Fred Truman
Design & Code Creative
Pousse Cafe
November 1, 2010
Role(s): Design, Programming, Construction
Collaborators: Paragini Amin, Michell Cardona
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Pousse Cafe is a physical computing project completed with fellow tinkerers Paragini Amin and Michell Cardona that set out to explore liquid interactions and how we could control and display this media in a dynamic way. We spent a lot of time during the initial phases of the project experimenting with various liquids and were ultimately able to distill (no pun intended) the idea: a voice controlled gourmet shot dispenser.
How we arrived at this conclusion was not so simple. We originally wanted a more immersive and ambient experience and set out to find the most interesting concoctions. We mixed soap with oil with water with sludge with paint with more oil and then we thought of drinks that have different layers to them. Using drinks immediately made the experiments less toxic (seemingly) and after having found some interesting mixtures the idea of drinking a beverage seemed to solve questions of scale, immediacy and closure to the interaction with the project.
From here we entertained the idea of many different different mixed drinks until we stumbled upon the pousse cafe – a lovely yet not-altogether unsweet drink (ok, it’s really sweet). It required:
- 1/2 oz (1 tablespoon) crème de cassis
- 1 oz (2 tablespoons) elderflower liqueur
- 1 oz (2 tablespoons) pear brandy such as poire William
and when poured properly creates a very nice layered effect that creates the visual interest we were looking for when we originally set out exploring liquids. However, we found, pouring it properly was nearly impossible. We considered this a challenge and set to work on creating the world’s finest pousse cafe pouring bartender.
Made from an old wine crate, three gravity fed solenoid valves, tubing, wiring, Teflon tape to prevent leaking, an Arduino and a voice recognition library called Voce for Processing we were able to piece together a very-fine tuned machine indeed. We hope to have a site up with more comprehensive documentation sometime in the not-too-distant future, but until then I hope you enjoy the video we made to demo the functionality of the Pousse Cafe and if you have any questions about production please just drop me an email.