Experiments
I designed a remote for an Android based TV project done in-house at Ixonos/Digitalist.
Sort of like Magic Mouse meets the Wiimote. There is the possibility to control the TV from your phone as well. Fun little HW design exercise.
Click to embiggen.
Magic remote.
Kill the light.
Literally. Kill. The. Light. I made an alarm clock for people start their day off on the wrong foot. The alarm goes off when the sun rises, because it's sensitive to light.
Zzzzz.
The alarm is silent at night.
BUZZZZZZ!!
Quickly grab the fabric tube! Don't let any light in!
Grab it like you mean it!
After all, it's society's fault you slept late.
Some people have electromagentic hypersensitivity. I met a couple, who lived in a flat that had it's walls painted with carbon. We made a bunch of prototypes that makes electromagnetic radiation audible. I basically made the first one by ripping out the magnetic pick out of an old Sony Walkman and adding an amplifier and a microcontroller to the package.
Audible WiFi.
This one is made in to a Pringles can with the Walkman pick.
This girls used a more sensitive one model with better electronics and a headphone jack and made a nice dance improv to the sounds.
I used this as a mass research tool to get the population of the city of Umeå to write or draw their opinions on to glass wall.
After they pressed the button the and/or text was sent Twitter, where we just needed to look at the answers and see where to make the city safer for bikers and pedestrians.
The whole thing was a clever hack since the trackers on the pens didn't have any API to get info out. I just used a bunch automation scripts and macros to monitor what happens on the screen and then just send it to Twitter.
Handwritten Twitter.
This is what we got in Twitter.
I managed to get multiple colours as well!
The social bag.
The original idea was to remove the excess boredom people feel every now and then, by adding elements in opening a package that would make it to have a locking mechanism in similar vein to Japanese puzzle boxes or other mechanical puzzles, such as the Rubik’s cube.
Prototype 1
This prototype emulates a combination lock. By turning the cube, different combinations are achieved. tumbling the cube to the left would turn on light #1, then turning to the right #4, Left #2, and so on. No red lights must be on for the lock to open. It was very easy to open the lock. Too easy.
The small window shows the on-screen demonstration on how the lock would work. The left side of the screen is mostly for me to see what I was programming. The lights on the right side would have been real physical lights, If I would have realised this concept properly.
Concept 2
This was a quick idea, where
applying the social interaction
concept, the box would require
at least 4 hands to make it open.
Boredom patrol
At this point I came to realise that I don’t know enough about boredom. I interviewed a few people asking them what they when they are bored. Most of the answers were related to modern day technological gadgets: “I'll fiddle around with my phone” or “I'll watch movies on my laptop”. I started to think if this over-avoidance of boredom is really good for us at all.
No, it isn't.
The bag
So, pack away all your distractions and let's get bored! Usually people use hand/shoulder bags to carry their distractions around. A shoulder bag is the right size to play with interactivity. Getting the previous ideas together and implementing them to a usable object I built The social bag. Just the right amount of boredom, but when you want some relief, you need to get social.
Here is how the bag works:
- You are bored, waiting for something to happen.
- You desperately want to use your array of gadgetry visible to you in your bag.
- You decide to open it, just to send a “I’m bored” message to one of your friends.
- You remember that you can’t open the bag by yourself.
- You start looking for someone equally bored.
- You explain that you require assistance with opening the bag to the other boree.
- Together you manage to get the bag open.
- Unboredom!
Gucci I am not.
It's like the game “Twister”, except with fingers.
Participants press buttons as they light up one by one after the previous has been pushed down.
The owner of the bag decides the “difficulty level”.
Successful combination on pressing the buttons will result in the unlocking of the bag.
The “game” will fail, if any of the buttons pressed down is let go, before the correct combination is finished.
You can also play memory games with it.
There's a window to display your distractions in the bag.
