ITP 3: John Schimmel
For the third in my series on New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, I’m posting a conversation I had with John Schimmel, an adjunct professor there. What brought him to my attention was that John had networked three Mason jars to communicate with each other — taps outside one jar trigger blinking of one color LED in all the jars. The jars work like any home wireless computer network — realized in modern technological terms, but based in nostalgia. The idea began for Schimmel as a class project spurred on by a conversation with his sister about their firefly catching activities as kids.
JM: When did you first conceive of the firefly project?
JS: I was a first year grad student at the Interactive Telecommunications Program, where I work now, and I was in a class called Networked Objects, a class in taking physical devices that you might see every day and you create yourself and you make them talk to each other over a distance. Could be a local environment such as a room or over the Internet or a cellular network.
I had this memory when I was going home over holiday break between the two semesters and I was talking with my sister and we talked about the fireflies that we used to catch in the summer time and we’d put them in an old Land O Lakes butter dish and punch the lid and we’d shake them and tap them to get them to light up. I guess we’d keep them in our bedrooms and by the morning they were all dead, but for that night, there was something nice about that. There’s a connection, we each had a jar in our room and we each had a little plastic butter dish in our room, full of these little blinking lights. I thought it would be a nice project to take on, one to see if I could do it but also to maybe make one for my sister that could do over the Internet from my apartment in Brooklyn to her home in Pennsylvania. Then I decided to make it smaller and work in a local environment.
The Mason jars themselves are that my grandmother would always can tomatoes and vegetables and she had a whole bunch of canning jars. The Mason Jars look really nice. I grew up in the Poconos, so that’s where most of my country boy comes from.
Fireflies, that was something you planned your night around. Fireflies are sort of the main attraction and then your cousins were over and you’d chase them down. A lot of reminiscing.
The technical side, what I really liked is that I had never seen a networked night light and I was wondering if you did that. Would people find a new way to say good night? And how big could the audience be if you had a dorm room or an orphanage, if each one had a night light, could they talk with each other? I want to see how many people could say good night in a different way.
On the other side is the networked object side. We tried to use Instant Messenger and cell phones and email to talk with each other, but it would have to be something lighter but still have context.
I don’t consider myself an artist, I’m more of a designer and a prototyper.
JM: What’s the state of the project currently?
JS: There are just three jars right now and they use a radio frequency, the standard old cordless phones used this frequency, and they each have six LEDs, three pairs of white, green and orange fireflies in its own jar and each jar has its own color, so if you tap on one jar, all the white lights will go on the other jars as well as itself, so you can identify who’s tapping which jar. You have one in your bedroom, and you would have the white one, and I would have the green one, so as I tapped you see the green lights go off in yours and you would know it’s me.
The radios go out they say 300 feet — that was two years ago when wireless for hobbyists were hard to get, but now they’re much easier to get and they say they can go a half a mile. You could have your neighborhood, you could give them to your kids friends, it’s a whole walking talkie scenario.
It doesn’t have to be in light, it could be little sounds, chirps and crickets and stuff like that.
JM: Could anyone use them, are they difficult?
JS: You just plug the jar in, you don’t have to configure it at all. It broadcasts itself and the other jars are just listening. Whenever the others are talking, they just start listening and they don’t have any control to talk back until the sequence is finished and the sequence is four seconds — anyone can tap on the jar for four seconds anyway they want and the others are listening for four seconds.
It’s a nice interface, it lets people jam on the jar, have a little firefly jam session.
JM: Is this the sort of work that usually interests you?
JS: The network side is really fun and the Networked Objects was one of my favorite classes.
I work on Assisted Technology at ITP, which is designing for disabled people. I’m always trying to figure out how I can give myself a project that I can work on networked objects with assisted technology and I think what I would really like to do is take something like the fireflies and give it to maybe a pediatric hospital or a hospital with people separated from families for a long amounts of time and let them communicate. It’s not to be like the telephone or email or that stuff, but to create a presence in the room. Like this is an extension. You could look at a telephone and it has a direct line to an operator who can connect you to someone else, but if you have one jar in your home — or some device — that’s directly connected to another person and you know it’s always them, it’s really nice I think.
