MAXWELL HARPER
AS WORK:
Blueprint for Change Videos
AS PLAY:
THINKER TOOLS:
Personal Feedback Loops in the Cognitive Ecosystem:
“If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don't bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.”
- Buckminster Fuller
I define a "thinker tool" as one that, through its use, generates a novel pattern of information, transmits this pattern by the tool's impression on the user or through its artifact(s), and in so doing enables new thought processes, meaning or knowledge.
Thinker tools tend to work on relatively tight time cycles or feedback loops. Human thought ->tool interaction-> tool impression or artifact-> advanced human thought -> repeat.
Thinker tools can be used to communicate information from one person to others, but this is not what makes them unique to other media tools. Thinker tools work in the personal-scale cognitive cycle. This means that they accelerate and/or alter the user's thought.
Just as simple machines provide mechanical advantage, thinker tools, provide cognitive advantage.
Thinker tools are to the cognitive ecosystem what agriculture is to the natural ecosystem; cultivating patterned information out of entropy.
"Thinker Tools" is my final project for the MIT Media Lab's Media Ventures class. Thinker Tools is a mental model-enabled exploratoration of the history and future of Thinker Tool invention.
SCROMPOST:
BIOMIMETIC COMPOST
How Archimedes Would Compost.
How Nature Basically Already Does.
There are many ways to compost yard, ag and food wastes. Worms, aerobic and anaerobic decomposition among others. No matter how you cut it, compost is a multi-phasic, linear process, and yet nearly all commercial compost devices rely on users to manage a multi-batch system; adding to container 1 until its full then moving to the container 2, and so on-- Lifting heavy containers, vigilantly enforcing proper-bin compliance by guest composters, tracking 'cure times'-- all of this adds unneeded complexities and anxieties. For these reasons compost
Scrompost changes all that-- making composting a simpler, single repeat action- just 'dump and crank.' Scrompost combines a turn-cranked Archimedes Screw inside a perforated solids channel, with a liquids channel running beneath for retaining valuable compost tea.
Inspired by the earthworm itself, this design allows humanity to evolve out of our unsophisticated 'flatworm' era of batched composters and enter an era of "complete," helico-linear digestive tracks.
Don't be a nematode...Scrompost.
HARMONEYES:
GEOMETRY-ACCENTING AUGMENTED REALITY
A visual proportion finder
Set Harmoneyes to “seek mode.” Choose a particular ratio... like 3 : 5. Now enjoy as the app seeks out that visual proportion around in the built, printed and natural world around you.
Set your Harmoneyes AR goggles to “discover mode” and enjoy as it analyzes your field of vision and highlights hidden proportions all around you. Then tunnel through a universe of objects sharing those proportions and learn more.
Set to “synesthesia mode” and play musical instruments tuned to the ratios in your view.
Set to "enhance" and experience artfully designed accentuation shows.
HARMON-EARS:
MUSIC-FROM-NOISE SCULPTING HEADPHONES
"I saw the angel in the marble and then I carved until I set him free."
- Michaelangelo
To focus, meditate, or relax I listen to a lot of binarual beats, wild nature sounds like birds, white/pink/brown noise, etc. I also love finding these combinations in the real world. A city park offers this 'musical' blend of birds, motors, wheels on roads. And instead of a pair of headphones that imports that ambience, or headphones that cancel noise...what I dream of having is a pair headphones that selectively attenuate and amplify specifc parts of the ambient noise signal... to sculpt music out of ambience by carving away select noise.
At first this seemed like it might require complex digital signal processing(DSP). But as I researched the circuitry and process by which noise cancelling headphones work I think I arrived at a technique that will only require a few minor changes to a traditional noise-cancelling headphone circuit. The theory being subtract the music signal from the amplified 'anti-noise'.
I believe that this can be done by adding a subtractor op-amp to subtract "music/signal" from the "anti-noise" signal. This leaves a music-signal-attenuated cancellation signal. When recombined with the noise the result is an ambient-quality/timbre musical residue-- the angel in the stone.
As the goal will be to experience musically-augmented the noise signal will need to be amplified -- this is of course a departure from traditional noise-cancelling headphones. Set the signal to binaural beats, or a progression through various musical keys. Combine with harmoneyes for harmony-amplifying sensorial journey's. I can also imagine an onboard processor running an algorithm which could detect naturally occuring harmonies and/or rhythms, and auto generate musical signals that would then enhance those select harmonies. This would redefine music. And why stop there... Why can't that same processor record samples throughout my day and feed them into a musicalized composition to compliment my world. An on-board omniaudient ambient DJ.
