Liz: July 2008 Archives

Long, detailed notes follow in extended entry.

In the Maker Shed

Kits like

Maker Faire!

conversation


  • what kits need: hot glue, soldering iron

  • kids involvement in Make, Maker Faire?

  • Dale: education day the day before

  • Ed: kits going to kids?

  • Brian: got the sense that a lot of people were buying them for kids

Fablab


  • everything to build machinery

  • how do we make this accessible to kids from elementary to high school?

Scratch
lifelong kindergarten project at media lab
something that kids can make themselves - for creativity and for learning
provides some built-in sensors with pre-calibrated values
shows a homemade Guitar Hero made by a 6th grader, who figured out that humans can complete a circuit
developing a community of young programmers through the website - over 170,000 projects posted since it started last year
next version of Scratch will 'raise the ceiling' for more expert use and finer grained control
integrating Arduino
and creating output from Scratch to systems of actuators
building graphic programming systems - enabling sharing code quickly and allowing people to double-click and get immediate feedback on what each visual "block" does
a small piece of firmware on the Arduino connects the Arduino to Scratch
supporting multiple kinds of engagement with Scratch - balancing the needs of multiple people - moving people into "real" programming

conversation
back and forth between controller and desktop - important to let people know what would happen IF they called a function

The manipulative is the message

embodied media
the narrowing of experience through windows-mouse interface
how can computers leverage our physical-world skills in a way that is generalizable

siftables


  • using existing physical gestures: tilting, swirling, pouring, moving closer

  • sense physical motion

  • display color graphics

  • sense neighbors in close proximity

  • communicate wirelessly with a computer: standalone or interface to a desktop

software: programming a distributed system


  • distributed code/algorithms: robust, enables emergent behavior - but difficult to author complex coordinated bheavior

  • centralized control: easier to author, but can be brittle

  • so siftables combines both

software: events


  • both single events (in a single siftable) and topology changes (a cluster of units, like pouring color from one to another)

interaction paradigm: embodied media rather than "physical cursor"

Sensor Network User Interfaces
f


  • irst idea: interface to a sensor network

  • but can we create an interface from a sensor network - so that interaction with nodes creates interface?

  • sensor networks are just barely becoming usable, but lots of opportunity for them

  • self-contained/powered mobile nodes! coordinated behavior!

  • lots of architecture problems are being solved - graceful degredation, localization, code change



the problem: how do we lower the barrier to entry?

  • what is the Flash for sensor network infrastructure? what is the Arduino for sensor network infrastructure?

  • Sun SPOTS, SquidBee, XBee

wish-list


  • dead-simple mesh networking

  • foundation: discovery, position, action,

  • higher-level: global, distributed behaviors, easily see what is talking to what -- discoverability

conversation


  • Dave M: Why do you want the multiples?

  • David M: We're good with multiple manipulation, like blocks. We're good at putting things together

  • Jan: Getting students to make the mental leap from the single spot of attention to the multiple units. Also, maybe programming sensor nets is hard is because parallel programming is really hard. Also, why not touch input?

  • David M: no touch input mostly because the original vision was of piles of things, avoiding cellphone

  • Phil: Productivize?

  • David M: Yes! After finishing thesis.

  • Pamela: Is there a way we can all be aware of each other and start a forum for exchange?

  • David M: networks of distributed objects and UI

The manipulative is the message

embodied media
the narrowing of experience through windows-mouse interface
how can computers leverage our physical-world skills in a way that is generalizable

siftables


  • using existing physical gestures: tilting, swirling, pouring, moving closer

  • sense physical motion

  • display color graphics

  • sense neighbors in close proximity

  • communicate wirelessly with a computer: standalone or interface to a desktop

software: programming a distributed system


  • distributed code/algorithms: robust, enables emergent behavior - but difficult to author complex coordinated bheavior

  • centralized control: easier to author, but can be brittle

  • so siftables combines both

software: events


  • both single events (in a single siftable) and topology changes (a cluster of units, like pouring color from one to another)

interaction paradigm: embodied media rather than "physical cursor"

Sensor Network User Interfaces
f


  • irst idea: interface to a sensor network

  • but can we create an interface from a sensor network - so that interaction with nodes creates interface?

