Tag Archives: AnnaMariaCornelia De Gersem

Building & talking

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It was four weeks since the last workshop. Despite of the time span I didn’t have a lot of time to spend on the project but I was content with the research I’d done and was keen to show my findings to Anna Maria Cornelia. I also hoped to get at least one gas sensor working.
CO_sensorAs I had to wait before I could talk to her I started with Paul to work on the sensors. But first I had to reduce the voltage level for the NO2 and CO sensors to work. It took me an hour and a half to put it together (with help from Paul and Meg), hmm, electronics isn’t really my thing I fear. I find it very hard to translate a scheme (even a simple one) into a circuit. But it’s very nice to have help close at hand, maybe I’ll learn some day…

Then it was time for me to talk to Anna Maria. I showed her the experiments and she was very exited about them and said they offered me a good springboard to continue. She said the parameters: colour, length, applied pressure and pressure duration are very usable for visualization.
The research will follow tree lines. Working with a roll of paper and ink plotted in lines and stains. A humidity meter which they have in museums is a good starting point. I also want to look into punching creating a relief, much like Braille. I could work on paper but also materials like latex rubber that can have a changing relief. This way you can feel the pollution, which is also nice at night. A matrix printer springs to mind to achieve this effect. The nice thing of working with paper is that you have a tangible result at the end of the day. Like an air quality receipt. Still I also want to send life data to internet and I’ll have to think about relation between these two.
Anna Maria suggested that I might use a screen to visualize digitally created flocks and maybe incorporate a watch so you only have to wear on thing around your wrist. She also suggested that it might be nice to somehow keep the functionality I’d used in the experiments working with smell to determine air quality. I could send a marker when I notice something about the air quality so I can later see them side by side to see if my intuitions were right.
She wants me to make five (!) different prototypes by September that translate the manual experiments into something mechanical and digital.
Back with Paul I managed to get the CO sensor working. That is, it outputs a voltage which varies when I breath or blow on it. The NO2 works exactly the same so it shouldn’t be to difficult to build. Now I have to find out what a certain voltage level means. But I will have to make a start in sending the data to a server. The next two months will be very busy…

Inspiration

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Saturday we had our first meeting with the wearable group. They seemed like an enthusiastic and creative bunch so that’s a good start. A lot of different ideas from everyone so we will pick up a lot from each other in the next couple of months.

Listening to and talking with Anna Maria Cornelia was a refreshing and inspiring event. She’s an Experience Design teacher at the Technical University in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. She talked about her mission for the students to find a balance between technology and ideas. Urging them to take a broad approach to the subject and not get stuck in solutions or technology at the beginning. Another important thing she stressed that in the design process, every step is important. For me it was an appeal for awareness of my own process and to value every sketch and scribble. A notion already installed in me by my teacher Martin van Opdorp at the art academy but this was a good reminder.

She put her approach to practice with us right from the start. As I talked about data visualisation she asked me what that was. So I started to talk about LEDs and displays. My assignment for the next couple of weeks is to think about data visualisation without the technique, everything but LEDs and displays… That’s quite liberating! (But also kind of a shock to be honest.) She thought the warning bit was a negative message and wondered if there’s a way to work with the data and send out a positive message. I must say some people in the group were not very pleased with knowing how bad the air quality is. I’m the kind of person who just wants to know, be aware either good or bad. But I do need to consider what I want to achieve with the data, what kind of emotions I want to arouse.

So much for the concept, we also had to think about the techniques we’re going to use. For me that means of course the different sensors (are there any sensors that measure ‘positive’ gasses, and what would they be? Oxygen may be?), communication with the mobile phone and an idea popped up to see if I can make the thing run on solar energy so as not to contribute to the pollution.

So quite a lot of challenges ahead of which I’ll keep you posted.