Tinker it now!

Dropped by an evening debate/panel called “Hacking Design : Folly, theft, or a new democratic dawn?” at the RSA. The event was chaired by Scott Burnham, author of a very interesting RSA Design & Society pamphlet on design-hacking that is tantamount to a design hacking manifesto. As an opener, postmodern fashionista Otto van Busch gave an entertaining and amusing overview of how he’s been taking the hacking and DIY culture to the fashion industry. He suggested that hacking culture can be instrumental in overcoming the stranglehold that Fashion Titans have on the industry by getting people to re-envision their relationships to ready-to-wear and cast off clothing (for starters). Karl Lagerfeld, watch out! The large number of fashion students in the audience seemed pretty convinced.

Less convinced were some of the other panel members, including Colin McDowell, fashion editor of The Sunday Times, Paul Thompson, Rector of the Royal College of Art and David Godber, an automotive designer and deputy CEO of the Design Council. Colin argued that design for the masses doesn’t necessarily lead to good design, anything you’d like, or want to buy. The reason for we pay for good design is that someone – probably a design professional – has thought long and hard about creatively solving a design problem. Think Eames Chair, Philippe Starck Jucier, Western Electric Type 500 Telephone. More alarmingly, think Boeing 747, a point I raised in the Q&A. I’m all for hacking but an airplane is not something I want to be hacked.

Actually, I think there’s a place for both: big “D” Design and hacking/DIY/democratised design. The key issue is the social context of the design activity. The Internet has made the Making and Hacking and Open Source communities possible – democratising design activity by easing communication and community building. And tools like Arduino have extended open source to hardware. With more people working on design creativity, more people are learning what’s possible and what design creativity entails. Big “D” Designers and agencies are learning from this activity too, and integrating into their work. We use our innovation workshops to jumpstart this process. Most of the team are in France right now doing this for one of our clients. Feedback has been pretty good. I think it’ll be getting better…

The physical world is made of stuff. Stuff costs money. It has to be transported. Building things takes time. And yet software is virtual. Data. A pattern of electrons. It can move from one continent to another in a split-second, for a microscopic fraction of a penny. Installation is one mouse click away. But you can’t touch it. Software is locked behind the monitor, trapped beneath your mouse.

What if the electronic world were more like the software world? What if trying out a new circuit was as simple as downloading new software and moving a few wires around a breadboard.

There are numerous Arduinos all around the world. They are standardised and compatible – they all run the same software. They are cheap, and easy to acquire or build.

Auduino launch event

Auduino is a synthesiser based on this principle. It is based around an Arduino, with the absolute minimum of extra components. A beginner can build one in less than 15 minutes. If you have an Arduino already, the rest of the components cost little more than the price of a pint of beer. You may have everything you need in a drawer right now.

With the obstacles of ’stuff’ reduced, Auduino starts to behave like ethereal data. Money and distribution are no longer a barrier. Anyone can download with a single click. Within days of its release, experimenters around the globe were not only building Auduino, but building upon it.

Auduino was released in late 2008. Within two weeks of release, it had crossed the Atlantic with new sliding controls. In the Netherlands, it got a shiny case of aluminium. New year passed, and a cardboard encased version appeared. The Arduino Mega and new 328 based Duemilanove appeared, and Auduino was updated to support them.

By the middle of 2009, there were experiments in paper based circuit fabrication. Paperduino was swiftly followed by a paper based Auduino. Circular arrays of dials and LEDs were added. A hybrid with a stylus control. And it continued. A colour reactive synthesiser. Making sounds from fabric.

In the last few days, we have spotted a physical sequencer, and a great case made from cardboard and a Sharpie.

Auduino and many other free projects are hosted at the Tinker.it! Google Code repository.

++ A blog post I wrote a while ago on our work with RFID was mentioned as part of an article inRead Write Web.

++ Digital Architecture London is a one day conference taking tomorrow, we’ll be reporting back.

++ A little isolated but Area 10 in Peckham is a workshop / exhibition space for artists and designers.

We’ve had the great pleasure of having Ben Barker in as an intern this month and we sent him to the Weiden+Kennedy hosted viewing of TEDGlobal and asked him to sketch his way through the day’s presentations. This is a little bit about him and what he saw that day.

Starting at the beginning, I met Alex through a Nokia Live Project presentation with Kin design. From then on I was aware of tinker.it. I had been using Arduino on and off through out the year and was very interested in its potential. So after a short period of stalking, I started an internship here.

