Øya Wall test movie

The collage wall is beginning to take shape. The small clips are random and is displayed when the wall is in standby mode. The big clips are your friends recordings that apperars when you touch the wall. The text is generated eighter from your movements on the festival or from the speech-to-text function mentioned earlier. We haven't decided yet.

We like the rouged and messy style of the collage but we have to work on the timing, positions, dimentions, exposure of the clips. The sliding text don't work that well because you kind of want it to stand still..

PaperPrototyping

Prototyping of the sequences at the recording stations in the ØyaWall concept.

Contribution Wall

Our final concept is now looking something like this. There will be a wall with a big screen that displays a collage of videoclips of the guests in a graffiti/"sjablong" style. It will also contain a microphone that converts speech into text. On smaller stations placed around the festival area you can touch with your wristband to record videoclips together with friends, and post it on the big wall if you want to.  

Speech to Text

Another idea is to also be able to leave short messages with a voice to text converter and paste them onto the collage wall together with the videoclips. Could be a nice typographic element.

Music Wall

We have also been looking into a concept of collaborative music mixing on the big wall, maybe with dedicated sounds based on your personal Øya-profile. At least we want also the collage wall to be interactive in some kind of way. Maybe just a "touch to upload my clip-function" and then the clip is pasted on the wall in an animated fashion and what not. Or, a way to touch and manipulate the clips and sort of customize them to make the contribution feel more pesonal.

Wall

Our current concept for ØyaPlay is an interactive wall where you can upload small video clips of yourself into a big collage with others. We think this will enhance the overall social feeling of the festival but we struggle a bit in making the actual recording into an amusing and playful event.

 Our basic idea is to have small recording screens around the festival area where you can play in front of the camera and do whatever you feel like, and be able to post it on the big wall afterwards if you want to. But to make the experience more interessting maybe these recordings should have an immediate affect on the big wall like in this project. 

Workshop with GK4

Due to the collaboration with students from second grade we held a workshop for the design of the RFID-wristbands. We used the Stig&Stein workshop methode as earlier in the semester.

Our problem definition was "How to enhance the festivalfeeling and to make it more personal?" with the focus on wristband and identification. Based on associative words and then forced combination of these words we generated many new ideas. Here are some favourites:

-Beer Brag, a giant beer bottle that is "filled" up according to the amount of beers sold. Both totally and individual sales. "Look how many beers I have bought"... "Look how many beers I have given to others"...

-The wristband as a Piece of Jewellery. Customize it based on your music preferences etc.

-Pick up Beer, pay the next beer for someone you like by touching the wristband at the last place this person has touched. 

-Seal of Contacts, let people you meet be able to make an imprint on your wristband. Could be physically or digitally. 

-Archetypes, wristband based on you being a character/belonging to a group etc. Could be combined with this years Øya graphical Cartoon Theme.

-Contact Three, a three with branches that grows according to your social interaction. Associations to Øyas Eco-Image. 

-Øya Advanced, gives you benefits based on your participation on the festival. How many years you have been there, how much time you have spent on the festival area etc.

Even Morrissey can stink

Our new direction in the festival project is to make a karaoke-machine. This singin phenomenon often produce a lot of bad material and is by many concidered being a tacky thing best suited for shady bars.

We on the other hand want to combine this concept with the more refined music culture of Øyafestivalen, with dedicated choices of songs related to the visitors music profile. Can this produce some what more pleasant sounds than the ones heard on the video?

Also take a look at Candice Breitz study on fan-culture and her karaoke experiments.

Tom Na H-iu

Our idea of "Viggo -the friendless installation" is thought to be something like this. Only with the lights moving accordingly to the touching of peoples hands. When more people touch at the same time the feedback changes, thus creating a subject for conversation and collaboration.

Festival Visuals

It's winter now which makes it hard to imagine what summer and festivals feels like. Some pictures might help.

Remote Speaker

Had to post this one too. This gives people an opportunity to express meanings public without the embarrassing attention of the speakers corner, yet it delivers the message in a more "old-school" way than lets say a sms-chat on a big screen i.e. 

I like the materiality of this installation because I fear that introducing to many digital devices like screens and graphic interfaces will inflict the festival-feeling in some way. Done in a nice way I think it can be a nice translation from digital to analog media.

