Collaboration is a coat of many colours – it exists in many forms and for many ends. It can be fun, it can be exciting, it can be extremely hard work and it can take you outside of your comfort zone. In its very best form it gives everyone involved a chance to learn something, to produce something meaningful and not just merely contribute from their own single perspective. HighWire’s strap line ‘creating innovative people for radical change’ doesn’t quite capture the collaborative nature of much of our work and of our thinking. But it’s there, it’s definitely there.

We held our first workshop on Tuesday around the general theme of emotive physicality. What do we mean by this? Well, there’s a sense that physical products can engage and affect us in ways that are different to digital media. Can we make use of these possibilities and provide experiences that seem more natural, more intuitive and maybe more fun? This is what we’ll be looking at over the next few months and the workshop allowed us to kick start the whole process.

As part of our collaborative approach, we were honoured to have both Taylor Nuttall from Folly and Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino from Tinker working with us for the day. They are both truly inspirational.

So, how did it all work out? Well, in the spirit of DIY culture and just ‘making stuff’ the initial warm-up session felt like you’d just entered a primary school classroom, but with less tears. This was surprising; to be honest I’d been expecting more tears. After the ‘getting to know us all’ session with card, felt, scissors, glue, string and balsa wood we then proceeded into the next sessions armed with only post-it notes for support. Stripped bare, we brainstormed ideas around data and data sources, connections and transformations, and finally physical realisations of these data sources and associated transformations.

There were a few novel interpretations of what data would be useful – ‘confusion’ was identified, along with a ‘busyness’ indicator. A cluster of ideas developed around ‘emotional states’, specifically asking the question about capturing the emotional states not of individuals, but of groups, such as an audience. The prize for the most inventive transformation must surely go to the inspired choice of ‘magic’. This struck me as a wholly appropriate way to think about transformations and maybe even interaction design in general. Interaction that has a sense of wonderment about it may be interesting indeed.

Final concept realisations were developed in the heady atmosphere of both the post-it notes and the contents of the craft boxes. Carnage ensued and fun was had by all as teams were rather naughtily swapped at half-time and inherited another team’s half-baked ideas. The physical models produced included adaptive architectures, connected gardens, handbags that dripped e-pheromones, and an interventionist God. What more can I say?

The day was rounded off in rather fine style with fizz and cake. I believe we may have judged the concepts too and awarded a rather special prize.

For me, this was the beginning of a journey. Collaboration, to work well, has to be based upon trust, building of relationships and of mutual interest (and passion) across a broad topic area rather than short-term specific questions. For those interested in forms of collaboration with Universities I can recommend reading Knowledge Exchange and Universities and Business produced by the Centre for Business Research.

One thing that clearly jumped out to me personally was the Renaissance nature of this developing field. It’s clearly post-disciplinary; skills and expertise are required in a wide variety of areas across art, design, engineering, and computing. We also need to both incorporate and synthesise theoretical approaches to help us understand and support these type of interactive experiences.

A final word – it’s likely that we’ll be running more of these workshops, focusing more on practical skills covering, e.g., arduino, processing and rapid-prototyping techniques. If you’re interested in these or in broader collaboration, please do get in touch.

HighWire recently held an Ideas Workshop with Alex Deschamps-Sonsino CEO of Tinker London. The workshop was the first of a coming series of workshops related to an emerging HighWire project involving Richard Wood, Graham Dean, Natasha Carolan & Marcia Smith. This project is focused on (broadly speaking) physical computing, interaction design, physicalisation of data and emotive and persuasive design.

The day was pitched as an ideas factory, to encourage idea generation, exploration of the domains of interest and networking between the relevant disciplines. Given our ongoing dedication to playfulness the day was designed to entertain and inspire each participant. With guests including Folly CEO Taylor Nuttall, Imagination Lancaster and the Computing and Management schools in Lancaster we started the day by creating teams through drawing keys out of bowl at random, a starting point which set up a playful and provocative atmosphere.

