While in New York, I had my first opportunity to work with an Arduino Microcontroller, already familiar with Processing I was really interested in how I could use an Arduino and some basic electronics to enhance my projects. That summer my friends at The Studio for Interactive Media and at Interaction Lab at RockwellGroup helped answer a lot of questions and really inspire me.

When I returned back to Minneapolis to finish up another semester at MCAD I found that I had to scale back my ideas, due to time allowed for execution and having only myself to rely on. At that point, using multiple capacitance sensors attached to a bench were a little out of my range, so I went digging.

A trip to Ax-Man Surplus struck some inspiration for a simpler solution for my project. I found 5 cent cardboard mailing sleeves, and a $5 roll of aluminum foil tape and decided to make my own switches. By applying aluminum foil tape to each side of the cardboard mailers and attaching leads to each piece, I was able to make a switch that held closed with force but opened without. Each switch was used with a pull-up resistor, so, if it was closed the current went to ground, otherwise it would lead to a digital pin on the Arduino. Printing this out to serial, I was able to read it into Processing, receiving “1010″ would translate to “there is someone sitting in the 1st and 3rd spots of the bench,” a sound would then be triggered accordingly. In this setup, a laptop is required to run the processing sketch and trigger the sounds. Upon reflecting on the process of this project, I would probably use a Wave Shield from Adafruit and remove the Processing sketch and laptop altogether, but I am still satisfied with the way I was able to remove complexity from the project by using a cheap 5 cent piece of cardboard.

To express our capabilities and make our space speak to what we do, we enhanced our existing plastic logotype with a hidden projector and camera. Mapping our projections to the space, we created sequences of illumination for the lettering and created a play between virtual and physical objects that responds to the activity of people in the space.

This project was designed and developed in collaboration at Colle + McVoy with Grant Eull.

It only takes minutes with Jason, for a seedling to turn into a giant beanstalk; and Squawq was born. Well, I guess there was all of the pain-staking work in the middle that made it a reality, a lot of which I was spared. A lot of hard work was done by Zara Gonzalez, Andrew Wetzel, Grant Eull, Andrew Charon, Braden Stadlman, Aaron Clark and Julie Kaloides and so many others. Thanks to their hard work, Squawq provides a lot of answers.

Squawq does a lot (soon it will do even more). It stores information about your terms so you can view its activity over a custom date range (most tools won’t show you past 3 days), it extracts common keywords, #tags and @authors associated with your terms, finds your most vocal authors (the people talking about your brand), and provides you with links mentioned in their tweets and more.

Heres an example of how I have been using Squawq. One of the terms I decided I was interested in was trends surrounding Actionscript 3 and Flash. Below you can see their activity between December 10th and December 16th, 2009, and you can see that Tweets dropped a lot on Sunday, the 13th. In one week the term was mentioned 590 times, Tuesday and Wednesday were the most active days (true to all Twitter communication as well). I was a little surprised to see the amount of self-promotion involved on these terms. Several users posted links to their latest article over and over. Since watching this term, it has been easy for me to see what is exciting the flash community the most on any given day; it has also become a good way to stay on top of any new exciting libraries that people are talking about. For example, Voice Gesture an article recently posted on ByteArray.org has been getting a lot attention on Twitter. It demonstrates a new Voice Recognition library built leveraging new features for Adobe Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2.0.

Squawq has already provided me with countless insights into communities and brands I am interested in, and it will just get better as it keeps collecting data. So this year, at Colle + McVoy we are giving the gift of data. Giving our clients a way to measure what is being said about them at a time when that really matters.

We were given the opportunity to create a quick project that we could show to other groups that share our interests. We created a mural, using rear-projection and top-mounted camera. The camera sends activity information into a Flash application that triggers animations. We decided to show the many styles of cycling and have some fun with it! I worked on this project with Grant Eull and Barrett Haroldson.

Printing our mark in the event program brings the users one step closer to experiencing the site; since there would be no need for them to print out a mark. Since Ad Week took place in New York and we are in Minneapolis, we wanted to connect the two. Holding the mark right-side-up shows you a Minneapolis sky-line and tweets relating to @collemcvoy, rotating the mark upside-down shrinks the Minneapolis sky-line and reveals a New York sky-line with tweets relating to Advertising Week. It was a pretty fun project to develop, It gave us a chance to learn more about flash-based augmented reality’s many limitations and of course using Papervision3D is always fun. Truly a fun labs-worthy project.
The video below is of my friend Andrew Charon demonstrating the piece. Be sure to visit the site at http://www.collemcvoy.com/big.

YearbookYourself.com is a project I worked on and is currently winning the People’s Voice Award for the Viral Marketing category, more information. I am excited to announce that Snowdin, a project I lead development of, is a Webby Award 2009 Honoree in the Self Promotion / Portfolio category. We also are honoree’s in the Music category for Paint that Shit Gold, a site to promote Atmospheres newest album and Fishington – The Fishing and Boating Capital of the Internet in the Social Networking category. It is great to see such appreciation for our work.

“What Matters Most is a real-time news aggregate built on my custom multi-touch hardware. The applications aims to determine what media people truly care about. Polling stories from the popular aggregate service Digg, content is displayed hierarchically starting at the top-level container topic. Navigating allows the user to drill-down into topics, categories and stories, as well as the surrounding user conversations. ”

Unfortunately, all of the documentation is from its first installation at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. The computer running that installation was a three year-old MacMini and had difficulty supporting the applications cpu needs, particularly the scattered conversations. In preparation for Make: Day last week, I made several improvements to the application; resolving lag, adding comment panning, and allowing an alternate organized conversation view mode. It was well-received, I talked to so many people my voice was sore for the rest of the day.

To view video of the project check it out at workofkylephillips.com.