During the last week we had to use arduino do gice a new life to an old product. The brief was to re-use an object found in the garbage and use it in a unexpected way, adding a bit of surrealism.
We (Jesper, me and Li) to transform a television in a fireplace.
Since put a real fire inside of a plastic (and not tempered glass) television could be dangerous, we decided to simulate it with fabric and led. The propose wasn’t to make a likely fire, but make it nice (and why not…kitsch).
People can interact with the television in different ways: if the fire is dying, people can grab the antenna and try to fix it, or if they have cold hands, they can put them close to the back of the television to get some warm air.
During this week we went trough small projects to start coding and prototyping with Arduino. Our teacher this week is Massimo Banzi, and I have to say that it’s pretty fun to learn with him!
First Exercise (Monday):
use external output as commands for a processing application.
Laura and me used light sensor to play pong.
Second Exercise (Tuesday): use external input and output through Arduino.
Laura, Shruti and me tried to built a scaring box. The fan we used it’s not enough powerful to scare people but… still working responding to a light sensor.
Third Exercise (Wednesday): connect two arduino. the first for reciving input, the second to send output.
Jennifer and me built a box to calculate the happiness average of the class. Everyone can tell to the machine how happy or sad it is, changing the global average
Thanx Jeany for the pic
Thanx Jeany for the pic
We used an RFID reader as input, and a servo motor as output. The hardest thing was checking the value of the rfid and turning it into a precise value for the other Arduino, but at the and, thanx also to David, we managed to do it
Forth Exercise (Thursday&Friday): free experiment with arduino.
Me and Jennifer decided to go on with the “emotion machine” so we came out with the hug-scarf. It’s a scarf that require hugs trough a pulsing led, and when the person that wear it have been hugged it alight. One by one the LEDs fadeout till the last led start pulsing again requiring another hug.
Thanx Mary for the video
and remember… forloop in the wrong position inside arduino code can mess everyting!
After the start exercise, we went deeper in the videoprototype concept.
We made two video to understand the difference between hight-low resolution and hight-low fidelity. The resolution it’s more about the quality of the video and props, the fidelity it’s about how deep the concept has been explained. Depending on the need, the video wuold be different. A low fidelity video, for exaple, colud be useful to open a discussion or brainstorming, a high fidelity it’s a better video to present a refined concept.
The topic given was immagine a service called Energise that could help people so save energy in the everyday life. That’s our experiments.
high fidelity high resolution
low fidelity low resolution
please let’s go see others works! most of them are amazing! ciidVimeo
Last week we went trough the videoprototype workshop by Vinay Venkatraman
We started with a nice exercice just to approach media: every group had a short “Canovaccio” on a piece of paper and had to record 5 minuts about the story, then we had to switch shoots with another group and edit the material without know what about their story.
This week we’ve explored the interaction design field without using digital technology.
From Monday to Friday we went through differents topic: interactive product, comunication for the city, switches, rappresentation of group and relationship, icons, mobile applications, storytelling and interface design. We did a lot of work! I think this week gave us the chance to work with different people everyday also… be in rush it’s a good way to know better each others.
For everyone who always thought that needs a better way to share musical ideas… and also for everyone curios about services that allow people sharing stuff in a different way.
