The diploma-work is progressing. Most weeks consist of electronics, programming, building, a little layout, writing and sorting out what I’m actually doing. Today I’ve been working on a front-end mock-up of the webservice side of the project (and been wrestling with google-maps: which are ubiquitous but not very good!)
This is an preliminary prototype of a device that interrupts you while you move through the city. Its the first of a series of devices designed to studie “everyday life as urban infrastructure”. More on this later.
We ( Timo, Jørn and I ) have just come home from Picnic07 in Amsterdam, where we participated on the Mediamatic RFID hacker camp. Together with Anne Helmond we built a photobooth that uses RFID to access the Picnic database. The photobooth takes photos of the Picnic07 participants, when they touch their RFID-tags to a spot iside the booth. The photos get uploaded to Flickr and connections between the people being photographed are made within the Picnic network. The photobooth managed to take 1346 photos during the conference!
Thanks to Anne and the RFID hacker camp crew!
Friday 14.09.07 I was one of the speakers at the first day of the Urban Interface conference in Oslo . It was a quite interesting event and a good opportunity to present my diploma-thoughts to a diverse audience. I presented my views on urban computing and urban gaming, and gave a slight preview of my diploma. I got interesting feedback, and I think the event can help me focus my concept/project. It was also a great exercise in communicating my research-work and discussing it outside the school-context.
I´ve uploaded my presentation and notes here: “Urban Computing and the Temple of Doom”
And I´ve been asked to gather a link-list from the talk:
“
I will be talking on the Urban Interfaces conference in Oslo the 14th of September. I will be talking about previous work with urban gaming (”The Institute of PanGalactic Studies“) and about current work with my Master thesis (”Adventures in Urban Computing”).
For the last couple of months I have been working on my Diploma in interaction design at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. The project will be delivered in December, and exhibited in January. The theme for the Diploma is Urban Computing; an emerging multi-disciplinary research field that focuses on computing and digital networks in urban landscapes, and on the cultural and social impact this has on the city. The project is situated between urbanism and interaction design and works specifically with designing mobile technology devices with the purpose of provoking and gathering opinions about everyday life in cities and towns. The conceptual backdrop of the project consists of oldschool psychogeography, the exploration of the Arctic, the commonplace and Indiana Jones. The project´s vision is to design and equip an exploration into the non-spectacular and mundane side of city life.
I´m currently working with theory and concepts, but will rapidly be moving on to practical exercises and prototyping. The thesis-program can be downloaded from here:“Adventures in Urban Computing” (program)
Today (10.05.07) I talked about the Music-ball-project (among other things) on the NRK P2-program Transit. (The program can be heard by clicking the 10.05.07-link.)
“Bowl” is a project looking on containers in the home as possible touchpoints for NFC-technology. The project investigates how specific objects and behaviors in the home can be utilized as interfaces for digital technology. It focuses on bowls, both as containers and as devices for sharing and presenting.
To be able to look into the detailed interactions with bowls and objects I´ve chosen to work on a specific case:
Case : To develop and test a token-based mediaplayer for children designed around a bowl. When the child places a specific token in the bowl the TV plays a specific movie ( i.e. Elephant-token = Elephant-movie).
The case-studie includes my 2 year old daughter as the primary test-subject and will be done over a longer period of time. Hopefully this will result in knowledge about the possibilities and challenges of alternative interactions with NFC-systems in the home.
The project-description and outline can be downloaded here:
ID-12 RFID-readers as modules for prototyping and testing. We´ve also built simple modules with only a Gnd/+5V/Data-plug for connecting to the microcontrollers.
Laptop-concert at Sound of Mu (24.03.07)
Sounds and hits from recent years.
(soon available for download…)