Archive for November, 2007

Meaning

Published by Tom on November 29, 2007 under The Softness of Things

Meaning and narrative: I took this week’s Softness topic in the direction of ‘meaningful’… meaningful objects, memory, sentimentality, history. It seems to me that we are heading toward a tricky situation with technology and the things that fill our lives. More and more of the objects that we live with are plastic and temporary. Computer and phones, the two things we probably interact with the most, are thrown away every couple years… and theres no way to make them really special-not like a pair of boots or or hardwood floor. We are loosing the ability to imprint ourselves in the objects we own… no history. Soon will be gone the days of the heirloom dresser, and the old cracky photo album from your grandma. Because technology is going to be put in everything, and technology changes, we are going to have to replace everything we own every couple years. I know that sounds hyperbolic, but it may be true… even the house, the once stable fixture in our lives, is fast becoming more fragile and stuffed with soon-to-be outdated technology.We need to start to deal with this problem. We need to start making digital heirlooms… something to encapsulate meaning. I starting thinking about the objects in my life that are meaningful to me: old leather boots, jewelry, photos, memorabilia, etc; and discovered that I don’t really care about the digital interfaces in my life. I care about the digital files, because they embody memories, but not the hardware. I would, in an instant, take a new computer if all my files and settings came with it… and I think thats a shame. We should care about the things in our lives… love them and their uniqueness.So, I decided to look at the cell phone. It is a good candidate to come up with some solutions for because its small, relatively simple, and is with you all the time. I made a list of the qualities of the things I care about (boots / wallet and jewelry: see presentation link), and a list of my cell phone’s qualities, then compared them. This is what I found: I think the reason I can’t relate to my phone is that I have to give it away every few years, and its made out of materials that wear very poorly. So, I decided to propose a few design changes: 1) Made the hardware modular, extendable, upgradeable. 2) (the more radical one)Make it out of materials you can imprint yourself in: leather and wood. The result is a little wood/leather/screen box. The words I hear people use when they hold it are like: “executive” “nice” “ooooo” “pretty”… no bad stuff… only good. I think people are missing these materials in their lives. Organic and human. It just makes sense.I know some companies are starting to make electronics with wood cases and such… but I don’t think thats enough. We need to change the paradigm of consumer electronics from “buy lots of cheap” to “buy few really good,” to make our devices more meaningful. And that will require a more upgradeable hardware. I hope we get there.Link:

Presentation

 
     
     
     

Felt Resistor

Published by Tom on November 29, 2007 under The Softness of Things

This week for softness is about MATERIALS! I like them… or at least I really love some of them, especially felt. There is something extremely pleasing to me about the pureness and density of felt. It is waterproof, insulating, soft, firm… kinda like fabric you can mold. So, when material week came I thought I would give a felt project a try.I have been interested in the idea of really tactile and soft interfaces for some time; something you can really sink your hands into in an organic way… thats missing from electronics. I decided to combine both of my interests and make Conductive Felt. I needed to first figure out how to somehow inject a conductive material into the felting process. I tried unraveling conductive thread first… but that was going to take too long… and then I thought of steel wool, and that worked; it also made a nice conceptual parallel: only using natural wool and steel wool to make felt. After I had the solution, it was time to make felt.Felting (the process of making felt) is tricky and time-consuming. There are two ways: wet and dry. I went for the wet felting method because I thought I could get a better a better mix of the two wools. Problem is, its really hard to make good felt… esp with wet felting. The process is simple… apply heat and pressure to wool… and ta-da you get felt… but in reality, its HARD to get a good dense felt. BUT, I did manage to make some decent stuff after a few tries and it was time to hook up some electronics.The result was not only a felt resistor… but a variable felt resistor… which is really useful. This is whats happening in the felt: You ground one side of the felt (white lead and safety clip in the photos/video) and insert a positive electrode (pin or any conductive thing) anywhere in the felt. Depending on how close the end of the electrode is to the ground the more or less steel wool the electricity has to travel through; because the steel wool has some resistance, it adds up to an analog value you can put into a microcontroller or amp.What you see in the video is the felt resistor acting as a variable resistor to control a servo motor… but you can use it to control anything, just like a knob or button.

This project is really exciting to me. I think I am on to something that has not really been explored before… and thats nice. It needs some more development, like better felting and implementation… but I’m working on it. I think I am going to create a larger installation for the Softness final… we will see!

Interaction (Connector V2)

Published by Tom on November 15, 2007 under The Softness of Things

The word ‘interaction’ in the ITP and digital media world has become somewhat of a dirty word. Describing works as being ‘interactive,’ nowadays, means almost nothing and ends up sounding trite. I think this is because it has been often misapplied and is not really understood. So, I was excited for this week’s Softness of Things topic: interaction. Could we maybe get a-hold of a good definition of ‘interaction’?Despina enlisted Dr. Paul Pangaro (an expert in Cybernetics) to help us wade through the science of interaction and come up with some answers. As it turns out, there isn’t really a good concrete definition for interaction, all you can really do is look at a situation and asses HOW interactive it is… and there are tools to help with that.One exercise that really helped me understand the systems I create, is to diagram the feedback system using four stages: goal, action, environment, and feedback. These four areas create a loop that can be constructed from any perspective or context. The idea is simple when one loop is sitting there by itself, but when multiple intelligences are interacting and mixing their own loops, things get more complicated. It is the presence of multiple loops, I believe, that make an system more or less interactive.

