New Media Art, Design, and the Arduino Microcontroller

* Master's Thesis: New Media Art, Design, and the Arduino Microcontroller: A Malleable Tool. By Alicia Gibb. Masters of Science in Art History at Pratt Institute.

URL = http://aliciagibb.com/thesis [1]

Excerpts

History of the Arduino

Alicia Gibb:

"The Arduino microcontroller is a principle representative of the microcontrollers commonly used in art and design. Others in the field include Wiring, Making Things, PIC, and the Basic Stamp.

The Arduino microcontroller was originally created as an educational platform for a class project at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in 2005. It grew from the previous work of the Wiring microcontroller designed by Hernando Barragán in 2004.

From its inception, the Arduino was developed to engage artistic and design-oriented minds.

Barragán, an artist and designer, created the Wiring microcontroller to be used as a tool for a parsing data to electronics. He intended it to be used by a “non-technical” audience: “artists, designers, and architects,” in short, not requiring prior electrical engineering or computer science knowledge. He emphasized the Wiring board as a prototyping tool. Wiring fulfilled Barragán‟s need for a designer-friendly tool (in this case a microcontroller) that was easy to use without a great deal of engineering or programming experience. Barragán‟s advisors for his thesis on Wiring were Casey Reas and Massimo Banzi. Reas created the visual programming language Processing with Ben Fry. Reas studied interaction in art as an undergrad, continued with John Maeda while at MIT, and developed Processing for a language accessible to artists and designers. Banzi, on the other hand was more interested in further developing the microcontroller as an art and design tool. The Arduino was originally developed for an interaction design class taught by Banzi. The creators of the Arduino are Massimo Banzi, David Cuartielles, Dave Mellis,26 Gianluca Martino with Nicholas Zambetti.

The Arduino team currently consists of Banzi, Cuartielles, Martino, Mellis and Tom Igoe.

The Arduino team wanted to further simplify the Wiring platform and thus the Arduino microcontroller was developed. The Arduino team made the Arduino microcontroller more usable by focusing on simplicity, a goal in pursuit of designing for a non-technical audience. Four cohesive reasons are echoed by Banzi when defining the Arduino‟s success.

These reasons also denote Arduino‟s differences from other similarly intended microcontrollers for artists and designers:

1. It is inexpensive

2. It is packaged with the Integrated Development Environment (IDE).

3. It is programmable via USB.

4. It is supported by a community.

The above points were deliberate decisions when the Arduino platform was being conceptualized and designed. The usability of the Arduino platform is significant being that every person interviewed spoke directly of the usability of the Arduino. Three people interviewed currently work at IDEO, and are experts in the field of usability. Participants were asked how they would describe the level of entry to the Arduino versus other microcontrollers. The answer was unanimous that the Arduino was easier to use. From having a simplified platform with a chip on board to a user-friendly Integrated Development Environment (IDE), made a difference to new users and people who appreciate visual aesthetics. Mellis comments that their goal was to make it less expensive and smaller than the Wiring board, “A lot of things people tend to build initially tend to be simple, they don‟t need a powerful microcontroller”. Ninety-Four percent of interviewees felt the four points outlined by Banzi; cost, an integrated IDE, programmable over USB, and supported by a community, were useful in their work and made the Arduino a successful platform." ([2])

Status

Alicia Gibb: 'After writing all about the ways which artists and designers influenced both the form and function of the Arduino by making derivative hardware, I curated an art show at NYCResistor called Art, Design, and the Arduino Microcontroller." (http://aliciagibb.com/thesis)