongest close to the interviewing desk, pungent enough to choke him. Into the larger main room he made his way, finding the powder odor was less strong beyond the main office as he switched on lights and took broader observations. On the large desk used for interviewing visitors he saw that the framed photograph of his aunt, Grover’s sister, had been knocked down, and lay on its face. An inkwell, in a pool of black on the floor beyond the desk, was shattered into large fragments, and tiny bits. He stood still, and shouted. “Tip! Tip! Potiphar Potts! Tip!” Getting no answer he raced across the chemical section to the man’s small quarters. The bed had been used, its covers had been thrown back, as if in haste. No Potts, as once before, stood tied to the bedpost. The room was empty.
  • 38. 139 He shouted for Astrovox, feeling a strange desire to laugh at the sound of the name when it was shouted. “Astro—vox!” He called for his cousin. Then, with every light going, in spite of queer terrors, Roger made a thorough search of the lower floor. That brought no result. Nothing seemed to have been moved and as far as he could tell the safe was all right and the device that now made it sink into a channel in the cellar, so that a steel plate could slide over and make it impregnable, seemed to be in working condition. Reluctantly, forcing his dragging feet, he crept upstairs. No one was in sight. The old star-gazer was gone also! Roger stood, uncertainly glancing around. Had this been tragedy? A shot? At whom? Where were the rest? Of a sudden the threat in the note became his uppermost thought. Had someone—or something!— drawn the rest away, and lured him there? Roger, nervously, glanced around him. The innocent squirrels and rabbits and mice curled up in their temporary respite from the ray-baths. The machines set up earlier hummed quietly, recording, slowly moving the telescope, casting spectra of a star’s light in bands of greenish-brown, yellow and indigo on a flat paper-table. Everything seemed innocent enough.
  • 39. 140 But where, he mused, had the scientific star-student gone to? Where was Cousin Grover? And, above all, where was Tip, one out of all of them who ought to have been on duty, if not asleep. Roger glanced up at the clock. Not five, but two, was the hour toward which the smaller hand was dropping as the minute hand marked the quarter-of. It had been “fire” that his record had screeched at him. But there was no fire here! Roger began to feel somewhat like a person flying in an airplane for the first time, seeing everything else swinging beneath him, and feeling no movement himself. It made him sickish. “Am I out of my mind?” he asked himself. “Is this a dream?” There must be some loose end of this amazing situation that he could get hold of, to reel in the story and steady his rapidly failing sense of reality. The sound-camera! It had been running perhaps, till its roll of non-flam film was done. It might tell him something. Feverishly he got pyro, acid and the sodas into the developing water. He did not stop even for distilled
  • 40. 141 water but took tap fluid. He immersed the hurriedly rubber-wrapped celluloid. As it stayed the required fifteen or eighteen minutes, he went over the lab. again, finding no more than before. He took out the roll, dipped it into hypo-acid fixing solution, and impatiently watched its opaque yellowish high-lights slowly dissolve and lose the un-needed silver salts, to clear into transparency as grays and blacks became more evident. Hastily washing the film, he unreeled an end, held it up under a light, to see if the sound-track at one side carried any shadows. There was a recording! Feverishly, forgetting his terrors, he raced to the projector in the screening room. Carefully in spite of haste he threaded the wet “stock” over the sprocket, down through the film gate, over another sprocket and clipped the end to the take-up reel. He snapped on the light. At proper speed, and sorry that he must harm the wet emulsion, but eager to hear its story, he ran his find. The picture was that of the upper room, narrowed down onto the various activities of the old star-reader. The first was a take of his rabbits as they scampered about under a change of ray-lamps. Then came the brief time-exposures of tabulations, preserved thus.
  • 41. 142 But nowhere, except for natural sounds, the squeak of mice when a movement of a high-frequency ray cast it upon them—the chatter of the squirrels—ordinary lab. sounds of moving feet and muttered words by the old man, did Roger hear what he sought—enlightenment. He was near the end of the reel, about to give up, when his ears sent a message that snapped his muscles into taut tension. “Hear me. I am The Voice of Doom!” He saw, in the picture, the astrologer wheel and stare. He saw him turn and run out of view. Then, with scream subsiding in moan, the Voice of Doom repeated its earlier moaning, ending in the grind and sudden cessation. The film, unnoticed, ran out of the gate, and the magazine clicked to the slap of its still revolving free end. Roger let it run on. He had discovered a strange clue! Once coming from a deserted room, and once spoken on a record that had been considered blank, and then a third time from a record that had been set to catch sound in Doctor Ryder’s home, had come that same Voice of Doom, the identical moaning and grating. In reality, in the heart of Tibet, Roger had also heard that sound. And in Tibet, the rock that cut off the sound had made no noise as its counterweight allowed it to shut out the wind that made the moans as it howled across the
  • 42. Himalayas and up through tunnel and whistling Buddha’s hollow cavities! Even as he made his startling realization, Roger heard a bell. It came from the office telephone. He dashed down the stairs, cutting out the projector as he ran by. “Hello!——” A voice came, thin with distance. “That you, Rog’?” “Yes. Tip—at the lab. Where are you?” “Hunting Grover.” “Where did he go?” “To find the star-man.” “And why did he leave?” “He was—took!” “Do you—does Grover—think he was—was in danger— hurt?” “We don’t know. You stay there. I’ll keep in touch.” The connection broke off sharply. From behind him a voice addressed Roger.
