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Design

On this page Crispin Jones, who designed Tengu, explains the development and various prototypes which went into Tengu.

The images on this page were originally prepared for a talk at The Happened which was delivered on 2 October 2007.

      

I had been interested in Solid Alliance for some time; particularly I admired the courage they had in releasing the Ghost Radar as a product (not many companies would release such a device!) On a trip to Japan I was introduced to Kuni Kawahara and Kenji Koshida and I liked them very much.

The image shows two of Solid Alliance's best known products - the USB Sushi Disk and the Ghost Radar.

      

When I was back in London I decided to make something for Solid Alliance. I wanted to make something that combined the "USB" (Sushi Drive) and "Ghost" (Ghost Radar) parts of Solid Alliance's products.

At this time I was looking at primitive Japanese artworks. I wanted to try and bring some of the animism of these objects to electronic objects.

  
    I started by making a foam mockup of a ghost form. I didn't really stray from the traditional "ghost" representation at this stage.      

I knew the character would connect to the USB port, I also knew that (for expediency) the face would be made from LEDS. I made a small PCB with an array of leds on it and made the ghost's face in acrylic. I knew with a thin front wall the the LEDs would diffuse nicely to make the face.

Unfortunately the leds diffused so much that they didn't really look like a face. Back to the drawing board...

     

I thought that I could make the ghost form from fabric as this would give a clear reading of the LED face and also reflects how people dress up as ghosts (with a sheet over their head).

Hmm this didn't work very well. With hindsight I wonder how it could have worked...

      

I went back to the acrylic form and tried making it with discrete partitions for the LEDs. This worked better (when the milling machine didn't cut through the thin wall on the front of the face). The face was becoming thinner and thinner because it took so long to cut (around 18 hours for this piece).

I decided to change the form both to make it easier to cut and because the form wasn't very sucessful at this stage.

     

I did some sketches of a much-similified form (basically just a rectangle). This had a couple of advantages - it was much simpler to machine the prototypes and it also posessed much more personality.

I was thinking as well about the YM901 special edition Game & Watch, which I always really liked the form of.

       I machined a new version based on the sketches. This version had a full data link back to the PC. The form worked much better by this stage and the LEDs diffused nicely to make the face      

I wrote some softeware to test some different animations on his face, you can see it run through some of the behaviours on this video.

I finished these behaviours and animations in time for another trip to Japan. I presented the Tengu in this form to Solid Alliance and they really liked it.

 
    The software which I wrote was quite basic - you could turn on different leds and make simply looped animations.       This video shows the two units which I made for the Solid Alliance presentation - I imagined that there could be some interplay between different units if you had more than one.  
   

Following on from the meeting with Solid Alliance we decided to make the first Tengu a self-contained device (so requiring no software on the host machine).

The prototype had a sound reactive behaviour - in this mode the face would animate with sound received through the host PC. I revised the electronics so the microphone was built in and dispensed with the software link to the host PC.

       This video shows an early prototype of the sound reactive Tengu. At this stage the sound reactivity wasn't quite as sensitive as I would have liked.
      This image shows one of the pre-production prototypes that Solid Alliance made. From this point onwards we worked on refining the sensitivity and also the animated faces.      

I was also responsible for the design of the packaging. I wasn't sure what it shoulld look like / reference.

The final packaging design was inspired by an early 20th Century poster for Sorcar the magician.