Season 1 | Placemaking Report

How this starts You are on the 11th floor of an office building in downtown Boston. If you look out the window, you can see the site of the Boston Massacre. It looks like a Stonehenge-type primal monument, an extraterrestrial landing spot: a wide circle of well-worn brass, studded with stars, enclosing a rough mosaic of cobblestones.

What this has to do with placemaking So placemaking... After walking every day past dazed visitors, and guides in Revolutionary War attire, it's starting to dawn on you: it’s tough being a tourist in Boston. It's not much easier being a resident, sometimes. Maybe some new technologies could help this situation? Make it more interesting? More engaging?

Using Mixed Reality to Create Places, from a Standing Start Another reason why you want to sprinkle some mixed reality around the neighborhood: all those futuristic technologies you've been reading about -- AR, VR, IoT -- are still trying to claw their way out of the vaporware swamp. So it's a legitimate question: Is this all BS or what?

The DIY and Maker Promise No experience necessary? You're going to find out. You're going to take the DIY and Maker movements at their word: "you can do this."

A tiny cloud-connected brain The best digital quarterback for this project? Probably something cheap enough to enable many tiny connected microcontrollers, which could be scattered around the city. So you chose this microcontroller (and wifi module) on a chip of non-conductive green fiberglass-epoxy laminate: a Particle Photon, created by Particle.io, a small startup based in Silicon Valley, California, USA, Planet Earth. They cost less than $20. each.

Dense: Physically and Electronically The Photon is chunky, and dense: physically and electronically. The base slab of this board is made from fiberglass and epoxy laminate. It's thick, non-conductive. Electricity is not going to skitter around this surface: it will follow the copper paths etched into the surface.

In the Cloud The importance of the cloud to the Particle became evident soon after your Photon arrives. A couple of young Particle engineers make a presentation at the hardware incubator Bolt, in Boston. As a few Particle Photon boards were passed around one participant poses an insightful question: "What's the dog and what's the tail?"

Blink an LED It's the "hello world" of physical computing: blinking an LED. It's making the connection, seeing if it works. Rudimentary, yeah, but it brings together physical and digital computing in a vivid way. Here's the quickest path to that adventure.

Blink an LED... ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD! Because that's what makes it an IoT project: interacting with devices everywhere. That's where it gets interesting: set something in motion and things happen all over the place. That's where the cloud comes in. It's kind of a relay: you send your instructions there, and they bounce out to your devices.

Breadboards Your primary sketchpad: a breadboard. Your drawing instruments: jumper wires. The great thing about this combo: you can quickly sketch another idea if your first one doesn't work out.

Cambridge Hackspace A hackspace is necessary to tackle a mixed reality project. There are just too many unknown unknowns to try to go it alone. Fortunately for you, Cambridge Hackspace -- a cross between a hacker study hall, a workshop, and a local pub -- is nearby. There are now hundreds of these places around the world.

Placemaking Project #1: Move a Detour Flag An LED has been blinked. Software and hardware have come together. "Physical computing" has been achieved, albeit in a humble, entry-level way. Next: a humble placemaking project, ideally tuned to the Boston Detours concept. How about a cranky, hung-over construction flagman, the kind of guy who waves you past road-paving projects? That's the concept.

Something's Burning. When Your Servo Smells like Failure. A servo is a small motor-like device with a shaft. This shaft can be positioned by sending the servo a coded signal. The first time you try to send a servo a signal, sitting at a long table in Cambridge Hackspace, a big guy working across from you raises his head, sniffs loudly, dramatically, and says, "Smells like failure. Something's burning."

Serious about servos You're still not exactly sure why your Particle Photons are sometimes dying violently when you connect them to servos. Often the death is accompanied by a plume of electric smoke, a little whiff of scary. So you go on the Particle community boards to try to figure it out.

Gustavo Gonnet One benefit of banging around the maker message boards and community sites: you come across people you start to recognize as sharing your interests. That was the case with Gustavo Gonnet. It was clear that he liked to trigger things with smart phones, expand networks in unpredictable ways, control things from the Internet.

Servo Code Once you start chatting with Gustavo Gonnet in the Particle Community boards, your servo control improves. Things starting looking up for Detour Flag Guy. Gustavo, who enjoys explaining how things work, adds lavish comments to his code snippets. That's when the code starts to make sense.

A Fiverr Find: Adanguevara You aren't looking for a bargain when you start searching Fiverr for an artist who can create a flag, a flagman, and some kind of background. Even though the starting price does hover around $5. You just want something fast, convenient, and relatively frictionless. You want to get this process going. After a brisk search at your desk over lunch, you go with Adanguevara, a "Visual Artist / Architecture / Photographer" from Venezuela. His starting rate for the job: $20.

Make That Display Now you just have to translate the servo movement into a Detour Guy moving a flag. Next tech: Elmer's glue, foam board, and an X-acto knife. Next stop: Michael's. You have to remind yourself: You are not working on a Science Fair project. You are prototyping.

Servo Success The Detour Guy is moving his flag, whenever you send the signal, from wherever you happen to be: home, work, Hackspace. The Cloud bounces the signal down to him. So you capture him on YouTube, and as an animated GIF.

A Lucky Break: The Taza Chocolate Bar Your goal: a location in the real world, an IoT outpost in the colder, harsher world beyond Cambridge Hackspace. And you score an early, lucky break -- a spot on a counter in the Taza Chocolate Bar.

