NetworkObjects

Background

The camera
The camera is a bit like the CD player. The CD player was the digital evolution on the record. It started out with a high price tag. Then as the technology caught on the price began to lower. Then the CD moved into the computers realm. It was roughly 15 years after the consumer CD player came out that I could look around me apartment and count 8 CD players in various devices around my apartment. Today that same 15 year sprint has happened with the digital camera, once it was really special to have a digital camera. Today I look around my apartment and there must be 10 digital camera of sorts.

There is always talk about the end of the film camera. The end maybe in sight for the film camera. This system maybe just another camera which will lead to the demise of the film camera. The film camera will live on, it will live on in the background for a special breed of person just like vinyl does in the music world. There has been little change o0f the film camera since its advent, other then the speed of the development process. There have been smaller and smaller formats but it was not until the digital camera that the whole dynamic of photography.

The digital camera has been around for a more then ten years, but it is only until recently that quality and price have made it affordable for all consumers. Today everyone has a digital camera, everywhere you turn you find a person taking a picture and looking at the back of the camera, maybe then nodding no and taking the photo again. Which is great in some respects, Instant gratification everyone loves it. Take a picture and a second later you see it. it is wonderful but it has its down side, ever been in a group photo with someone using a digital camera? Have you ever heard oh that was terrible lets take it again? And again? And Again? And then people have lost complete interest? Sometime instant gratification can create frustration. Imagine not knowing if the photo is going to come out, what would one do? Take a few extras and never mention it, people would not notice and go on with their duties.

One one the devices which I mentioned at the beginning of this section which has a camera and in my apartment is my cellphone. Since the addition of the camera to the cellphone then camera to an interesting turn, Nokia a cellphone company became the largest producers of cameras in the world. Today Sony holds the title. But this change things people really got hooked on camera phones adding photos to numbers in their address book, creating a screen background of girlfriends or boyfiends. It has been amazing to see the life of picture has grown. On May 4, 2005 on the front page of the new york post???? was headline which read… “Caught in the Flash”. A story about a girl who took a photo of a subway pervert with her camera and bought the man to be caught.

Toys
Years ago toys were objects for imagination. Children had an abstracted toy to play with and the child’s imagination would go wild. Role playing was also integral to this sort of play. As time passed toys have become less left up to the imagination of the child and more forced upon the child through design. Example of this is Lego, once a system of simple building blocks with a plethora of outcomes, now a complex design with very little variance in outcome. As toys have changed so has the end user, once a world devoted to children, this world has been invaded by grown –ups enthusiasts who, don’t really play with the toys but collect them and present them on their desk at work or other such places.

The Teddy Bear
Winnie the Pooh comes to mind when teddy bear is mentioned, and this was the ideal teddy bear. Then in the mid 80’s Teddy Ruxspin became the child’s friend. Placing a cassette tape into the back of the teddy the child could listen to stories and songs very hard and chunky. But for a long time, the idea of the teddy bears was thrown by the way side. Pushed aside by the Elmos and and Barneys of this world some hard and animated others soft, and teddy like. Five years ago Build-a-Bear stores started popping up a shop where a child chose for a collection of base bears and accessorize them as the child likes. Recent years brought about the Ugly Dolls a wonderful collection of dolls which is admired by both children and adults. These stuffed animals became my point of departure for the look of the Puffle.

Modern toys
Recently at ITP there has been a wave of children’s toys. Of the various toys which have been coming out of the program I was interested iin two in particular, Huggums and the Needies. The Needies are interesting because everyone seemed to mix them up with the Puffles in looks, or at least thought I was part of the team working on the Needies. The toy is wonderful. I find that the need for caring is something we all have inside us. Huggums was a lot closer to the Puffle then the needies. Huggums was a toyish device that the user squeezes and the device would send an sms which would state HHHUUUUUUGGGG… or such base on the length and strenth of the squeeze.

Blogging – Photoblogging – Moblogging

The Idea of blogging has been around for about 12 years depending on who you ask, but still grows why because people need to express themselves. There are roughly 2.3 million blogs on the internet today. It is said 2.2 million of them are never read. For me that is just fine! Because the Blog is really a form of personal Journal one such site that pushes this idea is livejournal.com. The blog is not really for readers as much as it is for the writers. Engadget.com, a popular technology blog, is not really blog, while it uses blog technology to publish is really is a online “zine”. One site,______, is said to receives $25,000 a month from Sony, sounds far fetched. And if it is true is doesn’t it seem that the site is valued with high standards of journalism? If a blog is a blog because of the software that is used, then there are some online stores which use blog systems, are they blogs?

