sacculi >> research&development, academic, artist

A Macbook Pro and croissant are all you need to create

The openFrameworks workshop/hack lab organised by Joey Scully and myself with the kind help and support of Culture Lab has now come and gone. Joel, Memo and Chris all came from their various points around London and the globe (Chris travelled in from Madrid especially) and lots of designing, prototyping and general love for geometry took place over three happy days. The value of paper prototyping, role play and bodystorming have all surfaced as the real benefits for interaction designers who attended the sessions. They got a real appreciation of how much this part of the cycle of working with a client brief made a difference in being able to conceptualise your idea and try and start to prototype it in code. For me, the revelation was working for the first time with the Fiducial markers and engine of Reactivision, which I can say is very smoothly integrated into openFrameworks and hints at the many possibilities for functions to which it could be directed!

Some of the workshop participants try bodystorming on stage

There was a brief flash of wonderment and digital inspiration down at Seven Stories on the Wednesday evening, when Joel, Memo and Chris displayed some of their incredible interactive pieces for an invited audience of 40, who enjoyed a glass of wine whilst viewing Baroque Masks, Body Paint and Delicate Boundaries from Joel, Memo and Chris respectively. Due to the health and safety considerations that must dictate what can stay in a gallery so open to the public (and particularly young children), these exhibits have proven to be all too fleeting, although there is a willingness to try and make them happen again some time in the future, with some perseverance and energy from all the partners!

Workshop participant works on openFrameworks application

Artwork on the beach

Had the very great pleasure of a windy, dark walk on the beach yesterday at Blyth, to see a new artwork from Jamie Allen and Laura Harrington at Culture Lab, Newcastle. The walk was stunning- stunningly cold, but also stunningly evocative, with the flash of a distant lighthouse to throw a beam onto the murky water and shifting sand. The artwork itself was as described, subtle and understated and really true to the categorisation as a time based piece, showing glowing LED bars embedded in solid, Nordic beach huts. Standing with a crowd of other artists, I enjoyed their presence too as outlines and shadows, each investigating the lights differently, and obscuring them in strange ways. The orange glow over the sand dunes also intrigued me and I’ve taken some for a Flickr upload when I get the chance. I recommend a visit, after dark…

I had the great pleasure of attending and presenting at the Recent Advancements In Assistive Technology and Engineering conference on Tuesday 1st December, with SMARTlab colleague Dr Mick Donegan. We were there to talk about creative composition, music and eyegaze technology, but I was there to absorb latest advances in a sector I now find myself at some distance from, having once being a ‘player’ as a senior access technologist with the Royal National Institute of the Blind. As it happened, Mick and I were on a platform with an old friend and colleague from the charity, Andy White, a technologist from the Bristol office.
It was firstly great to see advances in talking book technology related to DAISY, a format close to my heart and its limited and tortuous success something I ponder about. How is it that despite many bold and expensive efforts, something as fundamentally useful and inclusive and downright *helpful* as DAISY books still struggle for acceptance and a decent readership? I admit this is something that is not a million miles from my current labours with my PhD, which looks at a metaphoric theory of auditory saccadism which is predicated on challenging talkibg book production with many useful lessons from sonic arts research. But it is also something that could sit at the heart of strategies for digital inclusion that Martha Lane Fox and her team are also grappling with.
In human computer interaction terms, something cannot be successful just because it does well. We soon encounter interpretation,
‘[…] design is an intensely deliberative human activity, grounded in debate – even manipulation – toward some reconciling of viewpoints into an outcome’
(Gajendar, 2009 : 38)
We see that both scientists and artists seek to provide choice and agency, to enrich human understanding and experience, and tackle social, political and cultural challenges of their time. Data and its value has driven human computer interaction to a great extent, as it expresses a foundation on which disciplines can mix,
‘Data is fundamental for gathering feedback to evaluate multiple options of seemingly equal value (or wildly diverging paths).’
(Gajendar, 2009 : 38)
It is as if data somehow provide the glue and challenge on which joint endeavour can be usefully based, whether this is tackling social challenges like reducing the risk of elderly people falling in home within a community, or providing rich social interactions across a wide geographical area.
As Gajendar goes on to note, the ‘data of our experience’ is the new variable in the burgeoning field of HCI. This encompasses the empirical, the observational, and anecdotal types of data arising from watching people in their contexts.
I think the DAISY project I was involved with and the subsequent limited successes in launching it as a default format of choice in the UK might be due to a potentially botched horse before the cart scenario at an early stage which sought to transpose standards of production relating to an earlier form of digital media onto a new. A shockingly late involvement of a wide and diverse enough user group, I fear, was also part of the problem…
Reference: Gajendar, U. (2009), Data, Design, and Soulful Experience, in, Interactions, Vol XVI.6, November/December 2009, (Association for Computing Machinery, New York)

