Angelos Floros

Presented: Extending Arts 2013, Department of Industrial Design and Services, University of the Aegean, Syros, Greece, 2015

This paper introduces a “fast track” method that can be used during an intensive workshop, so us to apply an interactive object design procedure, as an educational method to approach the design issues in all steps, from manuscripts to realization. The Arduino microcontroller -an open hardware- was placed at the heart of the Interactive Product, as a prototype microprocessor easy to develop an electronic sketch and a circuit. 

Four (4) undergraduate students and five (5) post-graduate students of the Department of Product and System Design of the University of the Aegean they had participated at the workshop. 

What should be the educational procedure in order to engage Design Studies students to Physical Computing assets? In four courses were covered issues of the Digital Current Electronics and their tools, using primitives circuits. At the beginning of the workshop were introduced the grammar and the syntax of interactive circuits. Buttons, LED lights and the capacitive sensor technique were used, in order to understand how the digital current circuit works, but also to deal with the variety of binary data using raw circuits. This step was important to

the students to meet the Arduino microcontroller technology, the software and the primitives of electronic current.

At the second part of the workshop, the students were asked to develop a desktop and mobile independent object able to sense the user activity. The goal of this project was to implement an interface for a portable object that senses the human action and reacts on it. What does it mean in interactive product design to pick up on your hands an object, to hug it, to shake it, or to ignore it? How a device can be a user friendly and augment the game-ability?

Kosmas 500 was the opportunity for the students to investigate issues of the Human Machine Interaction Principles, to observe any play-ability option of a portable toy, and finally implement and develop a robot “pet”.