Some people don’t like to write. I’m one of them. I find it really hard sometime to write what I saw and did each day. Or if I go to an event it is almost unlikely that I will go home and write that much about it on my blog. But I will take pictures and add a bit of a comment under them. This I find so much easier and rewarding. Photoblogging while it is quite new is some respects, there is flickr.com which is highly reguarded by many in my circle of colleagues is a system which has been acquired Google.com and replicated on Yahoo. Flickr.com is an interesting twist and goes far more into the community around the images; it also has a cross referencing system which is based on a tagging system. What is most important about this site is that people love to post their photos and others like to comment. The interest is so great at New York University’s Interactive telecommunications Program (ITP), that many projects have integrated flickr, one interesting one is bickr… a system of competing and voting for images the viewing station. If there is an event the bickr team will sometimes create a competion that revolves around that event. Creating a vast collection of images from all different sources.

As I mentioned previously, I don’t like to write. But I love to take photos. I very happy when I received my first camera cellphone, but I did not know really what to do with it, great my phone takes pictures… Then I was turned onto textamerica.com and my life changes. With my cellphone I could record all the images I saw in my daily life and shoot them up to the internet. So now with a portable device which I have on my person most of the time, I can grab images which I see and image and send them to the web. I recently became interested in creating a system of my own which gives me more control of the images I upload. As system developed I started to discuss future development with Shawn Vaneverys a Resident researcher at ITP. He showed me some of his code which I later incorporated into my system.

While showing me his code he talked to me about vlogging… the newest and the latest in online journaling. It is very interesting to see how people are using the format. The addition of video is a future plan for Puffles and as the technology gets smaller and processers get faster, it will soon arrive to the puffles as well.

Where does all of this take us? Well there are researchers and companies banking on the idea of LifeBlogging. Mentioned in a book by Donald Norman, Teddy, was a audio bloggin device which learn and remembered.:
Everyone would have their own portable device, all the time. In fact, suppose we started out with our personal assistant at a very early age, two or perhaps three years of age. It could help us learn to read and write, draw and sing, spell. Because the devices would be handed out early in life, the version for young children should be soft and cuddly so children will always want it to be by their side: soft, and furry like a Teddy bear - hence the name: “The Teddy.”

By starting so young, the Teddy could store within itself all the information and experiences of a lifetime. People would become quite intimate with their Teddys. It would know all about them, while also giving them complete access to the world's databases of knowledge. I assume that by the time such devices are possible the speech recognition problem will certainly be licked, so we could communicate with Teddy by talking. We talk to it, it talks to us.

Teddy inspired the Puffles to grow, while not focusing on the need to record words but images. It seems that it becomes a system which allows for selective sharing, which is something we want to do as we grow. Were when we speak our inner feelings it becomes harder to select what can be public, and I wanted the Puffles to be a crossing platform for communication, not a system of self communication.

While Donald Normans teddy is conceptual devise, Nokia, has devised a service which connected to their phones and blogging:
* Nokia Lifeblog automatically builds your diary as you take photos and videos, and send and receive messages.
* To clear up space on your phone, connect to your PC and let Lifeblog save and display your items securely and efficiently.

Your Mobile Memories (in a Nutshell)

* With Nokia Lifeblog it's easy to save your mobile images and other content.
* Start your own, always-growing, personal archive.
* Lifeblog makes it simple to locate and share pictures, videos, notes, and MMS's.
* Its horizontal-scroll "timeline" navigation is intuitive and fun to use.
* Lifeblog's organic timeline minimizes the periods with no saved items.

This service is is taking a moment to move but it will become more populated as time moves forward and memory becomes cheaper. As seen in Samsund’s research, they are now able to store the entire daily life of a person in a single chip or memory. Based on 18 hours of recording daily. This will be amazing when they market it. There is one worry… how do we filter through it? This is also an interesting question. I think Nokia’;s system starts to answer this but in a very generic approach.

Life bloggin has a way to go before it is something we can really effectively use, and todays blogging system are still oversimplified, but the research is being done and it maybe be a system people while adhere to in the near future.

The Concept
Puffles where built out a collection of desires and interests. My desires for a new way to effectively Moblog, then there where inspirations from the world around me. In design there should be more to a device is the way we use it then just its one use. Design should help a user find other uses for tools developed. Memory is important to me. Safety and security became a interesting angle of the puffles after a mid term critic and a public presentation of Puffles during a round table talk.

