Whenever I think of Marshall McLuhan I can’t help but also think of his cameo in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall in which he suddenly appears to backup Allen’s character, who is critiquing the man standing behind him as someone who does not truly understand McLuhan’s theories. And while quoting McLuhan at parties might have its certain advantages because it makes you sound both smart and a prick at the same time, there is something to be said about the fact that you can still quote McLuhan at a party and actually still be relevant. Considering that he wrote Understanding Media at a time when the television was just beginning to emerge and years before the internet revolution, it was truly amazing for McLuhan to foresee the coming of the “global village” and the consequences of technology on our society, namely the impacts of the extensions of man.

The main premise of his book is the seminal statement “the medium is the message.”  here we are to understand that it is the impacts of technology–the environment that is changed by the emergence of any new innovation–that is and of itself the medium and the message, not the technology itself.  the content of technology is not necessarily a message that you and i might read as if we read a book.  but it is a content that carries a message of change.  he uses the example of the electric light bulb as a prime example in which while a light bulb’s content is not something you can read, but its message is actually the fact that it has now affected the way in which we work, play, and live.  our sense of time and scale has changed because we now have the ability to do continue our activities in once dark places and moments in time.

whether or not is it is any less important to understand media in today’s society as opposed to a little over 50 years ago, is not all-together clear.  what is clear is how much we have progressed towards this new sense of immediate urgency and environment in which we are now constantly changing based on new technologies.  I am consumed like most people, with the rush of daily work, living, and projects that fill a never-ending void but all with very apparent deadlines.  It has been surmised that technology and media will one day completely fix these time pressures on our behalf.  Through the introduction of instantaneous communication (e-mail, video conferencing, etc.), the work force is now free to continue at a pace that is no longer governed by physical limitations but as an indefatigable machine that produces at a continuous, unfailing rate.  No wonder that devices like the PDA and other electronic calendars are some of the most popular items on the market today.  Our culture has been bred to beat time; whereas, the only way how is to fulfill a seeemingly infinite number of tasks in a very finite amount of time.   McLuhan writes, “Ours is a brand—new world of allatonceness.  ‘Time’ has ceased, ‘space’ has vanished.  We now live in a global village…a simultaneous happening.”

With the advent of social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, people are able to communicate in a way that was never before available.  Friends and colleagues long fallen out of touch, now keep tabs on each other with the click of a button rather than with time-consuming conversations.  But as I wonder about the ease in which communication has been facilitated, I also question the times this week I have sent colleagues e-mails or instant messages rather than have walked over to their desk or called to deliver my message in person.  The myth being perpetuated by the belief that this immediate, instantaneous solution is more efficient and therefore better than doing things in a non-instantaneous or inferior manner.  When it comes to electronic communication, waiting is perceived as a downfall; and while we are at the mercy of various bandwidth support and download times, we forget to see that it could be our contribution as innovators and designers to emphasize the importance of human interaction.

And as we try to navigate our way through an increasingly convoluted environment, I find that the most valuable contributions to great ideas and projects are not necessarily solutions to complex technologies, but of our contributions as complex individuals.  Ultimately, we experience life emotionally.  These feelings can be intangible, volatile, and perhaps even unreasonable, but they drive us to coexist in a world of greater pursuits.  We would not believe that we live in a world where our interactions are transmitted purely through hidden synapses and silent, transmission waves.  Our thoughts, complicated and undefinable, require a more vast and delicate handling.  so as we continue to hurtle towards a future defined by our technological extensions, we must remember what it is that we are extending–our thoughts, emotions, memories–these are the messages of who we are as humans.