Why? Connectivity. As the hours add up on this project, you start asking yourself why it feels worth it. The answer: connectivity; the appeal of linking things: devices to the Internet, blinking lights to the the cloud, one person to other people, people to a location. That's what's exciting about the Internet, hypertext, smartphones, and the Internet of Things, over-hyped as that phrase is. Connectivity is the satisfying payoff. Or at least it used to, before the social networks started turning sour.

More on Hypertext, and the IoT Ted Nelson is generally credited with inventing the term "hypertext" in a 1965 paper for the Association for Computing Machinery. You once heard Nelson make a presentation to a conference in California. You remember his lecture as... rambling. Ironically, his talk was bedeviled by digressions and tangents. It was only much later that you found a passage where Nelson succinctly described hypertext as "non-sequential writing - text that branches and allows choices to the reader... a series of text chunks connected by links which offer the reader different pathways."

Connectivity on Location: Your Options Now you just have to find a way to enable passersby to connect to the Taza display via their phones. Your starting assumption is that people will want to do this. Makes sense, right? People are clearly obsessed with their phones: heads tilted down, thumbs flicking screens, always.

Beacons: The Coolest Connectivity Option on the Block Estimote Beacons are (update: were) the coolest connectivity kids on the block. Powered by Bluetooth LE, these brightly colored, nubby plastic radios tap a protocol backed by Apple (iBeacon) to target stylish, retail-oriented companies and customers.

A late arrival: NFC Near Field Communication (NFC) is solid, industrial connectivity technology, but it was late to the iPhone. Sure it powered Apple Pay, but for a long time that was all. Apple didn't allow other apps to use it. Apple wanted to stack the deck in favor of iBeacon technology. Then in late 2017, around the time you are evaluating your connectivity options, Apple relented and enabled NFC on the iPhone. It was still playing catch-up with the cool kids, but you like it enough to add it to your console.

QR Codes: Tech Tortoise QR codes have always been a tech tortoise: advancing slowly, improving slightly, getting a tiny bit more popular every year. Until Covid happened, when they suddenly took a leap, onto menus and everything else you didn't want to touch. This was way before that, when QR codes were big in Japan, and China, but still lame in the US.

Snapcodes Once you got going with plain, ordinary QR codes, you decide to consider some social versions, starting with Snapchat's Snapcodes. TechCrunch thought they might fill a niche. They didn't, for you anyway. You display a Snapcode sticker on the console for awhile. No one uses it.

Facebook Messenger After Snapchat revisited QR codes, Facebook (naturally) also jumped on the QR code bandwagon, in a half-hearted manner. You have difficulty getting these to work.

Javascript How to bridge the gap between a visitor's phone and the Particle Cloud (which controls the display): Javascript.

A Game... with Prizes! Now for some incentives, some game-making reasons why someone would want to engage. You quickly assemble some "Fun Paks:" miscellaneous collections of ephemera that are primarily, although not exclusively, inspired by Boston history. The idea is to add something to win if someone manages to move the Detour flag dude with their phone.

Up and Running at the Taza Chocolate Bar It took two very large rubber bands (to hold the console to the rest of the display), and a wrought iron tabletop picture stand from Michael's, and a few strategically placed patches of masking tape, but Detour Guy is now live at Taza. Here are a few hastily-shot pictures from your phone.

A Taza Chocolate Bar Customization Not long after the display launched, Christine, the manager of the Taza Chocolate Bar, makes a suggestion. You always listen to Christine, because she radiates a quiet, no-nonsense practicality. She listens to your futuristic ramblings, deftly inserts a question or suggestion, listens some more, then maybe adds a few more suggestions. Most of the time, her ideas bump the project up a notch.

A Continuous Rotation Servo If the granite grinding stone is going to spin, you need a "continuous rotation" servo. you order one from Adafruit. Unlike the servo driving your Detour Guy's flag, this one will go around in circles.

Taza 2.0 A paper picture of a Taza granite grinding stone is spinning now. For 5 seconds, once it's been triggered. The circular disc also syncs with the Taza chocolate pucks next door. Lots of circles. Confidence is high. Here are some pictures.

A Smartphone Reality Check The lack of interest surprises you. The Public Market was clogged with people obsessively checking their phones, taking selfies, posting Instagram pictures. But no one, apparently, wants to engage with an interactive display that challenges them to push their smartphone capabilities -- even a little bit -- to tap their phone's built-in bluetooth, NFC, or location awareness.

Not Working The first time you stopped by to check on the Taza interactive display, two college-age kids were playing with their phones next to the counter. They said they were from MIT. After a few minutes, the paper granite stone spun, and they high-fived each other. This gave you a sense of hope. A false sense of hope. Because barely anyone else engaged with the device over the next few weeks.

Competing with (and Losing to) Horchatas and Churros The next time you pay a visit to the Taza Chocolate Bar, you are surprised to discover a line, at least 20 people long, and an air of excitement. The Taza staff was working furiously to stay ahead of the demand. The reason: Taza had posted an event on Facebook promoting a "limited batch of iced chocolate horchata and churros." Taza fans, patiently waiting for their horchatas, did not notice the interactive display just inches from their elbows. Visions of horchatas and churros were dancing in their heads.

TLDR: A Season One Summary If you walk through your city frequently, and you witness widespread torpidity among visitors, you may decide to tap "mixed reality" -- the intersection of augmented reality, virtual reality, and the internet of things -- to make some of the local sites more engaging, informative, interesting.