I finally pulled myself together and released the easing library I wrote for the Arduino last summer. It’s based on Robert Penner’s nice work, so all credits should go to him.

Anyway, you can find it here:

http://bit.ly/arduinoeasing

The vehicles are extremely simple electronic objects, that seem to show a specific personality from their actions. The interesting thing is, that they are in fact extremely stupid, but because we (humans) only look at their actions without knowing why they act as they do, we tend to project our own logic and reason to them and thereby give them a personality that they actually don’t have. It sounds a bit complicated, but actually it isn’t – it’s just because I can’t explain it properly yet

I decided to base them on Arduino, though it might be overkill – the reason I did it is to keep flexibility, so that I later can upload more advanced firmware to the bots. Here’s a photo I took of one of my boards – unfortunately I put it upside down!

Anyway, of course I also snapped some photos of the first vehicle and it’s half-finished sibling today. Here they are:

You can see more photos in my Flickr photoset.

After having visited the elderly, we found out that they are no longer interested in creating and sharing new memories, they are more interested in re-living old memories, with people that can help them filling in the gaps and completing their stories from the past. But it’s not always easy to find people at your own age that you can actually do this with, as almost 85% of the residents on the old folks homes have dementia to some degree. And as the course was about graphical user interfaces, we also had to create some kind of device. After lots of thinking and another visit to Plejehjemmet Aftensol, we decided to develop a “time machine”. Well, not a time machine in the traditional sense, but at least something that would help you think back in time.

We decided to build a radio, that could go back in time. Instead of having a frequency scale, this radio has a time scale. Turn the knob back to the year you would like to get refreshed, and the radio will start playing content from that period. If you only want to listen to specific types of content, there is a knob for selecting that, e.g. news, radio-theater or classical music. I won’t go into the details of the UI, but we put a lot of thought into arranging the buttons and the graphical layout of the screen, to be as intuitive as possible. As this mock-up was developed in the second iteration, it is still very early – unfortunately we didn’t have time to take it to the elderly to evaluate it.

Technically speaking the radio is just a device with a wifi connection, and access to digitalised radio archives, e.g. from Danmarks Radio or BBC. The interface is kept “old-fashioned” on purpose, to keep a higher level of familiarity to the user. Our philosophy was, that this concept is a radio and therefore it should look and feel like a radio. Not a computer or streaming mp3-player.

Electronics-wise the mock-up (or hardware sketch) was built using Flash, Arduino (+ potmeters), a hacked Nokia speaker and an Asus Eee 901, all put into a cabinet covered with sheets of paper with a wood texture printed on them. The picture below is showing the radio when it’s not covered by the fake table.

In general the GUI class resulted in some really nice models, considering we had very short time for the projects. Take a look at some of the other mock-ups in my Flickr photostream. If you don’t want to go to Flickr, the photos from the exhibition (and some from the process) can also be found here.

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).

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.