Carpet People

In every Carpet there is Carpet People

by Ester Danelius Stenlund, Martin Magnusson, Jörgen Harre & Suzanna Kourmouli

(cleft) 2006

Website: http://webzone.k3.mah.se/projects/TheCarpetPeople/

Physical Computing 1, B.A. Interaction Design
School of Arts and Communication
Malmö University, Sweden

Introduction

Instead of making a movie based on a book we chose to make a carpet where people can find out the story by exploring it. In the theme Personal technologies, we wanted to make something that we normally take for granted. In every house there is a carpet, but who gets personal with it? We started out by thinking about the related stress factors in our every day life, how we could influence people to slow down for a moment. We got our inspiration from the book “Carpet People” by Terry Pratchett. What if there were people in every carpet? It was a question that kept us going threw the process. Now we believe in Carpet people.

The Concept

Our concept is a carpet that changes people’s mood and generate curiosity while interacting with it.

In the American film Karate Kid, there is a scene where the main character has to walk on a long thin paper, without breaking it. He has to walk really careful and gentle. We wanted to put that feeling into our carpet at first, the feeling that it would break if you walked to fast or to violent. In the beginning we talked about the sound of broken glass if you didn’t walk gentle enough but as the weeks passed and many discussions later the carpet became more of a story, something more than just a carpet with a certain sound. It became alive. A whole village grew under our feet day by day. If you walk fast, and with heavy steps the carpetpeople who lives there will respond. And as you walk slow and gentle you will hear parts of the story and the happy laughs from the village and the fields surrounding it. We wanted to create a story depending on the users mood and curiosity.

You could relate this to, for example Muslims that wash their feet before entering the mosque. And we want to put our carpet in a similar context; you have to do a certain procedure before you enter a certain place, giving time for thought and make the entering more solemn.

Scenario of use

In the beginning of the project we had quiet a difficult time finding the right social context for the carpet, where to use it so to speak. We discussed lots about technical terms and therefore we went out in the city of Lund with our carpet tried to somehow gather our ideas about how to actually “put” this carpet in a social context and how people actually would use this carpet. We placed lots of small carpets in a galleria, just near the entrance in order the see how people reacted, if they just ignored the carpets or if they walked in a different pattern. Some people indeed walked as if they where ignoring the carpets and some just used them for coordinating their own pattern. We choose the galleria because lots of people uses the halls there in a very frequently way, not thinking too much about where they place their feet “just as long as they get to the place in the galleria, that they want”. Then we installed some speakers and a laptop to see how people reacted when they sat down on their chair and placed their feet on the carpet, and at the same time heard sound coming from the table beside them. Another idea we had about the carpet was to place it in a library and when people run on it then a disturbing glass sound would be played to make people think twice before running on the carpet.

Then we had new ideas about using the carpet more as a form of way to explore a whole new world, we got ideas from the book the carpet people, we looked at the carpet more as a kind of map that could some how tell a story about people living in the carpet. So we wanted to tell a story influenced by the book by Terry Pratchett, We then had ideas about the carpet being placed where ever and not being so much focused on just a library. That way of thinking gave us more freedom to come up with methods to tell the story rather then concentrating on the exact social place to put it in. In educational purpose it can be still put in libraries to get a “taste” of terry Pratchett’s work or why not in a school context.

Link to the movie in the very beginning [here] Link to the final movieclip at YouTube [here]

The production

We were looking for the cloth we could use for a carpet, it was very important that it was hairy so we could relate to the real story where the carpet represented a whole new world. We started out with five simple pushbuttons and five led so we could get a result by interacting with it when it was connected to the arduinoboard. Then we added sounds for each button and it was actually there everything loosened up, the whole process idea got clear and we knew how to continue the process. The idea was not to build our carpet on simple pushbuttons and to receive a plane sound. We wanted it to be a little bit more advanced. The idea was to let the user become one with the carpet, for them to experience the sounds depending on how hard they walked on the carpet, not only by the touch or to step on the pushbutton. We wanted to measure the users way of moving her body and the tempo of her walk. So we started to look for speakers and a microphone that could measure the pressure from the users way of moving and produce the sounds after those two factors, pressure and touch.

We all agreed that the sound should come from underneath and it was there the speakers should be placed. So we had to build some kind of a podium for the carpet. We spent many hours in the workshop to build the podium. It should hold around 6-10 speakers, the microphone, the arduinoboard and all the wires. It was very important it should be as low as possible because we didn’t want it to be obvious for the people while stepping up on the carpet. Because of this criteria it made it harder to find the right element with the precise height and with the right Hz as well.

The sound is one of the most important parts so we needed a base as well so the sound would improve. Another moment in our process was to connect the arduino with flash.

In between the production part with flash and the buttons we went out looking for the right carpet. We all agreed in that it should be a hairy carpet as mentioned above and we knew it shouldn’t be that easy to find the one we talked about for so many weeks, we had become very determined to find the one. The one we found in the end was the one that made the whole project so real, a hairy blue one and just as big as we wanted it to be.

The Arduino with the pushbuttons connected to flas

The podium is built like a puzzle as you can see in the picture to the left. It contains 15 pieces of plates in the size 40*40 cm. The small plates are to keep the podium together. The podium is about 3 cm high from the floor. We also built a ramp so we can prevent people from feeling the difference on the height and so that they won’t stumble. The ramp goes from all the four edges from the podium.

It will be holes for the speakers and Plexiglas from above so you won’t step on the speakers and the microphone will be placed in the center. But we haven’t come there yet when this rapport was written.

The podium upside down as a puzzle

Under the carpet there is a two layers of a foil connected to its “pushbutton” on the arduino and in between there is foam-rubber material with cutten holes in chosen places for the “connection”. When you step on the carpet the foil will connect threw the holes and send a signal to the arduino and flash. The code contains the conditions for how you step on it and will send out that specifik sound after how the microphone measured your way of interacting. In the picture to the right we were jumping on the carpet for hours to see if the foil and the foam-rubber should last in the long run.

When we tried the carpet as a simple prototype