Memory Wall

Here is a good example of a relatively simple interactive installation which I guess gives added value to the social experience of a festival. Could be something to look to if we work further with gossip- or the sharing-ideas.

A hint

Due to our next direction in the project working with a 'hide and seek'-concept, I found the Spy-on-yourself Beauty Mirror interessting. Giving people at the festival hints on where they are, how they look and so on. 

Iteration Three - Platform for prototypes

Our first approach to the festival project is to regard the festival as an area that we can place different RFID devices into. Our thought is that every guest has a tag and this can in some way be registred by readers in different areas of the festival. You will get a feedback on each reader device but there will also be a feedback based on the network of readers that communicate with eachother, reflecting the activities of the tags.

So there are two layers of interactivity/feedback. The personal interaction with immediate feedback, and the "part of the big picture"-feedback that maybe is generated over time. So far these are just loose ideas but for the Arduino workshop we may want to investigate:

-how different readers can communicate with eachother?

-what is the difference between personal and common touch? 

Festival Feeling

"Hei jeg er på festival, jeg er klar for nye ting". 

Man krever ikke så mye på en festival. Den er veldig lite teknologisk. Den er jord, øl, skranglete band, blendende sol, krypende kveldskulde. Man går litt tilbake i tid nesten, til noe mer primitivt. (en venninne av meg sier hun begynner å jukse og juge) Man kler av seg den teknologiske drakten og selv IT-mannen bretter opp jeansen og føler seg kul. Når jeg tenker meg om synes jeg kontrasten mellom det primitive og teknologi er fengende. Og RFID kan passe veldig bra inn her fordi den er liksom så lydløs og lite spektakulær ( kommer selvfølgelig an på hva man designer rundt den men potensialet er hvertfall der) den er litt menneskelig om man ikke slenger på billige buzzere som lager kjipe lyder o.l.....

Iteration Two

Festivals

Finally we have decided the context of our project and it will be festivals. After evaluating our workshop and the ideas it generated we have found that many of them is about meeting new people, having fun and being social in a playful way within a defined context. We wanted to build on this and dicussed among others the two contexts of festivals or conferences. Festivals seems to be the most suitable for our task whereas we predict that working with the threshold and acceptance of implementing RFID into social settings will be one of our big challenges. On festivals people are probably more relaxed and open to try new things and the atmosphere is not too serious. 

Iteration One

Direction

For the direction in our project we have chosen the design breifs RFID and the everyday / Touch as culture and we probably should focus on who to;

-enhance peoples social life (physical world)

-explore peoples acceptance of touch in social context 

Reading up on blogs and RFID related sites we dicovered two interessting phenonemon ; Social objects / social life of objects

Social object is of a more abstract nature and can be said to be the shared ground of why interaction occurs . 

An example of such a common ground could be Thinglink.org.

Social life of objects could be relevant for us in this project because it is concerning the objects identity, history and ability to communicate. (BookCrossing)

"The interesting thing about Social Objects is not the object itself, but the conversations that happen around them"  Hugh Macleod, Gapingvoid.

To sum it up we could say that we want to Work within a tangible, physical approach to social settings. 

Observations

It can be difficult to get a direction with such a broad term as social life. First we wanted to sketch out different kinds of social interaction and did some observations, without focusing of any ideas or solutions:

-give short/necassary information (slippery surface)

-read other peoples thoughts (man looking curiously)

-explore other social groups (ethnic mothers with children)

-let objects become personal (parked cars, only personal when owner is present)

-objects that sticks out (giant palm, subject for conversation)

-find things (Marianne got lost)

-help others (man struggling with “rullator”)

-decrease inhibition (children dancing in the fountain)

-borrow objects (man with umbrella)

-get recommendations (girl walking with tempting, newly-baked bread under arm)

-can garbage hold information (tax deduction card in the gutter)

-random meetings (someone slips on the bus, starts a conversation) 

-accidental touch (narrow sidewalk) 

-disorientation/fear (kid mistaking me for his father)

-peeking/view (looking into peoples home, ground floor)

-locating seats (entering a café)

-ear-dropping/scene (girl and boy in love, playing around a car)

Plan

Arrange a workshop (see older blog post)

-research of peoples networks 

-formulate a problem definition

-generate ideas in multiple directions

-investigate thresholds for social interaction web/physical (probe Facebook etc..)

Workshop till you drop

After having two lectures (StigogStein) about how to plan and arrange a workshop earlier this week, Marianne and me arranged our very first workshop. 

