Last post I talked about designing with the recently possible. This is a mode of creating I love. Constantly watching what technology and ingenuity are making possible and filtering those new potentials through design constraints to build interesting new stuff.

That’s all a little on the abstract side though. So I’m going to try to lay out some concrete examples. Here’s just one sketch looking at Internet connected screens installed in public spaces.

What’s the tech?

Screens + tiny computers that can drive them are getting cheaper and rapidly cheaper. According to DisplaySearch, who track such things, the average price of a 32-inch LCD screen went from $725 in 2008 to below $300 and falling at the end of 2011. The cost of computing power that can drive those screens has fallen even more sharply. Perhaps the most dramatic example is Raspberry Pi, a credit card-sized computer that can connect to the ‘net and drive a hi def screen which costs just $35.

What are we doing with this tech?

So far the people catching onto the opportunity seem to be advertising types. Not even the smart advertising types judging by their efforts. The formula seems to be to take some same-old-same-old ads and give them front and centre priority on the screen. Then to justify their public location (your office elevator or a subway platform say) they paste on an after thought’s worth of news and public service information. I’m pretty sure we can do better.

What could we do?

Taking advantage of the dynamism of Internet based media and the specific geographic locations of these types of screens I think we could do a lot. For example…

Smart advertising

Advertising obviously has a place in how we use public screens. Advertising dollars paying for useful content is a common model for good reasons. Perhaps the ads these screens can be a little more human and take advantage of the fact they’re in a known location and context.

Maybe this looks something like the ingenious Baker Tweet, a prototype bakery broadcast system. Baker Tweet provides a super-simple way for a London bakery to tweet when different specialties are fresh out of the oven. Combine that with the local, public screens to broadcast snippets of useful information for your customers rather than just repeating the same static ad.

Compassionate screens

A few years ago my Father-in-Law spent several months in hospital. Many things about the stay were frustrating and the the art work on the walls of his room rated low down. However it did rate. He was a man of taste and an art school grad so the fact that his room was decorated with a few mediocre art posters was yet another indignity.

Maybe we could do that better. How about a digital screen on the wall that displays art and images tuned to the patient’s tastes. Offer an online interface the patient or their relatives could pick out a rotating collection of art that actually mean something positive and contribute to a sense of dignity and healing rather than just inoffensively filling a spot on the wall.

We can take this a step further by offering a system that lets (authorised) friends and relatives send photos and get well messages directly to the screen. Making the jump from a reproduction, Hallmark-grade pastel drawing of flowers to a photo of the patient’s grand-kids at hockey practice yesterday and another of their own wedding day. Perhaps with a tasteful plaque indicating that this was brought to you by GE.

Urban dashboard

Until all of us have a smartphone and a data plan there’s a niche to fill in providing factual, timely and super-local information. Maybe this could be the edge for a local coffee shop, providing a public screen that informs its customers when the next bus is coming by, which nearby bike share locations have bikes available and whether it’s going to rain in the next twenty minutes. (Hat tip to Toronto’s Grinder coffee shop who have had a version of this for a couple of years).

The Future

Obviously this is only a surface scan of what may be coming when we combine cheap public screens with smart content. My point is that lots of things beyond the rather unimaginative status quo are possible. Lets do some of that smarter, more human stuff rather than just throwing up more of the same eh?

Chris Heathcote describes himself as a designer whose medium is the recently possible. That’s a pretty exciting thing to be during our explosion of digital technology which throws out an awful lot of recently possible. See Chris’s slides and notes from a talk at the Do Lectures for insight into what this means.

This wealth of the recently possible to experiment and play with is really exciting to me. It brings the potential for doing some pretty amazing new things with interactive technology. Things that a few years ago would have been impossible without gigantic budgets and pools of PHDs working for you.

My personal fascination is where this recently possible technology juts out into the physical world. Say with a $300 remote control aerial photography drone or Arduino, an open-source electronics platform that allows people to automate their chicken coop or a create a self-playing drum.

I plan to explore some of these recently possibles and what they might mean over a series of posts here in the coming weeks.

Earlier this week I was at Screens, a Toronto conference by FITC billed as “one of the only events in the world designed for developers of all platforms of screen content.”. I followed my usual conference technique of seeking out the off beat and out of the ordinary. That approach led me to the audience of a Ben Fry presentation at an FITC conference in 2007. That was my first exposure to Processing coding and the surrounding community of people doing creative things with tech which sent me off on my current trajectory.

