Remember how on March 5th I was supposed to give a presentation in 1′, 2′, 10′, but it got bumped? And then the following week’s class was canceled, and then we had spring break. So it wasn’t until three weeks later, March 26, that I finally got to take my turn squirming at the front of the room. Three extra weeks! So, naturally, I used all that time working on my project, right?

Oh, no, that wouldn’t have been fair. I did revise my slides, but I left it until the last fucking minute, as usual, so as not to have an undue advantage over my classmates. Right. That’s totally why.

What I did do in the interim, however, was stumble across this fab webcast by Nancy Duarte about how to give better presentations:

After hearing her talk, I bought and started reading her book, Slide:ology, which is a more detailed presentation of the same suggestions.

(Here’s another Nancy Duarte webcast, which I haven’t watched yet: Creating Powerful Presentations.)

So between that and taking copious notes on my classmates’ midterm presentations, especially in Wearables, I got a lot of ideas about how I should redo my slides, as well as my overall presentation style. The result is a deck that does not make any sense unless I’m standing there with a remote, explaining it to you (PDF, 1.1 MB)—and using a remote is, I decided after watching a lot of in-class presentations, a good thing to do. I got my Mac remote to turn pages in Acrobat using a program called iRed Lite. I can’t really recommend it, since it stumped me for quite a while the first time I used it, and the next time I tried, a few weeks later, I positively could not figure out how I had ever made it work in the first place. There’s something about the UI that confuses the hell out of me. But it can, theoretically, do the job, and it’s free.

Some other things I learned from watching classmates’ presentations:

• Proofread, proofread, proofread.
• Stand while you present, even if you don’t have a remote. Think of someone you know who’s poised and relaxed speaking in front of a group, and then try to channel that person for five minutes. Breathe between sentences. Make eye contact.
• I really don’t care about the technical side of your project. Don’t tell me what hardware and libraries and so forth are used in it; describe it to me as though I were a normal human being who doesn’t have four Arduini in her apartment right now. Just because I have them doesn’t mean I know how to use them.
• Those very corporate-looking system diagrams showing how information will flow through your application? They’re completely unintelligible. Skip them.
• You don’t have to make all your graphics all slick, in Illustrator or Photoshop. Hand-drawn diagrams or sketches can be much more engaging.
• As early as possible in the presentation, show me some kind of image of what your project will be—or, better yet, the prototype you’re working on—so that I can hold that in my mind as you go into all the background and process and detail. If I don’t know what your project is yet, I probably won’t find the rest of that information interesting. This was true even though I knew perfectly well what my classmates’ projects were. When I watched their presentations, if they didn’t show and describe what they were making early on, I was unable to hold my attention on whatever else they were saying instead. Context.
• Don’t put a lot of text on the screen. If you’re talking and there’s a whole paragraph on the screen behind you, my attention’s going to be split. And if it turns out that you’re just repeating what that paragraph says, almost word for word, I’ll feel exasperated. People should be listening to you for the words in your presentation, not reading them off the slides.
• If you don’t have anything sexy to put on a slide for a given portion of your talk, it’s fine to
  1. repeat a previous slide, or
  2. show a slide that contains just one word representing that moment’s topic—”research,” for instance, or “inspiration.” Treat that text as a graphic element—make it big, pay attention to how it looks.
• Typography!
• If you have a relevant quotation to share, don’t bury it in a whole long paragraph; give it a slide by itself.
• Don’t try to cover too much. It’s better to give people a thoughtful, measured thumbnail-presentation of the project and stop talking early enough that there’s time for people to ask questions about the parts that actually interest them than it is to brain-dump every piece of information you have, leaving time for only a few dazed comments from your audience at the end.
• Videos of a thing working are helpful, but you have to explain what’s going on while it’s playing. This may be a good time to unload some of those boring technical details, while there’s a moving image to spice them up.
• Proofread, proofread, proofread. If I had a dime for every typo I saw during midterm presentations . . . I offered my services as a proofreader in the Webgrrls-style need/give session we had in 1′ 2′ 10′, but nobody seemed to think they needed such a thing. They are wrong.
• If you’re going to read some text that appears on a slide, do it slowly, with feeling; don’t just rush through it breathlessly, making it impossible for people to either read the text for themselves or follow what you’re saying. Make it clear that you’re reading what’s on the screen so people don’t have to struggle to figure it out. If you’re not able to introduce the text with something like “I’d just like to read you this quote, which really inspired me . . .” you probably shouldn’t be giving it a slide.

