Objectives

The primary objective is to inspire wonder and delight through the magic of embedded computing. Some ideas for possible forms which projects might take:

1. An artifact which visitors handle, manipulate, or wear.
2. A fixed installation or wall-mounted system, either intended for direct contact or remote interaction.
3. An unobtrusive environmental intervention which creates responsivity in a space.
4. A system of components related to making or building which visitors use to create or explore.
5. An everyday artifact which children might use in their daily lives.

Our goal at each stage is to produce a working proof-of-concept device, not necessarily a museum-ready experience: there are many problems related to engineering for public use which will lead you far astray from the scope and intent of this course. Children in particular are notoriously rough on installations. That said, actual hands-on testing will be more successful if attention is paid to robust construction.

These are intended to be research and exploration projects: the whole point is to learn something new, and no one is paying you for the result. Reasonable ambition is encouraged, so we’d like you to try new things, and failure is part of the process. However, we will attempt to guide you away from directions which we think are unlikely to succeed or require unreasonable levels of effort. But you are the ultimate arbiter of this: we won’t outright say no because we want you to learn to assess your own ambitions and skills and don’t want to stand in your way.

A guiding principle of the course is that all ideas can be rendered at all scales. Even if your idea is grand, there is certainly a core abstraction where the essential questions can be tested with simple prototypes.

Embodying Wonder

Our main objective: focus on creating a moment of delight.

The idea is really to build a machine which creates happiness. This can come from any number of things: a moment of delicious surprise, amusement, something sensory and stimulating, something memorable or mysterious, perhaps something social or loving, something comforting or chaotic.

This objective is quite open-ended, and perhaps one of the best ways to approach it is to remember: what gave you delight as a child? What was a secret fascination? What did you not understand until much later? It might be quite mundane. It doesn’t need to be universal; you may have a mystery which is particularly appealing to some but glossed over by others.

The central question we are trying to answer in the course is how the secret sauce of computation can be embedded into ordinary behaviors to modify them. There is a central tension between this and the goal of transparency; computation is an essentially invisible process, a black box. But we see what it does, so the role of computation can be elucidated by focusing on behavior. So it is true that the sensory stimulation of inanimate objects and characters can be quite delightful, but we are specifically focused on the kind of delight which comes from how these objects or characters act.

Don’t be afraid to keep it simple; making the right connection between cause and effect in a clear and empowering way can be very delightful.

Milestones

Students will work in pairs throughout the process. The nominal project sequence follows:

1. survey trip to Pittsburgh Children’s Museum
2. ideation
3. survey trip to Children’s School (on-campus)
4. proposal
5. purchasing and materials acquisition
6. detailed design
7. prototype fabrication
8. first test at Museum
9. review and revision
10. on-campus test at Children’s School
11. final revisions
12. second test at Museum
13. final critique
14. final documentation

Studying the Problem. We will need to become familiar with the vocabulary, approach, and constraints of the Museum. We will also need to become familiar with the opportunities and problems presented by making artifacts to engage with humans ranging from four-year old children to adults.

Children’s School visit. The class will make in-class trip to observe a four-year old classroom in the on-campus Children’s School in Margaret Morrison Hall. This does not reflect the museum context, but will provide insight in the cognitive level of a key target audience.

Purchasing. Each project will receive an allocation of the course budget, to be spent on either specific items or general prototyping materials. Please plan expenditures and request orders well in advance of your needs.

Iteration Process

The multiple iterations reflect that every test will yield significant information about both performance of the device and the audience perception. The revisions should certainly include fixing implementation problems but should also consider the specific observations of the children and consider deeper design revisions.

Potential revision objectives: increase engagement, enable simultaneous interaction with multiple visitors, extend the audience to a wider range, improve compatibility with the museum context. For example:

1. Go beyond creating delight for one visitor to engaging both children and parents. Can the project create a dialogue among visitors?
2. Follow through on the initial appeal with a more extended interaction. What was the feature which captured delight at first sight? Can it lead to a process of discovery? What additional intrigue can be revealed through sustained engagement?
3. Can the project follow an autonomy/initiative/industry progression by letting an affordance for independence develop into a decision opportunity leading to a concrete, tangible outcome?
4. Can the project move from a site-specific form to a more universal outcome?

Metrics of Success

A key element of the discussion process will be identifying metrics for evaluating the success of each project stage. Quantitative metrics can be difficult, and sometimes the only practical measure is observing the length and frequency of visitor engagement, but it is important to identify other potential measures and even build measurement into projects as feasible.

Qualitative metrics will help establish the framework for critique. These may come from the discourse of art, design, and product engineering, but we will also look for qualitative metrics from museum practice.

Technical Requirements

1. The project should blend computation and mechanism; that’s the whole point of the class.
2. It would be best to stick with a level of mechanical fabrication at the level of the laser-cutter for rapid iteration, and we can help you design for flat parts. But this is not required; if you have access to other fabrication resources no method is out of scope.
3. It would be best to avoid needing a laptop attached, so the use of computer vision, network access, large data sets, etc. is discouraged (but not disallowed).
4. The project must actually work; this is not just a occasion to test mockups or non-functional prototypes in the space. (This has not generally been a problem.)