JM: People do take comfort in inanimate objects that remind them of other people – this is a real application of that. Could you also use it as a signaling device?
JS: Totally. The idea is that when the telephone and the person who is hard of hearing will see that the light will flash and it will alert them that they have some sort of communication coming in. It could be on the person maybe, in the sense of the Life Alert, where the woman has a necklace with a button that she could push if she falls. That could also receive something, though that could be a little annoying.
JM: We’re talking about these practical, technological ideas, but there’s an elegance to it – it has an application but it’s also just a nice thing.
JS: People are like ‘Oh, you should sell them!’ I would love to sell them, but no one could afford to buy them right now. With the time put in and everything, it would be about $600.
It’s such a simple object that anyone with a little hobby electronics in them could build, but I think mass production would get rid of the glass jar, it would probably get rid of the touch sensor, they would probably on go 30 feet and put cheap parts in and it would lose all its flavor.
I feel like only Park Slope parents in Brooklyn could afford this for their kids, but it would be nice to make it available to people who really would want it.
I have a little free time, so I think I’ll be building some now. My sister’s pregnant, so I would love to get on in her kid’s room.
JM: Do-it-yourself has become a bigger movement, so it’s not unlikely that people might make these for themselves.
JS: It’s becoming so simple that anyone can pop these into a component board and make the same thing – maybe not in the same form factor, but make a prototype pretty quickly. I think that’s great.
I think information should be freely available.
JM: I keep thinking about mason jars decorated with cloth and beans and cookie mix – this is like a technological update of this crafter’s world object.
JS: People do give a lot of jars for gifts, don’t they? My mom gives the brownie in the jar, where it’s some kind of mix layered and it’s almost like a sand thing you would get at a carnival.
I had a weird obsession with Mason jars on eBay and for a while that was all I was searching for. You could get consistent sets on eBay, so they all looked the same, instead of going to a store and finding different shapes and sizes. Everyone knows Mason jars, so that’s nice, and they’ve been around since the 1910s or the 1920s, so they’ll be around longer, after we’re gone too, which is nice.
JM: I’m curious about the artist vs designer aspect for you. A lot of people have this desire to express their creativity in some manner, some people stick cookie mix into the jars, you sticks LEDs – does it open up things for you in regard to that? Can you see the art world a little more gray?
JS: It’s definitely more blurred. When I went to the gallery, I was talking to people . . . I went to Tisch School of the Arts at NYU and got to be with so many artists, I can totally have nice conversations with them, but they’re on a different level and I can appreciate that. I can help them technically and I can help them with the design and the programming, but what does it mean to be an artist? I guess that’s the question. Is it a quick category we put people in to decide things? I think the expression for myself was really nice.
Before I made these three jars, I made an earlier prototype a few weeks earlier. The girl I was dating at the time, it was her birthday, so I made her a jar with just yellow LEDs, six yellow LEDs — you’re tapping on it and they’re flashing back. She still has it — I don’t know if she has it on. I don’t think she has it on. That was more for her.
I’m not an artist because I can’t explain myself.
JM: A lot of artists don’t have that ability!
JS: I have no idea what fireflies actually blink for. Some people say it’s mating, some people say they blink before they die. A lot of people try to tell me different things, but I’ve never looked into it. I consider it a childhood mystery and I sort of want to leave it that way.
I was really interested in the fact that they’re out for a short time of day at a very specific time and they have a really short life span, which I think is beautiful in a way. I remember driving back through New Jersey from my aunt’s house and my parents’ house and there is this corn field that you drive by and right at the top of the stalk, I remember when corn was at its peak, the fireflies are coming out of the stalks, it was just this lovely scene. You wouldn’t even look at the sky because it was so nice to look straight ahead. I have no idea what fireflies do, they just do their thing. I think everyone has a story about why fireflies blink.
