Aleksandrium

Interactive ads in public spaces from Aleksandrium on Vimeo.

Screens are emering in public spaces. Some are big, some even interactive, and they tend to be taking over for traditional poster ads. We’re calling out for dialogue and discussions concerning these screens - because we see both great potential and great threaths.

What content can we allow, how little does it take before screens become a source of visual noise that you’re unwillingly exposed to in the city? Can we allow big screens on every corner? Can screen ads be comfortable? What can interactivity bring to table to make ads behave nice? The existing ads we found in our research were noisy and overwhelming. We wanted to see what we could do in the other end of the scale...

The project was done in colloaboration with FluxLoop.

I did a very short project on e-books and how they present new ways of navigating through content. Its original intention was to look at non-linear storytelling in childrens books, but ended up being a rough UX draft for a children/partens DIY project books. The thought is to simplify instructions for (more or less) complex building projects and let the reader more easily navigate freely through the instructions; such as navigating backwards, locating steps in a glance and choosing in what order to build parts.

Imagine this as a part of the IKEA catalogue, or for building your own kayak!

Scrolling animated instructions - mockup from Aleksandrium on Vimeo.

EV NT interactive poster wall concept from Aleksandrium on Vimeo. 

This was the last project for the "Beyond the screen" course. Full description inside video.

Concept & developement by Peder Theodor Eskild, Silje Maloney Barth and Aleksander Imset Wassum. 
Video and animation by Aleksander Imset Wassum

Nominated for "Prize for interaction design" at AHO Works spring 2012.

Anxii - fear of humans from Aleksandrium on Vimeo.

What will happen if all the helpful functionality of a robot is removed, and instead it’s equipped with fear? Fear of humans!

Robota , the origin of the word robot, comes from the Czech play “Rossum’s Universal Robots” by Josef Capek. The word simply means hard work, which is what one would expect from a robot. Robots are built to work for man with no objections or complaints, making life easier for us humans. So would you take a robots feelings into consideration?

Equipped with a proximity sensor,
anxii can sense the presence of humans. The closer you get, the more anxious anxii will get. You can tell from the amount of shaking and the fear meter on his chest. If you get too close, he will freeze up and stare at you. At this point, if you get even closer, he will faint from fear.

Is it fun to scare a robot or do you feel bad about it? Will you play around with him even though you know he is afraid? Anxii was exhibited at AHO Works at Oslo School of Architecture & Design, where the audience was free to explore their emotional relationship with anxii.

Concept and developement by Yen Sigird Cheung & Aleksander Imset Wassum.

Anxii was nominated "Best interaction design" and "Best use of technology" at AHO Works 2011.

After finishing the pysical interaction course of last semester, it's now time to take a look at screen based interaction. The course is called "Beyond the screen", and started out by introducing us to Processing . Our first task is to write a simple screen saver in four days. Learning curve is steep and having learned a bit of Arduino helped overcome the very first encounter with Processing.

Here's the exhibition poster for our last project "anxii", the result of the artificial empathy course. Will post video at some point...

For the last course of this semester we are working on a subject called artificial empathy. Though it might sound like we're trying to add empathy into computers, it's actually the other way around; how can we make humans feel empathic about computers and technology? I find the subject quite interesting as the area is so diverse and the possible applications are so many. There are a lot of different ways to approach this subject, but my group and me desided to make our project slightly humoristic. You would expect robots and computers to have some sort of function making life a bit easier for us humans, right? After all, this is what they're for. So what happens if you take away all the function and make the robot reliant on help from humans instead? And what happens when you introduce humans as a scary, mean character?

We are trying to make a robot that has no other purpose than feeling fear for humans. It's constantly nervous, scanning the room for potential danger. If you get close, it will freeze up and stare at you, frightened to death. And if you get too close, it will actually faint. And then you, as a human, will be the perpetrator, having to make up to the robot by picking it up and putting it back on its feet. We'll have to put a lot of work into the character of the robot and modulating the motion and interaction in order for it to actually seem scared and hopefully cute at the same time. Here are som very simple mockups we made this week.

The Slenduro is made entirely from wool yarn by knitting and crocheting. The electronics and an aluminium frame for the top is hidden inside the fabrics. The piece was made for the course "E-textile and musical interaction", a collaboration between the Oslo School of Architecture & Design (AHO) and the National Academy of the Arts (KHiO).

Our goal with Slenduro was to create a relaxing interactive installation. We took inspiration from wind chimes, falling snow and used the tones from the Indonesian instrument Gamelan. The Interaction is that you gently hit the snowballs and that will cause the gyro sensor to play of random tones and the Slenduro will light up in different places. If you hit it a bit harder it will play a 3 tone melody and more lights will glow. In a dim enviroment the Slenduro has quite a magical effect to it.

The name Slenduro is a combination of two words; "Slendro" is a tonal scale for the gamelan instrument, and "Uro" is the norewgian word for wind chime.

Here's the video from the class presentation of our custom built game controllers. It was very interresting observing how engaged the players actually got when they suddenly had to make a physical effort to controll the game.

The game that was handed to Silje and me, "Raptor Safari", has a pretty simple plot: You are a raptor driving a jeep. You get points for wrecking the car, making roadkill of other raptors and transporting them through a giant lightbeam to another dimension or something. The game uses six buttons as controls: four for left, right, forward and backward, one for turbo boost and one for releasing and then detatching a chain with a spiked ball, that you use for draging dead raptors to the giant light beam.

We are now done with the controllers, and will demonstrate them in class tomorrow. We made a chest-mounted four way tilt/motion controller for steering the car, and a butt (for two player mode) or belly (for one player mode) mounted control panel for the boost/chain. You slap a big green button to boost the car, and pull a string to release the chain.
 

 Looking sharp. We made the motion/tilt sensors from cardboard tube, big marbles, microswitches and some acrylic glass. The boost and chain buttons we made from thread, a wooden ball and a couple of microswitches. And it's working! Will post a video of the device in action tomorrow. In the mean time:

MORE PICTURES!

Time to dig into electronics and programming. As an interaction designer, mastering the right tools to prototype and sketch is essential. A concept for interaction is often very hard to draw out on paper. Timing, sensitivity, response, physical feel and all the other factors that plays a part in how we percieve interacting with a product or service, has to be experienced first hand in order to evaluate, debate and correct. Therefore, we are now learning the Arduino and basic electronic like swithces, wiring and so on. The Arduino system makes a great platform for easily building working prototypes without us being electronic engineers. It offers all kinds of sensors, microprocessors, controllers, LEDs and all the other geek stuff. You can basically build anything with these.

For our first task, Silje and I were handed two items.

Item one:

This is the i-PAC (it's not part of the Arduino series). It connects to your computers USB port, and lets you controll the computer by connecting any type of switches you like, to the i-PAC. Its main purpose is to let (entusiastic) people build their own game controllers in any way they like. This is what Silje and I will use it for. This brings me to item 2.

Item 2 was an envelope, and inside was the task for the next two (well, one, effectivly) days. We are supposed to make a multiplayer controller for the on-line game Raptor Safari. It is not allowed to make a joystick or gamepad. So we're making something else. Back with more in a couple of days!

The last two weeks of the three week course "digital companion" we have mainly been focusing on video sketcing and evidencing rather than making an actual product. The point of this, as intended from our mentors, was to learn how to "fake" or explain a concept or product without actually building it. This short is our final result and we think it explains it quite well.