by: Taylor, Amit, and myself

Otar is fun. Otar likes to tell stories. Otar likes to share.

Plug and Squeeze. Otar speaks through your computer’s USB port to a desktop widget that communicates with Facebook. With every squeeze, Otar’s stories come to life. To build stories of your own, you can pick images from Otar’s stories, caption them and send them to your friends.

A simple, easy to use system, Otar uses the body to drive communication through storytelling. Regardless of age, language, culture and literacy level, you can play with Otar.

Please read more on Taylor’s blog.

To use Otar, you must download and run the desktop widget.

Step 1 – Log in to Otar and let the squeezing begin.

Step 2 – Squeeze Otar to find the right image.

Step 3 – Pick a friend, caption your image, and then have Otar send it off.

Hopefully, your friend will already have the Otar Facebook application installed. If not, she may add it with a few simple clicks. Then, she will be able to review the Otar conversation you two have started.

More documentation

A more thorough description of our process can be found here.

For those trying to implement serial communication in Java through Eclipse, the archive below should be of great use. Make sure to add the native binaries to your library folder so that everything runs smoothly. The SerialInterface class provides a clean way to get to everything working. Serial Files

]]> http://www.blog.alexabreu.com/2007/12/13/i-am-otar-by-taylor-amit-and-myself/feed/ 0 http://www.blog.alexabreu.com/2007/12/13/collaboration-how/ http://www.blog.alexabreu.com/2007/12/13/collaboration-how/#comments Thu, 13 Dec 2007 19:16:32 +0000 alex.abreu http://www.itp.alexabreu.com/?p=39 “You’ll get nowhere by latching onto some parallel movement, you have to make a move yourself. If nobody makes a move, nobody gets anywhere. Nor is interplay an exchange: it all turns on giving or taking.” In his essay, Mediators, Gilles Deleuze discusses the interplay between different fields of study. He emphasizes the importance of thinkers in these different fields to constantly create and innovate in their own area of expertise, but that by doing so unmistakable similarities will arise in seemingly unrelated fields of study. It is these overlaps, that I believe create the greatest possibility for collaborative thought and creation. Unfortunately, when thinkers and creators turn to borrowing rather than making and allowing for the delicate congruences to form of their own volition, the potential for innovation is hampered and stifled. As stated in a recent article in Architectural Digest, “Regrettably, however, what was once regarded as primarily a method of production is gradually becoming instead centered around consumption. That is, where originally an open-source approach was an encouragement to share, it is these days increasingly used to account for the act of borrowing.” Our current understanding and use of the open-source model presents a potential pitfall in our quest for collaborative creation. Not that this will happen any time soon, but too exaggerate the issue, what happens when all ideas are borrowed rather than created? At what point does borrowing and recycling cease to work? There is indeed a greater awareness for the need of collaborative innovation. The complexity of current innovation dictates greater dependence on work and research which has come before. Still, how can we avoid turning our increasing dependence into an addiction, a potentially harmfully oppressive addiction in terms of creativity?

Dr. Paul Pangaro emphasizes that their is indeed a difference between interactivity and reactivity. More importantly, it is increasingly important to understand and highlight the differences between the two.  Pangaro, a cybernetisist, describes the language for analyzing how things interact. He uses illustration to great effect in demonstrating the looping nature of interaction. This looping behavior determines the on-going dynamics of a reciprocal interaction. Interaction requires the flexibility for changing inputs and outputs. A set of pre-determined outputs that do not change according to corresponding changes in input behavior cannot count as interaction.

Architectural Digest recently republished an article highlighting how language can be abused in design. Labeling everything interactive, for example, undermines a deeper understanding of the varying degrees of interactivity.  By limiting our ability to compare and discuss design, we hinder our ability to innovate in the spaces exposed by our comparisons.  Therefore,  as designers it is important to analyze both purpose and result in terms which express meaningful information about the design in question.

Yet, just as artistic tastes change, so do our understandings of mathematical problems. The beauty of crafted objects is that they avoid pretension and elitism. Crafted objects can be adorned, but can also serve a very distinct purpose. They take on a personality and share stories. Even after they are no longer useful as intended, they may hold a special sentimental value. Craftsmen have no public to please. They build for themselves in the style of those who came before them. Through this generational passing on of tradition, the crafted object earns a history which outlives the trends of art and minimal design.

As a en engineer and designer, I have to fight the urge to make an object too precise and too perfect. After all, what I truly want to create are objects which can be used and appreciated on a very human level. I think the key to that may very well be incorporating the concepts of craftsmanship into my work. On a very fundamental level, I just don’t think character and charm can be replaced by accuracy and functionality.

Shoes that change color when you reach your target intensity zone. More change means more activity and more intensity!

