I’m generally a technology generalist, who loves to dabble in all sorts of tech, but I’ve been yearning for something different in this modern tech landscape. Day to day, I’m mostly working at AG Grid, helping to build the best Grid and Charts Library for JavaScript. On another side, I’m also working on other projects in Forest in the Tree, where I’m exploring a range of other tech, including:

• 3D in Blender

  

• Unreal MetaHuman face detection

• Hand detection AI using Tensorflow in my Magic Hands project

However, although fun and futuristic to play with, the creation process and output of these projects were all too screen based for my liking. As I mentioned in my Magic Hand’s post, I’m still seeking what Bret Victor rants about in the future of interaction design and questioning why a lot of the potential futures presented to us are just glorified screens with screen based interactions. In contrast, our hands and bodies have so many more degrees of freedom, and the keyboard and mouse just strips away a lot of that capability.

Getting out of the screen

My attempt at getting out of the screen and embracing all of the bodies capabilities, is to make in the real world. This is a scrappy crocheted leaf light I’ve been working on. It’s still work in progress, but it does work.

The crocheted leaf is outlined by a LED noodle, which glows brighter as you squeeze the leaf. It’s powered by a coin cell battery, so no computer is required. Quite simple and basic. Something that you can touch, feel, interact with and pass around in the real world.

It also got me learning and delving into a few basic technologies:

• 🔌 Electronics
• 🧶 Crochet
• 💡 Light

🔌 Electronics

There’s a common adage in the industry that:

But actually, there are ways to make it not so hard.

Keep it simple

If you keep it simple, it’s not that bad. Ask yourself:

• Do you need a computer?
• Do you need a screen?
• Do you need wireless?
• Do you need to be so precise?

When I break down a light, it’s just: 🔌 power + 💡 light (LED in my instance).

An on/off trigger (a pressure sensor in my case) is actually optional as well.

If you can keep it simple, you can make hardware less hard.

Very established field

Electronics being a well established field, means it’s easier to search for information. I figured out the electronics using a combination of high school electronics knowledge, Internet googling, YouTube watching, and ChatGPT. It’s one of those topics that ChatGPT can shine in, since it’s probably well versed in the field and you can validate any hallucinations it gives back by wiring it up. It’s been a great companion when I need to ask stupid questions like - what is a voltage divider?

You don’t need to build everything

With all the products we have around us in the modern world, you can often find the smaller components they are made from, online, so you don’t need to build everything yourself. The LED noodle which the leaf light is made from can be bought from suppliers such as Pimoroni, PiHut or Amazon.

Making it yourself

This is what a pressure sensor looks like if you buy one:

However, it’s still useful to be able to make one yourself, as you can make it exactly the way you want. I can make it fit the exact size of my crocheted leaf. A DIY pressure sensor is made of:

• Conductive material - I used copper connected to wire with some solder. I bought my copper here
• Pressure sensitive conductive material - I used velostat, which you can easily buy
• Stick it together - good old sticky tape does the trick

For a vast collection of ideas for alternative sensors, actuators, power connectors etc., I love the DIY wearable technology documentation created by Kobakant at How to get what you want.

The idea of making these primitive electronics yourself is very similar to programming in that:

Thinking about the standard keyboard, mouse, phone and tablet interactions of today, I wonder why there aren’t many pressure sensitive inputs? What other kinds of interactions could we add to our everyday things if they were less binary in their input? Could things feel softer and more forgiving?

🧶 Crochet

I only learnt crochet this year, but it broke open my digital centric mind 🤯.

Materials/clothes were actually the original tech. Animals don’t make clothes for themselves. We made these tools to keep us warm, so we can live in more hostile environments. It’s also become a form of expression and creativity in both making and wearing. It was only a generation ago that we had to make or mend our own clothes, and it’s quite sad that we’ve lost these skills to things like fast fashion.

3D printer

Crocheting is actually like 3D printing with your hands. You are creating 3D shapes by using 1 dimensional yarn to crochet stitches into layers of volume.

Machines can’t crochet, so everything you see that is crocheted was made by a human. In a world where we are optimising out the human in everything, it's nice to remember the things we still do better. For now anyway.