I have been slowly and steadily hacking at a sequencer for a few weeks/months, from time to time, for a friend and colleague, Dr Mick Donegan, of SMARTlab at UEL. It’s designed for use with a myTobii eyegaze interaction system, which is a fantastic means for users with severely impaired mobility to access and control a whole range of digital technologies. I was extremely fortunate to stumble on a great sequencer from Ian Bartholomew which I used as the basis for this sequencer. The original sent outputs to OSC and did not play sounds directly, so I changed that. I also made it bigger, and have introduced a dwell select that needs fixing. I have made the tempo bar a toggle between visible and invisible. But there are more changes yet to come and the version linked to below is not finalised! I have a deadline too, for a conference where I will be presenting with Mick on the 1st of December. Anyhow, it has taught me a lot about logic and structure so another great programming lesson. Some colleagues at Culture Lab also deserve a mention for helping out and moral support!

Launch the eyeSequencer application

To use it, hover the mouse over either of the kick or snare buttons and when the toggle, leave them on red. Then when you move over the grid you leave notes. The clear, tempo and pause buttons are mouse clickable and do not work with the hover yet. Pressing L on the keyboard removes the red tempo line and pressing R brings it back…

I wanted to post up a sketch from Ira Greenberg, a key teacher for Processing that I have mentioned before, in my post with the Asteroid game. The sketch below is his Build and Animate sketch. An important series of points from this sketch, mostly around the way the program checks to see what is happening with nodes, and what is happening in what order- the playhead concept around programming. The draw() part of the sketch is kept really clean and simple, with just a few simple calls to functions, and no classes are used. Simply click the mouse in the window to put in a node, keep adding nodes (that connect with lines), and when the shape is closed (ie you click back on the starting node which turns orange), the shape animates. Click again to start afresh:

I wanted to write a little more about the exciting opportunity I have been given to work with Seven Stories, the pioneering centre for childrens’ literature in Newcastle. As part of a forthcoming exhibition, I will have the chance to help design aspects of the interactive media exhibition in their building, working with some fantastic staff from the centre and from Newcastle University, with whom they are partnering. Running co-design digital media projects with young people has been something I have been a part of for the last 5 years, if not longer, going back to my time leading the DAISY project, making talking books with young people with sight difficulties. I enjoyed it, but the groups were very spread out, right across the Midlands, and never met one another. Then at NESTA much the same experience: groups in Scotland doing exciting work, some in Wales, but never interacting, never meeting. And my involvement with the media itself was sometimes restricted to a quality assurance role, or when problems arose. But while working with Reactive Colours, run by the pioneering Wendy Keay-Bright, I started to experience a deeper level of engagement. Now I grappled conceptually, aesthetically, programmatically. I still considered it in terms of management, how to promote, pitch and change the landscape in which it sat. I am excited by the chance to bringing inclusive design princicples linked to my emergent programming skills to Seven Stories. I am very excited to be linked to the expertise there and at the University and will post ideas here related to the workshops and ideas that start emerging over the autumn.

I have neglected the site for ages, but aim to put new material on here much more frequently over the next few months. I’ve been working on a MacBook for the first time consistently, and it’s a more pleasant and hardworking environment- maybe psychological. I created a simple Asteroid Dodge game in Processing to celebrate, a homage to Ira Greenberg (his Springy Dude makes an appearance), and Daniel Shiffman (using his intersect function and some recursion). Both artists have written great guides to developing in Processing and are my constant companions as I get deeper into the code…thanks both…

The game involves dodging the bio-asteroids that attack from the right, the higher the score, the worse you’re doing. Yeah it’s simple, yeah it’s stupid but it’s teaching me stuff! Play the Game!