How might autonomous driving tech be shaped to support mundane and “non-viable” uses?

As with e.g. BoatSense, there are everyday interactions that could be supported using emerging tech. However, the systems of value required means that the access to this technology is unevenly distributed.

All this talk about AI and the current fuss about autonomous vehicles should trickle down to our little community sooner rather than later?

The community is located on a small island not too far from Stockholm city centre. However, the water surrounding the island, and the deliberate lack of tarmac means some logistical challenges arise. Deliveries of goods end up not making it across the water. Small postboxes on the mainland work for smaller parcels that don’t require a signature, but it’s still a hassle to make the trip to see if there is a letter waiting in the postbox or not. Many other factors make for a challenging environment for goods deliveries and this is an attempt to try to negotiate it while exploring self-driving technology.

With limited time and resources, and to not end up knee deep in the basics it was necessary to break things down and use whatever modular tech that doesn’t require an advanced degrees in its respective field. DonkeyCar was an excellent find that helped me get a 1/10 scale RC car driving autonomously reasonably quickly and cheaply. The platform will be a used Permobil C300 as so much is already done in terms of mechanical and control aspects, and it’s not as costly as commercial robotics platforms.

Getting all the parts up and running was a very interesting exercise that allowed me to dip my toes without having to get in and learn ROS at the very deep end. This is still the plan moving forward, as it’s the tried and tested software solution for this area.

Next steps are working with a local roboticists’ club to get a control interface for the Permobil powerchair up and running, mounting sensors and cargo area on the powerchair, build my own GPS-RTK base station for centimeter level positioning accuracy and figuring out how to use a thermal camera for identifying and avoiding people. And digging into ROS.

This project was prompted by the existence of some very analogue row boats shared by neighbours living on an island in Stockholm. On a first-come, first-serve basis, the boats make up one of several ways of getting across the water, often as a part of the daily commute. However, if you head down to the shore only to find all boats are on the other side, you may find yourself in a bit of a pickle.

Thus, the challenge was to build something that was tech-agnostic enough to be used by both new and older smartphones of different brands, something that would withstand the elements and be precise enough. After going through a few iterations, there is now a fairly stable service in place.

The interface is currently a web app that gives you just the information required – how many boats are available (it is online when the boats are in use; April-October).

It was built using bluetooth beacons and a LoRaWAN node + gateway, utilising the wonderful The Things Network as part of the backend.

Thanks to Greger for hardware hacking, Mikael Sjöbeck for initiating the boat pool in the first place, to Marcel for data wrangling and a few others for helpful input along the way.

I started the meetup group IoT Stockholm in 2013 with a long list of interesting people and companies working in the connected products scene. Since then we’ve seen many interesting speakers share their secrets, successes and failures and pitch their products and kickstarter campaigns on stage in locations from basement makerspaces and startup hubs to glass highrise buildings on the waterfront. Topics and contexts have varied from Dirty Data and Ethics to Tech and Making; design & development and have included talks, workshops and tutorials. The network now consists of 2500 members and is one of the largest tech meetup groups in the Nordics.

If we have access to more detailed information about our consumption of goods and services, does that help us make better decisions?

This is a question I’m exploring through a series of projects. One of those projects is Trippy. We all know that cars, as they are commonly used, aren’t very resource-efficient. Most of the time they are sitting in a garage or parking lot, and you typically have to pour money over them to keep them running. On the other hand, the freedom they give us is unsurpassed. By looking at our own car as a service, can we learn something? Can we more easily compare it to other modes of transport?

Trippy collects data about every trip I make, and calculates the actual cost. Not only how much fuel was spent but also how much it deprecated in value during the trip, how much the insurance cost me and how much the wear on the tyres amounts to. I print this on a taxi-style receipt on my Little Printer to provide a tangible artefact of each journey. The data is collected using the super clever device and service from Automile, tracking the position, distance and fuel use for the car. This is taking advantage of the increasingly connected artefacts around us and is an attempt to make it serve our needs and compensate our shortcomings.

This project was brought to prototype stage in order to learn and understand if it would be helpful and relevant. It is no longer working due to Little Printer’s demise. Bless its little electronic soul.

