Inspiration

Saturday we had our first meeting with the wearable group. They seemed like an enthusiastic and creative bunch so that’s a good start. A lot of different ideas from everyone so we will pick up a lot from each other in the next couple of months.

Listening to and talking with Anna Maria Cornelia was a refreshing and inspiring event. She’s an Experience Design teacher at the Technical University in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. She talked about her mission for the students to find a balance between technology and ideas. Urging them to take a broad approach to the subject and not get stuck in solutions or technology at the beginning. Another important thing she stressed that in the design process, every step is important. For me it was an appeal for awareness of my own process and to value every sketch and scribble. A notion already installed in me by my teacher Martin van Opdorp at the art academy but this was a good reminder.

She put her approach to practice with us right from the start. As I talked about data visualisation she asked me what that was. So I started to talk about LEDs and displays. My assignment for the next couple of weeks is to think about data visualisation without the technique, everything but LEDs and displays… That’s quite liberating! (But also kind of a shock to be honest.) She thought the warning bit was a negative message and wondered if there’s a way to work with the data and send out a positive message. I must say some people in the group were not very pleased with knowing how bad the air quality is. I’m the kind of person who just wants to know, be aware either good or bad. But I do need to consider what I want to achieve with the data, what kind of emotions I want to arouse.

So much for the concept, we also had to think about the techniques we’re going to use. For me that means of course the different sensors (are there any sensors that measure ‘positive’ gasses, and what would they be? Oxygen may be?), communication with the mobile phone and an idea popped up to see if I can make the thing run on solar energy so as not to contribute to the pollution.

So quite a lot of challenges ahead of which I’ll keep you posted.

Looking forward

Tomorrow is the first of ten meetings for the wearable group at the Digital Lab in Den Bosch, The Netherlands. Together with nine other artists we’ll each be designing and developing our own wearable. We’ll receive artistic support from Anna Maria Cornelia De Gersem and technical support from the lab.
I’ve been looking forward to this work group for a long time. It was scheduled for last year but was cancelled then. For the rest of the year we’ll be meeting regularly to work together and exchange ideas. In between the meetings we can continue with our piece our self.

For this work group I’ll finally be realising an idea I’ve had for quite some time. I want to monitor the air quality with different sensors and display the data real time on a wearable. This way me and other people can assess how healthy the air is we’re breathing. The piece will therefore be called Body-warner. The design will be inspired on a safety vest. There the bight colours are mend to warn others that you’re there. My vest will warn myself and others of possible dangers around us.
I don’t want the data to be lost so the plan is collect the data with a mobile phone and send it to an online database. I’ll be using a (Lillypad) Arduino with Bluetooth to communicate with the mobile phone. Through the phone’s internet connection I’ll send the sensor data to a server every couple of minutes. I want to develop a frontend using Google Maps to display the results. Through a calendar functionality you should be able to retrieve older air quality information for the areas I’ve visited wearing the vest.

There are lots of challenges and learning points for me here. As for the design/interface: apart from the reference to a safety vest I’m not at all sure how I will display the data. The vest could have a ‘cloud’ of LEDs (view sketch) or I may be using the chemical names for the gasses I’m measuring. They all contain an O which is nice 🙂 On the other hand I could work with rows of LEDs or even a display…

Possible design for vest
Possible design for vest

I also haven’t decided on which gasses to measure yet. It’ll depend on the availability of the sensors and if they can be combined with an Arduino. For example I’d like to measure oxygen, O2 (nice) but I don’t know if that actually tells me something about air quality. It would do inside, but I’m still don’t know if I’ll measure inside or if I’ll make a special indoor mode. This will also depend on the GPS I’ll be using. Will I get a separate Bluetooth one or integrate one with the Arduino?
I’m looking forward to finding out more about Bluetooth and Arduino and especially about the communication between the Arduino and the mobile phone. Gaining this knowledge will open up many new possibilities for me.

I’ve already had a lot of fun doing research for this project. The list of links on the right shows that lots of people are interested in the subject and working on similar projects which is very inspiring.

Online

Last week the piece went online. I’m really glad it’s finished and I’m happy with the result. I do have to rent a lot of extra Mb’s hosting space. But it’s worth it. So please visit the website: www.numuseum.nl/noord-zuidgevoel A fast Internet connection is a must to get a smooth download. You need the latest Flash player to view this work. If that isn’t installed yet you’ll be asked to download it. Downloading the Flash player is completely safe. The loading of the work may take some time, please be patient. If you need any help, please click the question mark.

Have lots of fun with this work. Drop me a line to let me know what you think.

