NOTES

Recently we ran the second trial of our AccessLab project. We are iteratively developing a workshop format that works across a wide range of audiences, helping people to access and use scientific information. This post covers some of the changes we made to the format, what worked and what didn’t, the feedback received, and what we’d like to change next time.

How do viruses evolve and switch to new hosts? Using virus structure as our basis we're designing a new tangible interface to explore the evolution of viruses, together with a game world full of host species that are affected by how you shape your virus. This post outlines the prototyping to date.

Once we acknowledge that weaving and programming are part of the same technological timeline, we can begin to look at the history of weaving as a eight thousand year long tale of human relationship with digital technologies - and use this long view to research new approaches to software engineering, a field with a much less developed history and many interesting problems to solve.

I'm writing this on the train with a slightly sleep deprived brain fizzing and popping from thoughts, ideas and conversations from this year's Algomech festival in Sheffield. The Penelope project took a significant role in the festival, with the group's participation in the Unmaking Symposium, the exhibition and also testing our latest weavecoding technology at the Algorave. I'll be writing more on the algorave in a subsequent post.

Thanks to Paul Chaney who runs The End of the World Garden, we had an opportunity to trial a short workshop based on our Farm Crap App and prototype Allotment Lab on his two-acre forest garden site in Cornwall. This was our contribution to the Bank Holiday Weekend Haymaking Extravaganza (along with a bit of hay-making too).

The genetic model we were working on previously has now been ported into a browser compatible form and connected to a new tree visualisation that displays the species that emerge as the host population adapts to a virus infection. It's still a prototype with rough edges, but have a play with it here, some example pics:

We have two projects where we’re building tangible interfaces – Penelope and Viruscraft. This blog is an exploration of tangible interfaces, harvesting thoughts from the worlds of neuroscience, choreograhy, cognitive science and education to see what we can learn to guide our research and design directions.

The philosophy underlying contemporary 'seamless' technology production seems to be one of endless energy, bountiful resources and waste being someone else's problem. Naive working assumptions of some form are a requirement when designing for the future, but do we believe in these enough now to make them useful? Flashy 'aspirational' tech videos of ever thinning devices disappearing into the 'cloud' seem to be less common than they once were, so …

After triple checking the schematics and design files and ordering 80 PCBs (50 sensors and 30 i2c boards) there was an anxious wait for them to arrive and do some initial tests to find out if there were any mistakes. We now have enough boards to make two new pattern matrix devices, one 4X4 and one 5X5 - the plan is to evaluate the design and refine it for future …

The concept for the viruscraft game is to have a realtime genetic model or simulation of the host evolution which is adapting to the properties of a virus you are building (either on screen or via a tangible interface as part of an exhibit). This model needs to be realistic, but only up to a point - it can be more of a caricature of biology than a research model …

We launched the accesslab project last week with two pilot workshops. This is a write-up of how the workshops were run and why, together with some of the feedback and modifications we will make in future.

A few weeks ago we kicked off the new Penelope project, one of our first jobs was to deliver the prototype pattern matrix (built with the help of Makernow) to the Museum of Casts of Classical sculpture in Munich for exhibition over the summer as part of our Penelopean lab. Our next mission in Cornwall is to design new pattern matrix hardware so we can start manufacturing a small run …

Following on from the first viruscraft workshop, we can now start planning the viruscraft game. The field of virology from genetics and interactions on the microscopic scale to the spread of disease and it's effects on the ecosystem is huge, so we used the workshop primarily to identify the core things that are the most important to convey, and promising ways we can use to explain them. Getting high quality …

Moving Mongoose data from Uganda to the UK is a problem as the current Mongoose2000 system has no automatic data transfer step. Dave and I sat down and tried to think of some stratagies.

For the Accesslab workshops this week, Hoon has devised a menu with a mix of cultivated and foraged ingredients. The workshop is all about helping people to access peer-reviewed scientific literature to benefit their work and artistic practices. We've spent a bit of time applying the same process to the ingredients that Hoon has chosen for the food he will make for the events.

The first workshop for Viruscraft is now complete – merging biologists with craft practitioners and researchers, we began to prototype a tangible interface game to understand why viruses infect some hosts but not others. This blog covers the event and our notes for future events.

In 2015 the "Weaving Codes:Coding Weaves" project was a chance to investigate a whole bunch of new things: building new forms of hardware, make tangible programming interfaces, taking the long view on technology and investigating other digitally based societies, such as the Inca with their Quipu knot databases.

This work has fed into so many new projects that it's great to be able to announce our participation in the new …

During my week at FoAM I worked on the project Molecular Soundscape which I am developing with chemists at Newcastle University. The aim of the project is to develop sound based work which can accompany visualisations of protein dynamics both to communicate the process of drug design to non-specialists and to aid scientists in analysing the effects of experimental drugs on specific proteins. The scientists I am working with have …

An overview of our Tanglebots workshop, re-developed for autistic young people and their families, together with the Cultural Minds research group from the University of Exeter. What we did to adjust the workshop format, what worked and didn't work, and changes we'd recommend others make if they run similar events.