Last week was the sold-out Interaction10 conference in Savannah, where Matt presented his project Wooden Logic:  In Search of Heirloom Electronics:

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):

to Fast Company:

Thanks for the mentions!

Matt Cottam-Wooden Logic: In Search of Heirloom Electronics from Interaction Design Association on Vimeo.

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.

Setting up the NADAmobile demo in our office ahead of time – all of these appliances are soon to become WiFi-enabled and iPhone-controlled.

Getting used appliances to match your brand can get messy.

The heart of it all: an Arduino Diecimila running NADAmobile.

A screenshot of the NADAmobile sketch we set up.  A simple push turns on the lamp.

And a nice shake turns the clock radio on and off.

My personal favorite – a quick burst of air aimed at the device’s microphone creates some wind onscreen and in real life (this one activates the fan).

How about creating some iPhone juice?  You can squeeze it as hard as you can, but in case that doesn’t work, there’s a backup – it activates the blender.  Not that we’re implying anything.

And in case all of that gets messy, we thought we’d allow attendees the chance to clean up by pretending the phone is a vacuum – thereby waking up our new fuchsia Dirt Devil.

Once we got to the fair, it was a challenge to configure our booth…

…and we ended up getting ourselves in trouble for pointing our fan at the huge card tower adjacent to us.  Whoops.

Our delicious AR cookie setup.

We had to provide a warning not to eat them (we don’t blame you, attendees).

The Augmented Reality memory game was a hit

Nick explains NADAmobile to interested attendees over the sound of the fan, vacuum, mixer, and radio.  Luckily the lamp was pretty quiet.

The day’s attendees came in all shapes and sizes.

And here are the videos we had playing in the background – check them out for more augmented reality, hacked appliances, and tech installation goodness!

Thanks to Hasbro for having us!  We had a great time and can’t wait to come back next year!

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.

The application takes photos without user input – a feature that only became available to developers a few weeks before the ride, with iPhone OS 3.1. Based on either time or distance settings, the app automatically takes a series of photos.  Every photo is stored with GPS location information, as well as a time-stamp, and a velocity profile.  In order to ensure that the phone would run through-out the long ride, we rigged up auxiliary batteries through a regulator and added them to Seth’s already weighty saddle bag (already holding 2 spare tubes, 2 CO2 catridges, and tire levers).

The time settings can be adjusted to take between 1 and 120 photos per minute (somewhat restricted by the capabilities of the iPhone’s camera capture), and the distance settings can be adjusted to take one photo per mile all the way down to one every 3 feet.

We hope to have the application in the iTunes app store soon – we will announce it here when it’s ready!

MakerPong from Tellart on Vimeo.

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?

To download the source files for this project, click here.

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.

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.

Link

On Friday, March 27, Tellart and the Umeå Institute of Design will present the Sensing and Sensuality summit.  This will be a day of talks by speakers such as our own C.E.O. Matt Cottam, Matt Jones of Dopplr, Lennart Andersson of Ergonomidesign, Jack Schulze of Schulze & Webb, and Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing.  See the full list of speakers on the 2009 Spring summit website here.

Friday, March 27, 2009
10:00 am
Umeå Institute of Design
Östra Strandgatan 30
Umeå, Sweden

Matt’s contribution to Papercamp London was featured yesterday over on one of our favorite places, the MAKE magazine blog.  The furniture was laser cut and etched from original illustrations in Helen Campbell’s 1890 book, The American Girl’s Home Book of Work and Play.

More info and other high-resolution photos can be found on the blog he created for his master thesis at the Umeå Institute of Design, Umeå, Sweden.

**Update**

The project has also appeared on Craft:

Thanks for the links guys!

A new video of our classic “What is a Switch?” project, from the Fall 2007 RISD Industrial Design studio The Internet of Things.

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.

full event description

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…