PComp

The "Online" Inspiration Board

Role Prototype: Description of Purpose and Usage

The Online Inspiration Board is a method of addressing the growing disconnect between a physical inspiration board and the best resources for adding material to an inspiration board. These days the best way to find a large volume of ideas or inspiration is through images searches on the internet, Twitter feeds, or blog feeds—but these feeds and posts can't be easily torn out like they could in a magazine.

With this product, the user would be able to input their favorite inspiration blogs (whether they be design blogs, home improvement blogs, or lolcats for that matter) into the interface, and have a number of LCD screens on the board that would then stream the information from these feeds. (Optimally the screens would be able to pull both text and images from these blog and Twitter posts.) Space would be left for magnet boards and cork board in order to allow the same functionality of an analog inspiration board, so that the user could still pin up any print outs, magazine clippings, swatches, etc that they want to include in their design—this way, they would be able to see the incoming feeds right up against the pieces they've already selected for the feel of their project instead of having to visualize these elements when staring at tabs on a browser.

Each feed's display would also feature an adjacent button that would function as an "interest" button; if the user is interested in reading more about the particular story that's currently featured on the board, they can push the button and have the link to the story or post emailed to them for further review (and potentially for printing out to pin onto a free part of the board.)

Look and Feel Prototype 1: The Overall Board's Appearance

This would be the general lay-out for the board—cork and magnet board with the user's own materials attached to it, surrounding screens with streaming data. These particular photos are low on the display side (I only have the one tiny one at the moment) but some of the magazine clippings can be visualized as larger LCD screens for the purpose of this prototype.

Look and Feel Prototype 2 : The LCD Displays

In order to show what the LCD screens might look like while rotating through feeds, I created some sample graphics and uploaded them to a digital picture frame keychain. These are a few screenshots (albeit a bit fuzzy) of what that might potentially look like once I'm able to either hack the keychain's display or find another method of integrating an LCD display.

Implementation Prototype: Pulling Feed Text from Twitter

My current success hacking the digital image keychain is limited, so for an implementation prototype I wrote a script to pull down the text of the most recent tweet from four different users by adding to (and otherwise modifying) the Twitter Alert code from last week's prototype. This code alerts the user when a new tweet has been posted and then displays the text of that tweet for the user to read.

The Code.

As per usual, the code is not showing up properly on Typepad. To see the full code, you can read it on my documentation blog.

CRITICAL ELEMENTS

PROJECT:

DESIGN QUESTION:

How can technology and the object can coexist to create better, more tangible interactions?

WHY THIS QUESTION?

I believe in a future where technology help us be more humans, by this I mean interactions with the digital and technological world that does not require new and foreign languages, we should keep been intuitive and casual.  Nature and material will play a crucial role in defining this intersection and my interest is on exploring how technological objects can bring strengths from both sides to create more emotional sometimes critical design and better interactions.

CONCEPT OF DESIGN:

CRITICAL ELEMENT

Critical Element explores the physical interactions with electronics objects as a way to provoke conversations about the interfaces of of a rapidly dematerialising, ubiquitous and intelligent environment.

Critical Element plays with a metaphor of life and nature, using shapes that represent the 5 classical elements (fire, air, earth, wind) and void or sky. The electronic object would come to live when the user moves the elements around and different outputs will come to existence: color, sound and movement.

You can see more images and documentation in my blog

CapTouch Servo Motor (Group Project)

 

 

 

Flashback: Curious Light Prototype 2

For my second iteration of the curious lights prototype,  I made a flexible origami ball with LEDs inside that flicker on when the ball is squeezed.

Light Ball from Caitlin Morris on Vimeo.

This project was again playing with the idea of blending very delicate, craft-based things with electronics, which are usually seen as hardy and modern.

The process started with a lot of precreasing to build the ball:

After a bunch of folding, the ball emerged:

Before the ball was sealed, the electronics were put inside:

2 button-sized 3V batteries were connected to 2 LEDs via 30-gauge wire (for maximum flexibility).  The two sides of the circuit were connected to long strips of tin foil, which were fixed to the top and bottom of either side of the ball.  When the ball is assembled, bringing the top and bottom together in a squeezing motion connects the two (or four) tin foil pieces and lights up each LED. 

Flashback: Curious Light Prototypes

Getting up to date with documentation!  Here's my first prototype for an LED bracelet from the Curious Light project:

The basic idea of this prototype is to have a soft-circuit bracelet, made with conductive thread, that contains LEDs which light up when the bracelet is clasped (connecting the circuit).    I like the idea of mixing traditional hand crafts like crocheting with electronics, and tools like conductive thread are perfect for this combination.

I imagine that this bracelet could be used in anything from more functional things like motion tracking (especially if you used IR LEDs), to more fun things like light painting:

Blue blue sky

Giorgio's BLUE SKY

Blue Sky Ideas -- Chris Piuggi

 

Piano Prototype II and mixer ideas

Above is a picture of my second pocket piano prototype.  For the second iteration I used a speaker instead of a button, and worked on getting a library working with different tones.

For the mixed class prototypes I made some drawings.

The first prototype is a piano with a corresponding led matrix above it.  I was hoping to also use capacitance touch on each of the keys.  The idea is that the matrix above the keys shows the user which keys are being pressed and how hard.

The Second one is an Elevator Traffic Display system.  The idea is that touch sensitive pads could tell people how many people are waiting for the elevator on different floors

And the third is a buddy bear that can tell weather and time.  This is a complex bear.  Its a pal for a kid to take to sleep, but is also a; alarm clock weather bear

[Help] "Serial server already in use"

Hey everyone, my Arduino has been giving me the error message that "Serial port ' ...' already in use. Try quitting any programs that may be using it". I tried quitting Arduino, restarting computer, and updating to lastest version.. but still doesn't solve the problem. Does anyone have any ideas how to solve this?