Angelos Floros

Presented: Extending Arts, Department of Product & Systems Design Engineering, University of the Aegean, Syros, 2013

A fast-track method for teaching the design of interactive objects inside an intensive workshop.

Nine students took part — four undergraduates and five postgraduates — and the whole sequence ran on Arduino, through four courses in digital electronics.

The first phase teaches the grammar and the syntax of interactive circuits: buttons, LEDs and capacitive sensors, used to make the idea of binary data concrete rather than theoretical. The second asks for something that stands on its own — a desktop and mobile independent object able to sense the activity of its user.

The final project is Kosmas 500 itself: a robotic pet. The brief required the students to work through the principles of human-machine interaction and build something that responds to being picked up, hugged, shaken — or ignored.

That last option is the one that does the teaching. An object that notices it is being ignored has to model a user who is elsewhere, and that is a harder problem than any of the sensors.