I.D.M. MicroMasters Capstone
“Re:Calling”
An interactive story of the effects of digitization and convergence told by those who experienced it firsthand built into a push button telephone from the 90’s
Written Project Description
Example stories included in Re:Calling
The Code
Prototype ReCalling
Project Proposal
Idea Generation
“A technique for Producing Ideas” by James Webb Young is the foundation for generating my idea. I found helpful tips in each but was split between this and Kirby’s 4 step method. The one aspect I would like to “steal” from his guideline is setting a boundary. I think that is a great way to narrow your focus. My boundary is “auditory storytelling of non-traditional topics that incorporates audience interaction.” Some of these sources incorporate some, or all of those aspects. Others focus on methods and items used to bring them into fruition.
Most sources are clickable links, others can be found here
Step 1
Raw Materials
Step 2
: Digest the Material
I began by exploring what Audio is, how it’s perceived and traditional interfaces that we use to interact with it. I went through the process of experiencing the source material and exploring it’s development process and content. I also am exploring the systems/platforms that they’re built on such as Arduino, Raspberry Pi.
Key parts that stood out to me were audience participation and agency, anecdotal storytelling and personification.
Step 3
: Unconscious Processing
I’m still waiting for that “A-HA!” moment but doing various activities such as playing games like “Among US”, celebrating my birthday, and adding LED lights to my stairs. There’s some concepts stewing but nothing has taken hold yet.
Step 4:
“Re:Calling”
The idea came as a phone that allows you to call up stories of those who speak about their experiences with the digitization of the world, what it meant to get you “hands dirty” and why that isn’t always a bad thing.
Progress Blog
11/4/20
Video and Oral Presentation Prep
I will be reviewing the process of building “Re:Calling” and practicing my oral presentation from now until the submission which will hopefully be Friday or Saturday. I will also be working on a video presentation, which will be shown on this page, about use and operation.
11/2/20
Final Look
I put the final touches on the phone in it’s case today and built a basic set including the numbers for the project in a little black address book. I setup a vncserver and ssh to be able to login and view the Raspberry Pi remotely so I can make changes without taking it apart. I will film a short video about its use and share some audio files here.
11/1/20
Audio Refinements
I edited the story files to length, added High-Pass filters to give them a more “telephone” like sound. I structured the files in a directory within the project and setup in code strings, relative paths to each which made the code much cleaner.
10/30/20
Hardware Shell (part 3)
Today was a quick job of soldering a simple breakout board to the keypad for easy connection to the raspi and reuse. I also split, stripped, and soldered a standard 3.5mm TRS audio cable to the handset speaker pinouts to send audio into the headset which works and sounds great. The main hardware aspects of this build are complete and all that is required is some adhesive for the boards and some cardboard on exposed wire to prevent short circuits against the phone’s metal bottom.
10/28/20
Hardware Shell (part 2) and Research
Today I wanted to focus on modifying the code that executes the behavior of the experience. To do this I referred to the book “Practices of the Python Pro” by Dan Hillard. This book focuses on code organization and software design. It helped me identify how to properly implement an OOP solution I had built for playing audio files. It was also instrumental in giving a process to compartmentalizing code to be able to work on it in a more modular fashion. The Hardware work today was to determine the pinout of the keypad in order to connect them effectively to the raspberry pi and pass them to the keypad class.
10/27/20
Hardware Shell (part 1)
Today I took apart two scrap phones I had with the intention to reskin the project in a much more visually appealing and tactically satisfying way. The first phone I dismantled was red and by the internal components were much older than anticipated. After reviewing the internals I was able to determine that the keypad was insufficient due to age and didn’t match the matrix style needed. The handset also was hardwired and lacked the typical 4 pin input. I opened another phone, this one beige, I had and this was much more modern, most likely from the mid 90s, and in excellent condition. The keypad was instantly recognizable and the detachable cord made for easy integration with the handset and raspberry Pi GPIO pins. I removed the bells and circuits for interfacing the old phonelines, cleaned wires and made space for the Pi.
10/26/20
Social Research
At the advice of the staff, they recommended I include a stronger research portion into the project. I researched two additional scholarly articles to strengthen the social aspect of the project. The first paper looks at consumer behavior with converged technology (mobile devices) in a research driven study and the second focuses on the sociological framework of human behavior and how that is affected by mobile devices.
The studies range from about 5 to 15 years old but still exist very much in the realm of “Web 2.0” which the contemporary world is still within and therefore they’re relevant. I found information that is significant to the ideas of mobile and converged devices having effects on society and human behavior including device relation to the centrality of processes.
