School failure and lack of interest in the classrooms should be solved with imagination.
Today, more than ever, we need to stimulate and to work creatively in education, not only to change inflexible structures but in order to provide imaginative tools with low resources to face global and total system reorganization.

To achieve this, they will need to rely on government support to encourage knowledge, innovation and education as a central theme of improvement.

Animo is:

A new tool as an educational game designed for educators and students, with or without learning problems, to turn concepts given in the classroom or academy into audiovisual animations.

Animo (UPF patent pending), intended to be an alternative, stimulating and the height of fun for what should be the education in the 21st Century.

Animo, challenges the lack of imagination of new generations of children and young people who are accustomed to following patterns and predefined challenges in video games that are obsolete of imaginative effort.

In addition to triggering the imagination through the game, educational values can be worked through understanding, not only by explanation given in the classroom, but lots of concepts that affect and shape today’s society.

Animo, is invaluable in learning new skills and taking part more in interactive work strategies. On the basis of one of the best ways to learn is playing and taking advantage of new digital technologies, Animo fulfils both characteristics and speaks the same language of young people.

Animo is also a useful tool for sensory stimulation, boosting creativity, and personal development with people who have learning and mental health problems. It is also a direct means of communication between patients and specialists.

How it works

Animo is straightforward in its use and fast in its results. Once the animation is visualised and approved, it can be automatically saved as a movie (Quick Time File) onto the hard drive.

Aims to be fulfilled as UTANI project:

o Turning the classroom into a space where educators and students have fun, be amazed, feel and reflect.

o Through the game, with its easy and friendly technology, new ways of learning, finding out and understanding can be inspired.

o To offer a new process and technology in order motivate and excite the teacher and student.

o On attaining an achievement, in our case an animation, it is suitable as a self fulfilment and personal satisfaction tool that can be enjoyed and much-admired by the whole group.

o To make, organise and set in motion a thought, a reflection. It is a tool of inclusion encouraging classroom integration by cooperative working, bringing closer the disabled person and increasing their potential.

o Teachers can motivate their students, inciting them to express their ideas, their innovations, developing them in such a way as not to be held back by traditional and monotonous daily teachings.

animo videos and workshops with our first prototype

Here some of our first social experiences with animo in schools and disabled people.

Here videos with the final prototype

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¿Más humanoides o menos humanidad?

La reflexión viene a partir de varios artículos que apuntan a que la tecnología está cada vez más al servicio de las personas mayores. Una de estas noticias, por ejemplo, es que un grupo de ingenieros franceses trabaja en viviendas inteligentes para procurarles una vida independiente pero controlada. Casas con detectores de movimiento, micrófonos que se activan con palabras clave como “socorro”, usuarios conectados a dispositivos que miden sus constantes vitales o detectan sus caídas y personal sanitario que verifica el estado de salud del inquilino desde centros de supervisión.

Esto además de favorecer la autonomía de las personas mayores, representará una posible solución a la carencia de plazas en residencias geriátricas, donde se prevé que en 2040 la población francesa de mayores de 75 años será el doble que la actual. Y según un último estudio de la ONU las personas mayores de 60 años representarán el 32 % de la población mundial en el 2050 y superarán por primera vez en la historia el número de niños. “En 35 años, Italia será el segundo país en donde habrá más población anciana, sólo por detrás de España” según fuentes de las naciones unidas.

Ya se habla por esta situación de que el “mercado de la tercera edad” es un pastel muy atractivo para cientos de marcas. No se si serán los hijos (no todos) o nuevos servicios de asesoría, lo cierto es que pronto alguien va a tener que asesorar y proteger a nuestros mayores, porque la oferta será variada y muchas las victimas.

Este fin de semana leía un artículo que explicaba el grave problema de la gente mayor en Japón por encontrar compañía y ayuda de otras más jóvenes. La razón no es otra que el problema de espacio de Japón y su imposibilidad en asumir una entrada de inmigrantes (mano de obra más barata. Problemas culturales también) que asumieran estas tareas. Ver una persona de Ecuador o Perú acompañando a una persona mayor al parque, es del todo improbable de encontrar por las calles de Tokio u Osaka, cosa del todo natural en Europa.

Esa es la mala noticia. La buena y beneficiosa es que Japón es el país del mundo que más esta investigando y trabajando con tecnología para ayudar-asistir a la gente mayor. En concreto la robótica es el territorio que más puede “humanizar” lo deshumanizado. La falta de asistentes sociales que den respuesta a un envejecimiento agigantado de su población, está llevando a investigadores japoneses a desarrollar con la tecnología, asistencia y cuidados para la tercera edad y discapacitados físicos. Es decir en lugar de asistentes sociales, robots asistentes. Humanoides por humanos.

