notes on physical interaction, sustainability, networks, simians, cats, and more.
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Thanks to Jeff Gray for this most excellent link to a project describing how to attach your blender to a motion sensor to scare yoru cat off the counter. On the one hand: gratuitous use of technology, anyone? On the other: didn’t buy yet another cat-specific item to do the job. On the third: how do you stop the blender from going off when you come in the room?
This weekend I went down to Austin, Texas for Maker Faire Austin, the 2008 edition. ITP resident researchers Rory Nugent and Hyeki Min went with me, as did recent alums So-Young Park and Young-Hyun Chung. Between us, we took eight ITP projects: Young-Hyun’s Digital Wheel Art, So-Young’s Music & Fashion Coordinator, Tom Gerhardt’s FireLight, Christian Cerrito’s Brushbots, Che-Wei Wang and Kristin O’Friel’s Momo, Rory’s Square Band, Alex Reeder’s Butterfly Dress,and Eric Rosenthal’s Liquid ID Spectrometer. It was exhausting showing work for two days straight, but a lot of fun as well.
Esquire magazine’s October issue has an E-ink cover. Neat, right? But reading the website notes on it made me realize that if this is the future of magazine publishing, then we might as well give up on environmental sustainability right now. It should be called the E-waste cover. Consider:
This summer I got to assist on a project by artists Matthew Belanger, Sean Riley, Ven Voisey, and producer Marianne Petit on a neat project called Lumens. Actually, they did all the work, I just offered a little guidance to get things started. It’s an installation of 160 networked lamps situated in two galleries in the towns of Adams and North Adams, Massachusetts, and the online arts organization turbulence.org. The lamps in each gallery react to visitors walking through the space, as well as responding to movements in the other space. In addition, visitors online can turn on the lamps as well.
HC Gilje’s wind-up bird(s) is an environmental sound work installed in a forest in Lillehammer, Norway. It’s a flock of mechanical woodpeckers that communicate via XBee radios, spread out through the forest. I love this line in the description: “Initial tests indicate an attraction: it took 15 minutes for a real woodpecker to join a wind-up bird on the same tree.”
Image by hc gilje
Emotional Design: Why We Love (Or Hate) Everyday Things
In this book, Norman counters some of the points he makes in his first book, The Design of Everyday Things, by pointing out that we do make decisions about design based on emotional reasoning, and that design affects us emotionally. He describes Human reaction to design on three levels: the visceral, or how it appears; the behavioral, or how it acts; and reflective, or how it makes us think and feel about ourselves through our association with it.
Fashioning Technology
This is a really great book for anyone interested in physical computing. It includes a nice introduction to basic electronics and a number of construction projects for simple electronic crafts. The writing is clear and readable, and the design and layout of the book is beautiful. The images and diagrams are big and helpful, and there are a number of really great construction techniques contained in the projects themselves. It won’t spend a lot of time on my bookshelf because I’ll be using it as a resource a lot.
Michihito Mizutani is a researcher at School of Design at the University of Art and Design Helsinki, Finland. His interaction design work is worth checking out…
Nortd have released TouchKit, an open source toolkit for making your own multitouch screen in OpenFrameworks. It looks pretty good, and fairly easy to set up. For people interested in experimenting with multitouch surfaces, this seems like a good place to start.
There are certain project themes that recur every year in physical computing classes. Many of them are ideas that lend themselves to multiple interesting variations, and are valuable ways to learn about physical interaction through doing. Others don’t offer only limited interactive possibilities, but capture the popular imagination because they’re simple and quite often pretty to look at. What follows is a review of some of the themes I see frequently. These are by no means the only themes that come up, nor are they the only things you can do with physical computing. Many physical computing projects feature two or more of these themes.
Sometimes when people learning about physical computing hear that a particular idea has been done before, they give up on it, because they think it’s not original. What’s great about the themes that follow here is that they allow a lot of room for originality. Despite their perennial recurrence, they offer surprises each time they come up. So if you’re new to physical computing and thinking to yourself “I don’t want do to that, it’s already done,” stop thinking that way! There’s a lot you can add to these themes through your variation on them.