INITIAL OBSERVATIONS:

the midterm for my physical computing assignment ended up manifesting itself through several different iterations.  i initially chose an idea that revolved around wearable technology because i wanted to learn how to integrate traditionally “hard” circuits and components into something soft.

having a background that included jewelry design and fashion, i knew i also wanted to make the object to have the ability to stand on its own.

traditional uses of jewelry have ranged from:
1. a means of personal expression
2. mementos of an important friend or family member–lockets, family heirlooms
3. symbols of relationships–  engagement rings, friendship bracelets
4. cultural and religious purposes — rosary beads, crosses, etc.

and traditionally jewelry has been made from precious materials, metals, gemstones, etc.  mainly because craftsmen were limited in the availablity of materials.  however, starting with the introduction of plastics, glass, and various other material composites, designers began to bridge and break the boundaries of what was considered jewelry.  my hope would be that this piece would be something that would be able to also bridge several of these ideas as well.  something that would emphasize the wearer and the wearer’s interactions with others and something that would use the materials now available to us (in this case technology).

PROTOTYPING

Our first initial concept for the piece was that in consideration that much of the principle behind having an accessory is to enhance our appearance to the outside world, we aim instead, to have the outside environment complete our wearable object

our goal is:
to create an object that will only be affected until the wearer has interactions (whether it be specifically people or the environmental surroundings)

possible applications are:
- ear muffs
- tshirt
- necklace
- bracelet

methods for achieving this are:
- force sensors
- pressure sensors
- light sensors
- vibration sensor
- sound sensor (programming to recognize the human voice frequency)

possible outputs are:
- changes color
- changes shape
- moves (reacts)
- makes sounds

In the end, we chose to use sound as the means for which to demonstrate when our user would be having an interaction with someone else. unfortunately however, i don’t think we quite realized how much of an investment learning how to build a microphone and op-amp circuit would be.  but we were committed to the task and kept going with the help of a few people and mr. oscilloscope!

some of the initial problems we encountered was the amplification of our microphone signal.  the microphone signal itself was not strong enough so we needed to use an op-amp with a line signal of roughly -1 and 1 volts to get us anywhere at all.  however, sound being an AC signal and having an oscillating wave meant that we weren’t getting half the readings that we wanted.  in which case, we learned about the full-wave bridge rectifier using four diodes and a capacitor to help flip the bottom half of our AC waves into DC and the capacitor to smooth it out.

some other new issues that we encountered were learning how to take our circuit off the breadboard and on to something more portable and something more compact.  we at first began soldering our components onto small perf boards but soon realized that we would be needing something even more flexible which is when we started to experiment with using conductive thread.  we also attempted to use a lilypad arduino but unfortunately realized that we were missing the lilypad’s usb link!  but i hope to use it sometime in the near future to test its possibilities.

MOVING ON TO THE FINAL PRODUCT:

meanwhile, i was experimenting with various fabrics and materials to use for our piece to get the right look and feel for what we wanted.  however knowing that we wanted to use light as our output, i strove to find materials that would be somewhat translucent and transparent in order to display our led lights adequately.  as a design intention however, i knew that i wanted to contrast both the organic quality of our materials with the inorganic nature of technology but also at the same time to embrace the products of technology in a way that wasn’t cohesive.

we also couldn’t resolve the recurring problem of the microphone not picking up the sound of our voice or near voices versus noise in general.  this led us to change our initial idea of a human voice as the sign of interaction to the idea that an intimate interaction can be one that is not necessarily between just two people.  thus the new concept became…

…as we find that an increasing number of our interactions with people become non-personal through the use of email, telephones, IM, etc.  the moments of standing close to someone and whispering something in their ear as an act of intimacy and closeness between two people become fewer and far between.  in light of this, we strove to create an object that would display that act of intimacy between two people, encouraging a more physical means of communication and in effect, publicly celebrating it and making it an interaction of many between the viewers, the wearer, and the person with whom the wearer is interacting.

from there, the whole thing came together more easily.  we hid the microphone in two head pieces that would be placed near the ear, namely a pair of earrings that would blend into one necklace and a headband for the other necklace.

FUTURE IMPROVEMENTS:

we obviously still need to figure out what happened to our objects on the day of our presentation.  but we are determined to have a working piece for next week’s class. in the meantime, some hopes that i have for the future of our project would be that we would be able to effectively make it portable (ie. small batteries, small microchip instead of the arduino, and a better means of making the connection in our pieces).

our powerpoint presentation.

the first part of this week in pcomp was the transistor lab.  i hooked up everything and than supplied an external power source using my DC adaptor to supply to my DC motor.  however.  i think i must have wired something wrong because although it did work at one point, the next time i plugged in my arduino, it stopped responding and the software said that the programmer has stopped responding and the L LED light no longer lights up!  ah!

