Bring on the noise?

The proprietors present this fine entertainment, being the podcast in which one Mr. Edwards expounds on noise, aural and digital, and how said noise ties together the coin toss, the credit card, and Guantanamo Bay. Humbly presented for your distinguished listening and with due thanks to the members of the freesound project who contributed samples of their efforts for the creation of this auditory presentation under the esteemed Creative Commons Sampling Plus license:

• jmaimarc (coindrop1.wav)
• Jace (Coin_dropping.wav Coin_dropping_long.wav)
• agarwal.parag (coin2.wav)
• Anton (scanner_NR.wav)
• virotic (machine7.aif)
• NoiseCollector (granugrinder.wav dime.wav)
• dobroide (obras.mp3)
• digifishmusic (Transaction_3_in_Department_Store_Australia.mp3)

The Incredibly Boring, Dreadful Technology That Just Might Save Millions of Lives

The proprietors extend a further invitation to the world of technology as surveyed by one its most humble practitioners as he confounds the assembled with tales of a truly dreary technology that nevertheless possesses the potential to improve the standard of living among this planet's poorest citizens. The producers are indebted once again to the members of the freesound project who contributed samples of their efforts for the creation of this auditory presentation under the esteemed Creative Commons Sampling Plus license:

• virotic (machine1.aif)

Boxes (Round 1)

Our first assignment was to build three boxes with different materials or other properties. I made these three in stackable sizes and varying opacities.

Boxes (Round 2)

Then we had to make fifty boxes! I used a survey and a genetic algorithm over the course of four generations to determine which boxes came out on top.

More Boxes (Early Generation)

Here's an earlier generation of the boxes project for interface class. Most of these were "killed" later by the genetic algorithm I used to generate more boxes.

More Boxes (Later Generation)

This is a later generation of boxes. The losers are on the right. My genetic algorithm evaluated each box based on preferences I got from people in surveys. The genome of each box contained its color, size, opacity, and saturation. Clearly, the transparent ones were not the fittest. The red ones were quite successful, though.

More Boxes (The Dustbin of History)

Once I was finished with the boxes, the ones that never made the cut were crushed. Think of my foot as the Permian-Triassic extinction event.

LargoCargo - Stuff for a Slow World

LargoCargo was a project that incorporated yet another box form to serve as a product for one of the worlds described in Einstein's Dreams. Ours were surprise boxes that children could collect and then smash in a "yearly" festival. The idea would be to disseminate propaganda among the young so they would never leave their parents in a world where time ran much, much slower than the rest of the world. Wacky stuff.

Above is our "Why/How" diagram that analyzed the situation in this fictional world and which led to our LargoCargo product.

LargoCargo Box - Anger

This is a box cover Alan designed. The idea was to create images for kids showing what awaits them in the outside world if they should ever leave their parents. In the "slow" time-dilated world in which they lived, parents never wanted to let their kids go. Read Einstein's Dream, and that will make more sense--we had to design these for a world depicted in that book.

Map of My Commute

This is a map of my commute. It measures noise, human movement, personal space, speed, and location in the course of my trip from home to Parsons.

Commute Map

Observation

There are my condensed observations of the PATH station near where I live. Beware of the hard-ass Port Authority Police Department -- they do NOT like you taking photos of the station. It does help to say you're from the neighborhood, though.

Observation - Mail Drop

Observation - NJ Transit Bus Out

Observation - PATH In

Observation - PATH Out

Observation - Pedestrians

Observation - Taxi Stand

Elevator Dictionary

Hsinping Dai and I made a non-verbal dictionary for communicating about a subject in an elevator. That subject? What to do when somebody farts.

Elevator Dictionary 2

Elevator Dictionary 2

Elevator Dictionary 3

Elevator Dictionary 3

Elevator Dictionary

Hsinping and I made a visual dictionary for people on an elevator together to communicate with each other, dealing with a very delicate subject. See if you can guess what it is!

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dictionary03.png	102.91 KB
dictionary02.png	101.54 KB
dictionary01.png	212.17 KB

Renga Game Board

I've long been an admirer of the Japanese renga, a collaborative poetic form. One of the major drawbacks, however, is trying to remember the rules. Each person participating must write a two- or three-line stanza using a pre-determined subject, usually a season of the year. In an autumn renga, shown here, the first writer begins with a three-line verse about autumn. The next writer completes a two-line verse about the moon, which is usually related to autumn.

The game board above really nicely condenses these rules. Even though this was just a simple assignment, it solved a long-standing problem for me. I'll most likely continue working on this project in the future. If you're curious about the form or this version of it, download the attached SVG below and print it out on nice paper. Included is a layer that holds the colored squares you can use to write the renga verses. I strongly recommend you use a size of paper bigger than 8.5 x 11, and I suggest you open it with the outstanding SVG editor, Inkscape.

Journal Square Deli

For our final project, my group was required to select a location, identify two groups there, and get them to interact in anyway we chose. We picked the deli inside the Journal Square PATH station. It turned out to be an amazingly difficult but rewarding project.

Depicted above is one of our observation sheets. Every 10 minutes, during the course of over 20 hours observing, we noted which patrons sat where, their gender, their approximate age, and their activity at the table. In so doing, we collected a truly huge amount of data that allowed us to make predictions about who would sit where for the longest period and which demographic they would most likely represent.

Journal Square Deli - Bingo

Our first attempt to intervene in the Deli. Bingo! Like travel bingo, but with deli stuff.

Journal Square Deli - Deli Oracle Volcanos

"Lot pots." Left on tables in the deli to get people involved in their tables and with each other. Each pot has a set of fortunes that require you to interact with other tables. Weird looking, but fun.

Journal Square Deli - The Restaurant Telegraph

The ultimate in deli interventions--the Restaurant Telegraph! Each half is place on a separate table. The switch lights up the lamp and sets off a sound. Cool, though much more fun in bars than in the Journal Square Deli, as it turned out.

Attached is the SVG file for the labels, in case anyone wants to repeat the experiment.

Audio Graffiti

For my midterm project, I hacked the sink in our 10th-floor bathroom.

The sink had an IR sensor with an exposed control box. I cracked that open, split off the power and sensor-data lines, and got it trigger a light show under the sink and play a sound sample from a speaker I attached under the porcelain. I left a record button hooked up to it, and, pretty soon, people were recording their own strange sounds and messages that would play every time someone went to wash their hands.

Enter The Dragon

For our physical computing final, each pair of students had to complete a link in a chain reaction, receiving an input from the previous team and producing an output for the next team.

Here's our AC/DC-playing, silver-painted-goat-skull, black-polycarbonate dragon. Our only design consideration: Make It Metal!

Metal-Head Goat Skull

This is the goat skull that was part of the physical computing final project. Inside its sinuses is a halogen bulb hooked up to a relay. He really lit up the room!