Showcase

A benefit of creating physical things, is that you don’t need a computer to showcase what you have made. Here, I made a local first finite canvas to display my progress:

In comparison, this is my notion board of progress:

It’s not necessarily a choice between doing things in the physical world or the digital world, as you can do both. It’s more of a reminder that although the digital world is more infinite and dynamic, the physical world can be more immersive and dynamic in its own way. The feeling of holding a physical crochet piece is different to looking at a photo or video of one, however good the screen based interaction is, even in more powerful 3D/VR visualisations with tactile feedback controllers.

Chill vibes

The activity of crochet taught me a slower, smaller scale way to make things. Sometimes, the better I get as a programmer, the more abstracted away and less human I feel - it’s nice to find activities like crochet that are more human scale and grounding. I highly recommend it if you are looking for a relaxing hobby away from the computer - 5 ⭐.

Another crocheted light

So, the crocheted leaf light isn’t my first attempt at combining electronics and crochet. The first finished project was for my wife:

My aim was to make something pretty first, and sort out the tech second. As with many things designed by an engineer, it was pretty over engineered for what it ended up being. The tech was made from a Raspberry Pi Pico W, with wifi and bluetooth capabilities, and an RGB strip with millions of colours. However, I couldn’t figure out a simple way of using these capabilities without taking away from the intention that it should be a pretty light, not a tech toy.

In the end, my wife’s favourite way to use it is either to leave it turned off as just a crocheted sculpture, turning it on on a static pink colour or a mode where the light animates a pink glowing heat beat. Simple features that don’t necessarily require the power of the pico w or all the millions of colours offered by the RGB light. A nice warm white light that glows might have sufficed. You can see this purposeful simplicity in a few other tech products eg, GRAU Fire, Philips Hue Twilight, Nothing Phone glyphs and Daylight tablet computer.

It’s also been humbling to do a project where I feel like the skills I’ve been honing for decades, was not an asset, but was actually a liability. Yet the simple hobby skill I discovered relatively recently, was way more fun and taught me more about how to make things.

Another view on pretty things

The project did make me ask a deeper question of myself:

One part of it, is that I don’t consider myself an artist or designer. At work, as an engineer, usually anything visual or creative is delegated to a designer. I don’t need to deal with it.

However, I’m realising that design is like engineering - it’s about solving problems. Design just uses different tools. The tools are layout, colour, composition, typography, hierarchy, contrast etc. These crocheted projects have been a great creative exercise in thinking about and using these tools. As with any other exercise, you get better the more you do it.

The most interesting projects are the ones which combine form and function in a holistic and meaningful way. Software is just one part of a whole, and it’s useful to understand the context around it all - the materials around it, the people who use it, the built environment it will be used etc. Learning and understanding the other parts outside of software allows you can have a more meaningful influence on the overall design.

💡 Lights

Light is the most basic of basic materials in my crocheted light projects. It is the original human invention and discovery. When we discovered fire, we got heat and light. It allowed us to defy nature and do things in the dark. No other animal that operates during the day can do that. For such a basic thing, it surprised me how ignorant I was of it.

Real world usage

To help with the ignorance, I read 4 different books about the real world application of light:

You could spend a lifetime to get good at any one of these fields in lighting. For something so basic, there is so much to it.

Let there be light

Overall, I learnt that light is energy.

It is where everything comes from.

There is no colour without light.

There is no life without light.

The “Light Science and Magic” photography light book made a good point that technology changes, but physics doesn’t change. The nature of light doesn’t change. If you understand light, you can create the same magic regardless of the current iteration of technological tools. The reason why digital 3D can look fake or off, is because it’s not replicating what it actually looks like in real life. Powerful game engines like Unreal are trying to model light as it is in the real world. Even if you have these powerful tools, you might not be able to use them well because you don’t understand the basic principles of the world around us.

I like the philosophy about teaching to draw, where it's not so much about learning the skill of drawing, but it's learning to see the world around you. Making real tangible things helps me see and understand the world around me - whether built, digital or natural environments.

As just a programmer, the field of view can be very narrow. Breaking out of the computer, helps to broaden the mind, get out of echo chambers and interrogate what it means to be human.

👋🏼 Follow along

If you want to follow along with my crochet light adventures or other projects, feel free to subscribe to my YouTube channel @forestinthetree.

I also post on Instagram @tak_tran and on twitter @zlog. Or if you want to get in contact, you can email contact@forestinthetree.com.

I’m also collecting interesting lights, so if you know of any, please send them over 🙇🏼‍♂️

I gave this talk at the Future of Coding October Meetup in London, and this is the accompanying blog post with more elaborated details and links to the things I talk about.