  • sensor networks are just barely becoming usable, but lots of opportunity for them

  • self-contained/powered mobile nodes! coordinated behavior!

  • lots of architecture problems are being solved - graceful degredation, localization, code change



the problem: how do we lower the barrier to entry?

  • what is the Flash for sensor network infrastructure? what is the Arduino for sensor network infrastructure?

  • Sun SPOTS, SquidBee, XBee

wish-list


  • dead-simple mesh networking

  • foundation: discovery, position, action,

  • higher-level: global, distributed behaviors, easily see what is talking to what -- discoverability

Sketching in Hardware Day 3: Tod Kurt

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Good hardware APIs

what makes a good hardware API

why is the Basic Stamp so hard? it's unclear what you do to it - you need to buy all those other bits in order to even get started

Arduino: has a USB port, and holes - people know how to use holes, you stick something in!

another good hardware API:
I2C connectors on Wii
Todd made his own connector to an Arduino
it's actually easy to interface
Wii MotionPlus 2-axis accelerometer for $15!

started thinking about this while making BlinkM - how to make an augmented LED that would fit perfectly into standard prototyping setups?

the benefits of .1'' spacing

BlinkM
MaxM - ultrabright
LinkM - productivized Arduino to make hooking up lights EVEN easier and less scary for non-engineers

USB not on Rails
turns out there are a bunch of problems with the original USB-HID idea
instead, use USB Communication Device Class (CDC)!
no drivers needed
it's simple, but maybe too simple (like serial)

generative shapes with laser cutters
Sketchup + SVG plugin to make patterns for containers

conversation
create "least possible" BlinkM deployment tool with connectors already attached for coin battery
adapter board so LED can be swapped in and out

Moving Things and the Anatomy of Prototypes

Moving Things
t


  • eaching in Umea

  • examples of student work: very fast projects - limited ability to prototype behaviors, faking it with video

  • easy to refer to and mimick human behaviors

  • but it's hard to articulate a vocabulary around different qualities of movement

  • looking for other modalities to describe (as the Futurists did)

  • consequences: you have to build stuff in order to ground design decisions

  • synthesizing movement (esp organic movement) is really tough! we need better tools

  • but the results can be fun


  • Kristofer Polhem's alphabet of movement

  • Babbage's sign language for the movement of machinery - kind of obscure

  • Labanotation - but you have to be trained!

  • taking inspiration from CAD/animation software

  • Fischer Technik kits

  • Parkes/Poupyrev/Ishii article on Desigining Kinetic Interactions for Organic Interactions

Anatomy of prototypes
Lim, Stolterman, and Tenenberg 2008 (behind subscription wall at ACM)
Systemic approach to prototypes and prototyping
past attempts to identify prototypes
fidelity level - not a great way to approach -- all in how prototypes are framed, and you can't separate prototypes from the activity they
dependent on type of activity
Lichter et al (1993): from software, 4 types: (1) presentation prototype, (2) proper prototype, (3) breadboard, (4) pilot system

Principles of Prototyping (from Lim, Stolterman, Tenenberg)
fundamental prototyping principle
economic principles
filtering dimensions
manifestation dimensions

why this is interesting
relationships between dimensions are complex
develop enhanced relationship to prototype quality
use as a thinking guide when planning
a "good" prototype is very dependent on what you are trying to explore, evaluate, understand

CTPuino! The perfect board!


Steampunk Treehouse


SFAI
Roboxotica
Fire Arts
Crucible
Wilhelmina: "Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea"

Open-Source Hardware vs Open-Source Software

what is open source hardware?


  • ex: Arduino, OpenSPARC, RepRap, Chumby

  • seven layer open source model from (PT and ladyada): physical, schematic, parts list, layout, firmware, drivers

  • people care about different parts

  • David's def: "Provision of the digital artificats necessary to reproduce, understand, and modify a piece of hardware"

how does it differ from OS software?


