Photo 6 Jun Arduinos & Digital Intimacy My boyfriend Owen and I have started on a new adventure- remote communication via arduinos.  As he’s in the US and I’m in Berlin, we’ve been trying new things to stay happy and connected. The adventure began when I received my arduino starter kit in the mail a few weeks ago.  After some coding, both of our snazzy boards were hooked up to the interent via wifi shields.  The next step was connecting to the online portal Pachube (pronounced patch bay), which allows sensor data to be routed around the world.  Pachube was created by the designer Usman Haque- who was a speaker at CHI 2010 and who Owen met at the Insitute of Design’s DRC (Design Research Conference). At the moment we have our arduinos set up to send light sensor data directly to Pachube and to the other person’s arduino.  The light input data sent to pachube is displayed in a simple graph format and the data sent to the other arduino is desplayed in LEDs (1 LED= darkish, 2 LEDs= med bright, 3 LEDs= bright).  This way, each of has a feel for the other person’s light rhythm (ie when the room is dark and the person is asleep, when the sun is bright, when dusk sets in, etc.).  Maybe, just maybe, this will help us bridge the 7 hour time difference! The plan for this next week is to try out a simple button mechanism, which would allow us to set off the other person’s LEDs more actively.  We have also been using Fritzing, an amazing piece of software that allows you to create & share circuit drawings and pcb layouts for manufacturing.  The graphic image at the top is courtesy of Fritzing.  Owen was super on it and wrote up a great post on our new project, so I’ll let him tell you a little about it: Cora and I are using these technologies and experimenting with new ways of communicating with each other.  Rather than having to send elaborate emails or spending hours video chatting, what would it be like to have a more subtle, albeit less detailed, means of connecting? What would it be like if we could digitally glance at each other? Or nudge one another? These are some of the questions that technology is allowing us to explore. Interestingly, the very act of experimenting has become a means of connecting. We took screen shots as documentation of the process. You can see the code and debugging screen for our arduinos, the Pachube feeds that we established with little graphs of the activity, the video chat between us as we get the hardware setup, some of the text chats we sent back and forth, as well as some assorted digital schmutz. I recently came upon an article from the New York Times titled-The Brave New World of Digital Intimacy, which describes the fascinating concept of ‘digital intimacy’- when technology enables one to sense the rhythm of another’s life.  I see our current arduino set-up as a prime example of this idea.  With digital intimacy it’s less about the details and more about the combined effect of signals/messages over time.  Microblogging tools such as twitter or status updates enable this sort of intimacy, which might explain why they’re so popular…  Over the course of time the acccumalation of little messages reveals something more than just what’s in the content.  Clive Thompson writes: “It’s an aggregate phenomenon,” Marc Davis, a chief scientist at Yahoo and former professor of information science at the University of California at Berkeley, told me. “No message is the single-most-important message. It’s sort of like when you’re sitting with someone and you look over and they smile at you. You’re sitting here reading the paper, and you’re doing your side-by-side thing, and you just sort of let people know you’re aware of them.” Yet it is also why it can be extremely hard to understand the phenomenon until you’ve experienced it. Merely looking at a stranger’s Twitter or Facebook feed isn’t interesting, because it seems like blather. Follow it for a day, though, and it begins to feel like a short story; follow it for a month, and it’s a novel. If anything, these arduinos have opened up my eyes to the vast possibilities for remote communication.  They’ve also made me realize how ‘unrich’ and ‘unsubtle’ our current communication tools are.  So many levels & types of input/output signals remain completely untapped.  Fortunately, designers are catching on and producing some work along these lines.  I was particularly impressed by Pillow Talk, a recent project by Joanna Montgomery, a Dundee University interaction design student, because it makes use of subtle signals from our everyday routine to communicate something so human and so rich.Future remote communication tools will definitely need to play into ‘digital intimacy’ and ‘signal richness’ if they are to be successful.  I know I’ll be thinking of these things when Owen and I brainstorm about which input and output signals we want to explore next.

