emily conrad

Field, An interactive LED Display on Prince Street, NYC Created by Emily Conrad, Todd Holoubek, and Jeff Galusha

What it is:
The PWMer is a kit that allows electronics enthusiast to rapidly construct an interactive project made of up to 100s of LEDs, each with the ability to dynamically change it’s brightness independently of the other LEDS. PWM, or Pulse Width Modulation, is the term for making a digital component fade in and out, in the same way the light on a Macintosh computer “breathes” (more about PWM here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse-width_modulation). In addition to LEDs, other outputs besides could include servo motors, DC motion control systems or for that matter any IC that takes a PWM signal. This kit offers 100+ PWM outputs.

The PWMer is designed with five analog inputs and nine digital I/O to be used with sensors, switches, or other ICs. So, for example, your installation will trigger or change functions when it’s dark, when a certain temperature is reached, when someone walks in front of it, when it gets twittered about, and so on. The options are wide open.

Kit includes step by step instructions, circuit board, Atmega 328 (Arduino bootloaded), TLC 5940, resistors, capacitors, diodes, terminal blocks (for sixteen outputs), three test LEDs.

Things to keep in mind:
• The PWMer uses the TLC 5940, which allows for 16 PWM outputs.
• TLC5940 standalone boards are sold separately. These boards can be easily connected to the PWMer for more outputs.
• Our boards can be connected using a DB9 serial cable (Male>Female) connector, which can be purchased with your board(s).
• You will need Arduino Duemilanove board, the downloaded TLC5940 library, a soldering iron, and some soldering skills to get the PWMer up and running.
• Also available as an Arduino shield for rapid prototyping.
Why:
Currently most microcontrollers only allow you to PWM a few pins independently. The PWMer includes a chip specifically for PWM capability, the TLC5940, that allows the user to easily PWM 100+ pins independently. This dramatically changes the electronics landscape. I often hear students and professionals asking “How can I power up to XXX LEDs? They must PWM!” Usually it’s for a lighting display or an installation that needs to have a strong impact, something a lot of lights programmed in animation can produce. It is now a lot easier to create these possibilities.

Contact hello at emilyconrad dot com for more details or to pre-order. Available in September.

An article from A List Apart that goes in depth about the importance of order and traditional aesthetics in web design. Great read that emphasizes the positive impact and trust gained from users when a site is attractive.

“A body of web user experience research shows that website users are powerfully influenced by aesthetics, and that positive perceptions of order, beauty, novelty, and creativity increase the user’s confidence in a site’s trustworthiness and usability. Recent design writing and interface research illustrate how visual design and user research can work together to create better user experiences on the web: experiences that balance the practicalities of navigation with aesthetic interfaces that delight the eye and brain. In short: there’s lots of evidence that beauty enhances usability.”

(Wouldn’t be complete without a diagram….)

The visceral (“gut”) processing level reacts quickly to appearances. It’s the visceral reaction to web pages that researchers measure when they detect reaction times as fast as 50 milliseconds. It’s crucial to understand that these instant good/bad visceral-level affective responses are largely unconscious: it can take seconds or minutes to become consciously aware of your first, visceral reaction to a stimulus—particularly a stimulus as complex as a web page.

Behavioral-level processing involves the more familiar aspects of usability: it responds to the feel of using the site, the functionality, the understandability of the structure and navigation, and the overall physical performance of the site. At this level, users are consciously aware of their attitudes toward the behavior of the system, and their reactions (pleasure, for example, or frustration) play out over seconds and minutes as users interact with a site. It’s at this behavioral level that techniques such as eyetracking are most powerful and trustworthy, because they offer detailed moment-by-moment evidence of what users consciously decided to look at and do to fulfill a given task.

Reflective processing of reactions is the most complex level, and typically involves a user’s personal sense of a site’s beauty, meaning, cultural context, and immediate usefulness. Reflective processing often triggers memories and encourages pragmatic judgments about the overall aesthetic worth and value of what a user sees. Eyetracking and traffic logs are irrelevant at this level, but user interviews can give you insight into your user’s reflective judgments.

