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Lightning a candle is for many a meaningful ritual, often used to create a relaxing and calm atmosphere.

The objects communicate directly to each other, and knows when the other candle is litt. When one candle is litt, subtle movements starts on both. Only when they are both litt, its movements become greater, more atmospheric; representing the shared moment.

This enhances the ritual by letting the users share the experience, and close presence, despite the physical distance between them.

This is it, our major project, with only three weeks left. The new brief is called Social Objects, with the end goal being a set of two working objects. They are going to be placed in two different houses/apartments and somehow communicate with each other through WiFi.

As it says in the brief some things are  "… intentionally designed to be social, to be shared and shape the interaction between people, or things around which conversation is based."

Kjetil Nordby, Associate Professor at AHO, presented The Ullstein Bridge Concept to us, which is a research project under development at AHO. They aim to redefine the whole bridge environment and change both the physical and the digital environment. It’s is a large project that requires a collaborative group consisting of researchers, designers, and engineers. 

I have worked solely with digital fabrication processes for a whole week. It started on Monday with a morning meeting where we all discussed our individual briefs we had set for ourselves. Coming from a graphic design background, and with little knowledge of working with 3D for printing, I decided to work with typography. Paul joined and together we played with various type and fabrications.

This was during the president election in the U.S, so we printed out both Trumps and Hillary's signatures with the SLS machine. The result of that was.. not sprigging; Trump made a mess and got involved with all the others parts, and made them all useless. Hillary broke in two.

Paul focused on the clay printer, which resulted in great type ceramics. I worked on ways to trick the Ultimaker to print in air, and other ways to make type interesting as a physical artifact. The week ended with an exhibition called Digital is the new Physical, showcasing the processes and end results of the week.

For two weeks I worked together with Nico to make people eat more bananas. We found the idea of ‘nudging’ people interesting and looked at various ways to change people's behavior at the canteen. We set out to nudge people to eat more bananas.

By making people more aware of the bananas we believe that they will buy more bananas in the canteen. So we thought what if the fruit bowl spins? It might be experienced as a gimmick, but will, however, attract their attention to bananas.

It grabbed people's attention as it started spinning when people came close to it. If they were to reach for a banana it would stop spinning, which made it easier for them to grab one.

The other part of the project, which was actually the first thing we did, was our ‘hidden’ stickers around AHO. This was done based on what we read about nudging, making small changes that change people's decisions subconsciously. Our idea was that we would put bananas in people's head throughout the whole day when walking around the school.

The day before our ‘invention’ they sold 2 bananas, the day that our spinning bowl was placed in the canteen they sold 16 bananas. The following days we noticed that people quickly got used to the spinning effect, making them less likely to care about the bananas. We released that we had to up the game if the attention was to remain, hence our Ba Na game. Press the button and see if you can spell Ba Na Na.

RGB strips usually require 12V. The WS2801 RGB strip does not, it can be run with only 5V. It works differently than the basic RGB strips, as this one is ‘programmable’, meaning that you can pinpoint what pixel you want to light up.

I’be been playing around with a library from Adafruit, but found it easier to work with the one from FastLED. They have great documentation on GitHub, were I found help in order to do this:

After two weeks of learning the basics of Arduino and programming, we have got a new exciting brief. Ready to put our newly acquired skills to practice. 

As a class, we will create a chain reaction of events, inspired by the Rube Goldberg machines.

A Rube Goldberg machine is an invention/device that is ‘deliberately over-engineered’ to perform a simple task. The expression is named after Rube Goldberg, an American cartoonist and engineer.

Our Rube Goldberg machine will be run with Arduino’s, using different sensors as inputs and other ones as outputs. This will challenge us collaborate well together, but also individually, designing clever ways to work with our given sensors.

The input sensor I have to work with is the bend sensor. Here are some shots from the first afternoon I worked with it.

The next weeks we will be working with a relatively new ‘design tool’ – the Arduino.

Today designers have to explain their ideas with prototypes – rapid prototypes. This can easily be done with model making or sketching some layouts. Today we face some problems due to user interaction with our designs. Interaction designers need to understand the user and how they would engage with the design. This goes for both physical products and interfaces located on screens. 

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform. It is a microchip designed for people to easily understand physical computing, without heavy programming.

“A few years ago I was given a very interesting challenge: teach designers the bare minimum in electronics so that they could build interactive prototypes of the objects they were designing. – Massimo Banzi.”

This is why designers have started to use it as a rapid prototyping tool, where 3D objects can become interactive much quicker than before. This allows the designer to understand how the users will actually engage with the design much quicker than before – leading to more informed design choices.

Arduino opens up many new ways of exploration. You start with an idea and test it out, but realise that if you tweak the code slightly, you end up with something ‘cooler’. This is better explained in Massimo Banzi book, Getting Started with Arduino.

