Investigation 1: Timmy Toaster

Intention

This project was primarily an exploration of animistic technology, and how I might subvert the typical user experience of a product in an engaging way. Technological animism is a concept in which technology is attributed with human-like qualities, such as emotions, intentions, and agency.

This concept of imbuing technology with human-like qualities is not entirely new - often designers attempt to give technology a semblance of “personality” as a shorthand to create an engaging, personable user experience. However, through Timmy Toaster, I wanted to push that concept - what if home appliances that were moody, temperamental, and as in need of attention and entertainment as the people who use them?

What I ended up building was a toaster that, like a person, wants something to read or watch over breakfast. The toaster refuses to cook for you unless it has some quality reading placed in front of it, and unfortunately has a short attention span.

Context

A huge inspiration for this project was David Rose’s Enchanted Objects. In many ways, Timmy Toaster is an example of an enchanted object, as he is an ordinary kitchen appliance that has been transformed into a more engaging and responsive device through the use of technology. However, through this work, I wanted to subvert the intention of these enchanted objects a bit - while he’s still engaging and companionable, Timmy is decidedly less functional. 

Prototype/Outcome

Timmy Toaster is an ordinary toaster enhanced with an Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense and a 30 pixel RGB light strip. To build Timmy, I removed the existing circuit board and power cable from a toaster (mostly for my own safety), and embedded the Arduino and light strip inside of the appliance. The Arduino was mounted onto a breadboard connected to the LED strip, and the entire thing was mounted to the heating element of the toaster. And because I had removed all of the circuitry that could possibly heat up the heating element, this was no longer an issue. This meant, while it could no longer toast, it could light up.

Because the onboard color sensor was now hidden behind the plastic shell of the toaster, I drilled a hole in the plastic lined up to where the sensor was mounted inside of the toaster. Googly eyes were glued beside the sensor holes to indicate to the user where to “show” Timmy the entertainment, and little legs made of pipe cleaners were added for a little bit of whimsy.

The code was based heavily on this documentation: https://docs.arduino.cc/tutorials/nano-33-ble-sense/rgb-sensor

It was modified with delays, conditionals, and some random number generation in order to imbue a sense of “personality,” but the algorithm essentially determines a color, and checks to see if the color sensor matches that value within a countdown. I am however particularly proud of this function I wrote that gradually shifts the LED strip between two colors:

for (int i = 0; i <= 255; i++) {
	updateColors(255-i, 0, i); // Shift colors red -> blue
	delay(30 * 1000 / 255); // Delay for a total of 30 seconds
}

Process

The process of building Timmy was pretty daunting to me, as someone who considers himself to be first and foremost a User Interface designer. Coming into this project, the only two things I was at least somewhat confident in was my ability to code, and my ability to glue googly eyes. However, thanks to great guidance from Daragh and Zhenfang, I was able to become confident enough with hardware to the point where I was able to follow some very basic Arduino cookbooks to build out the Timmy’s “brain.” This project was my first time soldering, my first time programming an Arduino, and my first time disassembling a home appliance with the intention of modifying it.

Due to my inexperience, I knew I had to develop my project around my limited abilities. So, I stuck to cookbooks and examples I found on the Arduino docs to see what I could work with. One of these early explorations was a program that visualized the dominant primary color of an object using the color sensor and the onboard LED.

Through my tests, I found that color sensor mounted on the Arduino responded best to colored light. I was predominantly using my phone’s screen to produce said light, and through this repeated action of “showing” the color sensor my phone - the idea for Timmy Toaster emerged.

From there, Timmy’s brain was a matter of connecting the LED strip to the Arduino with the breadboard, and repurposing some code.

Surprisingly, what I found hardest was disassembling the toaster. These appliances are really not meant to be tinkered with, and I was surprised by how much I had to actually break in order to simply get the plastic off of the central heating component. Unsurprisingly, I was the only one in the class who was crazy enough to try disassembling the toaster, but I was happy with the effect I achieved.

Open Questions and Next Steps

In terms of next steps, I think it would be very interesting to explore how I could better explore Timmy’s “moodiness.” So far, The simple Red to Blue light transition isn’t really portraying boredom or annoyance in the way I hoped it would.

Making the toaster actually refuse to lock in the down position was a missed opportunity too, but I am pretty certain I wouldn’t have been able to make it work with my limited abilities even if I wanted to.

Apart from that, I think it would be fascinating to explore an entire ecosystem of these types of products, I think some interesting interactions might arise. Could there be jealousy? Cliques? Furthermore, I would love to see how a user might adapt to having to cook in a kitchen full of these types of appliances. A part of my work as an interaction designer is identifying when users adapt to badly designed tech, so seeing if a person changes their day to day based on an arguably “badly designed” toaster would be super interesting.

Reflection

One of my greatest struggles when trying to bring the concept of Timmy toaster to life was the limitations of my technical knowledge. For example, extremely late into my build process I began to notice that the colored LEDs inside of Timmy were beginning to affect the onboard color sensor, which was resulting in very odd behavior. I tried in vain to mask the light from reaching the sensor, but I ultimately came up short. In the end though, I suppose part of the beauty of a “moody appliance” not acting the way you intend it to is, in itself, a bit animistic.

In terms of reception, I was happy that people could understand the concept I was going for fairly quickly. However, I felt that I didn’t quite achieve the affect I wanted - while Timmy was cute and technically functioned mostly as expected, the “moodiness” I wanted didn’t quite read with just lights as an output. I think if I had more time to explore, and possibly add more outputs, the overall effect would have been more successful.

Attribution and References

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0263276412456564

https://enchantedobjects.com