“It’s about context in space. It’s about information – all information has a space. Conversely, all places have information.”

Assignment 1: The Kitchen
What is the context of a kitchen? How do people really use kitchens?

A quick (hardly inclusive) list of kitchen based activities: Cooking, eating, cleaning. Socializing. Entertaining. Storing food – pantry / refrigerator.

Drilling down into just one activity, cooking, what could be involved in that task which could have an interface designed?

Cooking tasks:

• Gather ingredients.
• Prepare ingredients.
• Prepare tools – utensils, cookware.
• Prepare cooking surface – preheat oven, grease pans, boil water, warm oil.
• Cook – various methods: steam, sauté, stir fry, sear, boil, broil, bake, warm, poach, deep fry
• Cook – manipulate: toss, stir, brown, scramble, blanche
• Often tasks are interleaved and simultaneous. ie. cooking something while gathering or preparing another.
• Presentation.
• EAT! (not really part of cooking, exactly, but it’s a big reward for the effort).
• clean.

So, the act of cooking is quite complex. Maybe simplify, and just provide visual information about the stove. Gas ranges have a natural visual indication of their setting… larger flames indicate a hotter setting; you can hear the gas of the oven ignite when it’s warming. Electric coil ranges aren’t as expressive, although glowing red coils usually means it’s really hot. Sealed element electric ranges may glow differently. Many ranges have some kind of other visual cue to warn of a warm surface. Often these are lights distanced from the heating elements themselves and may suffer from poor mapping.

What information is relevant? Temperature / setting of the range and oven. Heating up / cooling down. Preheat ETA? Multiple cooking timers? Presence of cookware?
Direct (natural) mapping is most important here. Whereas gas ranges indicate their heat setting visually as a by-product of the technology and electric ranges seem to indicate whether the surface is warm or not, in both cases the temperature of the cooking surface must be inferred. Hot oil will sizzle water – too hot will smoke. How warm is a low setting? If cooking instructions don’t indicate an explicit temperature requirement in objective units, is it necessary to display the specific temperature of the cooking surface? Should this be an entirely new proprietary system, or it is something that can be retrofit onto existing ranges?

Cooking surface temperature:
Use color? Blue -> Red is a typical cool -> hot mapping. Gas ranges typically have blue flame, though regardless of the temperature setting. Use saturation? White (cool) -> Red (hot)?

Burner setting:
If using color to indicate the current temperature of the range, perhaps the scale of a particular burner’s display could indicate the target setting. A small graphic would be a low setting with a larger graphic indicating a high setting

Controls:
If retrofitting, perhaps there could be an indication of which control is mapped to which heating element. When an element is touched, display a connecting path to the controlled burner. If the heat is increased, display pulses along the path from the control to the burner “adding heat”; conversely display pulses from the burner to the control as it is reduced.

Design notes:
All graphics related to a particular burner will share that burner’s current temperature color. Too many colors became distracting and confusing.

Considerations:
Heat. Smoke. Steam (humidity). Splashes. Physical impact. Oil splatter. Dark range surface. Utensils on the range obscuring the display?

Technology:
Projector, mounted above range, in range hood, should keep it away from most spills and splatters, however it would still be susceptible to heat, humidity and smoke.
Temperature sensor(s). Physically mounted at each burner? Infrared / Laser temperature sensor(s) mounted in the range hood may permit sensing of the cooking surface rather then the heating element.
Microcontroller to manage sensors.
Multimedia computer to generate display

Other considerations:
There seem to be several patents for various in-kitchen work surface projection displays.
Built-in kitchen having projector, and cooking assisting image projecting system – Patent Review 6334684
Interactive kitchen control system and method – Patent Review 6976004

Regardless of the data source, for the output side I’m driving the analog decibel meter with an Arduino using pulse width modulation (PWM). Inside it seems to be a small electromagnet whose field moves the needle to the right. The movement is counteracted by several springs which keep the needle trying to pull back to the left.