There is no denying that shoe culture is bigger and better than ever. The big basketball shoe is definitely back for the attack. The Nike Air Force One collection is worn by rappers and hipsters alike, and having one pair just doesn’t do the trick. The louder/crazier the color scheme, the better. Of course, the problem with this sort of consumerism is the tremendous waste created by people owning pairs upon pairs of kicks. This got me thinking about creating a single shoe which could take on different color schemes based upon your current aesthetic preference. Why not have a a shoe which can go from business to party and back again? In certain ways, this has been attempted before through the LA Lights collection, and it is still somewhat popular among young children. The problem with LEDs as the mechanism for change is the loss of the traditional look and feel of a sneaker. LEDs are still too space-agey for shoes and cannot replace textiles and fabrics in the construction of a classic kick. While brainstorming, I began to think about about wearable products which have incorporated color change successfully while maintaining the look and feel of the intended garment. The first thing that came to mind was the Hypercolor t-shirt craze of the late 1980s. Despite the unfortunate side effect of accentuating sweat stains and the like, the Hypercolor t-shirt was adopted for its fun chameleon-like qualities. With that thought, I resolved to create a product which would have a similar captivating quality with a greater sense of control in order to limit undesired results. I’ve always had something of a shoe fetish and was interested in applying my concept to a an article of clothing which I believe says a lot about a person’s character and interests. And so, Kromicks were born.

The next step in my process was identifying how I wanted to use thermochromic pigment (dye used in Hypercolor t-shirts) in an expressive manner while also maintaining a sense of control over the color change. At first, I thought of simply allowing a user to control a simple switch or knob to toggle the color change functionality. For instance, if a user wanted to make his/her shoes change from black to red, he/she would flip a switch to get the desired effect. Although, I still believe such functionality would eventually be a nice feature, I didn’t believe such a simple reactive experience was enough. Through conversations with my teammate Seung Ran Woo, we converged on accentuating the original purpose of a sneaker. As designed, sneakers are intended for athletic activity. We believe a sneaker which highlights this athletic activity and movement will encourage the wearer as well as excite the spectators at the big game. I imagine the shoes as a physical representation of physical energy much like the ‘he’s on fire’ game play made famous in the classic NBA Jams video game. Imagine a middle school basketball player running up and down the courts at the championship game. Both he and the crowd know he’s giving it all he’s got because his shoes are glowing with intensity, and outshining all the other players on the court. Motivating, inspiring, and most of all fun.

Larger Version

Materials

Piezo – a simple sensor to track footsteps

LilyPad – a beautiful form factor of the Arduino to process footsteps

Small Electric Heater – to slightly warm the thermochromic paint to the necessary temperature

Proto Board – to manage power and take inputs from the sensor

Thermochromic Paint – painted on the Nike Swoosh to change color when high enough intensity levels are met

Air Force One’s – for a little style.

Images:

Protototypes

Images:

Video:

Construction

Images:

The Real Thing

Images:

Advice to not fight the prevailing wind, but to bend with it. Collaboration is flexibility, and our survival depends on our ability to internalize this rapidly approaching form of innovation and exchange.

Somewhere along the way, our trusty team began to discuss the land line phone system and its incredible tentacle like span. Rory had previously done a project with phones and we all seemed interested in exploring that technology from a new perspective. We started to play around with phone network ideas, and resolved to build our own party line. We then faced the challenge of obtaining an adequate number of phones and lines to reach our objective. We turned to our favorite network for help.

We sent out a message to the ITP student e-mail list asking if other students had any phones laying around for our project. A day later we’d received a few messages and along the way uncovered a smaller network of retro phone technology collectors among the ITP community. Our friend Alice actually had a working party line she let us borrow in exchange for a phone and more stable power connector. Great deal. Yet, our team had envisioned having to figure out how to hack the party line, and now that work was already done for us.

Now, we had to figure out what the heck we were going to do with our phone system. Needless to say, we spent a lot of time whispering and giggling over the phones, and had a great time playing around with a technology none of us had used in a while (cellphones are cheaper). There was something about the clearness of the sound and intimacy of the large phones that kept us captivated for a good while. If you haven’t done so in a while, pick up a non-cordless land line phone and have a conversation with someone. It’s refreshingly nostalgic.

So what now? We hadn’t really created a phone network, but merely plugged one in. Yet, our network was different from a traditional phone network in a few respects. 1) The phone system worked on a master-slave relationship. Meaning that a primary phone had to be activated in order for the phones to be able to communicate with one another. Picture a prison phone network. The guard has control of the primary phone and can listen in on all the prisoners’ conversations. Our team also wanted to explore the notion of the death of the network.

Four our class demo, we decided to create a simple representation of the way e-mail works using our phone network. Turning back to our favorite network (the student list), we grabbed some short e-mail messages and broke them out into individual words. Caleb, Rory, and I acted as nodes in the network sending our individual messages. We scrambled our speaking order as a way to simulate packet switching on the web. On another phone, at the other end of the network was the packet assembler who had to listen in to reassemble the messages Caleb, Rory, and I were sending. Evrim had control of the primary phone and had instructions to hang up if the packet assembler took too long trying to reassemble the messages.

Through our simulation we sought to emphasize that the network exerts a great deal of control over the users and can determine the results of interaction through it.

