The Morse Things are internet-connected cups and bowls that communicate with each other in Morse Code and over twitter.
These are some photo’s from a study we did with the Morse Things.
As you can see they are fully functioning cups and bowls
that can be used like any other cup and bowl.
These cups and bowls are part of ongoing research that asks thing-centered questions of things and technology.
A premise of the Morse Things is that any understanding of a thing or technology is unstable and arguably fragile.
Since our last study, we have been preparing for another study
in which we invited five households of an extended family to live with the Morse Things.
In this pictorial, we reflect on how we as researchers unexpectedly found ourselves literally entangled in the conceptual and physical fragility of the research.
The Morse Things emerged from a practice called material speculation, in which we craft counterfactual artefacts that invert design assumptions to ask “what if” questions.
In the case of the Morse Things, we countered human-centered assumptions of Internet-of-Things technologies
in which objects are augmented with connectivity for particular human goals and purposes.
With ordinary things such as toasters, doorbells and thermostats becoming increasingly connected
we set out to explore thing-perspectives of networked connectivity.
The design of the Morse Things draws from a concept in post-phenomenology called multi-stability,
that speaks to how things can be many things at once.
Ihde takes the example of the Necker cube, an optical illusion, to illustrate how a shift in perspective or embodied relationship can reveal different natures of the same thing.
Natalie Loveless makes a similar point through reading Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors
a painting featuring a distorted skull that is only legible when viewing the painting from one position – making the rest of it illegible.
What she highlights through this example is that no matter what position one takes, there will always be blind spots.
Shifting perspectives, whether actual or conceptual is challenging,
particularly with assumptions that are deeply rooted or things that are taken for granted – such as human-centered thinking in the design of technologies.
In our project, we were committed to continuously challenge our human assumptions through design
and to learn about the different stabilities of the Morse Things.
Throughout our design activities we have learned about the Morse Things in surprising and at times frustrating turns
exposing the instability of our understanding of what these cups and bowls are.
I will talk specifically on three of these activities with the Morse Things
integrating machine learning
designing packaging to ship the Morse Things to an extended family for a long-term deployment study
and sending a broken Morse Thing cup to Japan for repair through the traditional kintsugi process.
In designing the Morse Things’ virtual world, we chose to work with Morse Code as a language that already exists between human and machine language.
In our previous study, we had scripted conversations of the cups.
In this iteration, we saw an opportunity in machine learning to further decenter our human assumptions in designing the virtual world
and set out to create a learning curve that allowed for the Morse Things to form a temporal and virtual presence that is different from our human understanding, but still somewhat legible.
Over the course of the study, each Morse Thing is looking for a time to meet cups and bowls from the other households.
A Morse Thing wakes up randomly during the day, and when it does, it checks into an online server and chooses a timeslot in the future.
If any other cups or bowls have chosen the same time, the Morse Thing is given a reward.
Like this, the Morse Things can learn what a good time to meet is and will adapt their choices to increase the chances of meeting other Morse Things.
Our conceptualization of Morse Things Units (MTU) arose from a discussion on how we should indicate time in the Morse Things’ messages.
Using western, human time such as hours, days, minutes and seconds, conceptually did not fit for things that are attempting to meet other things in their shared virtual future,
and more practically, we were looking for a way to bypass the different time zones our participants are living in, too.
We asked: what is time, for a Morse Thing? and arrived at our concept of MTU.
Each Morse Thing starts counting their units from the time it is switched on and thus, MTU’s are a form of time-notation that is relational.
1450 MTU’s for the red Morse Thing of household 4 is a different MTU for the yellow Morse Thing of household 3, depending on when it started counting.
As part of our preparation for deploying the Morse Things with an extended family, we collaborated with a packaging designer to create custom packaging for the Morse Things.
Our design intentions were to keep the Morse Things safe in shipping as well as add to their presentation as a research product.
The packaging consists of a cardboard box with four stackable inserts that contain the large bowl, the small bowl and the router.
The cup was stacked separately with a piece of cardboard as padding.
To assist participants in shipping the Morse Things back to us at the end of the study, we also created an instruction video explaining how to repack them.
