Pure Data is an open source programming environment for audio, video and graphical processing. I found the video above in the exhibition section of the Pure Data community portal, it was contributed by Pure Data user BrN. It would seem to demonstrate some of what the framework can do, though there’s not much else in the exhibition to compare it with.

Pure data was developed by Miller Puckette seems to be based on Max, though I don’t fully understand the relationship. Searching on the web, it’s difficult to discern a single ‘official’ page, but the community page, and Miller Puckette’s software page seem prominent.

Some quick notes on what I did to get Basic Stamp 2 modules running on a USB Board of Education development board running on OSX Tiger.

1. Download FTDI virtual COM port drivers. Drivers for OSX Intel are about half way down the page. This driver is needed for the computer to talk to the serial interface of the stamp via the mini USB connection on the Board of Education development board.

2. Mount the disk image and double-click the package to install. This will require a restart.

3. Download MacBS2. This program allows you to program the stamp from OSX . The official editor only works on windows.

4. Install MacBS2 by dragging it to your Applications folder.

5. Start MacBS2 by double-clicking. It will offer to automatically install the PBasic tokeniser for you. Say yes.

6. Attach your Board of Education to the USB port of the computer and power it with a battery or power pack.

7. In MacBS2, choose the serial port from the drop-down on the top-right side. It will probably look something like ‘usbserial-…’.

8. you should be able to click the ‘ID Stamp’ button to check that the stamp is connected and responding.

9. Type in a simple program (e.g. DEBUG “Hello World”) and click the ‘Run’ button to download it to the stamp. You should see ‘Hello World’ printed in the console at the bottom of the window.

Two fascinating projects involving audio feedback from an industrial design student at the Technical University, Eindhoven, Bram van der Vlist.

The image above comes from a project called ‘Extend Your Senses’. In this project, Bram explored how sound could be used to provide athletes with added feedback about the movements they made. The sounds were generated based on signals from acceleration sensors attached to the equipment or bodies of athletes. The intention was that the audio feedback could support the athletes in learning and refining their movements, especially in relation to the kinaesthetic sense. This is the sense we have of the relative position of the parts of our body.

In another project, called Bat Biker, Bram developed a system to give feedback for blind mountain bikers. In the design, the bike in front is ridden by a sighted cyclist and equipped with a loud-speaker that changes sound depending on the kind of terrain the bike was riding over. The cyclist on the bike riding behind could learn to interpret these sounds and adapt their riding accordingly.

Did you ever play the game ‘statues’? The object is to stay as still as you can and the winner is the one who can stay still for the longest. It’s difficult and unusual for people to remain still like this (unless you’re a street performer). On the other hand, statues and other kinds of sculpture usually do stay still. But not always.

Below are some links to artists and designers who have worked with movement in interesting ways. This might be interesting as inspiration for students in Experience Design when creating ‘interactive mobiles’ or tinkering interaction concepts.

If anyone has examples of other artists’ work, please post them in the comments.

(Image credit Arthur Ganson)

Arthur Ganson makes wonderfully evocative and poetic mechanical scuptures. Check the page of videos on his website. I particularly liked the ‘Machine with Wishbone’ (image above).

(Image credit Ben Hopson).

Ben Hopson has been carrying out a series of experiments into ‘sketching motion concepts’. He achieves amazingly precise, intricate and delicate sequences of movements from very simple materials. He also does a very good job of documenting his work. The image is above is from a video on his website for a piece called ‘3-boxes’. He also has a list of links to other people and groups who have done interesting work in the same area.

(Image credit Theo Jansen).

Finally, Theo Jansen is a dutch artist who makes incredible walking sculptures that he calls strandbeests. Watching the videos, it’s easy to imagine that these are in fact gigantic creatures that have lumbered up from the sea. Click the image above to see more photos from his website.

(Thanks to Marcelle for the links.)

A summary of:

Battarbee, K. & Koskinen, I., 2005. Co-experience: user experience as interaction. CoDesign, 1(1), 5-18 (online article).

In recent years, the idea of user designing for experience has emerged as an important concept and goal for the field of interaction design. Experience has been a useful notion for helping think beyond usability as the primary goal for interaction design. This is necessary, because although usability is itself still important, a focus on usability alone does not give insight into other aspects of interaction, such as pleasure, desirability and so on.

The authors point to the following three approaches to the study and interpretation of user experience in design

• Measuring approach: builds on the approach that experiences can be measured by emotional reactions. This can be either by directly measuring physiological reactions that are linked to emotional states (skin conductivity, heart-rate) or by assessing people’s emotions subjective reports.
• Empathic approach: seeks to link experiences to the emotional needs, desires and motivations of individuals. This leads to the need for designers and researchers to develop rich empathic understandings of these aspects of people’s experiences.
• Pragmatist appproach: borrows from pragmatist philosophy and proposes that experiences grow from interactions between people and their environment. Fleeting, fluent subconscious experiences can form meaningful chunks of experience for people and be demarcated as ‘an experience’. These may in-turn be elaborated through stories into ‘meta-experiences’, collections of individual experiences.

The authors point out that each of these approaches to the study of experience for design has focussed on experience as an individual phenomenon. They propose that interactional aspects of experience should also be considered. They draw on a symbolic interactionism approach, and propose ‘co-experience’ as a framework within which individual experiences emerge and change as they become part of social interaction. This is based on three principles from symbolic interactionism. First, that people act towards things through the meanings that those things have for them. Second, that meanings arise from interaction with others. Third, that meanings are part of an interpretive process of a person encountering things (I’m not entirely sure about my use of the word ‘things’ in this sentence).

The authors then use this model to explain how experiences migrate from the unconcious background of ongoing experience, to concsious and deleniated experiences (an experience), to collaboratively elaborated and shared stories (meta-experiences). This is proposed through the mechanisms of ‘lifting up experiences’ (communicating an to others about an experience), ‘reciprocating experiences’ (acknowledging and responding to an experience that another person has shared) and ‘rejecting and ignoring experiences’ (rejecting or downgrading an experience that another person has shared).

The researchers explore, elaborate, and illustrate these processess of migration with the results of a study into the use of a multimedia messaging service. They show how the back and forth of message between people using this system functioned in terms of establishing meanings around the experiences that were shared. A methodological difficulty of the study (one acknowledged by the authors) is that the study only captured interactions that took place through the medium of the multimedia messaging service, so other channels of communication that might have served to lift up, reciprocate, or reject experiences are not visible.