Notes from Knut

Wanted images Last night, while working on my presentation for the Jack & Matt workshop on experience hooks, i discovered that i was a few images short. I knew they should have been on my K610i's memory card. I really needed those images! I've always known that there is programs that recover deleted files, but i've never had any use for them until now. The Dog A google search reveals a number of similar sounding shareware/freeware/cheap programs. So which one should I use? I downloaded one promising solution, but it failed to start due to some missing gif89.dll issue. The second one, and the one i would recommend is the one from "Zero Assumption Recovery" . I installed "ZAR 8.3" and i was a bit sceptical as free software often comes with a package (addons, spies etc.), and indeed it has some functions that are not free. But the ones i needed actually was free. Recovered! My phone has a 2GB card and even though it is easy to recover the images (hoo

Lecture by Jack Schultze & Matt Webb We got an introduction to who they are and what they do. Near future projects that has a strong focus on accsessibility and availability is their thing. One example of this is the, Olinda Radio for BBC. Their contribution to this project was to generate a document that describes functions of a new radio. " Olinda is a prototye DAB radio that shares listening with friends, is customisable with modular hardware, and aims to provoke discussion on the future and design of radios for the Home." Describing realworld projects It seems like their strong point and our lesson lies in describing projects. I would say that evidencing the qualities in the product that are about to be developed is what we will look into in this workshop. In " Growing Meat ", a future speculation and discussion project, the important part was how to model the project in an understandable and easy to understand way. This was achieved by napkin charts and

Ok, this is square one regarding my Bagheera interface. Lets take it from here and see where we can go. Please tell me if it gets too heavy with the applets embedded right in the blogpost. To view this content, you need to install Java from java.com --> I've commented out the embedded application for now, i'll make a separate webpage for it later If you want to test it on your phone feel free to download Bagheera_02.jar

This is really cool! By using Mobile Processing's export functions i can actually emulate the applications online in a blog post! The process is almost straight forward. I just have to cut and paste from the resulting html page that is generated when exporting from mobile processing. The applet is in it's very first iteration, just able to display "touches" randomly generated with touches on the keypad. You can even download the aplication (jar file) from the links below the emulation and try it on your phone! This is just the "Hello World" so don't take it as a proposal to finished product. Next version will look closer to what i want for the first real iteration of the interface. To view this content, you need to install Java from java.com --> I've commented out the embedded application for now, i'll make a separate webpage for it later Source code: Bagheera_01 touchClass JAD/JAR files: Bagheera_01.jad / Baghe

For less than one year ago i had never touched a blog, but it seems to be a nice way to document what i do at school. mobile processing 0007 For those of you interested, mobile processing was updated to 0007 not so long ago to be more in sync with processing 0135 . It is good to see the IDE evolve, but it still have some way to go to achieve the ease of use we are accustomed to with processing-0135. Geocoded content dev.opera.com has a great article on location based services. A wave of geo innovation is under way and it has the potential to connect local populations and to communicate news and ideas from every corner of the planet. If the World Wide Web has lured people away from their own neighbourhoods, then geo is the technology that will bring it back. it is an optimistic article, but i think it describes and defines the field of geocoding as it is today. Toghether with methods and examples you can virtually start making your own adaptions and services. Vimeo I should have an

SMS setup Well, instead of using hours to create the perfect blog post i thought i should just post my experiences from my first pre-alpha evidencing of Bagheera . After talking to einar, timo & jørn i decided to jumpstart the project by doing some tests with a simple sms setup (see picture). I created a set of SMS templates that corresponds to objects that would have been tagged with an rfid chip. So by just sending those SMSes whenever i "touched" an object to my Bagheera group (tnx to Silje, Gunnar and Ingrid) i could crudely simulate the user experience of Bagheera . I "tagged" a few objects and places and set out on a trip around campus to photograph some locations. I touched my Dell M70, my Canon D60, the door out of U1, the lunch room, reception and the wood shop, sending SMSes at a blazing speed to my unaware test group (i did not explain what was going to happen). Results So what did this ad hoc test show? The participants seemed to think it was nice

Bagheera: Black Panther living in the jungle and watches over Mowgli in Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book . Also, the spider Bagheera Kiplingi in the genus of jumping spiders are named after the author of The Jungle Books. Bagheera is the name of my premier concept this week. It is a concept that fits well with previous research into RFID and everyday objects and connected products . This is a work in progress, so i might not be crystal clear in my thoughts and explanation yet, but i'll get there. The basic concept is this: Gunnar is at home and finds himself wanting to take some pictures for his blog . He pics up his phone, grabs his camera, a pair of shades, a nice cap and looking through the window, he decides to bring an umbrella. While doing this he momentarily touches each object with his phone. Knut (Me) on the other side of town is working hard on my concept (this) at school. To get some distraction i glance on my "bagheera" wich is running on my phone. P

This week will be all about adding momentum to the project. Working with technical and Theoretical aspects just takes you so far. Today i started to look at the practical end, playing with some wax and my phone. The aim was just to get a feel of shapes connected to the phone. Rather crudely it evolved into something that penetrated the RFID tag bubble and extracts the information from within.

I just stumbled upon this guy that has a host of interesting projects going on. The above video describes a method of using any surface as a screen by tracking a projected image onto it in realtime from just one projector. That would be very useful for prototyping various devices with screens. The below video has a really interesting, but maybe not that clear application of RFID tags and projection. The idea is to capture information from RFID tags and project the information from the tags back onto the objects containing the tags. Check out more videos, and especially the haptic pen

Previously i have mentioned the term "Use Quality" as something i want to look into. We have now worked with RFID for more than three months, and my knowledge of the technology is steadily increasing. Lately i have been trying to figure out how the technology fits into my major project for this semester. At this point i find RFID to be a tool to enable cheap and ubiquitous objects to have networking capabilities. And then you ask: "What does use quality have to do with that?". The idea that are presented in the book "Toughtful Interaction Design" by Löwgren og Stolterman that the perceived quality of a product in use should be part of the designers repertoire of tools when designing. These qualities can be achieved by working consciously with the "language" of quality in much the same manner as we work with the language of shapes and colour. In my view the answer lies in mapping. Think of the earth and the history of cartography . In interaction