Perhaps not directly related to the DIY topic, however I have spotted what seems to be some kind of trend in DIY projects : 3D displays. I don’t mean the type of 3D display shown at SIGGRAPH and other places recently, but more the ‘real world’ displays using objects in 3D space to create a display.
Some time ago, in 2006, TUDelft students created the at that time ‘largest 3D display‘. This display was created using 8000 suspended LED spheres, allowing them to create low-res visualisations in space. It probably wasn’t the first of it’s kind, but for me personally it was my first encounter with the idea of having a 3D matrix of elements to display information.
TUDelft 3D Display, 2006
More recent, I’ve seen this idea popping up in other places using different technologies. Perhaps the most impressive one I saw at the talk of ART+COM at OFFF2010. The German design agency created a grid of metal spheres which they can move in the 3rd dimension, allowing them to create a moving sculpture in 3D objects. (a very nice movie over here).
BMW Kinetic Sculpture
Another recent project is by Richard Harvey. He created a floating display, using EPS spheres that float on a stream of air. By changing the strength of the airflow, the spheres can be lowered an raised again creating a visual in 3D space.
Floating Forecaster by Richard Harvey
As a last one, Daniel Schulze created ‘for those who see‘. A spatial display using smoke ‘puffs’ to create elements in 3D. The nice thing here is that the display elements only exist for a short amount of time before they fade out. Still it allows to create a visualisation in 3D.
For those who see, Daniel Schulze
Why do I blog this?
All the examples above show DIY created 3D display installations that explore the space between the real and virtual world and how things can be displayed in that undefined zone. By changing materials and other characteristics a very different type of display is created although the basal idea is more or less similar. Also, it points out that to create a meaningful display, we don’t need super high definition screens. Perhaps it’s more interesting to see what we can do with extreme low resolution in order to get connected (again) to real world objects and environments.
Long time no write, I guess I’ve doing a lot of thinking in between 
Anyhow, I’ve mostly been trying to put some boundaries to the topic of the PhD. Based on the three zone stuff I wrote about earlier, I tried to define a main research question;
How can people be supported to create in a pervasive world?
Obviously, this is still (too?) broad. Also, it does not contain the word ‘DiY’. The problem I encountered with the term DiY is that it can be interpreted in so many ways that it quickly becomes a hollow container. I believe that starting from this type of question ‘DiY’ emerges more or less in a natural way. The reason I evolved to this question is that I wanted to combine the ‘technical stuff’ with the ‘people centered stuff’. With ‘technical stuff’ I’m referring to the digital-DiY activities emerging (eg Arduino), the ‘people centered stuff’ refers to the everyday creativity which is re-gaining a lot of interest lately (eg Instructables).
The crucial words in this question are:
- People
- The way I see it now, is that depending on who is being supported to create in a pervasive world automatically defines the way DiY emerges from this question. Depending on someone’s level of creativity (Sanders & Stappers), someone’s type of logic (Mogensen) or the way of decision-making (Mintzberg & Westley) the modalities of this person’s DiY can be defined.
- Create
- Much like the term ‘people’, ‘creating’ can be interpreted in several ways. It can be creating tangible objects, customising a service, even choosing is TV channel with a remote could be seen as creating (you create the experience on your TV screen by pressing a button). Using frameworks and trains of thought set up in publications like The Craftsman (Sennet), The Design of Everyday Life (Shove, Watson Hand and Ingram) and The Culture of Craft (Dormer) a solid foundation can be found regarding the modalities of this term.
- Pervasive world
- The question states the pervasive world as a fact, this is mostly based on ideas gathered from publications like ‘Shaping things’ (Sterling). The modalities of creating will allow to set up some practical experiments with people.
I’m conscious that stating this ‘main’ research question might be risky, but I hope it elicits some conversation about the topic. If I take the above writings about the terms into account the questions could be reformulated to other questions like:
- How can a designer understand people’s use and interpretation of sensors and sensor based interactions in a better way?
- How can people understand sensors in the same way we understand a hinge?
Please, any comments thoughts ideas or constructive criticism more than welcome! I hope to finish a more elaborate writeup soon.
Over the last months I’ve mostly been trying to put down some boundaries to the research topics I’d like to cover. This has been far from easy, mostly because I tend to get distracted from one focus zone quite quickly and hover over to another one. I don’t see the need to stop doing that, but I do see the need to crystallize my research topics and ‘get down to business’.
