Tinker it now!

++ Thesis work of Pratt Institute graduate Alicia Gibb entitled New Media Art, Design and the Arduino Controller.

++ Post by Mark Pilgrim on the hopefully not-so-likely Tinkerer’s Sunset.

++ Freedom to Tinker site run by Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy, a research center that studies digital technologies in public life.

++ Swissnex SFOis a space, a service, and a platform for the exchange of knowledge and ideas in science, education, art, and innovation.

++ We were told Sorting Things Out was quite good by the lovely Elisabeth Goodman.

Every time I go to an interactive art exhibit, I end up feeling frustrated, but not in a way I can easily explain. I can always point to some projects that are particularly well done and teach me something new, but I leave feeling that, overall, something was missing.

This weekend I stopped by the RCA Work in Progress show (featuring Design Interactions among others) and the Kinetica Art Fair. Both certainly had their high points, and here are a few of my favorites:

David Benque’s Acoustic Botany, RCA
This caught my eye, and then I was charmed by the idea. It is a concept piece considering bioengineering as a medium for cultural expression – in this instance, engineering plants and insects into musical instruments. Nut-tree cellos, lilypad speakers, termite-mound pipes, and the like.

Acoustic Botany

The designs extrapolated well from existing natural shapes, and I like that the concept posits experimental biology as another of the many fields of human endeavor in which cultural expression is a strong and natural counterpart to practical benefit.

Unknown, Unknown, RCA
(I always take a photo that I really like and fail to get the relevant info, and this time I couldn’t even track it down online)

iPhone motions

Next to this display of not-quite-gears was an iPhone cradle and a motor. When you attach one of the jigs and run the motor, the phone is shaken in a way characteristic of the labeled gait.

I’m not sure of the intended or practical benefit of this, except for cheating at Nike + iPod. I liked the shapes of the different gaits. I’ve seen some over-engineered answers to the question of what an emotion or type of movement might look like, and these were nice antidotes—simple and legible, and they rang true.

Margaret Michel’s Tree, Kinetica
There were several pieces at Kinetica that I liked quite a lot, but this was my favorite: a motorized tree that uses its branches to draw its own leaves.

Tree

Very simple in execution, and the metaphor hangs together beautifully.

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This week, the Economist has a nice chunk of reportage on Social Networking for those who have been living underneath a rock, it would seem. (As a side bonus, the front cover was emblazoned with a saintly image a Steve Jobs, but that was luckily, not distracting.) An interesting tidbit from this spread was a long article on the effects of social networking and a statistic snagged from ACNielsen that showed consumer trust in advertising is highest when it comes from their friends’ recommendations – more than twice as much as advice gained from other sources (websites, tv, newspapers, billboards, etc). If this is true, it has significant consequences for Agencies and Brands.

The old stalwarts of print media have been in a well documented and steady decline of both readership and ad revenue. Broadcast media such as TV suffer from the scatter-shot limitations inherent to the medium. Are the people watching? Brands are left inevitably to wonder if they’ve seen real ROI on the ad budgets. They want more than ever to make sure their messages reach the mark – and everyone knows it.

The web isn’t immune either. In the face of declining revenue per impression for web-campaigns, vendors have been touting web analytics as a way to shed light on real impressions that make a difference. Click-throughs tell the tale. Trackable impressions and conversions to sales tell Brands what they need to know, and they’ll pay a premium for that information. Accordingly, this yields revenue for agencies who are now offering analytics, and analytics firms which are sprouting up like dandelions to grab the gold.

Experiential marketing blended with social networking has greater value still. The granularity of social media makes it possible to get even finer detail. Since each consumer holds a unique account, it is possible to track specific interactions, times of interaction, and number of impressions quite precisely. Patterns of use and viral communication also emerge. In one of our recent campaigns involving Twitter, we were able to identify exactly how many impressions and interactions individuals within the target population engaged in the Brand experience, and to identify eddies of conversation in the tweetstreams which had direct value for our clients. The consequences are clear: better information means higher value-for-money in campaign expenditures. And if this is the case, content creators can justify high budgets for more fun and engaging interactive experiences.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. As new techniques for tracking and measuring these interactions emerge, we’ll see better reporting and better precision. The big mobile manufacturers have already figured this out and are spending more on these kinds of campaigns. Those who are quick to the mark will be able to add real value for their clients and build more creative and interesting experiential marketing campaigns which offer new, physical, fun, and connected experiences for consumers. Now more than ever: Physical+digital=fun! And we can tell you exactly how much.

