On Mon 21 May we held our first Open House showcasing the work we’ve been doing. Little ‘exhibits’ were arranged on tables and walls of the cafe, which we introduced then let people explore at will. These included:
– Live Kinect peopletracking, projected and with a subtle emergent piano soundtrack. Testing of the Soundbug feonic speaker revealed that it’s just not loud enough. Jambox is much better.
– Speaking of quiet audio, our interactive donation box was tested for the first time. This too however suffered from low volume: the tiny speaker that comes with the Arduino wave shield was too meagre when encased within two layers of 1/2″ plywood. Having to put your ear to the money slot was, however, an interesting (if unintended) user interaction.
– Wish You Were Here interactive postcards installation. I also announced Daniel Eatock’s idea for people to actually use the postcards he designed, for their intended purpose, and send them to Spike Island.
– An introductory hardware hacking activity (thanks Oomlout for the excellent kit) using Arduino to make an LED light blink. One (nontechnical) participant went further to successively blink a whole mini-Las Vegas array of LEDs. That alone was a success!
– Results of information/interaction mapping exercise
– Workshop outcomes including computer drawings, personal interaction ‘scores,’ apple drawings, and slides on rational v. intuitive thinking.
– Printouts of Spike website source code, with particular tags highlighted, to prompt thinking and discussion about the head, body, dividers, scripts etc in the organisation.
– Printouts of assorted blog posts and ideas