sensory

Sensory Engagement & the haptic is about our physical relationship to the world and is a way of opening up different ways to get information to us.
This form of design is Intuitive and engaging. The haptic senses are all about the design coming out of the screen. It's about engaging the user by getting them to take advantage of all the information gathering appartus in their body in order to interact with the design.

Designers have also matured beyond the first moments of irresistible and immoderate enthusiasm for the new mediums, and learned to control their touch and to wear technology, instead of letting technology wear them.

Paola Antonelli ‘Digital By Design’ forward 2008

Theo Watson ‘Boards Interactive Magazine’ 2010

Gesture & The Interface

Gestural systems are no different from any other form of interaction. They need to follow the basic rules of interaction design, which means well-defined modes of expression, a clear conceptual model of the way they interact with the system, their consequences, and means of navigating unintended consequences.
Donald Norman‘Natural User Interfaces are not Natural’

Reactive Environments

The convergence of computational, communications and audio/video technologies is having an ever- increasing impact on human-machine interaction. The problems introduced by new applications, users and contexts are prompting new ways of thinking about systems and design. "Ubiquitous computing" (Weiser, 1993 ) and "Augmented Reality" (Wellner, Mackay & Gold, 1993 ) are two examples of this new thinking. The basic tenet of UbiComp and Augmented Reality is that systems should be embedded in the environment. The technology should be distributed (ubiquitous), yet invisible, or transparent. While the theory is appealing, in practice, resolving the seeming paradox arising from the joint demands of ubiquity and transparency is less than simple. This paper documents a case study of attempting to do just that. We describe our experience in developing a working conference room which is equipped to support a broad class of meetings and media for both same place and different place participation. The work is still "in progress," yet it is sufficiently well advanced that we believe that the timely documentation of our experience will be of benefit to other researchers.

‘Thus far, 21st-century culture is centered on interaction: “I communicate, therefore I am” is the defining affirmation of contemporary existence, and objects and systems that were once charged only with formal elegance and functional soundness are now also expected to have personalities.’ Paola Antonelli 2011

Ritornell's business cards are inspired by the project’s live show. The improvised concerts evoke a lively atmosphere by the combination of filigree electronics with playful timbres of diverse acoustic instruments and utensils such as egg whisks, toilet brushes, chopsticks or sewing needles. As an integral part of their set list, Ritornell invites the audience to bring along their private musicboxes. Arranged in a big circle, the players’ speed of turning levers is conducted: the results are as shimmering as you would expect.

Katharina Hölzl designed very special business cards to recreate this playful sonic universe. With the aid of laser assisted milling, nine micro compositions consisting of circles, triangles and Ritornell’s contact information were applied onto a long musicbox paper stripe. Before handing out the cards to interested adressees, each individual subdivision is played back via an especially designed musical box – thus providing every business card receiver with a tailor made musical experience.