TEI’09 notes and report
TEI’09 | Cambridge
February 16-18 2009, Cambridge, UK
http://tei-conf.org/
Tom Igoe, ITP
We are pretty good at making stuff, we have to get way better at unmaking stuff
Reware, firmware to recycle old devices like ipods, PDAs, etc
http://dev.eyebeam.org/projects/reware/wiki/Reware
Layers of information in a typical electronic device
-firmware state machine
-firmware high level code
-firmware assembly code
-firmware binary
-schematic
-net list
-board layout file
-bill of materials (BOM)
-components materials list
-chemical list
-assembly order
-drill files
-pick & place data
-assembly tool list
-supporting materials used in assembly
-supporting chemicals used in assembly
Not everything is needed for recycling. IP protection still possible
Consider trojan horses to get stuff in the popular imagination
We need to develop basic literacies: energy, materials, production, resources, legacy
Look for opportunities to use dead tech
Defaults to openness
Ylva Fernaeus, SICS
Programming by physical demonstration (ex. curlybot, topobo)
It can work, but sometimes it’s nice to have a bit of code
Conference report and impression
The conference opened with a keynote from Tom Igoe. He presented ideas about sustainability and unmaking things. He mentioned that information about production and materials should be shared more so the community and users can recycle, reuse and repurpose items. A lot of this information is not related to IP. As a corporation, you could/should choose what you want to share/open with the community.
Interaction’09: my presentation
Here is the presentation I gave in Vancouver for Interaction’09. I had only 20 minutes, looking back at it I think I tried to cram too much into that timeframe. Usually I’m not so nervous for talks, but this time it was a bit different. The crowd was really knowledgeable and in the end I was quite nervous to expose my ideas and work to this audience.
Abstract:
Our sensorial system is our interface to the world. It is trough and with our senses that we can perceive, reason and exchange with external systems, living or not. Our professional and personal activities are made of rich and complex sensorial experiences, spanning on different stimulus and modalities.
Up to now, the repertoire of input and output forms generally found in human-device interfaces have been usually centered on vision and to some extend audition. Despite decades of research and development, very few systems or devices today go beyond these two senses and truly offer rich multimodal interaction. Why is that so?
This presentation will explore the opportunities and challenges related to developing new multimodal interfaces specifically based on the touch sense. It will present various methods, techniques, tools and processes that interaction designers can use to assess, sketch, create and evaluate dynamic haptic and multimodal interfaces.
2009.Interaction09.Moussette.pdf [PDF, 35 MB]
Interaction’09 notes
Interaction’09 | Vancouver
February 5-8 2009, Vancouver, Canada
http://interaction09.ixda.org
Coverage of the event on the web:
Core77 & Johnny Holland Magazine
Workshop: Designing for Touch screens and Interactive Gestures
Bill DeRouchey and Dan Saffer
A 3 hour workshop to reflect on designing for touch interaction.
A quick intro on touch screens, technology, design considerations, deliverables, adaptive targets, etc.
First exercise is to design a space (6′x6′) to experience and buy music in a retail store.
Our group focuses on an avatar to bring back the “music dude who knows it all” that was very common in the pre-digital era.
We paper prototyped many touch interaction, and it’s not easy.
Second exercise invites us to elaborate on the presentation, communication and documentation of the (touch) system.
Simple workshop, maybe I was expecting too much out of it.
Check http://www.interactivegestures.com for touch and gesture resources
Keynote: Experiencing Sustainability, John Thackara
Similar insights and call to action from what I’ve seen before from M. Thackara. Nevertheless, he is capable of communicating his ideas across with great optimism. He explains the many “peaks” and how we will have to change to survive as a specie.
Hidden costs of a mobile phone: 500 kg of resources.
I read his book, In The Bubble, during my flight to Vancouver and it covers a lot of his talks. He talks about City Eco Lab at St-Étienne (I’ve seen and it is very inspiring and motivating indeed).
Go local and look/use/share what you have near you.
We don’t need to invent anything, it’s all already happening as we speak. Have to embrace it.
read more…
Cardboard poking trio
I’ve been thinking about this simple poking mechanism for over two years now, but I never actually spent the time to build it. Now it’s a thing of the past! I took 3-4 hours later yesterday and this morning to make this first iteration out of foamcore, cardboard, pins and hot glue. I used three Draganfly 9 Gram Sub Micro servos to actuate the linkage. The resulting force is amazingly high for such tiny (and weak) servos.
I used RJ-45 (network) plugs and cable for the wiring. It took a bit more time to build but I feel it’s nicer and more convenient in the long as I plan to test and swap output modules often while prototyping various alternatives. I still have to work on a proper sequencer for this. Now the very basic sequences are hard-coded in the Arduino sketch.
