I’m pleased to see a new product over at ThinkGeek, who are now offering the LittleBits Kits for electronics prototyping and learning. The kit has various sensors surface mounted with standardised connectors, which snap together magnetically. They are positioned for 7-13 year olds as well as hobbyists and newbies to electronics.
It’s clear that their ease of use greatly hides the detail of what’s going on electronically. For beginning learners this is good, as you can get straight to the payoff – I put a few bits together and wow!, I can build a touch-activated LED. This allows for easy trial-and-error testing, asking questions, exploring possibilities. And it can spawn further inquiry into what is actually going on electronically. It is one level of abstraction higher from, say, an Arduino, which would be an obvious choice for people who would like to take their learning a LittleBit further (sorry, couldn’t resist…not in my capacity…oof!). Incidentally, we created a similar kit with the Arduino team, at TinkerLondon, without magnetic connectors, though. The pricepoint is a little high for all but the most enthusiastic geekdads and will likely price LittleBits out of many school budgets. However, for those who are able to splurge, it makes a welcome addition to the toolset for learning.
For Design prototyping, LittleBits’ main limitation will be that the mounting of the components on boards limits how these pieces can be placed into a physical housing, and in fact, the main idea is to support learning and experimentation, rather than testing out interactivity. However, I can see a compelling case for adding this to the Design Studio trolley of raw materials for exploration and design ideation. I’ll be even more excited to locate a UK distributor!
Along with my colleague Yishay Mor, I will be chairing a workshop on Learning Design at the London Knowledge Lab in October. We’ll be investigating several thematic strands in Learning Design, including:
Theoretical Frameworks
Tools and Resources
Practices & Methods
Representations
Check out the CFP at the workshop website and make your travel plans now. It promises to be a truly engaging event!
I’m very pleased to announce that an app I’ve been working on for the past few months, Mammals on Roads (MoR), has finally been released on the iTunes App Store. The app allows “citizen scientists” to participate in the Mammals on Roads survey run by the People’s trust for Endangered Species (in the UK only). It’s essentially a tool for logging roadkill sightings – but on a positive note, contributes to a multi-year study on endangered mammals in the UK. And it’s a lot easier and more accurate to record sightings on the phone than on the old paper surveys!
The release of MoR almost coincided with another app, iBats (see my Projects and posts about that). Special thanks are due to my colleagues Adam Talcott and Crystal Campbell for their excellent collaboration on the project.
After a year of requirements gathering, development, refinement, and testing, iBats is finally ready for release! I’ve been working in collaboration with Adam Talcott of Atomic Powered to create a new iPhone application for the Institute of Zoology, in London. The app allows anyone with an iPhone to collaborate with the Institute to collect data on various bat species. The app connects to an ultrasonic microphone and records bat chirps, marrying this audio data with geotagging. Volunteers can drive around and sample bat sounds, so that data about populations and activity can be collected and uploaded to the Institute. People can set up an account to help out with the Indicator Bats Programme which tracks biodiversity.
As part of this project, I had to develop a cable adaptor which would allow users to connect a stereo line-in jack to the iPhone. The iPhone has a sensing circuit, so that it knows when a mic is plugged in – so you can’t simply plug a stereo line directly into an iPhone and get it to work. I previously posted details about hack to deal with this, and a circuit diagram so that you can build your own. Special props to Peter Knight for assistance with this part of the project!
The iBats app will be integrated with online user accounts and will be released on the App Store in the near future. I’ll post a link when it is ready for download there. An Android version is also being written.
I’ve been working with my colleagues on a project for SonyEricsson around the release of their latest mobile phones series (Satio and Aino). The project involves using twitter to inflate a warehouse full of spacehoppers on a live webcam. The hoppers will be “released in the wild” as part of the product launch, and tweeters can suggest what their fate should be. The whole system uses an Arduino-controlled solenoid array which takes its input from a Ruby script which is listening to the twitter streaming API. Tweets sent via the API are used to randomly inflate one of the 49 hoppers on the array. The hoppers, username and the tweet message are displayed via a live feed. Sony Ericsson have posted the “making-of” video on YouTube, and I found myself simplifying the technical details, yet again…
The British Computer Society’s Annual conference on Human-Computer Interaction was held in Cambridge last week and I popped round to present a paper on using sketching as a design technique to improve collaborative design activity, enhance creativity, and generally help the design process. This is an approach we foster at Tinker.it! and we try to actively engage with our clients in this kind of collaborative idea generation.
Highlights of the conference were the Keynote addresses and a few interesting papers on tangible interaction (though these were old news by now). In the opening Keynote, Prof Anthony Dunne, Head of Design Interaction at the Royal College of Art presented several interactive student projects and generally perplexed the audience, many of whom are not used to thinking about interaction design from a designer’s perspective – a couple of the audience questions could be summed up as “What’s the point?” The Formal Methods (see wikipedia) guys had a field day.
UI demigod Bill Buxton presented a stimulating closing keynote which showed examples of user interfaces from days gone by, like a touchscreen interactive mobile phone from 1991(!) – no web access though, since that was BEFORE THE INTERNET. Remember that?? He suggested that we can get a lot of great interaction design ideas and bootstrap design by looking at what’s gone before. And he made a good case for studying your interaction design history books – yeah, they don’t exist. In fact, at Tinker.it! we’re currently working on a really cool retro-80’s project with some pretty novel and old user interfaces. The results will be at the BFI this weekend, so stay tuned.
Urbanscreen, with their installation/projection in Hamburg’s Galerie der Gegenwart have pulled of a very nice example of the technology passively supporting the content – that is, the content stays main event. The effect they produce – an impressive, building-sized, animated trompe l’oeil does what it should do: it amazes passersby with the content and the effect. “How’d they do that?” is less a question – and that’s the way it should be. Anyone can tell it’s a projector; that’s irrelevant. And it’s not even interactive.
So many interaction designers miss this key point: it’s not about the technology. It’s about the experience. The problem with a great deal of contemporary “interactive” installation work is that people become fixated on the how, not the what, which misses the point entirely. People need to be focused on your message and not on how you made it happen.
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After a year of requirements gathering, development, refinement, and testing, iBats is finally ready for release! I’ve been working in collaboration with Adam Talcott of 
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