Paja

Here’s my playful design; making used and worn-out textiles recycled in a fun, but also critical design.
(Can for some reason not figure out how to upload picture, so please use the link)

textile

Kites are cool and Helsinki is pretty windy, so i was wondering during this dark season could be a good idea to fly one of this artifacts by adding some lights and a sound interactive system. So a sort of sound-visual installation controlled by a series of kites would look nice in the sky, also could be fun if you play it along with some friends.

I got this idea from my touch-screen gloves. They allow you to type on a capacitive touch screen with your gloves on, thanks to the conductive material on the fingertips.

How to expand on the topic of gloves and mobiles?

I thought of combining them with this:

To make Hands-free gloves!

The microphone would be embedded to the tip of the pinky finger, and the loudspeaker/earplug to the thumb. Then you can speak like this:

The fingers can be used for picking up and hanging up the call by touching them together.

The work done by the Sound Gloves -group during last autumns Wearable Electronics course can be used for background research. http://wearable.mlog.taik.fi/category/sound-gloves/

Two cups at the top: The Cat Plum: Geraldine de Beco, Bernardaud

White cup at the bottom: Creaturecups

Making an everyday object playful.

This is our main theme for Designing Interactions with Electronic course at Media Lab Helsinki this year. The playfulness can happen in the interaction with objects. To make an everyday object playful, you need to observe and understand its usage in sequences and then think how to modify it to let people experience such a fun. During the introduction, several examples was showed to the students.

The most important thing to learn from this course is to “communicate design through prototypes”. The playfulness is such a subjective topic which you need to illustrate expected experience in some format. One of the most valuable ways to do that is to prototype the experience.

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QML is a good user interface prototyping tool to develop mobile phone applications on Nokia devices. It is a JavaScript-based declarative language, which you can easily create UI and run it on the mobile phones. This post collects QML training materials especially for UI designers who doesn’t know programming but need to demonstrate UI as working software. To set up QML developing environment on your PC, please look at another postdescribing a step-by-step installation.

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This post describes how to develop your first QML application on Nokia N9. Unfortunately I have only instructions for Mac users but I assume the steps for other platforms are similar to this.

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I am experimenting N9 and Arduino. Since QML on N9 doesn’t support any serial communication over USB, I am using the serial communication over Bluetooth.

This post describes how you control a servo motor with N9 over Bluetooth.

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This is a project update for last years Designing interactions course, this could also be seen as the final report for the project for the course, even if the project in itself is still a work in progress. This project is called “Pingispöytä” and it is made by Pasi Rauhala and Niklas Kullström from the Photography department.

So What is “Pingispöytä”? The concept started from the idea of making a electronically controlled “mechanical” ball bouncer. Several different approaches arose in the beginning, with different alternatives for propulsion and ball types. In the end we decided to use solenoids and ping pong balls for the project. The idea being that a solenoid would bounce up a ping pong ball into the air at a specific defined time.

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The purpose of Interaction Design with Electronic workshop is an ”intensive hands on” workshop to learn how to turn your idea into a real physical object using electronics and microcontrollers.
 These tools and techniques will be useful for rapid prototyping in physical interaction design and/ or installation work.

The course provides a journey of design process from developing concepts to prototyping interactions. During the course, students learn how to build prototypes using software programming and electronic assembling. After a theme is given, students will work on developing concepts within groups and planning for prototypes. Actual prototyping experience consists of two phases. The students will be asked to present their work in progress after the first phase. Feedback from guests and other audiences should be applied to the second. The final prototypes will be presented in Demoday in the Media Lab.

These video are from some of students’ final presentations at the previous workshops.

Multitouch Table – aniMate.

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This post describes the way to establish communications between open frameworks on Mac OX10.6 and Arduino. The code using it is created on Xcode developing software.  It uses ofArduino library which let you control Arduino directly from Xcode. Although the open frameworks also provide a generic Serial protocol. In this case, you need to create own Arduino code using Arduino IDE software.

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physical computing _test01
This is primary test shot.
It works are have a many potential to progress.
I trying to find that How it can be contain a meaningful.

Designing interactions course

Date: January 24, 2010

Location: Media lab Helsinki in Helsinki, Finland

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Swing Thing created by Forrest Oliphant and Matti Niinimäki. The sound and images match when the two swings in sync.

Shadow created by Emmanuel Durand, Ranjit Menon and Daniel Praesius. Sound is controlled by shadow.

Historical Orchestra created by Reha Discioglu, Piibe Piirma and Ferhat Sen. Three instruments inspired by Turkish cultural heritage using digital technology.

Multitouch Table – aniMate created by Palash Mukhopadhyay, Irene Poutanen and Dipti Sonawane. Drawings get own life and move on the table.

Ferrocity created by Ben Dromey and David Munoz. http://interactionmen.tumblr.com/

Intensive workshop in Designing interactions course

Date: February 7 – 11, 2011

Location: Media lab Helsinki in Helsinki, Finland

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This post describes how to create PCB with Roland Modela MDX-20 mill machine. The above video shows a mill machine creating a PCB.

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First, install SoundFlower.

Then, set system audio in and out to Soundflower:

Then, set up audio in Puredata (similar should work for other audio applications):

Now, you can tweak iTunes, YouTube, Skype, and all other system audio to your heart’s content.