Outcome

Think Piece

    Time has witnessed the increasing ease of sending a message to the one we care about. At the same time, it has witnessed individuals become more careless in sending messages and expressing themselves. We had a hard time expressing our feeling to the person we love afar face to face, while we are also having much more ease in expressing ourselves in cyberspace with the boom of instant message apps. With WhatsApp, and Wechat, we can send dozens of messages to our loved ones far away, we are also losing the purposefulness and attention in wording and phrasing our messages. We type messages fast and hit the “send” button in a rush because we know we can retrieve the message using the latest “recall” feature. This could not happen when we are using a typewriter or writing mail with pen and paper. Before, we think twice before typing a letter or writing a character because we know what it takes physically in getting the message conveyed, and thus we take it seriously. At the moment, people no longer take expressing themselves seriously as we did before, getting rid of all the romance and redundancy simultaneously.

    Technology is shaping how we express ourselves, negatively. The boom of meditation as a lifestyle is combatting this tendency, helping us to retrieve a more mindful, present living experience. So are many devices artists and designers create. For example, the manual reader by Ishac Bertran reflects on the issue of information overload, adding physical edges to digital information to increase people’s perception(Bertran, 2014). The slow game takes one move a day and discusses the consequent fast pace technology instills in us(Bertran, 2014).

   So, can we be more mindful and present if we go back to the days before, grabbing our pen and notebook again? Or, using the typewriter to type and fax machine to send the message to our cared one afar? Will we be more mindful in expressing our love if there’s no more “recall” button, or if we are only allowed to send one message in WeChat a day? If convenience is undermining the experience we have, then what’s the purpose of this sort of convenience? Or a more general question cited by Frauenberger in his paper:“are we becoming the human we wish to become?”(Frauenberger, 2019, P18) (Introna, 2009) Do we have a say in this wave of the times? Are we becoming the guinea pigs of those tech giants, who release the features like recall and metaverse only because they think they can gain more economic benefits from it? Do they think twice before launching a feature, like “recall”? It left us endless questions we should ask ourselves, whether we have answers or not.

    James Pierce in his PhD dissertation paper writes: “Resistance is offered as a technique to be developed and refined, extended into other domains and concerns, and realized in the form of new design works(Pierce, 2015, P11).” And he put forward different products that represents the idea “working by not quite working” and slow technology(Odom, 2012, P1), like Camera Obscura 1C(Pierce, 2015). Reflecting on how we send messages today, our group intends to retrieve people’s mindful experience of sending messages to the person afar by creating two linked devices. On one end there is a old-fashioned typewriter and on the other end the printer. With the typewriter, the sender can only type one sentence and hit send button once. For the receiver end, it will print this message out with the printer. It calls the user to think mindfully before sending a message, inserting more space for imagination, and increases expectation and surprise.

    Ending this message with a quote by Charles Dickens in his book A Tale of Two Cities:
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness,
it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

• References

1. Bertran, I. (n.d.). Manual Reader. ishback. Retrieved April 12, 2022, from http://www.ishback.com/reader/index.html

2. Bertran, I. (n.d.). slow game. ishback. Retrieved April 12, 2022, from http://www.ishback.com/slowgames/index.html

3. Frauenberger, Christopher. "Entanglement HCI the next wave?." ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) 27.1 (2019): 1-27.

4. Pierce, J., & Paulos, E. (2015, April). Making multiple uses of the obscura 1C digital camera: reflecting on the design, production, packaging and distribution of a counterfunctional device. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 2103-2112).

5. Odom, W., Banks, R., Durrant, A., Kirk, D., & Pierce, J. (2012, June). Slow technology: critical reflection and future directions. In Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference (pp. 816-817).

6. Introna, L. D. (2009). Ethics and the speaking of things. Theory, Culture & Society, 26(4), 25-46.

• Annotated Exhibition Photo

Catalog Description

• Name

    Solid Message

• Credits

    Solid message reflects on how we receive and send messages, retrieves the old-fashioned way of sending messages and finds alternatives for the fast-paced message sending and receiving in social media. By allowing the end user to send only one message a day and physically prints the message out, we seek more deliberate, mindful ways of communicating.

