• capturing ideas, instantly
• marinating ideas, perpetually
• igniting ideas, magically

Capture – available, simple accessories

The capturing interface for tinder is deceptively simple and is an attempt to remove friction from long term idea generation. Often, we are reluctant to capture new ideas as they appear in our heads because our “inboxes” are clumsy, unavailable, or too complex. When we write down ideas in sketchbooks or on backs of napkins they often end up in a jumbled pile of notes, or filed away forever in a dusty file cabinet, or simply discarded after their usefulness has expired. Digital tools exacerbate the problem because they make capturing ideas as easy as bookmarking a web page. We suddenly have an overwhelming backlog of digital detritus, all at one point representing interesting ideas but now stifling our creativity. Indeed, by the time we pull our cell phones to tap out an idea, the initial spark of joy has already left the thought.

tinder provides a very simple capturing interface (i.e. the tinder, itself) – cheap, disposable scraps of magic paper that are always available on our desks or in our pocket; an ordinary pen or pencil is more than adequate to mark these pieces of tinder. Our minds are calmed because

Marinate – processing, powerful tinderbox

It is good to have holding places for ideas. By putting our thoughts in external holding bins, the ideas have a chance to marinate over the long term. Indeed, this is the heart of long term creative sparks. The longer ideas remain in a holding pattern, the more chance they have to connect in new and beautiful patterns. We grow in wisdom and can apply new contexts and perspective to these ideas. In fact, in early childhood development, the ability to make semantic connections between ideas is critical to normal cognitive growth [Beckage, Smith & Hills, 2011]

The tinderbox is a computationally powerful device disguised as an elegant wooden box. The box is wirelessly connected to cloud-based APIs that provide access to handwriting recognition, machine learning, and semantic network modeling algorithms. It detects and processes the content of every idea placed inside; the system organizes, optimizes, and reshuffles ideas in the semantic map based on everything from what is in current news headlines to the mood of the user. We feel a quiet confidence when we can find our ideas marinating as long as necessary in a brine of computational augmentation.

Ignite – revealing, magic tinder

When we are ready to address our long-term ideas, we simply remove the pieces of tinder from the tinderbox and begin to play. We notice that one of the pieces is glowing. We don’t need to know why, but tinder wants us to notice this spark. (In reality, the system’s algorithms have predicted that this piece of tinder contains a particularly relevant idea).

The heart of tinder is a new material called papyro. This paper-like material has sensor and computational matrices woven among its pulp fibers. Each piece of tinder, made of papyro, has a unique signature and fine-grained proprioception (a sense of position and motion), so it can compute its location relative to other pieces of tinder. Because papyro contains smart ink and luminescent tint, as we spread and shuffle the scraps on our desk, the luminescence spreads across the tinder and is constantly shifting as we reposition and decontextualize these ideas.

Finally, when we have a pile of tinder glowing brightly, we can “ignite” the stack by drawing a matchstick and making a striking gesture. Something amazing happens when a pile of tinder ignites. The nanobots that make up the papyro start to self-assemble into one, larger piece of tinder… a bigger idea that is the synthesis of the others. papyro is paper-like, so I can simply tear off pieces of the idea I don’t like or fold the paper to see multiple sides of an argument. If I want to add another idea, I can push one piece of tinder into the other and the papyro will melt together. If this new idea goes back into the tinderbox, the semantic network model will update, as well.

Presentation PDF: tinder_davidnunez

PDF

1st Project_Helena Hayoun Won

Smart magnetic interface is a new and important means of understanding relationships with others, their communities, their rules, their habits, and their references to the world. Designing radically new interface experiences for the creation of digital media can lead to unexpected discoveries and shifts in perspective.

I aim to motivate users in telling their stories by new data filtering and driving reflection on the outcomes of their behaviors. The key to bind the physical act of collection and the digital opportunity of representation is metadata customization and filtering. These mechanisms for gathering and filtering a visual, gestures, tactile and verbal story exist as branch alternatives to the usual fragmented tools.

When using this interface This, User play how an object would collect relative to the viewpoint of the acting spot. They iterate between trying and collecting in a world of multiple perspectives. The results are entirely new genres of user-created works, where user finally capture the cherished visual idioms of action.

HW1-SRay-Final

Introduction

Shape exploration is a process relying on different kinds of tools and media in different stages. Designers use brains for imagining, adopt paper+pen for 2D sketching, and manipulate clay for 3D modeling. The time consumptions of ideation with different media increase, while designers move from abstract to concrete representations. It is believed that reducing the time cost of transiting from one media to another could help to improve the quantity and quality of ideation. Therefore, we propose the idea of Sublimation Ray(S-Ray) which transmits and receives bidirectional signals to and from Radical Atom and to change its phases; Radical Atom is a new kind of computational material proposed by Pro. Hiroshi Ishii of Tangible Media Group in the MIT Media Lab. With the S-Ray, designers can change the Radical Atom from gas to liquid to solid on demand, and this mechanism is believe to speed up and enrich the ideation process.

