stimulant

A quick [cross-]post from a neat class I’m taking:

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blockquote cite=”http://mas714.media.mit.edu/”> Man, playing with the Scratch board was ridiculously fun.

A couple weeks ago, I bought an older court reporter’s Stenotype with the intent to learn shorthand (and how to use a stenotype). I hadn’t made much headway, but then I got the idea to make a stenotype of my own using the Scratch board. Initially, I wanted to duplicate the keyboard layout, but then decided that instead, I’d try to make something more along the lines of the “keyboard” I saw during Doug Engelbart’s “Mother of All Demos” from 1968:

Namely, I wanted to use four keys (and, it turned out, the slider and button) to provide for enough combinations to encode all the letters. Instead of having a key for each letter, I’d have a combination to remember.

I recently discovered Alumilite’s 20 minute molding putty, and was pretty keen on using it. So, I imagined a flexible mold that wrapped around your hand, and had four rubber bands with tin foil wrapped around them strung across the portion on your palm. Then, you’d have tin foil beneath the elevated rubber bands connected to the scratch board, as well as connections from the tin foil on the rubber bands to the Scratch board. This way, when you pressed on of the rubber bands down and it touched the foil beneath, you’d complete the circuit.

While I was playing with that, I realized that there was a better way. Instead, I could make little fingertip molds with foil and a Scratch board connection embedded, and mount a small sheet of aluminum on a holder molded to my thumb. The holder would also be connected to the Scratch board, and so I would tap my fingers in various combinations against my thumb to type out letters.

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But, once I made this I found that I had made the thumb mold too heavy, and that I was running into trouble with a single, bottom contact. So, I backed off from the “wearable” aspect of the design and just kept the tin foil on molded fingertips, replacing the thumb sheet with a piece of cardboard with four, color-coded strips of aluminum foil.

<img src=”http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2093/1887496415_a01d0221c2.jpg?v=0” width=’400/>

This worked well, and at this point I added capital letters and periods with the button and slider mechanism, making a grip/holder to make it possible to wear the Scratch board itself:

Finally, I could type (with the initial help of Jay’s typewriter program and some timing tinkering):

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For all the photos I took while playing around, go here — sorry for the quality, I couldn’t find the charger for my camera batteries, so I ended up using the built-in webcam…

The asynchronicity of the digital and physical iteration processes was pretty interesting: neither ended up getting constrained until the very end, and the awareness of designing a Scratch program whose inputs could easily be switched as I flit from design to design was a nice goal, and worked out wonderfully. By and large, the program was pretty constant, I just switched out the arguments passed to the “if” statement. Which was pretty tedious, given the lack of a find and replace function, but it was easy to do while the molding putty was setting.

I really, really like the fact that the Scratch board can turn such a wide variety of physical objects into computational objects so flexibly (via tin foil!): it makes the computational aspect of the physical object so open. Typically, the digital component of a physical object is very hidden — either for aesthetic reasons, or by virtue of the inclusion of a microcontroller. Despite the fact that the Scratch board has this black-box component, the openness of input to the black box is powerful. The design process comes off as feeling a lot more analog, in part because of the constraints put on you by what sort of sensing the board can do. Because the range of inputs is so narrow, the focus is on creatively creating those inputs and mapping them to different situations. This ended up meaning that I came away with a much clearer sense of the space of idioms for sensing with the Scratch board than with the Cricket (where I still haven’t explored all the ways for sensing and measuring).

I guess I’m kind of surprised by how positively I’m reacting to the prominence of the Scratch board’s constraints. It’s rare that I feel like a tool is entirely appropriately constrained (e.g. with Scratch I wished there were functions), but really, the most frustrating constraint of the Scratch board is all the wires.

There’s something going on that I don’t quite understand. I was a lot more satisfied with the interplay between the constraints and expressiveness of the Scratch board than the Cricket. But, that means that I’m not just reacting to how expressive a tool is. I think if you’d asked me a week ago, my naive answer would have been that I prefer using tools that can do more. I’m very interested in figuring out what elements of the digital+physical workflow bring out this more nuanced reaction of mine.

What were other people’s impressions of the interplay between the digital and physical constraints in the Scratchboard (vs Cricket) workflow?