Week 4

Consultation with Andreas

My consulation with Andreas was that my three pillars are still not clear and narrow yet. The current pillar that I'm still researching is the problem of the web. The other 2 pillars have yet to be explored in detail.

Mindmapping Exercise

In this week, we had everyone walk around and see what each other have on our mindmaps. We used stickers to pick out themes and keywords which we liked.

  • Exercise Walking around to look at interesting concepts.

  • Mindmap 02


From the responses gathered from my classmates, I can see that the concepts of cozy web, poetic web, followed by Dance Dance Revolution garnered the most interest. I wish I knew the reason why, but I would like to believe that it is a shared sentiment that the web feels like its lacking as it is now a more commercialised place. Users are looking for better web spaces to be at, and that's why they are drawn to words like poetic and cozy web. What does poetic and cozy web feels like? and what isit like? I think this exercise further reaffirmed my research inquiry into the web, and that I should continue on with what I have.

Dance Poem Revolution

  • Dance Poem Revolution Created by Melanie Hoff and Tyler Yin.

While looking through SFPC projects and lecturers of the school, I came across this project which also reminded me of permacomputing as a practice. I feel like this case study is a good mix of using "outdated" devices, and repurposing it into something that sparks criticality, yet is also fun and experimental.

Through dancing on the dance pad, users are able to simultaneously create poems for themselves which can be printed out.

Experiment 01: Getting the Dance Pad to work.

I chose this experiment to work on as I know that I'm able to 1) find the dance pad on carousell, 2) use the open-source code provided for learning 3) maybe use an arduino 4) learn new technical stuff. I also like that my experimentations and learning processes can be segmented into 2 parts, one for coding (HTML, CSS, Javascript) and making (mapping,arduino, DIY building). There were inspiration and references that I leaned into such as USB DDR Dance Pad (Arduino, Pull-Up Resistors) and DIY DDR boards.

Process of trying to get the dance pad to work I found that I couldn’t download Dance Dance Revolution on Mac. And looked for the substitute which was StepMania. Unfortunately StepMania doesn’t not support newer versions of mac, and I couldn’t get the software started. Moreover, when I plugged in the mat into my computer, nothing happened and I didn’t know why it was not working. On the contrary, making it work windows was much easier. With Stepmania downloaded, I tried my hands on using the dance pad. In Stepmania, I had to map each key button to the specific controls on the dance pad, so that the software could recognise the input.

Mini learnings While looking for tutorials on YouTube or Google, I managed to find a huge community that are dedicated to making dance pads from scratch. One of it is using an Arduino, which you can watch here, and also another written instructable, here.

Though I did not find the answer to my question on getting the dance pad to work on Mac, but I realised a dance pad could just be simply made up of conductive surfaces like aluminium foil or threads, which can then be linked to an arduino, then inputting code which involves the mapping of the 4 buttons into the arrows of the keyboard, so that the computer will understand which buttons are being pressed on the dance pad.

While looking for alternatives to StepMania and DDR program, I came across another alternative which was OutFox. But through it I also found a software called "Enjoyable" which allowed me to map the keys accordingly.

  • Screenshot of Enjoyable Calibrating dance mat keys to a keyboard



In hindsight, these experiments seem very small and minute, but I think its a good step coming from someone who does not know anything about how technical stuff like dance pads work. I could only slowly figure the technicalities of how things work, which in this case, I now understand that I could use arrow keys to map out a dance pad.

Using the code that I found, I realise that it doesn't really work that well and it's very buggy. I think it's because there are too many videos, images, functions, in the code.