Steven Smethurst

Steven Smethurst

Steven Smethurst is a Vancouver based Maker, Hacker, Coder, Artist, and all around great guy!

(2025) Counterproductive

Counter Productive

This is an art project

Instructions

Counter productive button

  • Press the button to reset the 24-hour countdown timer.
  • If the timer ever reaches zero, the project ends and will be removed.
  • To keep the project alive — press the button

This is a social experiment. To see how long this project survives and how people interact with the button. Will they keep pressing the button to keep this project alive?

When the button is pressed a signal is sent to a server that records the time it was pressed. With these logs I can determine how frequently the button was pressed, how long between presses, what time of day the button is pressed most frequently, etc…

This art work was installed in a small park during spring of 2025.

Current project status and stats

Counter productive stats

Build details

Counter productive button This project was built in 3 hours with spare parts I had in my workshop. I was looking for a quick project that I could do in a single night.

This project uses a XIAO ESP32-C6 as a microcontroller. It connects to the internet via wifi and sends MQTT payloads when ever someone presses the button. The MQTT payloads are captured by a custom NodeJS app and logged with a timestamp to a file. Then a report is generated based on this log and sends it to Github GIST. The stats page loads the report from the GIST and auto updates every 60 seconds.

I used NodeJS - Single executable applications (SEA) to build the NodeJS scripts into a portable Windows application.

This is the first project where I have used a Github Gist as a online object storage to store the reports. This allows me to not have to run a public web server.

I used a transparent box so people could look inside it and see what components were used. I was worried that people would see a countdown timer with a big red button and think bomb 💣. It turns out that a circuit board with exposed wires, also makes people think it might be a bomb 💣.

A 8x32 RED led matrix is used for the countdown timer and primary display. Its hard to see in the daylight but glows red at night. I think this lead to the button being pressed more frequently during the evening.

All the project source files can be found on the projects github page. github.com/funvill/counterproductive

Prior art