Reference

Hiroshi Ishii, Dávid Lakatos, Leonardo Bonanni, and Jean-Baptiste Labrune. 2012. Radical atoms: beyond tangible bits, toward transformable materials. interactions 19, 1 (January 2012), 38-51. 

Prototypes

Problem Description

Rapid prototyping and the free form construction of physical prototypes play a vital role in the ideation and design experimentation process. The current approach though is inflexible forcing a design to become increasingly constrained as it develops from initial sketch to the CAD model and onto the first fabricated prototype. This inflexibility therefore prevents the designer form being able to naturally experiment and try new designs and configurations where their understanding of the physical affordances and textures of the object shape the design.

Solution

To overcome this the Re-Form project presents an augmented prototyping workbench where physical prototypes can be rapidly developed in a freeform modelling environment. The project is built around an augmented projection system where visual elements such as the UI and object textures can be displayed on the physical form of the prototype. Through the use of reverse electrovibration textures can also be applied to the object allowing the rapid experimentation of both the visual and physical attributes of the prototype. Through these techniques Re-Form can support wizard of oz style interaction with physical objects enabling new user interactions to be immediately tested without having to redesign and fabricate each individual adjustment.

QWRKR (“Quirky Worker”) is a simultaneous organizational tool for the prototypical multi-colored post-it note ideation session. It comes as a suite of tools to help make these sessions more productive. [PDF]

Brainstorming produces an abundance of ideas, but team members often find it difficult to synthesize these ideas into actionable results. Additionally, analysis tends to occur after the fact rather than during the process of idea-generation. Typically, a team member is designated as “mediator” or “facilitator” for the ideation session—QWRKR takes on this role, organizing content on the fly and directing the brainstorm session to more productive results.

Faced with a chaotic wall full of ideas, humans tend to rely on simple, intuitive analytical tools to group and organize content, ignoring potentially valuable ideas.

1. Alternate organization schemes

Optical Character Recognition combined with Natural Language processing could discover latent organizational structures in the post-it data. By data mining Wikipedia and other web content, QWRKR could find associations between ideas as the team works, and check popularity to determine what ideas are trending and might be of higher value.

2. Visualizing Content

Visualizing content early can help team members discover unforeseen connections between ideas. This tool temporarily converts, with a single click, a post-it note into its corresponding image on Wikipedia. Clicking an image multiple times cycles through various associated images until appropriate.

3. Computer Vision

By tracking team members’ eye movements, QWRKR can create heat maps of ideas that are getting too much attention, and suggest focus on ideas being overlooked. As an additional association tool, it can track the sequence of focus through the idea set.

4. Semantic Organization

QWRKR can quickly re-arrange post-it data into sentences, creating surprising associations between ideas. These quasi-random reconfigurations could serve as a valuable lateral thinking aid for the team.

5. Idea Accumulation

Clicking on an idea in this mode automatically creates additional associated words or ideas around it, a directed brainstorming tool.

6. Directed Lateral Thinking

Oblique Strategies and other lateral thinking tools can help disrupt ossified thinking in the brainstorming process.

7. The Quirky Randomizer

This tool cycles through all tools at a controlled level of randomness. The ensuing cognitive dissonance can be productive, encouraging the team to reconfigure preconceived notions on the fly.

Slides

Motivation

These days, design activities mostly start from and end up in the computer screen, especially in the phase of developing forms and shapes of designs. In this situation, the  keyboard and mouse are the main tools of designing; sliding and clicking a mouse are the only interactions which are allowed to us. However, if we look back on our childhood, our designs were developed through physical interactions;  we played with clay or Lego blocks with our hands, having physical sensations. I believe this physical sense of interaction is very important in designing because it provides us with a good way of exploring design ambiguity. Even when we do not know what is the next step in our design process, we can be inspired by physically touching, moving, and distorting our design objects, and this physical process sometimes leads the way to unexpected design possibilities. Here, the question was how to restore this physical sense of designing/crafting in today’s digital environment.

Project Descriptions

In this assignment, a new design environment is proposed in order to restore the physical sense of designing/crafting. This design environment detects users’ gestures with a motion sensing device and responds to them by manipulating digital objects in the large screen. This environment will enable users to have the physical sense of designing/crafting and actively explore ambiguities in the design process. In addition, by mapping users’ diverse motion vocabularies to design vocabularies, this design environment could also provides creative ways to explore new design modes. For example, if the environment is set to interpret dancing gestures, users could explorer new ways of designing by dancing.

Concept Demo

Motivation

The idea behind StrobeDisplay is to create floating physical bits of digital information. The inspiration is derived from an installation at the MIT Museum, where strobes of light on falling water is used to create an illusion of stating datapoints(green dots). These elements could be used to represent an information element and interesting mid-air visualizations can be created.

Motivation video(Strobes)

Background

Present forms of display do it on x,y axis (pixels). There are attempts to make 2.5D displays lately, some from the Media Lab only- Recompose and Relief. Attempts to exploit the z axis  in an interface have been few, such as ZeroN.