Be Here Now, an interaction design course here at ITP, emphasizes the the present to build devices or services. This week we had to come up with a final project concept idea. We will use the rest of the semester for prototyping this idea.
Our concept idea is based on the following parameters:
Design an ambient device or service that can be used to display information from a network in real time.
My group includes Sarah Hallacher, Valentina Comacho, and Bruna Calheiros. We will be building our tentatively-titled project Twit-Knit.
The basis of the concept is to use information for an unconventional method of data visualization to allow people to see the physical manifestation of tweets.
The Twitter Motor will use a knitting-machine, an Arduino Uno, and a stepper motor to create an endless scarf based on the tweets mentioning the weather in a particular area. For example, the more tweets about the weather being cold will keep the stepper motor turning, and the knitting-machine will churn out more scarf. The Arduino is delivering instructions to the stepper motor after parsing tweets using the Twitter API for a search term, like ‘#cold’.