Going beyond screens
How can we interact with technology without using screens?
The new year started with exciting topics! Last semester was all about building empathy. This meant lots of research and engaging in conversations. This semester’s approach is a little different. This one is all about building and making stuff.
To get things going we kicked off the year with a course called tangible design led by Ottavio Cambieri (creator of the Mash Machine!), and with it a fascinating question: how can we interact with technology without using screens?
I was instantly blown away. We are so used to screen interfaces, and most of our engagement with technology is through them, that the possibility of even thinking about different sources of inputs and outputs hadn’t even crossed my mind. I mean, yes there are some haptics that are present with us in our daily lives — like the vibrations in phones — but this was a whole new level. The question being posed here was greater. It encompassed the nature itself of our relationship with technology and it was an invitation to explore the possibilities of creating more engaging sensorial experiences and its implications.
Our first challenge, to be completed in two days, was the following: create something that manages to transmit a message between to people without using visuals or audio.
FAST PROTOTYPING. CUTTING. GLUING. TAPING. SOLDERING. ARDUINOS. CODING.
Alongside Sebastian, my partner for this project, we came up with Lighthouse. Inspired by our own experiences of living far (very far) away from our families and having family members spread out through the globe, we thought about how to convey a message that transmitted — ‘ I’m home, I’m safe, i think about you, were still together despite the distance’ — without becoming something burdensome or without having to give to much thought to the differences in time zones and other complications.
To be able to achieve this we created small toy houses with lights inside. Along with the houses we made corresponding key trays. Each member of the family would have a pair of house/tray. So whenever anyone came home, he/she would place their keys in the tray and this made a little light turn on in all of the houses.
For further development of the project we could also think about the concept of ‘warmth of the family’ and have the lights also increase the temperature of the whole area surrounding the house. Or iterate more on the feelings of seeing the light turn on and off. Maybe instead of a simple on and off effect the light could actually dim out when the keys are taken away to recreate the sensation of that somebody was there even though they left recently.
At the end of this small project i felt very excited. The way technology has advanced over the years is both very exciting and scary. You could argue that in many ways things that we’ve created to bring us closer together have actually pushed us further apart. In a sense screens are part of this isolationist effect. Many interactions have become obsolete because of them, and even though positive have come out of this, we’ve also lost to a certain extent contact. Contact with others, with our environments and with processes.
Tangible design seems like a very interesting opportunity to explore how we could rethink our interaction with technology in a way in which could reconnect with the processes of life that power what technology is capable of. What if we could see our energy consumption when we engage with the material world? What if you could create spaces that would respond to the way with interact with them?
