Hi and welcome to our official blog. As you may have read on the “about us” page, we are doing a group project as part of our 2nd year Innovation Design Engineering course at the Royal College of Art and Imperil College London. The main theme of this project is digital technology and as we build up this blog, we will find out how the project evolves over time.

Today being the first day, we worked on establishing our brief.

Our initial direction was to “Use Technology as a Creativity Tool”

This would mean going through an experimental processes involving technology such as:

  • Reverse Engineering
  • Tinkering
  • Circuit Bending
  • Hacking
  • Building from Scratch
  • Patching
  • Arduino
  • Etc.

And the desired outcome from these experimental processes would be the development of some type of  “Open Source Platform“.

This platform could then be further used by anyone to address real world issues, such as Energy, Enhancing Creativity, Education, Anti-Terrorism, Natural Disasters or simply  Fun and Playful activities.

Note: “Using Technology as a Creativity tool” might mislead some towards thinking that we are interested in making tools that encourage creativity eg. A creativity button or some objects that help people be more creative. We would like to clarify that this is not our main objective. Although our final outcome i.e. the open source technological platform or experimental process might spark creativity, we are more interested in exploring the ‘PROCESS’ that leads us to that outcome.

Today’s Mini Experiment

To make things really interesting, we used our “super geek = Slyth” to carry out a small experiment for generating our brief statement. A quick computer program was coded to generate a random combination of ‘verbs’ and ‘nouns’ associated to our initial directions. This random program not only helped us clarify  the concept itself but also explore new possibilities. This process itself is part our very experimental methodology.

Here are all the verbs we used:

  • avoiding
  • exploring
  • reducing
  • enhancing
  • understanding
  • connecting
  • interconnecting
  • engaging
  • playing with
  • enrich
  • materializing
  • virtualizing
  • visualizing
  • taking
  • hacking
  • tinkering
  • bending
  • fixing
  • learning
  • problemsolving
  • addressing
  • focusing on
  • applying
  • developing
  • recontextualizing

Here are all the nouns we used:

  • interconnectivity
  • gadgets
  • technology
  • creativity
  • no-connectivity
  • connectivity
  • intelligence
  • functions
  • experience
  • interfaces
  • playfulness
  • circuits
  • interaction
  • possibilities
  • problemsolving
  • terrorism
  • problems
  • platforms
  • open-source
  • experiments

Here is the program:

#!/opt/local/bin/python2.6
import random
verbs = open("verbs.txt").readlines()
nouns = open("nouns.txt").readlines()
r = random.Random()
for i in range(0,1000):
    a = verbs[r.randint(0,len(verbs)-1)].replace("\n","").capitalize()
    b = nouns[r.randint(0,len(nouns)-1)].replace("\n","")
    c = verbs[r.randint(0,len(verbs)-1)].replace("\n","")
    d = nouns[r.randint(0,len(nouns)-1)].replace("\n","")
    print a + " " + b + " by " + c + " " + d + "."

We [the computer] generated thousands of sentences, and here are some interesting results:

  • Enhancing inter-connectivity by playing with gadgets.
  • Reducing gadgets by connecting functions.
  • Understanding functions by enhancing interconnectivity.
  • Enrich inter-connectivity by understanding functions.
  • Connecting technology by interconnecting gadgets.
  • Enrich functions by understanding interconnectiviy.
  • Exploring technology by interconnecting …
  • Engaging technology …
  • Enrich connectivity …
  • Reducing no-connectivity …
  • Interconnecting intelligence …
  • Reducing interfaces by Interconnecting technology
  • Hacking interfaces
  • Reducing interfaces by hacking interfaces.
  • Reducing functions
  • Enhancing functions by reducing interfaces.
  • Fixing interfaces by reducing possibilities.
  • Reducing possibilities by avoiding playfulness.

The interconnectivity actually has three layers.

  1. Connecting gadgets together;
  2. Connecting gadgets with daily objects having no technology, such as a chair or a cup;
  3. Connect objects (?) wtf…?@#*$)@)(#

So the plan for this week is to do a brainstorm tomorrow [12-10-10] and a revision of the brief  leaving Thursday [14-10-10] to refresh and make the brief solid for Friday [15-10-10].

//Joke of the day

Last but not the least here is our inside joke 😉

“Look Miles, what you thought was miles away from what we Ashly (actually) wanted to do! So we will Clare (clear) it up tomorrow and Neil (nail) it down for Monday!”

Miles, Ashley, Neil and Clare are our tutors!

Uncategorized

October 11, 2010

1 Comment