Results tagged “sketching” from confectious

Redrawing the line between PCU and MCU

some projects

• teaching: kits for classes


• installations for crowds


• working with obsolete parts


• ambidextrous magazine

research
Sketching 06 - design/test/analyze process for prototyping - getting feedback from tools you use to prototype
Exemplar - demonstrate/edit/review process for generating high-level interaction rules through programming by demonstration

"the best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas"

• sketching from elaboration to reduction: we are either widening our scope or narrowing our scope - but it's a fractal pattern occurring throughout the process


• so you can explore a design space really quickly


• good for communicating ideas to clients


• keeping things honest, so that you can make sure that testers aren't just giving you what they want

keeping multiple alternatives open

• exists for graphic representation, but not so much for interaction


• Juxtapose: experimentation with experimentation and alternatives for hardware/software


• so that you can switch back and forth between multiple versions in a runtime environment


• automatically building sliders to control parameters on desktop during runtime


• and tabs to control which program is running


• instead of compiling a program you actually compile the code along with a table that maps variables to a control interface


• tradeoffs: you lose

no more zombie prototypes

• the hardware is in place, but you don't have the software left


• $8 to avoid - add storage to the microcontroller


• plug the desktop to a usb hub, which is connected to a flash drive and to the arduino


• this can be miniaturized to a shield


• you could also keep the entire development environment on your project

Conversation

• where to site runtime controls?


• embed in IDE?

When is a shovel not a shovel?

• thoughtless acts - users changing what things do
• people's needs change depending on their mode (like Zipcar, renting cars for short errands)
• things facilitate social exchange (like the way Guitar Hero pulls people into video games for flirtation)

• new hardware technology is facilitating the participation of newer audiences
• people are using these new interfaces to bond with each other
• with traditional video games, all interaction is through the screen, and the screen is the focus of innovation
• with, say, the Wii, the interaction is in the room as well as on screen
• also, avatar play: making Miis as gifts
• cross-generational play

unmet needs/opportunity areas

• family dynamics - mother as facilitator


• leveling the playing field by including the audience


• Wii host games

how do we prototype behaviors? inspire-evolve-validate

• bodystorming/role play


• iterative user testing - fake prototypes, interactive prototypes


• release the thing and begin a conversation

discusses IDEO prototyping workshop - connecting it to a challenge to spur new thinking about a project

5 Memos

(citing Calvino's 6 memos)

openness

• trying to make a new medium accessible to kids, and other novices


• and using something pre-existing (Arduino) to save herself unnecessary time and labor

engagement

• Weiser envisioned technology disappeared into the background of a physical world


• But that misses the vision of a provocative, engaging technology - technology that asserts itself as a subject for discussion - that brings emotions like delight, flirtation, that take on active roles in social lives (workshop on touch-based sensing that gave teenagers an excuse to flirt)


• Or engagement as flow

• not a big part of engineering schools


• color, shape, scale


• why are some things ugly? aesthetics is not just the box, and yet the tools for board design don't really allow for personal aesthetics

• playing with non-traditional materials


• using conductive paint on canvas with magnetic arduinos to make a literal (fantastic and compelling!) sketchbook of electronics

• bringing more different people into technology design

conversation

history of physical computing

PC + dumb sensor/actuator interfaces
- "it's nice, it helps you break out of the PC world, but it still gives you a very computer-centric view of the world"

Programmable boards with microcontrollers on them
- like Arduino
- "now you have something that you actually teach to do something" - you can if you want disconnect it and it can become autonomous

matrix for examining toolkits

• iCubeX - expensive, but it all works really well
• Phidgets - can also work, but still mostly hooked to desktop
• Basic Stamp -

• Make Controller and Arduino - moving beyond serial

Ubiquitous technology sketching middleware

iStuff --> iStuff Mobile
- iStuff was missing a strong input/output device for mobile settings (ie, the phone!)
- it's still really hard to program without a good GUI (Stanford's Exemplar is another approach to this)
- uses Max/MSP-like wiring between boxes to connect sensors to applications through the phone platform

Organic Interfaces

Arduino's limits
size and cost

• - 100s of units


• - create emergent swarming behavior


• - lightup clothing with independent nodes


• - give away to people for studies

so: proposes LumiNet

• wired network of intelligent pixels


• sensor dongles inject data anywhere into network


• for tangible education and simulation


• learning about tree data, wave equations


• wearable installations


• programming by infection (like Phil Levis' work)

where is the biggest spot for innovation?

