ConLaKappa&LoZer0

Objects that respond

#physical interfaces #interactive systems #theatre #electronics #arduino #ivrea

I start again from here, with the subject I think about most: physical interfaces. Put simply: take an ordinary object, a desk, a drawer, a board, and make it notice who is using it and respond.

I have been circling around this for years, so let me try to line up my thoughts.

Where it comes from

As a kid I had an “electronics lab” where I ran experiments in my spare time. Then the Commodore 64 arrived, and from there I never stopped: MS-DOS, Amiga, Linux. For a long time electronics and code were two separate passions, and music a third. A bridge was missing.

The bridge

Programmable microcontrollers existed for us hobbyists long before 2005. But they had three problems. They were hard to program: assembly or an awkward C, a hardware programmer to buy or build, a slow test cycle. They cost money: the chip was cheap, but the development board and the tools around it were not. And you built the interfaces every time: power supply, connection to the computer, pins for the sensors, before you could even start the real project.

Then, in 2005, a blue board came out of Ivrea, and I grasped at once what the project meant. Arduino solved all three things together: a simple language and an environment where you write, press a button and the program runs; the price of a pizza; a board with power, USB and ready pins already on it. From that day the physical world and the digital world, which I had kept in two different rooms, could be joined easily and immediately. A sensor, two lines of code, a motor that moves: in an afternoon, not in a month.

A school that lasted four years

Arduino did not fall from the sky. In 2001 Olivetti and Telecom Italia founded the Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea, a postgraduate school of interaction design directed by Gillian Crampton Smith, who came from the Royal College of Art in London. Students from all over the world, teachers such as Massimo Banzi, and one clear idea: design the way people use objects, not only the objects.

Those students were designers, not engineers, and they had to make their prototypes work. In 2003 one of them, Hernando Barragán, made Wiring as his thesis: a board and a simple language, derived from Processing, so that a designer could talk to electronics. In 2005 Banzi, David Cuartielles, Tom Igoe, Gianluca Martino and David Mellis made a smaller, cheaper version, opened it up, schematics and code, and named it after the bar where they met, dedicated to Arduin, margrave of Ivrea and king of Italy around the year 1000.

The same year the school closed, absorbed by the Domus Academy in Milan. Four years of life. But in those four years Ivrea had done again what it had done with the Programma 101: take a technology for specialists and put it in anyone’s hands. Little of that school is left in town; in the world there are tens of millions of boards and a word, maker, that did not exist before.

I tell this because without that board I would not do the work I do.

The stage

Arduino gave me the tool. The reason I found at the MultiDams in Turin, where I studied music and theatre, and above all at the Officine Sintetiche workshops of 2008 and 2009. There I discovered that you could build something that listens, reacts and plays, and that this something could be on stage. I realised that was exactly what I had been looking for.

Theatre before the circuit

The most useful thing university left me is not technical. Antonio Pizzo, one of my professors, read interactive drama as a system of rules: the author does not decide the sequence of events, but the conditions in which the story can happen. With him were Vincenzo Lombardo, who studied how to have a computer represent a drama, and Edoardo Fadini, who told us about multimedia theatre, video theatre and new theatre.

Since then the first question I ask myself is not about the sensor. I ask what has to happen when someone comes close, touches, opens. If the answer is not clear, no circuit will make it interesting.

Why not a screen

A screen is something you look at. The body stays still and the eyes do the work, at most one finger. An object you open, move, turn, rest your hands on. And it carries everything we already know: a drawer pulls, a counter slides, a lever goes down. Nobody has to learn anything.

That is why I think an object that responds widens perception, while a screen tends to shrink it to a rectangle. The gesture stays the same as ever, but suddenly it has consequences. A drawer that tells you something when you open it. A counter that lights up the board. An old mechanism that starts again under your hands. It is a small surprise, and small surprises are remembered.

Making the technology disappear

Here I have taken a lot from those who came before. Myron Krueger, back in the Seventies, built environments that saw the body and responded in real time. Steve Mann speaks of “humanistic intelligence”: the person stands inside the machine’s loop, not in front of it. And he invented instruments played by touching water. Studio Azzurro called “sensitive environments” spaces where the relationship between people counts as much as the one with the device. Lev Manovich gave a name to something I felt without being able to say it: “augmented space”, a physical place layered with information, where what changes is the place and not a screen left in a corner.

The practical rule I drew from this is banal: sensors and cables must not be seen. If the first thing you notice is the technology, the technology is stealing the scene.

The less poetic part

Then there is reality. An interactive object is not tried by one person at a desk. It is touched by hundreds of hands that have read no manual, every day, for months. A sensor that responds a few milliseconds late breaks the magic. A firmware that freezes after three weeks is a real problem.

That is why I like to follow the whole chain, from the sensor to the software: every piece changes the others. And it is also why I do not do the set-up alone: building a space is another trade, and I gladly leave it to those who do it really well.

What I still have to work out

Every time the question is the same, but the answer changes with the object, the place and the people who will use it. I think that is what keeps me from getting bored.

I will come back to it, with some more concrete examples and maybe a bit of code.

Reading

If the subject intrigues you, these are the texts I return to most often: