As the prolific pedagogue and founder of The Riverside School in Ahmedabad, India, Kiran Sethi has infused the city’s youth culture with spirit and empowerment. Launching aProCh (A Protagonist in Every Child) early last year, Kiran has set after making Ahmedabad a child-friendly city. “They (children) understand intuitively that the real curriculum is not what’s taught in schools, but what’s written on the face of the land.” At the heart of the organization’s ideology is the fulfillment of the child’s need need for joy, safety, play, and the opportunity to explore the wider world. Bridging the gap between children’s teachers, parents, and their larger community creates the foundation of The Riverside School, and poises children to effect needed change.

Kiran’s latest thinking on how to enact change is The Design for Giving Contest. Through this, an entire emerging generation is called to action. She’s continued to drive home the point “Do not let the teachers drive the project; let them just guide it.”

With over 1300 entries pouring in from children full of earnest thinking and concern the teams from Continuum, IDEO, and the Institute of Design at Stanford were sure to be overwhelmed. As any contest of this size our team was rigorously making sure every entry had fulfilled each category with a level of clarity and conviction. Though, we also admitted how each entry would be its own mystery whose impacts we couldn’t possibly fully grasp: the elderly they visited, the thirsty villagers they spoke with, or the water sanitation issues they researched. Qualifying the entries would be soft, but also hard and fast. Sixth senses were hard to trust on this one.

I will not forget one particular entry. As we were going through many dozens of entries we began to learn their rhythm, their formats, language and tactics. Shivesh Pandey’s entry was different. This 11 year-old dove into a problem we hadn’t seen in other entries. He started to envision a technology device for his local train station. He explained that his motivation was several deaths from people trying to cross the train tracks as unannounced trains wizzed through the terminal. Following his explanation he submitted his genius: a fully equipped, stacked device outlining each feature – in crayon and colored pencil. Without a flinch, he had the answer. He was simply calling for its production and installation.

Though the entry by standard was not as robust, it showed a kid ready to make it happen. This was his idea addressing a problem in his world – straight from the gut. I presume that no teacher held his hand while working through his sketch. I appreciated Shivesh’s entry not because it was a great design, or necessarily even the right solution – but his potential to realize and act on the problem. He thought to outline the opportunity it seemed nobody saw. After all, that attitude struck me as core to the contest. If we can be a part of activating this generation’s custom of giving and support their design thinking, that is a powerful thing.

We’ll look forward to staying involved in Kiran’s work as it surely evolves. Kiran recently shook things up at TEDIndia and her contagious thinking. It seems the contest already has a life of its own – in the best way.

I saw that as of today there are just over 100,000 approved iPhone apps. The obvious question is: how many apps do we really need? While the quantity vs. quality vs. usefulness questions get discussed, there’s a bigger question: wasn’t the World Wide Web going to be the device-independent user experience platform?

Apps are great – having downloaded two billion of them, users clearly love them, but I wonder what this means for the future of users’ experiences on mobile and other devices. While apps are great at maximizing the experience on a particular device, the proliferation of different smartphone platforms means that there are at least five different OSs developers need to think about (iPhone OS, Blackberry OS, Symbian, WebOS (Palm) and Android). Isn’t this just another version of the Windows, Mac OS and Linux battles? (Interestingly, Windows Mobile, while early to the party, seems to be lagging.) What you can do in the mobile world depends, more than ever, on what device you have.

 Certainly the last 15 years have seen multiple revolutions in the web experience (anyone remember html 1.0 and blinking text?). Instead of ‘there’s an app for that,’ just a couple of years ago, we might have said, ‘there’s a site for that.’ But the limitations of the web environment (or the great capabilities of the iPhone) made the opportunity for apps too good to ignore. Each opportunity brings new challenges with it; in this case, it’s finding, choosing and managing lots of apps. In a world of 100,000 apps, the killer app might just be an app navigator. The iPhone App Store today has a lot more in common with Yahoo! in 1994 than Google in 2009.

So we’re only at the beginning, and we know a lot is going to change in the app space. But the right question here is: What’s the total experience that users really want to have? And who’s going to make it happen? It’s time to take a step back and think about people.

