Designer Drinks

Posted on May 15, 2012 by timpryde

Like Will Smith in most of his songs, here I am writing again following a few months hiatus. Since kicking up a stink with Olly and the Mint/Foundry guys I’ve done a bit of freelance work but have found myself wanting to take a step back from design to get a bit more of a perspective on what it is I actually want to do with my degree.

I found that the design work I had done since graduating had been fun but there was always an expectation for me to be far more adept at programming /electronics hacking than I am or, indeed, aspire to be (someone must have told someone I built a robot or something like that – just don’t show them the interior workings…). It’s great that I got some cool (*cough* award winning *cough*) work out of it though, and it really goes to show how far a base of leyman understanding, a dash of friendly assistance and a dollop of google searches can get you.

For me the catch is that I love to craft and create things with my hands, I don’t hugely enjoy spending hours working at a computer, that’s why I chose to study product design, it seemed the logical step up a ladder that began with Lego. However, I found that the opportunities for a physically focused designer seemed to be few and far between, contrasting with the citywide shortage of web developers and graphics designers that the online jobs boards would have you believe. So I thought I’d take a bit of time off and go and dabble down another route of interest, cocktails and bar-tending.

Whilst at university I simultaneously worked my way up to (unofficially) being Head Barman at The Playwright, a fine dining restaurant in Dundee with a close-knit team and a stellar chef. It was fascinating to develop a knowledge of the alcoholic ingredients I got to work with, along with learning the stories, histories and production processes that surround them all. Getting to experiment with concoctive combinations and research the products I’m using was a great opportunity and I’ve found that returning to this environment, whilst learning a few new recipes, has really got me eager to do more.

I don’t want to neglect what I have learnt during University, nor do I feel that I am. One of the key things I value about the course I done was the scope for diversity which it permitted. Applying creative design thinking to an increasing cocktail set at home (alongside a decreasing bank balance) is allowing me to do playful experiments with unfamiliar ingredients creating syrups, foams, and new flavour combinations with bottles of my favourite booze. I am researching new places around town as I would research the topic of a new project, going to classes and learning how other establishments are crafting cocktails, classic and contemporary.

I love that there’s a real heritage and culture surrounding alcohol and the drinks industry, with a history of ups, downs and the occasional sideways stagger. It’s a field with which I am intrigued by what could develop in the future and what I could add to it with a background in robots and videogames and smelly web things. Whether it’s shaking, stirring, straining and serving drinks on a night to night basis or getting involved in the brand development, increasing public awareness, knowledge and respect for alcohol I’m keen to see where this leads to.

PS: The image at the top is not mine, but I did make the drink. It belongs to Editor.com

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Revised Thoughts on Gamification

Posted on November 18, 2011 by timpryde


In September I presented a talk on DON-8r at the 5th International Fundraising Conference in Warsaw. I wasn’t sure what to expect but when I got there I found out my talk was the keynote presentation of the conference, with all 150+ of the delegates grouping together after a day of workshops to see it. I had loosely pre prepared my talk before hand but upon finding this out, I went about properly reading though what I was talking about!

My presentation began with where I began with DON-8r – with my dissertation on “What We Can Learn From Playing Videogames“. It was actually really enjoyable reading through it again and was nice to see how my attitudes towards some of the points had changed – primarily towards Gamification. At the time, around a year ago now, I was really excited by gamification so, as I explained in my talk, I went about creating NEoN Knights – a QR code, city exploration treasure hunt game. It was fun to make, I worked with a great team and I was of the mindset that making a game will make anything engaging because games are fun!

Well a year later and my opinions have changed a bit towards gamification (and QR codes). I recently got prompted towards this quote by Andy Ellwood which provides a nice perspective:

Gamificaiton should be about rewarding people for what they already want to do, not tricking them into doing something they don’t want to do.

— Andy Ellwood at MIT’s Futures of Entertainment 5 summit

I think that the whole problem I have with it now is that it is too easily used with a “points mean prizes” mentality, (I’ve linked to it before but here’s Margaret Robertsons’ post on the plague of pointless points within gamification – Can’t Play, Wont Play).

What I have come to think is that gamification should not be a process that outputs games, but rather it should be a process wherein game dynamics are incorporated into systems to make things FUN! The Worlds Deepest Bin does this excellently - a simple method of playful and rewarding feedback enriches the experience. Of course, it could be argued that the playfulness of it could transform it into an irritating gimmick but there’s always plenty of scope for more novel ideas – if something’s no longer fun then think of something else that is.

It’s quite funny to hear, from my short time actually working within the design industry, that gamification is a bit of a dirty buzzword. I think it comes down to misinterpretation though (and not enough input from those who either play or create games). Playfulness is really at the heart of what gamification is about – not as a means brainwash (or brandwash) people into a particular way of thinking but rather to enrich existing interactions. It is playfulness that will make something fun and engaging – games are just play plus rules. This is why I argue that gamification is not about creating games – it should be applied as a process for making something that people will want to play with. Sure, it might result as a game but you could end up with something far more interesting.

Anyway, as of now, that’s my thoughts. Undoubtedly I’ll have some different opinions soon enough and I’ll be able to reflect and disagree with myself but I think I’ll keep my ranting chronological.

