Jo Montgomery

DOING: Max MSP – Fragmentation

jo — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 12:58:04 +0000

The theme the Max MSP doing module was “fragmentation”. To me, “fragments” suggest fragments of memory, or remembering fragments of things, so I wanted to make something that would record snippets of the user’s life.

The first thing I had to do was establish precisely what aspects of someone’s life I was trying to capture. What parts of your day are actually worth savouring? It’s not gonna be things like buying milk, watching TV, or cooking dinner… you’re going to value more important things than that. So I decided to capture moments when the user experiences an emotional surge, ie. when they are excited, or distressed, or nervous.

To do this I created a circuit which uses an LED and an LDR to pick up your heart beat. It works by detecting the change in density in your finger; when your heart beats, your blood pulses into your finger and it momentarily becomes denser. Between pulses, the blood flows out and your finger becomes more transparent.

The LDR detects these minute changes in density. I used Arduino2Max (as, after battling with both for a while, it seemed decidedly more simple than Firmata etc!) to read in the values from analogue port zero.

So basically, my Max MSP patch reads in the analogue pin and, when the pulse hits 80 beats per minute or above (the approximate “elevated heartrate” for an average person), it records a 5 second snippet of video and sound. These are all saved, with the idea being that you could look back through them and have a record of fragments of your high and low moments. What I really like about it, is that you might not even be aware of some of them; you could look back through your day and find little fragments you weren’t aware were making you feel particularly happy or sad.

Here is my patch in full, please excuse my tragic face, I am full of the cold!

And in presentation mode, with the playback/viewing window becoming more of a feature:

I think the idea could have some nice applications within wearable technology. A rough concept I thought of would be for a “memory hoody”… sew a small camera into the front of the hood, run the sensor down out of the sleeve, and you could capture memories all day. The circuitry could be stored in a small pocket somewhere on the hoody.

All in all, my Max MSP experience hasn’t been as bad as I thought it would be. I found it a bit frustrating at first, as everything I do is very physical, and everything I thought I wanted to do with Max would have been much better realise with another program, so I had to really think hard about what I wanted to achieve. I never really do anything screen-based, so this was a first for me. I even managed to put aside the electronics to concentrate on the patch!

Things I would have liked to have done include adding a timestamp to the videos, and maybe a more comprehensive playback/viewing screen and controls. I think I’ve done okay though – I wanted to interface with Arduino, which I managed, and I did achieve the objectives I set out to.

Cultural Probes Results

jo — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 17:47:36 +0000

Just realised I never actually posted about the results from my cultural probes. In April I deployed eight little kits to four couples. Each kit had a camera and a postcard to document their dining experience every day for 2 weeks. I got the kits back last month, after a fashion, and spend a good week or two working through the data. I paired each photo to its postcard to keep the image and the “background info” together – but it’s true what they say about a picture speaking 1000 words… or whatever that saying is.

To be honest, I had some pre-conceived notions about what might come back, but the results were even more blatant than I had expected. There was a massive, clear difference between how couples dine when they are together, and how they dine when one person is away. I began dealing with them by just shuffling through and seeing if there were any major aspects which jumped out at me.

ENVIRONMENT leapt out at me immediately – as I flicked through them, there were some obvious groupings of the sort of places people were eating. I got out some big sheets of paper and divided them up into whether the meal was being eaten at a dining table, or somewhere else (98% of the time this was the sofa, but answers also included ‘in bed’ and ‘in the garden’). What I found was, when people eat with their partners, the vast majority of the time it’s at a table, breakfast bar, or some sort of proper “dining” place. When people are on their own, they tend to eat on the sofa or in a more casual way.

This lead me on to group by ACTIVITY. When you dine with someone else, you concentrate on eating a meal with them. You talk, you engage, or just simply enjoy their company. People eating on their own didn’t tend to do this so much, they tended to opt to also partake in some form of activity whilst eating, to entertain them. Most of the time this was watching TV, but people also noted working on a laptop or computer, reading a book/magazine and, incredibly, talking on the phone.

Finally, I decided to look at FOOD. Flicking through the photos, some of them were lavish meals, whereas some looked pretty tragic. What I found was that generally, when people eat together they eat “proper food”. By this I mean they enjoyed home-cooked meals, often more than one course, or with sides/extras such as bread etc. Couples dining together also ate in restaurants sometimes. People dining alone, however, put much less effort into their meals. Only two evenings did a ‘single person’ enjoy more than one course (both times they had a dessert). Their meals were often simplistic and were often ready-meals or convenience food. On about a third of evenings dining alone, individuals opted for food such as toast, cereal or “quick and easy” snacks such as beans on toast, omelettes, sandwiches, etc. in the place of their evening meals.