I’m really happy it works so well and that it took only four hours to build. Will it last long, problably not, but then it’s a good excuse to make an improved version, with 5 servos, add a flexible/bendable casing around or just try another genetic variation!
What it does: The servo rotates and the link bars are pushed outward. It should poke the user’s hand.
Build notes: Pins are sharp, be careful while piercing through foamcore.
Next step: Improve the package. Link to a decent sequencer/trigger system (recycle an old one from HAPI or build one from scratch, maybe with Processing/Blender). Plan a standardized RF-45 configuration for all my devices (when possible): same pins for Vcc, GND and PWM at least. Laser cut the panels. Make it stackable/modular?
An introduction to shape memory alloys
I just received my Flexinol Deluxe kit, a box full of samples and little experiments to discover the great world of shape memory alloys (SMA). I have been fiddling with this stuff before but I never got farther than the regular “amazing spring” setup: you stretch a spring beyond its point of deformation, then if you heat it up it goes back to its original shape quite vigorously!
The kit contains a mixture of stuff, cheap demos and gimmicks, but the nicest things in my opinion are the little leaflets that explain the qualities and characteristics of SMA. The text introduces the SMA, the strengths of this technology (compared to servos and solenoids) and some typical setups for how to use SMA properly and fully.
I won’t copy all the good text from the manual, but in short, SMAs rearrange their crystal structure and shrink (~4% for Flexinol) when heated to a specific transition temperature (wikipedia page). One common way to heat the alloy is to run an electrical current through it for a short time. The tiny wires can create relatively quite strong forces, silently and with lifelike movement. Over the years, I have seen some very clever usage of SMA for building actuated interfaces or devices. Ivan Poupyrev and Marcelo Coelho have the most interesting projects I’ve seen so far: Lumen, Sprout I/O, Shutters and Surflex. I have a lot of ideas I would like to try with SMAs: shape-morphing shells, shifting the center of mass in handheld devices, soft-haptic stimuli, etc.
Well, first things first. I have to start with the basics and learn how to harness the power of these floss-like space-age filaments.
Using sound for actuation
Sound and touch are very close in many ways: one can literally feels audio if the parameters are right. As presented by Roope Takala (Nokia Research), stimuli from audio and haptic overlap a great deal between 100 and 2000 Hz.
Today I was helping a first year student to build a little x-y laser scanner quickly and cheaply. We tried with RC servos and stepper motor, but the scanning motion was not good (fast) enough for our needs. We could see the laser dot moving from left to right, not a solid bar we wanted to have.
Remembering some projects I’ve seen in audio visualization, I decided to try with a speaker to see what kind of actuation we could get directly out of sound. I took an old speaker lying around in the workshop and mounted a little mirror on it using a piece of L-shape cardboard. Amazingly, this contraption worked perfectly. The laser beam was spreading evenly and fast enough so the source was indiscernible . We tried with different songs (Daft Punk) and with our own loops in Garage Band, with varying results, but all very satisfying.
I don’t know what kind of frequency we were getting on the mirror, going from the audio signal to the actual half broken speaker cone and support moving in the physical world. It feels that we are getting a couple of thousand Hertz at least.
The takeaway from this little tinkering session is that audio can be a very good source of movement or actuation. The amplitude is generally limited to 1cm or so (on common size speaker cone). As expected, specific discreet and sustained position might be difficult to obtain, but for fast and repetitive output it can be quite good and dead simple to use. The output is and feels “analog”, even if the input has sharp and digital-like qualities.
One of the great thing about using audio is that the elaboration of the signal is directly audible (and sometime enjoyable). You can “hear” the movement in a way. I think this is a very good thing as scripting/programming actuated output can be often very abstract and intangible. It can be a distraction too, as it is quite difficult to cancel the audible part from the movement.
Anyways, I like the idea of using one modality to control another. And the transition between the two is not well defined. The modalities blend into each other and the qualities are ported to the other. I will definitely explore this area further in the coming weeks and months.
Tangible compass, part 3: say Hi to N810
This is an iteration following part 1 and part 2 of the tangible compass project.
The focus of this revision is an excuse to get my hands dirty with Arduino and a N810. Following the good instructions from Dave Vondle at IDEO, I was up and running quickly with an Arduino talking directly to a Flash file running on a Nokia N810 tablet. The whole process is quite simple, my biggest issue was hacking a connector for joining two USB male connectors. While waiting for my special cables bought on eBay, I took my soldering iron and salvaged a dual USB jack from a defunct Phidget board. Add a touch of electric tape and it worked perfectly!
