Archive

Posts Tagged ‘My Experiments’

Guestlecture and Workshop Human Plant Interfaces

May 12th, 2016 No comments

Plant Colour Patterns

On May 2015, Myriel Milicevic invited me for a Guestlecture & Workshop on Artistic Human Plant Interfaces/Elektrobotanik for her Interfacing with Nature class at University of Applied Science Potsdam. The starting 90-120min lecture provided the students (in that case communication, product, and interface designer) an introduction about interfaces with plants. This includes viusal approaches as well as bio sensing projects.

 

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Workshop Format: Create a Game (Art) Installation

May 7th, 2016 5 comments

During mid of 2013 until the beginning of 2014, Juliane Springsguth and me had the chance to develop a new game design hacking workshop format for teenagers (Mostly 8th graders around 13-15 years old) in cooperation with "Berufsorientierte Schulprojektwochen (BOP)" organized by the Media Education Institution WeTeK Berlin gGmbH.

Our objective was to generate a tangible and audiovisual output in shape of a Game (Art) installation during the workshop. Furthermore, our intention regarding those young participants was to empower them to express their ideas in a (media) technology driven environment. Officially the objective was that they get a first impression how a job as digital media worker could look like.

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Prototyping an online development guide for medical devices

April 16th, 2016 1 comment

medtech_header

At my last blog post, I have told you that it was not possible to launch the development guide for medical devices from the beginning of our online platform medizintechnologie.de. This blog post describes the design and prototyping process of our development guide for medical device engineers.

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An online platform for medical engineering: Vision, Information and requirement engineering

April 5th, 2016 No comments

medtech_header

Some time ago, I posted a ‘making of’ series about the low-budget project wasfuttern.de. This time I will blog about the development process of the current bigger (3-5 years) web project in the field of medical engineering in Germany. My writings intend to give Interaction Designer and User Experience specialist an insight view what I have learnt from this project.

 

Background

When I started end of 2012, the publication Website: Nationaler Strategieprozess "Innovationen in der Medizintechnik" appeared and stated Germany needs more informational transparency about the medical engineering industry. The medical engineer stakeholders should be better connected to each other. And on-going, start-ups, small and mid-sized businesses need more support during their certification process within EU.

As one solution for these problems an online platform for the medical engineering community in Germany was proposed.

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Create speaker on the body of a leaf

November 27th, 2015 1 comment

For almost more than a year I wanted to write a tutorial about how to create a speaker on a leaf. Unfortunately, I found no time to write one. I think it is now time to show you the video as an example and provide you the links for built your own leaf speaker

For several years, I am really excited about Hannah Perner-Wilson aka Plusea's textile circuits. Fortunately, I could join her workshop during the Schmiede 2013 and applied her textile speaker to a lead of a plant. First experiment worked well with conductive thread, which kinda harmed the leaf structure. Therefore, we experimented with conductive ink, too. The result was much quiter noise.

Information and tutorials for building your own leaf speaker:
highlowtech.org/?p=1372
kobakant.at/DIY/?p=2936
kobakant.at/DIY/?p=3794
plusea.at/?p=4161
instructables.com/id/Embroidered-Fabric-Speaker/?ALLSTEPS

Happy tinkering!

Perception of Nature: “Season Patterns”

November 10th, 2014 3 comments

The human perception responds positively on natural environments with many plants. Especially, during the seasons spring and autumn people are excited by the shape and colours of plants. The photo series “Season Patterns” is an artistic approach of capturing and documenting these feelings of beauty caused by nature [Schwepenhäuser2007, pages 70-71].

Previous landscape painters already tried to capture the broad range of natural elegance in their artworks. Their approaches were very often accurate in every detail of the landscape, but still the painters were not satisfied with their visual representations of the landscapes. For this reason, the photo series “Season Patterns” uses a visual abstract expression for representing the prettiness of nature and plants.

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Plants in urban environments: “Dead Tree Drops”

September 29th, 2014 21 comments

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The previous project “Travelling plants” explored the possibilities of connecting digital communication technology with plants. People’s reaction emerged like expected, but the involvement of digital communication technology provides still some space for further experiments. Therefore, the new experiment named “Dead Tree Drop” connects and stores location-based digital data directly on a plant within an urban natural environment. In the course of this thesis the strong relationship between plant-based artwork and its environment were described before. For this reason plants can be associated with local characteristics. Moreover, humans like to stay and rest in natural environments, where they often like to read books and magazines. These initial conditions inspired me to create a physical interface for local-based digital information within natural urban environments.

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Public Intervention with plants: “Travelling Plants”

September 29th, 2014 5 comments

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The previous chapter described the artwork “Season Patterns”, which captured natural environmental changes. The interactive relationship only existed between the artist and his surrounding natural environment. In contrast to that, the collaboration project “Travelling Plants” with Juliane Springsguth created a direct interactive relationship between plants and humans as well as between humans and humans.

The interaction between humans and plants intended to improve the human well-being. This improvement was applied in an urban context, where the daily life is characterized by stress and appointments [Shoemaker2002, page 140]. Public transport as a public space is a location where people have the time to rest, although the environment does not provide a relaxing friendly atmosphere. Under these circumstances, a setting with plants has the ability to transform a stressful mood to a relaxing state of mind more easily [Shoemaker2002, pp. 181]. The famous landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted assigned plants a healing power for the human mind [Flagler1994, page 232]. Read more...

Masterthesis: Human Plant Interfaces

February 15th, 2013 No comments

Masterthesis Starter

Since October I am working on my masterthesis about Human Plant Interfaces. I chose this topic because plants are not well researched in an interface design context. Plants are vital for our life but they are very rare in urban environments. In the context of my thesis I will research plants under the point of view of an interface designer. My objective is to find ways for integrating plants more in our daily life. The results of the research will be shared on my blog. I am happy about every feedback and open minded for discussions. At the university I showed a small presentation of my topic, it will give you an idea what I am planning to do.

*** UPDATE: Download the masterthesis here ***

“TAKE ME PLACES” artwork is aborted

February 7th, 2012 2 comments

Last year at september Me and Andrea Suter started a location-based experiment with the name Take me Places. Our basic idea was:

TAKE ME PLACES is an art project, which plays with the notions of territory and dislocation, orientation and the loss of such. TAKE ME PLACES will travel around the world until July 2012. At the end of its travels the photographs as well as the added artefacts will be exhibited. TAKE ME PLACES plays with public spaces, is participatory, involves a random the public, is dependent upon it.

We decided to place two suitcases in public spaces. Each suitcase were equipped with a photocamera, kind of a map, kind of a container, and instructions.  One suitcase represented an anolog version (Analog camera, paper maps, suitcase box for additional artworks) and a digital version (digital camera, digital map with QR Code, USB Stick as a container for additional digital artworks). People were supposed to take the suitcase with them and add some personal value to it. Read more...