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How can a clump of sand become a seed: Designing tangible and embodied interaction using sand material
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School of Arts, Design and Architecture |
Master's thesis
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en
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50
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Tangible and Embodied Interaction (TEI). The term progressed from Tangible and ‘Embedded’ Interaction to emphasize the physical aspect of the interaction. It is based on the effort to see and communicate with each other face-to-face and eye-to-eye. Dissolving the boundaries between two parallel worlds will bring the digital world into the world we physically exist in and make people more comfortable with engaging their communities, regardless of online or offline.
For designing TEI, one needs a flexible approach for imagining fictional circumstances that sometimes seem outer-worldly. Speculative Design practice, established by Dunne and Raby (2013), shows the many possibilities of the imagination implemented in art and design. Writing a scenario ‘What-If’ can become a great thought experiment (Dunne, 2013) for users to digest the concepts perceived as radical or unrealistic in the present views. As interacting through a screen is still dominant today, pursuing computer interaction with tangibility may seem like chasing an unrealistic dream. However, the human body has already been dealing with the tangibility of its material instruments.
To understand where the tangible interface came from and how it evolved, the research even has to go far back to ancient history. Tangibles have existed alongside humans; in theory, one could even reach the beginning of humanity. Starting with the memories of an abacus from Professor Hiroshi Ishii, from MIT Tangible Media Group, it will examine how the tangible instruments contributed to humanity as encapsulated knowledge (Baird, 2004). In the digital era, Prof.Ishii and his team kept developing their own computing methods, from Urp(1999) to inFORM(2013). What was first graspable bits can only function as an I/O switch, and became a complex environment that responds to users’ different situations. The development of seamless tangible bits is still ongoing until it reduces to the atomic scale.
The artistic component of this thesis is based on the method of scenario What If, from a child’s absurd belief that the tree can grow out of sand, the production is initiated by setting up the ‘what-if’ scenario about ‘What if a clump of Sand can become a Seed?’. It was not about biologically turning a real sand molecule into a seed, but the curiosity about how much the computing method can help preserve one’s pure imagination. As Johan Huizinga said in Homo Ludens: The Play Element in Culture (1949), play is the realization of imagination, and play has existed among humans even before culture (Huizinga, 1949).