king talk

Music sequencing meets tangible interaction. After the well known BlockJam project from SONY labs (2002), the good people from the MIT Media Lab came up with this wonderful solution. It uses motion sensing, neighbour detection and wireless communication – cool AND buzzword heavy.

Actually I’ve been thinking about such a concept recently, when I re-discovered the Reactable, which is a nice synthesizer, but nothing like a sequencer. Well, apparently David and Jeevan from the media lab were faster once more. Kudos, and keep doing it right!

Oh, and there’s also a TED Talk about this!

via Digital Tools and Phlow

It´s nice to see, that the development process of Arduino is still in progress. After  the new user interface concept called Fritzing and some »building set« approaches like LittleBits, the TinkerKit is a new and upcoming improvement for all designers helping them to create interactive hardware prototypes with ease. The TinkerKit is currently composed of about 30 different parts: 20 different types of sensors, 10 actuators. There is also a set of Arduino-compatible hubs. Each part of the TinkerKit has a standard connector that can be connected through a standard cable to a main hub. This project is currently under development by Tinker.it! documenting the early stages of prototyping and user research here. Unfortunately this is not yet commercially available, but you can watch some TinkerKit videos on vimeo instead.

A little information for everyone wondering what Arduino is… It´s a small and cheap microcontroller that gives you the chance to explore the possibilities of electronic engineering without having electrical expertise. You can use a wide selection of sensors  (touch, proximity, thermo etc.)  and actuators (buttons, control dials, toggle switches etc.) as inputs for your installation. Otherwise you can use it as an Output for a nice ambient light installation or something else. The philosophy behind that mighty little piece of hardware is called »Tinkering«:

»The Arduino philosophy is based on making design rather then talking about it. It´s a constant search for faster and more accurate ways to build better prototypes… The classic engineer relies on a strict process for getting from point A to B while the Arduino way is based on getting lost on the way and finding C instead. This is the process of tinkering that we are so fond of: playing with the medium in an open-ended way and finding the unexpected.«
by Massimo Banzi

I can remember the first Arduino Workshop in November 2006 at HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd, were my project partner (Jens Franke) and I built the Earthwalk installation in one week without ever having done something like this before. I enjoyed it and started to love Arduino. Afterwards  new projects like the »toyhacked singing karaoke fish«, the controls for the »bugworld« or the »chemieraum«are projects that profited from this technical masterpiece. I´m sure that we will see much more easier and controllable hardware like this in the near future. Hopefully nearly everyone will be able to create interactive hardware mock-ups like everyone can edit an image in Photoshop these days. I like it…