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Beautiful Mistakes – Notes from NEXT

Posted on September 23, 2011 by timpryde

NEXT Aarhus Beautiful Mistakes

I have been putting off writing this. Not because I haven’t wanted to write it (it’s actually been getting to the point where it’s really bothering me) but mainly because the more I put it off the more it became a ‘thing’. That ‘thing’ that I knew would be really beneficial to actually just get over and done with but a ‘thing’ which was always second to some slightly more urgent ‘thing’ that would inevitably get done in its place. Anyway, other ‘things’ be dammed, here I’ll begin my overdue summary of the NEXT…

As I mentioned in the last post, the theme of NEXT (and the overall Aarhus festival) this year was Beautiful Mistakes - an analogy I can very much relate to through my all too frequent hack-and-hope-for-the-best approach to designing and prototyping. Not having the chance to see everyone, the first speaker of the conference I caught was Ted Howes, former Global Lead of IDEO‘s Energy Domain. His talk was on the topic of beautiful mistakes and how they can lead to an unexpected journey to what is next. Here’s some key pointers that I took from it:

  • We don’t always need to know where we are heading, however common perceptions of innovation act against this.
  • Sometimes it helps to bring ideas to inelegant spaces and embrace the resulting disruption. This notion was nicely summarised by his statement that we should “rediscover inexpertise
  • That’s not to say that every mistake is a good one, a good mistake will come from taking an opportunity that is grounded in some level of research. Ted suggest that we should “lead with people” and that ethnographical understanding will help highlight concerns. As he put it, “the difference between good and bad design can be anticipated by the number of people taken into consideration”
  • “People are not interested in data, they are interested in seamless information.”
  • “Our intrinsic motivation to be sustainable will come from contextualising our actions.” – Force feeding people data and statistics will not work unless this is put into context.

Nicholas Nova, Co-Founder of Lift-Lab, also discussed this notion of embracing failure as part of the design process through some examples of how products and brands evolve over time. He asked the question, without Nintendo creating the often ridiculed Power Glove, would we have ever have got to see the Wii? Here’s some pointers from Nicholas:

  • Nicholas explained, “innovation is about trying and the point is to learn, so fail, but fail quickly!”
  • Like Ted though, Nicholas emphasises the need for sound ethnography to avoid obvious failure, “much poor design stems from flawed assumptions about people
  • The scope to not only experiment with your work but encourage others to experiment with your work is really exciting. In summary he explained that we should provoke failure, embrace accidental design, repurpose existing design and encourage your design to be repurposed. I love this, it sounds like a mantra for design hackers!

This whole notion of going beyond failure prevention (and even failure anticipation) and actually incorporating it into the overall design and research process really interested me. It stuck me as drawing a lot of tangents to the games based learning research I did for my dissertation, particularly how games incorporate failure as an essential part of learning the game and progressing. This idea was touched upon by a few of the speakers, primarily those who connected playfulness with experiential learning but I’ll come to that in the next post.

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London Exhibition and Interview with Arts Thread

Posted on September 19, 2011 by timpryde

From 22nd – 23rd September I’ll be exhibiting DON-8r at the  Designersblock Exhibition in the Farmiloe building in Clerkenwell (if you’re in town come and say hi – I’ll be there in the evenings and weekend). I am exhibiting along with some other folk who have uploaded their work to design portfolio site Arts thread so off the back of that they gave me a quick interview about DON-8r, robots and gamification – here’s a copy/paste of it:

Tim Pryde’s DON-8r robot proved a huge hit at New Designers this July and we are thrilled to see the University of Dundee graduate as one of the ten designers selected for Designersblock from the ARTS THREAD site. With less than a week to go, we caught up with Tim to hear all the latest news on the robot charity worker.

ARTS THREAD: What will you be showing at DESIGNERSBLOCK?

Tim Pryde: I will be exhibiting my charity aiding robot, DON-8r. Each coin donated to DON-8r not only helps activate it for a short length of time but also goes towards supporting an affiliated charity. I hope to use the exhibition as an opportunity for DON-8r to raise money for The Pluto Appeal.

ARTS THREAD: Your ‘DON-8r’ project gained quite a lot of international attention since your degree show, what’s the current status of this project?

TP: I have recently been exhibiting DON-8r in Aarhus, Denmark as part of the NEXT technology exhibition and festival. This gave me the opportunity for DON-8r to appear live on national Danish TV!

I have also received interest from charities including The Science Museum for exhibitions later in the year. DON-8r is still only a one-off prototype model, however I plan to seek funding to further the design and produce more.

ARTS THREAD: You seem to have a love for robotics – where did this passion first spawn from?

TP: As I child I played a lot with LEGO, often making robots using their ‘Mindstorms’ kit. I loved how robots could perform such specifically intricate tasks, however I was never really drawn towards the notion of creating highly autonomous and intelligent robots.

Kacie Kinzer’s Tweenbots are a great example of what I find interesting with robotics – they are robots but very much human reliant ones. This dependency on human interaction from an object is what inspired DON-8r – I felt that it very much related to the dependencies charities also have from human support.

