The Interactive Telecommunications program lacks accessible memory of its people and projects beyond any given 3 year period. Using the dormant data in administrative databases about the people, projects, and classes, ITPedia is a website that brings the last five years of our people and our work into a wiki that is viewable and editable by current students and alumni alike. Using the commonly repeated set of relationships between people and projects as a structure, ITPedia provides a space for free- form collaboration that increases the granularity of the community memory over time as well as persuading a higher level of engagement. ‘Edit this page’ is the story behind this effort. You can download the accompanying thesis paper here (9 pages).

The microcontroller setup for swedishDawn is based on the arduino platform. I used the following combination of parts and tutorials:

• Arduino on a breadboard (link)
• A real time clock module from sparkfun (link)
• a TIP120 transistor to control the LED panel (link to tutorial)

(I don’t recommend using the clock module if you need precise timing, it drifts a few seconds a week. )

The Water Canary is a fast, networked, water-­testing device that radically reduces the amount of time, money, and skill required to test untreated or inadequately treated water for pathogens. The ability to test water quickly and accurately is a missing link in evidence-based humanitarian response. In the ongoing race against the waterborne illnesses that claim 3 million lives annually, the Water Canary project is dedicated to developing the testing technology that strategically assists international public health and disaster relief efforts. Most recently, the Water Canary team was a winner in the NYU Stern Business Plan Competition. We are currently developing our fifth prototype with an eye towards a large pilot in 2011.

The Water Canary is the product of a close collaboration between UNICEF’s Innovations Unit, NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), and the NYU School of Medicine Microbiology Lab. Visit our website at watercanary.com

A game designed with the constraint that it must inspire jealousy among its players. Key Party is a trick-taking card game for four players using a standard deck and shared scorecards. The shared scoring mechanism requires players to shift alliances mid game in pursuit a victory.
Players are dealt eight cards each and draw their remaining 5 in turn from a face-up community dummy. This is followed by a round of standard no trump turn-based play. Score card are shared by adjacent players and track tricks won in their indicated suits. Bring a node to 20 tricks, and the two players attached to the node win. A “Go It Alone” option — and the fact that spade tricks count toward whichever node the trick-winner chooses — often lead to shifting partnerships and tacit betrayals. Download a PDF of the full rules of the game.

KeyParty was designed in collaboration with Neilson Abeel Jr., Scott Hoffer, Justin Donato, under the guidance of Frank Lantz.

When you were baptized, I was in a somewhat self absorbed state and missed the event. Although this isn’t the first time I’ve missed important family functions, it was one (of three) I regret the most. It wasn’t because I didn’t want to be there, it was because I made a mistake with my calendar. Hopefully by the time you’re putting stuff in calendars, your computers and phones and other devices will have the ability to not just record your own input but recognize a possible human error by cross referencing semantically related points of data in your world.

Over the next 20 years, many different awesome things will happen to both us. Sometimes we’ll be living close to each other and get to tell each other about those awesome things that happened, and other times we’ll have to wait for a big family event like Christmas or Easter to hear about them. But what about in between? How can we make sure we somehow get to do the silly things, the little things, the big adventures? Your mom and I didn’t get to grow up together, and all our interactions for my first 18 years were through stories about each other as told by parents and other cousins. I think you and I should have a different experience together. This book represents that different idea.

This book is one big I.O.U., a book of common experiences revolving around spoiling you as much as possible. Here’s how we’ll make this work:

• You have 10 I.O.U. cards for a total of 10 days, one a year for 10 years.
• Each I.O.U. card corresponds to an entire day of me catering to your every whim, capricious or not. There are no restrictions as to when you can use them during the year.
• For logistical purposes, you have to give me 2 weeks notice when you invoke the card so I can make any necessary preparations.
• I am obliged to respond within 24 hours of receiving the notice with a phone call (or any voice equivalent). Every card has a theme with suggestions, and we can discuss how best to address each theme.
• If a year goes by and the card remains unused, you can always invoke it in a different year, but only one card per year.
• For the purpose of family peace, all activities must must be mom and dad approved as long as you are under 18.
• At the end of each IOU day, we’ll take a glorious picture to commemorate the day and we’ll put it next to the card in the book.

