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.

toaster that plays music

You wouldn’t know it by looking, but this toaster plays tunes based on what bread you put in to toast—then pops the bread up when the song is over. (Actual toasting to be added on the next iteration…)

ironic radio

Similarly, this iron is a radio. The metal surface is used to select stations, while the other knobs and dials control the rest of the radio’s functions.

tv awaiting conversion into fireplace

I failed to get even a half-decent photo of the end result, but this taken-apart television was converted into an artificial fireplace made of wood, fans, LEDs, and a blow dryer. You could make the fire hotter by adjusting the antenna.

hair dryer/telephone

This is a phone booth, partially purpose-built and partially resurrected from an old hairdresser’s hair dryer.

moveable speakers

These speakers play different kinds of music – sorted by year and genre – according to their location in the room.

turntable that plays photographs

This turntable senses the colors on ‘records’ generated from photographs, and uses that information to control a lamp.

New souls for old machines indeed. It was quite interesting to be able to watch a group of (smart) people work on projects from brainstorm to execution, guided primarily by what they thought was interesting. I keep getting bogged down on some of my thoughts about the whole week, so I will push that into a separate post.  Something about nostalgia and differences between pining for and actually reusing old materials, machine scale and human scale, and zombies and sea monsters.