Designing a business card printer for the degree show

I am finally happy that I have most of the details necessary for the design of this printer.

With help from Angus Main the system is now fully operational since Monday. All that is needed to make the printer print a business card at the press of a button is to plug it into a power supply!

The printer is currently reserved for external assessment and the result of this is that I can only start working on building it physically next week. I make what I can in the interim.

Front view of the printer

Top view with section cut

Back view

Designing my final first of three hand-in booklets

I have not logged much recently, and foolishly as it would have helped to have my ongoing impressions to hand at the moment. So here is what I am working on presently - my final hand-in document. I am planning to make three booklets two dedicated to my major projects from Unit 10 (Talk Over Tea and the joke Dispenser) plus one more dedicated to the smaller briefs I am or was involved with this year (CSM degree show identity + another project I am doing with CSM research department).

The deadline is May 12th (nine days away) and I should be finished in time - I am trying to feel calm, which is a challange.

Indesign screen shot of the overview of the booklet dedicated to Talk Over Tea (WIP)

Where are things with the joke dispenser

SU asked me to send them a short description of my project so far and include photos so:

Last year I began researching what social capital is and to test it in real life by making small adjustments to the way I behave in everyday situations. The first notable change I made was with beggars on the street. If anyone asks me for money in the street I give it to them in exchange for them going on tape to say what they will do with the money. Once they do and I pay them I upload that video to Twitter and tag the council this happened in:

Traded £1 with a homeless so he'd tell me what he'll do with it #BeggingBargain @camdenTalking https://t.co/doJXyUXxXD
— Gilad Visotsky (@v_gilad) August 19, 2013

My next stage was to go go outside and beg for myself, only I begged in a way that challenges the relationship we usually have with people holding signs on the street:

It went very well, I got over 40 jokes in three days, here is an unedited sample.

The next stage was to take this all this content, or the system in which I generated that content, and apply it, or compile it in a way that makes sense. I decided to do it in the context of where I am studying Central Saint Martins college. The reason for this is my conclusion that if all the contributions were made at one location it will make sense if seen one after the other - it is a way to get to know the people of that place. 

I began to design an experience based around this system. The core idea is that if you participate in this experience in any way, you get something meaningful in return.

And so began the journey of making this thing happen. I have invested in a coin acceptor, and with the help of 4D technicians Angus and Sion, wrote a program that plays a video when a penny in put into the system.   

Programming the coin acceptor

Building the Kiosk

The kiosk has wheels!

behind the screen 

For each penny inserted into this kiosk a joke is played. If someone chooses to participate by contributing a joke (which means finding me and recording it) they will receive a 10p voucher.

Here is a demo of how it works

CSM canteen vouchers for joke contributors 

And finally, today I have painted my Joke dispenser with the first layer of paint, during this process I tweeted and was asked to share this with the SU blog.

today: watching paint dry... (!!!)

Success!!!!

I managed to print my cat jokes properly using the thermal printer!!!!

Turns out I had the Arduino plugged in all wrong. I changed the wiring according to these instructions, then continued to use the code from aidafruit. In order to print the jokes properly (previously words got broken into new lines) I am now using bitmap images at 384px wide, thus controling the font, characters, line spacing etc. I can even print images!

I am using images instead of text to control the text appearance

The correct way to wire up the Arduino (from adafruit)

In this old printout you can see spaces appear at beginning of new lines, and words broken into the next line  

Vouchers for my joke contributors

After talking to Ian yesterday I have made 10p vouchers which I will give to anyone who contributes a joke for my project.

I hope no one can fake these bad boys!

Working on Talk Over Tea Posters and Table Tents

I am redesigning the posters and table tri-folds to mirror the changed way the service will work as of tomorrow.

Posters 

tri folds

Designing the Joke dispenser + more badges

I have a list of things to get done by tomorrow:

For Talk Over Tea:

• Redesign posters for Talk Over Tea
• Redesign TOT table tents
• Make more Badges
• Print more logbooks

For the Joke dispenser:

• Design the exterior
• Make 10p vouchers
• Edit videos at 1028x768

And finally for the Science (Cat Joke) book:

• Figure out splitting printed lines
• have fun with my thermal printer!

So far today, I have made progress on two of these points. I have made more badges and began designing the Joke Dispenser.

The photos of the progress are below.