We did not have a specific problem definition of our project yet so we placed our bets on defining it in the workshop. We did however have a main task and a direction we wanted to work within. "We want to improve peoples social life with the use of RFID". 

As an introdution the participants were asked to list up their web-based and their physical networks and to comment positive and negative aspects of those networks. This task was more of a user survey nature that provided us with data on social networks but it also tuned our mindsets in for the workshop. 

Based on the main task we asked the partcipants to formulate possible problem definitions. There were several suggestions that we dicussed but since we noticed an extra interest in a certain direction we ended up with: "How can we make new social settings more comfortable?"

Based on the definition we were now ready to use the creative tools. Starting off with assosiative words , grouping them, giving the groups names: Heartbeat, Home, Play, Wizard, Self-Promoting, Julebord.

Then we took one word from the assosiations and mix it with the group tittle to make new constellations that generates ideas which answers our problem.

It proved to be a really productive session. Lots of good and interesting ideas popped up that we feel can be subjects for iterations.

Some reflections on the practical aspects of a workshop:

-write answers big on the wall. People like to share and se what others have answered. We like to see our own contribution on the wall. Ownership.

-keep one focus. It is enough with only one person taking notes or it will decrees attention. If you write on the wall, all the focus should be on the wall. If you sit around a table, all the focus should be on the table and so on..  

-keep up the speed. The process becomes more productive with a moderate time pressure.

-try to motivate and engage the persons that is not contributing or is lacking focus. Do it in a positive and optimistic way. 

-try to make people elaborate the answers if they are to diffuse or not to the point. Ask them "yes but -why do you think that ... -what is it with...-how did you...etc.

-it is much better to stand than to sit. People tend to get more engaged mentally when they move physically

-remember to take breaks.

-show pictures and make people evaluate them

-sessions tend to last longer than planned

-explain the task carefully so that everyone does the same thing (ex. when generating ideas they should be concrete, because then they will be easier to discuss

Feedback from tutors

-make decisions on what kind of social environment  and social relationship we want to work with (family, strangers, friends, colleagues, classmates etc..) 

Living objects

Nanotechnology can be quite inspiring in relation to the social life of objects. Don't know exactly how this technology would be implemented but I think that the ability for things to change shape in that way will reinforce the impression of objects commming to life. This is maybe the layer that is missing now that objects becomes more and more intelligent yet they are to a high degree static in their shape.

Four-legged RFID

Thought about working with pets and tags. This is one of the reasons not to. 

Many ways of solving this ofcourse so it could be fun to work with. After all, pets are social objects aren't they?

Social life of objects

"The interesting thing about Social Objects is not the object itself, but the conversations that happen around them" ... "Social Networks are built around Social Objects, not vice versa." 

Hugh Macleod, Gapingvoid.

I am hooking up with classmate Marianne as we are concidering working in the area of social objects. What is a social object? Is it another word for sharing advice? What differenciate social objects from other objects?  

"The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people. They're not; social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object"  Zengstrom.com

Tactic Table inspirations

Imagine using this technology to instruct the higly dynamic game of football. Also including  RFID-tagged players on the pitch for positioning their representations on the table. 

Tactic Table

Inspired be the touchscreen found in different projects like the Microsoft Surface I Wonder if this could be applied to the tactic table for football. The existing solution is inspite of it's movable magnetic objects, quite limited in use. A dynamic touchscreen with graphics would provide the trainer with a much richer interface and a better tool to conveie the teams strategy.

Some loose ideas

Random encounters

We have all experienced the often plesant contact with complete strangers. Like sitting on the bus and a person entering and slips in the stairway creating a comical situation that just has to be commented to the person sitting next to you. A sudden and random contact is created and I would say it often feels very nice and as a relief oppose to the silent and impersonal space on a bus. 

Is it possible to create encounters like these through manipulation yet making the experience feel real and not staged?

What are the social principals of such situations? Is it our need for assosiates so that we can approve or differenciate us from our environment? 

Major Project - Itteration One

After four minor projects or workshops we now start up the major project that we will work on the rest of this term. Keeping in mind the different design breifs given in the course plan Tangible Interactions 2008 we are to chose a phenomenon or area we want to work in. This is only a starting point so to define our own projects, research the phenomenon, explore similar projects, observe people and behaviours, sketch the observations out will be our job initially. 