AT: Your work touches on engaging the public, via gamification, is this something you would like to explore further?

TP: My DON-8r project, in particular, began with research, culminating in a dissertation exploring the potential for learning through video games and gamification. This led through a few projects into how I could use game dynamics as a means to support a good cause.

What I have come to learn is that gamification is something which is widely touted by many who don’t quite understand good games. (Margaret Robertson of Hide&Seek game design studio has a great post on what she calls ‘pointification’ which pretty much sums up my gripes with gamification).

My interest in gamification is to look at it as a process rather than an outcome – the outcome should be something fun and engaging, inspired by games but not necessarily a game. I am very keen to further explore this area as a means to explore how we interact with products, objects and digital technologies.

ARTS THREAD: What else are you currently working on?

TP: Currently I am working at Mint Digital, designing physical objects that help to enhance our interaction with the internet and other digital technologies.

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DON-8r in Denmark (and Being Saved By Hackers)

Posted on September 1, 2011 by timpryde

In mid May I received an email from Danish design consultancy, Innovation Lab, inviting me to exhibit DON-8r at an event they were organising called NEXT. The idea behind the exhibition, I was told, was that they wanted to bring to together emerging technologies and innovative designers for an event where people can not only play with some products but also meet the makers to discover the inspiration behind their ideas. This event was under the overall brolly of the annual festival in Aarhus which this year had the quite brilliant title of Beautiful Mistakes. It sounded like fun so I thought, why the hell not!?

A few months and emails later, flights and accommodation were booked by Innovation Lab and I managed to wrangle a sneaky week’s holiday from work (despite having worked there for less than a month – thanks guys!). The catch was though that the week before flying, I discovered that DON-8r did not work. I didn’t know why and it quickly emerged that the main reason for it not working was that hacking electronic components together and hoping for the best will often result in things eventually breaking. Regardless, I made a few ‘educated’ guesses, ordered in some new components tinkered about with a few possible issues I assumed could be the cause however this began chewing into the time I was supposed to be exhibiting. At least I was showing off a live demo of how things can so easily all go wrong when it comes to technology!

Salvation came however in the form of Aarhus’s resident team of techno nerds & hackers (and fellow exhibitors at NEXT) – Open Space Aarhus. I can’t express enough how helpful they have been, primarily because they know what they are doing! I was well and truly schooled by them. It went a bit like this: “you don’t have ANY bypass capacitors!? What, you have no idea what they are!? How on earth do you expect to control the surges from the microcontroller? And what’s THAT? Why are you running 6V into the microcontrollers when they only have a maximum capacity of around 5.5V? Did you not read the data-sheet – they will get fried in no time! Where is your voltage regulation…!??”

…and so on.

Needless to say, DON-8r is now working better then it ever. It’s still not hugely energy efficient but as long as it can afford to pay for its own batteries I can live with that for now until I befriend some electronics wizards back in the UK. With that in mind I intend to get a membership at London’s Hackspace as soon as I can. If those guys are any where near as geekishly brilliant as their Aarhus counterparts then I will love it.

Anyway, thanks to DON-8r actually working it was featured on national Danish TV on a popular talk show called Aftenshowet (struck me as equivalent to BBC’s One Show). So it been broadcast to an audience of a few million which is amazing! Oh, and the host managed to break DON-8r’s flag live on air – it was covered up successfully though!

Also had a chance to have a head to head charity-off with a worker from the Danish charity I was supporting, Folkekirkens Nødhjælp (don’t ask me how to pronounce it, it was a challenge). This was filmed and edited however the clip is in Danish so to make sense, DON-8r lost to the human by around 100 Kroner (around £12) but this was primarily because someone gave the guy a 100 Kroner note because they knew him. Interesting for me though, can we develop relationships with robots that could promote aid in the same way? Anyway here is that clip – particularly enjoyable if you want to see me sitting awkwardly while people speak Danish around me.

More on the other exhibitors and NEXT conference to follow.

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Minty Fresh

Posted on September 1, 2011 by timpryde

So it’s been over a month since my last post here but I’ve been keeping busy – I have a job down in London as a design researcher, and it’s great! But as it has been a while, I will do this chronologically…

Following New Designers I made another trip to London under hoping that I would be able to set up lots of meetings set up with exciting people/companies. The plan being that surely one of these would score me a rocking design job, how hard could it be!? Well, as it turned out, things did not quite go my way and I had a pretty stressful time trying to organise stuff both before and during my trip to London. It really was full time work looking for companies that interested me, who also had vacancies (and some that did not) and then researching into that company to get a solid understanding of what they do and what I could do for them. After numerous dead-end phone calls and robotic email responses I was left feeling pretty down heartened.

On my last day in London however, I got a email from some guys at a company I was unfamiliar with called Mint Digital. As is turns out they saw DON-8r at New Designers and wanted to have a chat. This was great, a company was contacting me! Said chat was chatted and I found out they were a web design company looking to do their first ever grad scheme to explore the potential for physical objects connected to the web. I thought this sounded right up my street and also an ambitious manoeuvre for a company, pretty hot when the design is digital but not quite as savvy when it comes to physical products.

