Designing Behaviour Interaction + Show & Tell II
‘Intersections’ by Yoke and our lamp
As I was home sick when we had the lecture about “Designing Behaviour in Interaction” I’ve decided to reflect on the text in relation to a light installation called ‘Intersections’ created by Yoke that I saw recently at Arken, the museum in Ishøj.
‘Intersections’ at Arken
“Aesthetic Interaction (1) has practical use next to intrinsic value, (2) has social and ethical dimensions, (3) has satisfying dynamic form, and (4) actively involves people’s bodily, cognitive, emotional and social skills.” (Ross et. al, 2010: 1)
The light installation has intrinsic value in it’s aesthetically pleasing experience of being swallowed into a different space. It being an art installation it can be difficult to see a practical value, other than the fact that all lights and lamps have the practicality of lighting up a room. In the situation of the room at the museum the pillar lamps have the practical value to move the solid bits around to make the light and shadows dance on the walls.
Reading about Yoke’s vision about the light installation, it is a futuristic vision. Futuristic is a subjective word that can have utopian or — dystopian associations. This subjectivity also fits in with Ross et. al’s comment that not everyone will find the same things beautiful. In that way I, subjectively, feel that the installation has ethical and social dimensions in it’s somewhat dark visions about the future. It definitely doesn’t feel like a happy place to be — although a fascinating place.
Being completely hypnotised by the installation, I think it definitely has a satisfying dynamic form. Even though it’s just a circular motion, nothing feels boring or the same. You can look on both the pillars themselves and their turning, but also look at the floors and walls and practically everywhere to discover new effects by the lights. The pillars themselves are not a particularly satisfying physical form, but it’s the movement/the dynamics that make the installation time-consumingly fascinating to look at.
Being an art installation, again, it can feel like it doesn’t wake more than intellectual beauty in the user’s gaze. But getting the futuristic aspect of the installation, the atmosphere suddenly becomes a bit more scary, as it invokes associations with dystopian stories (or movies) and also the current news in which the whole world seems to fall apart. In that way this installation also awakens emotional and social skills in that it encourages conversation about current and future issues with the people the user experiences the installation with.
Our lamp
At this stage of our project, we don’t really have a specific lamp idea yet. Actually, we only have a context — “being afraid of the dark in a child’s perspective”. The only thing we have, is the feeling of being afraid. And an idea of the interaction being some kind of comforting of the lamp.
The idea of making a lamp that is afraid stems from group member Mette’s daughter, Ingrid, who is 5 years old. She was afraid of the dark, but Mette told her that her teddy was afraid of the dark as well. Ingrid suddenly felt a kind of responsibility for her teddy and decided to comfort the teddy and in that way she forgot that she was afraid herself. — This is of course based on only Ingrid and not children in general, and on another child this could have the opposite effect of making the child even more afraid being reinforced in his/hers fear.
Show and tell II: Feedback
First round — with the TA’s, Pernille and Anne-Sophie
At our first Show & Tell II we talked a lot about affordances (Norman 2013) and how our lamp would afford to be petted by the child. This was mostly based on the fact, that we have a limited knowledge of Arduino and could mostly imagine sensors being placed on hard materials. We also talked about how we are unset on both the temporal form and the physical form (Vallgårda 2014) and which we should explore first — The Arduino aspect (the temporal form) or the Lasercutter or other ways of shaping (the physical form).
Second round — with Laurens and Jonas
At the second round we focused more on our tendency to frame a problem and try to solving it. We were reminded to experiment and play with interactions instead of thinking to specifically on helping a child fall asleep. We were also encouraged to disregard the thoughts about the softer physical form as we should focus on one thing at the time and take it as a “step-by-step” process instead of trying to make a complete lamp immediately.
So at the end of the day we decided to make a to-do list to get an overview of what our next steps were going to be. After a lot of feedback from the two rounds of presentations we felt ready to move further with our lamp and focus on the Arduino aspect of the lamp firstly. Our to-do-list is as follows:
To-Do List
- Bodystorming to explore the interactions of being scared.
- Talking to Ole at the IntermediaLab at 12.30 to settle on some Arduino sensors and outputs in forms of LED’s.
- Start coding the Arduino, so we can experiment with lightning sequences and actions.
References
- Norman, Donald A. The design of everyday things: Revised and expanded edition. Basic books, 2013.
- Ross, P. R., & Wensveen, S. A. (2010). Designing behavior in interaction: Using aesthetic experience as a mechanism for design. International Journal of Design, 4(2).
- Schön, Donald. A. (1987). Educating the reflective practitioner: Toward a new design for teaching and learning in the professions. San Francisco.
- Vallgårda, Anna. “Giving form to computational things: developing a practice of interaction design.” Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 18.3 (2014): 577–592.