  • money!

  • this bothers OS software people - you need more money to do hardware

  • but if you're spending all this time, like in OSS, you could just spend money and save some time in OSH

  • distribution is essential - especially internationally - but it's not a problem in OSS

  • tools aren't good (ie, version control is really hard, and standard file formats aren't actually the source code)

  • Eagle and CAD are proprietary and expensive, in OSS you can use great free tools

  • testing is expensive and slow - it can take hours or weeks, so rapid iteration is hard

  • and collaboration is difficult - you can't just email a patch and run it

  • first off - what's the equivalent of a patch in hardware? then you'd have to have it manufactured to test it - so lots of people sending in little patches isn't practicable

  • so forking is the norm, not as political as in sw

  • so there are lots of Arduino versions - they don't stay together in one canonical form

  • encouraging entrepreneurship - distribution channels almost require starting a business. it's not just about creating the thing (the piece of sw) doesn't see it as a good thing or a bad thing - it attracts a different kind of person, and he's positive about startups

  • can't upgrade after release (given what Nate said) - you can do a new version, but people will still own and use the old one

  • extra knowledge required: sources, manufacturers, distributor relationships, etc - it's more than just source code

  • OS sw licenses may not apply to hw - you can't copyright a circuit, though you can patent it and you can copyright the expression of a circuit in a form - someone might be able to just redraw your file and not have to keep it open source

  • discussion: how to do licensing effectively?

core similarities


  • the four freedoms still apply

  • start with the minimum useful thing

  • you need more than just the source file: documentation, etc

  • there are many ways to contribute: documenting projects, teaching workshops

  • people are driven by many different motivations: making money, getting name known, helping others

  • community is key - support makes the difference in what's successful

  • there are many different governance models

  • it's okay to make money

  • it helps to have a thick skin - refers to talk by Subversion developers

what lessons are different?


  • the centrality of the source code: central repository isn't as big a deal; there's not One Big Thing everyone is working on

  • what happens when "compiling" hw gets cheap? maybe all these differences are just contingent on the difficulties of making hw - maybe open source software and hardware will look more similar?

conversation


  • Leah: relationship btw Arduino and sw?

  • Dave M what works is that they're all designed for each other

  • Phil: there's a community, a locus

  • Brian: well, also -- you just have to install one thing.

  • Jan: the big thing is the total usability of the package

  • Phil: it's just that someone took the time to do it

  • Jan: Layer 0 of the seven layer model added: the material science and the specs

  • Nate: traction point: how do you get critical mass of the community that's so necessary?

  • DaveM: Davide and Massimo's workshops, and the personal connection of knowing the developers, and when Tom Igoe started using it at ITP.

  • Nick: like pirated sw back in the day - you had to know someone - and then there's a movement to wider downloading


The New Ecology of Things

autonomous behaviors: ALAVs human scale: Nikolai Cornell's installation for George P. Johnson encouraging social interaction: round table for George P. Johnson, Jonathan Jarvis, Moto Development - the roundness of the table really makes a difference productive: people make their own experiences and produce their own meanings - designers are the facilitators

Tools for designers - NET Lab tools


  • tethered system, but with wireless

  • easy to use for designers, but supports coding

  • Widgets: drag and drop Flash components, configured in XML file

  • Supports: Osculator, analog in/out, esc

  • Hub: Java server that talks to all the devices

  • MediaControl: controlling the environment

conversation


  • free to download

  • but there should be some sort of consortium to share all these tools

  • demo: DMX light is controlled through ENTEC

  • Bjoern: what would the ideal solution look like, because we're all using hacks to make a really good dynamic gui editor for these graphics/hardware protoyping systems

  • Phil: Agrees with Matt: students already have and know Flash

  • Matt: Flash is important because it handles all kinds of media and web stuff - not because its graphical

Smart Healing Environments

design, art, craft, science: making creativity

things that think, spaces that sense, places that play

teaching: patient room of the future


  • field observations - looking for workarounds

  • care cart: locating clinical work in one rollable cart

  • patient family interface

  • patient interactive communication and learning system: touchscreen by bed controls information center

  • full room open house to demonstrate

  • pervasive asthma monitoring system

  • nosocomial infection control through behavior modification

  • rehabilitation exercises

a lab for making things


  • importance of making things

  • where would Leonardo da Vinci take classes today? need synthesis

  • programming is design, in the sense of design as making representations, and programming as the creation of representations

conversation
are hospitals really interested in adoption?