What I have been able to do is identifying three zones in which I see enough depth to start digging deeper into. Obviously all zones are related to Do-it-Yourself in general, varying between a real practical level and a more philosophical & psychological level;
1. Matching “Digital DiY” with “DiY”
In the past, DiY was more associated with craft. It is the craft culture that is clearly making it’s “reborn” comeback in the digital realm. (Illustrated very well in P. Dormer’s ‘Culture of Craft’ and R. Sennett’s ‘The Craftsman’) The first zone is all about the comparisons between these two interprations of DiY, the ‘classic’ one and the ‘reborn’ one.
Levels of DiY
Directly related to the first zone, I have the tendency to divide DiY into various levels. What these levels are, or what the precise dimensions are … I have no clue about yet. There is a good chance these levels are merely a re-interpretation of existing models, looked a from another point of view. Related research here is certainly the 4 levels of creativity by L. Sanders & P.J. Stappers and other ongoing research in domains related to creativity and participatory design.
Learning
Research related to learning is also a central theme within this first zone. Whatever way DiY is approached, digital or non-digital, there is always learning involved. Roughly there are three stages in a DiY related learning process to be identified;
- Buy
- Create
- Master
Each stage has an increased level of skill and knowledge. Also, these levels of skill can vary depending on the topic. Depending on things such as interest, context, motivation, etc.. someone will create something themselves or let others do it for them.
Related terms to the learning aspect in DiY are guidance and expertise (based on DIY:The rise of lofi culture by A. Spencer). I tried to plot various DiY related activities on a 2D axis, where guidance was the Y axis and expertise the X axis. The plotted activities were things like cooking, music making, publishing… all being things that some people either do completely themselves or are done by someone else for someone. It’s a bit hazy yet what the overall conclusions are, but I do have the feeling that making this comparison can contribute to the way the levels of DiY are interpreted. One thing that is very clear is that skill comes into relation with money pretty quickly. Also fun, joy and satisfaction are related terms that need further investigation.
2. How to enable people to create
A second zone is related more towards what factors enable, disable, motivate or stop people from creating things. Since creating or making things is ‘the’ central element related to DiY, getting to know why certain people seem more enabled or motivated than others is a crucial aspect.
New digital divide
A new kind of digital divide has been emerging for some time. In the past the divide was simply between people who use computers and people who don’t, but influenced by social and new media, the divide is becoming more complex. The so called ‘new digital divide’ is manifesting itself between digital media prosumers and consumers (indicated and summarised well by N.Hendriks in Netlash’s 2010 trendreport). Prosumers are people that contribute actively to communities, are creating their own media, uploading to facebook, sharing their geolocation, etc. The digital consumer is someone who watches digital media, but would be less likely to upload photos and videos.
The shift or change in this digital divide is remarkable because it shows that somehow groups of people are motivated to actively participate whilst other prefer to sit, watch and enjoy. Also it shows that it is possible for people to join in, if they want. Much like I covered in zone 1 of this post, being a prosumer is all related to skill, but it clearly relates to existing work on (psychological) motivation as well.
Create/Frustrate
Linking back to the part on ‘learning’ in zone 1 of this post, in the world of DiY there seems to exist a create/frustrate dilemma. In many cases, people have ideas to make something, but once they want to start making it, frustration rises because it does not go according to plan and the whole creation process is abandoned. (I guess this is one of the reasons some people hate to buy stuff at IKEA, since the building part is something that could be a source of frustion by many)
This dilemma links to motivation theory, and feels like a subject that has been studied many times before. It will be interesting to see how this relation manifests itself further in the DiY context, a track to be continued.
Hard & Soft DiY
When speaking of “creating” it is very important to make the correct nuances. When the words create and object are used in the same sentence, people tend to think of tangible things. This is not always the case, therefore it is important to segment the ‘things’ someone can ‘create’. As a starting point, two (maybe three) major categories are;
Material based (hard)
‘Hard DiY’ should be interpreted as creating physical objects. A carpenter that creates a chair, a butcher that prepares meat, a blacksmith creating an iron fencing, your nextdoor neighbour preparing oven fries, etc. This is all related to craft in it’s original meaning, people making things themselves to physically use in their day to day lives.
