Linda and Joe will be running a workshop on bike and hub motor assembly tomorrow, on Saturday March 23 in the Bike Cage on the campus of Occidental College. Come on by if you are curious about bike mechanics, and want to assist with the mounting of a hub motor and all the necessary electrical components on a bicycle. We will be working with donated bike frames and components from the Bike Oven and Flying Pigeon. Thanks for their generous offerings!
Our goal is to build a second bike for Sunday’s Arduino workshop. Ready to get your hands dirty!
Place: Bike Cage at Oxy [southwest corner of the Rangeview parking garage, come through the gate and turn right]
Our workshop #2 is happening on Sunday March 24, 2013. Get psyched!
In this workshop, we will introduce the design of the project’s interactive media/music system. In particular, we will explore interactivity and the Arduino microcontroller platform by attaching sensors to the bikes and using the resulting data to control musical output. Specifically, we will be using Hall effect sensors to measure the speed of the rear wheel of the bike, as well as pressure and flex sensors to capture movements of the riders. We will also discuss issues of design and physical computing—using sensors to translate (transduce) action in the physical world into computer data.
Time: Sunday March 24, 2013, 2:30pm
Place: Brown LearnLab, library
The Bike Share will buy some pizzas for us.
The workshop should last 2.5 hours. If you want to get a head start on the workshop, read these two posts by Steve:
We’re excited to announce the first of our workshop series for Movable Party. In this workshop, we will be fitting the bikes with hub motors and testing their electrical output. We will talk more generally about the laws of physics related to electricity, and compare the results of two different hub motors.
Place: Bike Cage at Oxy [southwest corner of the Rangeview parking garage, come through the gate and turn right]
Time: 5:30pm, Friday March 8
The workshop will last no more than 90 minutes. We will have some pizzas! Please let me know via email [hsuw at oxy dot edu] if you’re coming, so I can make sure that there will be plenty of food for everyone.
We’re excited about moving our project forward. Come and prepare to get your hands dirty!
How many times have you gone to a charge station at an airport only to find that all the plugs are being used? Have many conversations not mediated by a cell phone or other mobile computing devices have you witnessed in public spaces lately? It’s true that people don’t engage with one another in an embodied, face-to-face anymore. But sometimes people come into physical proximity when they need something – electricity. They crowd around charge stations or sit awkwardly in spaces around electrical outlets in order to gain access to electricity.
A group of students – Judy Toretti, Jacob Brancasi, Maria Lamadrid, and Cory Bloor – at Art Center College of Design recognized this social pattern and took it to heart in their design of an interactive media system for a homeless youth organization called Jovenes in east LA. Working with the youth participants, the student designers came up with Conversation Space, an interactive cellphone charging booth that requires at least two individuals to step on a foot pedal in order to activate electrical current. The design calls for a coordinated effort on the part of the users. To achieve the common goal of charging cell phones (and other handheld devices critical to the lifeline of homeless youth), users must engage in a face-to-face social interaction. It could be as much as a conversation, as little as a nod, an eye contact, or a chin-up.
The design of Movable Party is meant to accomplish something similar. Like the foot pedal charging booth, our system attempts to transform people’s interactions by redirecting the flow of electricity. We don’t mean this in a strictly physical sense [don’t ask me explain the physics behind the flow of electrons, ask Joe.] What I’m referring to is a design that yields particular desirable social sequences. This design challenges power consumption, a behavioral norm in most public and urban spaces in this country, and shifts our normative relationship to electrical power from consumptive to generative.
Our efforts aim at creating opportunities to generate, instead of compulsively consuming, power. Pedaling is an exciting, eco-friendly, and embodied practice. At an advocacy event like Ciclavia, collective cycling can instantiate the power of human-scale transportation. Moreoever, pedaling comes with a direct consequence of powering a musical performance within our system. This is a participatory event that involves lots of agents including the cyclists on the generator, DJs who will be spinning records, and bystanders and passersby who may be dancing to the music. The embedded sensors and Arduino microcontrollers will interface the system to fine-tune the interactivity among all the participants.
Through a system that re-routes the flow of energy, we hope to articulate the generative impact of pedaling, a goal that involves the translation of the significance of electricity from the physical into the social and symbolic domain. We want people to congregate in a public space. We want them to realize that the outcome of the event – a musical performance – is contingent upon a collaborative process of generating power.
We can’t take electricity for granted. Electricity is not just a physical resource; it is also a kind of social resource that can be harnessed to bring people together. Electricity can be used to power communication that happens in mediated platforms. But we know that already. We hope on at the Ciclavia event on April 21, we will start to see how electrical power plays a critical role in igniting positive and communal social interactions.
* * *
Incidentally, at the airport before my flight took off from LAX, I went looking for an electrical outlet to charge my laptop.
I shared an electrical outlet in the airport terminal with a lady who struck up a friendly conversation with me. “Is that plug available?”
I said, “of course!”
She and I exchanged stories about the overwhelming presence of mediated communication in our society today. She told me that she just saw a mother and her young son of eight or nine years of age dining somewhere. The mother was on the phone the entire time. The son was left to entertain himself.
“Isn’t that ridiculous that we are so dependent on these devices? What did people use to do before cell phones? I guess they talked to people around them,” she remarked.
I said, “It’s funny that we’re talking about this. I’m working on a project that involves the building of a bike generator to power a music event.” I told her the rest of the project.
A few minutes later, with my laptop charged at 84 percent, I disengaged from the electrical outlet and packed up my gear.
Before I scurried off to board my flight, she smiled and said, “good luck with your project!”
Thank you, lady, whoever you are, for your kind reinforcement of the meaning of our project.
We are thrilled to announce that our bike-powered music project will receive funding from the Associated Students of Occidental College’s (ASOC) Renewable Energy and Sustainability Funds. We proposed our Movable Party project as an opportunity for students (from my MUSI112 Digital Music-Cultures class and self-selected student volunteers) at Oxy to work alongside community artists and engineers to construct a human-scale system of power and interactive robotics. Our proposal details the learning goals of project:
This project provides a set of unique learning contexts that focus on applied knowledge, collaboration, and community engagement. Student participants will work under the guidance of community artists, advocates, and professionals in a multidisciplinary project-based environment. Specifically, they will gain hands-on experience of fabricating a complex bicycle-powered generator and components of interactive robotics from raw materials, from design to finish. This experience is particularly valuable at a liberal arts college where engineering and design courses are not offered. In addition, this project provides an access point for Oxy students to engage with local communities while acting as arts and bicycle advocacy partners. This partnership should empower the students to make decisions that would yield a positive impact in the community, beyond campus life.
With the funds, we will purchase the components for building the pedal generator (hub motors, battery, power regulator, copper wire, etc), and the interactive part of the system (sensors and Arduino microcontrollers). Our plan is to gather all of materials this week and start hosting workshops on and off campus throughout the month of March. Fabrication workshops will take place on campus at the Occidental Bike Share/Bike Cage, and off-campus at The Knowhow Shop, a design and fabrication studio and co-op in Highland Park. The specific time and place of workshops will be announced on this website and through Oxy-related channels.
Besides the launch at Ciclavia on April 21, 2013, we are in the process of planning an on-campus launch to raise awareness for green energy and sustainability and introduce our system to the grater Oxy community.
Making this project educational is among our top priorities. We’re excited to work with Oxy to demonstrate the capacity of human-powered energy through creative practices.