So, here again are the slides I ended up using (PDF, 1.1 MB) for my midterm presentation. I suppose some day maybe I’ll write captions more or less like what I said in front of the class, but in the meantime you can read the old slides if you want to know the gist.

Photo: A WORD IS ALSO A PICTURE OF A WORD by gwalton1; some rights reserved.

I’ve decided to go with the less impossible, more amusing of my two Wearables project ideas: The Party Dress.

Assignment: Project description

Write a description of your project (one page minimum) – describe what your prototype will look like, what it will do, and how it will be used. List your influences, goals, intended users, and provide a use scenario. If you haven’t decided on one project, write a full description for each project you are considering.

Here’s my silly write-up:

Concept

My proposed project for Wearables Studio is a Party Dress: a dress equipped with sensors and indicators that will encourage people to socialize with the wearer at parties, conferences, or other events where there may be a lot of people who don’t know each other but might wish to strike up a conversation. At its most basic, the dress will respond to proximity, encouraging people to approach the wearer and providing an easy ice-breaking topic. It will also, technology permitting, include a special cell phone pocket that visually indicates when the wearer has an incoming call, as this event is often impossible to detect in a room where music is playing. There could also be a panic button hidden on the dress that would directly trigger the lights on the phone pocket, so that the wearer could pretend to have a call, should she need a way to escape a conversation that is boring her or otherwise causing distress.

Description

The Party Dress will be sewn from Simplicity pattern 2491, a festive, cheerful style that was issued most likely in 1958. It has a plain bodice that will not be made too garish by the addition of lights; a full skirt that, especially with the help of a crinoline, will provide ample camouflage for a power supply; a wide box pleat down the front of the skirt that will provide a stable surface on which to mount a sensor; and a belt that can be used to hide switches or other controls.

The top of the bodice will bear a short-range infrared sensor (such as the Sharp GP2D12, which has a range of 4 to 30 inches) and two small clusters of RGB LEDs. When the wearer is engaged in close conversation, her interlocutor’s presence directly in front of her will cause the LEDs to light up. If the person steps too far away to be easily heard, the lights will dim or blink.

The bottom of the skirt will bear a longer-range infrared sensor (such as the Sharp GP2Y0A710YK0F, which has a range of 40 to 216 inches) and a ring of 20 to 30 more RGB LEDs. If no person or object is detected by either this or the short-range sensor, these lights will pulse or change color to attract attention from people across the room, encouraging them to come closer to see what on earth is going on.

By default, all the LEDs except those on the cell phone pocket will stay lit (though there will, of course, be an on/off switch for times when the wearer does not wish to attract attention, such as while riding the subway), and their color will contribute to the overall hue of the dress. If the fabric is light in color and reasonably sheer, they may be mounted on an underlining so that the fabric diffuses their light and takes on their colors more organically. All the lights may shift color depending on proximity or other factors, such as noise level, temperature, the ambient light level, or incline (in case the wearer is dipped by her dance partner, or—heaven forfend—faints). If the edge of the phone pocket is too far out of the wearer’s field of vision to be comfortably seen, its indicator lights may be mounted on the belt, instead.

Inspiration

The idea for this dress emerged from a conversation about wearable technology that I had in December 2008 with the mighty Erin McKean, proprietress of the website A Dress A Day and founder of the massive Vintage Sewing Patterns Wiki. In addition to being a great proponent of dresses, Ms. McKean is a frequent traveler and conferencegoer, and a charming conversationalist.

Intended Wearers

The Party Dress is intended for women who wish to make new acquaintances and are amused by fancy dress. It could function as an aid to the moderately shy, or to the intimidatingly beautiful, or to those who simply enjoy let their freak flags fly.

