Entering the Doctoral phase
Shortly the first cohort of HighWire students will enter the full doctoral stage of the HighWire Doctoral Training Centre. As such, fellow HighWirees are currently working to finish project work and construct developed doctoral proposals. In what is emerging as a tradition of sorts plans are underway for the initiation of the next cohort and the 2011 Doctoral Training Summer School. Watch this space.
Proposals then? I’m currently navigating a divide that has occurred in my research during my time in London with TinkerLondon. This time was somewhat changing both personally and research-wise and, as always, it seems that navigating splits and divides is something that I must do .
One approach to a proposal is driving me to look at ‘reconstructing’ (repositioning) the role of the designer. It has become increasing clear to me that designers in many fields are missing the development in ‘discipline’ that the digital economy, new technologies, economic development, social progress and cultural change afford. As a research proposal this is one that resonates with industry and policy and enables exploration of new models, services and approaches.
Secondly, ‘democratic design’ (also innovation) simultaneously the thorn in my side and my new found play thing is leading the development of the second approach. Research and literature reviews in this area have been interesting, frustrating, and surprisingly provocative. Thus the idea of writing a ‘democratic design manifesto’ appeals currently. (Harking back to my ‘discontent with design’ days – Johanna Van Daalen may remember these.)
Designers and writers ranging from Leon Cruickshank to Gaetano Pesce hold disparate views or definitions of ‘democratic’, in the sense of design. This approach has potential for development of an interesting thesis and philosophical perspective, with perhaps the potential to engage in a practice based element and development of a ‘democratic model of design’.
A fork in the road; more decisions ahead it seems.
‘Concretophone’ – Troglodismo
In my time in Tinker I have been exploring the developments made possible by the Arduino kit one of which was developed by Troglodisme, London.
Le Concretophone is an interactive and poetic telephone. The idea behind it is derived from a ‘brazillian art movement contemporary to Beat poetry which started as Poesia Concreta’.
The telephone is an interactive, retro transparent 1980′s, which simply begs one to lift the receiver. On picking up the handset the listener is ‘promptly surprised by a disturbing set of forcefully suave voices, a deranged blend of familiar instructions. Instead of sought after customer relief the listener hears poetic recitals including Ginsberg, Decio Pignatari and Eliott.’
The possibilities arising from democratic toolkits such as the Arduino and Tinkerkit make possible development of weird and wonderful concepts as the user is creating only for themselves, with lesser considerations of adoption and production cost that are core concerns to those developing on a grander scale. Making for a market of one if you will.
Tinkering in London
I have just arrived at the end of a few weeks in TinkerLondon helping on, and observing the beginnings of a project called ‘HomeSense‘. This is an open research project, enabling user led innovation in the Smart Home sphere. It is a collaboration between TinkerLondon and EDF. Why? This is where my PhD seems to be directing itself to and as such I have been observing a more industrially focused attitude towards this type of approach to innovation. My findings have been interesting and somewhat surprising to say the least.
Homesense brings the open collaboration methods of online communities to physical infrastructures in the home. Instead of having products forced on them through a top-down design process, selected households will create their own smart homes and live with the technologies that they have developed themselves without any prior technical expertise. My role in this has been to consider the toolkit design.
I’ve had a lovely time with the Tinker team, they really are the people to watch. Thank you!
Go follow @TinkerLondon and @Home_Sense now!
First Taste
NB: To continue to follow our progress with the Arduino please refer to the dedicated WordPress blog here: http://bauleban.aghillo.org/
So I’ve just got my hands on Oomlut’s Arduino starter kit and I’m going to try to log my progress. First impressions:
The case is a bit naff and there are components floating everywhere (there’s a glass-half-empty attitude). But its fantastic to get my hands on an Arduino at last. Windows XP doesn’t find the driver automatically but that isn’t unusual for XP. But if you follow the instructions on Arduino’s own website carefully: http://www.arduino.cc/en/Guide/Windows you shouldn’t have any trouble. Its simply a case of telling Windows where to look for the driver — which is amongst the files you download for the IDE.
There’s an awful lot of support out there for people who want to have a play with an Arduino board but don’t have previous experience of coding and/or electronics. Quite a few online crafting/electronic suppliers seem to have Arduino starter kits — so this is evidently a popular hobby.
Its exciting to get the “Blink” program running (Arduino’s version of “Hello World”), but because this board has a built in LED I haven’t had a chance to play with the components yet. First of all I’ve been changing the timings of the delay between LED blinks — baby steps first 
The Arduino IDE is available for free and on first inspection seems intuitive and powerful. My understanding is that you write in Arduino code (which is based on C++), this is then converted into actual C++, which is then compiled and can be uploaded to the board.
Design your own smart home?
Hello!
I’ve been observing the beginnings of a project by TinkerLondon involving DIY smart homes which will run over autumn of this year, and I wondered if you might be interested (or know other folks who would be)?
