I’ve been researching bits & pieces of inexpensive tech for art installations that bridge the physical/digital gap in interesting ways. In particular I’m developing tangible music ideas (moving beyond touchscreens and pixels) and integrating vision / motion capture into my realtime gfx stuff. Figure I’ll share some interesting building blocks. First, I recommend the great RFID visualization experiments and process writeups over at BERG and nearfield.org. The reader and tags are reasonably priced if you want to try.

Personally I’m into capacitance sensing for making touch-responsive objects. Here’s a technical article for beginners. If you’ve got an Arduino it’s one of the simplest circuits to build: a resistor, capacitor and, um, any piece of metal. The CapSense library‘s a great intro. Getting more advanced, the MPR121‘s a tiny, inexpensive chip that handles 12-channel touch for you. I’ve got one coming in the mail and am looking forward to tinkering. With multiple sensors you run into interference problems, but I found a neat paper on fighting these effects. (Love this spread-spectrum sensor but it’s waay more advanced to build.)

I liked this post at CDM on using the Kinect as an OSC music & video controller, lots of good starting points there. Another one shows live VJing with one using OpenFrameworks and TUIO. The NITE skeleton tracking component is available for OSX, as is the OSCeleton code. Kimchi and Chips have videos showing the promise of motion tracking + projection mapping.

Things are afoot, readers. Today I leave the steady day job in favor of these wild, crazy, hopeful adventures we’re creating in Detroit. (No, I’m not moving there… for now. San Francisco is home. ) Energy, support and connections have been building and it’s time to devote myself full-time to building out some killer websites and supporting our team in Michigan. And document the process here. So what’s good and exciting?

• This Xconomy story from last week, The “Disney-Sized Imaginations” at Loveland Are Out to Reverse Detroit’s Decay with Digital Maps does a terrific job recapping our story and explaining what we hope to accomplish.
• Jerry and Mary gave a brilliant talk at TEDxDetroit. The video’s here, specifically in Session 3 at 31:10.
• All the work going on at the Imagination Station. The first art installation, Salvaged Landscape by Catie Newell, opens on October 30. The team’s been out there relentlessly tearing down and cleaning up the property with volunteers out in force.
• Buy a Frame continues to gain momentum. Just a week or two ago Erik from Lemonade came to us inquiring about using the micro approach for funding the next project. So I banged out a simple site to accept purchases of individual movie frames, and in the two days since launching we’ve raised nearly $5000 towards telling this story of hope and determination in Detroit. The comments from our generous producers just radiate the conviction that this story needs to be told. Seriously, spend some time over there:

“Believe in the impossible, for Rebirth is yours to accomplish. Sending best wishes, Detroit. Love, a New Orleans Girl.” –Angela

“Detroit is resurgent. Ideas combined with action will create the positive change we need. Don’t let your ideas go to waste.” –Marcel

“As a born & raised Detroiter I’m a big believer that great things can & are happening here. Thanks for letting me be a part of this project.” –Andy

“I have $197 in my checking account and I’m buying 24 frames of Lemonade: Detroit. It’s that important.” –Tyler

• The inchernet.com site will evolve; many possibilities for making a difference in revitalizing & shrinking the city here. We received an letter from an unexpected, first field tester:

I was getting frustrated using the bid4assets.com spreadsheets to locate potential Wayne County tax foreclosure auction properties. I just don’t know the city neighborhoods/zip codes/streets well enough, as a whole, to use a huge-ass pdf fruitfully. Philip mentioned Living in the Map on inchernet.com. Then, I remembered seeing it in a TedX. Anyway, the visual really helped ferret out properties in areas I’m familiar enough with to investigate a little deeper. I picked out 78 properties from New Center to Downtown and went on a LONG bike ride yesterday. 22 miles later, I can give you an interesting review on Living in the Map. When it gives accurate data for properties, it’s indispensable. This type of mapping is long overdue.

• There are so many goodies I want to develop for our loyal inchvestors at Loveland to get creative with their land on the web. Really leveling up the micro-city-building tools and story there. We’ve had to put this on hold in favor of all the other awesome developments and related projects. But seriously, another round of site renovations is in the works and I’d love to reward the early colonists who believed in us and staked out their inches.
• Upcoming collaborations with Rita & Josh at the Imagination Age / Dancing Ink Productions. I met them through their early incherest in Loveland, and we’ve got exciting new projects in the works. Stay tuned, something will be revealed at TEDxNASA, November 4.

First though, a romantic weekend getaway on the coast, away from all things Internet. See you soon! <3

I’ve been working with the Lemonade: Detroit team for the last week to develop a micro-fundraising platform and make this film happen, and today we launched at #140conf Detroit. We invite people to purchase “frames” of the 90-minute film thereby becoming producers of the movie. And since there’s no limit on IMDB to the number of credits, everyone will be officially listed as such. Come see & join in at buyaframe.lemonadedetroit.com.

If you haven’t seen the trailer, please take a minute! I feel it really captures the passion and hope of the place and am very excited to see this movie take shape and be a part of it. This is the first time we’ve expanded the buy-an-inch model to another project – so far the response has been great!

Loveland partners with the Lemonade: Detroit filmmakers.

Lately I’m collecting a lot of design writing — these are great posts about building community sites.

