7 in 7 is bold scheme to do seven creative projects in seven days. The Resident Researchers at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program are pioneering this venture beginning June 8th, 2008. The mandate is as follows:
- Do a creative project every day for seven straight days, starting Sunday, June 8th
- Projects must be completed in a day, so they need to be as compact as they are creative.
- Each project needs a name and documentation posted at the end of the day. It should be a stand-alone accomplishment.
A preview of project ideas include Physical Flight Tracker, Door Twitter Sign, Salad Dress, Robot Phone, Window Ghosts and an album about a dangerous water park. Documentation will be aggregated on the 7 in 7 blog.
Just finished putting together Limor’s $22 Wave Shield for Arduino. This shield snaps on top of the Arduino microcontroller board, creating a ridiculously easy way to get audio playback into physical computing prototypes. The Wave Shield will play back uncompressed .wav files of any length from a regular SD card, either over headphones or through a small speaker. Now projects can chant, count, warn, soothe, mumble, moo, cajole, challenge, respond, sob and sing.
Like all of the Adafruit kits, Limor has made the ????????schematic and board files available for download, so once you’ve prototyped with the shield, you can adapt her design into a custom PCB. My favorite story so far is an NYC Resistor guy who combined a light sensor with a prerecorded scream. He made his Arduino afraid of the dark.
The May 15th edition of BBC World’s Click program covered the release of the Botanicalls Kit in their News beat. This is the second time the BBC has touted Botanicalls to the English-speaking world of leaf-lovers and hopefully we can keep them all as perennial fans now that they can buy a kit.
The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago is featuring Botanicalls as part of its Smart Home: Green + Wired exhibit. The Smart Home is a real, three-story modular and sustainable “green” home in the Museum’s own backyard to teach about the ways, big and small, that visitors can make eco-friendly living a part of their lives.
Museum visitors are taken on a tour of the home. In the upstairs office, they get a live demonstration of a Botanicalls English Ivy, which makes a phone call to complaining about its thirst. Guests can also buy their own Botanicalls Kit on the exhibit’s web site. You can see the home and its talking plant in Chicago through January 4th, 2009.
Botanicalls is continuing with open source initiatives on several fronts. We’re applying for the Rhizome commission and members should remember to vote…for us…so that we can continue to bring humans closer to the natural world.
There’s also serious work underway to make kits available to the public, spurred along by an upcoming exhibition in Chicago. More announcements on that front soon. While you’re waiting, please vote!
Robofest is a “day-long event for youth exploring the creative world of robotics.” Kate, Jenny, Max and I were asked by Vision Ed Inc board president Marianne Petit to be judges for the DANCING WITH THE ROBOSTARS competition at Sony Wonder Technology Lab in New York City. The five competing teams of children each built dancing Lego robots, and choreographed routines for themselves to dance along with their creations. We witnessed a medieval swordplay performance, Hawaiian surfing dance, video game emulation, disco mash-up and a funk collaboration. The young inventors learned their robotics skills under the tutelage of Laura Allen, through Vision Ed Inc in New York. We loved it so much that we gave everyone a prize.
I delivered an updated version of my Designing Attraction talk on Friday evening, as part of the Speaker Series that we host. There were a some slick signs up in advance of the talk, and it was publicized online as well, so I was pleased to serenade a decent crowd. Designing Attraction is a class that I’m working on producing about how to apply our knowledge of human decision-making to create projects that attract, engage and persuade people. The talk was streamed live over the Internet, and a video archive is available online. I’m working on building out a syllabus next so I can add this class to my teaching portfolio.
This summer I’ll be teaching a graduate class called Sociable Objects at NYU that includes pretty much everything you ever wanted to know about the XBee radios including ZigBee. Here’s the course description:
Sociable objects are devices that share. They can talk to each other, gain information about their context and react accordingly. Recent advances in wireless mesh networks have created the potential for a massively interconnected world of easy information sharing. Cheap communications, high reliability, unique addressing, small size, standardization, and routing features combine to enable exciting new interactions. Developers of toys, wearables, performance devices, portables, network objects and sensor arrays can take advantage of radio mesh networking to design more interesting, better informed and more complex behaviors for their projects. This course explores devices that connect with and respond to each other. The technical focus will be on 802.15.4/ZigBee wireless mesh networks. Interconnections with other platforms and devices will be examined as appropriate. Students will gain an expertise in all functions of the ZigBee system to facilitate smart and novel behaviors in their projects. Through a series of weekly exercises, students will build skills and explore the challenges and delights of mutual connectivity. As a final project, the class will construct dynamic device networks. Prior experience with basic electronics and physical computing is helpful, but not required. Most labs and projects involve group work, so students should be ready to collaborate extensively as they experiment on the cutting edge of device interaction.
Also be sure to check out ITP’s excellent summer Soft Circuits course and the Studio in Prototyping. Either would make a great double-header with Sociable Objects. Summer classes at ITP are open to everyone so now’s a good time to sign up.
I’ve been working on an idea for an ITP class that explores the psychology of human decision-making, and applies this powerful science to interaction design. The best way to learn something is to teach it, so on Sunday I did the first run of an hour-long presentation on the subject at BarCampNYC3. I talked about biases, heuristics and Cialdini’s “weapons of influence” including social-proof, reciprocity and a host of other persuasive methods. The slides for this trial run gave a rough overview of decision-making psychology, after which we had a spirited discussion of examples and ethics. The next version is going to conclude with some compelling illustrations of real world applications.
According to their web site, “BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants.” This one was held on the campus of Polytechnic University in Brooklyn, probably soon to be a new division of NYU. Lots of interesting people came, including my hacker buddies from NYCResistor and a few intrepid presenters from Canada and even Europe.
The next version of my Designing Attraction talk should be presented ITP in a couple weeks, as a Friday lecture.
In case you hadn’t heard, we’ve made Botanicalls Twitter as a do-it-yourself example for people who like to–well–do it themselves. It’s the first step in making Botanicalls available to a wider audience, and the online press has taken note. In the last 48 hours, we’ve been graced by the attention of:
Make Magazine
CNet
Slashdot
Lifehacker
Gizmodo
Wired
…and even Business Week
Botanicalls Twitter would not have happened without both brilliant code and sage advice from Limor Fried. We also appreciate the support of Phil Torrone who inspired our Twitter venture and helped to make it a success. Botanicalls is a project from Kate Hartman, Kati London, Rebecca Bray and Rob Faludi.