Use Scenario

A woman walks into a party where she does not know many people—say, one of those awkward parties that occurs on the opening night of a typography conference. As she looks around, trying to decide whom to try striking up a chat with, her dress begins to coruscate. Curious typographers begin to edge closer in order to determine whether this effect is a result of too much liquor, or whether that woman’s dress really is glowing. When they determine that the latter is more likely, they step forward to ask her what the blinking means. By this time, they have drawn close enough that the dress glows steadily. . . . Hours later, in the middle of the dance floor, the woman sees that her phone pocket is blinking. She steps aside to answer the call and discovers that it is almost midnight, and her pumpkin is waiting at the curb. She exchanges cards with her newfound friends, bids them goodbye, and exits, her dress starting to twinkle again as she heads for the cloak room.

* * *

Assignment: Paper prototype

Start thinking about and developing the physical form for your project. Using materials like cardboard, paper, muslin, and foamcore, experiment with size, shape, and placement of the different component parts of your design. The results won’t be functional, but they should represent as closely as possible the elements you plan to use.

Think through how the finished garment or piece will look and how it will be used. Use this time to develop your ideas about why and how the user will interact with the final prototype without the pressure of making it work – that comes soon enough. Come to class next week with your paper prototype and be prepared to talk about your design decisions.

The first assignments for Zachary Eveland’s Wearables Studio class were as follows:

Assignment: Make a wearable
Come to class next week with a working wearable device or garment. This assignment is just a sketch to get the juices flowing – whatever you make should function, but rough edges are fine.

There are no restrictions on the type of wearable, but it should relate to your semester-long project. Use this as an opportunity to experiment with new materials or techniques. If you haven’t built a soft circuit before, this might be a good time to do so.

Assignment: List your project concept(s)
During next week’s class, we will discuss and finalize everyone’s concept for semester-long projects. If you have more than one project in mind, write them all down.

Immediately after the first class, I went to the NYU computer store and picked up a new LilyPad, in case my project would require one—I definitely don’t want to have to unstitch that fucking glove until I’m sure we’re done with it. Then, all week, I was pondering what I could make. An apron with timers on it? A doodad in my handbag that would turn my living room light on and off? I don’t know; I suck at ideas.

I also suck at not procrastinating, so on the morning of class I ended up doing the quickest thing I could think of: taking apart my brand-new TV-B-Gone (which I bought readymade, not as a kit, because I know I can’t solder that kind of fiddly thing to save my life), mounting it on the back of a felt flower (formerly a barrette that came in a Sampler box), and hooking the whole thing onto a big safety pin so I could attach it to my sweater.

Such craftsmanship!

The point of this object is that the off-the-shelf TV-B-Gone comes in a rather menacing-looking black plastic case, and holding such a thing up to point it at a TV would be conspicuous and would probably get you accused of being a terrorist. The happy felty flower pin, on the other hand, is extremely stealthy: because the center LED emits IR, it doesn’t visibly light up when the button (located immediately under the LED, and clickable through the felt) is pressed. There’s a red indicator light that blinks when the IR beam is active, but it’s hidden behind the flower petals and so only visible to the wearer (except, maybe, in a dark room—but everyone will be looking at the TV, of course, not at your goofy brooch). It’s kind of inspired by the TV-B-Gone hoodie by Becky Stern, but my problem with that idea is that you have to be wearing your hoodie all the time. I like hoodies plenty, but I would never wear the same one every day, which means I probably wouldn’t have it when I needed it. A pin, on the other hand, could be attached to a hat, coat, or handbag that’s worn every day.

For the second assignment, I scribbled down notes about two ideas:

Party Dress

polka dots or other pattern elements have RGB LEDs on them, so that

• dress can change color to
  • match rest of outfit
  • indicate motion–e.g., red if the wearer becomes horizontal
• lights pulse when
  • your cell phone is ringing
  • someone stands close to you
  • nobody stands close to you

Memo jacket / scarf / pin

• records snippets of audio, e.g., notes to self
• transmits recordings wirelessly to computer, where assistant can transcribe or otherwise file them
• last recording can be played back
• camera can take a snapshot whenever she puts something away that she’s afraid she might lose
• emits a sound when the calendar on computer says has an appointment coming up
• has a display that can show messages/reminders
• can transmit an emergency call to her computer

The Party Dress idea came from a conversation I had with the magnificent Erin McKean of, among other things, A Dress a Day. The Memo Jacket idea is for my mom, who’s convinced that she has Alzheimer’s Disease. I don’t know how to implement either of these ideas, but the Party Dress is much closer to my field of nonexpertise, since I’ve already worked with IR sensors and LEDs. How one connects that many LEDs, I have only the vaguest idea; and how one gets one’s cell phone to talk to them? Well, surely somebody else can figure this out for me.