The project involves giving 6 homes across Europe a research kit of the latest open hardware tech, and training in how to use them. They then have up to 3 months in the autumn to play with the tech, make interesting things, and share their experiences through blogs and videos. Each household will also be partnered with some local technology experts who will help them throughout the autumn and provide support where-ever’s needed.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t know anything about technology – all of the kit and the training is designed so that folks with any amount (or not) of tech know-how. We’re actually really interested to see what kind of things non-techy people would make and how they make it. There’s no constraints on what toys people can build: people could track their cats, their plants, measure how often the fridge door opens, and anything else they fancy.
There’s more information here - www.homesenseproject.com – and do give me a yell if you need to know more. We’re on a pretty tight deadline to find our final round of households so do let us know soon if you fancy it, and please please do pass this on to anyone else who might be interested!
Cheers,
Natasha
Details available here:
http://www.homesenseproject.com/about/
Sign up here:
_Households
http://www.homesenseproject.com/make-me-a-smart-home/
_Experts
http://www.homesenseproject.com/become-an-expert/
Democratic Design
Ikea lauded as ‘democratic design‘ is a commonly cited argument, but one which has not rested so well with me recently. It must be noted that those arguing for Ikea as democratic design do make convincing arguments. Ikea’s pricing model is democratic in that it clearly enables ‘the masses’ to own designed goods. Ikea enables users to ‘participate’ in the construction of the final product in it’s supply of flatpack, while Hacker and Maker communities demonstrate ‘participation’ (a fundamental element within democracy) in ‘design’ in widely blogged ikea hacks.
So while it is reasonable to suggest that ikea enables democratic consumption of design, and that by virtue of it’s pricing model reduces the barriers to hacking and customisation. I suggest that this is not strictly democratic design. Participation in the construction of flatpack furniture is not democratic design, nor is hacking a product designed as complete.
Obviously this is a difficult and perhaps contentious argument to posit, rendered difficult to defend as there is no universally accepted definition of democratic design. So why do I make this argument?
To work from the following definition, ‘Democratic implies ‘characterized by, advocating or based upon the principles of democracy or social equality’ thus, as demonstrated, arguments of democratic design as applied to ikea are flawed. Of course, truly democratic design is not necessarily achievable or desirable, however beyond Ikea, there are better examples of democratic design.
These include but are not limited to; crowdsourcing, as found with organisations such as Innocentive, Hypios and Local motors. Social product design models as found with Quirky. Democratic design spaces such as FabLabs. Platform or toolkit provision such as Arduino or Shapeways creator. Generative design systems such as those provided by Nervous System.
Provision of blueprints, such as those provided in the stores of Shapeways and Ponoko. Modules in which the final product is built by the end user. Incompletes where the user must participate in the design of the product to finish it, such as Droog’s ‘Do Create’.
Time to define ‘democratic’ design?
Walled Gardens
I remember when I was a kid growing up in the really rather green and leafy suburbs of Auckland (New Zealand). There was always this lure of wonder and secrecy offered by the walled gardens of some of the local residents. I imagined a wonderful array of magical fruits ready to be plucked from the branches owned by some eccentric recluse. Not to mention the stock piles of tennis, cricket and rugby balls that I had personally seen/aided in flying over into the never regions of this strange barricaded land…
But I wonder, if I had known what lay beyond, that what was hidden by those tall hedgerows, that the gardens had nothing more to offer than the very open and playground endowed park no more than fifty meters away, would I still have been interested?
At the end of last week, The Times Online (owned by media Baron Rupert Murdoch) decided to implement phase two of the introduction of their pay wall. Phase two is where they actually ask you to front up for your news consumption. Phase One, well that was a few weeks prior and involved a pay wall, without the pay bit. All you had to do was register. The change in traffic/eyes on pages from phase one? a drop of 60%. The predicted drop after readers have to pay (phase two)? A further 10%. That leaves a potential/predicted/hoped for user base of 30%. The Times Online says if they can maintain a 10% online, paid for readership (only a third of what they predict) then they will be quids in. I’m not so sure.
In Chris Anderson’s “Free” he talks about the “Freemium” model where the 5% of those willing to pay for extra content or added features support the 95% of those who are not. But does this work when you reverse the current standard practice? Giving it away for free and changing to a model where people are charged for no real (subjective opinion, granted) added benefit to the viewer. Not to mention, that with the exception of but a few (The FT springs to mind), this content is still widely available, for free and online.
One thing to note though, this is not actually a “freemium” model… There is no teaser, there is a home page with some titles and some images. But that’s all you get on the back of your free perusal. This is now just a premium model. Something that I think might struggle to gain traction on an internet rife with free alternatives. Even the FT allows a certain number of free views. Dangle the worm and you have potential to catch a fish. Dangle the hook and…?
I would also question, with the now limited eyes on “paper”, is The Times Online still offering the same level of exposure to advertisers that their free counterparts can and are? Will the (potential) 30% supplement the potential loss of big money advertisers? What would be the use of posters on the inside of the walled gardens?