In the approach to the this task I am interested in the implmentation of RFID into everday life. Many projects with this technology tend to be of a social networking or community thing like the YellowArrow and such. I assume that very few people are into these cutting edge, behavioral trends. Not said that it's not important or interesting, because I think they do lead to development and change of social behaviour over time. But I think these projects also reflect the pitfalls of working with new technology that you might "over-do" it and that it doesn't become accessable to a wide range of people. I am interested in implementing the technology into everday social situations and enhance and facilitated them through ubi-comp. 

Tangible interaction projects

Lecture by Timo Arnall and Einar Sneve Martinussen

 part 2

Ubiqutous-city, Korea

-we have the home computer but what happens when we move into public spheres?

-american technologies that are not allowed to be tested in the U.S 

-

Blinkenlights

-uses large empty buildings as screens where the windows are individual pixels

Open city(Graffiti research lab)

-drawing machine

-large projections on buildings

-using buildings as paper

LED-throwies 

-led attached to magnets with batteries that can be thrown onto walls at night

-looking for metal surfaces in the city

YellowArrow.net

-each arrow has a code that you can send a story with 160 characters to a website. the story can then be read by others by sending an sms with the code seen on the specific arrow 

-not very successful; maybe built on false assumptions that people want to tell stories, and that people want to read stories from strangers...

Biomapping.net

-community engangement

-measures your stress level and maps them to areas where you have been and shows them graphically

-started as an abstract project but may now be used in city planning

-dividing mind and body, map your feelings.

MogiMogi.com

-orientation game, treasure hunt to find your way through the city

-address your destination, then you are given different clues and landmarks to find on your way to the destination. 

-misused as a game rather than a guide tool

Day of the figurines

Air (Area's Immediate Readings)

-portable devices which reads air quality

-many of these carried around be people gives a big picture all together

Blogging pigeons

-what if objects blogged? 

Windowzoo

-stickers fitted on the windows

Flash mobs / Eat brains

-internet is great at gathering people together

Streetwars

-Hitman-game

-apply to a game master, get an ID and register your address, get a mission which is to shoot a person with a water gun

Etsy.com

-sell your crafts and products that you have made

Thinglink

-show your crafts and things

Instructables.com

Flocks-by christien

Milkproject.net

-track the milk from the cow in mongolia to the table in cheese form in belgium

Megan Trainor- with hidden numbers

RFID snakes and ladders

Symbolic table

Sharer- by Vinay Venkatraman

Everything is a toy

-decided that everything in the world is a toy

RFID mon Amour

Arithmetic Garden- by Masahiko and Takashi

-physical full scale mathematic game

-walk around through gates with different numbers and solve the equation

Yourday- RFID visitor tracking at Alton Towers

-track your day in an amusement park and get it on DVD at the exit

-consider to change for example this controlled context rather than changing everyday life situations

Moving Pictures

Smart urban intelligence

-maps the places where you have been through the day

Interactions of transactions

One week group task with Ingrid and Kyrre: Re-design of the ticketing system of the public transportation company Ruter in Oslo, with focus the physical interaction between the TVM, the ticket and the validator device.

 The existing system is based on paper tickets purchased either on a TVM, on the bus/train/tube /tram or at the station. The main challenge in this task was to replace the paper ticket with a ticket based on RFID-technology.

We used paper prototyping to work out solutions to different problems concerning purcase of ticket and validating the ticket when in use. Our goal was to make the system easy to use through  few sequenses and understandable grapichs without taking away to much of the user options. 

The new ticket service got the name "SVIPP -turer med Ruter i Oslo" and is a card containing an RFID-tag. The service is devided in two modalities. A non-personal card for single or multiple single travels, and a personal card  for subscription or prepaid amount.

In case of ticket control the Svipp-card can easily be read with a wireless reader.

Hairfid- a simple RFID interface

The task was to explore the mapping between physical objects, readers and feedback (on screen and sound).

We explored different interactions movements between the RFID-tag and the reader such as hitting, stroking, sliding, pointing, tapping, rotating. We also wanted to experiment with different materials for the object containing the tag and the reader. At one point the reader had become the earth soil, and the tags through their form, materials and movement should represent the four seasons.

This proved to be a quite complex task to solve so instead we focused only one movement, the stroking. Stroke what? The hair ofcourse..