I need to make more! 

Provisional front of the dispenser

cog themed design (I need to reason it out though - not quite there yet...

The vinyl cuts are designed in Illustratur 

Today I need to write down many things

Insert from my diary:

–  where am I with regards to the cat joke box project
– where am I with regards to a penny for your joke project
– where am I with regards to talk over tea project

I will start with the left latter as it is the freshest in my mind.

# Talk over tea
I just finished working on a third or fourth variation for the talk over tea logo. I want to play with negative space and at the moment, I am trying to make a teacup superimposed with the word talk and have that the handle serves as the capital O for ‘Over tea’.
It isn’t going very well… Tomorrow is the first day when talk over tea will be running.  I got a second number for texts, so that customers do not have to use twitter. At the moment I’m thinking that I should promote people to use what’s app.
I have printed three logbooks for tomorrow they have places to enter date, time, name, location, order and further comments.
I am fairly apprehensive, as I am aware there is a lot that can go wrong. I have made plans to do other things during the day tomorrow in case talk over tea does not prove popular. Right now the’ worst’ thing that could happen is if #TOT proved extremely popular. I would not know how to deal with too much demand. But I will cross that bridge when I get to it. I really hope that it will prove easy to enlist help from other third years (or final year MA students).
it just occurred to me that I now have time to make quick designs for a talk over tea tray. The tray will be 50 cm over 35 cm it will have the words talk over tea carved into it somewhere and will have four dips for takeaway cups.

Log book mistake printed on see through paper

My three plain and proper log books

Inside layout - plain and to the point

I am struggling with the whole logo concept - I may just stick with a logotype or my older variation of the logo

Tray design

# Penny for your joke
I have a bag with four castor wheels, I bought from screw fix yesterday.  Tomorrow I will spend the day waiting for customers to request drinks from the cafe. In the meanwhile, I told one of the technicians downstairs that I will spend the day with him building the exterior of my joke machine. Made out of MDF, it will be a 1.7 m tall device, I haven’t got it written down but I am pretty sure it will be 60 cm wide and 60 cm deep. I have recommissioned my old Toshiba and they hope to install processing on it so it can run the joke program. If all goes well, I will have the parts ready and I will be able to assemble everything over Easter Break.



# Cat joke machine
 I have in my hand, envelope which contains a USB A to B cable, there are five thermal paper rolls and an AC power adapter inside it. I bought all of these with the intention of using them to power the thermal printer which I have a university. They should allow me to  to interact with my printer with much more ease than I currently have. I still haven’t used the RFID module which worries me a bit. I don’t know how simple it will be to use it, and I doubt that I will be able to connect it to the printer by myself.

Working on the joke machine and making badges

I spent today preparing videos for my joke machine. I also made badges for TOT.

Tomorrow I have an interview at the RCA and I am stressed!!!

Working on the videos for the 'Penny for your jokes' machine

making badges

failing at making badges

nice badges for the TOT program

making a signal map for Talk Over Tea

Yesterday I received CSM's floor plans and today I am turning them into a map to show where there is good mobile phone reception.

Working on Talk Over Tea logo

I'm just feeling like I need more documentation!!!! so here:

I want to order badges so I need a logo asap

This logo will be used for badges and for the new Twitter feed @TalkOTea

A day of stress and anxiety

My mid point review is on Tuesday at 11:00 - I have nothing prepared to show at the moment and I am #stressed beyond what I can explain.

But here is a description of what I would like to have by then:
- an A5 booklet* with notes and #WIP images of my three projects: ‘Science Book’, ‘Penny for your Jokes’ and ‘Talk over tea’
- the mechanism which will be inside the Joke dispenser for ‘#PFYJ’
- the mechanism that will be inside the Schrodinger cat book (Science book)
- any visual material like badges for the tea service.

The problem is that I must act fast and I am not certain I am up to the task

Here is a work in progress photo of a cat joke printed on thermal paper:

And here are some notes Yoriko took for me during a chat we had about the 'Talk over tea" idea

Success on the 'Penny for your jokes' front

With help from Angus and Sion, I now have a working system that plays a random video from a library of files every time a penny is inserted!!!

Successful use of the 'Penny for your jokes' machine from Gilad Visotsky on Vimeo.

More on Science book brief

Since my last post on the Unit 10 'Science book' brief I have change direction quite a bit.

