Hi
Im starting an investigation into OSS for interaction design education as part of my Masters research.
One of the primary challenges of educating students for the fields of Interaction design and New Media design generally is allowing students to experiment with a wide range of new technology, on a tight budget and under the direction of a facilitator that has a background in design and not technology.
How does one, for example, allow students to design and implement systems for touch screens without purchasing and hauling one into the studio?
Ideally, one would want a highly flexible platform that is inexpensive to implement, accesible in terms of the expertise required to use and provides a meaningful proxy of the commercial equivalent.
Johnny Chung Lee's "Wii hack" was my initial inspiration here: johnnylee.net/projects/wii/
Im aware that some universities are using a platform called Arduino: www.arduino.cc/ for interactive electronics prototyping.
I would like to know if the users of this forum have any experiences or suggestions as to where I might look for more information on this topic. Perhaps you know of an institution that has implemented a particularly successful solution to this issue or some academic research in this area?
Your input would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Scratch can be used with sensor boards to build physical devices:
http://www.picocricket.com/picoboard.html
There also tends to be a fair bit of this kind of stuff over on BoingBoing:
http://boingboing.net/
Make magazine might have some useful content, too:
http://makezine.com/
For the particular problem of touch-screen monitors, though, I should have thought a cheap second-hand one or conversion kit off eBay would be the easiest solution.
Some of the Project:Possibility accessibility projects should interest you. In particular I'm thinking of SunFLARE which used the motion sensors and other features of the SunSPOT device to provide a framework for guesture recognition and other interactions. This was one of our Semester Programme projects and lead by Dave Woollard.
A brief description of the SunFLARE project: "Our project concept is to use the wireless capabilities and accelerometers of the SunSPOT platform to record and recognize human gestures for command and control applications. Users with limited mobility often have difficulty using traditional computer input devices such as keyboards and mice. Our gesture recognition framework, which we call the SunSPOT Framework and Language for Action Recognition, or SunFLARE, will allow users to dynamically capture movements that they are capable of making (tailoring to a number of physical disabilities) and associate these movements with actions."
The project has not been properly published on the P:P site yet, but as I'm tasked with doing that it will happen eventually. For now there are docs and a raw video . Do let me know if you want more info/code.
Steve
Thanks for the info guys.
I'll definately be following up all of those leads. Cheers