• Description

   The topic of opposition and unity of new and old has always been discussed. With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology, people are constantly chasing new things and trying to make products more and more intelligent, which makes the product industry boost rapidly. More and more people pay attention on the new smart products, while those classic products may be outdated gradually and fade out of people's minds. How to make the classic products of the past still infuse the soul of intelligence to give off a unique brilliance? A good example of the design with old outdated devices is the project "The Typewriter Symphony" by Chris Gregg. In the project, the designers reused an outdated typewriter and implemented new smart technology into it. With the aims of modern technology, the typewriter can work normally as a modern printer to print out documents!

    A typewriter was  introduced in 1874 and it is a mechanical or electromechanical machine for typing characters. After it has been invented, the efficiency of typing was quickly enhanced. The typewriter was a useful machine for people to make self publications, writings, and even mails. However, after 1970s, typewriters began to reach their end of the line, because of the new electroclinic memory typewriters and computers coming up.

    Our project attempts to use the typewriter as one of the mediums through which people convey love and care. The project is composed of two terminals, one is located on one side (sender) and the other is located on the other location (receiver). For the sender side, we reused and redesigned the typewriter with the Raspberry PI as a executor, and for the receiver side, we set a thermal printer with the Particle to receive and process data that sends out from the sender side. Unlike modern popular communication devices, this device is used to complement communication with silent "soft communication" and share our physical and emotional information together. The redesign can not only re-inject traditional equipment with a fresh intelligent soul, but also effectively avoid the stress caused by sound and image communication with others. This is a harbor where we can feel love and tranquility in the hustle and bustle of the city. After getting off work, people just sit in front of the "Smart Typewriter" with a cup of tea, and sending a loving note to their loved ones would be a wonderful thing to enjoy. Then, the receiver would immediately receive the loving note from the thermal printer. This delicate soft communication can create a tacit interaction between senders and receivers.

    Besides, we continued to explore making the typewriter a way to interact with people. For example, how the device responds when people take different actions, like sending multiple notes. How the device can have reactions when it finishes one line and needs to shift a new line. Also, we considered technical connections between the device and the terminals.

• References

1. Fisher, M. (1995). The typewriter reaches the end of the line. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1995/07/06/the-typewriter-reaches-the-end-of-the-line/a10dbfb1-e90d-470f-8f77-57ccdec2e400/
2. Wikipedia. (2022). Typewriter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typewriter

• Interaction Diagram

• Processes

April 12th

    The manager of the physical computing lab, Zach sent me the raspberry Pi 3b for building our project. The first iteration of our work is using Teachable Machine and Open AI to build an interactive device that can help people that cannot be physically together to form a more casual and subtle way of “soft communication”.

• April 13th

    We set up the new raspberry pi and installed the latest version of raspberry os on our Pi, and tried to attach the newly bought camera to the pi. But strange things happened. We found that the correctly plugged camera can be detected and loaded, but it cannot capture images after debugging according to various tutorials on the Internet. In this case, we have to use a USB webcam instead, which requires us to install OpenCV and OpenCV-python to make it function normally. Due to unknown reasons, maybe the poor performance of the device or version of the software, we failed to install the OpenCV library.

• April 15th

    After rounds of discussion, we found that the previous propositions of the project were too general and had to be narrowed down to deliver our core thoughts of us. Finally, we decide to integrate an old typewriter to produce a sense of ritual and nostalgia in terms of communication. Then we together explored some online shopping platforms and placed an order for an old typewriter. We also started to reach out to find if there were any raspberry pi 4b available for us to use in this final project.

• April 18th

    We got a raspberry pi 4b from one of our friends. This performance of raspberry pi 4b is really impressive and the OpenCV library was correctly installed, though it took 5 hours in total to achieve this. But the problem with the camera still existed, we assumed that the problem is related to the camera instead of the raspberry pi 3b. After plugging in the webcam, we wrote some python code to test the functionality of OpenCV to see whether the library worked correctly and it worked.

