The Garden of Productivity*
Artistic statement:
This piece is a free-form circuit sculpture built with brass wire. It is inspired by the Pomodoro technique and the recently popular mobile app Forest by allowing users to set a 15 minute timer for focused productivity. Every 5 minutes, a flower becomes illuminated, and at 15 minutes, the user can enjoy a fully lit garden as a token of their hard work.
Documentation:
After showing my first version, featuring a butterfly and clock, I received feedback to make the project serve more of a purpose and also include interaction between the brass rod/LED sculpture and the clock itself. This inspired me to take an HS410561K-32 4-digit 7-segment display module and incorporate Arduino to make some form of a countdown. After hearing about the Pomodoro technique for productivity, I made the connection to an app that I have recently been using, which sets a timer and doesn’t allow the user to leave the app (limiting phone distractions). If the user successfully completes the time, a “tree” will grow in a virtual garden, acting as a product of one’s hard work and focus. I really enjoy this concept, so I felt inspired to create my own physical version of this using freeform circuit inspiration from artists such as Mohit Bhoite. And so, the Garden of Productivity was born.
For specific design elements, I envisioned a box similar to my previous design, but one with a clock module with the circuit completely concealed and connected by brass rods, as well as three brass wire plants that would light up as time passed. I decided on 15 minutes, and every five minutes, a flower would light up. While building the flowers themselves was not terribly difficult, I hit an obstacle when trying to connect the LED behavior to that of the clock. I was using example code from Dean Reading, who created a complete library called SevSeg (https://github.com/DeanIsMe/SevSeg), which allowed me to control the display of the HS410561K-32 module. This required a lot of guessing and checking to figure out which pin on the clock connected to each pin on the Arduino. Even after solving this, there were still some minor display issues, which could have been due to soldering mistakes. However, the clock module itself took up every digital pin on the Arduino, and I was short three pins that I could use for the LED flower sculptures. I decided to try using an Arduino Mega instead, which would provide me enough digital pins. This ended up having issues connecting to my computer, and the display would not show up properly. I was incredibly frustrated, and with a lack of time, presented a version of my project where the LED lights were on at all times. I expressed my disappointment in my own abilities because this version was not as sophisticated as I had imagined.
My overall feedback in this preliminary final version of my project was generally good, and most of my peers thought it looked very appealing, which reassured my worries about how it looked. Some advice I received was first to enhance the connectivity between the clock and the flowers as I had planned, but also to create some way that the user can turn on the timer with ease (without having to restart the code and run it connected to a computer). And as for the fabrication, I had very hastily covered the box with cut black fabric, and the edges were fraying and not very clean. I received feedback to make it more presentable.
As it turned out, the solution was much simpler than I expected. I could utilize the unused analog pins on the Arduino to control the LED lights! Once this was working, I felt a sense of relief. But the following day when trying to make everything work, something with the last digit on the module was acting strange and showing light when I had unplugged its pin the day before. Unfortunately, this problem never fully solved, and the final project shown at the IMA show had some light showing on the last digit. As for making a start button, I used a touch sensor and soldered a brass rod to the metal touch surface, and fed it through the black fabric I used to cover the circuit box. I put a bent piece of brass wire on top so that the “button” looked nice but was also user-friendly and not sharp in any way. In order to improve the fabrication of the fabric/box, I made a makeshift “hem” of the fabric by folding the edges inside and connecting with hot glue. This made the edges look clean and smooth. I struggled to come up with how to best make the edges of the inner cutout smooth, but found some cotton and tried adding it just to experiment. I ended up really liking how it looked, as it looked like a cloud and made the overall feeling whimsical and dainty, which achieved my goal.
A video showing how the button works and my final version before the show
A video of my display at the IMA Show
Feedback:
At the IMA show, I was delighted to see guests have an interest in my project and the process behind it– it was unexpected! I think guests were most impressed by the actual fabrication of the wire flowers and clock connection. After spending countless hours trying to connect everything and experiencing many failures (and many burnt fingers), I only saw the messy soldering and mistakes I made when I looked at my final project, but it was a great feeling to see other people actually impressed by something that I had made. I have never shown my artistic work in this type of setting before, and I admit that I was very intimidated to do so, seeing the amazing and technologically advanced projects that surrounded my own. I was afraid that my project was too simple, too basic, and did not belong in this setting. But I do have a tendency to downplay my own accomplishments, and overall, my first IMA Show was a reassuring and amazing experience. The general constructive feedback I received was to make it more clear what it was counting down. Because the clock was showing seconds, 900 seconds is not very clearly equal to 15 minutes, so some people became confused. If I had more time, I think I could have worked more with the code to show the minutes instead of seconds.
*For detailed work journal, view the following previous posts:
https://wp.nyu.edu/nyushanghai-celiaforster/2021/04/30/final-project-progress-entry-1/
https://wp.nyu.edu/nyushanghai-celiaforster/2021/05/05/final-project-progress-entry-2/
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