There’s some really nice experimental work going at Nihilogic integrating audio, HTML5 <canvas> and <audio> tags along with a javascript api which drives the graphics in real-time. The really interesting thing here is doing it in real-time, no pre-processing of the sound track is used. This is nice – it gives all sorts of possibilities to drive visualisations using live performance. However, it gets really interesting when we start thinking about using this to drive physical media as well as digital media. Dancing toys? Enhanced theatre performance? Adaptive architecture?

Yesterday marked the first of a series of workshops being run by the team here at HighWire and despite some early morning apprehension and what could generally be aligned to last minute “jitters” the day was a resounding success. From our end at least. The aim of the day, which is now much clearer in hindsight, was to explore how academics, students and industrial partners viewed and interacted with their data. In a word, physicality. For this workshop we split the subject into three sections: Data, Transformation and Physicality.

In the context of this workshop, Data is the raw information in the “loop”. It is a name, a bus route or the length your hair has grown since you last had it cut. It can both define and be defined by a physical embodiment. Imagine it in the context of Twitter and Data would be the “Tweet”.

For us, in geek speak, Transformation is the “middleware”. It’s the bit in between Physicality and Data that enables interaction between the two. It is the Arduino’s, the API’s, the PHP script and the “Code Monkey” bashing feverishly away at the keyboard to make it all work. Take Twitter again and the Transformation would be Twitter itself. For us, Physicality is about Data being physically represented in a sometimes playful and emotive manner. There are many great example of physical objects being controlled, adjusted or made interactive by using them in conjunction with data. A notable couple would be Tinker’s “Rewind” project and Mathieu Lehanneur’s “Therapeutic Objects”. Once again using the example of Twitter, Physicality could be a man, woman, or even a machine (I often have a tendency to default to technology), physically writing out each Tweet.

In each of these areas we then asked the participants to identify things that they were either doing, wanted to do or perhaps thought were impossible. This was done with trusted Post-It notes and appropriately titled boards.Next we asked the participants, over lunch (we’ve learnt that it is treacherous ground to ask academics anything on empty stomachs), to identify ideas posted on the boards that they felt particularly fell into one of five key areas. Those areas were: “Count Me In” – enabling us to identify potential points of collaboration and/or expertise. “Impossible” – looking for inspiration, we wanted to find the areas that the participants believed were impossible. After all, we do like a challenge. “Done to Death” – Where did the participants believe their was a sense of “overkill”, that the technology or society had moved on or that there were simply more exciting things to be doing. “Reference” – Where participants had prior knowledge of idea and thoughts we wanted them to share references that we could then follow up and Finally we wanted the participants to annotate anything that they believed was “Bright and Exciting”, that one is fairly self explanatory really. After lunch a series of activities designed to entice creativity and divergent, “unstagnated” thinking aimed to build on the playfulness of the day and potentially inspire us with a project direction we had not thought of. But that is another blog post all together.

So that brings me full circle, back to the title of this post – Physicality and the “Done to Death” Pile. At the end of the workshop we began to muse over what we had discussed, discovered and played with during the day. The “Done to Death”’s, a “pile” we had used during the workshop to help us remove the mundane, overused buzzwords from the list of potential key areas. One in which we had payed little attention or interest to, it was highlighted as an unexpected area of interest. So, here they are, listed below:

NB: It is important to note that the following list is subjective and only really based on interest levels

Data

• Search
• Social Networks
• Heart Beat

Transformation

• Google
• Walls for Graffiti

Physicality

• RFID
• GPS Tracking
• Wearable Sensors
• Sensor Tech
• Fridge that shouts at you
• Computer Vision
• Robots

Although, granted, each of the above points have interesting aspects or offshoots well worth exploring, the collective consensus of the workshop group, ruled them out. For me, this highlights the difference between academia and the commercial world and perhaps where they fail to communicate sufficiently. What commercial enterprises find interesting or perhaps a solution to a problem, may already be “old hat” in academic institutes. This is precisely where HighWire is supposed to fit in. Breaking down the ivory towers of academia and dispersing what we learn into industry and doing it quickly. To quote one academic at the workshop, “just get something out there”.