Softness of Things III - Connector

My idea is to connect people in close relationships who are far apart. Sometimes making connections to strangers are easy, but making real connections to who we really cared about is hard, it's especially difficult to synchronize with each other's daily activity when you can't see each other often. Intead of talking on the phone or chatting online while the other person's tired with perhaps 12 hours time difference, we just need to signal that we really care about each other.

This is basically what I want to express in this connector project. In the above images, I have demoed using a physical soft object to be the media (connector). When the heart is placed in both locations, some communciation protocal is established and maybe he can make a sound, blink one eye or make a hug. My goal this week is to setup circuits inside a soft object such as this. The fabric switch can be useful.

Another prototype I have in mind is for people in different location to coordinate and make drawings together, invoving a line and two nodes. The system will need to find a way to synchronize the move and when the line joins two nodes, it will give a song. The game could last for 5 mins or even a few days basically you can walk away from it and come back and continue. It just to symbolize the magic moment of connecting with each other when the drawing is made.

A video of experiment with magnet

Memory Map

Our assignment was to create a memory map.

I decided to based the theme on my grandfather's past life, which is a piece of memory that's been lingering around lately. There are a lot of objects and images floating through my memory, like the casset that I repaired for him to listen to his favourite chinese opera, that cane he uses, and the fake teeth that he denied using, and brief conversations that we have encountered, but when I started to draw it on paper, it seems like it's not like an easy-to-interpretate map, more like an excerpt from a comic book, I'd say. All the meaning and my emotions for him was somehow lost in "translation".

But the idea of writing about him starts to lighten me up, I started writing about him in my native language, then I used images to depict what happened in the story, giving readers some clues to hold onto.

The reaction from the class was quite interesting, when people starts to frowned upon the piece and puzzled at what I was trying to say in the foreign language, they also try to figure it out from the little symbols I've made. Some people get the it, they can tell that I am telling a story about my grandpa's past life but more people get frustrated figuring out what was written in the original text. I am glad to see the efforts people put in to read the map, it is like what I was feeling when trying to pull strings together to describe my grandfather.

Throughout the process, I was struck by the difficulty to actually depict the memory map, to trace what I was thinking about him and to map that feeling onto paper and have others sense the feeling, with the constraints of just paper and pen. I have had some positive feedback and wonder if I would do this any differently. I would try to poke at this subject later as I always wanted to do a piece about him. This memory map is definatlely helpful in getting one step further.

Tactile Detector Prototype

I intend to investigate sense of touch as a starting point of my project.
To build a detector for tactile, I need portable battery and microchips light/small enough to be held by hand. The flowing components is for considerations:

CR2032 battery To order

CR2032 battery holder

Conductive Fabric and threadlessemf

Solution for making fabric switch http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~buechley/diy/diy_e_sewing.html
Solution for sewing togher lithium battery. http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~buechley/diy/diy_e_sewing_old.html

Assignment One - Paper Flower

Other possible things to do with it: these wires provide flexibility to shape the structure, also can think of them as conductors, maybe I can make the petals to move using a servo connected to the wires ? That could make the whole thing into an interactive system. But I'm not sure at this point, as it looks like as I'm changing through different ideas, it lost its aesthetics quite a lot.