insTag: a tool for idea documentation

Video Sketch

insTag on Vimeo

Background

Taking pictures in a meeting or branstorming session is a common activity that I want to explore for this assignment. It is very interesting that those visual impressions that brought by photos could help us associating the notes that we’ve written down with the environment that we were in. And those pictures can serve not exclusively for a post-meeting organizing, but also as a tool for real-time discussion and modification during the meeting.

System Description

The insTag is a system that aims to help one intuitively capturing ideas and rapidly evolving them with others in a meeting situation. It has a hacked camera, that connects to the cloud. The camera contains also a printer, which will print only text of location and time of the shooting moment. Besides the camera, the system has a webcam, a projector and a whiteboard.

In a meeting scenario, one can use this camera to make digital pictures of any thing he or she finds interesting. A print with authentic time and location will be generated by the camera at the same time. The digital pictures are automatically linked with the prints, which allows one freely writing notes on. When the prints are pasted on the white board, the webcam recognizes each of them because of the uniqueness of time. The linked digital pictures will be then projected on the board for discussion. One can also make a layered modification of the picture’s content on the board. By wiping the print, the webcam will take a picture of the modification and link it with the respective print. The next time when the print is pasted again on the board, a history of the modification will be projected along as well.

In the end, we will have physical tags of the inspiring moments and discussions from a meeting. As physical objects, those tags are easy to organize and retrieve. And most important, the process of making and retrieving them is intuitive.

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About sophiachang

Sophia Chang – website N/A
Harvard GSD / MArchI 6th Semester

Experience
Art is something I pursue as a personal interest through painting, drawing, and music composition. Most of my formalized experience of making comes from manual design/making of furniture, but, I have also worked with the breadth of CNC tools available at the GSD to create architectural models. I have been studying architecture for 7 years. I am comfortable in Rhino, CAD and Adobe software as well as some animating using 3dsMax. I have also worked in various offices from corporate to young and experimental where I have helped to design on the scale from towers to room/facade sized interactive installations. For some of these installations, as well as installations for courses, I have customized C# scripts to respond to movement and sound. I have never created a C# script from scratch. I am comfortable in grasshopper.

Why
For my thesis, I am exploring issues having to do with how architectural space can react to changes in perception, lifestyle, and knowledge created by digital space. Because the course situates itself between the digital and physical realm, I am immediately drawn to it as a possible means to experiment, and a place where I can contribute through my research. As one idea, I could potentially explore the creation of a research environment which organizes information in relation to the body's position in space. Not sure if this is the project, but my main interest is in digital becoming spatial rather than merely object or device.

Art
Architecture
Craft/Fabrication
Design
DIY Electronics
Electrical Eng.
Mech. Eng.
Programming/CS

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