Public Speaking

I had the pleasure of speaking at the Pecha Kucha Brisbane, Volume 19 event, held at the State Library of Queensland on the 10th of October, 2010.

In this talk I discuss some of the projects that I have been involved with including the Meet Eater, the Bookery Cook, Commodore and Squiz-o-Scope.

A text-based transcript of the video with media for you to peruse at your own pace.

Bashkim Isai speaking at Pecha Kucha Brisbane, Volume 19

Slide 1

I'm one third of Studio Farrago - we're an Interaction Design agency that's based here in Brisbane. And basically this is just the story of how we formed and who we've become over the last couple of months as we've been running.

Slide 2

As Studio Farrago, our current project that's been really popular is the Meet Eater which is a plant that thrives on social interaction. Rather than actually feeding the plant water and rather than giving it your love and attention like any other normal plant, the way that this one is actually fed is through social interaction.

Slide 3

Here is the first iteration; unfortunately this one has died from a bit of over-loving. There are two presences for this particular installation – there's the physical presence which is located at the State Library of Queensland at The Edge which you can go visit during the break if you like, The Edge is open until about ... oh no wait it's closed it's six o'clock, sorry. So you can go next time!

Slide 4

The second presence is the online Facebook page. There are two ways to actually feed this plant. The first way is by talking to it on its Facebook page or becoming a friend of it which releases a bit of water and it grows and when the plant doesn't get any water it actually dies out.

Slide 5

This was found to be kinda interesting for us because we had this awesome explosion of media that came in at one point and it drowned the second iteration of the plant. We're at the third iteration now – which is actually going quite nicely because it's a little bit more water tolerant so he's much happier.

Slide 6

And this is a video – there's a time-lapse camera on top of the actual plant so you can actually see everything moving and growing live online. This is just a time-lapse of the first couple of weeks of the plants' life. I highly encourage everyone here to please add the Meet Eater on Facebook if you've got it, because it still does need more friends because it's starting to get a little bit lonely now.

Slide 7

Our next project is the Bookery Cook which was developed by Georgie Thompson; she did this while as a student over at QUT. We at Farrago, before we actually formed as Farrago, helped to actually develop this project from conceptualisation to an actual product.

Slide 8

Like Christina said, you can actually see it outside it's in the corner and we'll be there guiding you through it if you have any questions – so feel free to ask. The original concept stemmed from a cook book Georgie and her sisters Maxine and Jessica were writing; this is their gorgeous cookbook as you can see. They're in the process of making this at the moment.

Slide 9

They looked at the context of the fridge as a central hub of a household; it's where everybody kind of comes in and becomes one. They looked at all these word poetry magnets and said "Ok, these are cool because they allow you to be interactive with your fridge but they don't actually give you any context to the fridge itself".

Slide 10

After a little bit of planning and a little bit of designing, they came up with the Bookery Cook fridge. Each of the tiles on the fridge has a different type of ingredient on it and as you put it into its active square in the Perspex area, it generates a recipe for you depending on what you've got in your fridge.

Slide 11

I can tell you I have wanted this fridge in my house so many times, but unfortunately it kind of sits under Georgie's place. I'm very jealous. So this is one of the projects that we did which was a really interesting project for us because we weren't constrained by anything we had really only technology and reality to stop us – but we could do whatever we wanted in order to produce something.

Slide 12

While developing the Bookery Cook, another project that we were developing concurrently was Commodore. Commodore was (in technical terms) a tangible media project with an interaction design aspect on it. I developed this myself with some help from a lot of other people.

Slide 13

The problem was that we found, elderly people weren't able to engage with computer games because you have to learn how to use the computer, the strategy behind the game and then you had to learn how to play the game in order to engage with it. As you can see, this is the battlefield on top here.

Slide 14-15

But rather than being represented on a normal screen, what we decided to do is represent it on a table top. You had these physical ships that you can move around on the table; as you can see my cousin, a young child here, playing with it. As you move these physical ships it commands the navy on the battlefield underneath to go to those particular locations. There's no mouse, there's no click and drag, there's none of that stuff – it's all about immersive development. So you command a navy and when you align broadsides with your opponent, you pull back on the triggers at the end here, and it hits them! And then when they get hit, smoke starts coming out and then they start to burn ... We went a little bit overboard.

Slide 16

The project that we're developing at the moment is hopefully to be supported by the Brisbane City Council and it is called Squiz-o-scope. We're developing this in conjunction with QUT students who are in the back row at the moment – it was their idea we're facilitating the growth of this project as we see some real value in it.

Slide 17

Basically the idea is Brisbane is a beautiful city, but it's more beautiful from afar than it is from a street level. From a street level you're kind of constrained to what's around you, looking up. We looked at places where this was particularly an issue, and we saw that King George Square was a nice place to change with activation.

Slide 18-19

The idea that we're developing at the moment, hopefully, if the Brisbane City Council is in here, thanks, to put together this particular 'portal', if you like. As you look through the telescope, you don't see a zoomed in image of what's around you – you see a camera image of things that are afar. The idea is to create a relationship about what's with you and what's around you so that you are not constricted to your immediate physical area. A lot of our projects are maintained in this tangible media area and this is where we see ourselves as practitioners.

Slide 20

This is who we are, we are Farrago and if you have any questions we'll be outside to answer them and feel free to play with the Bookery Cook and hopefully we'll see you around at the Meet Eater. Thanks.