Arduinos & Digital Intimacy

My boyfriend Owen and I have started on a new adventure- remote communication via arduinos.  As he’s in the US and I’m in Berlin, we’ve been trying new things to stay happy and connected.

The adventure began when I received my arduino starter kit in the mail a few weeks ago.  After some coding, both of our snazzy boards were hooked up to the interent via wifi shields.  The next step was connecting to the online portal Pachube (pronounced patch bay), which allows sensor data to be routed around the world.  Pachube was created by the designer Usman Haque- who was a speaker at CHI 2010 and who Owen met at the Insitute of Design’s DRC (Design Research Conference).

At the moment we have our arduinos set up to send light sensor data directly to Pachube and to the other person’s arduino.  The light input data sent to pachube is displayed in a simple graph format and the data sent to the other arduino is desplayed in LEDs (1 LED= darkish, 2 LEDs= med bright, 3 LEDs= bright).  This way, each of has a feel for the other person’s light rhythm (ie when the room is dark and the person is asleep, when the sun is bright, when dusk sets in, etc.).  Maybe, just maybe, this will help us bridge the 7 hour time difference!



The plan for this next week is to try out a simple button mechanism, which would allow us to set off the other person’s LEDs more actively.  We have also been using Fritzing, an amazing piece of software that allows you to create & share circuit drawings and pcb layouts for manufacturing.  The graphic image at the top is courtesy of Fritzing. 

Owen was super on it and wrote up a great post on our new project, so I’ll let him tell you a little about it:

Cora and I are using these technologies and experimenting with new ways of communicating with each other.  Rather than having to send elaborate emails or spending hours video chatting, what would it be like to have a more subtle, albeit less detailed, means of connecting? What would it be like if we could digitally glance at each other? Or nudge one another? These are some of the questions that technology is allowing us to explore.

Interestingly, the very act of experimenting has become a means of connecting. We took screen shots as documentation of the process.


You can see the code and debugging screen for our arduinos, the Pachube feeds that we established with little graphs of the activity, the video chat between us as we get the hardware setup, some of the text chats we sent back and forth, as well as some assorted digital schmutz.


I recently came upon an article from the New York Times titled-The Brave New World of Digital Intimacy, which describes the fascinating concept of ‘digital intimacy’- when technology enables one to sense the rhythm of another’s life.  I see our current arduino set-up as a prime example of this idea. 

With digital intimacy it’s less about the details and more about the combined effect of signals/messages over time.  Microblogging tools such as twitter or status updates enable this sort of intimacy, which might explain why they’re so popular…  Over the course of time the acccumalation of little messages reveals something more than just what’s in the content.  Clive Thompson writes:


“It’s an aggregate phenomenon,” Marc Davis, a chief scientist at Yahoo and former professor of information science at the University of California at Berkeley, told me. “No message is the single-most-important message. It’s sort of like when you’re sitting with someone and you look over and they smile at you. You’re sitting here reading the paper, and you’re doing your side-by-side thing, and you just sort of let people know you’re aware of them.” Yet it is also why it can be extremely hard to understand the phenomenon until you’ve experienced it. Merely looking at a stranger’s Twitter or Facebook feed isn’t interesting, because it seems like blather. Follow it for a day, though, and it begins to feel like a short story; follow it for a month, and it’s a novel.

If anything, these arduinos have opened up my eyes to the vast possibilities for remote communication.  They’ve also made me realize how ‘unrich’ and ‘unsubtle’ our current communication tools are.  So many levels & types of input/output signals remain completely untapped.  Fortunately, designers are catching on and producing some work along these lines.  I was particularly impressed by Pillow Talk, a recent project by Joanna Montgomery, a Dundee University interaction design student, because it makes use of subtle signals from our everyday routine to communicate something so human and so rich.

Future remote communication tools will definitely need to play into ‘digital intimacy’ and ‘signal richness’ if they are to be successful.  I know I’ll be thinking of these things when Owen and I brainstorm about which input and output signals we want to explore next.


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