I said yes, they said great and now I have been working for the past month as one quarter of Foundry at Mint Digital alongside three other graduates – Chris Thomas, Ben Redford and Genis Carreras. We have been keeping a blog over at foundry.mintdigital.com where you can find out what we have been up (we have mostly been drinking coffee, getting drunk, windowshopping and making the internet smelly…)

So now I am a genuine London designer which is pretty cool. I have even found a place to stay down in the big now and have been quickly getting my bearing of the city through copious travelling by Boris Bike. Currently I am writing this from Billund Airport in Denmark following a mad week at the NEXT 2011 “Beautiful Mistakes” exhibition in Aarhus – but I’ll fill in that void in the next post.

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New Zealand Radio Interview

Posted on July 24, 2011 by timpryde

Just over a week ago I had a skype interview with the team over at Radio New Zealand’s weekly tech/consumer show ‘This Way Up‘. Yesterday it was broadcast and now it’s all up online to listen to.

My interview can be listened to here
or
downloaded as an Mp3 here

Thanks to the team for getting in touch with me and sharing my project with the other side of the globe!

Wasn’t sure what to put as a photo for this so the top shot is from my trip to New Zealand last year. It’s up in the mountains at the north of the south island just outside Motueka which is across the bay from Nelson. Behind the camera is (I think) where they filmed the chasing of the Uruk Hai sequence in The Lord of the Rings (it sure looked like it) and further behind that, off the mountain, there is a salmon fishing farm which has the best tasting salmon I’ve had. But there’s a bit of trivia for you, New Zealand is lovely and full of lovely people.

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Reflection on New Designers

Posted on July 19, 2011 by timpryde

Recently I exhibited DON-8r at New Designers – a 4 day showcase of design graduate work at the Business Design Centre in Islington, London. This was an opportunity for fledgling designers to promote themselves and network with industry types in the hope of securing one of those increasingly elusive internships to kick start their design career. However, I can’t help but feel a little deflated after the whole event.

I was discussing among fellow exhibitors some general thoughts on the exhibition and came to the question, would you recommend New Designers to future graduates? To which my response is, no – but go to London anyway. Save yourself the cost and effort involved with exhibiting and put it towards researching companies that excite you, companies you want to work for, and contact them. See if you can arrange to meet up! Put the money towards getting a sweet looking portfolio printed, perhaps even some flyers, post material or whatever else will grab the attention of the people you want to work for. However, if you really feel that New Designers is something you really want to do, then go for it. The only advice I can give is from my own experiences and, to be honest, I am just still feeling a bit underwhelmed by New Designers not living up to expectations.

On a more positive note though, I thought our stand was brilliant! I felt that we really stood out from the crowd with our Lo-fi yet polished setup and the fact that what we made actually worked. Bar a few other students scattered around the other courses, we were the only stand with products that not only looked great but also had embedded working electronics that people could get hands-on with. In fact, there where so many visitors to the stand who were surprised by our working projects by this that I recommend those from Dundee exhibiting next year should call their stand, ‘Oh, so it actually works!’. It was interesting to see how other product design courses approached their discipline however the majority of them seemed very traditional – crafting impressive pieces of furniture or producing concept prototypes that looked the business but didn’t work.

It frustrated me that the prevalence of this style of work made it feel like this was what most people expected to see and we perhaps sold ourselves short by not really emphasising our ‘working projects’ a bit more. I know for one thing we did not make adequate use of our few tens of thousands hits-worth of both online and offline press coverage. I think that we took for granted the basic product design skills we have, 3D modelling, technical sketching, graphic design – skills which most other stands were displaying but really just skills which all product designers have to know. What’s more, we could have played up our online presence a bit more. I collected numerous business cards from other students, all with work that impressed me, however over half had non-working websites despite a printed URL.

I guess that, the main issue really was that there did not seem to be all that many industry types looking to employ at the event. This is perhaps a sign of the times more than anything but it was frustrating to have paid so much money to exhibit and then primarily chat with students, school children and proud parents when what you are really looking for is some sort of security over what you will be doing next. Of course we were always polite and friendly but it’s hard work when future uncertainty looms over your head.

But there you go, it’s done now so no point in being bitter, I just felt I would pass on some advice to any final year students considering New Designers next year as I would have been interested to have received some myself. Not that it would have swayed me, I would have probably gone along anyway! But definitely, New Designers is very expensive and is not guaranteed to get you a job or put you in contact with the kind of people that a few well written emails and few confident phone calls couldn’t. And as I don’t want to end this post with the impression that I am a massive pessimist, here are some of my favourite things from New Designers.

First off, congratulations to Dundee Graduates Paddy from Product Design and Rory from Digital Interactive Design for both winning (well deserved) awards for their work! Best of luck with your internships guys!

A round of applause to Brigton’s 3D Design course for having my favourite stand at New Designers and some of the most impressive work at the exhibition. I love the way that there were questions posted on the walls and surfaces which drew you into each intriguing project. In particular, Harry Trimble’s locally manufactured domestic objects, Ashley Temudo’s ‘Super-Able Table‘ and Max Cairns’ ‘Construction Waste Stool‘, were among the best projects I saw.