Conversations
using algorithms from motes for updating
looking at Leah Beuchley's solutions for connectors and electricity
using multiple busses

AS220: Rhode Island art space

thinking in patterns of interaction that can be replicated: geek dinners, etc

Fox Filter: filters to view TV through - puts a moustache on TV anchors to remind yourself that you shouldn't take them too seriously

Conversation
advice for starting places like AS220? funding through cottage industries, like a taqueria and a bar, studio and darkroom rentals
start small - easier to ask forgiveness than permission
declared "a mission" about a year in

Democratizing Innovation

change from traditional, manufacturer-centered innovation paradigm to user-centered (democratized) innovation paradigm because manufacturers need a guaranteed market, so lead users go ahead

lead users solve their own problems, which is actually what has historically happened in medicine (John Gibbon, inventor of the heart-lung machine)

survey of historic development by users of major new innovations - who created those major developments? 77% built by users, not large manufacturers

User innovations don't look like "products" to manufacturers - example: radioimmunassay system, or circular irrigation system for agriculture

users develop functionally novel innovations; manufacturers develop dimension of merit improvements; ie, making existing solutions more efficient

large fractions of dedicated, enthusiastic users innovate

first one user innovates, then they form [sociations]

60% of products for kids are start-ups founded by users - ie, jogging strollers

Internet is enabling individual user innovators to join into collaboratives - increasingly powerful competitors to manufacturer-based design

ex: Lego Mindstorms and its user base

user collaboratives can out-compete producers in design - there are more of them and they share with each other, so they can cover more of the design space as compared to a few manufacturers who each hive off their own potentially sub-optimal solutions

so what about products like pharmaceuticals and GPS? none of us is going to build a satellite in our garage -- however, those problems can be solved by individuals cooperating if they take a different tack [this is leaning a bit too libertarian to me...is education one of those things we could all just do ourselves? what about people who need to be paid? we're getting into the free labor problem] - like Skyhook and wardriving

conversation
differences between individual lead user innovation and groups of people who come together to make open source solutions of existing corporate problem

Physical Computing's Greatest Hits: the wheels that people reinvent again and again
(in rough order)

1. theremin-like instruments
2. drum gloves (tangible vs intangible)
3. dance floors
4. Scooby-Doo paintings: paintings that react to presence (easy to sense presence, hard to sense attention)
5. body-as-cursor
6. video mirrors (aka, hand wavers, because people always wave their hands)
7. mechanical pixels
8. hand-as-cursor (aka Minority Report)
9. multi-touch surfaces (exercise:operate an iPhone while it's in your pocket)
10. tilty stands and tables
11. tilty controllers
12. things you yell at
13. meditation helpers
14. fields of grass (running your hand across it affects it)
15. dolls and pets
16. remote hugs
17. LED fetishism

conversation

these are really design patterns
what they have in common: 10 second space of expertise achievement, so they all feel the same
we need a tradition of "hello world" projects in crit culture, so we can focus on applied culture
tradition is fundamental in mature fields
but there may be just a community-wide obsession with the technical level

hoax Max/MSP video of Rock Band controller - "the next step beyond deception: obsessive self-consciousness"

the problem when the documentation is more important than the thing you invented in the first place

is it worth making things that don't work, and fixing them? is there a higher point to debugging?

conversation: opacity as positive and negative

glassbox vs blackbox interaction
- glassbox: you can use it without knowing it, but the you can see through the abstraction when you need to work with it

supporting students work by helping them build -- very heavy commitment to student support - but works with similar systems across multiple classes

from O'Reilly Hacks books to getting people off the desktop with Tivo hacks to Make magazine

Looking at DIY media as aspirational - even if the only participation is through dreaming. It's about the details of doing - sharing the practices. Like Popular Mechanics of 1920s. The language felt like it was written for hackers, but written for 1920s tinkerers.

what matters is not that the thing belongs to us in the end, but that we get to make the decisions ourselves as we go along - returning to hobbies to gain control over work again

Maker Faire - seeing things in person
----
Questions
Make, Craft, and gender? Make as high-tech->low-tech, Craft as low-tech->high-tech
recovery of lost arts - also, because older technologies are easier to understand visually, and hence to copy without owning the source

Stop and sell it sell something as soon as you get it functional, then revise the problems in another revision

Anything can be fixed get something working before you completely rework it

the promise of short-run manufacturing - and the skills necessary to do it well

Daria: but is there room for beauty? for aesthetics?