For those of you who were never a Boy Scout, the Pinewood Derby is a competition in which contestants build a small wooden car to race on a 40 foot track against other cars of the same approximate size and weight. The goal is to work within the parameters of the rules to build the fastest car.

Several years ago, the IDSA (Industrial Designers Society of America) decided to sponsor a derby car race for designers at their annual IDSA National Conference in Pasadena. The response was overwhelming as designers and engineers entered dozens of impressive cars that would lie, cheat and creatively steal their way to the finish line.

Since that first race in 2004, the competition has raged on, with designers from all over the country fielding extraordinary cars. For this years IBM Unlimited Derby held at the IDSA conference in Miami, Continuum approached their participation in the race in a new way. Rather than trying to create the fastest car, the team decided to create the most memorable car. To accomplish this, we started by brainstorming themes that would be relevant to what’s going on in the world.

The planet is currently going through a financial crisis that hasn’t been experienced in eighty years. We’re all being forced to pinch pennies and find creative ways to save money. At the same time, worldwide concern is high around health threats like the swine flu. Continuum took these themes and turned them into a statement of hope, a piggy bank car called Swine Flew.

Throughout the four-day conference, the attendees were encouraged to add their spare change to the piggy bank. This served two purposes. First, each coin made the car slightly heavier, and consequently, faster. Second, Continuum offered to multiply every contribution by 10 and donate the final amount to design education.

The Swine Flew pit crew members, Jung Tak, Damien Vizcarra, and Kevin Young (many thanks to the non-traveling crew of Jake Childs, Rich Ciccarelli and Bruce MacRae) have returned from the IDSA National Conference and are proud to bring home the award for Fastest Car in the Gravity Weight Class as well as the award for Most Fun.

We’re also proud to say that the generous contributions of the IDSA audience helped Swine Flew raise a total of $1,274.40 for design education.

final blog in a series of 5

There is still quite a bit of detective work to be done. A cursory look at our graphs shows we are using on average 40kWatts (the equivalent of 400, 100 Watt, light bulbs) during nights/weekends and about 120kWatts peak during normal business hours.

From the below graph we can see that during business hours something is causing large spikes. Since this only happens during typical work hours we could probably attribute this behavior to the power hungry tools in our awesome Models Shop, or maybe the elevator. The spikes are probably due to the inductive load introduced when a motor such as a saw or compressor is turned on.

The chart below is a display of power use over a ten day period. You can see the reduced power consumption over the weekends and holidays. I would gather that since there is a small amount of power consumption on Monday May 25th (Memorial Day) some Continuumites are workaholics!

What’s Next

Possible improvements
Migrate data server applications to a proper web server
Add multi client capabilities so we can host data from other users.
Tie in real time power cost metrics
Carbon footprint tie in
Tie in weather parameters such as outside temperature and humidity.

Contribute
If you find this design intriguing and would like to contribute in some way, or if you have any questions feel free to email me at mcosta@dcontinuum.com

#4 of 5 part series

The client application runs on the iMx21 meter reader. It contains 2 endless threads SocketThread and LCD Thread.

LCDThread – each iteration of the loop it performs a frame grab using the EZFB API. It converts the image to grayscale then calculates the average pixel intensity for the square we care about. The pixel intensity is low when the box on the Elster LCD is “on” and goes up when the box is cleared. This thread also draws a square onto the LCD screen so the person installing the meter reader can easily align the video camera.

Images of the meter reader output LCD.
The Kh box is visible, note the O/F text output. 1 means the box has been detected.

The Hr box is not visible, note the O/F text output. 0 means the box has not been detected.

The second thread is the SocketThread. This thread waits for a new measurement from the LCDThread. When a new value is ready it just sends the power value over Socket to the web server.

Testing
I tested the accuracy of the box blink rate algorithm with a test LCD display. Using a Microchip Explorer16 Dev board and a PIC24H processor, I rigged up a simple blinking box on the explorer16 LCD. With this test setup I set the blink rate to .1Hz, 1Hz, and 10Hz to verify my Emeter application.

Calculations
This application converts Blink Time to power in kilo-watts. The formula for this calculation is:

Power (kW) = (.9kWh * 3600s * 200) / BlinkTime
The .9kW and 200 are values taken from the meter.

