MUSICAL FELT INTERFACE
Stephanie Farah
Structural Materials and Processes
Professor Mary Liz Sargent
Spring 2011
PROPOSAL It seems to me that materials are moving in two directions. They are either driven by the environment or science or sometimes both. I am interested in pursuing this idea of emotional design and also looking at how traditional “craft” can be combined with advancing technologies. For my final project, I wanted to explore the idea of taking an organic material and applying it in a very tactile way to a digital product. Its purpose is to explore the meaning of “good design” as it pertains to consumer products. I used deconstruction as an exploration of the form, function, and usability of a product by way of emotional response. When the objects in our lives are all made out of disposable materials, what will happen to the idea of vintage goods? More and more of the objects that we live with are plastic and temporary. I feel a sense of nostalgia for all the beautifully crafted electronics that were built to last, to be cherished and repaired, rather than thrown away and replaced with the next bigger and brighter thing the moment they falter. We are loosing the ability to see ourselves in the objects we own… no history. Because technology is going to be put in everything, and technology constantly changes, we are going to have to replace everything we own every couple years. We need to take into account the idea of digital heirlooms, something to store meaning and that can be handed down for generations. So, I started thinking about the objects in my life that are meaningful to me: photos, my mom’s old jewelry, vintage boots, etc; and discovered that I don’t really care about the technological hardware in my life. I care about what my computer has stored, because it embodies memories, but not the computer as an object itself. A big part of sustainability has to do with creating value in products through meaning and human connection. I am interested in the idea of really tactile and soft interfaces, something you can really sink your hands into in an organic way… thats missing from electronics. Felt, besides being soft, is also very durable. What would happen if we applied felt to a radio or a speaker that could play music? I am interested in producing a normally mass-produced, hard, rigid object as something soft and puffy and with an obvious human touch. This project is concerned with emotional design and how it influences user experience.
Digital Heirloom Let’s make technology more like a favorite stuffed animal
Stuffed Animal
Technology
comfortable soft dependable nostalgia dependable memories history priceless special passed down precious old
growth useful convenient connection disposable fast detached sterile limiting global network status
WHY FELT?
Felt, besides having great utility (water-proof, insulation, etc), is a soft, spongy, and very durable material; so, I thought it would be a great candidate for making a soft interface to electronic components that would stand the test of time, wear, and become part of you. By ‘felting’ together natural wool and steel wool, I was able create conductive felt.
Making Conductant Felt Learning how to make your own conductive material can be very useful when you want more control over the end product. This material can be as thick or as thin as you want and you will have control over the amount of conductivity. Plus, once you have the conductive fiber mixed, you can get very creative with how you use and design with the fiber. You can create simple digital and analog switches are more complex circuits. Materials and tools: * Fiber - combed top that is 100% sheep’s wool is the easiest and most accessible to use, however you can use other blends, batts and so on * Fine Steel wool - find steel and other metallic wools here: lustersheen.com * Hand carders - you can use pet brushes if you do not have hand carders * Upholstery foam - at least 1 inch thick, can be found at any craft store * Dry felting needles - I used triangular size 38 needles, good for courser fibers *15 Range Digital Multimeter - used to measure the conductiveness in the felt, you can buy it at Radio Shack Before needle felting evenly distribute both the steel wool and regular wool as best as you can, placing one layer of fiber down, then laying another one on top perpendicularly to the first one. You always want to lay your fiber in a criss-cross pattern in order to produce a strong textile in the end. It can be seen as the equivalent of the warp and weft of a woven without weaving.
Testing the conductivity Take your multimeter and set it to the the OHM setting. Places the probes on opposite ends of the material. Start testing with the dial set to 2m and then dial it down towards 200. The meter should go from .000 to numbers If it says 0L it has no connection. If it says .000 it has a perfect connection. Any numbers you get will be the resistance. How can it function as a Resistor? More resistance means less power gets to the bulb. .000 = bright, .445 = dim, 0L = Off. When more metal touches, there will be less resistance. If you separate the layers of steel wool far enough apart, you can create a kind of dimmer switch.
When the pieces are not touching, the light remains off
When the pieces touch the light goes on!
CONDUCTANT FELT SPEAKER
I wanted to see if I could create a small music speaker from the steel
wool felt. So, I first took apart a small amp and separated out the circuit board and the speaker itself. Normally, a battery would be hard wired directly to the circuit board; but I wanted to see if the connection could flow instead through the felt. I wired the positive connection of a battery to one piece of conductive felt and the negative connection to a separate piece of conductive felt. It is very important that these pieces do not touch, for they could short circuit the speaker through the crossing of the wires. The structure I created had one piece of conductive felt on the front which was wired positively and one piece of conductive felt in the back which was wired negatively. There is a piece of foam on the inside adding to the shape as well as creating an insulation between the two conductive layers. The rest of the piece is felted with regular wool to keep the connection strong.
The structure itself became part of the technology. Instead of hardwiring the circuit board to the battery, the felt becomes this connection. Something rigid like wires becomes transformed into something soft and accessible. This object explores the notion of form following function and what happens when you reverse that paradigm. In the context of design professions, form follows function intuitively seems to make sense, but on closer examination it becomes problematic and open to interpretation. Linking the relationship between the form of an object and its intended purpose is not always by itself a complete design solution. In this scenerio, I created a form that was reminiscent of a childhood toy... which is something we all form emotional attachments too. Emotions have a crucial role in human ability to understand the world. Today, users buy a product, not only for functional aspects of it, but also they are attracted to emotional usability of the product. Therefore, designers need to be more focused on emotional aspects of design. The products that are designed based on emotional design are more desirable and bring more satisfaction to the user.
RESULTS
Soft Musical Interface With the integration of conductive fibers, felt can become a matrix for computation, allowing the material to sense and actuate. Conductive felt allows electricty to pass through the material, making the textle the wiring that enable independent micro controllers to communicate. Furthering my exploration of conductive felt, I wanted to see what would happen when it was given the power to control with sound when experimenting with second-hand electronics in a DIY fashion. I discovered early on, felt’s ability to act as an “on/off ” switch when connected to power. To demonstrate this idea more fully, I took apart an old toy from a thrift store. Using the circuit board inside, I was able to connect wires directly from where the different sounds came from to the conductive felt. Connecting conductive felt to an audio device involved removing the rear panel of the device and connecting any two circuit locations with a “jumper” wire, sending current from one part of the circuit into another. The results were then monitored through the device’s internal speaker. What I created is an interactive musical experience with the felt. By touching different pieces of felt together, different sounds can be played. It represents the idea of connection and how aesthetic value, immediate usability, and highly randomized results are often factors in the process of successfully creating “smart textiles”.
Alligator clips connected to the contacts the “keyboard” of the circuit board
Final Product
The results of these two experiments suggest that there is a hidden potential with conductant felt, and the purpose of creating it is to explore this unseen world and unlock the potential of the textile with experimentation. This project explores the idea of how emotional design is connected to sustainability, with particular emphasis on product attachment. With heightened environmental concern and the recent global economic crisis a new challenge has emerged for design; to take a more responsible role and tackle sustainability more innovatively. Not only do designers of the future need to be aware of common sustainable design thinking they should also be aware of more innovative approaches, such as, how to emotionally connect with the consumer and design products that consumers want to take care of, cherish, and repair instead of replace. Rather than adopting symptom focused strategies, such as design for recycling, designers should be designing products that users can maintain emotional relationships with and that users are reluctant to throw away. This area of design is missing in technology. How can design solve this?
The Softer Side of Technology