Data based (soft)
In contrast to the physical stuff above, ‘Soft DiY’ is everything that has no tangible aspect to it. Traditional examples are the Linux community where people are creating software that they like to use themselves with their own philosophy. Many other online tools that promote services ‘in the cloud’ can be mashed up by people in order to create a personal service for them, examples here are daytum, yahoo pipes and many many more.
An important characteristic of ‘Soft DiY’ is that it can be collected in a passive way. For instance, when people walk around with a GPS enabled mobile phone, their location could be tracked without them having to do anything. This data could then be re-used in unexpected contexts, creating truly personalised experiences. It are these kind of experiences that could give people the feeling of ‘having done something themselves’ without actually having done any activity in a conscious way.
Mixed media
Thinking about the hard and soft DiY creations, recent developments in technology are more capable of combining the two. A nice example is the rise of geolocation and geotags. It is because of certain physical devices (iPhone, HTC Hero, GPS trackers,…) that people are capable of generating new types of datastreams.
Saying this, the link to the new digital divide mentioned earlier becomes very important – at the moment I have the feeling the real challenge is twofold in this zone;
- How can the so called ‘divide’ be bridged in order for the mainstream public to participate in both the ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ realms of DiY?
- Should hard and soft DiY be reinterpreted for different user groups? Or how can the possible potential be made clear to a mainstream public?
3. Enabling people to think about technology in a non-tech way
The third zone is probably the most crystalised one, to some extend at least. In fact this zone can be regarded as just one aspect of the “mixed media” challenges brought forward before. Based on research done in Human Computer Interaction, one of the things that often pops up is the discussion whether design research can truly create new things (recently discussed by many based on a D. Norman posting). The way I currently relate this discussion to my research is, again, twofold;
- Once “technology” comes into the picture, many people immediately associate computers, screens, privacy issues, internet, files, complexity, etc… Technology as such should not be something people are afraid of, but something that should be embraceable and be integrated in people’s lives.
- In order for this to happen, it should be very clear what current technology has to offer in order for people to relate to any of it. People should be able to, discover, dream up and create things involving technology at their own pace.
Sensor swatches
In a couple of previous posts I mentioned the sensor boxes I have been making. One of the ideas I’m exploring is how taking abstraction from technology as such and offering it in a different packaging, as neutral as possible, can trigger people to understand the possibilities of technology without having to be confronted with high fidelity devices. It should be stressed that I do not want to force people to use technology, but I’m trying to bring technology down to the level of a non-tech artefact. With this ambitious goal I want to allow people to think about a sensor in the same way as they would think about a rubiks cube, or a wooden spoon.
Hackers & makers
Obviously there are already people doing exactly what I described above. Currently they are often referred to as hackers and/or makers, being people that create their own products to solve their own problems in their day to day lives. This goes from ‘hardware hacks’ like adding a piece of Sugru to a bicycle handle to coding their own wireless access point firmware. At the moment, most of this is community driven – an aspect I didn’t really talk about yet – it are factors like respect, teamspirit and passion that drives them.
So, in the above words I tried to outline my research tracks. I did an attempt at a first crystallisation of ideas, but I’m conscious that there is still some re-distilling to be done. During the next days and weeks my plan is to get a bit deeper into each of the proposed zones, link it deeper to existing research and try to define the research questions in a more refined way.
During the last week(s) of 2009 I built a first version of the sensor box. In fact there’s nothing special to it, just a box with an Arduino and a sensor on a protoshield. The only functionality the box has is that when it is shaken, the white LED goes on for a couple of seconds.
The original goal I put forward was to create objects that could facilite people to think about sensor based technology without actually being confronted with the technology as such. Via this way people should be able to use sensors much like they use material or colour swatches. The key to achieving this is to put the focus on the interaction with the sensors and not on the technology as such. The ‘challenge’ should be for people to explore the object to see in what way the sensor reacts. Obviously there are several challenges to overcome whilst designing the object as such, a couple of examples;
- Dimensions - a handheld object is associated with devices like a mobile phone
- Aesthetics, texture – colours and tactility have an impact on the interpretation of the object
- Predictablity – when someone has used a sensorbox once, the discovery of the interaction with that sensor should vary over time. In the case of the shakebox, this could mean that the direction of shaking or the intensity has an effect on the output.
- Output – the output of the sensor should be adjustable in order to trigger various ideas. For instance the LED should be interchangeable to a vibration element, a heat generator, etc.
So far, creating the box as a physical object has really catalysed my thinking – seems to work a lot better than just drawing things out on paper.
