Experiments in Communication

I definitely see some connecting threads in my projects so far. Two of them have involved words printed on little white blocks, and another two of them have involved jewelry made with conductive thread and LEDs. When I made my connector, I was thinking about interfacing it with my module, adding an electrical connection to the physical connection that my modules are designed to make with each other. I have been wanting to further refine my module to make it more like a piece of clothing or an accessory that people would actually wear (a bracelet, necklace, scarf, maybe even a skirt or a bag?). I tried wearing my modules as a bracelet but they were a little ugly, a little too weird to be worn out.

To me the concepts we have covered in the class are strongly related to each other. Open-source perhaps less so, but maybe that is because I haven't really thought about it much yet.

Conceptually, I think my projects have been about two different main ideas: language, and social connections. They are also about materializing/illustrating something that is invisible (I find that phrase in my notes a lot). Interestingly, language is also a means of social connections. Though the approach I am taking to it is a little more introverted perhaps? I'm not sure. I guess the network was quite strongly social.

I feel that it's helpful to take a step back and look for what it is I am trying to do, by looking at what I have already done. I just don't know for sure how it will help me yet. I am not sure how other people respond to my ideas, and if they like them. I don't know which of the main concepts I should keep pursuing, which would engage other people more (if at all).

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This week I had to ask myself "what is energy?" and make something that relates to that. I thought about energy and my main ideas about it were that it is something that you can't see, something that has the potential to become something else, to induce change. I feel that it's also something very "present" (temporally) and transient. I thought about a friend of mine who once told me she thinks about people in terms of energy, and that certain people to her emit a negative energy, and she doesn't feel very good when she's around them. Their energy really interferes with hers. After having this conversation with her, I started paying more attention to that, and seeing it in my interactions with people. I feel like there is certainly some truth in the notion that people have "energy fields," or whatever you might want to call it, that influence their interactions.

I wanted to make something to express that idea. One of the side effects of this "theory" is that there is a sort of feedback loop that is created when two people 's energy fields interact: two positive fields will both become more positive. Two negative fields will both become more negative. A positive field and a negative, I'm not sure what will happen. I guess it depends on which is stronger.

I made two necklaces, each with an LED and a photoresistor. When people wear them, the photoresistor faces the other person's LED. The LED represents the externalization of the person's energy field. A positive energy field (lit LED) will cause the resistance of the other person's photoresistor to drop, making their LED shine brighter (raising their positive energy).

We also had to keep track of our waste for the week. It was a somewhat unusual week for me in which I cooked, and had enough leftovers to keep eating the same food for a few days so I didn't have that much to throw out. I did throw out the peels and pits of the vegetables/fruit, things that are compostable, but in a tiny Manhattan apartment, that's hard to do (and I would have no use for the compost). Maybe ITP should have a floor compost. I also threw out a yogurt container every day. The last day I actually kept it and washed it, thinking I might use it for a project, but I eventually threw it out as well. I used to buy bigger yogurt containers, and scoop out as much as I was going to eat every time, but then I would forget about it, or not feel like eating yogurt for a while and it would go bad and I would throw out the yogurt with the container. So it's definitely a trade-off. I also waste quite a bit of water, and I hadn't been very conscious of that until now. Not having to pay for it has that side effect I suppose. I'm sure I used and threw away many more plastic cups than I should have (on the floor -- it was a bit harder to keep track of my trash outside of my apartment). I should buy a nalgene bottle. I tend to reuse plastic water bottles a lot, but I have heard that's not very healthy.

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Allistar, Eugene, Yan Yan and I were in a group together for this project. At first we had many different ideas, but nothing really seemed like it could lead to a project. At some point, we decided to brainstorm with different ideas and found that we were interested in the relation between the words we were blurting out, and whether or not if we kept coming up with ideas, we would have a set of very similar words.

That was the beginning of our idea. We wanted to see how words relate to each other, and how associations between words can lead different people to come up with increasingly more related words. We were trying to figure out how to visualize this, using the board as a rough prototyping tool. Somehow we decided that people might influence each other too much, if we just ask the whole class to shout out related words, and that we wouldn't be building a particularly interesting network. We then thought about considering each person's associations separately, and then comparing people's networks to each other. We all agreed that this would be very interesting to look at, and then decided to find a way to visualize it. Initially we thought about giving people transparencies with words printed on them, and ask them to draw lines between words that they associate with each other and then overlay them and look for patterns, but thought that the way we arrange them spatially on the sheet might inadvertently influence them. So we ended up giving people independent words (each of us picked 2 words, so we had a total of 8 more or less randomly chosen words), and asking them to connect them to each other with elastic bands if they found a connection between them. We then stacked the same words on the same pole of the wooden device that we built and let the yellow elastic bands illustrate the connections.

