David Cuartielles and Tony Olsson - Going Physical (K3 research seminar)
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Transcript of David Cuartielles and Tony Olsson - Going Physical (K3 research seminar)
INSTITUTE OF INTERACTIVE OBJECTS
Design - a workflow
1. analyse the field2. if there are no tools available, invent them3. with the tools in hand, make things happen4. disseminate, talk about it
Tool 1 - framework for electronic projects (pre Arduino)
● 2003 - 2004: tools for Interaction Design students to learn about digital electronics
● technique: hand soldered prototyping board, with interchangeable processor
● Basic Stamp (manufactured by Parallax Inc.)● Programmable mainly from Windows
computers using Serial ports
Projects made by students
● collaborative sound sculpture● physicalization of the use of toilets using
race car tracks● alcontrol
Tool 1 - lesson learned
● if the goal is interesting enough, it is possible to push the student’s curiosity to work with very complex tasks
Tool 2 - framework for electronic projects (rev 0002)
● 2004 - 2005: tools for Interaction Design students to learn about digital electronics
● technique: pre-manufactured board, components unsoldered, with interchangeable processor
● valid for multiple projects by selecting which ones of the components should be mounted
● Basic Stamp (manufactured by Parallax Inc.)● Programmable mainly from Windows
computers using Serial ports
Projects made by students
● iBikt: the automatic confession booth● Bipolar chair: Ikea blended with gender
stereotypes
Tool 2 - lesson learned
● immediate satisfaction actually works in getting the students to focus in the design aspects of a project, by no sacrificing the technical aspects of it
Tool 3 - Arduino Serial (the birth of the lab)
● 2005 - 2006: in cooperation with IDII (IT) we created the open source Arduino platform
● it was bringing to the table the shared experiences of two design schools in the need for tools for designers to build things
● 8 bit AVR processors (by Atmel)● Programmable from any OS using USB● We realized a space was needed, but we
had only 6m2, so we used the cafeteria
Projects made by students
● Involuntary dance machine● Luxus rocking chair● XSense helmet
Tool 3 - lesson learned
● the better documentation you put in hands of the students, the better their projects become
● the more constraints you put on their projects, the more they need to work with the concepts
● things need to talk to things, objects need to connect to other objects
Tool 3 - lesson learned
● you can now iterate interactive concepts really fast, you can build it, check the basic functionality and decide whether it will work with users … if not, go back to the drawing board
● THIS IS WHEN THE IDEA OF PROTOTYPING A LA K3 WAS BORN!!
Prototyping a la K3
● it is no magic recipe, it is all about attacking knowledge blocks within a technical skill (software, hardware) and proposing interesting design challenges to the students for them to force themselves into learning what is needed to make them happen
● this requires a precise control of the experience, having good sources of materials and documentation and timing up the production of parts needed
Prototyping a la K3
● we divide the whole experience in phases○ information: basic lectures about certain topics○ exploration: mini projects to learn about different
aspects of a technology, it’s all about skills○ video prototyping: a way to express interactive
ideas with moving images in a really short time○ project: development of a bigger-contextualized
task○ critique: we do design, we evaluate design not
technical excellence
● let’s see some explorations, week after week
Design explorations
● the digital material is made of bits, what in the physical world translates into buttons (inputs) and lights (outputs)
● the explorations made by the students during the first week of work consist in looking at what can be designed when being VERY constrained
● week after week, the constraints include more and more tools, what opens up for wider explorations of the material
http://vimeo.com/79106611
Prototyping a la K3
● the standardisation of our educational tools, allowed us simplifying our tasks, allowing us reaching a higher amount of students by keeping the subject up-to-date
● we were also gaining expertise, what allowed us condense the work to be done by a whole bunch of groups in just a few pages
Wearables
● we started the exploration of other fields where we thought physical computing would gain relevance in, one of them was wearables
● the field, a dream for many since the demo of the demos, lacked of an easy way in approach to start building things
● students took one of K3’s shared projects as an opportunity to produce the most used manual in wearable computing with Arduino
Prototyping a la K3
● once we had hardware tackled down, it became clear that we had to explore ways to make it relevant for people with other interests, so we looked into ways on how to get hardware to:
○ communicate to the internet○ become even more ubiquitous in unexpected fields
like fashion
Our take in communication
● communication can be achieved in multiple ways
● when thinking about design, we need to keep in mind which is not the most efficient, but the easiest one
● back in 2008 there were no truly portable ways of making an easy to deploy network connection for our designs, so we chose to experiment with using phones as gateways
insert image from the sweetblue experiment by 1scale1: the board with the phone and the shield
Sweetblue - API to talk to phones
● as there were no easy tools to achieve the communication between an embedded device (like an Arduino board) and a phone, we designed our own software library to do so
● Sweetblue is both a:○ piece of Android code that can be used even from
the Processing IDE to make phone apps○ piece of Arduino code that can talk to the phone
via a bluetooth chip of any kind
Haptics - our own exploration
● the development of Sweetblue as a tool for the classroom put us in contact with Dr. S. Stenslie, at the Universities of Oslo (NO) and Arhus (DK)
● we started the development of a series of haptic augmented garments
The Google case
● Google is famous for deploying unfinished technologies to allow developers and designers explore certain fields
● one of those is the creation of cable connected accessories to Android phones
● as we had experience in the field, we took the opportunity of trying to make a very easy tool to create accessories to phones and applications to control them
Arduino ADK + Processing ADK
● Processing is one of the most extended software packages for designers to learn how to program
● it is Java, which is fully compatible syntax-wise with Android code
● we created a combo of:○ a plugin for Processing to create Android apps that
would “wake up” when connecting an Arduino board○ a library for Arduino to build hardware accessories
for phones
And a publisher got interested
● Android and Arduino are big buzzwords in the embedded world, mostly because of their strong link to the Internet of Things
Stitchies - a new platform for haptics
● the idea of connecting through phones, brought us to the creation of our own haptics platform
● it is made of simple cells that can detect touch and send touch events through a bus
● at the end of the bus there is a different type of cell that can communicate over bluetooth or cable to a phone
● the phone will get the interactive garment to talk to others over a network connection
Where are we going - education-wise
● IoT is the new hot potato in design, we arrived early and are adjusting to the high innovation pace characteristic to the field
● we need to bring wearables to the next level● we need to integrate the idea of accessory
even more with in the education
How are we doing it
● learning by doing ● to meet the demands we need to treat
technology as any material in order to bend it to the needs of the few
● develop craftsmen skills
What are we becoming / creating
The digital artisant (also called Creative Technologist) which has a deep understanding of ● the theories of human cognition● the material he deals with● the tools of his trade
