Reconfiguring the firefly
By John E. Mitchell
Catching fireflies in a jar is well-mined childhood territory for many people — but in a technological world where so many experiences are becoming virtual, it’s no surprise that one designer has created a networked, wireless simulation of the final product.
John Schimmel, an adjunct professor at the New York University Interactive Telecommunications Program, has networked three Mason jars to communicate with each other — taps outside one jar trigger blinking of one color LED in all the jars. The jars work like any home wireless computer network — realized in modern technological terms, but based in nostalgia. The idea began for Schimmel as a class project spurred on by a conversation with his sister about their firefly catching activities as kids.
“We’d keep them in our bedrooms and by the morning they were all dead, but for that night, there was something nice about that,” said Schimmel. “There’s a connection, we each had a jar in our room or we each had a little plastic butter dish in our room, full of these little blinking lights. I thought it would be a nice project to take on.”
Originally, Schimmel envisioned an interactive project that worked over the Internet — he would have one jar in his apartment in Brooklyn and his sister would have another in her house in Pennsylvania. Eventually, he decided to localize the project for his class.
Despite his work to recreate the magic of the memory, Schimmel was hesitant to uncover the science behind the fireflies, instead wanting the wonder of the natural occurrence to find itself way into his Mason jars.
“I have no idea what fireflies actually blink for,” said Schimmel. “Some people say it’s mating, some people say they blink before they die. A lot of people try to tell me different things, but I’ve never looked into it. I consider it a childhood mystery and I sort of want to leave it that way.”
What mattered to Schimmel was the artful view they lend the landscape — he took his inspiration from one particularly magical drive through New Jersey on his way back from his parents’ house.
“There is this corn field that you drive by and right at the top of the stalk,” said Shimmel. “When corn was at its peak, the fireflies are coming out of the stalks, it was just this lovely scene. You wouldn’t even look at the sky because it was so nice to look straight ahead. I have no idea what fireflies do, they just do their thing.”
Schimmel ended up creating three jars, though in his mind the possibilities were endless.
“I had never seen a networked night light and I was wondering if you did that would people find a new way to say good night?” said Schimmel. “And how big could the audience be if you had a dorm room or an orphanage, if each one had a night light, could they talk with each other? I want to see how many people could say good night in a different way.”
Each jar contains six LEDs — two white, two green and two orange — and each jar has an assigned color that triggers the same colored lights in the other jars and will, therefore, identify who is tapping what jar. Schimmel used the standard cordless phone frequency for the jars to communicate with each other. Since wireless for hobbyists has boomed in the last couple years, it’s possible to get jars to communicate within a half a mile radius.
“You could give them to your kids friends, it’s a whole walking talkie scenario,” said Schimmel. “And it doesn’t have to be in light, it could be little sounds, chirps and crickets and stuff like that.”
Schimmel envisions a point where he could create an application for an online social network like Facebook that connects LED firefly jars over the Internet with relative ease — the tricky part is producing them in a large enough quantity that there would be users for the application. For this, Schimmel turns to the do it yourself ethic instead of manufacturing them.
“It’s such a simple object that anyone with a little hobby electronics in them could build,” said Schimmel. “I think mass production would get rid of the glass jar, it would probably get rid of the touch sensor, they would probably on go 30 feet and put cheap parts in and it would lose all its flavor.”
Without all the downgrades, it would be far too expensive for ordinary people to own — and buying one isn’t half as fun as making your own.
“It’s becoming so simple that anyone can pop these into a component board and make the same thing,” said Schimmel. “Maybe not in the same form factor, but make a prototype pretty quickly. I think that’s great.”
Schimmel doesn’t see what he did with Mason jars to be that far from the typical sort of crafter’s project that ordinary people encounter and create all the time — it’s just that Schimmel utilizes circuits in his.
“People do give a lot of jars for gifts,” said Schimmel. “My mom gives the brownie in the jar, where it’s some kind of mix layered and it’s almost like a sand thing you would get at a carnival.”
Schimmel’s preference for creative, do it yourself solutions is very much in line with his technological career calling working in assisted technology, which is designing for disable people. He’s been thinking about how he can apply networked objects to his field and has singled in on one of the central reasons he decided to build the fireflies — comfort.
“I would really like to take something like the fireflies and give it to maybe a pediatric hospital or a hospital with people separated from families for a long amounts of time and let them communicate,” said Schimmel. “It’s not to be like the telephone or email or that stuff, but to create a presence in the room. Like this is an extension. You could look at a telephone and it has a direct line to an operator who can connect you to someone else, but if you have one jar in your home — or some device — that’s directly connected to another person and you know it’s always them, it’s really nice.”
Schimmel has found that technological objects built for disabled people — or for hospital settings — are too often sterile in appearance and feeling and always geared towards rehabilitation. Schimmel wanted to fashion some gadgets that allowed for creativity and expression and has been collaborating with former students and professorial associates to do exactly that. One of his proudest achievements has been a dee-jay system for an 18-year old kid with cerebral palsey.
“It’s a ramp system,” said Schimmel, “and people on manual wheelchairs can ride up on these ramps and each wheel spins in a direction. The left wheel fades and the right wheel scratches.”
The project got Schimmel and his partners thinking about other ways that disabled people can be given the freedom to express their artistic sides. He and his students have been rigging up systems for cameras, hacking remote controls to allow people who are paralyzed to indulge in photography and videography. They’ve designed systems for students and now veterans.
“It’s a hard thing to consider, someone who’s 14 has never taken a picture before, and then just realize that he can’t really hold anything,” said Schimmel.
Schimmel’s idea is that the information on how to create these systems should be available to anyone.
“I don’t like patenting these things,” said Schimmel. The occupational therapists are incredibly bright – you teach them how to sauder and you teach them how to hook up switches and they get it right away, so I don’t mind making this stuff open source and putting it out there and saying ‘This is how you adapt a digital camera.’ And it could be a commercial project, because a lot of people don’t have time to make this stuff themselves.”
Despite his multiple projects in technology, Schimmel hasn’t forgotten the place where his networking ideas began.
“I have a little free time, so I think I’ll be building some more fireflies now. My sister’s pregnant, so I would love to get one in her kid’s room,” he said.