Tinker it now!

From 2 to 13 November, Massimo taught the physical computing section for the CIID Interaction Design program, and for the second week’s project, he asked me to design the brief and help teach the class.

After a bit of pondering, I pointed to such sterling design examples as Hangtime, MacSaber, iMac aquariums and cat beds, and growing grass in a keyboard. Then I asked the students to choose an electronic object and create a new way to interact with it.

I do love the above examples, goofiness and all. Primarily because each looks at a device’s less obvious physical possibilities, rather than focusing solely on communicating information through the screen. Yes, it’s a bad idea to throw your phone into the air – but it’s a good idea to think of a phone as a small object that can be thrown into the air, rather than just as a portable touch screen. Also, I wanted to push the students to play and to take risks, to be willing to break something, and hopefully to come up with something different from their initial intentions.

Directly on to the end results. Apologies for the rubbish photos (I only had my phone with me). If you want a better sense of things, Mary Huang took some video of the end-of-week exhibit – entitled a la Massimo “A New Soul for an Old Machine.” You can also find out more about the students here.

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I’ve been lucky enough to be speaking on a monthly basis at a number of different conferences and events, some of which describe themselves as “creative hubs” and some such. Often the by-product of local development agency or government money, they are corporate and everything other than creative.

At Tinker.it! in London, we’ve moved 3 times in the past 2 and a half years, mostly because its hard to find the type of space we would be happy with. Part office, part workshop, part studio…it’s a mess. We’re currently in a former squat that’s trying to re-invent itself as an office building. As a creative and new type of company, I thought I’d try giving a guideline for the type of space I would look for and be happy with as I’m sure we’re not the only ones with this problem and if the creative industries and government are looking at “fostering innovation”, they should understand that that has a lot to do with where you work.

TOP 10 things I want in an office:

1. Cheap rent (this usually means less than £150 per person per month which is the going rate for artist studios, but we like to pay for the whole space and not on a per desk basis. )
2. Location, location, location. Being next to the train station is not a sales point for a creative business, its being where everyone else is. In our case, next to the roundabout.
3. Lots of space, high ceilings, no walls as we can build that ourselves.
4. A closed meeting room you can easily book online (No fighting with secretaries for this.)
5. Good social spaces (open plan large kitchen, clean spaces, enough space for couches etc)
6. A great office manager who will answer the phone and pick up and sign for post.
7. Wifi that works consistently.
8. Hardwood floors (you have no idea what a pain it is to vacuum bits of electronics off a carpet).
9. Lots of light and good heating (nothing worse than being stuck in a basement)
10. Good security / locks

I’m pretty sure if cities invested in this type of space, the young creatives would throw themselves at it and “innovation” would just happen…

We’re very proud to announce that we’ll be running a series of workshops at the Victoria and Albert Museum in parallel with the Decode exhibition covering subject areas like Processing, Beginners Arduino, Toy hacking and Smart Clothing (ie Lilypad Arduino!) so sign up quick!

So a few months ago, I presented some ideas around what it would mean to be smarter about designing smart homes and spaces at London BarCamp 6.

I’ve decided to turn this project we call Homesense into a “soft research” project. What is “soft research” at Tinker.it! you ask? Well, not being an academic environment, not having much extra time or budget, it’s one of the many areas that interest us internally, that we will work on in a public way and will instantiate itself as a new tag category, will crop up in various public workshops (such as the one at LIFT@home event organised by The Council), blog posts and possibly new collaborations.

WHAT IS HOMESENSE?

Smart homes have generally been more successful in concept than in execution or in-home use. This problem is usually not one of technology, but of interaction and interface design–we can build a Smart Home, but who wants to use it? And how do they use it?

Smart home concepts have so far been designed in-house in r&d departments of large companies with very rigid use scenarios or pre-designed environments and technology infrastructures.

The Homesense Project will bring methodologies developed in virtual environments (user-generated and remixed content, communities, data visualisations, etc.) to physical infrastructures. We believe that better scenarios will emerge if users are able to adapt easy to use and flexible tools to their specific needs, social contexts and lifestyles. Documenting these scenarios and learning from them will in turn drive better product development & innovation for relevant audiences of the Homesense Project.

PROJECT ELEMENTS?