Screens provided several great sessions in the hard to define creative tech vein that excites me. Greg Hermanovic and Markus Heckmann of Derivative gave a presentation on projection mapping flavoured work built with their incredible Touch Designer tool building tool.

Touch Designer is beyond my capabilities to clearly describe. But you can see it in action in some great projects to get a sense. Dev Harlan creates sculptural objects and augments them with mesmerising layers of light and shape.

Alva Noto used Touch Designer to create great visuals as part of his live show, Unitxt, where the interface used to control the visuals and the projected visuals themselves are the same thing.

Another fun presentation was from Peter Nitsch of Teehan+Lax on the first 6 months of their +labs project to explore and frame the “physical internet” within the lab. The labs have a three person team mandated to do pure exploration (no client work). The goal is to help the agency staff and clients understand what’s possible in the exciting world of proliferating modular and powerful technologies.

+labs are doing some cool things with RFID, NFC and AR and many other technological acronyms searching for the creative applications they deserve.

These presentations and a few other signals boosted sense of optimism I’ve been nurturing for a while. It’s about something happening in an unnamed and ill-defined endeavour to use technology in human-focused, physical and creative ways to do things we don’t yet understand. Or from a more cynical angle, quoting the agency Trapeze, “”digital”, for the foreseeable future, will be stuck between the nobility of innovation and the banality of advertising”. I’m hoping for a reasonable ratio of nobility to banality.

If you liked this you might also like:

• My post-eyeo festival optimism on creative technology.
• A more detailed look at the opportunities of weapons-grade tech we can re-purpose for good and fun.
• The guest posts I did for FITC that go into much more detail the sessions of Peter Nitsch, Derivative and others.

The Peripherals Initiative was a Toronto experiment to see what happens when you put together indie game creators and hardware hackers and give them a parts budget, organisational support and a brief to create something new that mixes video gaming and hardware hacking in an interesting way.

I teamed up with Alexander Martin (AKA Droqen), a great local indie game creator. Right from the start (just a couple of months ago) we were fixated on doing something fun using an analog control panel with buttons and knobs and jacks that click and clack in a satisfyingly non-touchscreen kind of way.

What we built was new take on a Space Invaders style game where you control a little ship on its mission to blast through waves of hideous alien baddies. All of the player’s control is through a custom console with screens, switches, patch cables and knobs. There are lots more photos over here.

As with any genuinely new project we had to blast through waves of baddies of our own (“how the hell can we make this work?”, “why did I ever agree give up sanity and sleep for this?”, “which one of the 700 models of rotary switch in this catalogue do we need?). The results more than paid for those stresses though. We are really pleased with what we created and, most importantly, people who played Analog Defender seemed to enjoy and appreciate it.

So, from our point of view, the experiment’s results were positive. We ended up with a cool thing that we created and people enjoy (and that’s pretty much my reason for doing this stuff). On top of the immediate tangible result of the things that were built I expect the new connections between the Toronto game and hardware hacker communities will spin in interesting directions in the future.

Today I came across the (provocatively named) group Technology Will Save Us. They’re launching a physical space in East London designed to allow people to connect to technology as something they can be designed and shaped by ordinary people. In their own words:

Bethany says: ‘I believe technology plays a huge role in all of our lives and we know so little about how to fix it, how to make things with it and how to be more creative with it’. Daniel further explains, ‘We see a more creative world where people can get the skills and support to be more resourceful with technology and begin to solve their own problems and invent new uses – become producers not just consumers of technology’.

This is an idea I’m super-excited about. Much of my professional life is made possible because of an incredible upheaval in technology. This upheaval has seen really powerful technologies becoming accessible to hobbyists and enthusiasts where they used to be exclusively the domain of boffins with huge budgets. Think of laser cutting, microcontrollers, 3D printing, mobile computing, wearable electronics… The list continues on and on and on and we’re only seeing the first steps in experimentation what becomes possible in this world.

On the same theme I’m reminded of a great Ignite presentation by Mark Argo from Aesthetec in Toronto. He talks about the possibility for a near future world where you can visit a local craftsperson who customises gadgets to you personal, one-off requirements. I highly recommend the video, it’s just 6 minutes long and a fun watch.