One Morse Thing cup broke in the process of preparing for the study.
We set out to fix the cup through kintsugi: a traditional Japanese method of wabi-sabi aesthetic that values transience and imperfection.
Through a local ceramicist, the cup was send to a kintsugi master in Japan. The process included multiple iterations of
filling the gaps of the broken cup with mixtures of black lacquer, flour, fine wood particle, fine stone powder, air-drying in a moisture box, painting with black lacquer and polish, and eventually finishing with gold-leaf.
The kintsugi repair is a particularly lengthy and challenging process due as a proper process is dependent on humidity and weather, the complex shape of cup, and the severity of break of the Morse Thing cup.
The Morse Things are composed of two ceramic parts that house the electronics: a custom PCB, a transducer that functions as a speaker with a neoprene patch to ensure it is pressed against the ceramic surface and a LiPo-battery.
These parts are adhered to the inner ceramic part using 3D printed brackets and Sugru, a silicone based, moldable adhesive.
The outer ceramic is placed on top and adhered with small pieces of Sugru.
The Morse Things are then wrapped in rubber bands to ensure the pressure is kept on the neoprene patch as well as to reduce the gap between the two parts.
The pressure applied when placing the outer ceramic part over the electronics of the kintsugi cup released the bond of the kintsugi repair and the cup broke, again.
In preparing for the long-term deployment, we extensively tested the battery-life of the LiPo batteries and programmed a sleep-loop to save power when the Morse Things are not computationally awake.
As the Morse Things first ‘wake up’, they search for the Morse Things Wi-Fi network.
In our tests, we had not account for the power it would take the Morse Things to continuously search for this network in shipping – when the network is not active yet.
This drained the batteries very quickly and as a result the Morse Things did not work properly upon arrival at our participants’ houses.
In returning the Morse Things to be recharged and reprogrammed to take the shipping time into account
our packaging failed to protect the Morse Things and six Morse Things broke in shipping.
In our conceptualization of the Morse Things’ world, we paid attention to particular processes and temporalities.
However, as has become clear in the previous slides, our conceptual considerations overlooked more practical aspects of the Morse Things network.
As we made space for certain processes, others became blind spots.
We had always considered the Morse Things cups as particularly challenging as they have limited space to house the electronics and the battery.
Our focus on the circuitry and batteries made us overlook the obvious fragility of ceramics.
Even when one broke, we thought this would be a rare occasion and we would celebrate its uniqueness through kintsugi and its continued use in the study.
In our packaging, the cups were protected with one piece of cardboard padding that separated it from the medium sized Morse Thing bowl.
We were so taken by the resourceful use of the cardboard and that the packaging stacked the Morse Things within each other.
This blinded us to the obvious, placing the cup in inside the other bowls meant that it became like a small torpedo that broke the other Morse Things as it moved around during the shipping.
In this overview we present what is in hindsight an obviously fallible process
and we highlight the contrasts between our moments of confidence and moments of breakdown.
We see this as loosely related to material research on topics such as breakdown and repair, wabi-sabi, impermanence and patina, traces, decomposition and un-crafting
and we found it important to report on this process and highlight mistakes, unintentional aspects and re-framings in design research practice.
The Morse Things are back in our studio as we are preparing to fix the 3 broken medium bowls, 3 broken large bowls and the 1 re-broken kintsugi cup.
Beyond our practical concerns, our design process humbled our confident design presentation
our well-intended design decisions, such as creating custom packaging and making a ‘special’ cup to appreciate it’s imperfections only for it in retrospect has been an omen for the greater fragility of our research.
To conclude, and what we have learned from the Morse Things so far, is that the conceptual notion of what something is, is quite dynamic and fragile in itself
perhaps particularly with internet connected or smart things where parts of the thing’s existence are located in more dynamic forms such cloud-based services.
We want to emphasize the commitment to staying open to surprising turns and the way they can support de-centering the human designer in design processes.
In this pictorial we particularly considered how our lack of control shaped and re-shaped the project.
And we are curious to see where the Morse Things will take us next.