Según esta tendencia de envejecimiento creciente la solución a este problema es asistir a las personas mayores con robots. Sillas de ruedas inteligentes (AI Systems Inc) que se mueven solas y perciben los obstáculos para esquivarlos, trajes robóticos (Universidad de Tsukuba) diseñados para personas con debilidad muscular que ayudan a moverse con más facilidad, o robots pensados para procesos de rehabilitación donde estas máquinas asisten a los pacientes que se recuperan de parálisis o de operaciones de prótesis de rodilla, ayudándoles a mover sus piernas gracias a un brazo mecánico. Los precios todavía no es que sean asequibles a cualquier bolsillo, este último por ejemplo cuesta 28.000 euros (Yaskawa electric)

La expansión robótica puede ser seguro un éxito económico. Un informe del gobierno Nipón, publicado en Mayo, indicaba que la demanda de robots de ayuda puede suponer más de un trillón de yenes (más de 7000 billones de euros) en 2015, “año en el que se calcula que uno de cada cuatro japoneses tenga más de 65 años.”

Los robots llegan ya a reconocer los rasgos de su dueño y ofrecer servicios según sus gestos, como un robot diseñado en la Universidad de Chiao Tung en Taiwán. O “Robotics Lab” que ha desarrollado un primer prototipo de robot lazarillo para ciegos llamado “Maggie” que siente cosquillas, que reconoce la voz, que habla y se mueve y puede guiar a una persona gracias a sus sensores de movimiento. Otro robot parecido es “Emiew”, robot asistente de Hitachi (video en Akihabara News).

De fabricación japonesa también el “Wakamuru” aparece en el mercado en 2005 como el primer “mayordomo” japonés de gran tamaño. Un metro de altura y 30 kgs, creado por Mitsubishi cuesta $14,300 en el mercado japonés. Puede hablar, entretener a los pequeños, cuidar el hogar, se mueve con soltura evitando obstáculos. El robot puede ser programado para despertar a una persona, reconocer hasta 10 rostros y platicar con ellos, vigilar la casa con sus “ojos cámara” y emitir una señal a la mínima alarma.

Otros como el robot con forma de bebé foca “Paro” resulta tener propiedades terapéuticas, cuesta $3.211 y fue diseñado por el Instituto Nacional de Ciencia Industrial Avanzada y de Tecnología de Japón. Diseñado especialmente para personas mayores parece ser que “Paro” ha demostrado tener entre sus poderes curativos el de provocar relajación y proporcionar entretenimiento y compañía a través de la interacción física. El robot responde a lo que ve, escucha e incluso a la temperatura y posición de su dueño. Lo más increíble es que el bebé foca acabará desarrollando con el tiempo su propio carácter y modo de convivir con el dueño. Será charlatán como su dueña o contará toda clase de chistes del color que le gusten al dueño.

Aquel futuro que a todos nos parecía tan lejano y que hasta ahora solo contemplábamos en las escenas de ficción, está llegando. Gracias a una sociedad súper avanzada tecnológicamente o súper empobrecida humanamente. Puede que sea por cuestión de espacio o porque cuesta integrar generaciones con generaciones. No nos extrañe que muy pronto en lugar de “aparcar” a lo mayores en una residencia, acabemos regalándoles un asistente robot para que les haga compañía y les escuche en su casa. Son las dos caras del desarrollo.

Pronto será cotidiano adoptar un robot que pueda responder a una caricia y asienta entristecido cuando un mayor le cuente con nostalgia sus tiempos. Y aunque suene cruel, puede que cuando los nietos vayan a visitar al abuelo y a su robot, acabarán jugando con él en lugar de con el abuelo porque será más divertido, les contará cuentos y jugará a toda clase de juegos de mesa.

El robot se convertirá en un nuevo miembro de la familia. El shintoismo en Japón ha ayudado a que el japonés asimile y acoja sin dificultad al robot porque para ellos son como espíritus o genios (Kami) y creen que lo divino está también dentro de los objetos o cosas. En occidente costará más pero al final la necesidad de una persona por no sentirse sola convertirá al robot en algo más que asistentes sociales.

Utani

Bibliografía:

- “Japón desarrolla robots para el cuidado de mayores y discapacitados”
el pais- REUTERS - Tokyo - 19/07/2005

- SERVIMEDIA23/09/2008
“viviendas inteligentes para ancianos”

- “Congreso Internacional sobre Domótica, Robótica y Teleasistencia para todos.”

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The Information Society. Does it Help the Generations to Live Together?

Two of Utani’s areas of interest, young people and elders, were the focus of a congress aimed at considering and discussing the present and future of the two generations. This was one more experience for us to take into account as we progressively shape our own vision for understanding these age groups. Organized by Caixa de Catalunya’s Fundació Viure i Conviure, the purpose of the meeting was to put aside prejudices about youth and old age and to focus on policies, practices, and experiences that would foster positive and enriching relations between the generations.

Generations in transformation

For Jorge Larrosa, Professor of the Philosophy of Education at the University of Barcelona, today the ‘aged’ represent a social burden for both the state and their families. For their part, young people, a model for the mass media, are also a burden because they are finding it increasingly difficult to access jobs and housing. In addition, they are perceived as a rebellious, even dangerous generation. For Laurence Cornu, Doctor of Philosophy and Professor at the Institut Universitaire de Formation des Maitres, an intermediate generation that seldom features in this fixed picture of the generations is missing. She is referring to the ‘parents’ generation’: adults of active age who barely have time to devote to the other generations because of their work obligations and the need to ‘ be competitive’. And while people reach old age with better health and quality of life and live longer, the youth stage is also prolonged, with postponement of the transition to adult life represented by joining the labour market and emancipation. The economic, social and cultural conditions of ‘maturity’ and ‘ageing’ are changing at high speed, according to Larrosa. Never have they been studied more and never have they been listened to less.

Third and fourth age

The generations stretch ‘like chewing gum’ and have difficulty finding their space and meaning in this society, which brings forward the retirement of one generation for the sake of profitability. Thus, retirement is earlier, while life expectancy, fortunately, increases. The result is the ‘clash’ between a ‘third age’that is younger and more active than ever, and the birth of a ‘fourth age’. These changes demand dignified spaces, where the former can remain active and feel useful and the latter can be duly cared for. Unfortunately, this is not happening, and ‘old people’, although there may be twenty years age difference between them, share the same resources, with genuine intergenerational clashes, since while one group needs to stay active and involved in society, the other requires rest, dominoes, and gentle excursions.

On the other hand, we find an intermediate generation. These are the parents (in respect of grandchildren and grandparents), who have less available time and fight to stay active, ‘recycling themselves’, trying to keep their place in society, as explained by professor Enrique Gil Calvo in his entertaining lecture in which he compared young and old in an illustrative way. Dissatisfaction and anxiety cause new pathologies in adults, young people, and the old. Many are seeking an active space where they can play central roles. Young people and adults attempt to adapt to an everchanging, unpredictable society that is desperately seeking modernity, ‘eternal youth’.

In order to adapt, many have had to ‘melt’ the solidity of their own patterns, values, legacies, memories, and ‘get liquidized’, constantly adapting to changing realities. This is how Zygmunt Bauman, philosopher, writer, professor and scholar, expressed his view of the shift from ‘solid’ to ‘liquid modernity’. In a word, the rules of the game of life are changing. The solidity of discourses, the one-way direction in school are strained through society’s drains. Young people and adults know that they have to become liquid, to adapt their own identity and density to the volume or space shaped insistently by a society that is unstable, insecure, and in continuous effervescence.

The new voice of experience

Carlos Skliar, doctor of phonology and a specialist in human communication problems, talked of a crisis or ‘crack’ in communication or an absence of rich intergenerational conversation. The ‘legacy’ that the older person tries to incubate is rejected by the young person. In most cases it is not that the adult is unable to educate, but, today, is unable to ‘teach how to live’ and make this legacy stimulating. In many case, conversation between young people and adults is deaf, unfriendly because on the one hand adults communicate in ‘vernacular language’ about their experience, and young people answer in their ‘digital language’ from their own isolation and closedness because they feel they are being observed and analyzed by parents, bosses, teachers, politicians and consumer brands. There is rejection of experience because for the first time in recent history, the young are better at understanding and handling technology, rules, forms of communication than their parents. Adults are no longer the voice of experience, they no longer transmit knowledge. On the contrary, they often have to ask their children for help to cope with sophisticated mobile phones or computer software, which the latter, like ‘digital natives’, use completely naturally. Age has a bad image, older people hold obsolete ideas which are rejected by the young and, consequently, by a society where youth is everything. But the feeling of rejection may be mutual. When the kids stop being kids, they frighten the adult. To the eternal rebellion and self-sufficiency of youth is now added a novel power status, because the young control and speak the language of digital technology and, especially, because of the changes in personal relations brought about by this technology, where horizontality reigns and authority is not trusted.

