Just My Imagination

The 1-Wire search protocol works like that game of tag where you run across a field in groups...

Planning to blog experiences at TechShop Menlo Park this summer, a workshop for building things and learning to build things. Currently signed up for classes in:

I just noticed I have like ten drafts of posts I wrote but never finished and posted, so I'm just going to publish them all at once in unfinished form. Be warned if the next ones don't make sense...

I'm writing my Masters thesis right now and I'm all immersed in empirical data and academic papers, so I wanted to take a break and write about this the way I think about it.

I don't know why, but I remember the imagination games I played as a kid very well. It might be because my sister closest in age is a genius storyteller and she made them memorable. I'm also a very "what if" sort of thinker, generally very happy to be immersed in imaginary worlds but especially when I was a kid and sometimes needed a retreat from the real world.

Here are a few of the games we played, between 6 to 12 years old:

"Mage Bears" (we had a whole collection of those tiny "birthstone bears"--basically, 3-inch-ish tall stuffed bears in different colors matching the color of the gem for their month. We named them all accordingly--Sapphire, Garnet, Ruby, Diamond, Emerald, etc. As I list them, I can remember each one's distinct personality! Each one had a pretty specific persistent personality and history that seemed to appear almost immediately after we introduced it, with occasional adjustments and disagreements (my sister's frequent complaint being that I made a particular character "too irritatingly perfect.") We had some we favored and some that didn't come into the stories as often. Some of them had magical powers--the "mage bears" and some did not, and a lot of the plot revolved around the training of the young mage bears by the older ones and subsequent magical accidents and problems to solve. Another frequent plot point was various romantic triangles among the characters and the ensuing drama.

Clowny and Beep: The story centered around two tiny glass clowns. Each one had a disproportionately large three-story house (an entire bookshelf). Beep lived in my room, Clowny in my sister's room. My sister's room also housed their "village" full of other characters: a tiny pompom that lived in a plastic box, a giant ladybug, tiny ceramic animals, and a "grocery store" full of tiny bins of "food" (mostly ground-up candy, making the Fisher Price plastic cabinet they were housed in smell rather distinct). They had their own form of currency: called "kabobs" and made out of sequins. Funny memory: because we only had so many paper bags for the grocery store (folded out of origami paper), customers could get a small refund for bringing back their bags (this was invented to solve the supply problem, at the time we'd never heard of deposits for bags or bottles, nor the whole "green" movement). Clowny was a mad scientist and had an underground lab, and also kept farm animals. I can't remember what Beep did for a living (a lawyer?). We got a huge kick of pretending they called each other on their little phones by saying "beep beep beep beep beep beep beep...Beep?"

Papabla and Telly: Papabla was my sister's favorite stuffed bear, Telly was mine. They had sort of a Calvin-and-Hobbes dynamic, with Papabla being long-limbed and tall, Telly being short and stout. Telly's parents were lost at sea and Papabla's missing for some other reason, so my sister and I acted as what we called "legal guardians" (kids of divorced parents pick up the terminology!) The bears had little backpacks full of school accessories like tiny handmade notebooks, pencils, and paints. They would go to school and meet other stuffed animals, and we would invent assignments for them. Related to this game was what my sister and I did while they were at school: she was a marine biologist and I was a designer, but somehow we worked in the same office. We had a shockingly horrible boss who my sister had fun inventing different lipstick colors for every day. Our office was very high-tech: we could send each other drinks and messages via little transporter cubbies in the walls. We delighted in complaining about work--we must have gotten this from movies, because our parents never really did this. One of our favorite plots was to get together for "coffee" (or was it tea?) and at one point one of us would announce "I quit my job," after which the other would pretend to spit coffee everywhere in shock. Again, I have NO idea where we got this, but it never got old.

Other stories: Mrs. Tambrila and the Eternal Houseguests (my sister's dollhouse with a family of Russian dolls, with my characters being visitors to the house, occasionally living in the attic). There was a game with a group of tiny beaded magical alligators, and then the traditional Polly Pockets and Barbies. And then there were some my younger siblings played later, including one involving warring factions of plastic frogs and lots of games around superhero-inspired characters.
We also had a huge number of games where we acted out the characters rather than having physical toys.