Data & Web Server
The web server is running Ubuntu Hardy Heron, ProFTPD and Apache 2.0

EMeterServer Application
The EMeterServer has only one simple socket thread. This thread just sits and waits for a new Power value from the client. If there is a new value, it writes it to a MySQL database table.

Web Server
The data server hosts the data via simple RSS feed, and Perl scripts. Any internet ready device or web page could access the scripts or RSS feeds to get real time power use.

PowerRss.php – Returns an XML RSS feed that contains the latest power use value.

graphUpdateLong.pl- Returns a link to an image of a graph of the power use over time.

meterUpdate.pl – Returns a link to an image indicating the power use as a simple needle meter.

GoogleJSON2.pl -Returns a JSON object table containing historical power use. (used for Google Visualizations API)

Insert a link to these files in your web browser and you will see the results

http://209.48.56.105/power/PowerRss.php

http://209.48.56.105/power/graphUpdateLong.pl

http://209.48.56.105/power/meterUpdate.pl

http://209.48.56.105/power/GoogleJSON2.pl

With the recent banning of Speedo’s LZR sharkskin-inspired speedsuits and the exposure of possible steroid use by Boston Red Sox baseball player David Ortiz, it raises an exciting question: What role does design play in the evolution of sport?

Michael Phelps’ eight Olympic gold medals is a record that may never be broken, all set while wearing Speedo’s suit. The suit is modeled after the drag-resistant texture of sharkskin and compresses the swimmer’s body in key areas. Though Olympic records are falling, most world-class swimmers have access to the suits — is this an unfair advantage or an enhanced design?

Andy Roddick hits tennis balls fast. 153 MPH fast. Speeds like these were unheard of in the days of Rod Laver and wooden tennis racquets. Nowadays it is commonplace for men and women on the professional tour to be serving well above 100 MPH. Now that graphite, titanium and ceramic composites are routinely used for weight reduction and enhanced rigidity, even beginners have the opportunity to use something much improved over the tennis racquets of yore. But are the racquets improved or is the game just different?

400-yard drives on the golf course? Not before monster-sized titanium club heads.
Track spikes that are lighter than a slice of 7-grain bread? Not just for Olympians anymore.

Why should full-body swimsuits be any different?

Can a shoe be too light? Can a ski have too much spring?

Should altering an athlete’s equipment be any different than altering an athlete’s body? What is “ethical” body-altering? How about Red Bull energy drink? Can an athlete with a super-reconstructed knee jump higher or cut quicker than one without? How “able” should an athlete be? How soon will it be before athletes intentionally integrate prostheses or have healthy joints and limbs replaced with titanium ones before the original is worn out?

What is “performance enhancing design”? Few groups are asking and acting upon such questions — certainly there are lots of terrific opportunities to evolve sport and enable our bodies to push the limits of sport, but within what ethical boundaries? And how can (or should) design enhance such experiences?

 

Design Overview

The electricity monitoring system consists of two major components. The first component is the utility meter reading device, the second is the data server. The utility meter reader monitors electricity usage and sends the latest value to the data server via TCP/IP sockets. The data server stores this value and serves the historical data through custom Perl scripts for web page display or RSS feed.

 

Utility meter reading in the electrical closet.

 

Overview

 

The Elster A3 Alpha utility meter has a blinking box (called Kh in the manual) on the LCD display with a blink frequency proportional to the instantaneous power use (marked by A in the above image). Every time the box changes state, this indicates .9kWh have been used. This will be our method of monitoring instantaneous power use. 

 In short this is an Embedded Linux device centered upon a Freescale iMx21 processor. It optically reads power usage from the utility meter and feeds the latest power consumption data to the server through a custom TCP/IP socket.

 The main requirement for the meter reader was flexibility. Some other requirements are video input/output and Ethernet. As a result I decided to use an ARM based processor that could run embedded Linux. This would allow me to develop software in a flexible Linux setting using GNU libraries and I would have a greater array of compatible hardware peripherals should I need them. 