  • 43. 143 “Follow me—and be silent!” There stood the Lama from the Tibetan lamasery. Two others, also. Wordless, helpless, Roger moved: they closed in behind him. The night swallowed the quartet.
  • 44. 144 Chapter 22 WHAT HAPPENED TO THE EYE OF OM They allowed Roger to lock up the laboratory; but he had not been permitted to re-set the rays or other protective devices. That did not concern him overmuch. Roger knew that the safe protection was a separate circuit from those he had cut out when he had unfastened the door on arriving. Besides, he told himself triumphantly, he had recalled the camera fixed in the small decorative panel over the interviewing chair, so arranged that it would photograph a short time exposure of the office and of anyone there. Used to make records of visitors on their arrival with new propositions, as well as a night protection and recorder for the office, it had been operated by Roger, with good presence of mind, when his captors had entered. Whoever came there later would be able to develop the picture he had left recorded. He had not used the continuous mechanism, but his one photograph would reveal him and the Tibetan trio. A taxi, taking them to some unknown district, was further cause for triumph. The taxi, from a nearby stand, had been used before by the laboratory people. Its driver knew him, though he gave no sign.
  • 45. 145 Roger meant to act in such a way that the man, discharging his fare and being paid, would suspect something wrong, return to the laboratory, or consult the police. At a quiet, small hotel, the machine stopped. Roger, with hands clasped behind his back, made gestures; waggling his fingers to attract the taximan’s notice, then touching himself and clenching his fist. “Thanks, feller,” the man took his fare, and added, to show Roger he was “wise,” “That science place brought me a good tip. Guess I better go back and see about more good fares there.” Instead of causing a commotion as they passed the drowsy office clerk, Roger let things stand as they were, and was taken up to a quiet suite where the two guards placidly watched him while the Lama telephoned from another room. After a while, returning, the man ushered in—Grover. “How did you come here?” cried Roger. “So they got you.” “But you shouldn’t——” “I didn’t exactly walk into a trap, Roger. The Chief of Police knows where I came in answer to a note handed me while I was trying to trace Astrovox. If I do not telephone within an hour, somebody will come to see what’s what.” He explained what Roger had not known (after hearing the strange events of the opened door, the screeching
  • 46. 146 table radio and seeing the smoke-filled office). “I stayed to watch Astrovox make spectra-graphs of color bands,” Grover explained, “sending Tip here to be on guard. An excited call seeming to come from him brought me to the house just as a note he got started him to the laboratory. We passed, not knowing. I found your safeguards apparently working, and returned. Potts was trying to reassure the star-gazer who had heard that Voice of Doom. But Tip was frightened also. We sent the astrologer to lie down on Tip’s bed, while we investigated. He came back to us after a few minutes saying he was too much upset to stay there. He thought the Tibetans had involved him in some manner.” Tip, it appeared, had agreed to go along to be sure the man got going and reached home safely. Tip had bidden him wait, in the chemical section, while he went to his own room to get a weapon for safety’s sake. “I suppose he must have heard something or started into the office, Roger. At any rate, suddenly, we heard the shot. I was down those stairs in a bound, and beat Tip by ten feet getting in where the smoke still hung in the air.” “It was strong when I got there.” “But the office was empty. I told Potts to stay, and ran out. A man, strolling, had stopped. I asked if he had seen a man go out and he pointed up the street, and like most of those night-prowlers he tried to avoid the light and hid his face with his hat brim. He was fairly short and stoutish, but it wasn’t Astrovox. I ran, and thought I saw the star-gazer further along; but it was
  • 47. not our man. I suppose Tip, worried, came to look for me. You say the wires were silent.” He was stopped by the arrival of Tip who had been lured, as he had, by a note delivered by a boy; and almost on his heels came Clark and Doctor Ryder, fuming and puzzled and anxious. They were given no time to exchange words. The Lama spoke: “We want the sacred relic, the Eye of Om.” “It is in the Buddha’s head,” Roger said earnestly, “I saw this man put it there.” “He tells the truth,” Clark declared. “To prove it,” Roger hurried on, “the prongs work open when you press the Buddha’s third left finger straight in and then back.” The Lama stared. “And to furthermore prove it and make it inadmissible ——” “Incontrovertible, Tip means,” said Grover. “—I went back, later, to take wedges out of the lower lever, after we beat your trick tunnel, and picked up the Imitation that Rog’ tells me Mister Clark throwed away. I carried it as far as Bombay, and figured it wasn’t worth anything anyhow, so I left it in the waste-basket in the hotel room.” The Tibetan lama stared at him sternly.
