hello.

Thanks to Selcuk Artut at Sabanci University, I had the opportunity to go to Istanbul last month to give a workshop based on Making Things Talk. It was a really great trip. The workshop blog contains links to the parts used, and a resource blog for interaction designers in Turkish.

Istanbul is an incredible city, large, energetic, dense, sprawling, and beautiful. Well worth seeing. My touristy pics are online on Flickr. I was particularly struck by the large number of cats all around the city. The workshop attendees were wonderful. They were energetic, patient with the loads of material I threw at them, and creative in their use of the stuff. I had a really great time working and visiting with them all. There were a number of great project ideas that came out of the three days we spent together.

I also got to hear some of Selcuk’s band, Replikas, which I highly recommend. Been stuck in my iPod since I got back. Sadly, they weren’t playing any gigs while I was there, so I’ll have to go back.

A few other links from the trip:

Newspaperbox, a project from Selcuk’s department is a news aggregator that uses tree maps in an interesting way to suggest a newspaper layout, but give information about the length and import of the stories in a useful way.

Yeni (New), a performance piece by Genco Gülan, that we saw on my last night there. It was visually stunning, pix on the flickr site above.

Overall, a wonderful trip and one I hope to repeat someday. Belated thanks to Selcuk and Sila for their incredible hospitality, Mustafa and Osman for showing me around Sabanci and the city, and everyone else who I met on the trip.

I wasn’t able to keep up with the ITP residents during 7 in 7, but I got a couple of projects done.

Twitter sign

For a long time, I’ve had some pretty little LED displays on my desk from Avago, the HCMS-297x 1×8 display. I made a Twitter reader with them and an Arduino and a serial to ethernet module. Here it is on video:

It was useful for two reasons: I worked out how to read a twitter feed using an arduino, and I worked out the basics of a library for the Avago displays, thanks to Pascal Stang’s font5×7 library. I’ll document it properly sometime soon.

Physical Computing Workshop
Circuit boards for Lumens

I missed the last three days of 7 in 7 to go to Adams, MA, to give a physical computing workshop at Greylock Arts. It was good fun. I also helped artists Matthew Belanger, Venn Voisey and Sean Riley put together 30 or so Arduino-based circuit boards for Lumens, a piece they are working on that opens in July.

Here are the circuit boards. They took us two days:

Sadly, that’s all I got done!