WEEK19 - Project Development

WEEK NINETEEN ASSIGNMENT

Homestretch! this week was about finishing your project, and just updating on what's left to do.

Assignments

Complete your final project, tracking your progress: what tasks have been completed, and what tasks remain? what has worked? what hasn’t? what questions need to be resolved? what will happen when? what have you learned?

What tasks have been completed, and what tasks remain?

This project had been a bit of a whirlwind, were I went down long and winding research roads trying to understand what the hell I can do to properly sonify or visualize plant networks and nature interactions and communication, and then to come back in time for the deadline I had to really triage my ideas down again.

so realistically up until now these 5 months were about heavy experimentation and going down all the rabbit holes, and then this week was about understanding when to stop. and how to combine the things that worked into a working product and how to be okay with it.

RESEARCH

whooo completed but lets be honest totally ongoing. can also be tracked on my general research page which I keep for my own entertainment. ( its kinda incomplete cos tbh I keep it all in my notebook ( for my memoir when I'm famous :P - i'm joking ... kinda..))

and I keep track of all my tabs and research I find online using a tab managager.. I use toby, and honestly if you're anything like my and have constantly at least three windows open with atleast 10 tabs ( it's more don't judge me)

But honestly without a tab manager I would probably drown and loose thousand of things that I was trying to keep track of also for future spirals:

EXPERIMENTATION

also up until this week I was pre-occupied with experimenting with all the various sensors, trying to find a kind-off more universal way to plug into bio-networks without immediately simplifying the whole process or colonizing the plant and treating it as a tool.

In my experiments I:

• successfully got phototransistors to work as light-sensors (with sound)

• successfully got humidity sensors to work as soil sensors (with sound)

• successfully turned a plant into a touch capacitor (with sound)

• semi-successfully connected myself up to the neko-board to turn my own movements and heartbeat into noise... it was bit unstable though...

• successfully made 3M long cables with modular plug and play functionality (twisted and everything): to make sure there was as clean a signal as possible

• successfully tested multiple speakers.. I really wanted to use this vintage speaker but had to decide to use a smaller one based on packaging I imagined for myself.. though in the next iteration of this device I will definitely use these big vintage speakers.

• successfully milled a board that is finished and functioning for this prototype

WHAT REMAINS:

Now that I had to make a hard cut to stop experimentation and make decisions on what works at this particular moment I had to settle on using light/sound symbiosis for this particular iteration of the device... so the steps that remain are:

• Model and make the packaging .. well also structure
• mill a final board which will include positioning holes
• solder
• assemble
• do the coding - if you have time add code for interactive buttons
• do the video/slide
• finish missing documentation
• figuring out if I have time to make an interactive animation for the oled display.

What has worked? What hasn’t?

I mean you can see this in the 'experimentation' section above: Lots of things worked, but overall I wasn't successful in my initial idea to plug directly into the forest and I had to settle for light.. though that gives me more more space to play with multiple input directions for the noise.

What questions need to be resolved?

There are some problems that I am still working around until the end:

1. controlling volume within the noise.. I wanted to be able to control the volume of the various input channels, and without wastening whole pins on that I wasn't rrly sucessful in that task. because when I tried to do this analog.. the turned grounded input pin didn't silence the code.. it kinda just made the whole board freak out and shut down.

2. coding a sleep button as well as including a start-up animation for the display

What will happen when?

After the extreme triaging session, I kinda came with spiral development for the future beyond the presentation deadline... but also... I mean the rest that needs to happen before it comes functional needs to happen this week - lol. I want to be able to shoot by tuesday or worst case wednesday, so I can edit on Thursday.

What have you learned?

Over all of Fabacademy? man... honestly.. my life was kinda changed by coming to Japan and being convinced to do Fabacademy and this something I will forever be grateful for.

Skills: I learned how to design electronics, how to mill and draw pcb's .. but more than that I learned where to find the information to understand how to make the things that I want work.

I learned how to use cnc milling for molding and casting and beyond. I learned that making workable packaging for a project wasn't something unachievable.

This was the first project that I made come to life from beginning to end and that makes me really proud... and I guess that means I also learned how to be proud of triaged spirals.. I learned that you can structure prototypes in a way that even when they don't work YET they are still presentable for continuation.

I learned basic coding which is more than I ever had before.

I learned 3D modeling and so much more.

But more than skills.. I learned that there is a community of people that are kind and sharing and not mean and obsessed with credit and fame. I come from a media art scene where the past years of my life had been filled with people who tore each other down at every step, filled with false friendships and competitiveness that had nothing to do with driving each other forward. SO when I'm asked what I learned in Fabacademy, I have to say that I learned to make friends and I am so grateful to all the people I met during my fab-journey who welcomed me like family and genuinely made me feel so at home in Japan that I never want to leave again.

I learned how to be caring and wonderful instructor from Georg and I hope I can be even half as much to my future students. I'm so thankful to him for convincing me to do this, for sitting through late nights with me, for putting up with my bratty attempts of trying to challenge the briefs and the endless snack run's. For sitting at immigration with me and generally being just an amazing friend.

Thank you to Youka-san for welcoming me into the Kamakura family and genuinly caring for me ahah.

Thank you to all the instructors for putting up with me, to Tsuchiya-san for dealing with my last minute chaos; to Nagano-san; to Rico and his dog for all cheering me up when I would be close to giving up cos it seemed like electronics would never work for me; to Kai for always being up for random adventures and for absolutely always being there for me and for not laughing at me when I never use shortcuts in fusion.

To Claire for being like best co-sufferer ever.

To Miriam to welcoming me in seoul when I just turned up ahaha. and for always bullying me to be better during asian-review.

What did I learn during Fabacademy? I learned that life can be really kind, and I can do things that I truly love surrounded by people who all treat each other with real care and desire to share together to simply push invention forward... and honestly that is not something to take for granted. Beyond the skills... it's community.

Thank you!