A gentlemanly and overly pretensions salute to the guys at Goldsmiths for lasting 4 days of being totally mental, hyperactive and fun to chat to with their wiki-brief / non-exhibiting / live studio-stand. It was great!

So if you don’t exhibit, pop along to New Designers anyway. There’s some great talent there and a lot of inspirational projects worth checking out.

(Photo at top taken by Pete Thomas and uploaded by Tom Costello)

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DON-8r at Robots Live!

Posted on July 3, 2011 by timpryde

Two weeks ago DON-8r and I where invited along to Robots Live!, an event at the National Museum of Flight in East Lothian. It featured, amongst other exhibitions, battling bots from TV show Robot Wars, physicists from The University of Edinburgh (if I remember rightly…), football playing robots (expertly programmed to keep falling over, they were uncanny) and various workshops for electronics, aliens and hula hooping.

It was pretty great, felt to me like an up scaled Pop-up Science Museum!

I had been invited along a few months ago, the mention of Robot Wars competitors was the hook for me. Unfortunately my top 5 bots from the show – Razer, Hypno-disk, Chaos 2, Wheely Big Cheese and Tornado – weren’t there but the ones they had where incredible! It was amazing, and bloody noisy, to see a 100kg+ block of metal get flipped 6ft into the air!

On a slightly tamer note though, this was the first real opportunity for DON-8r to flaunt its stuff. A jam packed event focussing on robots full of excited kids and equally excited adults. Over the 6 hours DON-8r was there it raised around £40 and only needed 1 change of battery. I think that if I can upgrade DON-8r so that it reacts differently to different values of coin then I can encourage larger denominations of donation than 1p and 2p coins. Then who knows how much it could raise!

I was discussing with one of the managers there about my thoughts on manufacturing and selling/renting more DON-8r’s and the thoughts were that if I can produce them to sell for around about £400 – £500 that’s only 12ish big events and its made its money back for the charity.

Something to think about anyway… I am considering applying for some funding via Starter For 6 to get something off the ground. However, as I write this I am on the train down to London on my way to exhibit at the New Designers exhibition in Islington. A chance for recent graduates from varying design fields across UK university’s to show of their stuff to industry types with the hope of acquiring some certainty as to what they’ll be doing for the next few months. So bearing that in mind I am keeping my options open and optimistic this week.

I’ll update in my next post a when I have been working on for the past fortnight – a newspaper for Product Design Dundee at New Designers promoting the work of the exhibiting students, the research department among other bits and bobs. You may recognise the recycled front cover…

For the time being though here’s some of the (slightly shaky) photos I took of DON-8r at Robots Live! Thanks to Bryony and the team at National Museums of Scotland for giving me this great opportunity!

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Pop-up Science Museum Review

Posted on July 3, 2011 by timpryde

Last week I graduated from Product Design at The University of Dundee. I would like to say that I have celebrated this by taking a holiday and chilling out but instead I have been keeping myself as busy as possible. I think design working/thinking is something that you can easily slip out of focus with unless you keep busy. I know myself that previous summer’s have been spent without much design consideration so bearing that I mind its been a pretty full on June!

As the academic year drew to a close towards the end of May, The University of Dundee Product Design Research studio moved into fresh surroundings at the Dundee Contemporary Arts centre and rebranded itself under the slightly catchier title of The Small Society Lab. This is a play on PM David Cameron’s ongoing Big Society plans and is all about engaging local communities with digital technologies, design thinking and social innovation. As part of that, Jon Rogers (Product Design course director), asked if we could put together a form of pop-up science centre featuring the work of myself and my classmates as exhibitions for the public. Thinking that this sounded great, I decided to go ahead and get it sorted along with  assistance from those who exhibited.

The day was great. A bit slow to start but we had a mad rush of kids at 4pm once the schools had closed for the day! There were exhibitors from product design and illustration demonstrating their projects which had a focus on science and/or social engagement. There were also workshops for children (and grown-up children) to get hands on with science though building robots, launching rockets, exploring quantum physics and printing 3D models. Expectantly, the place was an absolute mess once the last of the kids had gone home – brilliant!

Project entry here
-
Blog post on poster design here

 

Exhibitors:


Tim Pryde / DON-8r demonstration and Robot Building workshop

Patrick Stevenson-Keating / Quantum Parallelograph demonstration and Parallel Worlds workshop

Chris McNicholl / Tweeting Seat demonstration

Kathryn McCann / Rocket Science Workshop

Jamie Thoms / D.N.A Stamper demonstration

Jack Chalkley / Timeline Tools demonstration

Gavin Rutherford / Space Exploration illustrations

Michail Vanis / Makerbot demonstration and 3D Printing workshop

 

Thanks to Jon Rogers and The Small Society Lab for sponsoring equipment and supplies!

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Pop-Up Science Museum

Posted on June 14, 2011 by timpryde

Come one, come all to the Pop-Up Science Museum!

