1 - How it started

Pigmento was born as a master thesis project in Interaction Design at IUAV University in Venice. This is overall invented and designed by me, Giuseppe Burdo with the initial mentoring support of Davide Rocchesso, Gillian Crampton Smith and Philip Tabor at IUAV University. After attending several workshops for kids in Guggenheim Museum in Venice, I was very surprised by the mind of 4-5 yr old kids. Their no-previous experience and discovery attitude gave them the power of instantly learn and make connections, unthinkable for many literate adults. A good topic for exploration in this age is about colour theory. The main task is how to get derivate colours and I was thinking to design an interface where they could touch and manipulate with ease and instantly, because kids can get very bored if something doesn't happen straight away. I was fascined by Bill Verplank on enactive technology, this is why I was planning to use a liquid or granular material.

2 - Look and Feel

Splitting and merging water on a table was quite annoying as user experience. Also, many variables can affect the overall interaction: temperature, hygiene, weak control on manipulation. Then I came up with coarse salt, after trying other powder-liquid materials. Salt and pigments share some stories. They were of high values, carried from Orient and they can be minerally similar. Also I was looking for a cheap and white/opaque material which would never affect kids health. The magic aspect is about videoprojecting the salt of light, with the same behaviour of colours. This gives the flexibility of using the same material, with all the advan../tages a software can provide. This prototype is just time-based and the aim is to see what happens from a user point of view over the touch, sight and sound senses.

3 - Computational tinkering

Before defining the overall design, my priority was to see how far I could go through prototyping. I was supposed to work all alone, apart tips and tricks from few friends and from web communities such as OpenFrameworks or Processing and generally about computer vision libraries. After few of the latters, I had the feeling to do much more in OpenCV. The basic features were to split some amount and to merge all again the groups, in an endlessy process with every kind of amount. The colour is still quite random (I just added a certain amount of H value on the HSB scale).

4- Building the prototype

One of my favourite parts is when it comes to the building. I had to show the proof of concept at University, so I decided to make a very basic structure. The hardest part was to calibrate all the components together. At the moment I had a long throw optics projector. Because of this, I had to use tricks as several mirrors, again quite dirty. I'm anyway very grateful to Davide De Lucrezia of Explora Biotech, otherwise I could not do prototyping at all.

5 - Color Science

I started to write my thesis only after the first technical prototyping iteration. As I was studying from any available media, I got very inspired by Giuseppe di Napoli, with the book called "Il Colore dipinto". One great point was about colorito vs. colorato, where the first is made up of tiny points of different colours where the overall feeling is just about one. The colorato means that all the pigments are the same. In nature, everything seems to be in a colorito way, for example in leaves, stones, natural fabrics and so on. Also, there is a huge difference between colore and colorante, where the first one is matter and the second is just some colour added to a material. Well, I wanted that all the salt, and specifically, each material part was conveying colours and not something just added. This led to an awakening discovery: I could make possible what impressionist and scientists were talking about: putting dots of different colours would give the imperssion of some other ones. This was even more interesting considering I was making the subtractive synthesis colour with lights. Here I got the chance to meet Arch Cristina Boeri from the Colour Science Lab in Milan Polytechnic, where my interest was to intestigate deeper in the field.

6 - all round design

After few chapters of thesis writing, I still had to manage big problems about the user interaction. I spent a weekend with my friend Francesco Saccone who is an automation engineer, trying to figure out how to develop it further than I could do by myself. After few days of pessimism with a deadline in four days, two great ideas came to my mind. One was to have a rounded surface instead of a rectangular one, splitting the surface in two areas: lateral and central. In the lateral one there are the primitive colours and in the central one the users can literally and physically mix themselves to get the derivative. In anytime they could go back and be on their own. The other one was to use all the surface, because in any time they could move salt wherever, whithout having any no-use areas. I previously thought it was my lack of knowledge about openCV. Then I realised the design was wrong, or better poor designed. I was missing how the game could start, continue and possibly finish. Also, without defining the colour splitting and mixing, which is a matter of science, not a random experience.

7 - Product and code

Once again I needed to build both the structure and some simple code in order to verify what only my ideas were about. After two years at IUAV University, I was lucky enough to manage pretty well most of the tools in the wood lab, so I made it by myself. Meanwhile on the code, there were three challenges: identify and colour the lateral areas, to track the missing salt on that surface, to generate the derivate colour. It was very complex also because the endless changes of room light. Here Daniele Muscella was of essential help.

8 - User testing

A step behind this one, I only was going by guessing. As I started showing the table to some children, I got incredibly happy about their reaction. Those moments were full of insights and satisfaction. I used to play few tricks, showed in the second video, and they were able to already have expectations after few minutes of use. This meant it was easy to understand. Of course it was a mockup and some features were not developed.

9 - Thesis Presentation