Tobias Toft

It’s always nice to see other people mention your work, especially when it’s FastCompany!

Check out this well written article by Kit Eaton at FastCompany.

Only five more days to go before the final exams start. Here’s a little taste of what I’ve been doing for the last couple of months. More info will be available very soon!

Simona (the head of our programme at CIID/DKDS) gave everybody a small cactus, that she thought suited our personality. She gave me this one:

It kind of looks like a brain – but a very small one. Not really sure what that means

My thesis at CIID is about objects with personality and the different ways there are to implement “artificial” personality in otherwise stupid objects. As part of my research I have decided to take a closer look at Valentino Braitenberg’s work with synthetic psychology in the beginning of the 80’s. Especially his investigations in the book “Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology” where he designed the rather famous Braitenberg vehicles.

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.

Last week we (the CIID/DKDS Pilot Year) visited a bunch of different companies. One of them was Bang & Olufsen, makers of extraordinary hi-fi equipment. Sorry for being such a geek, but I really love the old Bang & Olufsen designs. These five are my favourites (actually the MX tv should be here as well, but I didn’t get any shots of it):

And as a small bonus, a close-up of the Beosound 5 controls and the Beo 5 remote – extremely well-engineered aluminum parts. Maybe a bit over-engineered actually?

Here’s the Beo 5 remote. I still don’t know what I think about the design though.

And finally: B&O’s office and factory buildings are in general a bit boring, but the newest one was actually quite interesting. Here’s a couple of shots from the inside.

You can see a lot more photos from our industry visits in my Flickr gallery.

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.

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.