A Thinking Sam @ITP

Typography and Descriptive Words

This week in visual design, we did a really fun project based around typography. The first part involved setting your name in 6 different typefaces that represent you in some way. See this PDF for the full project.

My favorite sans-serif was TradeGothic LT, a very readable and sophisticated modern font:

 

My favorite serif was Georgia, a classic font with great contrasts between thick and thin elements:

Here are the full 6 fonts:

The second part of the assignment was to create descriptive words. I went food-based with obesity, hunger, and fast food:

economz: your carbon foodprint

For my final projects in ICM, Pcomp and Web, I’m creating one big project around how food choices influence one’s carbon footprint.

The project is called economz (for now), and the website for it can be found here: http://economz.tumblr.com/

About economz

Everyday, multiple times a day, you make a key choice that will determine your personal carbon footprint. It’s not necessarily the car you drive or even the fuel you burn (although these are important sources as well) — rather, it is the food you choose to consume.

When it comes to your personal carbon footprint, your food choices matter – a lot. Some studies peg food choices as contributing as much as 30% of one’s overall carbon footprint.

economz is a visualization project that helps people make sense of their carbon foodprint. By creating meals using popular and standard food items, economz shows the associated carbon footprint using a gauge we’re all familiar with: car miles traveled.

There are two ways to use economz:

  1. On the Web — create meals, learn about your carbon foodprint, and share!
  2. Physical Installation — located at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, you can also create meals using our physical installation of mock food items

The Facts

  • What you eat is much more important than where it came from. The distance that food travels is only around 11% of the average American household’s carbon foodprint.
  • Food production is what matters. More than 90 per cent of beef’s emissions, 69 per cent of pork’s and 72 per cent of farmed salmon’s emissions come in the production phase.
  • Certain foods are associated with much higher carbon emissions, due to the production systems it takes to produce these foods — from the pesticides and fertilizer used to grow animal feed all the way through the grazing, animal raising, processing, transportation, cooking and, finally, disposal of unused food.
  • Meat and cheese are the worst culprits: Lamb, beef, cheese, pork and farmed salmon generate the most greenhouse gases.
  • The typical American consumes around 127 pounds of meat per year – on average, that’s 40 percent more than other developed countries
  • If everyone in the US ate no meat or cheese just ONE day a week, that would be like not driving 91 billion miles, or taking 7.6 million cars off the road
  • The positive side: Changing food habits offers a very real way to change your personal carbon footprint! Changing transportation and electricity choices can be tough in the short term, but food consumption can be changed pretty much whenever you put your mind to it.

The Project

economz will be a Web-based visualization project with an accompanying physical installation.

The To-Dos

  • Visualization project in Processing
  • Physical installation (fabricate various food items and hook them up to sensors that can identify which food item is which and communicate that info to the Processing sketch; the food registers when it is placed on a physical plate).
  • Website in Ruby/Sinatra (1. embedded visualization; 2. ability to save and tweet your meal visualization; 3. browsable gallery of featured meals and their “score”; 4. video of physical installation)
  • Branding / Visual Design

The Questions

Processing

  • Show food items and drag over OR show menu and “click” on text items?
  • How many output options (if you ate this meal once a week for a year? if you ate this meal once a day for a year? more?)
  • I want people to be able to tweet their visualization, which people can then view at a specific URL. I need to save the frame, save to the database of my ruby app, and then post to twitter with that URL. “Food choices matter for the environment – a lot. See my carbon foodprint example at ~~uniqueURL~~ by @economz”

Pcomp

  • Best way to fabricate fake food? Laser cutter (but with what material?)? 3d printer? Hand-made (but with what material)? Real food??
  • Best sensor / identifiers?

The Outreach

  • Meatless Mondays
  • Eco and Environmental groups and publications
  • Eco and Environmental writers/bloggers

Signs, signs, and more signs

New York City lends to an interesting study of signs. There’s a sign for everything, pretty much everywhere. Some are boring. Some are great. Some are funny. Some are chic. And some are just perplexing. I’ll be covering the latter in this post.

The Goal: Hey you driver! There’s a new Stop sign. Take notice. You should stop at it. For real.

The Problem: It’s hard to imagine someone is going to notice the Stop sign ONLY because there is a small yellow “NEW” sign beneath it. Presumably, you’d see the much larger Stop sign before the smaller New sign below it. The logic is faulty here. Seems like an exercise in futility to me.

A Solution: One solution could be to change the color of the Stop sign itself. For example, new Stop signs could be an obnoxiously bright shade of orangish red. But I think a color change could be dangerous to something as important and fundamental as a Stop sign. Instead, I would advocate some bright flashing lights outlining the sign. If you really want people to see a sign, why not highlight its outline with something they HAVE to notice?

The Goal: You got legal problems? Well, we got legal services. All of them. Literally.

The Problem: Clutter. Color. Font face. Everything.

A Solution: Besides the obvious color issue (seriously Mr. Ciafone, Esq., let’s stick to 3 colors max — you get to choose red/yellow/black or American colors, but NOT both), this sign would be much clearer if it limited the information. Mr. Ciafone, we get that you will take on all cases; your sign could portray that information much more concisely. What would be nice is to have a stronger value add statement and an even stronger call to action.

The Goal: Hello there, subway traveler. Oh, you’re about to come down these stairs? Well, you’re in luck if it’s non rush hours. Otherwise, DON’T YOU FREAKING DARE.

The Problem: The sign doesn’t take into account how people actually behave. No one cares about what the sign says. If there are people coming up that side of the stairs, then people won’t come down. And vice versa.

A Solution: If you really want to direct people when they can and cannot go down these stairs, how about a simple light system: green checkmark when it’s OK, and red “do not enter” mark when it’s not OK. This stuff is easy. We learned how to make something like that in our first week of physical computing. COME ON MTA!

The Goal: (said in a deep Barry White style voice) Why hello again sexy subway rider. You know, nothing exciting ever happens by staying home. You should come out and do something exciting, presumably at our proprietorship.

The Problem: I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT SAID PROPRIETORSHIP IS!?! It’s just a weird logo with “CH” and some needle and thread icon (I think?). Sorry CH, you’re not on that level yet. But I will try to go out. Just probably not to your place.

A Solution: A real logo or name would be cool. Maybe even a website or something? I want to come out and create a great story of my own, but you gotta give me more info CH!

 

Collectabite: An Experiment in Shared Nutrition

For our physical computing midterm project, my team (which included the wonderful Wajma Mohseni and Wang Yang) developed a fun installation to track and encourage healthy eating in a shared kitchen or break room.

Check out the project website here. The code for this project is available on Github.

And now on to the details.

Collectabite was an idea borne from our belief in:

  •  HEALTH, particularly nutrition
  •  COMMUNITIES influencing eating habits
  • SOCIAL ACTIVITIES that are fun and that can positively influence healthy eating!

How does it work?

Collectabite is a shared nutrition system that tracks how often people are eating fruits and vegetables, and highlights the positive habits of individuals and the group.

A day in the life of a Collectabiter:

Solange is a busy techie at a startup firm. She eats an apple at 11am instead of grabbing her usual danish. Feeling happy with herself, she high fives Lil’ Collectabite in the kitchen to register her apple consumption. “You go girl!” it yells out in encouragement. It takes a photo of her from a camera which is projected onto a public screen for everyone to see: “Solange the Healthy Superstar” using a cool picture format. The eat-o-meter goes up by one on the screen, getting closer to the company’s combined goal for the day. Now everyone will know Solange is eating healthy and contributing to the community goal.

The collectabite information is fed into a website, where pictures of healthy eaters are stored, the meter is monitored, and discussion forum + social media feeds are streamed.

Once the community goal is reached, Lil’ Collectabite shouts out and cheers. The information will be fed into a tweet or website so all members of Collectabite are notified (and if companies or organizations wish, rewards can even be provided!). The meter is refreshed for a new week of healthy eating. If the goal is not reached, it will be recorded and tracked.

Technical Overview

The code for this project is available on Github.

Collectabite is built using serial communication between an Arduino micro-controller and the Processing development environment. The user registers a healthy eating action by high fiving our apple figure (aka “Lil’ Collectabite”). Using force-sensing resistors that we calibrate, we are able to determine exactly when a high five has been registered by the system.

Once the system has been triggered, Processing takes over. Each High Five produces the following action:

  • An encouraging sound or song is played (using the Processing minim library). For example, “You Go Girl!” or a series of cheering.
  • A series of photos are taken to document who just registered the healthy action and at what level the meter is currently. An animated .gif is created (using the gifAnimation library in Processing), shown on the public screen for everyone to see in person, and uploaded to a website that everyone in the group has access to. The website allows for even more public recognition of the healthy individuals as well as a tracking system of the meter.
  • The meter goes up by 1.
  • If the goal has not yet been reached, the system remains open and someone else can high five Lil’ Collectabite.
  • If the goal has been reached, a final “winning” song is played and the system resets.

Video on the User Interaction

Visual Display of the digital system:

Image of the physical installation:

Video on the making of Collectabite

Kanyeify Me

What happens when a Processing project meets a hurricane, boredom, and the greatest genius of all time (i.e. Kanye West)? Kanyeify me. That’s what.

Developed using the Processing video library, this is a program I wrote called “Kanyeify Me” (and these are screen captures of the interaction). Yes, you can guess what happens.

Collectabites, a playtest

Pictured here is our playtest set-up in the ITP kitchen area. People were asked to either “High Five for Health” or “Throw Ball Through the Mouth” whenever they ate a fruit or vegetable. We need more incentives and interaction.

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