In this lab, we are further exploring serial communication by using multiple sensors as opposed to just one from the previous week.  The initial part of the lab was simply setting up our breadboard with two sensors.  In this case, I am using a force sensor and a potentiometer for my analog in and a switch for my digital.  The reading of my first sensor (the potentiometer) was successful as I received values from 0 to 1023. 

and than afterwards told Arduino to read me numbers with various types of data formats:

moving on…using the punctuation method to separate our sensor data:

and using the handshake/call-and-response method:

to bring it into processing.  i had to adjust the mapping values in processing in order to correctly get a range of my potentiometer and force sensor values.  i also had some problems with the background.  i couldn’t see my ellipse because of the background (bg color). 

ICM MIDTERM PROPOSAL

PURPOSE:

in order to present a unique and fascinating insight into people’s interest in weddings and obituaries, Diego and I are going to create an interactive platform with which the user can examine these two events using the NYTimes RSS feeds. it is also a commentary however on the types of people who would submit wedding announcements versus the types of people who are deemed worthy of announcements (as in obits).

GOAL:
create two swarms that are rotating around two foci on our screen.
one swarm represents obituaries
the other represents weddings

the user will be able to roll over one of the objects which will bring up a small block of information with a photo and the announcement

STEPS:

- requesting the xml data from the NYT RSS feed
- create a new String that will find and replace all of the hexadecimal for apostrophe (which is giving us problems) with “/’” (apostrophe in processing)
- save the new String as the old String
- save the file in our folder
- create two classes of objects, weddings and obituaries
- have objects rotate/swarm around focal points
- create a mouse rollover effect that detects when the mouse is over the object
- create a timer effect that detects how long the mouse is over the object so that it will hover and grow while a pop-up screen appears with the linked information from the NYTimes
- when mouse rolls out, the object will return to size and to the swarm

CODE:

the initial code is here.

For our sequential image assignment, Dimitri and I decided to go back to our original idea of the computer mouse as mouse. This time however, our mouse put forth such an immense acting achievement that a movie producer wants to buy the rights to our concept and star our mouse as E.P. extra peripheral probably making it the best non-concept since seinfeld.

this week’s lab has been about exploring serial communication, specifically between a variable resistor (in this case the potentiometer) and the computer.

first, i programmed the arduino to read the values coming in from the potentiometer which actually gave me the data in BYTES causing the data to come out looking funky like this.

second, i tried to open up a serial port using terminal on Mac OS X but for some reason it kept returning a value that said “permission denied”.

finally, i programmed processing to read and write using the computer’s serial ports.

and used the x-position on the graph to visually graph the potentiometer’s values.

this week we are learning how to control a servo motor using analog input.  the servo motor is a great little tool for doing all sorts of things and i’m sure the possibilites are endless. nevertheless, following through the basic steps is essential and I was pretty successful in terms of wiring up the breadboard and our potentiometer for the first part of the assignment.

next i decided to take it a little further by using a photocell to control the movements of the servo motor and to take that idea of hand movements and apply it to shadow puppetry.  so far the servo’s motions are a bit too jerky i think for this exercise but i still do believe that it is a nice take on the idea of how a different sort of hand motion can control a puppet. I made a little video below showing the puppet in action. I didn’t have any cloth on hand though so next time I think it would be fun to see what it would look like behind a screen. i was also initially imagining a whole stage set-up with several puppets controlled by several different servo motors…may be some hanging and going up and down or somehow moving across the stage. the music in the video is bonnie “prince” billy, the world’s greatest.

Servo Shadow Puppet from Angela Chen on Vimeo.

this week’s project was building on my last week’s assignment and arranged the objects i had created, “balls” and “orbs,” into two different arrays.  Clicking the mouse will add additional orbs to the sketch through appending.