This week’s study in our Da Vinci class is about robotics and automata. Our assignment is to create a robot or automata, give it a name, and describe its features.

For this piece, I was inspired by the class of insects that take on the shape and form of sticks and leaves, commonly known as stick insects, and the art form of robotic insects. MIT has been building robotic insects for years, and many DIY makers now do this around the world. One of my favorite examples is the Articulated Singer Insect, created by Christopher Conte in 2005, which he made from antique singer sewing machine parts like his grandmother owned.

My drawing includes the figure of a tree budding and my robotic insect creation, Phasmeria.

Text:
Phasmeria is a 5 inch robotic insect whose visual processing and patten matching technique mimics that of an order of insects known as stick insects. Most phasmids, or stick insects, are known for effectively replicating the forms of sticks and leaves, and the bodies of some species. Their natural camouflage can make them extremely difficult to spot. The Phasmeria identifies things in its natural environment that are similar in shape and configuration to itself, and then adapts its camouflage to mimic its surroundings. Phasmeria are known as robotic insects or mechanical insects, built to the specifications of the Phasmatodea, class Insecta.

This week we studied the Da Vinci themes of optics and light. We looked at several artists who work with light, such as Dan Flavin and James Turrell. We were invited to go to PS.1 in Long Island City to see James Turrell’s long-term installation: The Meeting.

Our assignment was to make a pencil and ink drawing on the topic of light, optics, and eyes. Select an artist and extend from his/her practice. Invent past our comfort zone. Pass the first and second thought. Illuminate the topic from our personal point-of-view.

I was inspired by Jacob Sutton’s L.E.D. Surfer, a short film featuring a pro snowboarder wearing a suit of LED lights at night. “I was really drawn to the idea of a lone character made of light surfing through darkness,” says Sutton of his costume choice. “I’ve always been excited by unusual ways of lighting things, so it seemed like an exciting idea to make the subject of the film the only light source,” said Sutton.

In my own piece of art about contrasting light and dark, I also wanted to work with the unique texture of the paper and sepia ink color, a bit of organic-ness.

In our Da Vinci class, we studied geometry, symmetry, and folds this week. We also watched the PBS documentary film, “Between the Folds” about the art and making of origami paper folding.

In Grand Central Station, I saw a ball gown in a store front made from paper. It was beautiful, especially the rosettes.

This week our assignment was to make a sculpture from watercolor paper: Paint it, draw it and fold it. Also as a part of the assignment, we were invited to attend the John Chamberlain exhibit at the Guggenheim, and were asked to write down our reactions to his work on our folded paper sculpture.

I folded my paper with sharp edges, so that it stands up on the table. From the left angle, you can see the images painted on the inside of the center fold.

This week’s focus is anatomy. Da Vinci cut open cadavres and made incredibly sophisticated drawings of human anatomy, and this is one of my favorite areas of his work to study.

Our assignment:

Study the artist Sterlarc and his practice. Inspired by his statement, “We are in the age of the cadaver, the comatose and the chimera,” invent an extension/project for him: Invent the technology and the science. Combine mechanical and organic forms. Show different angles. Integrate him into the drawing. Complete and compliment with text.

Using the form of the human fetus, I made a mechanical extension of a 22 week old fetus for Stelarc to wear on the exterior of his body. This would not seem strange to you if you knew that in 2007, Stelarc had a cell-cultivated ear surgically implanted in his left arm. With that said, I believe this synthetic fetus seems like a device that he would actually wear.

Stelarc close-up:

Drawing process: Start with pencil, then with the brush with different degrees of water define the light and shadowy areas, then finish with ink.

For Da Vinci class, we had to replicate the Study of “Design for Chariots and War Weapons” by Leonardo Da Vinci c. 1485, The Royal Collection. His drawing of horses in movement are amazing.

Materials for this work include pencil, ruler, dip pen, sepia color ink, round watercolor brush, and watercolor paper.