I am now planning to create a device that will produce freshly printed text each time a magnetic card is detected near it.

The device has a cat shape recess to indicate where a card should be placed. I chose the shape because of the relationship this idea has to the Schrödinger Cat thought experiment.

Side section

Top section

Wireframe view

Unsent letter to Paulus Dreibholz

I just wrote the following and realised it was just an exercise in procrastination:

Hi Paulus,

Not sure what the following email is supposed to achieve but here goes:

I have a very clear idea as to what I want to convey with our brief, these last few days have been extremely hectic and I am ashamed to admit that I suddenly realised my plans for tomorrow are not very developed and a bit tooinappropriate.

I am not looking for an excuse and I hope to make a good presentation tomorrow, but at the moment (22:15) it is unresolved and I am not as confident as i would like to be about it. 

Regards,

Stressed Nervous and Stressed (also exhausted) Gilad

Meaningful Exchange

I noted the following in my diary yesterday:

Avi and I talked and came up with the idea for#MeaningfulExchange

This is after today's dispiriting crit with #KenHollings where it was (rightly) highlighted that my idea for a machine which provides jokes for 1p isn't quite hitting the spot.

The new idea is as follows:
For 1p the machine would offer potential users the chance to hear a joke I harvested for £1 from a stranger. At the same time as replaying the jokes the machine will record the users reaction. It will thereafter produce a receipt which would feature their photograph. In exchange for the receipt, the uni shop downstairs will offer some small discount (maybe 10% or 10p - something related to £1/1p) for drinks bought that day. This serves as both an incentive to participate and as a way to encourage the user to have their face in the right spot. I'm not sure if I should offer drinks as then I wouldn't need the receipts for my records as the shop would need them as proof of purchase.

The idea behind this work is that every exchange in it is meaningful in a true, practical way to all the participants:

• The strangers got £1,
• the users get a funky receipt or drinks at reduced cost
• the shop gets the exposure (with me, most likely covering the costs)
• I get exposure

win win win win

A paragraph for Ken Hollings

This is sopposed to be 200 words:

Aim: 

To create a collection of jokes which is accessible to the public and in the process explore how we relate to strangers. I want to explore the idea that a fair social bargain can promote the crowd to interact with the work. 

Method: 

Turning a ubiquitous, possibly undesirable, experience into a novel and entertaining one by altering what the crowd gains from the interaction, leaning it in it's favour - manipulating a small detail and making a big difference. 

I took to the street with a big sign: 

                                                                                                                        

Picture by: Laurent Moulinat

When I see a person standing in the street, holding a sign I immediately assume he's out to take advantage of me.

So, based on the idea that successful social endeavors mean everyone involved stand something to gain I wondered what would happen if that interaction was altered - I will give that person money if I get something valuable in return! I cannot, however, assume most people have material possession they will be willing to part with, or that they will feel what I am asking for represents a fair deal. I needed to ask for something everyone is likely to have – information: a story, an advice or a joke! The advantage of jokes is that they can be consumed in bulk or individually, they are not preachy or too heavy and they entertain, they are attractive.

I collected and video recorded over 40 jokes (here are some). My challenge is to figure out how to present this collection in a way that retains any lessons and relates to the experience. At present I am considering attaching a projector to a coin slot and have a joke projected each time a penny is inserted. I think a small amount like a penny is an equivalent to the minimal level of involvement that can be expected from a person new to this project.

This is a hard bit

Background:
I have been collecting jokes from random individuals by standing in public places and holding a sign that promises £1 for each novel joke. So far I have 40 jokes

A photograph taken by Noel Cottrell

[excerpt from diary]
...
I know that this project is about social capital and interactions we perform that involve bargains. But now that I have 40 videos of random people telling jokes I feel stuck. **what am I going to do now?**
I could go for another round of asking students and friends to illustrate a joke at a time thus making the entire endeavour crowd sourced. But what will that stand for?
I could also try gathering more jokes by only asking and not offering money to allow for comparison, but I feel this avenue is too simplistic. I need to find my so what? For this project. so what if I'm making a book which is crowd sourced? Even more accurately - so a collection of crowd sourced  jokes can be acquired, filmed and edited... So what?
I will try to spell out what I think of this subject:
Together, collectively we can be very smart and sophisticated. But the fact that individually we seem impressionable needs to be explained. I believe that this can be seen as analogues to the way we try out new foods to determine how we like them. This process requires that we first taste the food, see if we enjoy the flavour. Then we eat it based on that decision, then see how it affected us afterwards. We remember this by experience and so we make up our mind. And in my case, not make up my mind and periodically try everything That did not disagree with me too strongly even If I did not love it.
I imagine that even the initial tasting involves countless nerves and biological processes. The implication to the analogy is that in order to be able to make the collective decision (which I believe changes constantly) we the individuals are acting as the nerve ending and we feed back to the crowd using our social tools. Our tools for providing this feedback are our computers and mobile phones with the internet as the mode of delivery.