So I went back and looked at a few of my projects and analyzed their Cybernetic systems. One project in particular caught my attention: my Connector project (the one with the rolling ball and LED’s). The Connector project was successful as an experience for the user because there was a really tight feedback loop: When you tilt the box, the ball rolls and you feel it instantly. It felt great and was fun, but not interactive. There is only one loop inside itself. What would happen if it had two loops working inside it?

Interaction hopefully. I was interested enough in a ’smart’ ball rolling game that I decided to make one. This is how it works: (Also see schematic pdf) There is a brass ball which rolls on two rails. The rails are divided up so that they make an array of seven switches that are triggered by the ball rolling on them. Depending on which switch is activated (by the ball being on it), the whole platform, that supports the rails and ball, is tilted to a certain degree with a servo motor. The user still holds and tilts the game to make the ball move, but the game fights back… makes it harder… interacts. By adding a little a.i. into the game, the system becomes more interactive with the user. You find yourself cussing at the little wood box more… playing with it. Most of the success of the Connector game still carries through, but is augmented and supported with the interactive addition.

Link:

Schematic Analysys .pdf

 
     

 
     
     

Head Space (Reactive Spaces V2)

Published by Tom on November 15, 2007 under The Softness of Things

Luckily, this week’s Softness of Things topic was space. So, I could continue my pursuit of a reactive space. This week I really wanted to get a sense of what a human-scale spacial system would feel like. As always, we only have one week to complete our projects, so a full-scale ceiling is out of the question… but a head-sized space is more feasible.So, I set out to create a small tunnel with a small ceiling that might simulate, or at least get closer to, a movable ceiling. Because of it’s small size, I was able to use servo motors, which made the whole thing much easier to deal with. In all I had five panels at about 12×20 inches, which made a tunnel/space that was 5 foot long and 12 inches wide. Three servos working together enables the five panels to move in a wave-like fashion in response to a person’s movement in the system.As you walk up to the tunnel, the first panel lifts up for you to enter. As you move in and down the head-tunnel, the panels move up and down to make room for your head.

It works ok… The panels are not as responsive as I would have wanted (mostly because the servos were lifting at their limit), but I think it starts to give you a feeling of something. Probably not anything like what a full-scale space would feel like, but something. People seemed to enjoy the prospect of a ceiling that moved… they really wanted to try it out when I told them what it did… but I think the actual experience was not that rewarding for them. For me though, it was most interesting to see the interest level in more human-scale objects. something you can really use your body with, instead of just fingers and hands.

Aside from my observations of people, I got some verbal feedback that was interesting to me: A few people said they wanted mirrors, or at least some sort of translucent/reflective material, to be the movable panels. They said it would make it more interesting to be in it. It was supprising for me to hear this, because I was focused of the ’space’ of it. In my mind I kept picturing pockets of ’space’… and that would be interesting… but the thing is, you can’t really see space. You can only see the effects of space on light. In the prototype I made, it was all shadow in the tunnel… no light the tunnel could affect. I wonder if that is why people where suggesting mirrors or translucency… they were missing the depth. THAT is something I will put in my little bag of tricks to remember.

  
 
     

 
     
     

Networked Alarm p.2

Published by Tom on November 5, 2007 under Networked Objects, Physical Computing

Since our last installment of the Networked alarm, we’ve made a few changed and advancements. (Man that sounded very government scientificy) First, Kacie joined me to make this a group project, which is great. Along with her came a very important concept: social networking. We wanted to make the process of waking up a more meaningful/rewarding experience, and we figured involving your friends/family would do that.

At first, we wanted to have audio messages from your friends/family wake you up in the morning when you got up and turned off the alarm. That turned out to be impractical for the technology we are using. So we turned to written messages instead. In some ways, little text messages are more intimate and cute (especially with the little LCD screens we got). AND, with text messages we can easily connect the system to Facebook and other social-networking platforms.

So this is how there system works:
In the morning your alarm goes off. The alarm randomly picks one of the several nodes you have around your house, and tells it to start making noise. You wake up from the noise that the node is making, and get out of bed. Once up, you have to figure out which node is making noise. Once you figure it out, you walk over to the node and press it to stop its noise. If you woke up and got over to the node fast enough, you are lucky and a message is displayed. The message is from one of your friends or family on the Facebook. Each day, there is a blank on the ‘Networked Alarm Clock’s owner’s Facebook profile where one person can input a message. The next day, that message is delivered to you at the alarm node.

If you are slow getting out of bed and over to the node, the message is not displayed and you miss it… forever. There is no way to recover your lost messages, so its an incentive to get out of bed.

In the last bit of the process, an email is sent to the person who wrote the message to you, telling them if you got the message or not, and when. If, on a day, no one leaves you a message, a default message is displayed which the owner sets. This could be a reminder or inspiration, whatever.

That is where we conceptually are.
Physically, we have work to do. This second week though, we have the wireless communication working, and the alarm clock hacked and accessible.

OH, and if you want to know more, see the pdf Presentation.