How do you commit to a promise that takes place in 10 parts over the course of 10 years? How do you give a gift to a little girl that doesn’t even talk yet, a gift that says I’ll be around to be a good uncle, when the same gift implies that you can barely promise you’ll be in the same city more than once a year?
10 promises is an empty photo album with 10 implied interactions between an uncle and his niece. Every page of the book has an IOU that can be cashed in once a year over the course of 10 years at any given moment. The uncle must oblige, and provide the means to fulfill the theme of the IOU, in person with his niece, over the course of an entire day. Spoiling is optional, but in the spirit of the exercise almost necessary. Every IOU is scheduled to end with a complimentary photograph that is placed next to the IOU in the photo album. (link to preface text).

A demonstration of the normal distribution inspired by Sir Francis Galton’s Bean Machine. Made from common household items.

A meditation on folding paper and the materials that can bind it: adhesives, ropes and clamps. Inspired by the movie synecdoche and it’s continuously collapsing into itself narrative.

Epimetheus is a proof of concept prototype for a network of wildfire detectors designed to be deployed by active citizens. Utilizing cheap and available technology, the prototype detects UV emissions specific to forest fires, and updates a publicly viewable layer on Google Earth in real time.
The communications framework was designed around an open architecture both technically and socially. Open on a technical level translates to allowing independently built nodes to begin transmitting data without asking for explicit network permission. Socially it means that all transmitted data is equally available to all interested parties: the individual node maker, commmunity vigilance teams, even local government leadership.
Epimetheus was developed around a single driving thesis: that the act of localized deployment and open monitoring of a site can create a long-lasting effect that transcends a single forest fire: Empowered civilians with a real sense of custody over a specific site.

The Epimetheus prototype came out of the 2008 Physical Computing studio class at ITP. Many thanks to Tom Igoe, Eric Rosenthal, and Rob Faludi.

A soft webbing based module that replaces shipping pallets. Each module consists of a strip of strong webbing 5.98 meters long with a grommet hole on each end. That specific length is twice the internal height of a standard shipping container plus the length of the long side of an ISO pallet. The model in the photographs is built to a 1:10 scale.

SwedishDawn is a bed headboard that simulates dawn by gradually increasing luminosity over time strictly mapped to a geo-located sunrise timetable. The incrementally increasing light tethers the user to the natural dawn of wherever they lay to sleep and re-establishes natural circadian rhythms. SwedishDawn is designed to to be a minimally intrusive aesthetic intervention against the maladies of subsyndromal S.A.D.
Seasonal Affective Disorder is a mood disorder that affects people during the winter season. Depressive symptoms include sleeping too much, a lethargic lack of energy and an increased desire for sweets and starch based foods. SAD is a serious disorder that requires professional attention, but also includes a subsyndromal variant that may affect 14% of the US population, approximately 49 million people.

Background

The fade is controlled by an arduino microcontroller simulating a “sigmoidal”-shaped dawn. ¹ The sigmoidal function simulates the natural dawn, beginning with a gradual slope, followed by a steeper slope from about 5:00 AM to 5:30 AM, and then a gradual slope. For a bit more technical information, read here.

A common treatment for SAD is the use of a sunlamp, a specially designed fluorescent lamp, many times brighter than normal indoor lighting. This kind of light treatment has proven to be effective at doses of 2500 – 10,000 lux, a luminosity unit that takes into account the size of a room. With a sunlamp, the user sits in close proximity to the lamp between 30-60 minutes once a day. A different type of light treatment is dawn simulation, where a lamp of considerably lower overall intensity is gradually increased during the twilight in the user’s bedroom.
Dawn simulation is based on lab research done at Columbia University in the 1980s that showed animals’ circadian rhythms as sensitive to the gradual rising light of dawn. At least one study, conducted in 2001 shows a better response to dawn simulation than a regular sunlamp ².Artificial light, intercontinental travel, 60 work weeks, have all contributed to mass disruption of human natural circadian rhythms that affect both our day to day energy and our moods.