  • 48. 147 “That was but an imitation. It was the one taken out that I demand, from the boy who must know where it is.” “But—I tell you!” Roger was earnest, “I saw Mister Clark exchange the false one. And he dropped the one taken out into his coat, and when we got out of the tunnel and closed the rock, he threw it away, saying it wasn’t any use. Tip, here, found that!” The lama shook his head. “The Eye of Om is not in its socket!” A sudden thought came to Mr. Clark. With a cry of dismay he told them his startling idea. “It must be that in the excitement, meaning to exchange the imitation for the real—to put back what rightfully belonged there and protect my friend, Doctor Ryder, I must have mixed the gems, and instead of replacing the false one with the real one, I must have put the false one back, and really threw away the true Eye.” “Then—I throwed it away in Bombay.” The lama considered the statement made by Tip. “If any of you speak falsely,” he said, slowly, “you who speak so shall hear the Voice of Doom and shall feel the Wrath of the Hand of Doom.” With that threat he bade them depart.
  • 49. 148 Chapter 23 THE ACID TEST “Oh, no you don’t,” Grover spoke for the first time during the interview, “there is a matter of a vanished scientific student of the stars, a shot prior to his disappearance, and other things.” The lama turned toward his aides. Grover, as Roger and Potts sidled close, smiled. “An hour and ten minutes has elapsed since I arrived,” he remarked, pleasantly, cool and slightly triumphant, “I would not be surprised—yes, there they are.” The police car, sent by the Chief of Police, brought two patrolmen and as a frightened clerk ushered them in, the lama shrugged. Captor became prisoner, and with his pair of native aides, the lama was taken to the laboratory by the interested officers. There, as Grover’s car discharged its crowd of former captives, Roger was able to reward the taximan who had faithfully read his signal and who was waiting with a patrolman to be assured that all was well there before going to the address the taximan had noted.
  • 50. 149 “I knew this joint was lucky,” the taximan chuckled, pocketing a pleasing tip, “Hope all stays well—but if it doesn’t—I’ll be handy.” While Tip was sent to develop camera films from various devices which had been set off during the exciting developments, Roger was busy assembling the ingredients for an experiment which Grover meant to conduct, in order to learn which of the people there had held the pistol that might have harmed old Astrovox— that had certainly been fired in the office. To their surprise as they brought together the necessary chemicals and Roger got out plaster-of-Paris from his stock-room, with highly refined paraffin, the star electrician, Ellison, arrived. “What brings you here at five in the morning?” Grover stared at him with a degree of suspicion. “I have been working out theories about our queer situation,” declared the electrical specialist, “I could not sleep, because Clark had told me all about his experiences with Roger in Tibet, and I was of the opinion that Roger might be in danger.” “I told him how they had captured you,” Clark said, as Roger recalled that they had worked together in India on power-construction, so that there was nothing to fix suspicion on them in thus having a reunion after Clark’s return. “I went to your home,” he told Grover. “Roger’s room was open, his aunt was greatly disturbed because you were also absent.” Naturally, he had come to the laboratory.
  • 51. 150 While he softened the paraffin, Roger told him their adventures. “Now,” Grover told the absorbed patrolmen, and a detective who had come, by Police Chief’s order, from Headquarters, “here is a dodge that some police departments have tried, and it will interest you.” Roger assembled on the interviewing desk his heater for a great lot of the wax, held in a crucible over the electric stove. In a large glass container he mixed, according to a formula dictated by Grover, nitric acid and other chemicals, which discretion suggests should not be mentioned here. “The purpose of this experiment,” Grover said, “is to learn which hand, if any among us, held, and discharged the weapon. That seems to be the simplest way to narrow down investigation. Once we know our culprit, he must reveal where Astrovox is, what happened.” The very modern experiment, the police saw, was based on the fact that the charges used in modern pistol projectiles form, during combustion, gases which leave marks on any hand discharging the bullet. Grover explained his procedure. “The gases blow back sufficiently to mark the hand,” he stated. “If our test is made within five days after such an occurrence, the test will reveal it. “I will be first. Roger will take the wax, properly softened, and at a temperature around one hundred and fifteen degrees, Fahrenheit, not hot enough to
  • 52. 151 scald, will pour it over and will mould it around my hand.” Roger carried out the action as it was described. “The paraffin, now cooling, at a point where it is hard enough to hold its shape, is taken off.” This, also, Roger carried out carefully, securing a sort of cast with the shape of the hand moulded inside it. This, as Grover talked, Roger carefully placed in the chemical solution, and they all watched in absorbed attentiveness. “If my hand has discharged any weapon or in any other way has gotten the peculiar gases of powder combustion on it, within the past five days, the acid and solution will bring up the stains as bluish discolorations on the wax.” No such spots appeared. Although a tedious operation to carry out for the Tibetan trio, and then, by their own insistence, for Doctor Ryder, Clark, Tip and Roger, the results in each case held them in suspense until there was clear exoneration of all. “But Ellison hasn’t submitted yet,” said Tip, suddenly. “Because I have handled chemicals in my work that may come out in the reaction,” Ellison frowned. Nevertheless, though he declared that his work had brought out the stains that showed as small blue spots and smears within his mould, everybody felt that he
  • 53. ought to know what he declared he did not—where was the star-scientist?
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