Student Area

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“Taptap” is a physical computing project created by Leonardo Bonanni, Jeff Lieberman, and Cati Vaucelle. It is a wearable scarf that uses haptic input/output modules to record and play back nurturing human touch. Taptap can be personalized for individuals and its creators thought that it could provide emotional therapy. The idea of using technology to provide emotional comfort that feels real and substantial is something that interests me, especially during the pandemic when we are more isolated. The emotional comfort that could be provided by this project comes from recreating human connection and emotion; it’s not just a gimmick or distraction.

http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~orit/taptap.html

junebug-soli-sketches

I really would like to focus on creating beautiful, mesmerizing art with this project because I really appreciated how different Caroline’s Chalky Weirdos was from other Soli projects because of the introduction to illustrations.

Idea #1: Landscape Pond Visual
Design will include lily pads, water ripples, koi fish flocking, firefly flocking, and maybe more later?
Tap: add more ripples, which the koi fish/fireflies will then avoid the area
Swipe: Change of time of day (swipe right: morning –> noon –> dusk –> night / swipe left: reversal)

Idea #2: Tarot Card Reading
Each card will be hand-illustrated and would like it to be very detailed and look like Caroline’s project
4 card placements with a stack of cards at the bottom in a random array.
Swipe: move a card from stack to a placement
Tap: Flip over the card

Idea #3: Forest Landscape Visual
Inspired by my Looking Outwards 2 post about Manolo Gamboa Naon’s work. Want to create a hypnotizing work of a landscape with generated trees.
In a perfect world, I would like it if the sensor could tell the position of the user’s hand hovering over the phone so then the colors of the trees would shift colors where the hand hovers over
Swipe: make trees rustle/move side to side
Tap: change color variations

mokka – Looking Outwards 03

 

Mitgenommen(2014) is a collaborative project by Kaho Abe with Caro Blaim, Elia Tomat, Eszter Némethi, George Sinclair, Ramsey Nasser, Lilli Unger, Martin Kroll, Mascha Fehse, Sandra Panzer, and Tom Clowney. These people were a group of game designers and architects!

final public park space

The group crafted hand-made wooden boxes with found materials and made each of them function diversely(some move, some light up, and some make noises). Every box utilized solar power to function. They designed these boxes in hopes to invoke curiosity and playfulness into a park that stood in the middle of the city they were in Witten, Germany.

 

I think the most important aspect that I admired about this project is the fact that those who interact with it(the park-goers) are allowed to rearrange the boxes as they please. They can be taken away, stacked, or even hidden! The people who visit the park have agency in what the artwork can end up looking like for other later viewers.

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I think this work by Zimoun is really cool. I spent a lot of time on his website and I think this work really stood out relative to his other work. Inside this old water tank, Zimoun created a sound installation which gives a very other-worldly sensation. The installation uses hundreds of motors DC motors and cotton balls to create a unique, repeating sound. The sounds are asynchronous, which allows randomness to arise out of order. Zimoun's ability to create nuanced environments with repeating elements is fantastic. Computationally, none of it is difficult (ie. it's just some motors spinning). However, being able to translate a simple computation into a dynamic environment is fascinating to me.

pinkkk-CriticalInterface

 (To) interface is a verb (I interface, you interface ...). The interface occurs, is action.

-Be gentle with your keyboard, after 70 years typewriting your fingers will appreciate it. 

-Change the keyboard settings to one that doesn't match the images printed on your keys. Once you get used to it, change again. 

-Do not click today.
 I find this to be most interesting because it fundamentally challenges my understanding of an interface. I have always thought of "interface" as something on FIGMA that the design team passes on to the front-end team to implement. It's something that's for sure comes to life from static pixels to interactive components of a live app, but I've never thought of the word as a verb. The level of familiarity that I have with having interfaces in every moment, every angle of my life, has made me forget that the word "interface" is not just a noun before "interface designer", it's what I interact with and what I need as I am typing down this particular letter. These are all interfaces, but I've forgot about their existence because of how they are well integrated in me.

 

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Tenet 9. Can we make the invisible visible? The more present interfaces are in our lives, the less we perceive them.

  • Don’t use emoticons: just send oral-spoken messages to say you hate it! “I’m blind cos I see images” (Mahmud Shabistari) (1>)(P)(W)(+c)
  • How many times do you remember you’re shifting gears when driving? Speak the gear number loud every time you do it.(P)(1)(-c)
  • Use your smartphone with your toe (or your tongue) https://vimeo.com/104791815 (A)(+c)(1>)
I found this tenet interesting because the pervasiveness of interfaces. Often times great video editing goes unnoticed because it allows the view to be engrossed in the video. By contrast, glaring discontinuities (bad jumpcuts, etc) are very easily noticed. I think interfaces are similarly invisible, and only really noticeable when you look for it. Something as simple as the way someone organizes their files or their IDE preferences are all invisible to us, till we go to someone else's computer. I think this tenet is interesting because it considers interfaces which are so universal, such as gear shifts.

Some other examples of invisible interfaces include literal interactions like Bluetooth and forks and knives and writing utensils. Other examples that support this tenet include checking out at a grocery store. While the latter example may be evolving due to COVID and self-checkout, the idea of a conveyor belt to move groceries four feet forward often goes unnoticed.

pinkkk-lookingoutwards03

This project called Programmable Droplets for Interaction is created by the MIT media lab's Tangible Media group.

LINK

It uses the technique called “electrowetting on dielectric” (EWOD) to create controllable droplets that can be translating, morphing, merging, and splitting multiple droplets simultaneously.



The concept is to utilize something so ordinary in our daily lives to function as information display, and one of the possible way to integrate it in our daily life is demonstrated by the GIF below. The droplet can be used to create "handwritten", thus becoming an extension of us to simulate human actions without us being physically there, yet delivering a similar level of authenticity and love we wish to convey.



It intrigues me because of the simplicity and beauty of the droplets, as well as the poetic concept. The level of control we can control and simulate an organic and delicate substance in our lives fascinates me.