I’m taking a class studying Leonardo Da Vinci, in which we try to tap into the polymath mind of the genius artist-engineer. His 7000 pages organized in codices serve as a creative framework to survey contemporary digital art. Throughout the course, we review digital art practices in the areas of his study and his inventions of warfare, flight, anatomy, robotic, geometry, architecture, painting and more, and we focus on exercising our own capacity to invent.

This week I invented a micro flame torch based on organic and non-organic forms. In particular, I was interested in the form of the bellows, a method for delivering air or gas in a controlled quantity, using the shape of the human lung and rib cage.

Our assignment:

Select three (or more) elements from Da Vinci drawings and one photograph of a tool of your choice, collage them together in Photoshop and then draw them onto paper, first in pencil and then ink. Integrate text into your drawing: text that explains your design and sites the source images from da vinci; text that inspires. Your goal is to make a completely seamless drawing.

Materials for this work include pencil, ruler, dip pen, sepia color ink, round watercolor brush, and watercolor paper.

For my final project in Video Sculpture class, I made a miniature 3D display top for the iPhone, using the illusionary technique of the Pepper’s Ghost Effect.

I wanted to recreate the feeling as a kid when you catch fireflies in a jar, or bugs in a box, and you wish you could carry those living things around with you everywhere you go. In my box, I decided to include a variety of living things, ranging from butterflies to chipmunks to…(surprise) dinosaurs.

I constructed my own pepper’s ghost box for the iPhone 4S, based on the documentation from the Japanese crew who built the i3DG Palm Top Theater. The makers did not include a pattern or DIY instructions, so I was on my own for the construction, which was a really fun challenge.

Using regular clear plexi glass (not mirrored plexi), I built a small scale 3-paneled box that encompassed the screen size of the iPhone.

In order to get the correct measurements for this physical construction, I had to first section the iPhone screen into 3 parts of the overall 960 x 480 format. I found these proportion guidelines from the i3DG Palm Top Theater makers. The top portion of the screen should be the largest width, and descending in width to the bottom. These distortions will help make the 3D video objects appear layered in foreground and background. Each part also has a black space below it for the plexi glass to be placed on. I cut out paper patterns, then cardboard patterns, and then I laser cut the real plexi glass according to these measurements.

After I cut out the plexi glass shapes using the laser cutter, I glued the pieces together in 45 degree angles to help create the 3D visual effect. Then I enclosed my iPhone and the pepper’s ghost box top inside of a user-friendly black plastic box to make it look like a seamless object, kind of like a child’s toy. This small, dark enclosure space really helped enhance the effect of making the video objects appear 3D and morphing into one another in the foreground and background.

I created several short videos featuring living things, such as animals, insects, and fantastical creatures, moving around in different environments, like grass swaying in the breeze and rain falling. I primarily used green screen for these objects, and in After Effects, I used the keylight effect in order to key out the green screen. Then I layered these video objects using the iPhone screen layout measurements to create 3 sections for the pepper’s ghost effect.

It worked! The rain effect looks amazing inside the tiny box, and the butterflies look very delicate and realistic. My classmates really liked the end product and imagined that this sort of box could easily be turned into a marketable toy for kids, especially if the user interaction could use the iPhone’s accelerometer to control the movement of video objects.

I demoed Commons at the New York Tech Meetup (NYTM) in November at the 92ndY.  NYTM is a monthly gathering of the NY Tech community, mostly comprised of folks from the startup scene, including developers, investors, entrepreneurs, hackers, founders, etc.  The theme for this month’s meetup featured innovative ideas originating at NY universities. The 700 house seats were sold out for our demos.

Here’s the video, go to 2:00 minute mark for my presentation:

NYTech Meetup November 2, 2011 from NY Tech Meetup on Vimeo.

Forbes published a piece on the event, and featured my project:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterhimler/2011/11/07/new-york-tech-meetup-college-edition/

I opened the demo with a quick look at the current NYC 311 mobile app and talked about how it’s user experience is really limited in terms of offering a way for people to track their reports, bringing people back to the app on a daily basis, and delighting users. Then I spent about 4 minutes showing the Commons app, talking about the importance of making citizen reporting more social. Afterwards, we had a brief Q&A on stage which was great.