When we wanted to decide what to play, we had a hierarchy of decisions to make that would help us pick a game. First: toys or acted-out characters? Setting: past, present, or future? Were we allowed to use magic? "R or no R?" (R was a codename for "romance"...ie. would imaginary boys be present in the story, or would we conquer the bad guys on our own?!)

One thing I notice: the characters in each "world" didn't interact with each other. This doesn't seem to have been an issue of scale or what the toys were designed for, because most of the games involved an extremely miscellaneous assortment of character toys. I also don't think I ever used "multivocality"--different voices for each character, but relied on "he said, she said" like we were narrating a story.

I stopped playing the year I turned 13. I have a ton of fun with my younger siblings now, but I can't seem to play imaginary games anymore. There's still something I'm fascinated about, though, and I've been trying to pin it down and learn something about it in my thesis. It's this idea of character-perspective: the toy you are playing with has a personality and while you're playing, you see things from its perspective. You make objects for it at the right scale and physically look at the world from its level. A little bit like Toy Story and the Velveteen Rabbit and other books where toys come alive. This has two dimensions: one is this idea of the toy coming alive and having a real personality, the other is this perspective-shifting you do when you play, seeing what the toy character sees.

You know how there is a whole field of user interface design: how to design computers or robots to relate effectively to humans? I started thinking of toy-computer interactions or user interfaces for toys--what if the toy characters had working technology? This came out of a project I was doing on remote communication interfaces for kids, where I built two dollhouses with tiny working phones (they were hooked up to a computer running Skype) and a "mail system" (tiny letters could be placed in a mailbox and were transmitted to the remote dollhouse and printed out the mail slot on a tiny photo printer). Later, by popular request, I added a video system--first a decontextualized one, just a video window at the right scale for the toys to see each other, then one which made the video screen look like a tiny computer screen sitting on a computer desk.

My thesis is about perspective-taking in that sense, how when kids play they learn to see the world from another's point of view--both socially and cognitively.

The kids I tested with liked them a lot, but none did what I expected, which was to invent extended stories and develop character personalities like I remember doing. I've been reading and reading but I'm a little stuck on how people get real results sitting a kid down in front of an unfamiliar toy for an hour. They just can't possibly have time to get to know the characters in that time! Or do they not play that way anymore? A few of the kids reported not playing imagination games at home...they played computer games or Webkinz. I have a lot of papers I'm making my way through on kids' play, but what I'd really like to find is transcripts and recordings of play sessions, to find out exactly what the stories are today.

Things companies could give away at conferences/events that I would actually use, not mind the logos, and which would be just fine if I got duplicates:

My winter break internship reminds me I chose the right major.

Here's a service that adds value: bringing information from one world to another, where knowing how to get the information FROM one world and TO the other requires time, knowledge, experience, or resources, such that it would not be easily doable by most of the population in both worlds.

My computer's desktop gets messy fast, it seems to be where I save everything.

Every now and then I will strive to get organized and create a file hierarchy with the "a place for everything" philosophy.

Unfortunately, it's harder to get things in their places when I have to navigate through three or more levels of folders each time I want to save or open something. It's not the number of clicks, it's the memory access time (mine, not the computer's!) to remember the name of where I kept something that is painful.

My solution to this in the physical world (the way I organize my room) is to keep everything in drawers, pockets, and boxes with open tops to make it as quick as possible to put something back where it needs to go. Avoid any kind of boxes-within-boxes that make me have to stop and think and manually open each one and close it again and put it away. I also have this great shelving unit (IKEA Expedit) with open cubes that make it possible to access things from both sides.

Is this metaphor even applicable? What is the digital equivalent of accessing something fast from any "side" and of having "open boxes" in which to place things?

My current approach, which I'm not yet fully happy with, is ordering directory hierarchies so that most often accessed locations are the easiest to access. For instance, courses are organized like this:
Courses -> Current Course 1, Current Course 2, Current Course n, "Older than Fall 2009"
The "Older than Fall 2009" folder holds: Course 1, Course 2, Course 3, "Older than Spring 2009"
etc.
Things still end up on the desktop.

