As a final project for our Physical Computing workshop, Ujjval Panchal, Alice Pintus and I created a physical email notifier in the form of a wine bottle.
Message in a Bottle is the first prototype in a series of physical objects for the home that notify their owner of incoming emails. Our goal is to limit our compulsion to obsessively check the computer for new messages while also bringing characteristics of postal mail to the digital world.
Through ambient lighting, this wine bottle will display the amount of new emails from a set of specific contacts (i.e. friends from back home) which are defined in the user’s email client. Picking up the bottle will activate an LCD screen with a summary of the most recent message and turning the bottle upside-down will load the next new message. Once all messages have been read, the LCD screen and ambient light will shut off until new messages are received and looked at.
We envision different objects for different sets of contacts, such as a picture frame for family, a pencil holder on your desk for work contacts or a sentimental object to notify emails from a significant other.
After only five days of studying physical computing and working with Arduino, we were presented with this brief for our final project:
Home automation and the internet of things enable our intelligent objects to silently communicate amongst themselves at faster and higher degrees of autonomy. This requires less and less interaction and relationship with the user. These trends also create and depend on cycles of replacement and upgrading, leading to the rapid discarding of old objects. Our project will challenge these behaviors of passivity and obsolescence by exploring and adapting the cultural, physical, and psychological user interfaces that reside in the objects we have given up on or replaced. How can new interactions with and between our old objects create more meaningful, engaging, and thoughtful relationships with contemporary situations, needs, and desires?
As more and more behaviors and interactions get packed into smaller and smarter objects, what are the physical gestures and interactions we threw away with “outdated” technology that could add logic, humanity, and meaning to our daily lives or specific situations.
Please find old objects and re-imagine their functionality: the way they interact with either another object, other objects, people, or the computer in new and relevant ways.
Ujjval, Alice and I spent a rainy Sunday afternoon discussing ideas that would satisfy this brief while still being achievable with our given time frame of less than five days. Amongst many other things, we talked a lot about the postman, postbox and other aspects of traditional mail and how we could apply these objects to email in the context of physical computing. Finding a concept that we could all get excited about was easy, but finding a concept that we could all get excited AND execute by the end of the week was not so easy. Thankfully on Monday Massimo, Gwendolyn and Dave helped us refine our ideas and by the end of the afternoon we were programming our first prototype of a physical email notifier.
I am happy to say that the rest of the week, although incredibly busy, was a lot of fun and without losing too much sleep. We started small by programming an LCD and Arduino on a breadboard. Then we added an accelerometer so we could switch email messages by tilting the board and eventually we added a second Arduino and radio transmitters so that we could send the email messages wirelessly (our final prototype does not actually download real emails from the internet). We customized an old wine bottle in the glass studio and soldered our final circuit board in the electronics labs.
By Friday morning we were finished and ready to present our project to the rest of the students, faculty and a small external crit group which included Bill Verplank.
Post a Comment