This spawned a whole new area of interest for me. It kind of… gave me a problem, I suppose. Coming from a design background, I like to solve problems, so this really interests me as people definitely do not eat as well when they are alone. I didn’t realise how much the social aspect of eating drives someone to… well, do it. Eating became very much a “task of survival”, rather than something that was being enjoyed. Are people actually suffering nutritionally by dining alone?

Other observations which came from the postcards:

Whilst eating alone:
- People put little effort into the “set up” of their meal. They tend not to set a table. They often will only use the bare necessities of crockery needed for their meal. Sometimes they won’t even “plate up” if they don’t have to – some people noted eating things from their tubs or wrappers to save on washing up. This shows me that even the activities around having a meal are considered social and worth sharing – ie. setting the table, washing up, etc.

- People tend to only have one course when eating alone.

- Sometimes people feel they eat “because they have to”, not because they enjoy it.

- Individuals like to have something to engage with whilst eating. Ie. if they don’t have someone to talk to, they prefer to watch TV or similar.

- Men are more likely to have an alcoholic drink with their meal then women.

Whilst eating together:

- Both people play a part in preparing the meal. For example, often if one person is cooking, the other will set the table or pour drinks.

- Interestingly, people are more likely to have an alcoholic drink whilst dining with a partner.

- Meals often consist of more than one course, or have “extras” such as bread, olives, dips, etc.

- The meals are usually consumed in a proper “dining” environment – ie. setting the table with cutlery, glasses, salt and pepper etc.

- Manners come into play a lot. For example, if having starters, one person will always wait for their partner before continuing.

- Eating is seen almost as an ‘activity’, evenings are often planned around it.

- In several instances, one person held off eating for up to an hour or more, to wait for the other person to join them.

- The most talked about thing at the dinner table is how each person’s day has gone, and how they are feeling.

Telematic Dinner Parties

jo — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 14:28:05 +0000

I’m also really excited to have been introduced to Pollie Barden, a PhD student at Queen Mary in London. She’s doing a project on remote dinner parties using projectors to enable communication between two separate dining environments.

Last week she ran one between Barcelona and London and I was lucky enough to see the live stream from each. We’re going to run one here in Culture Lab next month. I’m hoping I can have my final project fairly concrete by then, to hopefully run it past the group and see what they think.

I think there are a lot of correlations in our research so it’s going to be really interesting. You can read more about Telematic Dinner Parties on her blog.

Ideas

jo — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 14:09:28 +0000

Trying to make some decisions about my final project and the path it’s going to take. I’m rapidly realising I have a serious “design head” and I’m all about solving problems and things having a point – which I’m not exactly sure falls within what the course expects of me and my final project. Having spent the last eight months starting a business and developing a product, I’m finding it REALLY hard to not think of things in terms of their commercial potential!

I’m finding it quite frustrating having to pinpoint exactly what it is I want to do. It feels too early to be doing that? I’m still quite involved in the research process and am reluctant to have to commit to a definite project spec.

The way I’m starting to see it is that there are 3 “output” revenues I can venture down:

Literal: Where each party has some physical object or piece of technology and this is used to provide the communication. This is a very product-based approach and is probably the one I’m most comfortable with.

Installation: To create a two-person dinner set which is paired/connected in several ways. My final piece would be two tables (to suggest the separation) and the whole dining experience would be exciting and interactive.

Concept: To produce a resolved concept/proposal for something more scalable. For example something like “speed dining” – a restaurant or area of restaurant/cafe where it’s acceptable to eat alone, and there are screens or similar which connect to other people dining alone in other places. Another humorous concept was “Plate Roulette” – a small screen/webcam device which you place on your dining table, which randomly matches you up with someone else eating alone. I wouldn’t be able to implement this fully on my own, so I’m not sure how I’d present such a thing.

Max Circuitry

jo — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 12:20:26 +0000

Battling with my Max assignment a little bit. I’m using a technique/input I’ve used before, with an LED and an LDR in a circuit. The LED goes on one side of your finger, and the LDR is on the other and can detect the change in density of your finger and therefore your heartbeat.

My circuit is working okay, and I’ve got the analogue pin reading into Max. I’ve then read that into a slider which splits the signal, and outputs a bang for the range of heartbeat I want (above 70bpm), which will hopefully trigger a short recording.

I currently can’t get it to actually RECORD anything. I can take a picture, control a slideshow, etc etc… just can’t record yet. Yikes. More work to do.

More Max

jo — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 17:12:43 +0000

For the Max MSP assignment I’ve decided to try and make something which captures fragments of your life. I’ve been thinking about what moments of your life you would want to capture and how I can determine this. Initially, I was thinking I might make it random…. that way you might end up with some moments you’d otherwise not have stopped to appreciate. But similarly, you could also end up with a load of rubbish ones.

So I think I’m going to use emotion. Ah, that old gem. I’m going to use my favourite input ever – heartbeat – and try and detect surges in emotion, ie. raised heartrate. That way the result should be a “catalogue” of emotional highs AND lows.

Doing: Max MSP

jo — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 22:07:32 +0000

Cracking on with my Max MSP assignment. Unfortunately my Max MSP trial has expired so I’m back down to Earth with a bump and am wrestling with PD again

The theme is “fragmentation” which made me think… fragments of something. I’ve lost marks in the previous two assignments for having too loose a relation to the designated theme, so I’m gonna get this one right. To me, personally, hearing “fragments” makes me think fragments of memories, or remembering little bits about things. So that’s what I’ve been running with.

I’m a very hardware-based designer so I’m looking to create something wearable that records fragments of your experiences to convert them to ‘digital memories’. Watch this space.

Final Project Update

jo — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 22:58:57 +0000

Still beavering away at my final project. Here is an A3 Research poster prepared for last weeks’ project session, but expect some better stuff soon. Cultural probes have started to come back, I’ve started to analyse those so will post my findings soon.

DOING: Processing

jo — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 21:41:09 +0000

CONCEPT

“Abertrack” is a Processing program and visualisation which tracks and plots the voy- ages of an international oil tanker called MV Aberdeen. Ship location data is provided by a service called “Ship AIS” which provides regular updates, including the latitude and longitude of the vessel. As my partner works at sea, I regularly check Ship AIS but often find the information confusing. There is an option to view the vessel position on a map, but it only shows the previous 6 hours of movement.

I wanted to create a nicer, more aesthetically pleasing visualisation of the MV Aberdeen’s movements over a longer period of time.

IMPLEMENTATION

When I embarked upon this project, I wanted to pull the vessel’s location data from the Ship AIS system via XML feed, however this proved to be an insurmountable feat. Most sources did not have an XML feed that Processing could read, and the only one I could find required a fee of several hundred pounds to access. However, I expect with enough time – and perhaps some outside advice – I could eventually overcome this problem by reading the val- ues straight from the PHP cell on the website.

After several weeks of battling with the above, I opted to manually store the data in a text file. I then called this into Processing as an array, with each line (latitude, longitude) being parsed as a string. This was an easy workaround and allowed me to achieve what I had set out to. For each string, I drew an eclipse to mark the co-ordinates of the ship at that time. Once I had my co- ordinates plotting correctly, I joined them with a line.

The biggest challenge I faced in this project was plotting the GPS co-ordinates onto a 2D map. It took a lot of research into mercartor maps, a distressing amount of maths and rather a lot of trial and error to finally come up with a solution which enabled me to plot GPS co-ordinates directly onto my map.

SCOPE & POTENTIAL

There is potential for this concept to be scaled up to create larger and more engaging visu- alisations. This example shows a mock-up of three different vessels in three different seas, in different colours.

There is also potential to make the map interactive, for example allowing the user to zoom in on specific areas or choose which ships they view. A live feed would be nice.

MYTHS

As inevitably predicted, I’ve gone for a very loose connection to the theme of “myths”!

When hearing people talk about myths, it is often sea-related things which spring to mind, eg. mermaids, the Loch Ness Monster, the Greek God Posiedon, etc. One of the most famous myths is based around the Chinese Ocean God T’ien Hou – a mythological being who guarded sailors and kept them safe. She would watch over sailors and ensure they were always safe on their voyages. Arguably, tracking vessels ensures their utmost safety and security – so my project relates to the theme in this way.

You can view the A3 poster I made to accompany the project by clicking here.

Mobile Media Development

jo — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 19:10:06 +0000

Outlined the technicalities of my Mobile Media project, which I’ve decided to call “Key to the City”. Excuse the crude format, I’m a fairly sketchy person and I’m in Scotland this week without my graphics tablet, so I wanted to do it by hand rather than crudely with a mouse. This is very much a first draft though, so expect a neater, more resolved version soon.

As you can see, it’s pretty simple. It’s not very complicated in terms of technical details, which will hopefully make it easy to implement. I also drafted a user scenario – again, still to be neatened up!

In terms of equipment and materials, here is my current spec (to make one working prototype):
1 x key
1 x RF receiver
6-8 x RF transmitters
1 x on/off switch
1 x vibration component
1 x battery

On the prototype front, I’m aiming to have one key working, picking up signals from approximately 6-8 transmitters. I’ll need to do a bit more work first, but if I can’t get the aesthetics I’m aiming to achieve, I suspect I’ll make a functioning prototype and and experience/aesthetic prototype.