In class, then, we did an brilliant thing: Zachary had us each explain our project ideas to another person (or, well, it was supposed to be two other people, but I was paired up with Lara, who’s all about wearables, and we ended up just talking with each other), and then that person explained the project to the class. So we got to hash out our ideas a bit in a low-stress interaction, and then we got to hear what parts of our description were most memorable and comprehensible.

Above is the PowerPoint slideshow that Diego made for our in-class presentation. There is also copious supporting material at the following locations:

• Photos, with lots of chatty comments
  
• Videos, interspersed with kittenage
• Arduino code
• Processing code
  • colors_highlight_new_swatch – this is the color palette module. It reads a text file containing all the colors in the appropriate Krylon spraypaint line and outputs them as a grid of colored squares. The active swatch and rolled-over ones are highlighted with colored borders. It’s glitchy, as you can see if you look in the upper left corner, but basically it works.
  • spraycans – I would like to make my own set of brushes, based on Diego’s, that are all the same style but in different sizes. These would then be mapped to the number of fingers being held up, with more fingers triggering a bigger spray cone. This would make it easier for users to get predictable, slightly repeatable results. Toward that end, I made a spraycan object whose spray cone, label number (for the size), and can color (for the paint) are variable. Epileptics should probably not view this sketch.
  • Main application – The “final” in “final_application_4″ refers to the this being our final project for the semester, not to the code itself actually being final. For, verily, it is not. This is the wrapper into which all the other modules will eventually be rolled. It’s a whole lot of nested if statements and functions. This program doesn’t run unless the glove is plugged in; I should fix that, to make it easier to check code while programming.

So then . . . The other day I was talking about the glove project with my friend Rose, and I rhetorically asked what the hell this kind of low-fi, large-format drawing setup would be good for. Rose’s answer was immediate: graffiti.

Duh.

So then, what we need is just a limited palette of Krylon spray paints, and a couple of brush types—say, a fat marker and three sizes of spray patterns. And then, when I asked my perpetual question of “What are the other fingers doing?,” Diego had this brilliant idea: the number of fingers you’re using determines the brush size. Index finger for the marker; index and middle for a small spray nozzle; index, middle, and ring for a medium spray; and all four fingers for the biggest spray—what you’d use to fill. That’s a pretty intuitive mapping. We wouldn’t need to track motion on all the fingers, just whether they’re flexed or not. And we could use an accelerometer to register wrist tilts, somewhat like the Rock ‘n’ Scroll, to cycle through the color palette.

The thumb would remain an on/off switch.

We could have different backgrounds to paint on, like brick walls, subway cars, trucks.

Bitchen.

This idea is, in fact, so cool that it has already been done.

Developing . . .

Photo: ASBO by rubberdreamfeet / David Hayward. Some rights reserved.

Ever since we started putting the actual glove together, I’ve been thinking about how the software side of this project should take into account what I expect to be a pretty low-resolution input system. When I was making a drawing interface for what was purely an ICM project, I was assuming an average level of mouse dexterity. The stroke-width picker that I made last Wednesday, for instance, is obviously too small to be operated with our crude pointer.

So what kind of interface would work?

I did some Googling around, to get ideas of what kind of controls can be operated with little dexterity. In particular, I looked for things you can do while wearing mittens, since I figure that that’s approximately the level of control our hypothetical user will have. Some findings:

Some military radios are touted as being usable even while wearing Arctic mittens: “The desired frequency is set by four knobs on the side of the radio which can be operated even while the operator is wearing Arctic mittens, or in the dark by counting clicks from the end-stops” (”Clansman PRC-349 / RT-349 VHF Transceiver,” Armyradio.com). Its that idea of click feedback that I find interesting. If you’re choosing from a limited set of options—say, brush sizes— on a very small display, it’s not too annoying to cycle through them one at a time to get to what you want. This is the way my cell phone, toaster, and camera menus work. And they all provide beeps or clicks for feedback. What kind of feedback will we give to let our user know what’s going on?