If we return to the food analogy then it's interesting to note that I, at least, get most of my information about food (even food I already had) from the internet, and that this information often changes how and what I eat.

In case this doesn't make sense, I think that the choice to use my iphone as the tool for capturing the jokes is highly appropriate - I just don't know what I'm trying to say by that...

...

[end]

A project concerned with meaningful exchanges bargains respect and social capital.

The project that I am currently working on will be the first self initiated brief as a part of unit 10 of my degree. I have not made any more progress on my previous work, but I have decided to put that on hold because I am incredibly interested in this project, and I don't think I can do much for the 'science book' at the moment.

 The basic principle and the inspiration for my project is how to transform uncomfortable or unwanted social interactions into rewarding and meaningful ones. When I was 15 I was in Los Angeles and as I was walking into a McDonald's a beggar asked my cousin for money. I cannot remember whether she acknowledged him or ignored him but she did not give him anything. It struck me as curious I asked her why did she do that. She told me something along the lines of 'he's only going to use it for drugs '. At that time I was living in a kibbutz in Israel and this was one of my first encounters with a person in  such a situation. Nevertheless, since that experience my attitude towards such requests from beggars was pretty much in line with my cousin's.
While studying for my dissertation I came across the notion of social capital.  I made a connection between two observations in this field. The first is that the more individual members contribute and support their community the better the community becomes. Or in other words, that just because you help to somebody else in your community the chance of somebody entirely different would help anyone else who needs it is increased.  The second observation is that when people interact socially, they  form some kind of agreement, a social bargain. So friendships for example is a kind of 'be there for me and I'll be there for you' type of agreement.
I had a realisation that relationships and interactions which I deem meaningful all make me feel I am getting something out of them. I then started thinking of relationships I did not rate meaningful which is where the beggar incident popped into my mind. It was almost funny to find myself in a situation where I am thinking 'what can I get out of a beggar? '.
What can you get out of somebody who has no material possession? Who is so desperate that he is asking me for money… Up until that point my reason for not giving money to beggars was that they might use it for drugs, or that I do not know what no use it for. So I started asking beggars for that information, but  in order to make it meaningful even if they are lying I would video their response.

Traded £1 with a homeless so he'd tell me what he'll do with it #BeggingBargain @camdenTalking https://t.co/doJXyUXxXD
— Gilad Visotsky (@v_gilad) August 19, 2013

Suddenly, I was 100% okay with giving the money. It's almost like it didn't matter what they would do with it because they did something for it and therefore the money is theirs.

 To tap into this kind of conditioning in my brain and to manipulate it felt pretty amazing.  I introduced a tiny change to an existing occurrence, and since my outlook of people has transformed. Because I now look at beggars as individuals with  something which is potentially personally valuable to me.

 for my project I want to use this premise and create something, I don't know what, that is engaging and nonjudgemental. I don't really have an opinion as to what needs to be done about the homeless people, beggars and the likes. But there are real steps that if taken (judging by my own experience) can change the way that we look at other (marginal?) members of society.

Designing my quantum book.

I am in the progress of designing a kind of book which produces pages for the reader to observe without disclosing information as to the coming page's content. To achieve this the book will allow the extraction of desirably one page at a time.

Side view

Bottom view

Side view of the internal mechanism

I am planning to use wood and foam to create the book. paper can then be inserted into the box. I am confident that there are issues I am not taking into account. These may have to do with how paper reacts to foam or how narrow the bottom opening is, as it may be too narrow for pages to be extracted or so wide that pages simply fall through. I hope that by producing a prototype I can better identify and address them. My chllange now is o find the time and figure out how to produce it.