I’m now working on the next step of this series, a yet unnamed service that helps you understand your grocery shopping behaviour better.

Icons used are from The Noun Project; route by Juan Pablo Bravo and car by Murali Krishna. Thanks to Pelle Lindhe for coding assistance.

I’m involved with the newly started foundation Quantified Planet which looks to index all data streams related to goal #11 in the recently-adopted-by-UN Sustainable Development Goals; the urban development goal. Urbanization is a mega-trend, and we need to figure out new ways to keep the planet and the people who will soon be living in cities happy. One way to achieve this is to monitor environmental factors, or indicators, in our surroundings, and learn from how the data changes over time.

The notion of the “Smart City” and the data streams that powers it are abstract concepts, even to some of the decision makers who take the responsibility of making it happen. Therefore I wanted to present the actual hardware in a way that showed both how ugly and mundane they are, as well as how they may be worn or carried by the citizens themselves. Of course this was also a way to ignite conversation around sensors and what, where and how we should keep them around us.

The sensor smörgåsbord was assembled for QP’s Healthy Cities Summit at Openlab in Stockholm.

Thanks to Hanna and Manika for collaborating on this.

Openlab is an innovation lab in Stockholm looking to address societal challenges, using design methods and iterative refinement.

I performed research around the target group (new designers as well as more experienced service designers), and developed a concept for prototyping as a tool for understanding, communication and creation. I built and equipped the prototyping workshop space called “Make”, and helped run introductory prototyping sessions for students and members.

All photos by Patrik Engström

Nearness is a system for providing glanceable, slightly fuzzy information about people’s whereabouts. The giant ‘a’ shows if I’m on my way home and the 3D printed mini-me lets my colleagues know if I’m in the office, watching over them, or not.

So far it’s small scale and a bit obscure, something to scratch my own itch, really. An iPhone app reports your approximate location to the backend which in turn is polled by your physical avatars. These avatars can then report if you’re nearby or not and are typically built using Arduino, Electric Imp or Particle boards.

App and backend developed by Jonatan Lövgren, help from others along the way.

I’m continuously teaching and advising on prototyping in various forms and contexts, often with hardware platforms such as Arduino, LittleBits, Particle and various types of other hardware. I’ve been involved in formal teaching (Berghs School of Communication, Hyper Island, Openlab Stockholm), community (OpenTechSchool) and at various companies.

The objectives are always different, sometimes we work to express brand values through physical interaction, sometimes we look to communicate a concept to a company-internal or wider audience and sometimes it’s a race to cover as many tools as possible to get an idea of how to select the appropriate one for our next project.

Between 2012 and 2016 I was Internet of Things Expert at Ziggy Creative Colony in Stockholm. As we are soon due to be flooded with connected devices talking to us and each other, design and a critical eye are necessary tools in the quest to tame them. Many new things become possible as the physical and digital continue to overlap, and in some cases fuse, and I try to help manage that shift.

At Ziggy I worked with brilliant people across a range of different things, among them are:

Strategy and business models for connected devices
Prototypes for connected devices
Service design
Interface design
Concept design and prototypes

Mellbratt & Wiberg were asked to help support the new Sruli Recht A/W 2013 collection with narrative, scenography and performance for the launch at Paris Fashion Week. We teamed up with GeekPhysical and others to bring a dark future vision into reality.

A concept for a not so connected object; a soft toy dog that helps you live longer and healthier.

We worked from the premise of research published in The Lancet in 2011; Walking for more than 15 minutes a day or 90 minutes a week extends your life by 3 years.

Brilliant. How can we make this happen for those not interested in gadgets, activity tracking, digital achievements and graphs? Getting a dog can be something that gets you out of the house more, but then you have the responsibility and the feeding and the insurance and the…

Hm. How about a toy dog, that keeps track of your walks, and that is looked after by the children of a household? He sits in the hallway, and calls for your attention by wagging his tail if haven’t taken him out today. After taking him out, he sits back in his place in the hallway, but tomorrow he will encourage you to walk a little bit further if you’re not quite getting your 15 minutes in. That’s all – no app, no API.