• Hardware (perhaps based on existing TinkerKit development)
• Software and GUI (a visual programming interface, similar to Scratch)
• Data bucket and visualisation (collating information from the user testing, visualising it in interesting and compelling ways)
• User testing, research and design probes
• Product design
• Online presence for the project (user-lead stories, interviews, etc)

APPROACH

Equipped with a toolkit including easy to install hardware and an easy to program GUI that connects to the internet, participants will be invited to use the toolkit for a duration of x months (yet tbd obviously) in their home, in any way that they see fit and is relevant to their lifestyle.

Data collected from the use of that toolkit will serve to document the project and create a narrative that users will help weave.

Users will be chosen from different geographic locations, various social backgrounds and varying levels of computer literacy to challenge the built infrastructure as much as possible.

As you can tell, this isn’t exactly a small project, but we’re hoping to build this along the way. If you’re interested in contributing, give us a shout!!!

++ Kibu are accepting new artists in residence in Budapest. Sign up, they’re a lovely bunch!

++ Former IDIIers Cute Circuit have made a fabulous Galaxy Dress. _Lots_ of LEDs.

++ Pervasive and Advertising & Shopping conference in 2010 has an interesting programme.

Nick Weldin has been teaching our workshops in the UK since we met him in 2007 and even back then, we wanted to allow him to share his passion and skills with a broader audience. We decided to make a book, and not only that but a book on the internet! No official publishing company, all creative commons images from the community and many many contributors. A true team effort that has been 2 years in the making.

We had the great pleasure of having Crystal Campbell join us for a few months in the autumn of 2008 and help make this a truly visual piece of work and Ben Barker took over this summer to tweak it, help with the editing yet again and with the intricacies of Lulu and now , right on time for Christmas, it’s out!

Tinkering with Arduino is a cousin of Getting Started with Arduino, inspired by the pdf Massimo wrote some years ago, going through the basics of how to use Arduino, but from Nick’s perspective, adding details about how electricity works, how programming works all in a beautiful visual package we are extremely proud of. 90 pages of beautifully illustrated works from Crystal but also with some of the original drawings from Elisa Canducci.

A part of what we’re trying to work out with our work in education since 2007 and hand in hand with the development of the TinkerKit is the language of technology and how it can be opened up to a broader audience and be presented in a friendly way that isn’t off putting. We think that Tinkering with Arduino is a step in that direction along with the great books like Making Things Talk, and other more advanced books like Programming for Interactivity.

If you’re out of ideas for this Christmas, well then give it a go!

In our current office building in Shoreditch, we’re fortunate enough to be surrounded by our peers and people we admire and whose work we love. Berg are such a company and after a conversation with their MD Matt Webb, we were encouraged to follow their lead and post up weekly notes but on Twitter! So follow us if you don’t so you can get snippets of what we’re working on!

++ O’Reilly are coming out with Make: Electronics this December…lovely Xmas present if you ask me :)

++ Discovered The Next Layer project where researchers in academic context share their process through peer-previewed content. Open academic process, nice!

++ Very ambition Fabbers Market is trying to connect designers with engineers and manufacturers.

About two months ago (2 September), we ran a one-day masterclass on the Internet of Things at the dConstruct conference in Brighton. It’s rather late to blog it, but we want a post on which to hang links to some of the course content.

We had been looking forward to this class, as it gave us a chance to pull together some pieces of technology we’ve been working on and talking about separately, but not necessarily together. (And try to teach them in a single day!)

Arduino

The morning opened with an introduction to Arduino by Nick Weldin. Participants were introduced to the hardware and software platform and built basic digital and analog input and output circuits.

XBee and RFID

This was followed by a brief introduction to Xbee radio modules and RFID readers by Daniel Soltis. After some troubleshooting, participants configured XBee radios to make a mesh network and wired up RFID readers to send tag numbers over the network to a central location.

The slides for this section are here.

Ethernet

After lunch, Matt Biddulph walked participants through connecting Arduino to the internet using the Ethernet shield, and setting up a simple chat network.

And the slides for this section are here.

I (Daniel again) finished last week by speaking at Playful 09, organized by Toby Barnes and Pixel-Lab, which was a bit lighter-hearted than the C&binet Forum. (Although as usual there’s a serious undercurrent in conversations about gaming.)

This one was fun. I’ve been trying for a while to articulate a certain story about the changing role of custom-built hardware in games and game design, and about why it’s important for (some proportion of) games—particularly in the world of mobile and pervasive gaming—to include built-for-purpose hardware (as opposed to software in general-purpose devices like mobile phones). The slide deck for the talk is here (although the transparency on some of the slides got lost in conversion).

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