++ Massimo is in Savannah for IXD conference at the moment.

++ I’ll be attending the Lirec progress meeting at UEL first. Then I’ve been invited to speak at Lovebytes I Love Technology in Sheffield where I’ll be talking about the world of “making” as we now see it and the relationships to design, craft, business and innovation.

++ The week after I’ll be speaking at Experimental Objectsabout the impact of prototypes on design teaching. This seminar is organised by Lancaster University as part of the Experimental Society’s activities.

If you’re at any of these events, come and say hi!

It’s a little unfashionable to look back in February, but hey, I started this blog post on Dec 31st and never finished it… :) The sentiment is still valid though, so here goes.

Massimo & I started Tinker.it! in the middle of 2007 and 2009 has been the year that felt like the “year of teenage angst” for us. We met some wonderful collaborators and clients, worked on some great projects and I thought I’d take a minute to wrap the year up and thank everyone properly.

We saw the year start with some work with Duncan Wilson at Arup Foresight to give life to Force Field, an interactive and Oyster-card reactive light sculpture.

We then worked with Silvio and Paulo from Limiteazero for the National Geographic Store on Regent Street to build a very complex and highly bespoke media player for their storefront. This was a real opportunity to work in product design again as well as figuring out some tricky engineering and going through the very challenging process of bespoke one-off electronics that need to be robust enough for a final permanent setup. In our studio, the word prototype is used very carefully as for clients it can become misleading. A prototype is often a proof of concept to show that something can exist and be built, it’s rarely if ever the final thing.

We then took part in the first Kinetica Art Fair (the second one is on this weekend) and built a presence-sensitive game of Hopscotch. When you played the game, the corresponding squares would light up on a sculpture mirror of the game.

During the late spring, we built a web-responsive physical bar graph called Centograph. This was great fun, as we got to work with David and Olly from St Paul’s for this. The brief was really simple: build something that will appeal to the general public for the 500 year anniversary event and will communicate the value of their 4 technology programs. Centograph invited people to look up any word and would physically display how often that word had been used in the past century according to Google Archive. The slow reset and motion of the physical bars created a sense of expectations and build-up that people really enjoyed. We also noticed straight away that people were searching for terms that created the biggest curve (check out what they looked for via the Twitter feed we created based on searches).

Later on that year we built a complex node-based sensing system for Christian Nold’s Hedenheusene project which we’re still involved in and trying to make the whole world of connected urban devices come to life. Plenty of challenges there in terms of how robust and local you can get and what the quality of the data you can get with industrial sensors is. Really interesting.

The autumn kicked off with our work with Hyper Happen to help kick off the PUSH competition for Nokia’s open source device the N900. We wanted to create a series of “hacks” and documentation that would get people to play with the phone in creative ways. We’re still working on that and presented those projects at the BFI and at Designersblock in Earl’s Court. Fabulous fun to see people interacting with them.

At about the same time, we started working with Dare Digital on helping them make an idea that complimented their digital work for the launch of Sony Ericsson’s Satio come alive. We helped them build a massive adressable grid that pushed air to deflated Space Hoppers according to the use of a hash tag on Twitter. This was streamed live for 2 weeks and was great fun. The challenge here was building such a massive piece after having played around with phones for 3 months.

In mid-october, we went on site to EDF R&D Innovation Lab in the Parisian suburb of Clamart to help them create a start-up culture and develop product ideas in 5 days. Really intense, but we like it that way and the projects that were created were really inspirational to the rest of the company. This is a model we call Innovation Workshops and we’re really trying to push this forward with new clients this year.

We then spent most of December tying up loose ends and starting 2 little projects, one for a client, the other internal, which we’ll hopefully start talking about in the coming weeks. It was great year and a really challenging one, but the team crystallised around Brock, Daniel, Peter and I in London with contributors like John, Cefn and Georgina our dynamic seems really fluid and creative.

In the coming year, I’m looking looking forward to integrating new friends and new ways of working. We’ve moved for the 4th time in the 3 years we’ve been around and I’m hoping that this new office will stick to us more than the others. I’m also looking forward to being able to contribute more to the general scene around physical interaction design and how the digital can become physical and vice versa. There are some really interesting opportunities there which i think are worth talking about and working around. There, I’m spent :) Happy New Year everyone!