It seems to take minimal current < 1mA at 5V to peg the needle. The face of the meter indicates “1mW 600 Ohm” which I assume means that the max input is 1mW and the resistance of the unit is 600Ohm. (Please correct me if I’m wrong). I’ve installed a 220Ohm resistor and small LED in series to provide more load to the PWM pin which allows finer steps in the meter as well as protects the Arduino from any possible reverse current as the needle’s springs pull it back past the electromagnet. I likely don’t need that, but it wouldn’t be an ITP project without an LED (it’s not blinking, though).

In this demo the Arduino is receiving data via a serial connection from a simple Processing sketch to control the position of the needle. In the above mentioned configuration I’m mapping the input value to a PWM output range of 0-40. Sending byte 255 will change modes in the program. The default mode is to accept ASCII values of 48-52 (that’s 0-9) so I can test in a terminal. The second mode will accept all bytes bytes of 0-254, and the third mode simply reports back the received values.

Next step is to figure out exactly what to do with the meter; since it accepts serial data it is pretty modular.

Applet and code

While the graphing application was certainly useful in tuning the system, it was confusing for viewers to understand. I don’t really view this as a fault of the design since it was intended to fulfill a specific need in developing the project. However, I really would like to convey the moments of traffic’s encroachment into a cyclist’s personal space.

I was directed to look into the field of proxemics and the work of Edward Hall by our “Visualizing the Five Senses” professor, Jane Nisselson (Virtual Beauty). What interested me most was the depiction of personal space into four categories: Intimate, Personal, Social and Public. Although this work primarily seems to deal with intrapersonal relationships I wondered if the categories could be used to express the space around a cyclist…specifically to communicate the space to non-cyclists.

Here are several images of the resulting visualization. The project is animated – I’ll an example of the movement online in the next few days, with the source code.

Here is an update to the proximity visualization application incorporating the 4 Proxemic distance classifications of Intimate, Personal, Social and Public. I’m hoping to show that while riding a bicycle in traffic riders experience frequent intrusions by vehicles into the Personal space. The haptic feedback device that is being devised for the CycleSense project will transpose the events in Social and Personal space to the Intimate space to provide an immediate awareness of these intrusions that generally go unseen as they occur behind the rider.

The next HUGE challenge is to refine the rangefinder sensor package, which I’ve never been able to get completely reliable.

looking forward to the final project for visualizing senses, i’m thinking of working with touch and space. several projects that i’ve investigated for other classes have involved interaction with proximity and awareness. what specifically drives the tactile sense? does the chill of a breeze or the warmth of nearby body stimulate similar senses as physical contact? at jane’s suggestion i’d like to read up on the field of proxemics as introduced by edward hall – the categorization of physical proximity and interactions deemed appropriate for each category. all this space around us…

the visualizations of the results as they filtered in were great, but the new york times seemed best. specifically that you could zoom in and also look at historical results by state or county. great work

This is very much a work in progress. My ultimate goal with this visualization was to see if various varieties of wine share characteristics with other varieties of the same category.

The categories and taste characteristics are depicted in a network graph, and suffer from congestion due to the number of visible items. I’d really like to refine the display to isolate specific characteristics and/or wine varieties to clarify the visualization.

The above image depicts an early state of the animation. The tastes begin in a centralized location and drift toward the various categories, eventually settling along an axis determined by the “strength” that a particular taste shares with the wine as inferred by the frequency of those taste terms found in the wine database taste notes.

Unfortunately, I’m unable to post the live applet at the moment as the database is in MySQL format and I have yet to publish the database online. Here is a video of the preliminary interaction. The movement of the category ellipses are from user interaction.

Oh well, I’ll tinker with it later.

Applet and code

The Ripples project is one the the first that really convinced me to dive into using Processing. This depicts sound as a series of ripples emanating from the center of the display. Several example videos on the flight404 site show it being used as a VJ visualization. There have been many following projects, but this one really got me thinking about generative animation and the power of Classes. It’s relatively simple, too…so reading the code helps to inform new ideas.