Workshop #3

Today we had our third and final workshop. We spent most of the day doing creative building with Lego. Through various exercises, we used lego as a creative guide to develop and come up with ideas. After initial exercises to get the creativity going, and telling stories about the things we built, we were sorted …

Presentation day

Yesterday we presented our lit reviews. Afterwards we developed our business idea through a workshop. The critique I received for my presentation was mainly that it lacked a real focus. I needed to sell something better. I agree with this myself, in that I don't think I really had a business or idea to sell …

Reflections on the code before the big day

The lamp is now ready to show off to the world.   After letting the sensor warm up for 18 hours, it is now a lot more responsive to user input. We tweaked a few values of the code to make the lamp feel as alive and give immediate feedback, and not delayed. This is …

Photo shoot

Yesterday we also had a proper photoshoot of the lamp where we tried to capture the both the interaction gestalt, the physical form and the temporal form. I think we succeeded in showing as much as possible in the four pictures. The only part not shown, is the lamp slowly fading over time.

Temporal form: Fine tuning the code

Since the physical form of the lamp is now complete, the only thing left to do is getting the code and sensor to work together as we want it. These form the basis of the temporal form, and for the lamp to feel satisfying and interesting to use. What we've been doing to achieve this, is fine …

The devil is in the detail

The lamp is now fully functional and tied together. We faced a challenge earlier on, with the glueing-flaps casting hard shadows on the inside of the lamp. To solve this issue, we embraced this problem and tried to turn it into something visually pleasing. To tie the physical form more to the grounded and natural …

Final decisions on physical form

Working on the final touches of the physical form, we explored different shapes in which to blow, to activate the sensor. We tried a few different options for what signified "blow here" rather than "Talk here" or "kiss here". Ultimately we ended going with our original thought, the right-most shape of the picture below. We also …

Final touches on the code

Taking advantage the DMX system, we hooked up a power supply to our lightbulb and added the dmx simple library to the code. To create a piece of code that responded better to the exact moments that people started and stopped blowing at the lamp, we re-added an average function to the code: float averageFraction …

Now we’re talking – Air Quality Sensor

We finally got hold of a sensor that does exactly what we want it to. An e-mikro Air quality Click. It gives us precise and clear readings from blowing into it. It measures the CO2, so shaking the table or the heat rising in the room doesn't affect it. Somehow, talking doesn't affect it either. …

Working on the physical shape

To avoid people using the lamp as a joystick, we're looking into ways to make people understand how to interact with the lamp. To do this we're adding a wooden base, for the lamp to seem more solid and grounded. We also considered cutting off some of the tip, to take away the joystick feel. Below …