INPUT OUTPUT AND THINGS IN BETWEEN

Input Output and Things in Between

In August 2006 we gave a 4 day workshop at the College of Fine Arts in Sydney. In the workshop we investigated interfaces between the physical and the digital realm by creating responsive systems with hard- and software.

The workshop was motivated by the new challanges designers face, working with these converging worlds. On the one hand they need to acquire the skills to use such technologies on the other, more importantly, designers need to find meaningful ways to apply them.

The objective of the workshop was to teach students how to merge these technologies into a coherent design process. We provided an environment in which the students could investigate the core paradigm of physical computing: translation from input to output and vice versa.

Also check out another version of the workshop d3 did in the digital class at UdK Berlin in 2006.

Teaching Method

In short-term workshops complicated areas like microelectronics and programming cannot be discussed in depth. Keeping this in mind, we rather focused on sparking interest in sensors, actuators, programms and their meaningful application. We achieved this by providing simple hardware and software examples the students could immediately investigate, tweak and work with.

Our constructivist, hands-on approach provided a context in which the students could acquire an intuitive understanding of the 'material', much like a sculpture could form ideas from shaping clay.

Although each example was a module with a discrete task, they could easily be combined. This approach incorporates a concept, we believe to be of utter importance: being able to identifiy, find and assemble prefabed modules to build a more complex system.

Workshop Structure

Each student conceived an object with inputs and outputs that could be connected to a computer for communication. The shape of the object was a pre-defined white cube, creating a uniform visual appearence while drawing the attention towards the behaviour. The inputs and outputs were controlled by an arduino board placed inside the cube. The board could also communicate with a processing sketch running on an iMac.

On the first day the students examined various hardware setups we had prepared in twenty, zip-locked bags containing a circuit diagram and all required hardware components. Each setup performed one single task. On the second day the students were asked to develop ideas based on their playful experiments from the previous day. We also introduced basic programming concepts. The last two days the students finalized their ideas, while we explained design concepts and technologies in more detail.

The workshop was completed by an exhibition in the evening of the last day, where the students presented their object.