We made a brush with 3 different surfaces and a tag inside for each surface. They give 3 different sensations when stroking through the hair, from smooth to rugged. The reader is put inside a wig. For the output we projected short film clips of a person reacting accordingly to the face of the brush you use to stroke. 

  

Introduction to Tangible Interactions Studio course 2008

Reading

The first week was dedicated to get a overview on the history of design and technology with a focus on the ubiquitous and tangible research, products and services. We were presented to chapters from different litterature within the subjects. They ranged from the spectacular, almost divine foresight of Nicola Tesla in his work from 1916 "Wonders of the future", to the social concience focus of John Thackara in his book "In the Bubble" where the new technology's main goal is to facilitate human behaviours, not to show off skills. "Appropriateness surpasses performance as the key to technological success"

Some specially interresting books:

- John Thackara, "In the Bubble"

- Mark Weiser, "The Computer for the 21st Century"

- Malcom McCullough, "Digital Ground"

- Jane McGonigal, "The Curious Interface"

These readings really was a welcomming approach to the course. A subject like new technology tend to get very, yes, technological. But one should strive to always put the humans in centre rather than the technology. In my opinion this has not been the case in many of the products and services presented for users the passed decades.

NRK3 movie

Task from NRK3: create an 8 second short movie branding the new channel. It could be anything but should express values as openminded and accepting. It is an entertainment channel but for the more narrow audience. 

I worked together with Håkon Raanes in the service design class on this one. After narrowing down alot of ideas we decided to work with compressed time and transformation. To portray this we used a microwave oven and placed i.e  a curly shirt, pressed the button, waited, and two seconds later out comes a smooth, ironed shirt with a tie. Other objects were: playing cards, ingredients for a cake, wollen yarn, a flowerpot without flower and a lightbulb. The surprise was ofcourse what the objects would transform into. 

We got good credits for this movie but for them to buy it we need to do some adjustments concerning the enviroment around the microwave. We will probably make another version soon.

Lefsa- cross media storytelling

Cross-media storytelling is about telling a story about a product in different medias and to use those medias individual strenghts and advantages to create a synergie effect that strenghtens the product.  

Karin and me chose to work with Vestlands Lefsa and to use three different medias to tell the story about the product: commercial(tv-cinema), web and the product itself. This took the shape of being a brandingcampaign.

To make a long story short, lefse is dull so we wanted to play with this and came up with a concept for commercial where we intervju young people on the street telling us about how dull it is. Then we edit these statments to becomming positive but in a funny way that you cleary see that we have cheated. On the web we would alow people to play with the intervju sequenses and participate in a contest by sending in edited videos. For the product we played on the editer/director assosiation and made a stamp on lefsa that only would be visible when being prepared in water. (like a photo in a photolab). This stamp would maybe give you exclusive information, a prize etc. 

Processing

What a nightmare.

Algoritms, float, init, void, setup..... I kind of knew it was comming but I'm not the programming kind of guy. And this was worse than expected. Processing is a programming application and we used it as a way to create generative, computational art for a start. First we made a drawing tool which ended up being two boxes moved around by the mouse creating beautyfull images as they rotates and fades in intensity. 

Finally we (Ingrid, Marianne and me) made a simple but cute computer game called Flea Olympics. The player controls a flea as it's running through the hairs on a dogs back. Like in a slalom contest. With great help from our teacher on that course, Marius Watz, we pulled it off. 

PLAY

Anders Waldersnes

Former interaction design student Anders talked about his diploma assignment called PLAY. The project was to examine how we could use television in the future now that it has got heavy competition from computers. 

He talked about the importance of being thorough and structured in the analysis and to trust that methodes will generate new ideas. He also stressed the importance of evidencing and experience prototypes. In his project he had made an interface for a tv-menu. Although it was just a sketch and had simultated functions it served the purpose well of being an experience prototype. We got introdused to the quick, creative methode of idea cards where you write an idea down on a card, make a simple drawing of it and also attatch a picture that is assosiated with what your idea is about. hang them up on a wall to get easy accsess later on. 

Through analysis he came up with three concepts to interpret the future tv experience:

Filter- alow the users to filter the kind of programs they want to watch.

 

Share- find ways for the users to share their preferences and opinions with their friends, or other users.

Max choise / Minimize choise- use the existing model where the broadcaster controls what programs is sent or let the user deside.