Over the past year Moblogging has been a interest of mine. I started to build a one click picture taking in from a j2me application. It is needed and quite simple but there were other aspects of the system which pulled me away from the cellphone as the platform.

One concept which I was not really used to was the idea of transitional objects in real life application. But a friend of mine has “mongmongy” Korean for puppy… but it is their baby blanky and they are grown up. It is important an a tool to relieve their senses for stressful situations. While the transition object per say is not something that can be chosen for the child but is an object the child becomes attached to, one can hope that puffles would be more of a favorite toy… like Woody or Buzzlight Year from Toy Story.

Designing in multiple tier design is hard most of the time, but for Puffles there were some obvious direction which came up. The Puffle could be used as a child monitoring system. Using the parent image monitor (explain later in the deign section) the system could be set up where the Puffle sits in the crib with the child and if the baby cries or makes noise the Puffle can send a message to vibrate the parent monitor. What is beneficial is the presence of the Puffle during the infant stages in the crib give the Puffle a better chance of becoming truly the transitional object.

Memories are meant to be kept. Puffles are there to help people to remember. Images taken and stored help people to remember unlike video they inspire the memorys to come to life video forces the memory on you and there should be a delicate balance between the memory and the imagination.

Safety Zone was an interesting turn of events which came out of a mid process critic. As today’s world is sadly less safe, parent feel more concerned to let the children out of there sight at a young age, while children want to roam. Puffles give parents a chance to expand the safety zone. As the child carries on they take pictures. As the pictures are added to the childs blog the parent get a sign from the parent monitor. Parents can look online and see where and what the child is up to. Safety became a topic of discussion during a roundtable on vlogging and blogging and the IMC Studio Talks. Puffles were brought up and a great way to give security to parents children and people in general. Take the scenario:
A mugger approaching you and saying, “Give all your money!” you lift you device and click photo up to the system and there is nothing the mugger can do. Face is now stored.

This scenario help people feel more comfortable and maybe having Puffles at the park will que deviants and other to back off or you going to be caught!

Since the design was to be a plush toy for children there is a need to focus on two things durability and tactile sense. So materials are very important. If one used canvas as the skin material of the toy, it would be durable and great but would not be a maretial one would like to hug too much. Other toys I founf on the market where fury and wonderfully tactile, yet little children would pull out the hairs or suck on them then drag the toy and create a bacterial stadium. The Ugly Dolls use polar fleece a strong material with a great tactile feel, yet if it is dirty it is reasonable easy to realize and a parent can through the puffle in the wash… (At present the puffle’s skin is only washable, the technology has not been waterproofed)

The attention to tactile sense is not only the material that covers the toy but also was important o look at for in inside. In the prototype of the Puffles, they were stuffed with quilt/pillow stuffing. During a talk with Red Burns, the director of ITP, she said, “I don’t like the feel.” This was the begin of a search for materials for stuffing. Looking at various foams on the market my search ended when I found Thermaputic foam. The feel and squooshiness are unrivaled. This choice became definite when testing with users and finding people unable to put the toy down and continually squeezing.

The original design had WiFi technology inside for various reasons one many of which was based on added features, which in the end were not interesting or needed to really achieve the true nature of the Puffles. Therefore the design moved from a WiFI network based system to a GSM cellulare network device. The choice allows the me a more viable connection to the network and on to the internet for a microcontroller in more places around the world. Using the GPRS system the Microcontroller can send sms, send e-mail, attach to websites, and can even become a server unto itself. To build would I wanted I ended up using a Development board from a group out of Boulder Colorado by the name sparkfun.com. using their module I was able to connect a PIC Microcontroller to it and access various aspects of the Telit 862 PCS module which is the main guts of the Sparkfun board.

Software for the device itself where written in PICBasic. But on the client side the flow chart looks like this:

Design
Form and function, is the balance which must be put on the scale for good design. Research started with all-in-one design vs single function design. Then the form would have to grown out of the group of users which would have the device. Materials are important to how this system of balance falls into place. To balance the materials in form is the software which is must weigh correctly for the function. After creating the primary device assceories can be added to aguement the functions and expand the design of the more developed system. In the end choices are made and they should be eacknowledged.

I had the good fortune to spend time teaching children in other countries, we would give the children a project to do and after a week they had to present it to the rest of the class. We asked them to document their work.