hello.

Régine Debatty’s interview with Graham Pullin on WMMNA is a good read. I like what I know of Graham’s work a lot, and I love the Museum of Lost Interactions. I think it’s an excellent way to teach about interaction. Looking forward to his new book, “Designing Braille for the Sighted”.

Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design Bill Buxton. Morgan Kaufmann, ©2007. ISBN: 0-1237-4037-1.

In this book, Bill Buxton talks about the role that sketching plays in the design process. He gives a number of good examples from hand sketches to digital sketches. Then he launches into a discussion of what a sketch of an interactive experience is, and gives a number of good examples of interactive sketches and sketching methods. It’s an excellent read for anyone who makes interactive things.

Technorati Tags: design, interfaces, networked objects, networks, pcomp, philosophy, physical computing, sketching, toys, wearables

Shaping Things Bruce Sterling, Boston, MIT Press, ©2005, ISBN 0-2626-9326-7.
Bruce Sterling’s take on a plausible future in which everything made has a network address, and therefore a documented and documentable history. He takes this vision to its extreme, showing how it changes everything from design to manufacturing to consumption to disposal of material goods. An inspiring read if you’re interested in networks, material or information design, or sustainability.

Technorati Tags: design, environment, law, networked objects, networks, pcomp, philosophy, physical computing, RFID, sociology, sustainability

Brian Jepson and I will be giving a workshop on Making Things Talk at O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology conference in the first week of March this year. It should be a lot of fun. We’ll be teaching participants to make a physical game controller for a networked game of pong. The controller is a variation on some of the projects in the book, and should enable a very special activity that’s not always seen at E-Tech…

I finally got my hands on an Openmoko Neo1973 phone tonight. Not sure if it’s ready for primetime. A few notes:

It took me an hour and a half to flash the root file system and kernel on it. The getting started page and the Mac OSX page were helpful. I used this version of the kernel from buildhost.automated.it and the 2007.11 snapshot of the rootfs.

The operating system takes longer to load than OSX 10.4 on my macbook.

There are a couple things about the UI that bother me:

• It’s not obvious how to answer or hang up a call
• There’s no obvious way to access system settings through the UI, including things as basic as ringtone or volume
• It’s apparently not yet possible to send or get text messages.
• There’s no way to turn it off when the OS hangs, other than removing the battery.

I hope it gets better. It’s a nifty-looking phone.

Phil Torrone did a nice Arduino gift guide for the holidays on the Make site. I like Ladyada’s getting started kit a lot. And I’m still totally in love with the LilyPad. I can’t wait til there’s more stock in the super-accelerometer board for a project I am working on that needs accelerometers.

NIBIT is a photo blog of physical control interfaces, some really obscure and fascinating ones. Inspirational for people building interfaces of all kinds.

Thanks to Terri Senft for the link.

From the Chaos Communication Camp comes Open Beacon. It’s basically an open design for actrive RFID:

“OpenBeacon is a free design for an active RFID device which operates in the 2.4GHz ISM band. The device contains a unique serial number, but may have other information. OpenBeacon is designed as a transceiver device and therefore both transmits and receives radio waves. The intention of this project is to offer a wide range of use cases such as visitor or item tracking and wireless remote control with a free self-contained and low-cost RFID design.”

Thanks to Massimo Banzi for the link.

Technorati Tags: electronics, networks, open source, RFID

Ben Hopson has a good site detailing his work on his masters’ thesis at Pratt on designing movements. The videos are very nice illustrations of some simple, expressive mechanical movements.

Thanks to Lesley Flanagan for the link

Technorati Tags: design, mechanics

…at least, my favorite examples of physical computing.

Durrell Bishop’s Marble Answering Machine - A really nice example of using tangible elements not only as memory tokens, but as physical interface. This image has been quoted in many different papers on the web, but curiously, I couldn’t find a link to Durrell’s own version of it. This one comes from a link on Sriam Subramaniam’s homepage, but I think they may have gotten it from Rachel Abrams’ paper.

Toshio Iwai’sPiano - As Image Media - The interaction is quite simple, and even traditional, in computer interface terms (a trackball), but the effect is beautiful.

Tad Hirsch’s TripWire - I love the fact that it’s relevant to the city it was designed for, and attempts to address real political issues in that town with just the right level of seriousness and humor.

Maywa Denki’s BitMan - The behavior seems entirely natural when you play with it, as the little man moves from one side to the next as you rotate the object. The quality of the animation, despite the low resolution, is what makes it work so well for me. They pack so much character into very few bits. Scott McCloud would be proud of them.