Really really detailed notes follow. Thanks to all the SubEthaEdit contributors.

Electronics as material

what we thought we wanted
an easy way to use electronics prototyping kits for Smart Design


  • simple enough for people with little to no electronics knowledge

  • supports quick and loose ideation

  • easy to assemble and disassemble

  • small and mountable

  • reusable

what we really needed


  • not a prototyping platform, but a material

  • already enough prototyping platforms

  • industrial designers don't actually want to do software logic - they want to work with a tangible thing like

  • cardboard, paper, nuts, bolts

  • all you need is a power source


what we came up with: littleBits
you can grab it and use it, but can escalate to a more complex prototyping tool
discrete components that are not quite raw
so they use magnets: small, impossible to connect incorrectly, easy to snap together
no logic: it's just on or off once the components are together
using cardboard with copper tape to mock up surface mount

some ideas


  • create a recorder modules to preprogram common behavior and configurations

  • moving to 3 wires so that it is compatible with Arduino for more complex interactions

  • make it open source to enable libraries of configurations

  • get wider adoption!

Looking for something super

from hardware engineering to MIT Media Lab's computing culture group - learning how to make things fast

from assembly to disassembly
from large scale engineering design to hacking

kinet - animated surface from hard flexor materials
random search - undergarment to wear while travelling that records search process from "random search" - complex system
Teta Haniya's Secrets - hacked toys turned into kitschy lingerie in Syria inspired her line of lingerie

Constructed Narratives Construction Kit

  • mechanical puzzle and language game designed to encourage exchange of ideas
  • technology in public spaces as tool of engagement
  • continues existing languages of wooden block forms
  • building in physical world echoed on screen

goals


  • encourage discussion

  • physical interface for learning and exploration

  • component tracking system that requires minimum of external devices

  • system for building and annotating physical models

2008 prototype emphasizes both swift prototyping and management of power needs in individual blocks

co-building language space and negotiating with that space through physical construction of blocks

Conversation
the blocks are magnetic and they snap together

Confessions of a Recovering Toy Inventor

  1. I never shared the tools I created
  2. There is no innovation. We just recycled old ideas.
  3. Could have given up evil ways sooner and joined IDEO!
  4. Will go through slides really fast!

So:
lots of stuff created but never shared
design engineering with constraints - making stuff that guarantees a return on investment means no incentive to do anything new (ie, risky)
off-the-shelf prototyping!
tools that people outside the toy industry never see (ie, EM5700 sound chip)
aside: toys don't have power switches because consumers don't remember to turn them on and off
no user-friendly tools for designers - imagine making 2 or 3 prototypes a week
they started to break the tools and needed better software
started to use LabView - very powerful, but very expensive
paradigm is powerful for him, but does not reach larger community - so we're all losing out

conversation
learned about LabView through doing biomedical engineering
two views: graphic programming environments not always useful, but a good tool for doing complex things quickly vs using graphic programming environments to do small things and doing large things with code
phil van allen: not "either or" - lots of options
maybe what we need are interchange formats so that people who work in different modes can translate work between them


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)
video games as social tools
  • 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


beauty

  • 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


materiality

  • playing with non-traditional materials

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


cultural context

  • 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


centralized architecture

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

Sketching in Hardware Day 1: Tom Igoe

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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

music interfaces at Parsons - teaching circuit bending

how to work as a sound sculpture artist?

-----

Questions: conversation about responsiveness, and performance: using physical performance to get past overvaluing of obscurity and mystery in responsive

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

From product to process
  • 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?