Assignment 2
Prototype a Smart Thing
Brief
Design and build a Smart Thing — a physical object from the Lucid.Bar, made smart through a sensor and a sound behavior that corresponds to the character of that object.
Your Smart Thing will be presented at the Furniture Music at the Lucid.Bar.
Process
Week 4 — Choose your object and sensor
- Pick an object from the Lucid.Bar (must have dynamic properties — see Lucid.Bar Whitelist)
- Conduct an object-centered study: one-day object diary, character analysis, inter-thing correspondence, thing-personification
- Choose a sensor (see Lucid.Bar Whitelist) that connects to how you see the object being smart
Week 5 — Pitch + ethnography
- Present your object, sensor choice, and object-centered ethnographic study to the group
- Receive peer-to-peer feedback
Week 6 — Mapping and sound design
- Define your mapping (sensor values → sound parameters)
- Build a first patch in Max or Plugdata that responds to live data
Week 7 — Intermediate feedback
- Present work in progress, receive feedback
Week 8 — Event
- Your working Smart Thing is installed and running at the Lucid.Bar
Deliverable
Submit a short video documentation of your working Smart Thing to Canvas by the deadline — show the object, the sensor in use, and the sound behavior it produces. Include your Max or Plugdata patch and your Arduino sketch.
Resources
Linked from
- Thing-CenterednessThing-centeredness is a design perspective that takes the object as the starting point for design, rather than the user or the system.
- WirelessFor the installation to work, your sensor prototype needs to send data to your laptop without a cable.
- Week 4Écouter Presentations + Furniture Music19 May
- Week 6Lecture + Design Workshop2 Jun
- Week 7Feedback + Hands-on Prototyping9 Jun