Category / Bear Abouts

This week I ran a workshop at Filton Avenue Primary School to test the new version of Bear Abouts. I’ve been working with creative producer Sarah Warden to plan and deliver the testing workshops. Through the workshop we were both testing the new technology we have developed, and also trying to find how kids use…

We have got to some kind of break through in developing the sensors for Bear Abouts -the system recognizes pages and (although basic) it is very very cool. I’ve been working closely with Mark, and (mostly through his brilliant programming skills) we have developed an algo that detects and translates touch patterns into animations. There’s…

I’ve been working with Mark Wolloncott, who is a unity3d wizz, but also a brilliant game designer and maker. He is working on some changes to the Bear Abouts program. This week we have been testing different ways to get touch input to read from objects. First tests with conductive inks: This Bare Conductive tutorial…

I found out in December that we have been successful in another phased of the Bear Abouts project (yay!). This means that I have received further funding from Innovate UK for the storytelling app project I have been working on for a year and a half now. I plan to work with a number of…

Lots of development on the book app and it also has a name: Bear Abouts! I tested the latest version with participants at Somerset House during the Into the Wild weekend. The app also has a wonderful soundtrack made with a combo of digital sounds and papery noises, which I will share at a later…

I tested the latest version of the book at Now Play This festival at Somerset House. The book (because of it’s unusually papery interface) was part of the strange controller showcase. It was quite amazing that the device worked, and lasted a day of play with the public, and it was also fun to play…

I say cutting string because there is a string that connects the page through this book by the wonderful Willaim Wondriska I’m looking into how those strings (pages) are deconstructed and reconstructed in books. Dan Collier’s non-hypertext book is full of strings. And, well, ahhem. Hatually, they are just arranged in a non-linear relational way,…

New pages and also page holding foot things. Yoop.

Other things that invite you into the fabric of the book: flipping! Flipology is the science of flips in books. No, I didn’t make up this term. There is a resident flipologist on the streets of San Francisco who performs flipological acts as an art, I have borrowed the term from him. A flipological text…

Over the past few months I’ve been learning to use openFrameworks and I am *just* starting to like it because I hactaully made something do something. I’m playing around with having blob detection recognize very very small holes. Oh the joy. Look at those blobs. Oh, and playing with blob-detection whilst wearing a totes blobtacular…

Using cultural prompts (a research method I learned here), I made a set of activities which I sent out families. The activity prompts the participant to do something, and contain blank copies of the following: a map, a postcard, and a picture frame. The aim was to gain some perspective on the way in which…

Yup. Look at my desk. that is how I am feeling right now. I have made a massive mess. I had something really great, and I’ve spent the last few months breaking it and making it not so great. Why. Why? All I have right now is broken code, badly drawn things and paper that…

I have been developing the way in which paper pages connect to the digital. There are various options and I explored each to see which was worked the best. Magnetism I used this code snippet in openFrameworks. Magnets are really fun, however they are pretty unreliable and hard to control (it is difficult to place…

I spent a few days working with a writer to explore and research some methods in storytelling. The aim was to develop narrative for the phonebook. In the end we made many -components- of stories, but not actually any stories. I also looked into some writers experimenting with narrative from such as Eric Zimmerman and…

I’ve been reading lots of children’s picture books as “research” for the phonebook project. I’m particularity drawn to this wonderful picture book by William Wondriska. It has no words but makes many connections. This looks a little bit like a diagram that our tutor Jenny drew illustrating the learning process.

Such great news: my work has been selected to be part of a residency-professional-development-seed-funding programme called MV Works, which has been created by Makerversity and is funded by Arts Council England and Innovate UK through their Arts and Technology Pilot Programme. This means that I am now a member of one of the coolest spaces…