Amongst tampering with DON-8r and tempering with chocolate electronics I have been organising a robotics workshop as part of the Small Society Lab’s Pop-Up Science Museum. It is on this Friday, the 17th June. We’re getting in 40 a few RC cars, a heap of junk and electronics then getting a group of children to hack and create their own robots. The idea being to encouraging them to think about what a robot is, or could be while developing an understanding of prototyping and hacking.

Along with this we have mini workshops for cosmology, rocket science, engineering and quantum physics. Bearing in mind this day is for all ages, these topics will have activities and appeal for children and parents alike. So bearing this in mind here is the link to the event page again – The Small Society Lab’s Pop-Up Science Museum. Be sure to book if interested, it’s already looking set to be busy!

Above is the poster I designed alongside fellow Small Socialite Patrick Stevenson-Keating. What you see is very much a product design approach to poster design – electronics, hacking, glueing and spraying with a touch of digital work thrown in for details sake. I bought an airfix kit, cut up a sprue, glued in some electronics and sprayed grey. This was put on a pink background while Paddy photographed the set up and we worked together to produce the digital image. This took about 2 days so here are a few snaps of it in progress.

Again, the finished image is at top so if you are interested then click on the poster or follow the links above. If you have any questions about the day fire me an email at tim[at]timpryde.com or leave a comment below!

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Chocolate Chips Version 1.0

Posted on May 26, 2011 by timpryde

A product based on a pun; this is my first attempt at making chocolate chips.

An idea I had a while back, I found myself with some spare time today to have a go at it. Basically the plan was to take electronic components and chips, stick them in the vacuum former to create plastic moulds and then pour tasty chocolate into the moulds to create chocolate components and chips! Today’s attempt resulted in a mould of an Arduino microcontroller and one of a computer RAM card. The arduino is above – had a bit of an issue with air bubbles and getting the chocolate out of the narrower parts. Also don’t think I left the chocolate long enough to fully set so there a reason already to try again. Here’s how the RAM turned out:

The thin base of the RAM meant is broke quite easily so I think this will also require a bit of tweaking to get the mould right. Also, air bubbles – what’s the best way to get rid of them?

Any advice on how I could do a better job of this would be appreciated!

I would quite like to be able to mass produce these, perhaps with a selection of flavoured shields that can clip onto the arduino chocolate bar (thanks @cmcnicholl)! Also need to look into food safe plastic…

Looking forward to the next attempt as this was a tasty evening!

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Submission Video and Final Hand-in

Posted on May 15, 2011 by timpryde

As one of our deliverables we were asked to submit a 90 second video detailing our designed and refined products. This video begins with an in studio shot inspired by what I tried on my coin collecting early prototype video. The middle is a montage of a diverse group of people playing with DON-8r with completely natural and unprompted interactions. It ends with a shot responding to some of the FAQ’s that have been arising since my user interaction video. This shot being that DON-8r is in trouble so its minder runs in to save the day (my moment of heroism!). I hope it makes it clear that there is someone always watching over DON-8r, I even made a t-shirt to bring about a quick bit of branding and further emphasis!

Anyway the hand in went well – DON-8r was clearly in a good mood and didn’t decide to break down. Now its a wait to see what the confirmed grade is and start planning for the future!

On that note – my CV is available to view online – have a gander!

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Finishing Up Making-of

Posted on May 13, 2011 by timpryde

I think I have been suffering bloggers block. Since I put out my first few press releases I have been pretty narssisistically infatuated with watching and waiting for updates from twitter feeds and google analytics. Well here goes the last of the the making of blog posts, meant to do this ages ago – I even have the photos compiled into a album ready and waiting but have been putting off doing it. So this post will briefly chronicle the last few tweaks and touches I made to DON-8r for the final hand in we had on the 3rd May.

What I needed to do was sort out the seam between where the head meets the body. Some of you may have noticed the dashing silver collar that appeared on DON-8r (above) after the user testing video came out. That allowed me to cover up the sanaded and smoothed surface between the head and the body with mixed success as you will see towards the bottom of the page. Anyway hover over the images for a quick description on what’s happening on each. In true fashion I done a bit of a hash job the first time round but salvaged it on the 2nd attempt…


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Post Press FAQ Response

Posted on April 28, 2011 by timpryde

Blog neglect strikes again but I have a legitimate reason this time. DON-8r has been receiving a lot of online media attention since my last blog post so I have found myself flitting between various other blogs, websites and comments sections just to see what people have been making of DON-8r. Other than being a complete productivity vampire, this has allowed some of the issues surrounding DON-8r to be highlighted based on a mix of balanced criticism and misunderstanding slander (all of which is helpful to an extent!).

So without further ado here’s some FAQ’s and my responses:

Q: So what is stopping people from stealing it?

A: This is the most recurring comment. Usually followed with some derivation of “I would totally steal this” or “this wouldn’t last 5 minutes in <insert home town here>”. There is no inbuilt GPS or other high tech tracking system as some have presumed. There is, however, always someone watching over DON-8r, whether there are one or more robots. This is similar to the way that self service checkouts work, one member of staff monitoring the stations should they need assistance. Someone will always be on standby if DON-8r gets stuck; if someone has a query regarding DON-8r / the affiliated charity; or if someone should attempt to steal it.

