digital prosthesis

It’s that most wonderful time of the year again. My blogging season starts here. A bit like duck hunting or fishing - but with words and concentrated perseverance. I heard a Michael Palin interview today and he described his diary keeping skills. I felt a tug of guilt as I remembered my disused and momentarily abandoned wordpress home for ramblings.

Since I have graduated I have eased off posting to the point where I have reached online stasis - so to work.

I am now a fully fledged freelancer having worked for 6 months under the banner of oldmanvegas - here - and have been working at twofour and now with the lovely onshore people on a new site for Pentillie Castle.  I have been working on a new interactive flash site for a Friendly Society (always nice to be nice) which should launch 2010 - here - and has taken a lot of work.

I am still gigging with Freshly Squeezed and I’m looking forward to a couple of tasty gigs this weekend at Chudleigh Knightons’ Claycutters Friday and the mighty Maker on Saturday.

Well - it’s been a while.  Since the last post I have graduated (2:1) - and been working full time as a freelancer which was unexpected, but welcome. Mon to Fri back at Twofour so it’s a welcome return to my placement stomping ground.

I have been mainly working on web design and Flash development - getting my hands dirty learning AS3 - which isn’t that bad it turns out and I have been creating some nice content with external classes and coded tweens :]

The band is going great guns (much to the chagrin of the wife) and taking up pretty much every weekend - which can be pretty tiring - esp as Goldie has now taken to waking every morning at 6:30 and jumping on me to sing “Row Row Row the boat” - but despite the tiredness it’s a pretty lovely way to start the day.

The inLaws have been living with us for about 3 months - and Fuch had baby number 4 in our front room on Monday night so there are 6 of them now (we are officially outnumbered). The little mite is lovely and currently nameless and I’m glad for Rhamis as the family managed to get immigration to let him stay for the birth - he has about two weeks till the end of his visa to get to know her.

Ahyhoo - I best get back to work.

But if anyone is reading this - the dissertation I wrote on the prospect of our digital future - heres a nice update on BCI - some peeps have made the first tweet via BCI to show the potential for the disabled to stay in communication with friends family and followers. Nice work.

How have I managed to get out of student mode and begin a regular 9 to 5:30 day job? It turns out the brain is elastic and can adapt itself - especially if a sensory input is broken/disrupted. I found it out here

I have booked a space in the local village hall to exhibit my project 3-6pm on Weds 20th May to enable me to film people interacting with the reader and inputting comments - I have put the word out so hopefully I should get a few along…

But first I just need to do a final check that the whole thing works correctly.

RFID tag on object

Tagged object launches webpage from archive

Sorted. Heres hoping there are enough people there tomorrow…

I have spent the day sticking, slicing and cutting out all my artwork so I can label all the objects in the archive and make the reader look professional (as per the brief). Here’s my visual log:

Cutting and slicing RFID stickers

Wireless interaction

Tagged objects completed

Close up object (Monkey Keychain)

Tag detail (hiding the RFID)

Reader redesign

Now for the final tests…..

It seems that for every project I create I require an afternoon in the garage with some random wood, a saw and some glue!  I have made the basis of my reader body - after ensuring the RFID tags can still be read through a barrier (mounting board) at about a 15 mm range.

Wooden base for reader

I have designed a top for the reader and for the stickers to cover the RFID tikitags so I now just need to get them printed and buy some other peripherals (Wireless keyboard, mouse and luggage tags) to complete the set up for the installation.

I just found an online tag cloud generator (here) - so I popped in the text from my dissertation and it gave me this;

Well the big day came - and we did our thing.  Here’s my summary;

First of all I had to do the classic ‘Yes Men’ costume change in the gents - and like a reverse Mr Ben I emerged wearing a suit and tie and renamed ‘Andy Credit’ - a representative of Consumer Direct.

my Andy Credit suit

My exhibit was a sort of info point for Consumer Direct - with pastiche posters extolling the virtues of consumer spending. I reversioned the WW1 propaganda poster of Lord Kitchener and mashed it up with Gordon Brown and the chip and pin logo to create a call to all consumers to spend to rescue the ailing economy - the literal “Your country needs you”. Alongside other such promotional posters there was a terminal to surf the ‘identity corrected’ Consumer Direct website so visitors could pick up crucial consumer advice on maximising credit, the feelgood factor of purchasing and avoiding ‘consumer stagnation’ by replacing obselete items.

The exhibition went well - although it was lacking the usual business the Lewinsky Building usually has, I think this was mainly due to the preceeding Bank oliday and the ridiculous amount of building works in the grounds which cut off easy pedestrian access to the building from the main campus and so stifled the usual passers by. Those that did show up seemed interested and involved in the various works, I had some good conversations with visitors as ‘Andy Credit’ and also to those that knew me already they were interested in the content of the site and the artwork.

The other contributors all had keen interest, with visitors parttaking in the interactive pieces and sampling the open source beverages (I even managed to get a decent snowboarding jacket from the Freetrade Boutique!). My family showed up for a look around and my little girl got stuck in - Adbusting at the age of 15 months!

Goldie vs Matalan

All that is left to do now is edit the video documentation and update the site with our experiences of the exhibition.

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Have you seen the revamped Pepsi logo? - a designer did hehehehe

Lawrence Yang