Tobias Toft

I’ve wanted to write this post for about 6 months now. And now I’m finally doing it! Hooray!

One of the first quick foundations courses we had was with Massimo Banzi and Gwendolyn Floyd, where we explored and played with physical computing. First week we played with the basics of Arduino and serial communication. That’s where I built a couple of small (and stupid, but cute) robots with Jason. Second week I worked with Eilidh and Ashwin on a self-chosen concept within the realm of physical computing and networked objects. We decided that we wanted to design for “Guerilla free-time”, in other words the project was a comment on how technology that is supposed to give us more free-time, actually ends up stealing our time, because everything becomes more and more efficient.

We set our context in busy office environments where people often isolate themselves in their cubicles, staring at the screen all day. The only times they take breaks is when they walk to and from the coffee machine or when they have lunch. We knew that we probably couldn’t convince people to take extra breaks, so we decided to tap into the existing “break-facilitator” of the workplace: the coffee machine. Getting a cup of coffee usually takes less than a minute, and then you’re back at your desk. We wanted to extend that time to a little more than a minute.

We decided to make a coffee machine that requires you to take a break, to get your coffee. We did it by hacking a coffee machine and a rocking chair, so that when you sat down in the rocking chair and started rocking, the coffee machine would start brewing you a nice cup of coffee. In addition to that, you would get a relaxing Gilbert O’Sullivan tune playing – and working as an indicator for when your coffee is ready. If you stop rocking or leave the chair, the chair will warn you by fading out the music. If you still aren’t rocking, the coffee machine turns off.

We did that by making a special plugboard, that could be controlled wirelessly (Arduino and Xbee) that the coffee machine was plugged into. Under the chair we put another Xbee equipped Arduino with an accelerometer, hooked it up with a hacked El-Cheapo mp3-player and a small Nokia speaker.

I’ve always been a fan of Don Norman and I can watch this talk over and over again.

Fantastic video explaining the reason behind this blogpost.

Sorry. I know it’s been incredibly long time since I’ve updated this blog. To remind myself of doing it, I’m publishing this post of things to come:

Posts I need to write:

• One about the “Rock is the new swivel” project we did in Massimo Banzi’s electronics class
• A post about the Tangible User Interfaces-project “IntelliTrack” that I did with Erlend.
• Something about the industry project I did with Intel on smart grid water supplies.
• The service design project about COPD patients, that I just finished before easter.
• Reflections on what Interaction Design is and how to explain it to people.
• A post where I rant about the expensive tickets and disappointing line-up at this year’s Roskilde Festival.

…and, I think that’s it for now. I wish I had a nice picture to put here.

I changed the design a bit on this blog, it’s not in any way radical but I just felt like changing it. I’m using the header to show some more or less random pictures I’ve taken. Most of them will probably be related to the Pilot Year or interaction design in some way.

The official CIID/DKDS Pilot Year project galleries are finally up! This is the place where all projects made throughout the year will be collected.

Ouch. This stuff actually happened before Christmas… I’m not that good at updating regularly. I’ll be back soon with a post about the TUI course we just finished, and hopefully that will make this site a bit more up-to-date.

Well, the last week before Christmas was dedicated to “Skills Upgrade”-courses. The class was split in two, one half was working with James Tichenor and Joshua Walton from Rockwell Group, on different proposals for interactive installations for SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen. The other half (which I was part of) worked with games and computer vision which was taught by Yaniv Steiner.

We spent the week experimenting with different small things within the field of computer vision. The first project we did, was the game “Style Wars” – a reaction game, where you use your hand as the game controller. The game is very simple: you and your opponent face each other like in a classic western duel. When you hear a specific bang-sound, it’s all about being fastest to draw your gun (gun = pointing hand). If you react too early (before the right sound), you lose. The name “Style Wars” doesn’t really make much sense – but the reason for the name is, that in the game, one player has the role of a flamenco-dude, the other player is a hip-hopper. I am assuming that it’s common knowledge that flamenco-dancers and hip-hoppers don’t get along very well.

Dave Mellis captured me and Erlend dueling in the video above. After making “Style Wars” which was based on simple Flash-motion tracking, we moved on to reacTIVision, where we made our own lo-fi reactable with a standard camcorder, a window and a desklamp. We used the table for testing and having fun with both Flash and Processing.org. One of the applications were a “body-mixer”, that made it possible to build your own custom CIID student (or freak) by mixing the legs, torsos and heads from all of us. The controls were three “dials” with fiducials underneath.

I uploaded some pics from the skills upgrade on Flickr – you should check them out if you want to see some of the other cool stuff people made, like the Dancing Game, for instance… The thumbnails are here: