MIT Inventors Turn Power Cords Into Gadget Interfaces

Go ahead and charge your phone on your fancy new IKEA desk, but don’t get too excited: We’re still a ways away from a totally wireless world. As it stands, cables are still the fastest, most efficient way to transmit data and electricity. And really, is that such a bad thing?
No. Not at all. Cords can be good for more than just tangling and tripping us up, argues a group of students from MIT.
In a project called Cord UIs, Phillip Schoessler of MIT’s Tangible Media Group and Sang-won Leigh of Fluid Interfaces (the team that brought us THAW) is exploring how we can transform pesky cables into responsive interfaces. If we have to use cords, the thinking goes, why not make them useful?
The cables attached to your devices are a lot like a hose; electricity and data flow through them, like water. And just as you can bend and kink a hose to change how that water flows, the same thinking can be applied to cords. This metaphor drove the prototypes the team laid out in a recent paper.
The first example uses knots to dictate interaction. A cord embedded with a bend sensor can control the color and brightness of a light by constricting or expanding the flow of data. The tighter you squeeze the knot, the dimmer the light gets. If you were to move the knot’s position on the cord, you could theoretically control another variable, like color. “For instance, three knots could represent the red, green, or blue value of an RGB-LED lamp, respectively,” they write.
A more conceptual idea uses the cable as a slipknot—kinking the cord connected to your computer could automatically create an event reminder or a task in a to-do list. “Upon completion the knot can be removed and the event or task is automatically checked off,” they researchers write. “The cord then acts as a tangible representation of the digital data.”

Pinching the headphone cable will pause or play music. GIF: MIT

In another prototype, you watch as a pinched headphone cord turns music on and off via a capacitive sensor. It’s a little like the button you might already have on your headphones that controls volume and playback, but there’s a subtle advantage to embedding interaction into the entire cable: You don’t have to think about where you’re touching. “It’s about how much mental effort you to need to spend on interaction,” Leigh says. A similar example, harnessing the power of pressure, shows a computer being put to sleep by dropping a book on its power cord.

Stretch sensors perform the same task as clicking “eject.” GIF: MIT

If you’re prone to prematurely yanking USBs from the port, this is your prototype: The team embedded stretch sensors in a cable, allowing it to program an interaction that will communicate your intent to eject a disk or USB by simply pulling on the cord. This stretching action is akin to clicking “eject” with your mouse, but it streamlines the process by building that action into a motion you’ll already perform.

Kinking and unkinking a cable will turn the power cord on and off. GIF: MIT

The last prototype shows a power strip turning on and off according to kinks in the cable. Using a micro controller and a cable that detects electric currents, they designed an interaction that turned the cord into a power switch. Kink the cable and the light turns on, do it again and the light turns off.
Though there are some obvious practical applications, you could question the efficiency and necessity of these interactions. Why not just stick to flicking a switch or clicking an icon? It’s not like kinking a cord saves much time.  If you ask the team, applicability really isn’t the point. To an extent, research projects like Cord UIs are more a provocation than an effort to produce something that can be commercialized. “Sometimes it’s about the poetics,” Schoessler says. Cord UIs does accomplish what the Tangible Media Group is all about: Giving invisible data a physical presence. If nothing else, the project is a nice reminder that it’s possible to reframe the nuisances in our lives by giving them an added layer of functionality.