• April 22nd

    We received the typewriter. After a long journey from Maine to Pittsburgh, the machine looked good and we spent some time learning how to use it. We started looking for methods about how to transfer the information of the keys typed on the machine to computers, Arduino, or other computing devices. After the research, we found 2 ways to achieve the wanted functionality. The first method is to put a PCB board under the machine. More specifically, since the base bars of the keys on the typewriter will reach the same level after being pressed, we were able to utilize the metal base bars as the conductor to connect two separated resistors on the circuit board. Thus different combinations of key pressing can help us form different circus, which helps to send signals to the computer. The other way is using OpenCV and Tesseract(a machine learning-based text recognizing software). The webcam connected to the raspberry pi will collect the image of texts typed with the machine, and the Tesseract will recognize the texts being typed and parse the texts into lines of meaningful information. Since there were only 12 days before the final exhibition of our projects, nobody could guarantee that the PCB board will be produced and delivered in time. In this case, we began to dive into the implementation of the camera.

• April 25th

    Being worried about whether the performance of raspberry pi could install Tesseract software successfully and function as expected, we started our experiment of setting up the runtime environment and testing the functionality. Being a relatively large software, it took half an hour to install Tesseract and the supporting libraries. Though not performing perfectly in the first several trials, we made it clear that the path we selected was totally feasible.

• April 28th

    We got our thermal printer. Due to unknown reasons, it kept printing out random characters under the circumstances where we believe we had set up the codes correctly. We thought it to be a problem with our own printer. But when we borrowed another one from IdeAte, it also did not work properly. With the problem unresolved, we decided to complete the code which would be uploaded to particle board first.

• April 30th

    The problem with our printer turns out to be the adapter. The old adapter cannot provide enough voltage to power the printer. When we used a 15V adapter to drive it, the printer worked just as expected. Then we started combining the whole system at both sides: particle board and thermal printer, raspberry pi and the typewriter. The system worked fine after several tests.

• May 1nd

    To make the final product look better, we decide to make wooden shells for all the naked components to create a more natural and warm texture. The work went on smoothly and we were satisfactory about the wooden shells that we created. There was one final step left: setting up button to let user send the message. We were using the GPIO ports on the raspberry pi. When the connected button is pressed, the message will be sent to the particle board on the other side and transfer data for the printer to print.

• May 4th

    Install and set up in the exhibition site.

Technical Resources

1. The Arduino typewriter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8Sm4_yuImg
   
2. How to detect text in OpenCV[python] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkG3oBhi0zc&t=259s
   
3. Arduino Printer Tutorialhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1eDYvFvRoA
   
4. GPIO zero documentationhttps://gpiozero.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
   
5. Tesseract documentationhttps://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract
   
6. Particle Cloud API documentationhttps://docs.particle.io/reference/device-cloud/api/
   

• Bill of Materials

    The materials that used by this project are below, including Raspberry PI, Particle, Power supplies, Typewriter, Cables, etc.

Critical Reflection

• Roadmap

    If we have more time, like working during the summer break, which items should we consider to improve and refine?

    The first aspect that we would like to involve is to adjust the camera bridge above the typewriter and make it more suitable to the moving of platen knob of the machine, as for now the bridge might influence the working efficiency when people type. A good idea is enlarge the bridge and make it thinner or change another material for the camera bridge.

    The second thing that we could engage is to improve the text recognition system. Currently, we use Open CV for Python as the library to recognize the texts printed by the typewriter. But sometimes, it is not very accurate due to the lens focus of the camera or the CV recognition system. It would be a potential to regularize the training process and also fix the lens focus to improve the whole system more sensitive.

    The last aspect is the typewriter itself. As the machine is relatively old (more than 60 years old), some of the keys are not working very well, which lead the printed notes a bit blur sometimes. From this point of view, we would fix the ink tape or deep clean the key hammer to make the printing more clear and sharper.

• Critical Reflection

    One reflection and feedback from the users is the user-friendly design can be improved. When the sender plan to send a note to the receiver, he or she has to figure out how to load paper via the roller. Besides, how strong to type the keys is also an element to consider, as we found out that if the user type a bit light, the camera detection system will not work perfectly. When the user finish the note and about to send out, they have to find out the sending out button, which is not very obvious.

    Another feedback is the detection size limitation of the printed note. Some users may tend to type a long message rather than a one or two sentences' note. The camera detecting area is about one fourth of the letter size paper. Therefore, it would be difficult to detect a long message via the camera and the users need to move the paper twice in order to capture the whole message that they input via the typewriter. We may adjust the camera distance between the paper or change the detection area via Python to realize a larger area detection.

Coding

Github repo: https://github.com/xinyew/RME_final_2022

• Circuit Boards