Playful interaction
Assignment A: New Playful Interaction Concept
Come up with a new concept for a social playful interface to encourage positive behaviour within the main THUAS building
- Describe/sketch context of the play space
- Sketch/illustrate Interaction between players
- Sketch/illustrate Interactions between players and the system
- Describe/sketch Technical aspects
- Input technology
- Output technology
Hold the door
Play space
Research
The Intimate Bench by Yoav Sterman
This is the Intimate Bench, designed and built by Yoav Sterman. It's purpose is to explore the social scenario of people sitting on a bench in a public space. The bench looks like any other ordinary park bench, but inside are seat sensors (input technology) which are connected to a microcontroller inside the bench. When someone sits down, the system reacts by turning on lights embedded in the bench in different configurations, depending on the position of the people sitting on the bench. (output technology). When people sit far from each other, the lights inside the bench react in ways that try to get the players closer together. When the players are close together, the bench reacts in ways that strengthen that situation. The lights inside the bench cause shapes like hearts to appear, which players can experiment and play with.
The 'play' with this interface is unstructured, meaning there's no real end goal and playing with this interface is mostly exploratory. It's strictly a multiplayer experience, since the bench only reacts when there are two people sitting on it. Playing with the bench is a cooperative experience as well, and play is interdependent. The players share the same object and have to play together. The degree to which the system reacts positively to the players is dependent on the players willingness to play together.
Assignment C: Reflection
I think playful interaction is a really cool topic. I feel there's lots of applications that go unnoticed to the untrained eye. When learning about playful interaction, I noticed that play can be integrated in just about anything that humans interact with. In the case of playful interaction in public spaces, a lot of these projects use objects that you wouldn't normally expect to be able to play with, which I think makes it all the more fun. Things like trash cans, benches, stairs, and crossroads all have the potential for play. I think this something really nice to think about, and I wish to see more of these playful interfaces in the future.
I do think that designers of these interfaces need to be careful not to overdo it though. If every object and interface is made into a plaything, it might lose its novelty and it could quickly become boring and even annoying to interface.
Overall, this topic pretty much went about how I expected. I had seen the video of the musical stairs before (like I'm sure many people have at this point) and a lot of the concepts handled in class seemed pretty intuitive to me when you think about them in hindsight. That being said, I still had a lot of fun thinking of different concepts and looking at stuff about the topic online.