The next step was to make the whole package a bit smaller. I used an Arduino Wee, an USB to serial adapter and the newly received micro USB cable.
After some struggles with Actionscript 3 code (I’m not used to it, or just not using it regularly enough to be comfortable), I got it working the way I wanted.
What it does: The arrow maintains a specific heading obtained from the compass module. The Arduino gets the reading over I2C, sends the value over serial, a serial to flash java server transfer the data over to the Flash movie where the graphic is updated accordingly.
Build notes: It doesn’t work everywhere. I assume the surroundings have a lot of electro-magnetic perturbations. I should maybe try it outdoors where the signal to noise ratio is probably much better. Browsing the filesystem via shell on the N810 is not totally coherent with the one available via the GUI: “Documents” is accessible at cd /home/user/MyDocs/.documents/
Next step: add some haptic feedback to the graphic output. Build a case or plate to get the external components stable and fixed.
A proper sequencer for sketching haptic feedback
During my Masters thesis, I built a quick and dirty sequencer to control my haptic feedback units. You can see a video of an early version of the sequencer on this page. It was done in Processing from scratch. I struggle a bit to get the whole package working fast (serial link to Arduino) and smooth (GUI + keyboard controls + xml configs).
I’ve been looking around for a better/easier sequencer for some months. It was one of the point in my presentation at Sketching08: it would be nice to have nicer software tools to manipulate/control real-world output, an application at the convergence of CAD and robot control. Chris Palmer suggested that I look at various servo sequencing software from Lynxmotion (link). This looks promising but I feel using servo (or PWM) is too limiting for what I want to do. I need to control or drive other things than servos. I’ve looked at various audio applications where sequencing is a core function, but generally they work best or only with MIDI. Arduino can not do MIDI or OSC easily from what I know. I need something that can run with my homemade serial protocol. I also had a quick look at the sequencer offered with the BlinkM from ThingM, but my initial evaluation is that it would require a lot of work to modify for 5-10 different tracks. Maybe I’m wrong…
Last week, I found the nice work of Daniel Thompson where he is using a Maya Python plug-in to control a servo motor (via Arduin0) from Maya (3D application with very good animation capabilities).
Maya + Python + Arduino + Servo (Part 1)
Maya + Python + Arduino + Servo (Part 2)
I definitely have to look into this. I’m not a big Maya user myself, but I’ve been using Cinema4D a lot over the last few years. I’m wondering if I could build/port something similar to C4D. It would be awsome. Otherwise, I’ll have to dive in Maya again. Or maybe try to do the same with Blender and Python. My short experience with Python this summer turned out to be very enjoyable. I can’t wait to have more time to look into it more.
I think this mixture of application, 3d software and custom I/O could bring very interesting possibilities for IxD and ID designers. Can you imagine you have a sketched physical model that react and behave in sync with its virtual representation on screen, all in realtime. Lovely!
Tangible compass, part 2: using a stepper motor
This is an iteration following part 1 of the tangible compass project.
To obtain a full 360 degres and limitless rotation for the pointer, I decided to swap the servo motor for a stepper motor. The stepper motor I have is relatively small, but still much bigger and bulkier than the initial servo. It also requires a driver circuit to easily and properly control with the Arduino.
What it does: the pointer (blue tape on the shaft) maintains a specific heading obtained from the compass module. Arduino runs from battery power, stepper driver from 9V regulator.
Build note: the EasyDriver board has a secondary ground pin that is not very well documented. See this post.
Next step: see how this could fit in a handheld format. Maybe I’ll have to try something else if compactness is required.
Cumulus conference St-Étienne, notes
Cumulus conference, St-Étienne, France
20-23 november 2008
Design Education for Sustainability working group
Peter Stebbing, Ursula Tischner, Ezio Manzini, Armin Reller, Yoram Krozer
What since the Kyoto declaration last year?
Peter Stebbing:
Incomplete information -> bring science to design curriculum
The goal is not to become scientist but understand information that is important
Designer = knowledge choreographer
Ursula Tischner:
econcept.org, sustainability.designacademy.nl
Design week, design awards to promote sustainability at the institution
Ezio Manzini:
DIS research unit, www.sustainable-everyday.net
What is design? it’s when problems are not well defined. if defined, you have an engineering problem.
Designers need to dare.
Eco-design is not Design for sustainability
Armin Reller:
Material, when we will run out?
platinum, 5g in 10 tons of raw ore.
computer, 2000kg raw material to produce a 2-3 kg machine
we have to close the loop to capture the new “spice materials”
Yoram Krozer:
Cartesius Institute, NL, sustainable innovation
European Industrial Banana doesn’t exist anymore. New regional centers of knowledge.