Tinker it now!

++ Will be speaking this week at Disqo’s Making Digital Real event in Soho.

++ Lirec, an EU funded project on emotional and digital companions and robots is looking for an evangelist. A nice part time gig for someone who is passionnate about robots and a great speaker.

++ We’ve been hard at work with the lovely people from BBC R&D working on Next Generation Remote Controls.

++ 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!

We’re very pleased to share our latest work and collaboration with Dare Digital as part of last autumn’s campaign for Sony’s newest product: Satio.

As an extension to the Hopper Invasion campaign in the UK, Tinker.it! built a grid that allows 49 Space Hoppers to be inflated dynamically through the use of hashtags (key words) on Twitter and through the Satio website online.

Each Space Hopper is inflated to capacity over a period of time depending on online activity, removed and replaced by a deflated Space Hopper. The whole event was streamed online 24h a day for 2 weeks from a secret location in London and users were encouraged to tweet what they would like to do with the hundreds of inflated Space Hoppers.

Building of the grid by Tinker.it! staff was filmed live from the 16th of November and starting on the 23rd, online users were be able to use the keyword #pumpt to activate the grid and inflate the Hoppers.

Tinker.it! was involved in all the fabrication, hardware design and software integration with Dare’s online activities.

Have a look at the behind the scenes video with Brock and Peter here:

For more pictures and behind the scenes look on what was involved, check out the pics and project page.

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!

We’re incredibly happy to announce that we’ll be contributing to the Bus.tops project that was announced this morning on Radio 4 by co-creator Alfie Dennen. This is part of the Artists Taking the Lead program set up by the London Olympics.

We were approached some weeks ago by him and Paula Le Dieu about the idea and immediately wanted to get involved! It will be an incredible challenge to design and manage the setup of so many screens on top of London’s bus tops but it sure will be fun!

Check out the full project description here.

We’ll be presenting Rewind as part of London Design Week from Thursday 24th to Sunday 27th as part of Designersblock presence at Earl’s Court. Register quick and come and say hi and experience the project for yourselves and learn about PUSH!

You might have heard a lot of noise about the latest Nokia N900 from Nokia. Well we’re lucky enough to have just completed a piece of work: Rewind using the phone tablet for Hyper who launched PUSH, an open competition to creatives and hackers alike.

Knowing that selling the value of a platform is in what you can do with it (see Arduino :)) we thought we would revisit the 80s and devices of our youth and picked 4: the Viewmaster, the Rolodex, an FM Radio and the Speak & Spell.

This is what we ended up with after 3 weeks of very intensive work with some technical nuggets.

Now in 3D!

Remember those red and blue paper glasses? Did you see Jaws 3D or Friday the 13th Part 3?
Using the Nokia N900’s 5-megapixel camera and 800 X 480 widescreen display, you can create your own 3D memories. Look into the Viewmaster® to see miniature 3D images, or put on glasses to watch the show. Then create your own photo!

HOW DOES IT WORK?

A Nokia N900 is sitting inside the Viewmaster®. When you move the Viewmaster® to the left or to the right, you trigger a switch. An Arduino then sends a message over Bluetooth to the N900. A Python script receives that message and, using GStreamer (a library for controlling media playback that is included in Maemo 5.0), saves a frame from the camera as a JPEG. When two photos have been taken, numerical (a python library for manipulating arrays) is used to transform the size and color of the images, and pygame (an open-source python wrapper for controlling visuals,) is used to control the screen display.

Any 3D image actually needs two images. The two photos are taken several centimeters apart–about the distance between your two eyes. When you look into the Viewmaster, each eye is isolated to see only the photograph of what would be seen by that eye, and your brain resolves the two images into one 3D image. On the larger screen, the two images are colored red and blue and superimposed. The red and blue lenses of your glasses each cause one image to disappear, so each eye again sees a slightly different image, and your brain translates them into 3D.

Talk & Text

When E.T. needed to call his mates for a lift home, he hacked a Speak & Spell ™ to send an interplanetary text message. Now, with the help of the Nokia N900’s phone functionality and the Maemo platform , you too can text your friends using this much-loved childhood toy.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

A Nokia N900 and an Arduino are hidden inside this Speak & Spell©. When you press a key, the Arduino detects which key you have pressed and sends that information over Bluetooth to the N900.

The letters you see are actually the N900 screen. A python script receives the information from the Arduino and uses pygame, an open-source python wrapper for controlling visuals, to display images that mimic the original Speak & Spell display. The voice synthesis is also generated on the phone, using flite, a speech synthesis engine that we compiled to run on the N900’s ARM processor.

When you complete a text message, the D-Bus messaging service is used to send your message to the phone number that you entered.

Leave a Message

With a Rolodex© to keep track of phone numbers and newly available answering machines to take messages, businesses in the 1980s no longer missed that important phone call. Now, of course, contacts and voice mail are seamlessly integrated into the N900’s user interface. Travel back in time to call your favorite characters from Saturday morning cartoons.

HOW DOES IT WORK?
An Arduino connected to the Rolodex© detects the position of the wheel and sends that information over Bluetooth to the N900. Each position indicates a specific contact. A Python script receives the incoming information and uses the xtst library to emulate the key presses and screen touches that would be necessary to view that contact and, when you touch the screen of the phone, to place a call.

Phone FM

In the 1980s, we started to listen to music differently. Mix tapes, walkmen, and portable boom boxes allowed people to make personal soundtracks and share them with friends. These days, you can create and share a playlist with just a few clicks. Text your favorite 80s musician to the Nokia N900, and tune in to your playlist on an old school radio.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

The N900’s Maemo platform uses the D-Bus messaging service to allow different applications to send message and alerts to each other. When you send a text to this phone, it transmits the contents of your message over D-Bus to a Python script. The Python script then uses pylast (a library for communicating with last.fm) to send the artist’s name to last.fm and receive the mp3 files and cover art generated for that artist. The script then controls the screen display and music playback using GStreamer (a library for controlling media playback that is included in Maemo 5.0) and the pygame (an open-source python wrapper for controlling visuals).

Playback to the radio is controlled by the N900’s built-in FM transmitter. The transmitter can be set to broadcast at any frequency, an the phone’s audio will be picked up by any nearby radio set to the right station.

We also wrote a handy guide for hackers for anyone wanting to get their hands dirty with the phone and hooking it up to Arduino.

As promised, here’s a lovely little video of the Centograph in action. Enjoy!

We’ve had the very great pleasure of finishing a lovely piece of work for St Paul’s School for Boys for their 500th anniversary last weekend. Their very prestigious establishment has several technology departments who work on electronics, motors, and other great design and technology related projects. We were asked to come up with an installation that would communicate the power of all these technologies and the internet to a crowd mainly composed of parents, students and benefactors of the school. Thus the Centograph was born.

The Centograph is a physical representation of virtual information, uses today’s technologies to encourage viewers to reflect on the past.

When you enter a search term into the computer, Centograph queries the Google News Archive for a list of related news articles over the past 100 years. The archive returns a timeline of articles sorted according to date. The bars on the graph then change height to display a histogram of the relative number of news articles for each decade.

This allows you to view the ‘shape’ of the past century in relation to different topics—from progression in computing technology to times of war and peace to changing sources of energy, to name a few possibilities.

We additionally hooked up all searches made to Twitter which produced a really interesting feed.

This installation is now a permanent asset to the ICT department of St Paul’s so if you go and visit, be sure to try it out!

VIDEO COMING SOON!