Author Archives: korovyov

Errr… not really quite so magic, but what can you do? In the immortal words of Bob Dylan, there’s no success like failure.

My first impulse for this project was to use magnets to activate other magnets. For some reason, I have long been fascinated by magnetism, and the possibilities of relationships between permanent magnets and electromagnets. I suppose it has something to do with powerful invisible forces, and the possibility of setting up relationships that are reliable and predictable but unforeseeable to an audience.

It struck me that stage magic was a good context for playing around with this. I decided to build a very crude reed switch, activated by a “magic wand,” and use it to turn on an electromagnet that would then cause something to jump up, and sit back down when the switch was interrupted. But I found that the most robust magnets I could build with the resources at hand (after a couple nights of trying and a nastily burnt power supply) were woefully inadequate to the task of making anything move in an impressive way, so I abandoned that idea.

My next thought was to use fans to blow confetti around. Not quite the nice rhyme of using a magnet to set off a magnet, but still something that would look like a fun cheesy magic trick – stillness, then action, then stillness again. I also decided to enhance the effect by turning on “stage lights” along with the fans. So I picked up a couple of small 12V fans and a new power supply, and grabbed some rainbow mylar foil to cut into confetti.

I wired everything in a big cardboard box using this schematic:

using bright white LEDs I had lying around from earlier tinkerings. After a little trial and error and sparring with another very dodgy power supply, I got everything working!

Unfortunately for some reason it hadn’t occurred to me that my tiny fans might not be very powerful. So the lights turned on, but the little handful of confetti I put in to test it went nowhere. It was the dullest magic trick in human history.

Panicked, I searched around for anything else I might use to do something (anything!!), and found a small 6V DC motor. I wired it through a 5V current regulator (since I had already wired the LEDs to run off 12V, I needed to stick with that as the overall voltage of the circuit), built a “propeller” from camera tape folded laterally in half, mounted it on the bottom of an old paper coffee cup, and made a new and much more powerful fan.

But still it didn’t really do very much moving of the air in the box, and I realized my confetti idea wouldn’t fly, literally or figuratively. I did still have my rainbow mylar though, so I cut a strip of it, mounted it to the “fan,” pinned it to the back wall of the box, and used that as the “act.”

I will say that the switch itself worked beautifully. The failure I experienced was really mostly a failure of imagination – that I found it hard to abandon the ideas that weren’t working and come up with others that would be meaningful and yet achievable with what I had at hand. At the end of the day, I would have been better off taking a step back and looking at the possibilities, rather than chasing one thought to the exclusion of all others.

As I’ve gone though my first week at ITP, I keep returning to Slavoj Zizek’s critique of the philosophy of Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld states that, in the leadup to the war, we were faced with known knowns (things we know we know), known unknowns (things we know we don’t know) and unknown unknowns (things we don’t even know that we don’t know), where presumably the real danger lies. Zizek points out that he misses the logical fourth state, which would be “unknown knowns.”

In Zizek’s reading, the “unknown knowns” are suppositions, tendencies, reactions and practices that are not acknowledged or scrutinized (hence “unknown”) but which are integrally part of our operations (“known” in the sense of fixed/assured and not subject to change). It creates a picture of an actor who presumes he is working from a defined set of parameters to create an ostensibly predictable outcome, while he is in fact working with some other parameters which he neither acknowledges nor understands, but which nevertheless affect the outcome and render it unpredictable, in Rumsfeld’s case catastrophically so.

I feel like this dovetails quite handily into discussions of interactivity. As a complete amateur, I see building interactivity as the process of determining how a person enters parameters to affect the outcome of an event, which is then in turn edifying, entertaining or in some sense meaningful to the person. Our job as designers is both to come up with the skeleton of an interaction (desire -> process -> result) and figure out how to allow the participant to “create” that interaction for him- or herself.

Code on a screen is terribly appealing because, in its stripped-down form, it ostensibly allows the programmer total control over what goes into an event, the processes that take place within it, and the output/result. By limiting operations to strictly defined and digitally enforced mathematical operations, it presumes to get rid of both the unknown unknowns and unknown knowns (though of course, that’s an illusion too, as anyone who has ever used buggy software can attest).

But when we begin to deal with devices that will accept input from the physical world, we encounter these other problems, a giant host of unknown unknowns and unknown knowns on every level, which are paradoxically the most difficult and the most exciting aspect of interactivity. From the environment (ambient light, temperature, background noise/vibration) to the psychology of the user (what does he expect from this machine? what does she want that tool to do? is that a natural motion for someone who wants that outcome?), devices that draw on physical cues need to be intuitive and flexible to process both things that the machine is not expecting and things that the user doesn’t realize are happening.

And they can also play with this background of unconscious operation to illuminate things that have never been shown before. How many people ten years ago realized how many steps they took in a day, or what their resting heart rate was, vs. now?

But at the same time, how does a human use this information? Ten years ago, I never had to worry over how many steps I took in a day – what does it mean to me? What should it mean to me? I was always taking steps and my heart was always beating at some non-zero rate – what good does it do me to know the figures?

As we progress into a world of intensive data surrounding every aspect of our lives, we will begin to need mental/spiritual cleaning systems that order and organize the cacophony and help us to forget things. In some sense, it’s a shift from addressing diseases of privation to diseases of plenty.

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Turning to the readings, I was struck by how different the world is now from the world Crawford describes in his article – amazing to see how through-the-looking-glass we’ve gone in only a dozen years. He speaks dismissively of the unthinkable case of “Nintendo Refrigerators” and yet we now have refrigerators with screens in them, refrigerators that can become freezers at the touch of a button, ovens that refrigerate your food all day until they start baking it in the afternoon…

I am intrigued by his model of a device acting as a participant, which listens, thinks and returns a new stimulus to the other participant, as the definition of interaction. It’s a good one, though in contrasting it with a non-interactive book or painting, Crawford credits the program/process/device itself (which can listen and respond) rather than the human creator or creators of the program (who can’t), as “thinking,” which is sort of a dangerous assumption. I suppose on a deeper level of interactivity (and one that we’re coming ever-closer to) the “thinking” can itself be defined by the user/participant, though that risks becoming something like a funhouse mirror.

But I guess I’ve also been thinking about a technological interaction as exclusively being between a single human participant and a nonhuman device or series of devices, which is flawed. There are of course interactions with multiple human participants, in which the device is there to modulate the contact between them. And this is obviously the lion’s share of the interactivity we see today.

The Rant is brilliant, so brilliant that I don’t have much to say about it. I think that “things your hands know” (as opposed to “things your eyes know”) defines a huge and meaningful subset of the “unknown knowns,” and probably the ones that are the most fun and rewarding to dig out and play with. Of course, the challenge it posits is how to create physical, hand-knowable inputs that are as mutable as points of light on a screen, but that’s the challenge we need to take up. And maybe mutability isn’t the be-all and end-all of design. Maybe there is a place for old-fashioned permanence in the world of Things.