3, 2, 1, 0

At this moment I’m uploading all the material to the web. The whole project folder is 195 Mb! That’s not surprising as it contains thousands of photographs. The script for the whole application is 535 lines long. There is one bug that I couldn’t fix at this moment. But after two months of full time work on this project I’m calling it a day. Hopefully nobody will notice the bug and then it won’t matter. Of course there are little inconsistencies with the data but it would take me another month to sort all that out. On the whole visitors can get a very good idea of two weeks in the life of D. R. Sometimes it’s very intimate, sometimes it’s very boring, sometimes it’s quite exciting. Just like real life 😀

Back in workflow

I’ve recovered from the flue which has stopped me from working for three days. I picked up my poster from the print shop today. The result is OK. Due to outdated information on their website I made my lay-out to small so the quality could have been better.

My notes on two image folders
My notes on two image folders

For ages I’ve been wanting a program that allows me to make notes on folders. So a visual and textual clue about what’s going on with a specific file or folder. I did a little search last week and found File Notes Organizer. I’ve been using it as a trial and I’m very happy with it. Especially with all the different things going on in respect to the images I’m sorting now for this project. It’s nice to see where you are and what’s finished and so on. I think I’m going to buy it once the trial period is over.

Developing media

Yesterday my good friend Cécile had a look at the design for my poster and made some useful comments. So I’m not finished with it but almost finished. I think it will look nice on A2 size.

Print of poster on A4 format
Print of poster on A4 format

I’ve made progress with the loading of the images. I’ve now come to the point that I really can’t postpone the sorting and scaling of the images any longer. So I’d better get going.

Day by day

I’ve just finished the interface for browsing the work day by day. It took much more time then anticipated. This was because as soon as I jumped to another day the program started slowing down to an unacceptable level. I had to figure out why that happened before I could carry on. Finding that out and fixing it took me about five hours!

I finally discovered that a drawing new heart-beat graph slowed down the program because it got bigger with every new day you clicked. This graph is build up from thousands of dots and lines. To make the animation go faster I had to remove those first. But I put them in the wrong place so I couldn’t remove them. I had to rewrite the code for building the graph so I knew where all the lines and dots were and then I could remove them. Now with every day you pick the old graph is removed and a new one is drawn and the speed stays the same.

On the net I found this really nice code for adding listeners to the seven buttons in a dynamic way:

addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, mouse_click);
function mouse_click(event:MouseEvent):void {
var object_name=String(event.target.name);
for (var i:int = 0; i < 7; i++){
if (object_name == day_btn_array[i])
{
get_day_data(event);
}
}
}

So instead of writing all the listeners by hand I now only have three eventlisteners (only one is shown here.) With every click the function finds out what button was clicked. It calls the appropriate function and passes the original click event. In the called function I again retrieve the name of the button from that event using event.target.name again.

It’s taking shape

The blue line for Amsterdam, the orange for Breda
The blue line for Amsterdam, the orange for Breda

Yesterday I spend all day working on the web application (finally, because Wednesday evening it appeared that I still had two days of data to sort which took me the rest of the day.) To my mild surprise this went very smoothly. I can now show the two graphs with heartbeats, the two maps and the activities. I’ve also added the possibility to zoom in and out. It’s a joy to watch, very funny. It was a bit slow. The program is so heavy that I can’t really speed it up much. It takes a lot of time to watch a whole day and that’s too much to ask from the visitors. So now I’ve programmed a button with which you can skip an hour. Now I just have to make a nice looking button to go with it.

Pick a day and skip an hour, visit this blog and get some help
Pick a day and skip an hour, visit this blog and get some help

And because you can’t speed through the days I made a design for the interface so you can jump to different days. I still have to build and program that. As the program runs now it just can do one day. I’ll have to make it load data from different days and reset things for it to work with different days. The plan is to finish that today so I’d better make a move on.

Acquire, parse and filter

I’m finally finished with the acquisition, parsing and the filtering of the data. The non-visual data that is. I’ve spend the last couple of days working on it. It’s pretty dull work but essential for displaying the data correctly. So now I’ve got 14 exquisite files which hold all the data (date and time, heart-rate, GPS coords and activities) for all 14 days. My Flash app will only have to loop through them. Bit by bit I’ll work on the photographs and I hope the whole work will be finished and online by next Wednesday.

An interesting book on working with data (for which I unfortunately don’t have enough time to work through) is Visualizing Data by Ben Fry, yes one of the developers of Processing. He’s a real genius in working with data, take a look at some of his projects.