On March 9, Matt traveled to Mountain View, CA to give a “Tech Talk” at Google:
What is a switch? Is there a place for the Army at an art school? How do physical and ubiquitous computing fit in the industrial design curriculum? Is interaction design just 21st Century industrial design? Can designers and engineers play nicely? And what do high altitude and disaster medicine have to do with any of this? In a fast-paced and highly visual presentation, Matt Cottam will discuss these ideas and others, sharing work from his professional practice as a designer and medic, and drawing from experiences as student and teacher.
Monday saw the successful launch of a new Horsepower Challenge UK, with 90 thrilled students and one Olympian athlete participating in the opening day’s run. By the end of the day each team had accumulated thousands of steps - one nearly reaching 85,000!
UPDATE: Get involved in the project and download the software from the Google Code project: http://code.google.com/p/nadamobile (sorry, for the moment it requires compiling some code)
1. Introduction (2008 Demo: 1 of 4)
Tellart’s 2008 Research and Development annual demonstrations. This Introductory chapter picks up where NADA (sketchtools.com) left off and takes Tellart’s sketching and prototyping tools into the mobile realm. This short video is a demo of Tellart’s RunSketch application working with Apple’s Dashcode on the iPhone and iPod Touch.
2. RunSketch (2008 Demo: 2 of 4)
This second of four chapters demonstrates how Tellart’s RunSketch application is integrated with Apple’s Dashcode to quickly and easily create applications that utilize all of an iPhone/iPod Touch’s functionality. Creating these applications is made extremely simple by RunSketch–requiring only Javascript to create sophisticated mobile applications and prototypes.
3. I/O Backpack (2008 Demo: 3 of 4)
This third chapter demonstrates the NADA Mobile hardware and software toolkit by Tellart. The hardware involves a custom designed circuit board that communicates to a computer via a wireless radio link. The board allows for both sensors (light, heat, motion, force, etc.) and actuators (lights, motors, etc.) to be integrated with the iPhone/iPod Touch’s hardware and software. The goal for Tellart in making NADA Mobile was not to extend the functionality of the iPhone as much as to create a sketching and prototyping platform that would empower designers to quickly and easily imagine and test new concepts for interactive products and services.
4. 1/8″ Jack (2008 Demo: 4 of 4)
This chapter demonstrates Tellart’s 1/8″ Jack (Eigth Inch Jack) software and hardware toolkit. 1/8″ Jack allows analog sensors to be connected to an iPhone or iPod Touch without the need for additional circuitry or power source. The system allows for fast and simple prototyping of new mobile concepts and requires only a basic understanding of Javascript to implement.
What is going on here?
That was recorded live, including the falling snowflakes. Flash can “see” the pattern on each card–depending on the pattern, the computer plays a different note. The result is that you can use pieces of paper like instruments.
An article in today’s MarketWatch outlines the growing importance of interactive games for health - mentioning dance games, the Wii Fit, and our very own Horsepower Challenge for Humana:
“Video games aren’t just for kids and couch potatoes anymore. They’re increasingly being used to motivate people of all ages to move their bodies and manage their chronic health conditions more effectively. …
The Horsepower Challenge gives each student a pedometer, which tracks their movement and sends wireless updates to the HumanaGames.com Web site. Students also receive animated horses that represent them online, where they can see their progress. Teams of school systems compete against each other, and kids who accumulate activity earn rewards they can use to accessorize their horses.
“Our mission is basically to help people play their way to better health,” Darst said. “We want to make it fun for people to get healthy.”
Things have not been quiet around the Oakland office. One reason is the recent epic recording session to get some urgently needed musical material finished. As a non-musician, I find it pretty inspiring that people are doing this here. The tracks can be heard in various Tellart projects, including some of the videos elsewhere on this site.
A sneak peek at the newest generation in the Sketchtools line…
*Update: Check out a full demo of NADA Mobile in this blog post or just skip right to the 1/8″ Jack demo. You can also download the source code for the project at the NADA Mobile Google Code page.
Our favorite new iPhone hack, the duiPhone, will let you know for sure whether you should hand the car keys to a friend after a long night in the bar…
Once you blow into the mouthpiece, the application will determine your blood alcohol level - either telling you you’re good to go, or that you should consider calling a cab.
We built this from a store-bought-and-hacked breathalyzer attached to a 3G iPhone - our first experiment with Tellart’s newest Sketchtool: NADA Mobile.
Yes, this video was taken at our office. Yes, those are real 40s on the table.
No, Jasper was not allowed to drive home. (no Tellart employees were harmed during the filming of this video. Photos after the jump.)
[ed: Yes, the video shows an iPod Touch--which is a lot less expensive to test with than an iPhone--but the demo runs over WiFi and works on any device running iPhone OS]
One thing I learned, my serve is ok, but I need to work on my backhand.
Tellart’s Friday office lunch turned into Wii Olympics. Wii, Wii Fit and just about every accessory available now installed at Tellart HQ and all in the name of research.
Holistic Service Prototyping: Sketching Hardware and Software
Matt Cottam (Tellart, Rhode Island School of Design and Umeå Institute of Design), Maia Garau, Jasper Speicher (Tellart), Brian Hinch (Tellart)
9:00am Monday, 03/09/2009
Computing, Mobile and The Web, Objects, Tutorial
Location: Gold Room
The Economist has defined services as “products of economic activity that you can’t drop on your foot.” Where businesses once viewed services as a necessary but inconvenient accompaniment to their product offerings, they now increasingly look to designers to develop holistic, human-centered and innovative service solutions that can help expand profits and cement brand loyalty.
Services are richly complex offerings occurring across space, time and multiple touch points. Their essentially intangible nature presents new and exciting challenges. Designers in this emerging field must expand the toolchest of product and interaction design to develop new approaches for communicating and prototyping service concepts.
This one-day tutorial will cover key concepts and methods through a combination of lectures, demos, and hands-on activities. Though there are countless types of services from air transport to farmer’s markets to medical care, it will focus on services that can benefit from the integration of web, mobile and embedded digital technologies. We will introduce key tools and techniques for prototyping physical computing interfaces and will develop functional sketch prototypes using Flash and RFID.
The “What is a switch?” project is a Tellart classic.
It takes the form of a workshop or a longer course, and, by using low-cost materials and familiar design tools, is meant to demystify electronics for design students and artists - expanding their conception of what it means to design with embedded electronics.
A switch, after all, is just a connection made or broken between power and ground.
When you begin to think about it that way, the “what is a switch” experience goes beyond a simple electronics lesson. What happens when you take the switch away from the wall, out of the plastic casing?
What kind of interactions can you create when you start experimenting with other materials, quick prototypes of your concepts, and new ways of connecting?
Tellart teaches Physical Computing/Interaction Design workshops yearly at the Umeå Institute of Design in Sweden - in this particular two week long workshop, the students were asked to conceive of ideas that would encourage a more energetic “desk-job” experience. “Repetitive strain injury”, or RSI, is the name for a group of conditions common in computer workers and assembly line workers - carpal tunnel syndrome is a well known example. The conditions arise from too much time spent in a poor posture position or too much repetitive muscle activity.
The students, who came from a variety of different undergraduate backgrounds ranging from Computer Science to Psychology, were taught some basic physical computing concepts, and given an introduction to our Sketchtools platform.
Check out the Offsite section on tellart.com to see more videos of our workshops and courses…
