insta bowl

Intention

Write about the big ideas behind your project? What are the goals? Why did you make it? What are your motivations?

I was initially interested in sleep and how we can interface and explore creatively at the boundary between wakefulness and rest. The daily habit of sleeping (or not sleeping) led me to think about some of the other things we do every single day (perhaps the mundane) and how they can become augmented for various reasons and purposes. I hope that investigating these types of activities, can create magical and extraordinary experiences. Through my case study on food, I was lead towards thinking about how our food culture has changed as a result of increasingly ubiquitous smartphones with cameras. There are various desires (or lack there of) that we have to post on social media and share with the world what we might be up to in a given moment. This space of capturing (either photo, video, audio) or even screen capping text or images is an interesting space for reflection. My goal with the "insta bowl" was to create the inverse of what we normally see when we think of pictures and food. Instead of a beautiful meal or a posed cheers, glass clink, boomerang, it's about the bowl providing you with a new way of seeing yourself during a time of temporary and repeated engagement. I made this specific kind of bowl because it was a straightforward concept to me which I knew I could execute and it was easy to make use of materials which were readily available. My motivations were primarily to question what kind of output could be generated through making this type of artifact and what perspectives could be gather from the artifact and further investigated.

Prototype

Describe your experience/working prototype: What did you create, how, etc.? What tools and technologies were involved? Include appropriate content and illustration (e.g. a concept video, a video of the device in operation, diagrams, code, etc.)

It's a simple bowl with a chamber at the bottom to separate the food stuffs from the tech.

Tools: laser cutter, solder, copy & paste, lots of testing

Here's the view of the running demo code!

a. 

b.

c. 

Dropbox Uploader (c) by 2010-2017 Andrea Fabrizi 

Precedents

Describe theory, concepts, and research you have performed. Describe the prior work, ideas and projects that influenced your design. What work informed this idea.

I knew there were other projects out there that had the approach of equipping or embedding objects with cameras and sensors so I wanted to execute on my own take of this to see how it would turn out! 
https://connectedeverydaylab.org/thing-centered-design/ (and work by Elisa Giaccardi)

Process

Describe how you arrived out the outcome. What iterations, refinements, design decisions and changes were made?

I thought laser cut acrylic would be the best way to make a bowl but I also thought about:
- clay
- heat shrinking a type of plastic
- a pre made glass or plastic bowl
- mold making / casting
In the end, the laser cut just barely worked out. The green tint was a really nice touch that ended up working in a totally different way than the completely clear acrylic aesthetic. I created a hole in the side for a small USB cable to pop out and even that was the tightest fit, everything was just barely working. I didn't iterate much, I just tried to estimate based on prior experience with laser cutting acrylic and in the process of trying to seal the layers together I really wish I had went for a thicker version of the material so that the work wouldn't be so painstaking. That cement stuff is so strong smelling.
Other refinements I made was about positioning the components connected to the Raspberry Pi and wrapping the wires and keeping the battery out of the way. 

Open Questions and Challenges

What questions remain to be addressed or questions about memory did this exploration raise for you. What are the things we should pay attention to/discuss in class for future explorations?

I'm not sure what I can do with the output or if I can get a higher quality output, or maybe even to curate the pictures or perhaps record video. Maybe it would be good to reflect more on what capturing and gaining perspective in this way could mean or if it could serve any purpose at all. It would be interesting to learn more about food and memory because I think I want to open my own restaurant some day. In addition, I learned so much about how raspberry pi's work and how that interface to a monitor works and how the Mac terminal works. Burning questions are really surrounding what is possible?? at the intersection of computation and tangible interaction design.

Reflection

Reflect on making this project. What did you learn? What would you do differently? Did you get where you wanted to? If not, why not? What do you need to get there, etc?

I learned a lot about my motivations for this course and about my attitudes towards academic in general this semester. I think I spent too much time on this and also consulted our TA for many hours. There might be more efficient ways of working in the future which I have just not accessed yet. I got to where I wanted... for now! I think gaining a better sense of scope and pushing my abilities further will be the continuing steps that I find as a result of making and investigating in this way. Sometimes projects aren't what you'd hope they turned out as but I was pretty excited about this one so I was able to see it through. It's not perfect, but I'm okay with that. In the future, I want to go a little more outside of my comfort zone.

Attribution and References

Reference any sources or materials used in the documentation or composition.

https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects/getting-started-with-picamera

https://github.com/andreafabrizi/Dropbox-Uploader/blob/master/dropbox_uploader.sh