This was an AW&SOME project based in a few simple goals:

* Hack habits rather than APIs
* Share responsibility rather than data
* Encourage rather than compete
* Track time, not effort

Zeebo is a mostly functional prototype, and was built using an Arduino, Adafruit’s MP3 player shield, a motion detector and some other bits and bobs in the 24 hours of the Health Hack Day in Stockholm 2012. You can see the presentation to the jury here.

Fjord is a digital service design agency with presence around the globe. They help develop services for clients in industries such as telecom, mobile, finance, publishing/media etc. I worked there for almost a year before moving back to Stockholm.

At Fjord’s London office I did a mix of strategy, concept development, information architecture and interaction design with everything from small to huge clients and research projects. As most of the work I did there is confidential, I can’t share it here.

My masters thesis project with the Experience Design Group at Konstfack in Stockholm.

I worked with Nina Bačun in exploring relationships between people and technology. We created interactive prototypes and fictional scenarios for two case studies, which were also showed at the degree exhibition. At the exhibition we also offered consultation to anyone willing to share their experiences with technology. In response, we offered suggestions on readings or prescribed actions to take in order to gain a more well-rounded perspective on the role of technology.

Personal technophobia and technophilia was a trigger which led Nina Bačun and Anders Mellbratt to the process of re-questioning the world of existing and emerging technologies.

Should exposure to a new syntax of metaphors serve as an additional tool to help people navigate their relationship towards technology?

More info here and at the project website.

Mixology 2 and 3 are featured in Gestalten’s book “Delicate”, and has been performed in many iterations since, all over the world.

Mixology 4 was performed during HönnunarMars (DesignMarch) in Reykjavik, in collaboration with Dill Restaurant. See more photos here and video here.

It started out as a fun way to socialise with friends, but has been scaled up and performed with over 150 guests. That time in collaboration with Fredrik Eriksson of Långbro Värdshus.

Wait, what?

The long story made fairly short is that Prang had her laptop held hostage by the repair shop of a well-known computer/fruit company refusing to repair or return the computer. A fundraising campaign started alongside diplomatic attempts to get the computer released. This time, diplomacy won, to the joy of us all as we proceeded to throw a party using the funds raised. This was the first installment of Mixology and the start of a eating design project spanning several years and spawning new concepts along the way.

When guests arrive, they are given labcoats to put them in an experimenting mood, and notepads to document their culinary trials. During the course of the evening they are asked to follow three simple rules;

1. Compound of Three
2. Only Once
3. Do Tell

Meaning that participants should look to make combinations of three ingredients each, only have each combination once, and that they should feel free to share their experiences and perhaps trade combinations with others.

The combinations are recorded, along with any comments.

I co-designed the event with Josefin Vargö and Prang L of Another New Design Studio and I also managed the documentation of each event. More video can be seen here, and more photos here.

Konstfack Design Talks is a collection of short interviews with leading design thinkers about the use of design thinking in non-design contexts, as well as a series of interviews with researchers and students at Konstfack about their experiences from earlier or ongoing projects.

I designed the concept, managed the project, shot and edited the videos. Willow Tyrer designed the website and identity. The cards above we designed together, basing them on the sound graphs resulting from the interview quotes appearing also in type on the cards.

Play-along with Frédéric Chopin; Nocturne in F major. The player sits down at a piano, where lights are mapped to four keys on the piano. As the music starts playing, the player can take part by listening, watching the lights and pressing the corresponding key, just like in the familiar video game.

I designed and built this installation as a low-tech interactive piece, to be included in an interactive theatre performance. It consists of a control panel built in Max/MSP, coupled with an electronics part based on an Arduino.

I’ve worked together with Nina B. designing and building scenography for the Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship events Startup Day and Good Morning 2020.

Insulinom by Aktör & Vänner is an interactive theatre performance set in a medical clinic. As special effects technician I helped create the illusion.

Photos by Oskar Allerby

A vision for the future of medicine;
The practitioner combines traditional and conventional medicine in a treatment tailored for the patient.