What exactly is a practical decision, device, or moment? The drinkBelt is impractical by design, through a sincere attempt to be practical. This is one of my favorite things I’ve ever made, a collaboration with quite possibly the most practical man in the universe: my Dad.

In order to be a Geogenius, you have to be able to do two things:

1. Decipher cryptic text and pictures about and from your city and neighborhood
2. Challenge pretenders to your Genius throne by making smarter clues than them

Geogenius was developed in the Fall of 2009, during an early and productive time in the geo-locative mobile app scene. Scavenger hunts tend to be large scale scheduled events, that require plenty of foresight if you want to participate. Instead, we designed an ongoing game that allows players to grab unsolved clues based on their vicinity, so they can play whenever that have a chance and impulse. We also made sure to incentivize not just traditional clue solving, but also the creation of clues for other players. We think it’s the kind of game that appeals to 80% solvers and 20% clue creators, a great mix of puzzle lovers. The working app was displayed at the ITP Winter 2008 show.

Geogeni.us was created in collaboration with Corey Menscher for the Designing Around Place course at ITP taught by Dennis Crowley and Michael Sharon. Sage game design advice was provided by Jaymes Dec, Matt Parker and Charles Amis.

Screenshot Gallery

Tweeting every definition of @everyword in the English language. Task will complete in 2013. Written in python using the twitter library, the Princeton WordNet project, and the Python library pyWN for WordNet.

I like to keep track of the beaches I visit when I’m back home, but I needed a decent starting point. So i scraped a few different tourist information sites and cobbled together a KML file for google earth with about 1000 beaches all over Greece.

KML File

A mixture of graphite and home made Gak, conGoop is a playful conductive material that makes for a slimy, stringy and rubbery human computer interaction.

Sharing a house with 2 other busy people can mean you don’t always know who’s home. It turns out few people enjoy yelling “Lucy I’m home!” when they walk through the door (confession: I do). The amicable solution? The arduino based roommate detector. RoomateDetector monitors activity on the wifi network, checks against a database of known devices and their users, and lights up the appropriate LEDs to indicate presence of the specific person.
The always on wifi device requirement proved to be surprisingly reliable and a successful proof of concept. Maybe when network traffic monitors are commonly used at the household level I should revisit this idea. RoommateDetector was conceived and built in a day as part of the January 2009 4in4 event at ITP, using Processing, Arduino and 3 very large LEDs.

Based on John Cage’s seminal silent piece 4′ 33”, this ringtone is decidedly noisy. The technical requirement imposed by universally usable ringtones resulted in 32kb encoded audio, necessarily polluted with compression artifacts. The source material is the 2004 orchestral version as performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Despite it’s origins in an exercise in silence, I would not recommend any of these ringtones as a safe alternative for meetings, classrooms, movie theaters or places of worship.

First movement: 25′ – ringtone

Download al the 4’33″ ringtones (mp3 files)

1st Movement: 25′
transition from 1st Movement to 2nd Movement
2nd Movement: 25′
transition from 2nd Movement to 3rd Movement
3rd Movement: 25′

An exercise in resources for inspiration: 15 short poems in a cahier or desktop widget, for those moments of creative or technical frustration. This particular collection serves the needs of the professional architect on-the-go.

A physical collection of cards stored in a moleskine cahier, ideal for on-site brainstorming and sidewalk conferences with engineers.

A Mac OS X dashboard widget, out of sight during long sessions of Maya, but quickly invoked with a keyboard shortcut (Download widget).