Sensing Senors

In our first class for Interface Lab - we discussed a fundamental question that addresses the name of the class.

What is an interface?

Rather than a concrete definition, we listed examples of devices we interface with, and created a sketch of just how many devices the modern human body interacts with.

To further drive home the point, our homework was to take a walk around our neighborhood, ideally a routine walk, and take a count of every interaction with a sensor we see or experience. For me I chose a walk down 8th St / St Marks in Manhattan, This quarter mile stretch connects my home to my local grocery store, my pharmacy, and R/W/6 subway lines. Today I walked this route to get home from the climbing gym on a rainy summer night.

An estimation of the route I took (exact location changed for privacy)

Throghout my route I was pleasently surprised that I interacted with less devices than I expected.

I put on my noise cancelling headphones to drown out the car noise on the east village streets, using the on device controls to play, skip and change volume.

I have a hard time remembering a time before noise cancelling headphones

I turned on my air conditioning through an app on my phone to cool down my apartment by the time I arrived

Summer game changer

I waited impatiently for the traffic lights and crosswalk signals to show me when I was allowed to cross the street. Because I live in one of the few places in the country whose design considerations include pedestrians, I didn’t have to press the crosswalk button and instead simply waited my turn. I was also likely sensed by some of the smarter cars, trucks and busses that drove next to me while I crossed the street.

CAPTION_GOES_HERE

I checked the subway times out of habit even though I wasn’t boarding. I had the usual frustration at seeing train times and info take up 1/10 the screen real estate as ads.

This photo doesn’t even show the other side of the display which was only ads

I scanned my key fob at the apartment entrance and checked the lobby display to see if I had any packages delivered throughout the day (I didn’t). And finally I came back to my cooled apartment and flipped on my lights to make some dinner.

The one big surprise I did have was the security cameras. Once I started looking for them, they were everywhere. I saw 4 on the outside a single corner bodega. I have 4 I could see in my apartment building entrance (2 outside, 2 inside). Some were brazen in making themselves known - a big detterent to wannabe petty criminals. Others where secretive, looking to catch, catalogue and archive anyone who happened to wander by. An interesting thing I found while doing this assignment was that using a cellphone camera makes it very easy to see which sensors are active, since it can pick up infared light not visible to the human eye.

A collage of some of the many cameras I saw