Some of the NYTM tweets I got from attendees were pretty funny, including the guy who made the NYC 311 app. He said “I made the NYC 311 app, and I agree that it’s pretty frikkin boring!” Sort of hilarious.

I saw Talk to Me, a new exhibit that opened this summer at the Museum of Modern Art, exploring “Design and the Communication between People and Objects”. I was expecting the exhibit to be more focused on interactive media and human-computer interaction design, but actually I discovered that it is about more than good interface design or the interactions between people and technology, it’s about the meaning and emotion behind the communication between people and objects.

On the floor, I found myself much more drawn to the displays about human-to-human communications, and the language patterns we see in these methods of communication, than I was to the interactive media displays. I don’t know if this is due to my predilection for languages and culture, but most likely so.

One of my favorite displays was the “Graffiti Taxonomy: New York and Paris” by Evan Roth, 2009 and 2011. He cataloged characters from graffiti tags into letterform and typography taxonomies. In doing so, he isolated the ten most commonly used letters in graffiti (A, E, I, K, N, O, R, S, T, and U) and displayed these crowdsourced catalogues to show the different regional styles, commonalities, and deviations among each letterform.

Here’s a photo I took of the “S” form.

The other display that I really liked was the “Homeless City Guide”, by Emily Read and Chen Hsu, 2007. These two ethnographers developed a pictorial code for homeless people to communicate with each other about safety, shelter, dangerous places, free food, and other important events, by writing on walls, sidewalks, and other surfaces in chalk.

These non-permanent marks keep the information up-to-date and relevant, like a Twitter feed, that is somewhat ephemeral in nature and always changing with the times. This is very important on the streets when things are changing so rapidly from one day to the next.

The tagline is “Make Your Mark and Help Others to Read the City”.

I especially liked that they even attempted to introduce a rating system for some of the symbols to give a more qualitative aspect to the message. For example, the symbol for “soup run” has a rating associated with it.

I wanted to see a video about the design and development of the code, but they didn’t have any to watch. And I wanted to know what homeless people thought of this code, and if they created any additional symbols on their own.

There were some other projects that I enjoyed seeing at the exhibit, but these two really resonated with me. I really like these simple forms of communication that we develop, despite the fact that our society is in the age of cloud computing, mobile computing, and the like. The simplest forms of communication and language, like pictures and symbols, are still useful and relevant because of the meaning and emotionality that they convey.

In the realm of interface design, how should web interfaces be colored, spaced, formatted, accessed, ordered, architected, and what sort of content should be where and why. Our class did an Interface Design Roundup to collect a set of useful digital design tips.

Here are some tips that I’ve found useful in my work over the years:

Consistency with the overall device experience is more important than consistency across platforms.

Make objects consistent with their behavior. Make objects that act differently look different.

Consistent standards. Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing. Follow platform conventions.

Choose metaphors well, metaphors that will enable users to instantly grasp the finest details of the conceptual model.

Users often choose system functions by mistake and will need a clearly marked “emergency exit” to leave the unwanted state without having to go through an extended dialogue.
Make actions reversible. Support undo and redo.

Dialogues should not contain information which is irrelevant or rarely needed. Every extra unit of information in a dialogue competes with the relevant units of information and diminishes their relative visibility.

Error messages should be expressed in plain language (no codes), precisely indicate the problem, and constructively suggest a solution.

Use status mechanisms to keep users aware and informed.

Offer users stable perceptual cues for a sense of “home”. Stable visual elements not only enable people to navigate fast, they act as dependable landmarks, giving people a sense of “home.”

Reduce the user’s experience of latency. Communicate the potential length of wait time through an animated progress indicator or message.

The back button is our friend.

Text that must be read should have high contrast.

Use font sizes that are large enough to be readable on standard monitors.

Test with representative users well before a product ships.

Sources:

Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics.

Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini’s list of basic principles for interface design.

UX Booth and mobile UX design.