We have been introduced to the brief within the physical interaction project:
- Try to give your light a personality in its dynamic form.
- Try to design an interaction with your light, that invites the “user” to act according to a human value.
We are constrained to LED light as output. So similar to the one pixel project we have brightness, color and blinking pattern as ways of reacting to the user’s actions.
For this brief my partner, Anton, and I want to explore a physical way of interacting with an artifact. This means no buttons or ordinary switches. We want the interaction to be gentle and be about caring for the artifact. So according to Shalom H. Schwartz’ human values, which we were introduced to today, we are aiming for benevolence and especially helpfulness and responsibility.
We have used Hans Eysenck’s personality traits as a starting point for picking a personality for our blinking light. To correspond to the value of helpfulness the blinking light should express a need or demand for help. So we are aiming for a choleric, restless and changeable personality trait.
We are inspired by the sleeping pulsating pattern on Mac computers, and our idea is a light that sleeps (uses the same sequence), but suddenly wakes up and starts blinking rapidly. The user must lull the light back to sleep like a baby.
To realise this we are working with an accelerometer to detect if the user lulls the light.