I was surprised to know that people in the west don’t have fireflies. I was visiting in Seattle and they were like ‘We’ve never seen a firefly.’ Oh, my god, a deprived childhood!
JM: Is networking your main interest?
JS: I love the Internet, I think the Internet is fantastic, but I can’t stand where the Internet is going right now, it seems like people are trying to turn the Internet in TV and an advertising platform.
There are simple things you can do when you have an Internet connection.
We have this Internet connections that connects people in a thousand different ways and we’re using the same sort of media, very passive, there’s a screen and you look at it. We go to work and we sit in front of a computer then we go home and we sit in front of a television, you’re not doing anything. But if you have these little items around your home that are also doing their own thing — it could be autonomous, it could be you using it or someone else contacting you. The whole Facebook thing where you read a feed about your friends doesn’t really do it for me.
We’re all overloaded with too much information, so if something can be running in the background and doing its work, that’s nice.
JM: Can envision a Facebook app that connects the fireflies over the Internet and allows friends to change the lighting in his house over the Internet?
JS: I don’t know how to really make circuits — when things start getting hot, I turn it off and then re-plug it in. We knew nothing about electricity, we had a general idea of what it does and how to not short things out. It’s fun to watch everyone.
There’s always the simple one of making a picture that can be networked and as you walk in front of it, it lights up the picture that’s opposite in someone else’s home – so we have pictures of each other and you walk past the picture of me in your home and the picture in my home would light up. It’s a common project for the networked objects class – it’s been done several times for the class, and yet you’ve never seen this in the world anywhere. I think it’s been done at least a dozen times at ITP.
JM: What else have you been working on?
JS: I’m working on a wheelchair dj system right now for assisted technology. It’s a ramp system and people on manual wheelchairs can ride up on these ramps and each wheel spins in a direction.
We met this 18 year old with cerebral palsy who was rapping to the nurses and we thought it would be great if we could rig up his wheelchair as a dj system. The left wheel fades and the right wheel scratches.
It’s almost like a bike trainer where you take your wheel and you lock it in. They sit on top of these rollers, he spins but he doesn’t move, so the wheels can detect a spin in a direction and it’s really fun to build. That was the whole thing with me staying at ITP as a researcher, just to bring out these designs from the assisted technology devices that could be used for creativity and expression. Most of the pieces are very sterile and feel like they’re straight out of a hospital. When we started making that, it was a group of two other guys and myself, it turned into this really big idea and we started noticing that other things weren’t allowing people to be expressive and use creativity, everything was just rehabilitation.
In my class, I’ve been teaching an assisted technology class, students have been adapting digital cameras and video cameras, I was really glad to see those projects come through, because they’re just simple hacking the remote controls of these devices, enabling people that can’t hold cameras to take pictures. One child was 14, and he had an obsession with Canon Powershots, so we went in and hacked the remote control for his Powershot and then took a gorilla pod, which is a gorilla tripod that has the flexible lengths, and it wrapped around the wheelchair arm and he was able to use a big button to take pictures – and he took pictures of his school dance – he had never taken pictures before. It’s a hard thing to consider, someone who’s 14 has never taken a picture before, and then just realize that he can’t really hold anyting.
We’re working with the veteran’s office in Newark and we’re going to try and adapt something for a guy who’s paralyzed. Really simple solutions, that’s what’s so great about it.
It’s a mish mash, we find stuff for each other to work on. If I could pull some grant money together and build ramps and build some other projects for acceptability and creativity, that would be an ideal job for me. I love doing those things.
JM: Do you have any plans for these in the wider scope, so that other people can use them?
JS: I don’t like patenting these things, I don’t mind making them open source. The occupational therapists are incredibly bright – you teach them how to solder and you teach them how to hook up switches and they get it right away, so I don’t mind making this stuff open source and putting it out there and saying ‘This is how you adapt a digital camera.’ And it could be a commercial project, because a lot of people don’t have time to make this stuff themselves.
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