The result was quite interesting. I was a little worried at first that the results would be very uniform, and that the experiment would be a bit of a failure, but I was happily surprised by the outcome. The structure was definitely interesting to look at, and the variation in the connections was pretty satisfying. I noticed that someone interpreted one of the words differently from how we had intended it ("wind", as a verb, as opposed to the noun), which was a perfectly valid thing to do, just one I hadn't anticipated at all. That's just one of the many complexities of language and playing with words and meanings that to me makes it an interesting subject matter to explore.

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I teamed up with Andy, Mandy and Allistar, and we thought about different possible interfaces for a pong controller (a moustache that you would touch was pretty high on our list). Then we decided to put the interface aside for a while, work on the technical part of the assignment. It took us a little while, and some advice by someone who has taken Networked Objetcs before about the correct order of hitting reset and "x" to get to the Xport's configuration menu, but once we accomplished that things went pretty smoothly.

On a trip to Ricky's to get mustaches, we came across this amazing set of two pink guns with holster, that we hacked (with aluminum foil) so that the trigger would be a switch. It was really satisfying to use as a controller, and once you got the hang of it, you could be pretty precise with the movement of the bar. Here's a photo of our finished pong controller in action:

Posted by kyveli at 04:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have a mac, and the weather widget is one of my favorite things about it. I have multiple ones open, to monitor the weather in places I could be (Athens (my home city), New York, London (many friends of mine live there)). It's like a game, and my goal is to be in the place with the warmest temperature. I am losing right now.

I was away this week, so I took the opportunity to talk to my family about what their feelings are about the weather and what they might want from a thermometer. They are definitely not as addicted to checking the temperature every second as I am, but my dad likes to go sailing so he is interested in knowing what the wind conditions will be, and he also wants to be able to access forecasts from the sailboat (ideally through his cellphone).

For our ambient thermometer, we decided that we want something that helps you know exactly how the weather is (or will be), without using abstract values (degrees, percentages, etc), but by creating a tangible sample of the weather that you can instantly sample with your hand.
We discussed a lot what the shape of the device should be, what the interaction will be and how the interface will look. Our notes are on the wiki.

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For the first assignment I decided to observe the quality of light in my environment. I am quite sensitive to the kind of light I am exposed to, and I feel like it probably affects my mood. I hate being in badly lit rooms (especially if it's overhead, fluorescent light)and always feel better when I am in the sun.
I decided to use a color sensor for my measurements. It has photodiodes covered with red, green, and blue filters to measure the color of the light. Unfortunately I didn't have enough time to make the sensor wearable, so the measurements I took were all in the same room, under different lighting conditions. I used a bluetooth Smirf to send the data to my cell phone, and then DanO's downloader application to send the data to my computer. I made a graph of my measurements in excel. I would like to go a little further with this, and try and get recordings throughout a day. If I get some time I will work on this further.

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Thinking about connectors, my first thought was to make a device that connects people who don't know each other but are in close physical proximity to each other (say, you're walking down the street and want to initiate a conversation with a stranger). I decided that a pretty good way to do that would be to use humor. So my connector is this slightly silly device which you can carry with you and when you want you can unfold it and use it to poke, or point at whoever you want to talk to. They are sure to respond one way or another.

I then thought that this idea might be too foolish, so I decided to work on a different idea of mine. I want to make a connector that can connect two people that already have a connection but are far away from each other. I want it to be a more intimate, subtle interaction that a phone conversation or a text message would be. Because I think that getting a text message that just says "hi! how are you?" can be somewhat annoying, but at times you don't really have much more to say to someone, but you want them to know that you are thinking about them. I want this "message" to have some kind of physical manifestation, such as a gentle vibration. I know this idea isn't totally original; cutecircuit's hug jacket is pretty similar (but it seems like the action of sending a hug would take too many steps. I want my device to have a very straightforward, subtle interaction.), also my idea is very much inspired by Jack Godfrey Wood's allmyfriends idea for a concept phone. I wonder if anyone has made anything like what I am thinking about making.

For the time being I made a simple LED-bracelet made with conductive thread, an LED, and a key-identifier battery holder attached to the conductive thread by a snap button.

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Posted by kyveli at 04:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This week we had to make a module for class. I wanted to make something soft, flexible, and simple. In some ways an extension of my zipwear projet, my module is a unit of a potentially wearable creation. In figuring out what its design should look like, I went back to thinking about cognitive science and the brain and nerves. Nerves have a soma and axons and dendrites. The axons and dendrites are long extensions that connect the nerves to each other and transmit information.
My modules are star-shaped, with long "legs" that are used to link to each other by being threaded through buttonholes that are sewn into the more central part of the module, and then tied into a knot. They can also potentially send information to each other through these longer parts and buttonholes, if both are lined with conductive thread (which would connect them to some sensor or actuator on the central part of the module).

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