ORA ETech '06
2006-03-07

Sketching in Hardware
presented by Matt Cottam & Mike Kurniavsky

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Contributors:
Gabe Hollombe - http://avantbard.com/ - gabe@avantbard.com
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Going to talk about how to get to Bruce Sterling's idea of the Internet of Things

About Mike
    - designer: hotbot, wrote _oberving the user experience_, founding partner of 
Adaptive Path
    - does hardware/stuff hacking too
    - international symposium of electronic arts
    - interested in how etech effects people, the interaction between physical 
objects and information objects

Casemods are not ubiquitous computing (ubicomp)
    - cuddlechimp is a robot that costs 40 bucks. is an example of us trying to 
figure out how to do more with tech in different ways (we just learned how to make 
web pages not suck, so we've got a long ways to go)
    
We need new, good, ubicomp design tools

basic design tool is sketching
    "sketching is a process, a kind of inquiry, rather than simply a matter of 
externalization" - D. Fallman
    sketching is iteration of design ideas and prototypes

what are the interesting parts of sketching?
    1. fast
    2. provisional (the bare essential details are helpful for maintaining focus)
    3. preserves history

Matt teaches at RISD
    - was able to come up with a cool industrial design chair because he sketched 
in model form at quarter scale with wood and metal before the final product, also 
built a full scale prototype out of wood with adjustable parts to size chair to fit 
someone
    - had his students use spare keyboards to make quick switches
    - some fun cheap industrial sensors are cool to playwith
        - flex sensor, potentiometer, light sensor, temperature sensor, stepper 
motor, air valves
    - company called Making Things in SanFrancisco makes Analog to Digital 
converters

NADA is a suite to let designers code in flash or java to control analog devices
    - demoing NADA
        * NADA component in flash
        * draws a circle, adds actionscript to it to respond to an old volume knob 
of a tv hooked up to his computer. turns the knob, circle's transparency changes. 
30 secs of coding. cool. one like of AS
        * has an airplane force sensor configured to zoom the image, a light sensor 
controlling transparency, potentiometer to rotate the image.  like 50 lines of 
code.

free version of NADA avail at http://sketchtools.com, tutorials also avail for 
those who have no flash experience (for design students) - examples in flash and 
java

another demo
    * has a card with an rfid, swipes it, movie plays
    * flash movie is fetching weather data, especially wind speed
    * fan is supposed to start spinning at the speed of the wind, but it looks like 
fan is lacking power. =-)  ah, there it goes now