Freescale iMX

We have worked with Freescale iMX processors on a few previous projects before so I knew they would be sufficient for my needs.  The iMX21 micro has an Enhanced Multi-Media Acceleration (EMMA) peripheral built in which frees the ARM processor from some of the intensive video manipulation tasks. The M9328MX21ADS development board from Freescale comes with an Embedded Linux BSP making it a very attractive platform for its “out of the box” quality.  Plus Gerry Vahe the FAE at Freescale is an Embedded Linux buff and he is a great resource because if you have ever built an embedded Linux development environment you know it can be a headache at times!

Freescale M9328MX21ADS development board, some notable features: 

·     IMX21 Arm Processor

·      Video Camera

·     3.5″ TGT QVGA LCD module 

·        Ethernet Interface, RS232

·     Hardware based RS232 bootloader ensuring I can never “brick” my device. 

Freescale Linux BSP with LTIB

·     Powerful kernel containing drivers for hardware included with the ADS dev. board

·      Blob TCP/IP bootloader featuring NFS capabilities & RS232 shell terminal

·      Includes GNU arm compilers and libraries

·      Includes a large array of demonstration applications and utilities.

I especially like the flexibility of deleloping an embedded device using NFS (Network File System). With NFS I don’t need to flash the device with new firmware for each build, I just recompile and reboot the device. The bootloader is setup with the proper IPs to fetch the kernel and file system image from my Linux development machine.

Tune in next week for a description of the software.  

 

2 of a 5 part series

Option 1

There are many options to monitoring power use.  One such way is to attach inductive coils around the main power lines to monitor Voltage and Current.  There are lots of products on the market that can be used in a residential setting.  These products require direct access to the mains power lines, but our commercial electrical closet has a main circuit breaker indicating 4000 Amps.  There is no way we were going anywhere near that!  Since we did not want to professionally install any expensive equipment for this initial experimentation stage we opted not to go this route.

from Elster Alpha Plus manual

 

Option 2

The Elster utility meter has an ANSI C12 Infrared data port on the front (marked by B in the above image) offering the ability to read power measurements from the meter.  The hardware protocol is a simple RS232 like-Infrared serial protocol.  We initially considered using this data port to read data from the meter but upon talking to NStar about it they told us we were not permitted to attach anything to the meter itself as this would be a violation of the meter lease agreement.

Option 3

The Elster meter has a numerical LCD display of the total watt/hours accumulated by the meter over a finite period of time.  We considered implementing an Optical Character Recognition system that would read the values on the LCD with a webcam and convert that to power use.  Unfortunately the values seemed to only update on a daily basis.  We wanted at least up to the minute resolution so this method was out of the question.

Option 4

After some research on the Elster A3 Alpha utility meter I found that there is a blinking box on the LCD display that has a frequency proportional to the instantaneous power use (marked by A in the above image).  Every time the box changes state, this indicates .9kWh (kilo Watt hours) have been used.  Finally a feature we can work with!  We will watch the blinking box with a web cam on an embedded Linux device and determine the energy use by monitoring the blink rate.

Tune in next week where I discuss the electronics and software design.

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According to the latest statistics from Market Share, 68% of you are likely using Internet Explorer (IE) to browse the web – and read this blog. My browser of choice (Firefox) has increased its share of users to almost 22%. Safari (Apple), and Chrome (the new browser from Google) round out the top four at 8% and 1% respectively.

The trends however are not in Microsoft’s favor: IE has lost 7% of its market share in less than a year, with Firefox and Safari making up most of that difference. Google’s Chrome (introduced in September 2008) has also taken a sliver of the market.

Quick Background:

Internet Explorer is the browser that comes pre-installed on all Windows operating systems. Since Windows also has almost 90% market share for Operating Systems, its dominance in the browser market is not surprising. Detractors of IE have many complaints including: security vulnerabilities, non-adherence to interoperability standards, and general performance issues.

Safari is the most common browser on Apple computers. Apple has recently ported Safari to run on Windows operating systems, and even included the installation download for users of its popular iTunes software (whether you wanted it or not).

Google Chrome is a very new player in the browser market. Google outfitted its browser with an extremely fast engine for running java applications – a feature that IE and Firefox have quickly rushed to copy.

And, last-but-not-least is Firefox: the browser from the Open Source organization known as Mozilla. I like to think as Firefox as the phoenix that rose from the ashes of Netscape – the browser that enjoyed up to 90% market share during most of the 1990s.

Why should I care?

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