Another idea is that I know I have a very spatial memory--that's why the boxes in my room work, I remember where they are and can reach for them without thinking. There's this (information science?) idea of names or IDs being fixed, while the labeled thing can move around freely in space. What if relative locations were fixed and names didn't matter? If I could think of a way to keep files in locations I associated with their contents, that would help significantly. My desktop could be a world map with dots where the files were. I could zoom in, and as I zoomed in I would be able to, say, zoom into a building where I had a class and all the notes and papers from that class would be sitting on a photo of the classroom. (I tend to remember where I had a class and where I sat better even than who the teacher was).

Combine geotagging of photos and documents (computer with GPS remembers where a document was written) and a little user guidance and this could be generated partly automatically.

Hmm. I could probably write this, but it wouldn't be reflected in the save file dialog from applications, which are fairly text-based and a significant part of the clutter problem. I still like it! It could even be an "augmented reality" application on a mobile phone: as you walk into a space, your related documents and files and emails are floating around there.

I cut things out of foam core to get my head around them enough to put them in Sketchup.
I draw things in Sketchup to get my head around them enough to make them into 2D laser cut files.

I feel like I'm playing with legos, just a little bit more abstractly. No point to this post, just that these programs are super awesome.

It is strange to me that there are many digital picture frames that cost more than some laptops.

Curses! I thought I was very clever this morning for describing DIYers/Makers as "citizen engineers" (as opposed to the citizen scientist movement). The name turns out to be all over the place.

Here are my favorite sneaky travel habits. I forget how useful they are because they're so simple and I do them without thinking now, but they are pretty darn helpful.

-Print a 1-page street map with the place you are staying marked, and including the surrounding neighborhood. Print another page of driving directions from the airport to where you're staying. Doesn't matter if you're not actually driving or not taking that route, having both on the map helps give you a general idea of where you are. So far this has worked super well for me. When arriving at a new place I tend to just get on a bus headed the direction I'm going and see what happens. Most of the time this works and is a great adventure. I get lost sometimes (embarrassingly enough, the last time I can remember was in San Francisco ie. across a bridge from where I grew up) but it's a reasonable tradeoff in my opinion. When I went up to Seattle a couple weeks ago, taking the bus rather than a taxi led me to discover one of the best lunches I've had in my entire life. It was just a tucked-away cafe near the Bellingham transit station but the food was astounding. I think this was it.

-If staying at a youth hostel (only because I do this a lot), bring a shower mat/floor towel. You can grab a super cheap one at IKEA. Totally beats hopping around on one foot on a wet tile floor while you try to dry your feet and get socks on, or drying your feet on the same soggy towel countless other visitors have dried theirs on. Completely worth the small space it takes up in your luggage. Also: flip flops, a lock, and a laundry bag. But those are more obvious.

On another note, I just came back from CHI (Computer-Human Interaction) 2009. It's funny, these conferences and events that are all about the things I'm most excited about and full of people who are also excited about those things are awesome, but completely burn me out on the subjects for a couple days. I felt the same about Maker Faire last year: I was incredibly thrilled to go and to be there and to see everything, but after a couple days I really was done. Now that I'm back and have slept for a couple of days I am back to being stoked that I went and ready for more work.

Life is full of small and lovely pleasures. I am eating tomatoes with sesame-ginger dressing, and the sesame seeds blend in perfectly with the tomato seeds.

I'm the treasurer/fundraiser/inventor of fun ways to spend money/graphic designer for my university's Linux User Group. I just had some hats made for this semester's "Installfest" and I think they came out pretty well. :)
I really want to learn how to use an embroidery machine.

No "reed" per se, just magnets, but it works nicely.
Actual prototype currently inaccessible, will put a picture up when I get home.

Here is the only picture I took in Seattle (well, Redmond rather):

Snow! :)

Stumbled across this by accident, not sure how new it is but it is AWESOME. Beautifully simple idea for surveys/forms that cuts out all the middle layers. It lets you make a form for people to fill out and puts the collected data right into a Google spreadsheet.

Like this.

You can even fill it out right in your email.

Yo.

I'm using the Skype4Java API to write a Java program that talks to my Arduino board and controls Skype accordingly. Will explain why as soon as I have pictures to post.

This:
com.skype.NotAttachedException

means you need to sign into Skype.

*phew.*

How can you make a simple circuit that turns something on when a switch is open, and off when the switch is closed?

Like this!



Diagramming took a few tries:


But I got it in the end, sort of:




Now, how do you make one that doesn't drain the battery the whole time?