Learning something new is a good way to begin the year. So, from  to January 5-9, I participated in the intensive workshop about physical computing at the School of Arts and Communication, K3 of the University of Malmö, Sweden. Malmö is a small and friendly city in the southern part of the country. It is a twenty minute train ride from Copenhagen.

David Cuartielles, David Sjunnesson, and other members of the Arduino team taught the course that entailed working with a diversity of software and hardware components, such as Processing, Pure Data, Arduino and XBee.

Here is a project that i realized during the 3rd day. It is a 5X4 matrix of LEDs connected in parallel to simulate a screen and an accelerometer used to sense changes in the position of the device. If the board is tilted sideways or upwards, the LEDs on that side will react by lighting up one by one. The matrix is connected to my computer via an Arduino board.

The course was a great experience and served as an introduction to this new area in computing and design. Getting over the usual thinking and conceptualizing design in terms of the screen was initially difficult. Once you are past that hangup, all sorts of possibilities open up.

I also had the opportunity of listening to a lecture by Durrell Bishop at the Copenhagen Institute of Design. Durell is a principal at LuckyByte, a product design firm based in the UK and tutor at the Royal College of Art. He spoke, among other things about the “physicalisation” of computing artifacts. Is it worthwhile to physicalise something? Why? How?

He also urged the students to think in terms of the properties of objects, since this strategy can be used to design behavior. This last point, reminded me of how, in the design research seminar at Media Lab, we use a modified version of the artifact analysis method in order to tease out the properties of artifacts/object. Check out his sketch where he presents a re-thinking of the artifacts used when interacting with a stream of video. The sketches also made me think of the work we did with performative research and scenarios for the HandsOn project.

Here is yet another sketch where he presents the difference between everyday interaction with objects in the physical world, and potential interaction via, presumably digital, button based mechanisms.

After the lecture, we went to a nearby watering hole for beer and tea. In the picture, from left to right: Heather Martin (our hostess from CID), Durrell Bishop, Fernando L. Barrajón and David Sjunnesson (from 1Scale1).