Nono Martínez Alonso (@nonoesp)
Abstract.
How would our interaction with day-to-day objects change if there was a dialogue in between bodies, objects, and spaces, and what is happening around them, so they can “communicate” with us by reacting and adapting accordingly.
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Everywhere, we find bodies, objects, and spaces surrounding us which have a solid or rigid state. Some of them, as an intrinsic property. The firm and stable shape of these elements—built in their nature, either artificially (i.e. a table) or naturally (i.e. an egg)—is, in many cases, a trade-off.
Yes, everyday objects, such as a table or a phone, are rigid in order to improve the way we interact with them. Yet, we encounter situations on a daily basis in which we wish those elements were not that rigid after all. When we pass by and hit the corner of a table, the pain caused is amplified due to its rigidity, as if the table was punishing you for not being careful and noticing it. When we drop our phone, its solid state, together with its flimsiness, increases the probabilities for it to break, as if it wanted to break because we were not careful enough.
Understanding this as a continuous barrier in our lives to interact with bodies, objects, and spaces, we propose an improvement to our daily interaction with them—a dialogue between day-to-day objects and us. This is, a way to inform an element on how we are using it: Are we touching it? Did we drop it? Is is free-falling? Is something going to collide with it?
Using haptic feedback, jamming, or motion detection, objects can be aware of what is happening to—and around—them, and respond accordingly1. Along the vision of Radical Atoms2, materials can be intelligent and, for instance, they could pump or suck air from their inside , in order to adapt themselves to whatever consistency the current environment requires1.
The corner of a table or the hard edge any surface—which softens right before you hit it—establishes a direct dialogue with you, it knows what you are doing and reacts to your actions, adapting its hardness as you are passing by.
A surface that softens when an object is free-falling to it, or an element which adapts its envelope while free-falling, would react to help us, as if an invisible entity was trying to make our life easier.
Things wouldn’t break, or at least, not as often as they currently do. Materials would be capable of “talking,” capable of communicating with us using a new language in order to let us know they are aware that we are here.
- Follmer, Sean, Daniel Leithinger, Alex Olwal, Nadia Cheng, and Hiroshi Ishii. “Jamming user interfaces: programmable particle stiffness and sensing for malleable and shape-changing devices.” In Proceedings of the 25th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, pp. 519–528. ACM, 2012. ↩
- Ishii, Hiroshi, Dávid Lakatos, Leonardo Bonanni, and Jean-Baptiste Labrune. “Radical atoms: beyond tangible bits, toward transformable materials.” interactions 19, no. 1 (2012): 38–51. ↩
This is very interesting, makes me think of a sort of “internet of things with shape / stiffness change”. Fantastic use of GIF’s and contrast here, really cool. In terms of the talking to us, check this out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect.