a feature of my experience this week has been a tenable feeling of what my comfort zone is as i’ve been feeling very much outside it.
after our day of hosting i got back to making with much gusto on the tuesday.
my day began with accepting something very unexpected. the load sensors i’d ordered were not on next day delivery as promised, they are coming from hong kong instead.
i took a gamble and bought some bathroom scales to hack.
arriving in the mill i once again missed the window of opportunity to get inducted on the vinyl cutter. i cracked on with the work connected to trying to make the maker bar more understandable and accessible.
the first aspect of this is the remaking of the a board to communicate what the maker bar is for the visitor, especially the first time visitor. i’ve seen so much conscious dissonance on the faces of visitors and i am driven to improve this for future visitors.
my plan is to add to the prepared board the words we need to get over what the bar is. interestingly while working on how to make the words, the words themselves have evolved to include some more maker language.
across two separate days i’ve prepared the boards and investigated word production other than vinyl.
the next stage of the visitor experience is the maker bar menu. when we began the residency the bar had one activity to do and this was different for every single time the bar was open. i saw this as potentially unsustainable.
the menu follows up what the a board says. it lists the process, materials and projects that the visitor can become involved with. it also takes the opportunity to highlight the other processes available to try in the workshops.
to maximise the space on the changeable menu the header has been moved onto part of the physical form of the menu.
my favourite image of the week is this one of the letters sitting on the base of the laser cutter
my other project of the week has been to create a method of sensing a person. this is for my re-imagined snee snaw project. the bathroom scales are for this.
having played with 4 load sensors to create a load cell earlier in the residency i feel i know and understand how it works and it made it easier to hack the bathroom scales.
put simply my plan with the scales was to remove the lcd and circuit board. this leaves the assembler board for the load sensors. to this i attach new header pins and connect to a hx711 amplifier unit. this connects to an arduno pro-mini. the pro-mini also has a bluetooth hc-05 board connected to it. the whole set up is powered by a usb power pack.
i successfully made the hack.
the value for the scale is broadcast via bluetooth to isadora. in isadora i noticed how the value rolled over ie got to 255 and went back to 0 and kept increasing.
i did some testing and discovered that isadora can only accept 0-255 on the serial connection. using a test sketch i worked out how to use the arduino map feature to ensure that isadora receives values between 0 and 255. on reflecting about this, i think that the big bang interactive would benefit from the map modification as well.
with the research confirmed and uploaded to the pro-minis. i now have two person sensors. their output in isadora can differentiate between the masses of the persons. maybe i need a posher word than sensor ….
at the beginning of the post i mentioned comfort zone and my feeling of being out of mine.
the origin of this has been to do with wether or not i could achieve a way of sensing mass of a person and feed this into isadora. it’s the basis of the snee snaw (re-imagined) actually working.
the feeling has also been further increased by the need to create the maker bar interpretation things. interestingly in an art context i think this would be mediation. personally it feels like mediation as i need the visitor to know something. interpretation to me speaks of someone else making sense of something for them. i’m actually after the visitor making up their own mind about it rather than reacting to it.
having made the mass communication work, my out of comfort experience has been reset so i can begin the next phase of edging into discomfort prior to feeling ok again. this rather implies that if i am to truely make something i will feel uncomfortable.
at the height of my recent discomfort i went for a walk.
during the walk i tried to consider what visually the out of comfort zone would look like. i arrived at this.
it is sometimes very difficult to use verbal langauge to describe a feeling and i get how visual language is so strong at doing this. years after graduating it finally makes sense !
so using the same location to describe visually what inside my comfort zone is …