I am by no means suggesting that the Times should merely give away their content. I am all for making money. With the modern media consumption rapidly moving away from paper (Murdoch vs. Jobs(iPad)/Schmidt(Google)) they can no longer support free online content on the back of paper offline content sales. But here in lies my gripe. Why not link the two? As it stands, the Times have no link between paper, online or phone application. You pay for one, you don’t get the other. In my humble opinion, you link the above and you make for a much stronger case for paid-for-content. Why can’t I buy a paper on the way into work read the front page, sport and a few of the comic strips, and then be allowed access to cheekily read online content during work…?
My overall opinion on the whole is that I just wouldn’t like to be first. When people realise that what’s in the walled garden is pretty similar to whats in the public park and that public park is supported by many a free folly, maybe they’ll move on. But you never know. I have been wrong before and to be fair, I’m not offering much of an alternative.
Visit to Horizon DTC and recent reading
Picking up a random book to read in the library led me to take it out and read it cover to cover. The excellent “Out of their Minds” profiles 15 Computer Scientists including John Backus, Alan Kay, Edsger Dijkstra, Knuth and Fred Brooks. Having the human element really makes a change from a lot of the other reading I’ve been doing on all things smart energy, smart power and smart homes. Often the papers present systems in such a dry, systematic manner you would be forgiven for forgetting that people are supposed to want to live with them. Exploring the motivations for installation then the extent of continued interaction is a theme I’d like to explore more within the “smart home” area.
This in mind on Friday, I, Rachel Keller and Gordon Blair visited the Horizon DTC at Nottingham University. Discussed my interests in smart energy and kept in mind my inherent computer science predisposition to frame problems and discover solutions.
Met some students after being shown into the facilities by the Lake on the Jubilee Campus. The computer science buildings are located separately to the main Nottingham campus and finding it in the morning on the way up from the Igloo Hostel was a happy accident.
After sitting in on a meeting then having lunch we went to the other building housing the Horizon project and got mini-introductions to a variety of projects by staff. The time taken out to see us was much appreciated. Finally we met Prof. Tom Rodden whom seemed to share similar ideas to me around the data side of smart meters and pointed out some relevant projects with a great deal of knowledge and enthusiasm.
Meeting this Ubicomp focused contemporary of Highwire was an enjoyable and valuable day out.
Bauleban
Recently, there has been a real emergence of what may broadly be called ‘maker culture’, incorporating diverse activities such as open-source hardware, data visualisation, design hacking, interactive products and art installations.
A number of events and communities supporting and facilitating this culture have appeared recently. As an example, Maker Faires now take place in many countries; originating in the USA, the first one in the UK took place at the Newcastle Science Fair in 2009 and was repeated this year, more recently there has been a series of events across Africa. Other examples include the interactive design community forming around the open-source microprocessor Arduino and the Processing visualisation language, events such as Hackerspaces and Dorkbots and groups like the Manchester based Madlab. It has also captured the interest of the literary world through Makers, a novel written by Cory Doctorow. This also fits with a culture around such activities as high-low technology at MIT, the re-emergence of Craft as a social and economic force, Fablabs and in design and fashion hacking.
I’m really interested in how this can support local sustainable (in the broadest sense) development – particularly in integrating traditional craft skills with digital technology skills. This is partly inspired by some thinking around the Bauhaus movement – in particular their ethos of design principles for mass production. However, in this case the design principles would be about taking into account local issues such as local needs, availability of materials, facilities and capabilities. Bauleban perhaps…
Fully supported and improved multi-touch for the masses
Further to my first entry here, Chris and I have been hard at work making our software compatible with the rest of the world. In order to do this, we have made a stand-alone application which reads data from the Wiimote and then goes on to generate TUIO and Windows 7 touch events.
This software can be downloaded in binary or source format from our Google Code project: http://code.google.com/p/wiituio/
In summary:
This project aims to improve the stability of the IR sources captured by the Wiimote using some thresholds and spatio-temporal classification. The application generates TUIO and Windows 7 Touch events using these stabilised contacts. This enables people to turn their existing Wiimote whiteboards into fully functioning Wiimote multi-touch whiteboards that are compatible with most multi-touch applications out there.
Each raw IR source captured by the Wiimote is either assigned to the best existing tracked source or generates a new tracker. This means that events can be generated from stable data without the jitter (namely, false-positives generated between two IR sources and the unordered source buffer) that occurs when trying to use the Wiimote to capture true multi-touch IR.
We hope that by releasing this to the public we will make it easier for people to start hacking around and making multi-touch fully collaborative (Single Computer-Multi User) applications without inuring the need to start with the large cost of professional hardware!
For your viewing pleasure I have uploaded a small YouTube video which demonstrates this software in a nut-shell. The video was taken at the behest of some of the folk over at the fantastic Natural User Interface forums.
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