As part of my final for Physical Computing, I’m setting up a system of ambient informatics and feedback which I’m calling The Destiny of Rooms. This idea started with an email sent to the notorious ITP student listserv by someone sitting in the Japanese Room, a room at ITP which is reserved for student use. The email, though public to everyone at ITP, was clearly addressed to the other people currently in the Japanese Room, asking them to be quiet, as the Japanese Room was supposed to be a quiet study room. The immediate effect, rather than to make the room quieter, due to the opt-in nature of receiving email, was to spark a debate with people outside the room as to what the actual “purpose” of the room was. Somewhere in that debate the notion that none of us, singly or as a group, had control over what the room would be floated to the top - it was a decision which was happening unconsciously in everyone who used the room. We might as well be saying that the room was deciding for itself.

So, I thought I would let it voice it’s decisions.

Over the ensuing weeks I built a system of sensors to gather ambient data about the current state of the room. I decided to choose three variables, which would give me a good picture of what was going on: volume (obviously), the number of people in the room, and whether the doors were opened or closed. For volume, I used an array of two condenser microphones mounted near the ceiling, which were mixed into one audio signal, giving an average volume for the entire room. The doors were monitored using simple magnetic switches, salvaged from home security systems. The people counting was more complex. I had originally thought that I would use laser break beams to count people going in and out of each door, but properly aiming the lasers was problematic. In the end, I used a more intrusive but reliable system - foot switches under doormats, placed on either side of both doors.

All of this was feeding back to an Arduino, which captured the numbers over serial and sent them via USB to a desktop computer. On a Mac, serial ports are treated as files, so I could just output the real-time data using the screen command in terminal, for debugging, or use cat and > to save it to a text file. Every two hours, an Automator script would save the current file to a folder and timestamp it, to keep the data manageable.

Over two days, this generated over 5GB of data about how students were using the room.

For the output, I decided that the room should play by the same rules that the students had set for it - it would send emails to the student list, attempting to influence what was going on through email. For the purposes of posterity, the emails would also be archived on a blog. The construction and sending of the emails was handled by Processing running on the desktop computer. Every fifteen minutes it would average the values for each of the sensors, and choose one of several pre-determined phrases deemed appropriate for each one, assemble them into an email, and send the mail to the student list. The Japanese Room spoke in the first person, and thus became an entity in it’s own right - despite the fact that my name was all over the project, all responses were addressed to JR (as he preferred to be called), and students quickly picked up on the rivalry between JR and the Lounge.

On December 12th - 14th, JR sent 15 automated messages, all of which are archived here, at a rate of about one every half hour. In addition, Adam sent 5 messages in character as JR to establish the situation and attempt to manage some of the response, for a total of 18 messages from the Japanese Room account. In response, there were a total of 23 messages about the emails or addressed to JR on the list, as well as 3 comments on the blog, for a total of 26 responses.

From the data, it doesn’t appear that anyone took the initiative to actually try to oblige the room in any way.

In response to some, “user feedback,” the emails were slowed to once every two hours after the 12th, and it was possible to have the room not email at all if he was happy. But the pendulum swung too far the other way, resulting in a day without JR emails, so on the evening of the 13th, emails every two hours were reinstated, no matter the state of the room.

Quotes from students responding the Japanese Room are available here, and all emails sent from the Japanese Room are available here.