High-Low Tech

Cell phones are great for communication in a virtual manner, but lack expressiveness in personal surroundings. Many people try to give their phones a personal touch by customizing them. Android Meets Arduino is a toolkit to connect Android-driven mobile devices with Arduino microcontrollers via Bluetooth. The toolkit provides easy access to internal phone events which can be further processed on the Arduino open-source prototyping platform. This toolkit seeks to empower people to externalize their phone events to creatively demonstrate them on wearables, living spaces, or other tangibles.

Electronic Popables is an interactive pop-up book that sparkles, sings, and moves. The book integrates traditional pop-up mechanisms with thin, flexible, paper-based electronics; the result is an artifact that looks and functions much like an ordinary pop-up book, but has added elements of dynamic interactivity.

The LilyPad Arduino is a set of tools that empowers people to build soft, flexible, fabric-based computers. A set of sewable electronic modules enables users to blend textile craft, electrical engineering, and programming in surprising, beautiful, and novel ways. A series of workshops that employed the LilyPad have demonstrated that tools such as these, which introduce engineering from new perspectives, are capable of involving unusual and diverse groups in technology development. Ongoing research will explore how the LilyPad and similar devices can engage under-represented groups in engineering, change popular assumptions about the look and feel of technology, and spark hybrid communities that combine rich crafting traditions with high-tech materials and processes.

Run your hand across this wallpaper to turn on a lamp, play music, or control your toaster. This project experiments with interactive wallpaper that can be programmed to monitor its environment, control lighting and sound, and generally serve as a beautiful and unobtrusive way to enrich environments with computational capabilities. The wallpaper itself is flat, constructed entirely from paper and paint. The paper is paired with magnetic electronic modules that serve as sensors, lamps, network interfaces, and interactive decorations.

The Arduino platform makes prototyping and tinkering with electronics open to more people, but its complicated programming language is a barrier to entry. Building on the graphical-blocks programming language developed in the Scratch project, we are creating a new, more accessible way to program the Arduino, so that more people can become "makers" with electronics.

What interfaces might we build if we could sketch functional systems directly on paper? We have developed a construction kit that enables users to paint functional, interactive devices on paper. Users of our kit can create painted sensors and actuators, functioning user interface sketches, beautiful drawings that integrate functionality and aesthetics, and working schematic drawings.

We are exploring ways to sense tilt, motion, position, or shape through a variety of crafting and needlework techniques, using affordable and available materials such as conductive threads, yarns, fabrics, and paints. We use these materials to sew, knit, crochet, embroider, and laminate, creating a range of textile-based tilt sensors, that in turn form a tilt-sensing quilt. Draping the quilt over various objects, for example, will yield different results, which can in turn be visualized and interpreted for a variety of uses. We are interested in observing how users react to, and handle, this soft interface, and what possible applications this work could spark.