What I can say to this is that DON-8r is a project designed to highlight the goodness of people. It stemmed from Kacie Kinzer’s Tweenbots project which, through human reliant robots, really emphasised how willing people are to interact with a playful cause – and interact with each other in the process.  It’s great seeing how people will curiously approach DON-8r, realise its purpose and then donate to it. This is often followed by a conversation with the stranger next to them about DON-8r. I know I have had quite a few interesting chats with a diverse mix of people as they have spotted me watching over DON-8r during its outings! It would be naive to assume that no-one would consider stealing it but I believe these people are very much in the minority compared to the majority of people who show playful support towards DON-8r and its affiliated charity.

Q: How much money has it raised? /  How much money can it hold?

A: In the space of around 3 days when DON-8r was officially out fund-raising for Dundee Science Centre, it clocked up around 9 hours of work and raised £25.86. Not bad considering that the bulk of this was made up of coins no larger than a 20p! With regards to how much it can hold, it has the capacity to hold a large number of coins however, as individual donations, each coin does not take up much space so it would take a very long time, or a very generous event, for it to fill up completely. DON-8r would probably struggle under the weight  before it was full anyway which is another reason a minder is required to empty it out and lighten the load.

Q: Has it broken yet? How much does it cost to run/repair?

A: Yes it has broken plenty of times but this has been a lesser occurrence as the model design has progressed based on testing and tweaking. My approach to the design of DON-8r has been primarily based on resourcefulness and as a result it is pretty cheap to fix – a bit of glue and a lick of paint! It runs on batteries and is not the most energy efficient so will chew up a set of 4 AA batteries after around 2 hours of movement however this allows for a further 2-3 hours of standby when DON-8r is calling “hello”. Currently I have managed to find a local supermarket that is selling decent batteries at a pretty cheap rate which have been working well. I have chosen not to go down the rechargeable battery route as this would have been more expensive than the batteries I have been purcahsing. Though it would be cheaper in the long term I would like to adapt the power system so that It can be charged from the mains via a plug of some sort. This brings me neatly to my final question here which has been brought up by friends and family more than web comments:

Q: What’s next for you / DON-8r?

A: I will be graduating on the 23rd June, I have my final hand-in on the 3rd of May and I will be exhibiting at the Dundee Degree Show which runs 21th  to 29th May and also New Designers, in London, which runs from 6th to 9th July!
I would love to progress DON-8r to the next stage though. This would effectively involve getting either the plastic panels or the moulds for the panels manufactured through CNC milling of rapid prototyping  allowing me to produce more than one model. This all cost money though so first things first, would be great to score some funding or free manufacture! I would also like to work alongside someone that’s hot with robotics so I can get DON-8r scooting about with a bit less terrain hindrance and produce an electronics interface that is a bit more user friendly, so people other than me can use it.

But before then, I need to get DON-8r looking smart for my final University hand-in.

For future reference, here is a list (in no particular order) of all the key places I have managed to get DON-8r onto on the web (EDIT: THIS IS COMPLETE LIST NOW!). Big thanks to engadget who brought a whole load of traffic to my user testing video (22k hits in one day!).

Engadget

Slash Gear

Ubergizmo

Laughing Squid

Geekologie

Design Spotter

Huffington Post

PSFK

The Chronicle of Philanthropy

B3ta

Fast Company

open-output

The Mary Sue

Neatorama

Plastic Pals

NOTCOT

Trend Hunter

Creep.ru (russian)

membrana (russian)

Fayerwayer (spanish)

Coolest Gadgets

Design You Trust

Quipsologies

Walyou

Rounded Off

Digg

cnet

Curiosity Counts

Materialicious

tecca

spacecoolhunting

Gev

Yanko Design

Super Punch

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Testing User Interaction

Posted on April 12, 2011 by timpryde

While also being a fund raising and publicity opportunity for Dundee Science Centre, my couple of days out at The Overgate Shopping Centre was also a great opportunity for some in depth user testing. This has allowed me to highlight some alterations that will be required for the final model as well as provide a chance for me to scope out how I might film my final video – which is one of our required hand ins for the final deadline on 2nd May. I am thinking for this video that I am going to go for a similar approach to this, a montage of people interacting with DON-8r in a manner which I have not prompted, instructed or influenced. I really like the variety of honest interactions which come through in the video above!

Back to user testing though, DON-8r was misbehaving a bit on early Saturday – not really coping too well with the outdoor terrain. I thought that this may be due to the motors wearing out which was a bit concerning. A quick change of the batteries though and DON-8r was speedy again! I had altered some coding to compensate for the slow movement but with it working at a good pace again I will probably change that back. I think that this highlighted the battery duration is around 5ish hours before they become too weak.

I also noticed that, when outdoors, DON-8r needs to stand out more. The flashing head is not really noticable at all in the sunlight and the audio, though amplified as loud as I can get it, is still drowned out by traffic and the general hustle and bustle of the town (unless you approach DON-8r). I was thinking it would be nice if DON-8r wobbled or moved enough to make the flag wobble as a means to grab peoples attention. I’ll get this coded and see if it helps.

