Public service organizations know this. Take a look at the hardened buttons, displays and controls in a transit system. Anything the public might encounter is beefed up to the max, because if it can break or be broken, it will. And yet, they are out there, those BSODs and broken interactions. There are two high-visibility art installations at Heathrow T5 right now, that have been “down” for a while. Interactives can be brittle in public spaces and, like transit companies, Museums inevitably have to cope with this. Many digital art pieces are one-off, specialty installations and might be around for a few months at most. It’s a shame when they don’t even last for this short duration. Just recently, I went to the digital art exhibition Decode at the V&A, featuring “the latest developments in digital and interactive design”. True to form, a couple of the pieces were out of action, sidelined and waiting for maintenance. There was one piece which I’m not sure ever really worked properly. But this is not an indictment of the exhibition, the artists, or curators at the V&A. Much of the work was innovative and aesthetically engaging. Rather, I’m highlighting the need for a culture of stewardship that we tend to forget about at the so-called cutting edge of the design community. When you’re busy doing the cutting, it’s easy to lose sight of the long view of the lifespan of the work.

There’s a tension between the desire to “expect it to work” versus the need for “design innovation”, and getting the balance right on limited resources is a challenge. Large companies have been using management approaches like the 6-sigma DMADV method or the ISO 9001/9002 standards for quality of production and servicing since they emerged 80’s. These methods yielded substantial cost savings and increased quality control. But the adopters of these standards and techniques continue to be global producers – multinational firms with mass markets. They’re making millions of widgets for WalMart and have margins to spare. Design firms tend to be smaller, and those who contract for bespoke designs and one-off interactive experiences have yet to seriously adopt these approaches. Lack of internal resources and budgets limit what can be done.

Indeed, there’s not even yet a mature enough culture of stewardship in the digital design community to address these issues. We must continue to innovate – design means seeing things in new ways and discovering the possible – but being aware of the problem is critical for improving the quality of what is delivered in the end. We must think about the long term, about the unexpected departures, plan for them, bid for them.

We try to educate our clients that digital interactive experiences must be reliable, but that means they require maintenance and service level agreements, in a word: stewardship. As any brand designer will tell you, good stewardship is key to maintaining brand value. And digital interactive work is no different. Perhaps it’s a bit premature to set such high expectations in a newly emerging arena, but I think those people who do will be the ones who stick around and who continue to deliver for their clients and their clients’ customers.

Try this code:

int count;
void setup() {
  Serial.begin(9600);
  Serial.println("Here are some random numbers");
  for (count=1; count<=10; count++) {
    Serial.println(random(100));
  }
}
void loop() {
}

I get the numbers 7, 49, 73, 58, 30, 72, 44, 78, 23, 9. You probably did too. Not very random.

Generating truly random numbers in electronics isn’t easy. There are all sorts of problems to solve – where to get the random numbers from. How to make sure they really are even and fair.

We often have need for truly random numbers on Tinker.it! projects, so we wrote a library to do just that. We’ve released it so that others can use it too. TrueRandom is downloadable from our Google Code pages.

So lets try that again, with TrueRandom installed.

#include <TrueRandom.h>

int count;
void setup() {
  Serial.begin(9600);
  Serial.println("Here are some random numbers");
  for (count=1; count<=10; count++) {
    Serial.println(TrueRandom.random(100));
  }
}
void loop() {
}

Much better.

We’re looking at using this library for games, ESP experiments, fortune telling, cryptography (generating keys, challenges and nonces) and automatically allocating unique serial numbers (UUID, Ethernet MAC addresses). We’d love to know what you use it for.

++ 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.

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.