“The theme for this year’s Social Media Week is Empowering through Collaboration, something close to our hearts. One of the things we are interested in at Imagination is things and how they talk to each other, what that means for our clients, ourselves and our future. If you read us regularly you will know about Activitea and our activations for Shell and Ford.

We have a small experiment/game we have been soldering all weekend! We have some brilliant speakers and we have food and drink. What more could you ask for? Maybe we’ll see you here. If we haven’t completely crashed by then…”

KATIE STRETEN | Creative Strategist at Imagination

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This project was sparked by connections made by Tim Brooke and Matt McGuire at EMFcamp 2012. They returned the following Monday morning with some tech and an idea. The tech was badges (more like lanyards) with an onboard Arduino Leonardo, RF module, an Infrared transmitter and Infrared receiver. Since Social Media Week was approaching and Imagination’s Creative Technology team were in full swing, a plan was devised to conduct a social experiment by counting the number of interactions at an event hosted by Imagination.

Logistics were discussed and prototyping began. It quickly became apparent that due to the size and weight of the “badges” we would treat them as lanyards. I mocked up a potential cover for the board, displaying the Imagination logo:

It was also decided that the shape and colour of the boards was not ideal, especially as they would be on show. Matt continued discussions with Charles Yarnold (who has been invaluable throughout the project) to amend the board.

Infrared, RF and the leds all needed testing, however we only had three boards. Using Arduino Leonardos and some improvisation with the RF modules we were able to build enough boards to test with.

Meanwhile 150 boards, lanyards and Plastic covers were all being developed. Estimated shipping time showed that all the parts would arrive 4 days before the event.

Sure enough, 4 days before the event (on a Saturday) lots of parts arrived. A team of us came in on Sunday to start work on programming and construction.

Firstly the boards needed to be snapped from their sheet (kind of like Airfix) then the rough edges needed to be filed down.

We also experienced some supply issues with the batteries (coming from China). It was apparent that they would not arrive in time, so we scrambled 150 together – 90 from Charles Yarnold’s personal supply and 50 from Cool Components. The boards were nearly complete although they required the battery and RF module to be soldered on – totalling 12 solders per board – then boot-loaded and flashed with our code. On all 150 boards!

Everything was ready to go with a comfortable 15 minutes to spare. Participation and interaction with the boards was great, followed by some interesting talks and a Q&A session with the panel. The panel consisted of;Jon Rogers – University of Dundee (@ileddigital), Mark Coyle – BBC (@markcoyle65), Dave Patten – Science Museum (@davepatten), Kel Phillipson – Imagination (@kelfish), Katie Streten – Imagination (@watsui) and Alex Trickett – Imagination (@alextrickett). The Next Web did a nice write-up for the event which can be found here.

Tim and I are building an arcade machine.

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Week 3 began with a trip to the laser cutter.

The marquee (the lit up bit at the top) Imagination logo graphic, screen surround, screen mount, speaker mount and Mac Mini cradle were all cut for the machine. These were fitted and the control panel was completed and this is how the machine stands now:

To get the main cabinet shell built took approximately 3 hours. The screen mount, marquee and control panel need to be custom built. Here’s a time-lapse (shot as an experiment with the Miniatures app) and how it looks now:

The rest of the week has been spent prototyping and developing button layouts for the control panel. The control panel on the cabinet is quite small – especially since we are opting for 2 player. After reading this article on button layout 2 custom layouts were prototyped:

After testing the two, the one below was selected as the final layout. It gives enough space below the buttons to support the wrist and the buttons are in an ergonomic shape. This will be drilled into the actual control panel next week:

This will be streamed into a Donkey-Kong-like platform game, where the employees crossing the bridges have an effect om the game (drop power-ups, bonus points, etc.)

The necessary parts were ordered, first to arrive being the screen followed by the arcade controls. This gave us enough to build our first prototype, so we did just. In one day, the controls were integrated into a cardboard box (the one they were delivered in) and the screen was flipped 90 degress and ran a very early gameplay demo (built by Simon Sarginson). The cardboard prototype gives a robust platform to test gameplay elements. Even in one play of the game it’s clear what is good about it, and what it lacks:

Here is a quick pre-presentation hero image:

Press Release (web friendly version)

“I certainly love the idea of a physical version of the whereabouts system. So the brief I would set is a physical version of the whereabouts system.”

IAN FORRESTER | BBC R&D



The Physical Whereabouts Clock is a Twitter powered whereabouts system inspired by The BBC, designed for MediaCity UK and Mozilla Mozspaces.

Whilst sketching ideas, simple prototypes were constructed. Limited by ability, a simple prototype that changed colour at the command of a tweet was constructed:

This was developed into a prototype that displayed locations from the Tweet:

A common atribute of Mozilla Mozspaces and BBC MediaCity is the kitchen area. Both have kitchen spaces that are central in the office and are used for communal meeting. It was decided that the kitchen element would be referenced in the items aesthetic. Glass was considered and jars were used to experiment with. The jar was rotated – with the view to having vinyl lettering indicating statues – as the Tweets were received:

Jars have numerous advantages over bespoke glass, some being; cheap, accessible, already threaded to make for easy mounting. It was important however that the aesthetic of the jar was removed from that of a piece of cheap glass. This was done simply by sandblasting them – which seems almost too easy however it looks fantastic and is great at diffusing light. They also reinforce the kitchen reference and in an array they are associated with items such as wine or spice racks:

Different shapes and styles of jars were experimented with, however it was the cheapest and most basic jar that suited the project best; Tesco Breakfast Marmalede jars:

These were washed out and various fonts and text application methods were prototyped:

Up until this point, the prototypes were made to house the jars horizontally, but turning the jar 90 degrees made it more aesthetically pleasing by distancing the similarities of the spice/wine rack association and making a different array proportions (a previous prototype of a 4×3 horizontal jar array worked out at almost exactly screen proportions. Not ideal when trying to move away from an existing screen). It then became more of a challenge to hide the servo mechanism. This was done by mounting it inversely inside the jar and designing a lid type piece to support its’ rotation.

Space was allocated on the list for the jar’s owner to hand draw a handle or avatar:

The vinyl lettering was laser cut straight onto the jars. Given the delicacy of the size of text, the task to plot and manufacture the vinyl was refused by a local sign maker’s.

The backing board for the jars was constructed of Acrylic and housed numerous LEDs. The jars were attached and made to be removable by using 4-pole jack sockets to connect them to the rest of the circuit. This did however make the wiring relatively complex:

It was then just a matter of assembling everything:

The final prototype was be presented on Friday 4th May and was exhibited at the #mscpd OpenLab 2012 on 25/05/12

On Friday Tom Metcalfe (@tommetcalfe), Michael Shorter (@michaelshorter), Roy Shearer (@royshearer) and I (@jack_chalkley) participated in Culture Hack Scotland 2012 (#chscot).

The challenge was set; use one of the data sets provided for the event (there were many, including gig coordinates, stats, lyrics and more) to create a hack.

We devised 2 ideas, based on 2 data sets:

“The Skinny’s Jeans” – a pair of Levis 511 commuters containing robotic legs that reacted to the the number of events happening in Glasgow. The more events, the more they moved. These were powered by The Skinny‘s XML that updates events live (a more complete write-up here).

The “Trackman Word Installation” – a small line of projected text that appears when a visitor approaches the installation. As the visitor waits, the text transitions through the novel: Trackman by Catriona Child. As soon as the visitor moves away from the installation, the text fades away (a more complete write-up here).

Wristband – Blue = Designer:

Ideas Discussions:

Ideas:

Arduino and PIR Sensor:

Legs powering The Skinny’s Jeans:

Trackman Word Installation:

Inspired by the pottery we saw at NID whilst in Ahmedabad, India, Jon Rogers organised a Pottery workshop for the Product Research Studio. Much fun was had by all and we’re all waiting eagerly to see the final results (they need to be fired first).

We made two mugs each; my “one liner” for the day was putting my twitter handle as (and on) the handle of my mugs. I laser cut a stamp out of acrylic and pressed it into the wet clay. The results look good so far but only seeing the post-fired results will tell:

And my finished mug with my Twitter Handle handle

Tom (@tommetcalfe) and I have been working on a paper radio. Yes that’s right a paper radio. We’re using Bare Conductive paint for the interaction, and some hidden electronics to pull recently uploaded audio files uploaded using AudioBoo. The Official reveal will be at SXSW with #sxpaperapps but here’s a sneak preview:

As part of the MSc Product Design program I took part in a research expedition to Ahmedabad, India.

[Click here for the full write-up]