I mentioned previously the atelier I was running on our BDes Product Design degree, so here’s one of the projects I supervised.
Ross Coffield’s final-year project “Puppets of Propaganda” grew out of his dissertation, which looked at Guerrilla Tactics in design. Combining influences from projects such as Troika’s SMS Guerilla Projector and Tad Hirsch’s Tripwire, Ross has proposed a Toy for children 6-10 years old which allows them to record a subversive message and play it back without being present.
…a project which looks at subverting the preconceived ideology of toys to promote anonymous audio freedom of speech. Aiming to challenge the social idea that children should be seen and not heard, the puppets act as a medium for social communication in the hope of provoking social commentary. The puppets work by allowing the child to record a message and communicate it anonymously when the inbuilt sensor is triggered.
The child presses a button inside one of the puppet’s ears, and speaks their message into a microphone in the other ear. Inside an Arduino with a SpikenzieLabs Voiceshield records the message. The child then positions the puppet in a place where it can deliver its message to the intended audience. An Infra Red distance sensor in the belly (see the two holes) allows the arduino to know when someone is within range, and the audio recorded is played back.
Ross went through a number of prototypes, modelled using Rhino and rapid-prototyped on our ZCorp 310 3D Printer. Early prototypes used a hacked “voice doorbell” type device connected to the Arduino + IR sensor, but as is often the case with hacked electronics they had a tendency to fail unexpectedly. The VoiceShield is a good solution, using the Winbond ISD4003 voice recorder chip. The sampling rate on the shield is only 8kHz but this is absolutely fine for speech.
As well as the physical design Ross also undertook detailed user research and testing with primary school kids, resulting in some rather charming (and some more alarming) ideas for ways to use the toy.
It’s showtime in many Art & Design schools just now, and Edinburgh Napier University, where I lecture, is no exception. The annual Creative Showcase is a degree show of student work from the School of Arts & Creative Industries, plus a programme of events including musical performances and film screenings. It’s open 10am-6pm until 14th June.
This year I was running an Atelier (Platform) for final-year Product Design undergraduates, which involved a semester researching and writing a dissertation, and then another semester working on a major project. My Atelier group, “Everyday Electronics”, focused on the role of electronic objects in everyday life. Apart from discussions and research relating to our relationships with devices, I also ran some introductory Arduino workshops, to give the students a basic grounding in electronics prototyping.
This was only a first step, and the students had never done any electronics before, but I was pleased with how it went, and along with other workshops I ran for 3rd-year product design students, as well as masters students at Edinburgh University, this experience has fed directly into the curriculum design for two new courses BDes (Hons) Interaction Design, and MDes Interaction Design, which I’m pleased to say were recently validated, and will begin in September this year. I’m really looking forward to getting these off the ground, and putting stuff like Arduino and Processing into the curriculum of studio-based design courses.
Some of the Product Design students will also be showing work at New Designers (Part 2), in London from 16-19 July.
Last year Joe Knapp wrote a great bit of arduino code that can send RC5-compatible codes as used in Infra Red remote controls. Using a single IR LED you can control domestic devices like TV sets.
I’m not sure whether this code has a home now, but I know it was a real life-saver when a student of mine needed it for a project this time last year, so I’m putting a copy up for download here: rc5xmit.zip.
If you want to use this code with a Lilypad, or another Arduino that doesn’t use a 16MHz processor clock, then you need to change the setting in the irparams.h header file:
#define SYSCLOCK 16000000 // main system clock (Hz)For example, for an 8MHz Lilypad…
#define SYSCLOCK 8000000 // main system clock (Hz)