ActDresses - programming robots with accessories

• we already dress up robots
• dress signals mode of interaction
• visible forms of program representations are valuable
  • for example, the action language of comics, which refers to visible and tangible objects
• questions about appropriate level of abstraction

Interaction Lab at Rockwell working in a "habitable collage," aiming for "quirky pluralism"

Luminodes: project with industrial designers, architects - lights that talk to each other and communicate with each other - tangible interaction

"we always tell ourselves not to be too smart"

covent garden reactive street

Near Future Laboratory: emerging from visions with Nicholas Nova about devices and scenarios that seem intriguing - not so much products, but offering practices: prop making for a future world. Sketching practice, writing practice - expressing ideas through artifacts.

DIY hardware today is like the Web 10 years ago. Someday, "productive consumers" making their own objects

Nokia Design - clarifying and translating business opportunities through design.
Design relatively new. How to connect design directly to strategy? Fast prototyping answers those questions fast.

Need a toolchain for materializing ideas at the next level of refinement from just working to how it expresses itself in the world (see: Shapeways

Wish list

• refining sketching to add finish


• rich narrative and explication for documentation - including the failures


• 32 bit sketching with displays


• prototypers and sketchers at Nokia

• reflecting on Bell Labs' work with artists
• and the move by Michael Noel to policy
• from Design by Numbers to Ben Fry and Casey Reas - they were right in working on Processing! remaining open to discovery
• Scratch and Michael Resnick
• the beauty of limited vocabulary - and how does that relate to "individual artistic expression" (heavy scare quotes) - what is novel? does it matter that something is novel? or is it okay just to do stuff for fun?
• mixing student and faculty concerns on one blog - resisting attempt to separate them so that peopole can listen to each other
• looking for something simpler in computers - like a memory of Photoshop when it was really simple
• the difficulty of the "mathematical gap" between how we experience the world and how we represent it in computers - how about a programming language without math?
• coming from an art perspective: what is the user experience we need to make truly amazing things on a computer?
• the law requires annual reports, which in turn creates the graphic design industry - what if the required movies?

Sketching is at the Industrial Design department of RISD, courtesy of Tellart

(im)material

• before the 18th century, everything was handmade; the Arts and Crafts movement is the child of mechanization
• patterns: grid, loop, abstraction, representation: relating patterns of knowledge and patterns of fashion
• for example, layering and separates are examples of grid design in fashion
• a different sociological model: Issey Miyake's print-and-cut-out dresses - a different production model, a different relationship to clothes
• her own work: processes of compression, translation, abstraction
• art, politics, fashion, digital futures

Questions
- interesting conversation about corporations - is the cultural change in the new tools we make?
- Eric Von Hippel - corporations will become production and distribution arms, with innovation coming from individual users and smaller groups

Sketching is at the Industrial Design department of RISD, courtesy of Tellart

Mike Kuniavsky: intro

• vernacular, craftsman, artisan electronics in between one-off projects and massive industrial products
• democratization of process of making, which in turn enables sketching
• sketching: speed, cheapness, provisionality (put together only to be reworked), something that "wears a history of its own ideas in its physical presence
• we are far enough along the hardware sketching tool development process to not have to reinvent the wheel
• time to think about the values we embody in our tools, and how we can make it easier to do the "right" thing than the "wrong" thing - no matter how we define that

Mike Kuniavsky: Blender history

• history of blender controls as a history of "encapsulation" of expert knowledge into increasingly customizable and interactive food tools
• "so we don't have to know the messy details while still getting good results"
• more and more things are becoming more "appliance-like"
• linked together into object-oriented components, rather than individual devices
• ie, like the RoomWizard scheduler
• so, a question: how can knowledge be abstracted into the products that we make?