I had the good fortune of heading to the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston last week. For me, the word “enterprise” has always been one of those slippery words that can mean many of a thing, but in this case it specifically refers to innovative large companies. Enterprise 2.0 is the term used for the various suites of tools being developed to help with knowledge management, collaboration, and efficiency within corporations. The suites of tools have varying ranges of social media, document management, and governance. Most Fortune 500 companies have Sharepoint or some other giant software (Documentum, Lotus) already in place. This presents a challenging but interesting dilemma for start ups (Thoughtfarmer, Box.net, SocialText) whose software is more nimble and arguably more adept. They claim there is no point in trying to “dance with the elephant” when it’s possible for more people to use cheaper and better software than at any point in history. Still at the end of the day, the challenge remains for executives and managers to figure out how to leverage more of the desirable parts of technology.

The good news was apparent- the execs and managers don’t have to figure it out alone. The common factor of all the winning software tools was usability. I heard this over and over, from Gentry Underwood of IDEO discussing their internal collaboration software to Amy Vickers of Razorfish discussing how she customized Sharepoint. The Executives who spoke would often refer to the need for people-centric software, and the need for level of granularity between a completely shut system (think banning Facebook, Twitter, and other informal ways to communicate), and one that is completely open. So how can companies can keep the desirable aspects of technology, like building a participatory culture, receiving information when and where you need it, connecting people and sharing knowledge, while deterring the undesirable like data leaks and security issues? I saw this as a challenge for designers, developers, usability experts- how can we better design the front end of these software tools to create social space and collaboration around knowledge topics, while also promoting the level of efficiency and security prioritized by the enterprise?

A few solutions came up around the front-end design. The first from Gentry Underwood of IDEO. He walked through IDEO’s internal collaboration website. He mentioned they had tried at least 25 different tools before landing on the right one. Here’s the five principles for designing collaborative tools that work:

• Build pointers to people
Connect people, because most of the valuable information doesn’t get shared in digital space. It’s often too contextual and tacit. Focus on the people the people, not rote knowledge. Earlier at the conference I heard that 80% of a company’s knowledge is in people’s heads. This number is likely inflated because it’s truly impossible to gauge, but the point is well taken.

• Reward individual participation
It’s simple, offer recognition of good work, let other employees know what their peers are working on, and encourage the next step up. What are they working towards? HR needs to be included in this discussion.

• Demand intuitive interfaces
There is a lot of talk about adoption vs friction, and some of the things that IDEO found that increased friction was the need for specific programming languages (like the wiki), navigation was not automatic or intuitive, too much training is required. Basically an integrated system has to be created that brings content together. And most importantly, designers have to make something that fits into the organization, not something the organization has to fit into.

• Take the road more traveled
The software should be part of a habit, and feed into other habitual areas (email, for example). Experiment with putting up screens showing employee’s faces, comments, and thoughts in spaces where all employees can see (lobby, kitchen, etc.). Integrate social media in to workflows.

• Iterate early and often
I’ve definitely heard this a lot lately. The point is to try an iterative cycle, try out new things, put them out there and build out the ones that take off. He gives the example of Pocket God, an iPhone app that’s been successful for some time now because it iterates every week, there’s a new feature all the time. It’s an example of a game that’s tuned into something more.

The software they developed was on the Thoughtfarmer platform, and for reference looks like this (It’s the only public screengrab I could find):

A public example of IDEO's wiki, supported by Thoughtfarmer

Another set of solutions was offered in a workshop by Dion Hinchcliffe, Founder & CTO, Editor-in-Chief of the Web 2.0 Journal, Hinchcliffe & Company. He had his SLATES advice to offer:

SLATES
• Search is very important. You need to discover information. (The failure of intranets is that they do not make it easier to find information.)

• Links are need to put information in context. They allow you to move back and forth between content.

• Authorship is important to allow everyone with access to the platform and identify them when they contribute content.

• Tags allow us to apply our perspective to the content. You should also be able to see what other people thinks about that item of content.

• Extensions mine patterns and user activity. “You may also be interested in . . . .” Amazon is one of the best examples of this. The cure for too much information is more information.

