Translating Interfaces: Twitter
“Redesign the interface as a physical, tangible with no visual screen or any kind of virtual, sight-based components”
The first time I read the prompt for this assignment, I immediately began thinking of ways to redesign some of my favorite social media apps. Instagram was the first to come to mind, because of how users can scroll through pictures both vertically and horizontally. I began to sketch ways that I could recreate that interaction in the physical world:
My brainstorming hit a wall after these sketches- I felt like I may not have been interpreting the prompt correctly. I decided to go back and read the assignment again, and after my second reading a new part of the prompt jumped out at me:
Choose a piece of digital media (could be a digital video game, a computer application, a website, an interactive film, a video-conferencing tool, basically anything happening on a screen) and spend some time redesigning the way you interact with it, translating the existing interface into a different kind of physical interface.
The concept of “redesigning” was something that I hadn’t attempted in my first sketches. My sketches were translating an existing virtual concept into the physical space, but not reimagining it. In order to attack the prompt with a clean slate, I decided to shift focus onto another social media platform: Twitter.
After documenting all of the affordances that Twitter offers and ways that I could translate them into physical interactions, I decided on one that was particularly exciting: turning the scroll, like, and retweet functions into physical computing components. I decided that I would translate the three major components of twitter into Arduino functionalities using the components pictured below.
I decided I’d use the potentiometer, which acts like a dial, to simulate the scrolling functionality. I also decided to use the two buttons with corresponding lights to simulate the like and retweet actions.
The Process
The first step to creating this new Twitter interface was wiring the components on the breadboard. After wiring the potentiometer and integrating the buttons with the LED lights, the breadboard looked like this:
To make the interface more similar to the real Twitter interface, I realized that the lights would need to either stay on or off, and change only when the button was pressed. After implementing this change, the breadboard looked like this:
Finally, I needed to incorporate the potentiometer and the serial monitor to allow users to feel like they were interacting with tweets on a timeline. I wrote code that would print to the serial monitor the tweet number (between 1 and 15) that the user was viewing. The serial monitor would also report every time a user liked, disliked, retweeted, or undid a retweet for each tweet number. In this implementation I didn’t implement state preservation, so if a tweet had previously been liked, it would not remain liked when a user returned to it. See the final product below!
