Recently, as part of an iPhone development project I’ve been working on with the Institute of Zoology and Birkbeck, I had a need for an audio line in adapter so that we’d be able to record stereo audio from an audio sensor. The application tags audio data with GPS information as part of a citizen-scientist data collection project.

Strangely (or perhaps I didn’t dig around the interwebs long enough) I didn’t find many resources for a home-brew line-in adapter and the ones I found were pretty vague and hard to follow. So Peter and I put our heads together and rolled our own. It’s a fairly straightforward circuit, but has a little twist, because the iPhone OS is smart enough to detect what’s plugged into the stereo jack. (The diagram above is a lot more clear than anything I found.) This particular project only required a left channel audio input to the monaural iPhone mic, but if you wanted to route both left and right channels to the mic, that’s represented by the dashed line.

The resistor+capacitor network provides a pull-up that the iPhone is looking for to detect whether you’ve got a standard stereo headset plugged in or whether you’ve got a microphone (i.e., iPhone) headset and can take a phone call with it. This particular circuit is tuned for the audio sensor we’ve been using, but is about the right spec for most audio recording purposes and works fine with the audio recording app that ships with the iPhone. The parts cost about £3 and I whipped one up in about 10 minutes!

++ 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.

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.

But What Is Missing?

I was glad to see the two shows in juxtaposition. The RCA show was concept-heavy, while Kinetica emphasized mechanical and built objects, and each filled in some of the other’s gaps. But as usual I left feeling somehow dissatisfied, and not entirely sure why.

Part of it, I think, is that interaction design, especially in the realm of physical computing and digital art, is a new enough field that we’re all still working things out. We haven’t completely determined what the major themes are, and we keep revisiting the same concepts with incrementally improved sophistication. The technologies themselves are in such flux that there’s a lot of overlap between learning a new tool, developing new ways to use that tool, inventing another tool entirely, and making meaningful statements about how that tool is affecting or may affect our lives.

Perhaps as a consequence, physical interactive works often focus on function and/or concept, with esthetic decisions coming in at the last minute, if at all. On a good day, there’s time to hide the electronics in a box. On most days, the explanatory text is essential for viewers to figure out what’s going on.

And this is where at least some of my dissatisfaction lies. It’s not even that we’re making bad esthetic choices; we’re just not making choices at all.

With the right underlying structures, you can get far with no esthetic decisions. There’s something inherently beautiful in a functional machine; add some algorithmic structures that mimic natural processes, and you can’t go far wrong. But it’s not the same as designing the form to go with the function, much less using that design to illustrate or enhance the story a work tells.

Before I left the RCA show, I went downstairs to see the architecture, and I was instantly jealous. As I walked into this strange carnival of maquettes and shadow boxes, I had no idea what any of it meant, but I wanted more. This, I thought, is what we need.

Architecture Student Work

Or, more accurately, this is what we need to start bringing together. We need to spend time with architecture, puppetry, fabric crafts, furniture design, wood- and metal-working. We need to look at different ways to embody stories and emotions in our physical objects, and bring that earlier into the process of learning new technologies, making new technologies, and trying to make sense of what it all means.

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.

++ 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!

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 were very happy to have made it to the original Silicon Roundabout map put together by Matt Biddulph back in 2008. In this month’s Wired UK was rethought and reframed and we’re still there! Yay!

We’re also really happy that our project manager Georgina Voss was involved in this new version as part of her work with the lovely people at BERG, work she presented last month at Wired’s Apple Store event.

All in all and regardless of where our next office might be, we’re very happy to be proud of such a vibrant community in London.

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.

++ Beautiful and moving use of openFrameworks for EyeWriter project.

We were very happy to take part in Are you ready for the Internet of Things with The Council, a one-day conference in Bruxelles last month. As part of it I ran a quick 3h workshop to kick-off some thoughts around Homesense and what it means designing for smart homes. I’ll spare you the images of post-it sessions but roughly the workshop ran in the following way:

0:00 Start of workshop and round the table introduction of participants. Each one talked about what makes their home “home” and some of the problems that they’d like to see resolved in their home.

0:30 Quick post-it session where we identified and mapped out objects (according to GS1 we are surrounded by 5K objects on average), people who interacted with us at home and spaces outside of the home.

0:45 Placed in more than random teams of 2 (we were around 14 in total) we had 20-30 minutes to brainstorm a scenario that would use the technologies we’re aware of in order to tie an object, a person and another space to our own home. We had to illustrate this and fill in a sheet of paper with a quick user scenario, a short description of the product/service and what would need to happen for it to exist if it wasn’t possible right now.

1:30 Every team presented to the others and received comments.

During the last hour, we discussed the possible challenges that emerged from the scenarios, as well as identifying some guidelines and overarching principles about designing in this way for a home context. It appeared that a top down approach was problematic for different reasons. Some of these findings included:

++ Building with a closed user scenarios is difficult. In a home, there are often more than one “user” and the question “would your wife and kids use this?” often resulted in a resounding no. Maybe this points to the fact that we keep designing for people like ourselves only, which in a home environment quickly becomes inappropriate.

++ The idea of home is a flexible one. Someone feels at home because of a number of often qualitative parameters. Home is also an environment where technological intrusion is kept to a perceived minimum even if wifi, sound systems and electronic objects are everywhere. They remain usually disconnected to each other and we seem to like it that way. We demand ubiquity in our work life but not necessarily at home. This could again be related to the various actors involved in the home.

++ There is a definite need to move beyond RFID as the only sentient technology we think of with smart homes. The need to filter out information is great but no one wants to commit to handling information at home in the same way as RSS feeds or Facebook updates. Noise versus signal ratio in our homes should be reduced as much as possible.

++ The number of actors involved in sharing information generated, gathered and produced by the home is hard to manage. Privacy is seen as something of utmost importance, even if the actors themselves reveal much of themselves and their activities online and through social media. The home is a perceived black box. This relates back to a lot of security and disclosure issues that might or might not be relevant but because of a lack of “killer app”. Because of this, it seems like non-negotiable criteria for design for now.

++ Marketing the value of a connected home will be very important. People don’t understand why this should be important right now and the internet of things will eventually invade the home and not just the city.

I really enjoyed leading this workshop and the participants were really engaged and wonderful to interact with. A great source of inspiration and thoughts for this project. More to come soon on the topic hopefully.