I’ve worked on a number of projects outside of my BA Design at Goldsmiths, such as the SketchTravel which follows a book around the globe as famous people draw in it and for website design company in France called Laetis as photographer . Most of my personal work can be seen on my blog . Scroll down to see the Fairy Tale project, where I researched and wrote a modern fairy tale and King’s Cross project where I built a new pedestrian cross down the road from the station.

At Tinker I’ve been helping with some of the visual side of what they do here and learning as much as possible from them about physical computing and interaction. I’m interested in Arduino and everything it has to offer but I’m very much a beginner. I enjoy taking pictures, playing with graphics and trying to make things.

Alex was kind enough to invite me to my first New Designers show, a showcase of th best student work from designs schools around the UK and I was really impressed. Some of my favorite projects included (Warning, not all of these projects were prototyped with Arduino :) ):

- The Ravensbourne MA in Interactive Digital Media students produced some really interesting and I really liked the lighting installation from Mingyu Jung.

- Mac Oosthuizen produced a really lovely project called Soundgardening.
“A means of recording sound and location information from our environment and collecting and sharing it in a way that promotes expression and collaboration. The garden addresses the constrained nature of sharing digital information by creating a tangible platform for exploration of the urban environment.”

- Dainius Slavinskas has a twist on the Cat Tracker project with “What is my cat doing now” project.

- Kirsty Gawthorne made some really beautiful decorative textile designs

- Fergus Walker designed a People powered flour mill which is “bicycle-driven grain grinding mill designed to connect the community to its local food production.”

++ Nice BBC Technology article on the growth of open source. They’ve also written about whether programming skills will become essential on the market and covered the latest Dorkbot event.

++ Dave Mellis, main software developer on the Arduino team, gave a talk at Reboot11 a design conference in Copenhagen last week on “Making money from open source hardware”. He was kind enough to mention Tinker.it! in his talk as well!

++ Violet, founders of the Nabaztag rabbit are coming out soon with Dal:dal a sort of ambiant web connected orb, not unlike the one from Ambient devices.

++ TInker.it!’s frequent collaborator John Nussey has just completed a series of multitouch tables for London College of Fashion end of year show. It’s on till end of July, go check it out if you’re around Oxford Circus.

Went to the ever so popular and sweaty Royal College of Art Final show and thought the Design Products course in particular had some fabulous work. Worth seeing for yourself:

- Trace of Time project by Il-Gu Cha
- Beautiful Musical typewriter project (I had wanted to make that for so long!) called “Typing the Sound” by Fabien Capello.
- Beautiful and poetic windmill hooked up to an oldmechanical knitting machine by Merel Karhof
- Really interesting fabrics and furniture by Giles Miller.
- Wonderful interface and mobile project about fruit-bearing trees in London landscape by Vahakn Matossian.
- Finally an absolute must-see was the installation by Matthew Plummer-Fernandez in a small corner with nature-inspired glass capsules filled with blue ink dripping on a paper landscape depending on the level of activity around it.

Lots to see and now that the private view is over, you might possibly even manage to breathe! It’s on till the 6th, so go West and see it all…

++ Wiedan + Kennedy have just launched a sort of finishing school for young creative graduates. You have until the 3rd of July to apply to work for them as part of an intensive 6 month paid work experience called Platform.

++ Our friends at the Curiosity Collective have a show going on this weekend of their wonderful proverb-inspired installation work in Ipswich.

++ Lovely home brew display installation from Oli Wood.

++ Went to the Central St Martins Communications opening show tonight and saw some wonderful work (most works arent online yet so you’ll have to go see for yourself)They’re open for another few days, but work that caught our eye included:
- Crocheted meat cuts from Clemence Joly.
- Urban London photography by Martin Schoberer.
- Interactive paper-based projection by Patricia Callison.
- Beautiful mappings of the use of instruments across China by Yuxi Lin.
- Fabulous maps of time and tracks of people in London by Yunzhou Jin.
-Beautiful language-based posters from Seetal Kagdadia.
- Guisseppe Constanza also did a wonderful job with some very Bruce Sterling-esque work with FoodTracer project.
- Neville who interned with us last winter has also finished in Graphic design with an SMS project that communicates between the students, the visitors and the website.

I’ll be checking out the RCA show this thursday and will report back!

++ Systemic interactive architecture project made by Ecologic studio with the technical details on Nick Puckett’s research blog

++ Free OpenFrameworks workshop in June in London, we organised one last year and it was great!

++ New kid on the block, Seaweed studio design lovely interactive works and teach kids about Arduino!

++ Wireless power meter using an Arduino…in an Instructable!