Applying “A Pattern Language” To Online Community Design. I recommend this social web perspective on Christopher Alexander’s classic study of how towns and buildings function & how we create successful shared spaces. Excerpts:

A Community of 7,000: Communities that are too large are not effective. While this doesn’t mean you should limit the size of your overall website, you should consider ways of creating smaller sub-communities within the website if it is big. Creating sub-communities within the larger whole is one way to go about this. Another option is to limit exposure to the full membership… The purpose here is to make each member feel as though they matter in the grand scheme of things. If the user sees a membership roster that includes a 100,000 names, they’ll feel like a tiny fish in a huge pond.

Your Own Home: Everyone should have their own home in the real world, a place they can go to at the end of the day that’s safe and secure. In the online world, this would be the profile page. People want to customize their home, make it their own, host friends there, put their mark on it and let people know that this is their space and that it reflects their personality. In the online world, people want to do the same thing.

Short Passages: Moving from one profile to another should be quick and comfortable. You want members to interact with one another, and so the pathways between them should be inviting. Think of ways to encourage interaction between members along these passages. One way to do this is through comments on the activities of others.

(If you dig architecture or the metaphor of websites as buildings / living space, you may enjoy Design from a Diagram.) I found good advice about applying Alexander’s methods in everyday design work in Ryan Singer’s “Designing With Forces“ talk (52 min). He suggests that instead of starting out your site / product by making a list of requirements, we look carefully at the surrounding context and think in terms of the “forces” acting on it, e.g. “I can never remember to make followup phone calls,” “I hate data entry” or “I need to pick up a teakettle without burning myself.” It’s helping me sketch a cohesive vision for a web app today.

Metafilter’s Matt Haughey wrote up great community tips I keep returning to. MeFi’s always stood up as an example of a respectful, well-managed community with a high signal-to-noise ratio. From his introduction,

I hate the term User Generated Content. I never use the phrase when talking about this stuff and I’ll never use it when writing about it. I consider it a pejorative that reveals a lot about the person saying it. It makes members of your site feel like dutiful robots, crapping content that you convert into cash.

Johnny Holland’s What’s Up With Social Objects?

Which is a more accurate description of gifting on Facebook: the relationship between two friends and the practice of giving gifts on birthdays, or the graphic of the beer mug? The more accurate description of user interaction would be that which explains the practice of gift giving, the symbolic act of presenting a gift, the Facebook tradition of recognizing birthdays, and the social space in which gifts are seen by others such that birthdays create a cause for a stretch of social interaction.

And tips on applying social interaction design thinking:

All content in the world of web 2.0 is communication. Yes, it is information and it informs. But it is created and left behind by countless individual acts of communication — with the intent to communicate. If you view social web content as information you’re still in web 1.0.

Designing for Social Interaction breaks down the idea of online “friends” into several types and gives tips for designing social web apps around them.

The average number of friends on Facebook is 130, and many users have many more. Yet despite having hundreds of friends, most people on Facebook only interact regularly with 4 to 7 people, and for 90% of Facebook users, 20% of their friends account for 70% of all interactions. We also see this with phone usage. We have hundreds of people in our phone contacts, yet 80% of phone calls are made to the same 4 people.

Our social web tools must start to understand the strength of ties, that we have stronger relationships with some people than with others.

“I just invent, then wait until man comes around to needing what I’ve invented.”
— Buckminster Fuller, quoted in Jack Cheng’s essay.

We struggle sometimes explaining LOVELAND to people. “You’re making a group buying system for houses?” they ask, or “People bid on land auctions for cheap?” in an attempt to find the nearest conceptual anchor or category. They read the website and still have no idea what it’s about. We’re still learning how to communicate the vision and the very real things we’re building (it’s actual land, made of dirt, but also online), and although some friends ‘get it’ I still feel a gap in understanding holding us back.

The problem with the Newton wasn’t any physical or technical problem. Those are easy to surmount. The problem that broke the Newton was that nobody was prepared for it. There was no mental slot in people’s heads that the Newton could glide into.

There’s a cozy, pre-existing slot in people’s brains that the iPad fills quite nicely. “Oh,” they say. “It’s a big iPhone.”

You don’t just slap a product out there and hope it will succeed. You have to prepare people for it.

— The iPad, and the Staggering Work of Obviousness, @amyhoy

Is this a game company, a charity, community development organization, a social network site, or a real-estate investment company? All of these and none. VCs scratch their heads trying to categorize us. I can relate to Mike at Crowdspring when he writes, “Our business model, and others that are popping up every day, is still so young that the milk in my refrigerator is nearly as old. A challenge faced by many of these businesses is to find a way to introduce to the market, and to their potential customers, a new-to-the-world product, service, or category.” Remember how Twitter seemed pointless to so many until it finally ‘clicked?’

I joined LOVELAND precisely because of its novelty. I had never heard of anything like it, and given the chance to create something new rather than yet another social network I jumped in. We didn’t know what would happen — heck, one of the first ideas was an augmented reality flower garden on the floor of an art gallery — but we were captivated, and so are hundreds of others. We’re making a playful platform for people to own land and gather around their shared spirit of building something where nothing was. By growing our Detroit presence we’re inviting the world’s attention and energy into a city fertile for creative reimaginings of the urban landscape. Our inchvestors all come for different reasons; go read the delightful things they’ve written so far. I’m excited to be crafting the tools and space to let them show us how big they can make an inch. We’ve profiled a few active projects happening on this technical foundation.

Come meet the gang this Saturday May 15th at the micro meetup at Noisebridge, or Tuesday the 18th at SF Beta.