• Signals make information easier to consume. Signals push out updates of new information. It shows you the flow and not just the artifact.
There seemed to be hundreds of speakers, and the most interesting of them discussed the challenges their organizations faced and the steps they’re taking to tackle and solve them. In short, the topics I heard most about or found most interesting I’ve bulleted out here:
• Bottom up, not Top Down
• The enterprise needs to recognize the 360º person
• The tools we use should be like a rearview mirror, you don’t need to slow down to use them
• 80% of a company’s knowledge is in people’s heads
• 1/3 of our time is spent looking for relevant information
• People need to know, and want to know what their colleagues are working on
• Let natural selection take place, there are lots of options, but we need to understand what’s surviving (Facebook, not Friendster)
• People are broadcast stations. We need to work with that.

Also I have attached the Enterprise 2.0 tag clouds to share the other hot topics.

As a technologist, and electronics enthusiast, I’ve noticed a huge push in the DIY movement for arts and crafts. As a mom, and in the spirit of Ruth Handler, I know I want my daughter’s toys to be made for her needs. Spinning off the concept of personalization, I began recording my voice, my husband’s voice, and our family members who she knows and loves but does not see them as much as we’d like (we’re in NYC, my family is from Ohio).

The toy exists as a prototype; a box with yellow square, blue triangle, and red circle. When my daughter picks up the red circle, she hears her grandmother’s voice say “red circle”, and the blue triangle is her grandfather’s voice, and so on. There’s also a place beneath the circle or triangle for her grandparents pictures so she can make the audio visual connect. Everything is wooden (except the electronics), and all paints are non toxic. My daughter, who is 2 yrs old, loves it!

The big idea, and differentiator, behind this toy is the audio – it’s your voice your child hears, you’re the one teaching them even if you can’t be there all the time. And it’s a way to connect to family members who may not be near by. The child will still hear her family member’s voice and recognize the picture. What grandparent wouldn’t want that?

Many of the toys she plays with now (Leapfrog’s Learn and Groove in particular) showcase anonymous voices singing ABC’s or teaching colors. And for a while she would spend hours with these toys! I have been working with a child psychologist who has emphasized the need for a child to hear her mother and father’s voice for comfort, but little is known of this connection other than comfort. Seems to me, our loved one’s voices play a huge role in our development.

At this point the prototype is up and running and I’m working on a next iteration of the interface and would like it to be more “in the round” and to tell stories, as opposed to a box top with shapes (though Melissa and Doug seem to be doing just fine with this idea). I want to make it easy for parents to record their own audio, and fun so the child learns through play.

Yesterday during breakfast the mailman dropped off the Duplo Legos I had ordered from Amazon for my soon-to-be 2 year old daughter. We could both hardly stand finishing our eggs and peanut butter toast, because what we really wanted to do was open the box. Once I cleared the table and coaxed the box from Blue’s hands without her crying, we tore it open and dug into the candy colored pieces. This was the first time Blue had played with Legos, and I was surprised that she knew exactly what to do (one of the highest marks of good design).

She started putting a few pieces together, but got really excited when it clicked, that she could stack the pieces up as tall as she wanted. I sat by and just watched her build and build the four-nubbed Legos into a tower made from all the same pieces. It sparked a thought. This is what it’s like to discover building and architecture, and the primal impulse is to make it taller. “More, more more!” she wanted. I couldn’t help but think so many of us feel this way, and it takes rational thought the overcome it. The push for innovation shouldn’t just about building upward but about creating an experience for your audience, or consistency within a physical context, or for conceptual integrity, or simply for beauty.

I was reminded of Rem Koolhaas’s reasoning behind the Central Chinese Television (CCTV) building in Shanghai- instead of taller and more slender, he opted for a continuous loop to represent modernization. The locals call it “big underpants,” but he envisioned “a shared conceptual space in which all parts are housed permanently, aware of one another’s presence – a collective. Communication increases; paranoia decreases.” From what I hear, it was, at least temporarily, a hub of social activity and facilitated connectivity among the workers. I like that Koolhaas looked beyond the obvious next phase of skyscrapers (taller, skinnier), and strove for an experiential design.

I attached the manifesto in case you’re interested.
Koolhaas: Beijing manifesto

Blue with Legos

A quick Flash mockup of little project I’ve been working about the loop of belief; going from religious, atheist, to spiritual and back. Glass bulbs and lights will replace the 2D feel, just testing out the timing and animation of the lights.

why worry?why_worry

The blogger in me has won, so I’m in the process of streamlining all my sites into a WordPress framework. Old and new stuff forthcoming.