10/25/20
Prototype Day
So the prototype of the projects were due today. I added a few stories I had received into the code and managed to get them to correspond with the input of a number. I also included a “411” number message for information about the experience and a “911” number to alert those that this was a fake phone, in case it was ever mistaken.
I made a quick cardboard box shell for the prototype components and used headphones to emulate a phone handset. The prototype worked great but the stories and sounds didn’t come through so well. I suspect this is the fault of the headphones and not the other hardware. I made a quick demo video which can be seen posted to the right in the content section.
My key points to work on moving forward are:
More diverse stories submitted by people
A Much better aesthetic overhaul to the project
Refactoring code to work in a modular fashion
Improving overall audio quality of project
10/24/20
Electronic Prototype Pt. 2
I found a keypad library for the Raspberry Pi that helped out with programming significantly. I had to make some changes in the “keypad” class to make it a bit simpler and add in the ability to pass which specific pins I chose to the constructor. After doing this I was able to poll the keypad and get the corresponding values as Strings and store them in a variable.
10/23/20
Electronic Prototype Pt. 1
Today I started working on the electronic prototype of this platform. The key focus is using a Raspberry Pi with a keypad and switch salvaged from inside the phone body. Modern phones and late touch-tone phones use a matrix keypad and so I had one pulled from an old safe I destroyed to use for now. I used a basic button to emulate the phone being on and off the hook. I worked on integrating the software and had the hook working fairly quickly. The keypad would take more time.
10/22/20
Research
I dove into the social and reasearch aspects of the project today. I looked into some books I own such as “Convergence Culture” and “Alone Together” (all cited at the bottom of page). They talked about mobile devices and their convergence from many other uni-task devices into a single multi-function device.
In the introduction of “Convergence Culture” author Henry Jenkins talks about his experience going to buy a phone and only being able to purchase a smart phone and is stuck in a new world where all phones are multi-faceted and a simple “phone” cannot be purchased.
In “Alone Together” Sherry Turkle discusses the psychological aspects of modern day devices. She states that they “provide space for emergence of a new state of the self, split between digital and reality.” She also talks about how devices effect our thoughts on multitasking and perceiving time. I’m interested in talking more about this in my paper as it plays into the themes of the project and some of the stories I’ve already received.
10/21/20
Playing Sounds in Python
I ended up settling on the Pygame Library to be able to play sounds with Python. There weren’t many audio choices and Pygame seemed the most robust in terms of documentation and features. I continued to program a basic sketch that when something happened it triggered a sound and that was successful. I used the “mixer” module and was able to start and stop sounds on cue.
10/20/20
Software Design
Today I mapped out the software design of the telephone’s behaviour. I used concepts from the “Creative Coding” class like Object Oriented Programming to compartmentalize each story and make the code modular and easier to work with. The program has a main sketch and a class sketch to hold the object’s constructor and functions.
The overall program is built like a very simple finite state machine. The three states are standby (when the phone is on the hook), input (when the phone is awaiting a number to be dialed), and playing (when an audio file is playing back that isn’t dial tone).
10/19/20
Social Prompt
I narrowed the prompt down to a specific idea for those contributing stories to the project.
The initial prompt was this:
“What is an item or process in your life that you’ve seen become digitized or performed by a computer? In under two minutes, describe your prior and current experience and how you feel about the modern process.”
I also added tips for good stories which included sensory descriptions, being vulnerable and honing in a very specific aspect. I began my outreach to those over 30 years old to hear their stories of digitization and how it affected their lives. These would become the stories within the phone that those experiencing can dial and hear.
So far I received two stories and will work on editing them in the future.
10/18/20
Research and Idea
I noticed that lately I’ve been absorbing a lot of audio based content. Podcasts, immersive experiences and music have been in my ears almost constantly. Because of this I decided to choose an audio based project. Reviewing and refining that content led me to understand that I would be looking towards story-driven content that included audience interaction. I combed through some books on my shelf regarding storytelling such as Aristotle’s Poetics and critically analyzed podcasts such as “Everything is Alive” and “S-Town.”
During this time I realized that I am consuming a lot of this information on my phone. That’s when it hit me. The phone is now the culmination of all different types of devices and processes that once were confined to their own areas of study. I also connected that with my experience of teaching new media to high school aged kids and having other teaching artists drone on about kids and their cell phones while my class actively promoted their use. Because the phone became this point of contention I thought it fitting to give it that form but one which served it’s original and sole purpose of connecting others.
For my project I plan to have people over 30 tell their stories of processes or items that have now been largely digitized and briefly talk about their experiences with the original an new states.