As Jorge Larrosa points out, it is necessary to construct both youth and old age in a different way. Social and cultural changes should be fostered that will help both groups to properly take possession of their youth and age, and spaces created that make possible and encourage positive intergenerational relations. Other spaces need to be made for analysis and reflection whereby the present and future of relations may be approached without taboos or hyopcrisy. And, probably, the generations need to be schooled in tolerance, learning to ‘interact’ with electronic music and poems, tattoos and war wounds, heroes of one age and another, online and life lessons, connecting and hugging, chatting and talking till the sun comes up…
 

Intergenerational conflict

These differences may create conflicts which, in their most extreme manifestation, may degenerate into violence. Manuel Castells analyses as a sign of intergenerational conflict the dramatic cases of serious beatings of elderly tramps by groups of youths. It is as if they let loose all their fury and impotence on their victims. Adults represent to them the obstacle to accessing wellbeing and freedom. It is adults who own inner city housing, who fix the price of rents and thousand-euro salaries, who buy and sell assets and hold the power to command and decide politically in parliaments because they are the masters of information. They are inaccessible and defend themselves against the young so as not to lose their jobs. Tramps are an easy target for the accumulated hatred of the young. Who else would ever beat them up? Similarly, in the heart of the family environment, sadly, physical abuse makes its appearance. Thus, 40% of elderly Spaniards suffer some kind of mistreatment or abuse (emotional, neglect, economic, etc) and between 4% and 5% of over 65s suffer violence. (Source: María Teresa Bazo, Professor of the Sociology of Old Age, University of the Basque Country).

Mobilising through emotion

We have talked about the communication crisis in a society that speaks dead and digital languages. We have observed that to be able to reach the fourth age is a sign of longevity in the first world but also of shifts in social tectonic faultlines. But we have still not talked about politics. And the fact is, intergenerational crises have been politicised, they are fashionable. They are instrumentalised because the mass media carefully serve them up on the TV news seasoned with sports. Today we are experiencing a crisis of ideals. In their programmes, politicans continue to cling to their exhausted welfare state when the entire first world looks to its own interests, has its needs more than covered, only believes what is said in forums or communities, and does not save to be a model consumer. The only thing that can mobilise generations are the numerous forms of collective action (Michel Wieviorka, “La primavera de la política”) . Mobilisation, if based on emotion, can unite and rekindle flames between young, adults and elders.

The worldwide demonstrations against the Irak war, the attack on the twin towers in new York, or the commuter train bombs in Madrid, amongst many others, are examples of emotion-based mobilisation with a powerful background of the vindication and defense of basic values such as peace, freedom, justice, equality, which people of all ages claim as unquestionable and untouchable rights. Emotion, Wieviorka says, is important to the extent that it can build for the younger generations a decisive moment of political socialisation. The new contemporary political ideals and programmes will cease to be based on wellbeing and move towards goals like solidarity, inequality, poverty and injustice. Will today’s young generation perhaps play a leading role in making a more human world in the next fifty years?

And the elders? Everyone knows that it is very easy to mobilise elders politically through nostalgia. But - what about with hope? Optimism? Excitement? That is to say, daring to articulate the word ‘future’, finding new ideas to give shape to a future for now uncertain and demotivating, for these ‘young old ones’.

Conclusions:

‑ With regard to the congress, we were surprised by the philosophical and rhetorical overload of the messages and speakers. Interesting in many cases as arguments to stimulate thinking, to be sure, but somewhat removed in discourse, as well as precluding the creation of a broader environment in which to debate more everyday and real aspects of the issues. Perhaps something in which we were all interested. Sharing experiences not philosophies.
‑ Another conclusion, not only from the congress but as the fruit of the learning curve of professionals working for coexistence between the generations: for us, there is a generation - the young - which for the first time is able to manage on its own with the aid of technology and the information it generates and obtains from technology. These young people live between the real and the virtual, taking refuge in this habitat that is inaccessible to adults and the elderly. Virtuality provides an escape hatch from their surface reality. Salaries, jobs, housing problems, the problems of living with parents - all this forms part of their surface reality.
‑ The response of young people in the form of an increasing belief in and involvement with non-governmental organizations and a rejection of politics as we understand it today is a signpost to where as adults they may come to direct nations.
‑ Throughout the papers, we had the feeling that intergenerational communication is synonymous with the elderly and children or young people. Although several speakers mentioned it, a critical view of the role of those of at adult age was missing. It would seem that because we produce and are integrated in the labour market we are exempt from helping these groups to find their place in society. In our opinion, experiences should open up to more diverse groups. Why not elderly people teaching at high schools? Why not adults doing volunteer work with young people with social integration problems? Or kids collaborating - guided by adults of course - on experiences with their sick or disabled peers. Unfortunately, society is full of groups and collectives in need of help, and we find it very limiting and even somewhat perverse to reduce the equation to only two ages (and, in addition, without taking into account cultural, economic differences, etc between two young people or elders of the same age)

The Fundació Viure i Conviure of Caixa de Catalunya’s Social Welfare Department has been working for more than ten years to promote intergenerational relations, developing highly positive projects such as the “programme for shared living between seniors and university students”. This project, in their own words, “demonstrates the obsolescence of the idea that old age is an inactive and unproductive stage of life, while it raises the awareness of young people about older people and fosters an awareness of solidarity in an eminently individualistic society.”

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