I posted this on my Grad Project blog, but I’d like to re-post it here for the crowd who hasn’t been following my schoolwork. So without further ado, here’s Gezellig:

How it works:

The quilt is made up of pockets with buttons, and static squares. One of the static squares has been outfitted with an array of LEDs, and one of the button pockets has been stitched with conductive thread. I sewed a circuit onto a separate piece of fabric, which leads into an Arduino that’s been embedded into a secret pocket in the quilt. When the button pocket is closed, the circuit is completed and the Arduino is programmed to tell the LEDs to pulse softly.

The button pocket.

Pulsing LEDs behind one of the static blue pockets.

How it helps lonely people:

The intent of the Proof-Of-Concept is to show how a ‘traditional’ medium can be updated with technology, and send a message to its users without being obtrusive or tacky. Quilts are, in my opinion, one of the best examples of a comfort object, and they tend to be treasured artifacts that carry a family’s story through multiple generations.

In context, this project would be kept in the home of a lonely, elderly person. When updated through social media by their family (that element is going to be detailed in the next semester), the quilt will be able to show a visual message to the user that they are being thought about, and loved. For people who are separated from their families due to distance or disability, having a visual reminder of their family can be a powerful motivator. The creative element of the quilt (putting photos or other nostalgic items into the pockets) should also help the user to get into a creative mood, sharing memories of their family with others and contributing to the personalization and customization of their quilt.

What’s next?

Next semester (Spring 2010), I plan on adding to the customization of the quilt in a number of ways: First, I’ll be working on the capacity of the user’s family to update the quilt via social networks such as twitter, flickr, and facebook. I’d like to aggregate information from the APIs of those services, so that family members can trigger reactions on their grandparent’s quilt through something as simple as tagging a photo, or using a #hashtag on twitter or facebook.

Second, I’ll be working on the visual elements of the quilt. I’d like for the static pockets to do something more than just pulse an array of LEDs. Though I felt like it was a good end-point for this semester, I’m not satisfied with the message it sends. I feel as though the message can become more complex without complicating the integrity of the quilt as both a medium and a metaphor. I’d like to figure out a way to incorporate either thermo-chromatic inks, or OLED panels so that the message can become slightly more tangible and ‘realistic’.

Third, I’d like to work on my craftsmanship and try to create an object that’s both technologically sound, as well as technically beautiful. Quilting is a timeless activity, and I come from a long line of smart women who have perfected their craftsmanship through quilting and needlework. Over the course of the next semester, I’d like to get my quilting to the point where I’m very satisfied with my quality of stitching, accuracy of layout, and create more complex geometries/patterning.

Last week I heard on the grapevine that there would be a free introduction to Processing class at Emily Carr, so I hopped on that. I’ve been absurdly busy with classes, work, and everything else, but it would have been stupid of me to not go to the two sessions offered by the ever-awesome code.lab artists-in-residence.

I’ve puttered around in Arduino before (which is built on the Processing platform) so I wasn’t too unfamiliar with the structure of the program, but I was totally blindsided by how super cool and visual this format is. I can’t wait until I can dig up some time to really stretch my capabilities.

A simple sketch I completed today:

The concept is that students are given a ‘potato’ with an RFID reader and bluetooth arduino board embedded inside. Each student wears an RFID tag ring, and the potato is programmed to light up once a randomized number of tags are read. The students pass the potato around like in the game hot potato, and when the RFID potato lights up, the student holding the potato is selected to present. The student’s presentation is loaded by the computer (via the bluetooth arduino) and he presents. Afterwards, the potato is reset and the game starts over.

The project is only about halfway to completion, so I’ll probably end up making a new post with pictures of the sketch model and final prototype. It’s been a neat process, though- I love having an excuse to work with RFID, especially when I can make it fun.

Chew on that for a few minutes, won’t you?

The concept of the book will never die, but its format will forever be changing. Books will very likely be phased out within the next century, replaced by tablets that relay information instantly. The internet has already done so much to ‘kill’ the book- physically published information is considered out-of-date as soon as it hits the editor’s desk. On a related note, citizen publishing has brought the newspaper into its death throes. Twitter is providing more up-to-date information on a global scale than the television can provide- the book can’t match this pace.

For what purpose does a book serve but to provide a permanent copy of information? Is it really permanent, though? Books can be destroyed, or worse- forgotten. Despite the fact that we still can’t find an acceptable way to remove ink stains from our shirts and blouses, ink is not a permanent invention. Unpurchased books go to die in landfills, and controversial ones are burned by those who disagree with their contents. The tangible form of the book is no longer reliable. Books are heavy, cumbersome, and the oldest books can’t even be touched by human hands lest the acid destroy their delicate pages. What good is a book if it can’t serve its intended purpose?

I’ve read that people are worrying about the advent of citizen publishing because they say that this spells the death of books. I’ve heard claims that the next generation of students may have difficulty reading through old prose because they’ll be so accustomed to new forms of relaying information- in chunks and sentences, as opposed to chapters and volumes. I’d like to argue (in an unacademic way) that this isn’t a cause for concern. Just as we have academics who choose to spend all of their waking hours in libraries, reading through ancient texts to divulge meaning from those words, we will always have people who choose to study the old, and those who choose to produce the new. The book will die, but its foundations will not. There will always be content to publish- and whether it’s written in an old-style or new-style, it will be made available to the entire world. The economy of written text has changed dramatically in the past 500 years, and what was said with the lyrical rhyming scheme of sonnets is now said in the shorter stanzas of conceptual rock albums. People were fearful then of the loss, as they are now, but progress pushed out the old methodologies. Their core ideas, however, have been maintained for hundreds of years.

I’m not going to be alive in the day that words are no longer used to convey the message that books carry, but I know that as the world shifts towards a more open-source method of publishing, new language conventions will be developed to convey information in ways I can’t even fathom right now. Whether or not this is a good thing is completely subjective. I’m excited to be living in a world that is constantly changing- and I hope that I live long enough to see another massive shift in the way that information is provided to others in an open and egalitarian way.

Note: I still love books- I’m enamoured by the way they smell and feel, and I’m sure I’ll never embrace a 100% paper-free existence. I expect my potential great-grandchildren will be fine with it, though.