Other physical controls that can be operated while wearing mittens include a camera’s zoom ring and aperture and shutter speed dials (Matthew G. Monroe, “How to Shoot in Freezing Temperatures and Keep Your Hands Toasty Warm,” digital-photography-school.com); Velcro closure tabs on outerwear; and KEYnetic’s rock ‘n’ scroll cell phone interface (via LyteByte).

On the screen side of things, some relevant input methods include Morse code and onscreen keyboards. Again, I like the simplicity of tapping, though I can also see uses for a matrix of a few very large buttons.

Obviously, with two weeks to go, I don’t have time to really get into learning interface design for this project, but I think where I’m going is toward a system that has a drawing mode and a tool selection mode. When you’re drawing, there’s nothing else onscreen except maybe one or two tools or hints—how to turn the drawing line off, how to activate the control menu. You can’t select these controls onscreen, because how would you do so without drawing a line all the way to the button? And whatever gesture you use to activate the menu must be able to be done without moving the drawing pointer.

The Rock ‘n’ Scroll model is pretty good for us within one mode or another, but you have to be able to switch between the two without moving your drawing pointer. So that would involve . . . the thumb? It’s possible, though not necessarily easy, to move your thumb without moving the rest of your hand. So maybe as long as your thumb is tucked in, the pen is on, and if you stick it out, the pen is off.

Once we’ve got a way to separate the two modes, I was thinking the control screen would be super-simple, with only one control editable at a time. So, something like this:

Photo: Elephant Painting by Venson Kuchipudi. Some rights reserved.

I finally managed to be in the same place at the same time as Diego, so we were able to make a work plan, go buy some supplies, and put together our first prototype of what now seems to be The Drawing Glove.

Well, actually, first, we were able to sit there scratching our heads over how to connect a flex sensor. I’ve had one of those things for months and never used it, because I could never figure out how it should be connected. So I looked online and found . . . lots of other glove projects using flex sensors. That’s okay, though—“This one is different—because it’s us.” I also found some inspirational photos of flex sensor connections.

People had warned us that these sensors break easily, and I’d read that they only last for a limited number of bends. I knew there was no way I could solder wires to one these without wrecking the whole damn thing, so I thought that for quick-and-dirty prototyping purposes, maybe I could just hold them together with electrical tape.

Yeah. Meanwhile, Sofia wandered over to ask what we were working on. She, too, was making a glove, and I took the opportunity to ask her how the hell she was attaching her flex sensors to wires. The answer: wire wrap. Okay, that makes sense. She also kindly revealed the location of the specific Radio Shack where she’d managed to find a wire-wrapping tool, but it turned out they had them (albeit somewhat hidden) at the store closest to school. So Diego went out and got us some enamel-coated magnet wire and a wrapping tool.

Man, I am never soldering anything, ever again. Wire wrapping is the way to go.

Diego had attached the flex sensor and LED to his original, flat prototype using Velcro, and we decided to stick with this approach (so to speak) for the glove version. So I borrowed a needle from Thomas and spent a ridiculously long time sewing tiny squares of black Velcro onto a black glove using black thread, in the inky darkness that is the central work area at ITP. The following photo is enhanced for your viewing ease; in reality, I could not at all see what the fuck I was doing:

Finally the wires were all wrapped, the Velcro was all attached, the alligator clips were clipped (yes, the wires we laboriously wrapped were too short; and your point is . . . ?), and we had a thing to test.

Hey! It lights up!

It even stays lit when you put it on! And the flex sensor turns the LED on and off!

As the video shows, we soon ran into some technical difficulties. I ended up tailor-tacking the sensor and all the wires down, so that they’d stop pulling out of place. But it kind of works! Amazing!

Onward. Next, we get to try to attach the remaining four sensors and LEDs. And we’ll probably want to eliminate some of those noisy wires, since flex sensors really don’t like them.