PROJECTS

A citizen science game on butterfly wing patterns developed for the Paris Natural History Museum.

The UAV toolkit is an experimental application for making use of your smartphone's sensors for airborne science. It's main purpose is using time or space based triggers to capture images with associated sensor data for further processing. We've designed it with the help of the Westcountry Rivers Trust and the University of Exeter for creating maps using drones, rc aircraft and kites.

Dazzlebug is an open source citizen science game made with Laura Kelley and Anna Hughes at Cambridge University to see what patterns are most effective at evading capture from predators. We can then use these results to look at what visual effects these patterns have, and to see whether these patterns match up with those found on real animals in the wild.

The pattern matrix is a tangible weavecoding system for exploring the connections between code and weave. Developed as part of the AHRC funded weavecoding project and Future Thinking for Social Living, it was built as a collaboration between Makernow and FoAM Kernow (now Then Try This), developed during an arts residency at Miners Court extra care housing scheme in Redruth, Cornwall.

What happens when we apply a five-thousand-year-long view of technology to programming? What are the parallels between investigations into weaving as thought and livecoding performance? Both represent new ways of approaching human activities otherwise reduced to purely "utilitarian" roles, but which are central in all our lives. Is weaving - perhaps the first digital artform humans engaged in - actually itself a computational process?

Symbai was a project in collaboration with Dr Shakti Lamba who studies the evolution of sociality and culture in humans. Shakti collects detailed networks of knowledge and prestige in villages of different cultural backgrounds in rural India. Symbai is a solar powered Raspberry Pi/Android anthropological research tool allowing Shakti and the field assistants to work collaboratively in areas with no power or internet connectivity.

Egglab was an online computer game in which players searched for hidden eggs against different backgrounds to help scientists make new discoveries concerning camouflage and its evolution. The game featured in The Economist, The Guardian and Popular Science and was played by over 40,000 people.

We developed a free software programming environment and set of teaching projects based on Raspberry Pi and its freely available version of Minecraft. This was used as part of an initiative to provide short programming courses and taster days for young people in Cornwall.

How do butterfly wing patterns evolve? The Heliconius Butterfly Wing Pattern Evolver is a game where you take the role of a hungry bird and drive the evolution of an edible species to mimic the patterns of a toxic species. The game was based on genetic models used by the researchers at Cambridge University and was commisioned for use at the 2014 Royal Society Summer Exhibition in …

A behavioural research tool for use in remote areas lacking reliable internet connectivity or power. Developed for the Banded Mongoose Research Project at Exeter University for use in their field site in Uganda, Mongoose 2000 uses a Raspberry Pi to synchronise behavioral observation data across multiple Android tablets used for daily recording of mongoose behaviour.