For centuries artisans have had the ability to sketch with wood and hand tools to craft high-quality, precious objects. With digital technology the functionality of objects became less tangible and visible, and their making fell almost exclusively to engineers and computer scientists. It is only in the past decade or so that the community and tools have evolved to the point that designers can sketch with hardware and software. This project seeks to combine seemingly dissonant elements, natural, material and virtual, and explore how they can be crafted to feel as if they were born together as parts of a unified object anatomy that is both singular and precious.
The talk has received some great attention online, from diverse places such as MAKE:blog (who did a great synopsis):
We thought we’d share some pictures from last Thursday, when Tellart popped over to Hasbro HQ in Pawtucket, RI to participate in their 2009 Inspiration Day. This was a great afternoon of eating, meeting & greeting with folks from creative industries across New England, all set to the tune of some interesting live performances and speakers. It is designed as a fun, science-fair-like event that lets Hasbro and others explore new technologies and inspire innovative thinking.
We were there displaying our delicious augmented reality cookies, AR memory game, a control-things-with-your-phone NADAmobile demo, and movies of the things that were too big (or too virtual) to bring in person.
Just a week or so ago, Seth took a day-long bike ride up and down the New England coastline as part of the Rhode Island chapter of Team in Training, the world’s largest charity sports training program (money raised goes to the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society). Tellart loves documentation, so we couldn’t resist the opportunity to outfit Seth with a few extra accessories for his 100-mile ride: we attached his iPhone and some extra battery packs to his bike via a modified iTMP handlebar mount, zip-ties, and Gorilla tape.
The extra hardware and phone were to support a special iPhone app we whipped up for the occasion – one that follows the path of the bike using GPS and snaps a photo every 1/8th of a mile. We ported its results over to the 100 mile photoscape project page, where you can check out the mapped ride, the photos plotted along it, and the 100-mile panorama they created.
Over the weekend Tellart hosted a couple of great events at the first-ever Rhode Island Maker Faire in Providence. We kicked things off with a workshop on WiiMote hacking, where we taught folks how to write applications controlled by WiiMote gestures. After that, and then again on Saturday at WaterFire, we installed our special interactive pong game – like the one from your childhood, but projected life-size on the floor and controlled via infra-red LED’s on your head. Who says video games cause laziness?
Check out MAKE issue #18 for Andrew’s article on his Bloog project, a “blog post synthesizer” that pulls in RSS feeds from the internet and allows the user to scramble them to create new paragraphs. The machine was built using Tellart’s Sketchtools NADA project.
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.
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…
