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literate
luciana frazāo, fabio nogueira and yasmin avancini

Literate emerged as a tool to help professionals leave the inventive stagnation while developing their projects, linking technology and creative insight.

In 1926, the social psychologist from the London School of Economics, Graham Wallas, launched a theory called “Art of Thinking,” defining for the first time the creative process in four stages: preparation, incubation, enlightenment, and verification.

The second stage of the creative process, incubation, is a moment of unconscious processing in which the creative mind works without direct effort. Many people refer to this phase as a “creative leisure” moment. It means a moment in which you are not deliberately looking for a solution to a problem, but in fact, your mind is searching for new connections, unconsciously and involuntarily, based on the brewing accomplished in the preparation stage. This moment of the creative process is where many professionals have difficulties in continuing with their projects. Literato was created to help engineers, designers, artists, and others during this stage of concept.

In 2004, psychologist Mark Beeman, from North-Western University, led a study where he measured the cerebral activities of volunteers through exams like functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) and electroencephalogram (EEG) while they were having an insight. Beeman’s study shows that the insight is accompanied by an intense alpha activity in the visual cortex, inhibiting neurons' action potential. That means that, during a moment of sudden comprehension, the brain is less involved in processing visual information, which can be a distraction. For this reason, a sound stimulus was chosen for the development of Literato.

Sketch2

First sketches to define the shape and to define the dispositions of the components

Sketch
Eletronics

sound detector sensor LM393

parallax rotation servo Futaba S148

sound detector sensor LM393

arduino uno

According to specialists, unexpected mental associations are a way of activating creative thinking. Literate creates phrases in the basic form with subject + verb + adjective, randomly, without a logical context. We create a scale from 1 to 15 for the noise range detected in the environment. The subjects and adjectives were divided into groups to be activated according to the ambient sound. 

If the noise ranges between 1 and 5, Literato emits words semantically light, like love, hope, happiness,… 

If the noise ranges between 6 and 8, Literato emits words that do not have emotional appeal, like image, someone, tangled,… 

If the noise ranges between 9 and 15, Literato emits words semantically heavy, like sadness, darkness, nobody,… 

sound detection test

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