Last semester, as part of Service Design for Public Spaces, a class taught by Rachel Abrams, my fellow students and I produced GO4: A ‘Go Bag’ for New York’s recently laid-off.

From the website:

“GO4 is a suite of services for New York’s New jobless, connecting people to resources they need for the arc of time between a layoff, surviving unemployment and getting back on their feet…

After 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, New York City’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM) ran a campaign called Ready New York to prompt individuals to prepare a bag of essentials to have handy in case of emergency, whenever a natural or man-made disaster called for a quick exit out of town.

This year’s ‘Go Bag’ responds to New Yorkers facing a crisis of a different kind:
The economic downturn – intangible and invisible and not site-specific, but no less disastrous for some.

It’s a concept proposed by an architect and an interaction designer and articulated by a group of ITP grad students who live and work and study (in) NYC”

Click here to download the full presentation.

It has since been picked up by Brian Lehrer of WNYC Radio under ‘Uncommon Economic Indicators,’ a project focusing on unusual manifestations of the downturn.  More info here.

DISCOVERING THE EMOTIONAL QUOTA OF EVERYDAY OBJECTS

Picture a scene in which highly valued objects d’art are being examined and appraised for their worth.  Laid out is a precise system for emptying your baggage, your self-worth, your memories, and displaying them in a visual system of objects, a classification order intending to be a mirror of yourself.  Part performance, part interactive art, the Object Fetish Atelier (OFA) seeks to help people understand the meaning and the emotional attachment behind the things they carry with them everyday.

More than interactive art, the OFA offers a service using the metaphor of renegade art agents, who engender the user to question the objects in their posession.  Today, the selection process behind the objects we buy is all the more essential, in light of the new economic order.  In our consumer society, we tend to buy certain objects because we are told that it is like nothing else; in reality, we also buy certain objects because everyone else has done so.  In such a way, these objects are a way for us to project onto its entity our desires, and allows us to become oneself through the accumulation of such objects.  We aim to have the user question the things they own and our appraisal of these objects will imbue them with new life, allowing them to extend beyond mere objectification and rather, giving the owner a chance to develop a new love affair.

PROCESS:
Under the cloak of the OFA, we will ask participants to drop off the contents of their purse, pockets, bags, etc. onto a tray that will be engraved with a matrix that is broken down between different emotional states.  The agents will than insert the tray under a camera that will take in the contents of the tray and going through an array of pixels will distinguish the objects from each other as well as their specific location on the tray.  Using an algorithm in Java that we will develop, the final output will take the user’s objects and create a visual system in a spatial panoply that arranges their objects according to either: (a) emotional state; (b) color; and (c) size/shape.

PROJECT REQUIREMENTS:
In order to accomplish this, we will need to borrow a black table, on top of which we will build a hutch that will house our camera and lighting equipment.  Within the hutch the trays will be inserted.  Underneath the tray we will place a sheet of retro-reflective material under a sheet of clear plexi.  We will also need an LCD screen to display the visual output.

ABSTRACT: For those of us without any vision impairment, the world is a visually rich environment; and we have learned to base many of our judgments and actions upon what we are able to see.  For those of us without this ability however, the task becomes that much more difficult.  There are several options I believe however in the future in which cameras can aid in the endeavor towards helping vision impairment become a thing of the past.

(1) THE CONTACT CAMERA

The notion of a camera as portable is important in our increasingly mobile society.  The ubiquitous cell phone camera has literally infiltrated the market so much so that the cost of production is minimal yet the instant feedback is intensely satisfying.  Yet despite the fact that we most always have this camera with us given our latent dependencies on cell phones, it still requires the explicit step of centering this camera over our frame of view which at times can be inconvenient and conspicuous.  Enter the world of nanotechnology and biological enhancement to create the Contact Camera.

Current research is being done at the University of Washington to create the Bionic Contact Lens which opens up possibilities of bringing the digital world into our everyday environment, projecting information and data before our very eyes.  Digital contact lenses could be embedded with microscopic electronic circuity that will allow the wearer to not analyze their environment the way a camera sees it in terms of light levels, GPS positioning, and other metadata, but also in honing the eye to a new way of perception  and memory.  Gone are the days of forgetting a certain event or object, the contact camera would be able to instantly transfer data over a wireless network to a databanks that would become warehouses of images, memories, emotions, information and more.

I believe that there could be further implementations of the camera that would be used towards the possible use of the contact camera as enabling the blind to see.  Research done at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies has shown that projecting images past the damaged parts of the eye directly onto the retina are registered and recognized by the brain, enabling people to see.   Their current prohibitive areas are currently cost and the size of the machine used for this technology which the contact camera could possibly resolve.

(2) CAMERA IN THE THIRD-DIMENSION!

Computer vision is already trained to reconstruct 3D environments from one or several images which can be simply a set of points in space or reconstructing a more complex surface model.  Though currently heavy in its implementation, future models of a camera could possibly quickly produce 3D physical models to be read by the blind along with a voice recording device that would provide additional information.  Although only a conceptual prototype for now, the Touch Sight camera uses these ideas by using a Braille display sheet which than displays a 3D image by embossing the surface, allowing the user to touch their photo.

vase modeled using subdivision surfaces in Maya and fabricated using a 3D printer.

Description  of Work

For our midterm project, Adi Marom and I built a machine whose purpose was to create an “inflatable” structure.  Our original proposal was the transformation of the shape and size of these structures through air using a piston-and-crank mechanism, powered by either a servo or DC motor.  In the end, we chose to focus more on the mechanism itself and using the idea of  paper-folded “puffer fish” as a whimsical counterpoint to the solid sleek nature of the linkages and pistons used to make them expand and contract.

In the same vein as utopian architectural movements from the 60s, it was to be an outlet for us to creatively play with a structure that is at once grounded in the mechanisms of our machine but also ephemeral in its final result. We are fascinated by the ephermalization quality of the structures, transforming between a compact and an expanded state.

Components / Structural requirements

The geared DC-motor powers the mechanism that controls the expansion and contraction of our structures. A crank and double-piston mechanism was used to convert between the rotary motion of the motors to the reciprocating motion of the “pumps”. The linkages were first drawn in AutoCAD which was than converted to an illustrator file to create the template that  was laser-cut out of a clear acrylic sheet.  The “pumps” were made from acrylic rods & tubes.

Puff. the Machine from Angela Chen on Vimeo.

Wiked Awesome!!! from Winslow Porter on Vimeo.

For our midterm, we continued the color tracking extravaganza to make it even bigger.  This time we went on a road trip at ITP and turned ourselves into a comic strip.

our roving setup to follow our car comes complete with video camera and laptop and winslow.

Planning our comic strip portion.

and

The code has been refined so that it is less jumpy.

MASKPARTY featuring Coconut Horse, ODB, Lemonhead, and Mario from Winslow Porter on Vimeo.

Our group wanted to accomplish several things for this week’s assignment: first to improve the code from last week make it less jumpy and to let it track things that are not necessarily in a straight line.  And secondly, to do something different with color tracking.