Letters from Tord

A 21 year old guy with modern attitudes, vintage values and classic style.

[totoxd]

The Breakfast club

We were also assigned a another cool task on Friday. We were separated into groups, each group receiving some money to provide breakfast for the whole class one day of this week. It’s an exercise in making a lot with little, relying og network, knowledge and creativity to make the best event for 23 people with 500 kr. Remember that Norway is expensive, and therefore this can be quite challenging when the ideas are large. The first breakfast was a cocktail- type event, with tapas, entry drinks, and  ribbon cutting, announcing the true beginning of a better class and the new semester.

Then, Tuesday, the breakfast was problematizing the perfectionism in society today letting us enter into a tent through a giant labia and into a “womb”, that was all white, signalizing a safe space where all of society’s expectations were irrelevant. 

Today my group held a American election breakfast, with cupcakes, french toast, bagels, coffee (from starbucks cups) and OJ. The decor was american flags and election posters, with a majority of Trump posters as we find him both scary and hilarious. We had brief discussions about the american election circus. Thanks to @juliesandvoll and @vilderebekka for amazing pastry. 

I do wonder what tomorrow brings! Perhaps some pictures!

[totoxd]

A summary of the last five weeks: 

In the last five weeks I’ve been working on a product for this brief:

http://ahointeractiveproducts2015.tumblr.com/post/132141183826/inventing-interactive-products

Short summary: Make an interactive product using Arduino. It must have one input and one output and be put in a context.  I decided to work with marketing as my context, and interactions between people. In particular hugging, witch I think is one of the friendliest and most delightful interactions between people in the world. 

What I essentially did was to make a “hug-o-meter”, It’s a machine that measures how good a hug between two people are, and that gives a instant visual feedback (the arrow) on how well the hug was preformed, and also a reward if the hug was sufficiently good. 

The build was rather simple. A large poster(left in the picture) with a scale for reading the hugs’ value, and a measuring device(right in the picture) witch was to be the center of the hug.

The reward in this case was two pieces (one for each participant) of chocolate covered biscuit, that also provided the marketing context for my project. Manufactured by Freia, “Sjokoklem”, witch translates to “ChocoHug”, is one of my favorite biscuits. Fortunately it’s very poorly marketed and fitted well with my idea for the hugging machine, witch in turn made it a good choice of context. 

I posted the code I used for the Arduino earlier. 

The components I used for the input was two pressure sensors, witch feedback together calculated the value of the hug. This was so that one person less easily would max out the scale. It worked brilliantly, To reach a good score, pressure would have to be applied from both sides of the “hug-o-meter”. 

For the output I built the instant feedback arrow from a servo engine. I would also have liked to make the chocolate ejecting mechanism, but it proved too complicated in the short time between user- testing the experience and prototyping for the exhibition. 

Regrettably I was too preoccupied with handing out rewards and tending to som unforeseen complications during the exhibition to remember to film people using the machine, but the response was good. Especially when two full classes of fifth- graders came to have a look at what our course was about. 

All in all a great semester, and a very cool brief!

[totoxd]

The code I used

The code I used for my hugging- machine:

#include <Servo.h> Servo myservo; const int pressure1 = A0; const int pressure2 = A1; const int greenLed = 5; const int redLed = 3;

int arrowVal = 179; int switchVal;

void setup() {  myservo.attach(9);  Serial.begin (9600);  pinMode(3, OUTPUT);  pinMode(5, OUTPUT);

}

void loop() {     switchVal = analogRead(pressure1) + analogRead(pressure2);

   switchVal = map(switchVal, 0, 2046, 179, 0);

  if (switchVal < 60) {

   digitalWrite(greenLed, HIGH);    digitalWrite(redLed, LOW);    } else {    digitalWrite(greenLed, LOW);    digitalWrite(redLed, HIGH);      } Serial.print(switchVal);     Serial.print("\t");

    if (switchVal < arrowVal){      arrowVal = switchVal;

     }

    myservo.write(arrowVal);     delay(15);

    Serial.print("Pil Verdi ");     Serial.println(arrowVal);

}

[totoxd]

[theodorvange-blog]

[totoxd]

As stated earlier @heitheodor made the final visuals for our project, and it turned out beautiful, It’s heavily inspired by my own sketches, witch I like a lot :)

[theodorvange-blog]

[totoxd]

@heitheodor took the responsibility to make the final suite for the app. His sketching process was great to watch, check it out on his tumblr!

[totoxd]

The next assignment was to build a in-browser mockup with a sitebuilding tool called webflow. The thing about this tool is that it follows the rules of HTML and CSS when it comes to positioning things. This challenged us a lot, and in the end we mangaged to build a semi-working prototype. It’s not as beautiful as the illustrator file, but it was a lot of work.

[totoxd]

We made this mockup in Adobe Illustrator as our front page for the concept Plant.no. 

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These are flowcharts that explain how the personas would use the page, the flowcharts also act as sitemaps for the site.

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These were our personas, they are entirely fictional, and I found the pictures on google. Linda is supposed to represent our primary users.

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A few words about the process.

In our process we started by interviewing a lot of people about our concept. After we figured out what our target audience wanted from us, we sat down drawing up flowcharts and sitemaps. We also created 3 fictional personas inspired by the people we interviewed to help us make the site as fluent for our primary and secondary users as possible. In the next post I will post the personas. 

[totoxd]

Ron Finley: A guerilla gardener in South Central LA

Ron Finley plants vegetable gardens in South Central LA -- in abandoned lots, traffic medians, along the curbs. Why? For fun, for defiance, for beauty and to...

Check out this guy, he was the inspiration for our answer to the assignment.

[totoxd]

In the next brief we started making homepages for sorting fruits and vegetables. I was working with @torgeirnh​ and we decided to make an effort to encourage Guerilla Gardening in Oslo.

[totoxd]

Made a time-lapse of when I edited the first film. A cool view :)

[totoxd]

En søndag uten ost og kjeks er som en søndag uten ost og kjeks. Heldig at det ikke er denne søndagen.

[totoxd]

Gårdsdagens middag! Selvfølgelig når Renato er på besøk.