There’s a fascinating thread here, of taking the newly affordable and accessible technology and placing it in a storefront  where all kinds of people can approach and understand the exciting stuff that’s possible. Turning the tech that’s now the domain of nerds into a solution for real people’s needs. This reminds me also of the great 826 Valencia in San Francisco where a pirate supply store (no kidding) fronts an exciting (and free) creative literacy tutoring space for kids.

So, if anyone’s got a storefront open in Toronto and wondering what to do with it…

Back at the end of June I went to the Eyeo Festival in Minneapolis. It was brilliant! I’ve been trying to come up with some sort of cohesive description of my experience. No luck so far but I can’t let another month roll without at least noting the experience.

The festival featured an almost overwhelming line-up of people who I admire for doing very cool stuff. They mostly fell into two rough categories of data viz folks and (much tougher to describe) art/installation/physical computing/robotics/interactive spaces people.

The speakers were great but it was the crowd that made the event for me (there was really no distinction between speakers and crowd which was great). The space was peopled with ~400 people who really love this stuff (whatever this stuff is exactly) and were excited to talk about it. I struck up great conversations with wind data scientists, geneticists, hospital IT guys, artists, ad agency people and I’m not really the striking up conversation type. It was so easy at Eyeo though because almost without exception everyone there really wanted to be there.

That’s it really. I was there and it was great. It really helped re-excite me about the future of the kind of stuff Media Lab Toronto is experimenting with and was just a whole lot of fun.

Some random notes over here.

Joshua introduced his talk by saying that “Building interactive spaces and devices that communicate with spaces is not really all that difficult.” and explained his interest in this area came from having lived in many different places with the realisations that “many of us aren’t too connected to our streets and buildings and I’m curious what we as technologists can make these things more meaningful and real”.

Another quote that really struck me was “It is worth looking out beyond the screen. Trying to break the hegemony of the screen can create a really special place. If you can pick it up and twist it or it makes a noise or whirls around it’s really exciting”.

He pointed out that 100 years ago there was no such thing as a commute. Then we started driving to work and so we produced radio programming to support this new activity and a whole industry sprung up around that and he thinks there are lots of similar, unfilled niches that we can design services for today.

For this talk Joshua was focusing on small devices. Not just physically small but also small in footprint, infrastructure requirement and cost. Cheap is really important because once you can build something for $10 you’re happy to leave it where it might get rained on or eaten by a dog and that opens all sorts of possibilities.

Joshua also talked about some technologies that are small in these ways: micro-controllers like Arduino/TI MSP-430 (very, very small)/PIC/AVR; QR codes; radio frequency (like remote control vehicles use) you can get modules for $3-4 and they robustly send data 400m; XBee mesh network protocol you can get 16km range with the right antenna and they cost $16; RFID tags are cheap and small and getting more so; IR beams as a cheap way of transferring data in indoor, short range line of sight applications.

There’s a niche to fill in enabling local relationships. As Joshua said “I have a million tools for connecting with people in Japan but I want to be able to connect to people on the bus”.

I was lucky enough to be invited to the FITC conference here in Toronto as a live blogger. Something I quickly learned about live blogging is that you don’t actually get much chance to absorb what’s going on as you’re too busy trying to capture it. So I thought I’d try digesting some of the what I heard and making more thoughtful posts out of it. Here’s the first:

Narratives in New Spaces described as “a panel that will explore how technology is acting as a catalyst to richer, immersive stories in both art and commercial spaces.” The panel was moderated by Dave Girolami and featured Steve Di Lorenzo, Tali Krakowsky and Theo Watson – all of whom work on some very cool interactive/immersive stuff.

Theo Watson is depressed by some of the bad ways interactive is used by ad agencies. They haven’t done much work in the marketing world not out of principal but just because 95% of the ideas agencies come to them with are just really bad.

Tali Krakowsky pointed out that brands aren’t going to stop doing this stuff so maybe working with them to create something artful is the smart approach. Seth Godin describes advertising as disruption to a person’s life. So maybe we should take that and push it. Create a disruption that’s so cool people will go out of there way to come and experience it rather.

Theo pointed to Toyota iQ and Nike+ as examples of work YesYesNo has done for brands where the experience itself is creative and fun with minimal branding and the marketing aspect comes in when they get shared widely as online videos with the brands attached.