“Tinkering is what happens when you try something you don’t quite know how to do, guided by whim, imagination, and curiosity. When you tinker, there are no instructions – but there are also no failures, no right or wrong ways of doing things. It’s about figuring out how things work and reworking them.

Contraptions, machines, wildly mismatched objects working in harmony – this is the stuff of tinkering.

Tinkering is, at its most basic, a process that marries play and inquiry.”

The Tangible Interaction course at AHO has been involved with Elvelangs for some years.

‘Elvelangs i Fakkellys’ is a yearly event that invites people to walk next to Akerselva (a river in Oslo) and experience music, and light installations, for free.

We designed an experience that invited people to play with their bodies contours. This was done during with a large custom built screen where we projected peoples contours on from behind. This created a mirror-effect but was, in fact, the readings from the Kinect camera on the front side.

(Final-outcome film coming soon)

This was a two-week project; first week we played around with concepts and explored how we could use projection mapping to engage people at Elvelangs.

Reminded us of the northern lights.

This could be seen from both sides – more engaging than one screen.

On Monday, in the second week, we tested our initial outcome. We wanted to use three screens, that way people could walk in between and have a more spacial experience. This showed to be difficult, as we had troubles with syphon and a projecting mapping software.

The solution to the problem was to make one bigger screen, as we could see that people enjoyed playing with their ‘shadows’ anyway.

The final step was to include one element that responded to people's interaction. This was a small ball that would go to the closest point read. This made it more playful and sparked people's curiosity.

(final set-up photos to come!)

We used Processing 2 (available at processing.org) with a Kinect. The code required some libraries which are listed below.

PGraphics, Fingertracker (used to outline the contours) and SimpleOpenNI (accessing the Kinect and its depth camera. This is why it can be used in complete darkness, as it reads infrared signals.)

Useful guide and tips for Kinect+Processing.

Don’t listen to Cura – take a chance. 

3D Printing // Ultimaker 2

AHO has one of the best-equipped 3D printing workshop in Europe. I am lucky enough to play with these printers as I have chosen —- as my elective course. Here we are going to test the boundaries and limitations of the digital fabrication.

We work in pairs where we make 3D files in our chosen software. Here we have to consider what type of printing method and machine we will use. Throughout the semester we will build up a library of test prints, which will help us chose the right machine for future jobs.

The Ultimaker was the first printer we used. This is a ‘desktop’ 3D printer that is available for people's home. The people behind it support the open-source community and offer you to download to files you need to build the whole printer yourself. So there is a lot of software, help and forums online for Ultimaker.

We decided to try and make the Ultimaker print out some organic forms. We questioned if 3D printed parts can ever feel organic. We ended up designing a double stitch knot, which is usually soft and slightly loose, but in this case its.. well, plastic.

The Ultimaker is not good for overhangs, and 45 degrees is typically the limit on angles. We followed the guidebook and cut the knot in half, with a plan to glue the pieces together afterwards.

But that’s not a great looking result, so we set out to do what Cura told us not to do – just print it as one piece.

Visualising Data We have spent the last week visualizing data available online. This had to be visualized in a physical object, that allow the user to ‘physically interact with and / or alter that information’. It will be a two-week long project. The last five days we´ve worked with rough prototypes and video sketches of how they would react to live data.

This has been very hands on. Discovering by doing. Learning by failing.

Initially, we aimed to visualize live global cyber attacks. We stumbled upon a website by Norse which visualized this with a global map. After two days of trying to deal with the significant and global issue, we decided that we had to step back and choose a different data source.

Internet of Shit

Pooper is a service that is currently available in San Fransisco, Los Angeles and New York. It works almost exactly has Uber;

1. Receive a poop notification 2. Tap to accept the scoop 3. Follow the map to the pin 4. Scoop, and tap «complete»

Flic - The Wireless Smart Button 

Flic – the wireless smart button. 

Flic is a small, wireless button that use Bluetooth to connect to your phone. It comes with a set of default ‘recipes’, like play spotify with one click, turn on the alarm on your phone + more. It aims to simplify your life with eliminate the need of opening different apps on your phone. You simply press the button without picking up your phone.  Flic has teamed up with IFTTT (if that then that). Here you can create your own ‘recipes’. If you press flic then ... happens. Our task was to create three new recipes. They had to be innovative and useful, and not already exciting on IFTTT.  We quickly understood that the Flic is quite limited in its use. It’s really only a shortcut, and need to be close to the phone (bluetooth signal). We decided that it works best when people don’t have time, or the opportunity to fiddle with their phones. This is our three recipes: 1. Ice cream van live tweeting it’s location.