I added a bit of red electrical tape around the coin slot as I noticed many people were not finding the coin slot as immediately as I would have hoped. Also, many people were taking photos of DON-8r from the front although there is not branding for Dundee Science Centre here so I may look to see if I can get a couple more vinyl’s as I’m sure it would be good publicity for DSC to get their branding on some Facebook photos.

——————————-

Credit to Dundee’s chiptune maestro Edwards Shallow for the soundtrack to this video – I love his stuff and you should too!
Listen to his tracks (and download them) here: http://edwardshallow.bandcamp.com/
check out his youtube here: http://www.youtube.com/user/edwardshallow
Follow his Tumblr here: http://edwardshallow.tumblr.com/

UPDATE::
Forgot to mention, there’s no hard feelings towards the girl who breaks DON-8r at the end of the video. It was user testing after all and clearly the head was not secure enough! DON-8r has since been repaired and recapitated

UPDATE 2::
This video has been receiving a whole heap of online attention. I uploaded it to b3ta.com (a cacophonous online community of meme makers that I frequent) and received largely positive reviews. It was then later unexpectedly picked up by geekologie (a tech/humour blog I was only vaguely familiar with) and was apparently lambasted by both the author and within the comments. In the case that all publicity is good publicity I decided not to get directly involved with a retort and thank goodness for that as it turns out that their harsh tone is a recurrent joke for their opinion towards robots. Could have resorted in a flamewar there! Still a bit miffed that the top google result for “DON-8r” directs you towards their article (which, for the unaware masses, doesn’t give DON-8r the most shining review) but I have received around 4000 hits and counting on the video so I guess thanks to geekologie for the traffic there!

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Fundraising at the Overgate

Posted on April 12, 2011 by timpryde

On Friday and Saturday, Dundee Science Centre were at The Overgate shopping centre in Dundee performing some fun experiments such as dusting for fingerprints and creating lemonade fountains. DON-8r and I were also there, outside in the sunshine, gathering money for the science centre. In total around £15 was raised, not bad for primarily made up of 1p and 2p coins! I will most likely be back out later on in the week for filming my final video so I will gather it all together after then for the final count. I took a video over the two days as this was a great opportunity for some user testing so will put that up in the next blog post but for now here are some snaps of DON-8r out and about!

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Tweaks and Changes

Posted on April 12, 2011 by timpryde

A typical backlog of blog here so in a non-chronological order here are some updates from the last week. After the successful PR day at Dundee Science Centre, I took DON-8r back to the studio for a repaint and a touch up on various spots. This involved masking off the vinyl text and respraying multiple coats of glossy white. Unfortunately though I am most likely going to have to sand back some spots and repeat this as the finish is a bit drippy. No worries though as I think I am still doing quite well for time right now.

This was all done in time for Friday afternoons’ day at the Overgate shopping centre along with Dundee Science Centre but more on that in the next blog post. Thought it would be good to include here some of the last minute fixing and reprogramming that was required over the 2 days I spent at the Overgate:

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Final Model #12 – The Final Model!

Posted on April 6, 2011 by timpryde

Though still needing a few tweaks and tidy here and there, this is pretty much the finished model! Really chuffed with how it has all come out! Had this all working and ready (just) in time for a PR afternoon at Dundee Science Centre on Monday. I was literally putting on the final touches as a reporter and a massive camera came into the workshop. Turns out they were from STV which was pretty nerve racking! A photographer for local papers, The Courier and The Press and Journal, was also there taking snaps of me and some kids with DON-8r. Here’s what came from that – A nice big photo in The Courier and a wee article in the Press and Journal.

Pretty great! Although I found out this morning that STV had to “squeeze” the interview out of their telly broadcast, which is a bit disappointing but I am chasing them up to see if the video can exist elsewhere on the internet! Still, a great start for the TALK stage of my final year project.

Thanks to Dave Martin from Fotopress for taking the photos and passing them on to the paper and to STV for coming down, interviewing DON-8r and me and making me feel really nervous (in a good way!).

***UPDATE***

Dundee University have put up an article about my project over here: http://www.dundee.ac.uk/djcad/news/newsdetail/?ID=42868
Thanks to Mhari Macdonald for helping to get that sorted!

Dundee Science Centre also have an article up over here: http://www.sensation.org.uk/news.php?id=167

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Final Model #11 – Assembly and Decals

Posted on April 6, 2011 by timpryde

Nearly finished! with all the electronics inside I attached the bumpers using hacked up Tesco Value sponges which were absolutely perfect! Not too much pressure to hit the switch and enough sponge to bounce them back out easily. The RGB LED housing still need a bit of work done to it but essentially it is just help in place though a slot underneath the head. This was all done on a rushed Monday morning as the paint was still drying and time was increasingly running out for my intended PR day afternoon at Dundee Science Centre.

I made to to DSC in the late morning to get vinyl decals adhered to DON-8r by their technician. These had been designed by DSC’s in-house graphic designer, Jamie, and printed up at a sister science centre up in Aberdeen. I think they look great!

DON-8r needs a couple more coats of paint though so there is going to have to be the tricky task of masking of the decals and spraying around them, should be straight forward enough though! Anyway here are some snaps taken by Jamie of the decals being put on:

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