Asked about using this kind of work in a health and healing context, Tali observed that our lives are dictated by the environments we live it so creating interactive environments is relevant in every sector. That made a lot of sense to me, we may not have found out exactly where and how this tangible/physical/digital stuff fits but it isn’t going away anytime soon.

Theo and Emily Gobeille touched on this unintentionally with Funky Forest when they found that some autistic kids loved experimenting it and really opened up in positive ways. To the extent that parents are taking their kids on special trips to see it as a therapeutic activity.

Theo also talked about their work on Eyewriter with TEMPTONE. Tempt is a pioneer graffiti writer from LA who has ALS, a disease which shuts down muscle control but leaves the brain un-touched. Eyewriter was a collaboration to build something that would let Tempt write graffiti using just his eyes (the only muscles he could still control). They hacked together a software and hardware system that allows him to write digital graffiti projected onto buildings and then beamed back live by video into his hospital room. Theo’s made the point that we have the opportunity to solve these types of niche problems using technology available to us (a bunch of open source software, cheap sunglasses from Venice Beach, a hacked Sony PlayStation webcam some electronic parts from Radio Shack and a lot of ingenuity in this case).

Steve talked about a collaboration he was involved in to create an installation for the Critical Care Unit waiting room at Toronto’s Sickkids Hospital. It’s stuff that can really change people’s lives but finding the funding is still very tough. It’s hard to convince the board of a hospital that they should spend money on this stuff when they need new MRI machines.

This is just a fraction of what went on in the panel but I found it really interesting to hear from these top notch practitioners in a pioneering new space.

This is a super-rough hardware sketch of what a mechanical Twitter feed might look like. I’ve been playing with ideas around combining digital projection with mechanical motion and this is a prototype to test some of the ideas.

It consists of a series of people I follow on Twitter represented as their user photo printed out and suspended in space. Next to that hangs a blank speech bubble that is attached to an electric motor which is in turn controlled by an Arduino microcontroller that can re-position the speech bubble by winching it up or down.

On top of the physical layer there is a digital layer in the form of projected text. All of this comes together to provide a small fraction of my Twitter feed in physical form. I have lots of ideas for expanding this. To make this genuinely useful it would need to represent more people. That could be by scaling the piece up – adding more user photos and bubbles on a large wall would be fun. Another option is to move the user photos onto a physical scroll that can be moved back and forth using a similar system.

Anyway, I had a lot of fun building it and I hope to follow up with some developments along similar lines.

Parts list:

• fishing line
• foamcore (for the bubble)
• arduino with Adafruit motor shield and stepper (to move the bubble)
• large tin can for the winch and Pololu universal hub to attach can to motor

As part of my exploration of what it means to be a Creative Technologist I’ll be looking at examples that I consider great products of Creative Technology.

I came across a new mobile app, MyVoice, today (via Siobhan O’Flynn). The app is designed to help people with health problems that impede verbal communication to ‘speak’ more easily.

One group this is aimed at is stroke victims who have reduced command of speech. A use that particularly struck me as my Great Aunt Peg, one of the kindest and sharpest people I’ve known, suffered a stroke which hit her speech hard. She was still as sharp and funny as ever after her stroke but for her to speak her thoughts was a huge struggle.

At the heart MyVoice provides ‘books’ of words and phrases that the user can navigate and select and have read aloud by their mobile device. There are several features that might seem common sense to anyone familiar with the world of the web (auto back up, remote customisation and syncing…) but apparently the world of assistive devices lags far behind. The feature that really struck me though was the app’s clever use of location awareness.

As with many great uses of technology the location awareness in MyVoice seems obvious and essential once you think about it – but the point is that someone had to invent it first. Simply, the user can attach ‘books’ of phrases to particular physical locations. The app then automatically puts those books at your finger tips when it detects you are in the specified location. So when you’re at the barber’s “just a little more off the top” is an easy tap away while at the bank you get the more useful “I’d like to deposit this cheque please”.

I don’t know if the creators of this app think of themselves as Creative Technologists, likely they don’t. But I think this is a great example of what the Creative Technologist’s approach can achieve at its best – taking seemingly disparate advances in technology (mobile, GPS, UI design, speech synthesis…) and putting them together in really valuable ways.

I also think we’re overdue for the potential of technology to be spread a little more evenly with more focus on real problems and less on the whims of 20- and 30-somethings. So cheers to the MyVoice team for putting their minds to a tough problem with very real potential benefits.