Of course!

How could we explore manifestations of these concepts without of course discussing what makes them work. We discussed Massive Change and Cradle to Cradle, and how this literature, more than ever, applies to our work and our world. As part of our weekly assignment we had to create a project focused on energy as well as keep a log of our waste output during the week. Prior to the class assignment my good friend and classmate, Taylor, and I built upon our idea of connecting physical and virtual spaces through a new form of person-centric advertising. We’d spent some time thinking about how ‘broadcast’ style advertising can often times deter interest in a product. We also discussed the limitations of advertising and why it fails so miserably when adapted to the web. After class, and several discussions later, Taylor and I came to the conclusion that advertising is a physical construct no longer necessary with the advent of a much more visibly interconnected space like the web. Through advertising, advertisers seek to create connections with potential consumers. In the process, they spend considerable amounts of money, target people who could/will never be interested in their product, and waste great amounts of resources to spread their message. Luckily for us, the process is: 1) Energy Intensive 2) Wasteful. Just what we were looking for.

Why is advertising so wasteful? Simply, put advertising is an inefficient means of establishing a connection. But, how does this relate to energy. Well, Taylor and I had to explain that part as well. This PDF file explains our analysis of advertising as a highly energy consumptive process. To the best of our ability we attempted to remain true to our previous definitions of space and connection. These axioms were essential to our understanding of waste. We emphasize that advertising in the physical world is limited by the inability to reach pathways. On the web, these pathways are clearly marked, and users explore them freely. We relate this dichotomy to learning theory, specifically behaviorism and social constructionism. Physical world advertising is an attempt by advertisers to mold consumers while the web provides for a much more user-centric experience. The web provides the channels for the consumer to find out about anything he/she desires without an advertiser directing when and how.

‘Social constructivism argues that the most optimal learning environment is one where a dynamic interaction between instructors, learners and tasks provides an opportunity for learners to create their own truth due to the interaction with others. Social constructivism thus emphasizes the importance of culture and context in understanding what is happening in society and constructing knowledge based on this understanding (Derry 1999; McMahon 1997). ‘  Wikipedia

Rather than keeping track of our own personal waste for the week, Taylor and I decided to collect the waste we were forced to take on by advertisers in NYC. We obtained all sorts of junk including: t-shirts, flyers, postcards, and booklets. Each piece of media was handed to us by a person on the street trying attempting to forge some connection with us in order to push their product. We spent over half an hour talking to a group of Nokia advertisers in Washington Square Park about the best methods to ensnare an audience. The most shocking revelation came when one of the advertisers mentioned how much propaganda (warehouses full) is kept in storage for this type of advertising. More than a few dollars, man-hours, and resources are being wasted to push product. Unfortunately the majority of this type of advertising ends up in trash bins around the world.

Taylor and I learned that we collaborate best when we’ve defined the space in which we can play. The diagrams and PDF files below explain our analysis and what it means to connect space. We could not actually begin building a connector without defining space and how connectors interact. We turned to our good friend the Venn diagram for help in explaining our theories. The sum of our work is a proposal for a device which integrates with Facebook to store/retrieve information as needed when interacting with people in the real world. If meeting a person for the first time in a coffee shop, and the Facebook database knows that you like the same music and have 10 friends in common, why should you not know the same information so that you can strengthen your connection with your new acquaintance faster and more efficiently? The technology exists as does the need for such information in a world increasingly dependent on the web.

Human Space
Connected Space

Always interested in drawings and the interpretation of image, Muniz has explored a physical manifestation of pointilism in some of his work. I realized that his work emphasizes the importance of scale, resolution, and perspective to deliver an image to the viewer. Viewed from too close a vantage point, much of his work appears to be nothing more than a sloppy mess of caviar, chocolate, or trash, but viewed from the proper vantage point his image is revealed and you are most likely shocked and awed.

After viewing the Vik’s presentation, I was helping a my classmate Amy Khoshbin to create a simple version of a paint program in Processing when we got to talking about traditional pointilism. We decided to fix her application to only allow the user to create images through small colored circles. After our talk, I focused my efforts on trying to create a physical representation of that form of expression through a modularity.

I created stackable light discs out of PVC, wooden dowels, nails, and LEDs which power each other when placed on a conductive surface. The top top and bottom of each disc connect to power and the sides of the discs connect to ground. This way, hundreds of discs could be placed on the conductive surface–each disc grounding or powering an adjacent one. To complete my idea, I created a conductive base with the floor of the base providing power and the sides connected to ground. At least one disc must be placed so that it touches the side wall of the base in order for the circuit to be completed. I connected a power supply to a 5v voltage regulator to supply the juice for my project. I stepped down the voltage through a 220 ohm resistor before connecting power to the base. The LEDs within the discs are connected in parallel so that an unlimited number of them may be arranged to create beautiful 3D images with light. Please use your imagination to fill out the surface with hundreds of different colored, stackable light disks. Future expansions on the project will include a ball bearing surface for smooth rolling goodness.