Bagheera in transit

I marked (left, bottom corner) my favorite seat in a metro carriage (line 2) so everyone knows when i ride in comfort. 

Prototypes finished - Call for participants!

Finally, my prototypes are ready.

The reasone behind making four units is to test Bagheera in a real context. So on Wednesday i need some help (10-20 minutes preparation and 1-2 hours of testing while you do your regular stuff). In my project i have aimed at at real test of the interactions in a working system. I know it is little time left and people are stressed, but this is the last mile and hopefully some important lessons are to be learned.

I need three testers (Gunnar has signed) with Bluetooth phones that are relatively new (Sony Ericsson and Nokia seems to work best). I'll talk to any that are interested in participating at school up front. Everybody can participate if they want to watch whats happening by downloading my software to their phone, but they will not be able to upload "touches" to the system, only recieve.

I will take pictures and maybe some video to document, and i'm interested in your feedback at the end. But we'll sort that out while doing it.

The units are packed and ready for testing!

Prototyping

Ok, so now i have actually a working Bluetooth (BT) RFID reader. The pictured device is ugly as nothing else, but it works. Second iteration will be made with clear acrylic or PET plastic. What remains in code is to merge the Mobile Processing (MP) code for the BT reader into my main code, so it will upload read RFID tags to the Bagheera service.

Stay tuned!

PS. While working with the BT setup i discovered something peculiar. Take a look at the video!

Rapid Prototyping Design brief

I am now starting a collaboration with a group from the second year that will work as a independent design team. I welcome Mari, Mario and Alexander to the project!

Inspiring visuals from nature and science.

Startup tasks

• Flesh out all ideas related to the project, write them down
• Find reference projects, inspiration and some concepts
  
• Make a short presentation
  
• Make a project plan
  

NFC Prototype Device

NFC Prototype Device
Originally uploaded by etunKo

I've ordered 4 bluetooth modules from sparkfun. The order was shipped last friday and i hope the units will arrive here in Oslo before thursday this week. I strongly feel that my project will be more solid once i can actually test how it feels to transmit and recieve a touch over some distance.

While i'm waiting i am testing how the parts will attach to a phone (or not). This can be a starting point for exploring some encasing options that i will brief another class to make for me. Maybe it will be separate from the phone or perhaps it will be more attached like a parasite.
In any case this is a remedy for the situation that i do not have a working NFC phone to work with. I've been told that they are a bit harder to program than using just mobile.processing

Experience Hooks

The workshop we had with Jack Schulze & Matt Webb was three good days of intense work. It was all about cutting all excess fat and presenting our project as if it was completed already ("Evidencing"). This seems to be their core strength as earlier described.

Workshop presentation
The presentation is based on what they call Experience Hooks which i could try to define as: "The experiences the user tells friends about after interacting with the artifact". So what i tried to do was presenting how i interacted with the buying, unboxing, reading the manual, working the tags of the Bagheera service.

| View | Upload your own

I'm using Slideshare for the first time and i could not upload my pptx, but had to convert to pdf. So i lost some of the detailing and animations i guess, but i'll try to update later with a better one.

It was really refreshing to avoid working with the technical details and infrastructure and just focus on the experience. While working on it i thought i would miss my target completly, but the feedback from Jack Schulze was encouraging, as it made him understand the concept and got more curious towards it. So i learned that if the Experience Hooks are well communicated they serve as a really good way to present projects. As Matt said,

"Be rigourous in idea communication, then build the models and prototypes ontop of that and snap everything into the presentation at the end"

Making a career
A lot of buzz is generated by people making ideas look real and post them online. Jack Schulze spots a trend in interaction design of people making careers out of imaginary products that are presented using exciting Experience Hooks and well communicated ideas.

"Make the project really easy to communicate over the web. Short, simple and sweet so people will remember it, then you get the job."

It is better to be sucked into work by people that have noticed your projects rather than doing the rounds with your portfolio.