Yo-Yo Machines are simple communication devices you can make at home to stay in
touch with your friends and family. They come in pairs and are connected via the internet
so that interacting with one sends a signal - a light, movement or sound - to its remote partner.
They're made from simple off-the-shelf technical components and household materials and are easy
enough for just about anybody to make them at home. We've released four basic Yo-Yo Machine
designs and published instructions for making nine variations of them.
We developed the project in response to a call soon after the first lockdown
from the UK Research and Innovation department for ideas to address Covid 19.
We saw the opportunity to draw on and extend previous research including Media Space research
from the 90s, which emphasized the importance of peripheral awareness of who is around what
they are doing, and arts and design research on expressive communication devices that started with
Rob Strong's Feather, Scent and Shaker project at the RCA in 1996. We also built on our own 20-year
history developing highly finished and technically robust research products, including recent work on
developing self-build devices that people can make at home by following online instructions.
For example, My Naturewatch camera is a wildlife camera that about 3000 people have made at home
after it featured on a popular BBC wildlife program. We saw the opportunity to explore
the prospects for peripheral and expressive communication devices during the pandemic
and to further our research program on self-building as a methodology for large-scale
research and as a route for disseminating research products outside of commercial channels.
As I said, we've developed four basic designs which I will describe briefly here.
You can find out more by looking at our website or reading the paper.
Each Light Touch has two LEDs, one controlled locally and the other by a remote partner.
A capacitive touch switch lets you cycle through colors and send the one you want to your partner,
who can reciprocate, and the colors mix on the device. Speed Dial allows you to indicate one of
seven pre-selected messages remotely. These might be words or images or phrases and as
serious or as silly as you want - you can make your own dials and share them with your friends
Knock Knock uses a piezo microphone to sense when somebody taps on it
and recreates the pattern on its remote partner using a solenoid. Finally,
Flutter By uses a PIR sensor to sense motion and triggers movement at the remote end. In this case,
a ribbon that spins to create ephemeral shapes when there is movement at the remote location
Developing the four designs together meant that we could explore a design space described by
a series of dimensions. For instance, media: such as light, sound or movement. Persistence:
for example Light Touch fades slowly over hours while Knock Knock's sounds disappear immediately.
Pervasiveness: for instance you can hear Knock Knock without looking at it,
while you need to focus visually on Speed Dial to see its messages. And Deliberation: most of
the devices are triggered deliberately but the Flutter By senses and indicates motions passively.
We believe that these dimensions are important for the ways that people can engage with the devices
as well as for their emotional palette.
We've circulated the Yo-Yo Machines as self-built devices. We developed a website with information
about the project and devices, all leading to detailed, carefully designed instructions for
assembling the technologies and uploading code and making the device enclosures.
We also designed a kind of publicity campaign - this was integral to the project, since
self-building depends on people knowing about the devices. We developed a presence on Twitter,
Instagram and Tik Tok and the project appeared in a number of online and print publications.
The publicity worked. Almost 20,000 people visited our website in just over a year,
with the peak at the beginning of 2021 when we released the designs.
The software for the devices has been downloaded about 1500 times, and there were 274 active users
as of December last year. People sent us descriptions and pictures of their builds,
including experiments they had done and the final devices they had made,
which range widely from well-finished to clearly homemade and from serious to very silly.
They also sent us descriptions of using the devices, and talked about how they helped them
feel connected with their loved ones, almost as if they were present in each other's homes.
We've also shared our own experiences of living with the devices.
For instance, I have shared a Light Touch with my mother for well over a year now.
We send each other light several times daily. She insisted on repairing her device
herself when it stopped working after a fall. And we both find it important to keep them lit
as much as possible as a matter of mutual care both for the devices and for each other.
There's more detail in our paper but I want to quickly summarize some of the insights we've
gained through the project, both about peripheral and expressive communication
and about the self-build methodology. First, it is clear that these kinds of
devices can support a feeling of connection and presence with remote friends and family.
It is also clear that the dimensions of the design space I described earlier
are important to how the devices are used and what it feels like to use them.
But idiosyncrasies of the designs also make a strong influence on how they work and feel - the
design space is far wider than we have explored or can articulate fully. The local context of
use is also crucial to whether and how people will engage with the devices, and more generally their
historical context has changed since the first peripheral and expressive communication devices
were proposed - they now need to find a niche within a world of smartphones and social media
These are some of the most technically ambitious self-build devices that we have developed,
but we have succeeded in making them approachable enough that a wide range of makers have
succeeded. Nonetheless, the hands-on access to technology that this kind of design both
offers and requires is clearly in tension with ease of making, both real and perceived.
The project also indicates how integral publicity is to success, at least if success is measured
by the number of makers. Because it also turns out there's a kind of tension between promoting
the widest circulation possible and access to makers for research that we discuss in the paper.
For now, i simply hope that you will go on to read the paper
and to visit our website yoyomachines.io. Thank you.