Created with four other students as part of the course Trendspotting in India.

“The Experience Design Group powers your brain”

After the yearly Nobel gala dinner there is an afterparty hosted by students of Stockholm’s universities. In late 2009 the Experience Design Group was asked by the organizing committee at Karolinska Institutet to craft an experience to honor the Nobel laureates. We interpreted and re-negotiated the brief, which originally was to make visual portraits of the laureates. After researching the achievements of the laurates, and designing experiences in line with those achievements, we decided to give every attendee at the party a “brain”.

The evening’s experience started on the buses from the gala dinner to the nightcap, with random guests on every bus bursting out singing “If I only had a brain”. This was received differently by guests, leaving them amused, confused and curious as to what might happen once they get to the party. Upon checking their coats, the guests each received their individual brain. This brain could then be charged with knowledge at different stations around the venue. One station contained written quotes projected inside a picture frame on a wall, one was a whispering station and so on. Every time a guest used their brain, a circular projected neural network visualization placed in the ballroom would respond, and as the evening progressed, the neural network would reflect the accumulated activity during the evening.

Another of the experiences were “Telomere cookies”; chromosome-shaped and dipped in differently flavored frostings. They were wrapped in packages and presented on a wall, and when they were removed they revealed what you might look if you were of a different age.

This was done with the Experience Design Group at Konstfack, part time for about 8 weeks. My role was in co-designing the event and helping figure out the RFID solution for the brain stations and the network.

An intervention in collaboration with Prang L.; an example activity in a larger scheme looking to make public transport more attractive, while also gently questioning our habit of sustained time optimisation.

Krepp-à-porter is a dress responsive to the volatility of markets. The work is based on the hemline index, the old truism that skirt length varies with the stock markets, and is inspired by the worldwide economic meltdown (Kreppa in Icelandic) as well as the eco-design boom.

Working in the tradition of transcending figures like Hussein Chalayan we explore how technology can change peoples relationship to clothes. If the clothes are self-adapting, how does that change the way we feel about them? In the intersection between several disciplines such as art/design, fashion/technology and research/innovation lies the work of Anders Mellbratt and Nils Wiberg. This time all of them coincide in the groundbreaking project Krepp-à-porter; a dress that automatically adapts its length according to the stock exchange. Fashion is changing at an ever-increasing rate – so is the economy – sometimes in a way that has massive repercussions such as the recent global financial collapse. Do people really have time to worry about fashion in such situations? Or is it perhaps even more interesting in volatile times?

There are very few truths within fashion but one of them is claimed to be the so-called “Hemline Index”; the proposition that skirt lengths adapt after the stock market. When the economy is good, skirts are shorter, and in economic downturns the skirt lengths go down too. Pioneered in the 1929′s by George Taylor who observed that skirt lengths not only followed the stock market but even predict it. Two weeks before the stock market plummeted on the collapse of 1929 the Paris runwayas premiered dresses that went all the way to the ground. This predictive quality is the basis for this dress showed at IASDR2009 in Seoul, South Korea.

Photos by Ju Hang, model is Sylvia Benavidez

I developed the concept together with Nils Wiberg, co-designed the dress with fashion designer Sally Ståhl, designed and made the custom circuit using Arduino and Fritzing and built all electronics, as well as co-authored the peer-reviewed paper for the IASDR conference.

To connect a site with tradition and values of a time past, I and Josefin Vargö chose to have Marcus at Stockholm’s Grill Bar compose a drink based on Årsta brännvin.

Recipe
3 cl Årsta Brännvin
1 cl Limoncello
1 cl Vanilla Liquor
3 cl Red Orange purée
1 cl Syrup

Shake and serve in a cooled cocktail glass

A Couple of Morons, together with light designer Daniel Andersson and dancer Amanda Apetrea started a collaboration around movement-based interfaces in 2008. The work has continued through live performance and lab-like experimentation.

When A Couple of Morons was asked to perform an interactive piece using the monolith display at the Re:New festival in 2008, we couldn’t say no. After initiating dancer Juli Gabor, she moved with audio by Nils Wiberg and interactive visuals by me.