FIRESWARM:
CONROLLABLE SWARMS OF ANIMOID FIREFLIES
Radical Atoms.
Drawing on a number of emerging technologies, I foresee the coming possibility of finely controled animoid fireflies, which will fly energy efficiently, be luminance-controlled and motion-controlled in 3 dimensions.
Remote controlled insects are at least 6 years old now. Chip-mounted roaches and flower beetles have had researchers and hobbiest playing Dr Frankenstein for years.
OPTOGENETICS: FRUIT FLY HEART CONTROLLED BY LASER: Researchers at Lehigh University have controlled a genetically-modified fruitfly's heartbeat with a laser. This experiment relied upon our detailed knowledge of the fruit fly genome. While fruit flies are much less complex than humans, they still share 80% of the same genetic material. The researchers were able to insert a gene for channelrhodopsin, a light-sensitive protein found in single-celled green algae (a field known as optogenetics). This protein was only expressed in the fly’s heart, making those cells sensitive to light. By pulsing a blue laser on the fly’s abdomen, researchers were able to trigger a contraction at the same interval as the laser.
CHOREOGRAPHY:
"y tu camisa tambien"
Every semester in college I danced in the big student dance production. My last semester, I got the courage to finally choreograph. This video shows the better of the two different pieces I choreographed.
Borrowing a simple yet delightful stage magic technique I'd learned years before, my friend and I created this entire piece one late night in the college dance studio.
We began organically experimenting with different combinations of clothing black(hidden) and white(glowing), expressing their different characters in emphatic movements, combining each with different songs.
I still laugh at it to this day. I appreciate the simple elegance; where each character is reduced to their 2 dimensionality, flattened of color, down to an essential form. It manages to toe the line of literal and figurative, narrative and fantastical.. which I find much of dance can struggle with. This very lyrical and paced song provides excellent contours for dialogic progression, while its growing tempo and intensity underpins the increasing drama. We were convinced that with more time and a simple bag of laundry, we could make an entire show from the effect.
As I graduated, I was asked by a member of 'De la Guarda', an Off-Broadway aerial dance production, who saw my dances, if I was interested in working my way into their troupe. They were impressed by the creativity and dedication to illusion. I ended up doing hydrology research in the Colorado mountains... but I still wonder what would have happened had I gone to New York...
INSPIRATION
SAMPLE OUTPUT
CODE SNIPPET
CODEWIRE:
UNIQUE POSITION LOCATOR
400 Digit String, Where No Three-Digit Substring Repeats.
Imagine a zebra-looking, 1-3mm plastic-coated wire, printed end-to-end with a continuous barcode. The barcode encodes a string of numbers where no substring set of three (forward or reverse) occurs more than once. Each substring of 3 is a unique location identifier. This encodes upwards of 500 unique locations.
This idea, admittedly small in application, was conceived as a solution to enable "radical atoms," (spheres traveling on wires/chord) to have positional awareness independent of an internal encoder. This would be enabled by a barcode scanner reading three/four digits on the continuously bar-coded travel wire. This would enable a radical atom to be freely moved from one travel-wire to another and access instant knowledge of positioning.
The string is built off a simple python script I wrote. The code generates a random number, forms substring, compares to present main string and adds if neither the substring or its reverse are in the main string. The string length could be significantly enhanced with a more robust search algorithm. And, while I haven't done the analysis yet, I'm also quite curious how informational densities(and string lengths) compares across various barcoding "symbologies" and number systems.
I could see this concept expanding to fluid / unending QR code walls that adorn physical spaces and offer positional or other information at any interval.
SHOVEL KING:
FROM COLLEGE DAYS
Here's a remake of an installation art piece I made in a college class.
The assignment was "projection"-- use a projected image in an installation art piece. I made a piece in a torch-lit ampitheater where bowed shovels faced a projection of a backhoe. The audience entered to dramatic chanting music and the image was revealed at a crescendo. It was very well recieved by class mates who asked me to setup multiple viewings the following night.
Sure, its a fairly collegiate concept, but I think the attention to the small details made it sing. The hidden amphitheater location, the heirarchical seating arrangement for different shovel types, the concentric rings in the dirt, the angular posture of the shovels, and the anticipation and climactically-timed reveal of the projections all contributed to an enveloping and expressive scene.
PRO TOE TYPING:
JUST FOR FUN.
Sometimes you just have to make that silly thing in your head.