Tobias Toft

This summer I visited the Citromuseum in Castellane in France, because I had heard that it had one of the most complete collections of old Citroëns in the world. It was a fantastic experience, that I can strongly recommend anybody with a passion for beautiful french cars. These are some of the pics I took there. If you decide to go, you should know that there is very low light in the exhibition space. I took these photos with the cheap, but surprisingly well-performing 50 mm f/1.8 Canon EF lens and no flash. Feel free to use them as you like.

Why don’t we have tv like this in Denmark? Warning: The song will stick in your mind.

No mom and dad, I’m not referring to you. I’m talking about last week’s CIID course, which was about user research. We spent two half days visiting nursing homes in Copenhagen, which was both a very interesting and scary experience. Not that the nursing homes are bad (at least not as bad as the rumors say) what really scared me was to see how sick and tired everybody is at such a home. Especially the people suffering from dementia. I had never experienced people with dementia before, and I must say that it is an illness that is much worse than I thought. Especially for the relatives to the sick person.

Our group (Sara, Nunzia, Sid, Mimi and me) at the nursing home Aftensol, interviewing the manager. Unfortunately Mimi is hidden behind Sid.

After having visited the homes, we spent the rest of the time analysing and interpreting the data we collected. My group came to an interesting conclusion (among others); that the meaning of friendship changes over time. By that we mean, that when people are young(er) we get friends to socialise with and among other things create and share new experiences with. When you get old enough to move into a nursing home, you know that your life is probably soon to end. You stop looking for new friends in the “traditional” sense and instead you start reflecting over your life and the experiences you had. Instead of having friends to create new experiences and memories with, you need friends to re-live the past with. The carers and families can come listen to the stories from the past while you re-tell them, but it is not the same as talking to someone that actually remembers the past and can help you completing your stories and memories. Fill out the gaps, so to speak.

This was a very quick and superficial description, but essentially the point all my jabbering is that elderly people need empathy instead of only sympathy. They also need sympathy from family and carers, but empathy is even more important. But how do we facilitate that, when up to 85% of the residents in the nursing homes are suffering from dementia? That’s what the next couple of weeks will bring.

I didn’t take any pictures last week, so I’ve posted one that our supervisor Oren Horev from ReD Associates took of our group instead.

It’s been a long time. I know. To make it up to you, I promise to write two posts today. One about the progress at CIID, and then this one. So what will this post contain? Lots of awesomeness! Not in the sense of great writing or the recipe for the world’s best cookies, no. That’s too boring. Instead I will post a YouTube video by The Hives, it’s the song “Won’t be long” and it is just one of many many extremely cool songs by The Hives. Enjoy! I will.

The second week of the physical computing course ended with a small exhibition/presentation where we had the honour of having Bill Verplank as part of the external crit group. The second week was dedicated to developing a small concept and building a working prototype. The brief that Gwen gave us said:

Home automation and the internet of things enable our intelligent objects to silently communicate amongst themselves at faster and higher degrees of autonomy. This requires less and less interaction and relationship with the user. These trends also create and depend on cycles of replacement and upgrading, leading to the rapid discarding of old objects. Our project will challenge these behaviors of passivity and obsolescence by exploring and adapting the cultural, physical, and psychological user interfaces that reside in the objects we have given up on or replaced. How can new interactions with and between our old objects create more meaningful, engaging, and thoughtful relationships with contemporary situations, needs, and desires?

As more and more behaviors and interactions get packed into smaller and smarter objects, what are the physical gestures and interactions we threw away with “outdated” technology that could add logic, humanity, and meaning to our daily lives or specific situations.

Please find old objects and re-imagine their functionality: the way they interact with either another object, other objects, people, or the computer in new and relevant ways.

The result of that brief ended up in many different projects, ranging from games to physical products and public installations. Our project dealt with how technology makes our lives more efficient, but at the same time steal more time from us. We wanted to create a product that would facilitate break time in the otherwise hectic workday at the office. The project was called “Rock is the new swivel” and basically combines a rocking chair, Gilbert O’Sullivan and a coffee machine. Sounds strange? I’ll explain the project in more detail in the beginning of next week when we have a video ready. Meanwhile, check out the pictures from the exhibition (thanks to Ashwin by the way – he helped me by taking a lot of the pics).

Two weeks ago we started the physical computing class. The course was based on learning how to use the Arduino board as well as different basic electronic components, accelerometers, ultra sound distance sensors, servo motors and different analog sensors – our teachers in electronics and Arduino were David Mellis and Massimo Banzi, and Gwendolyn Floyd helped us with the inspiration and conceptual level. The Arduino board is probably the easiest microcontroller board to get started with, it has a large online community around it and everything is open source – that makes it really easy to get help, instructions or inspiration on how to use it. The topic wasn’t new to me – I have been working with both Arduino (which is Atmel based) and PIC processors before and know a bit about electronics and programming, but it was great to spend some time letting my inner geek loose. In the end of the first week we did some mini-projects, where the focus was on communication between two Arduino boards (via serial). I worked with Jason from Taiwan on two small rubber robots, one was sensing motion and the other one was reacting to what the first one experienced. The following video show the bots, it doesn’t really do them justice, but at least it gives an impression of their behavior. In the video it looks like they are physically connected, but actually they are not.

I was impressed with how quickly people actually got to use the Arduinos – even people that never tried either electronics or microprocessor programming before, created fairly complex interactive contraptions in only one week. Below is a bunch of pictures from the first week – notice how our class room rather quickly turned into a room filled with small robots, electronic junk, tools, sketches on crumpled paper and empty coffee cups. Second week it got even better.

By the way, the latest issue of Wired had an interesting article on Arduino and Massimo.