Two Interactive Projects
Weather Thingy
This interactive project by Adrien Kaeser is about playing music using real time climate-related events, the climate changes would modify the settings of musical instruments. This device contains a weather station that has a rain gauge, a wind vane and an anemometer. The user can control a brightness sensor as well as buttons to modify the value received from the different sensors.
I regard this as a great interactive project because it contains not only the interaction between the user and device, but also takes the climate surrounding in to consideration. According to Ernest Edmonds, this project contains “responding” and also “influencing”, which can be canned is “Dynamic-Interactive (Influencing) “. With the introduce of the climate, the project widens the range of interaction it provides. The Weather Thingy involves both the interaction between users and devices and the interaction between users and the whole environment.
Soundmachines
This Soundmachines is a custom-built instrument for performing electronic music by visual pattens on record-sized discs. By moving the pin into different pattens on the discs, music would changes its speed and rhythm. With several different discs at the same time, various music can be performed only by moving around the pin.
This project actually only has limit interaction with the users and audiences. Since the amount of discs and the pattens on them can’t change, the user have limited options when interacting with the device. But just as the producers said in their reflection, they intended to improve by using “easily changeable or even paintable discs”. Also they were thinking about using cameras to detect the audience and let the audience become part of the performs, too. By having such improvements, I think this Soundmachines can have further interactions with the users. If the users can make their own discs to play and the audience can involve in the music, this could also be a “Dynamic-Interactive (Influencing)” rather than only responding to the user in limited ways.
About “Interaction”
My own definition about “interaction” actually changed a lot since the beginning of the class. At first, after reading The Art of Interactive Design, my definition is about two objects having input, processing and output. But after having the group research project and the midterm project, I noticed that interaction can involve not only the user and the device, the outside environment can also be one crucial part of interaction.
This idea of having device, user and environment together goes further after I read Art, Interaction and Engagement by Ernest Edmonds. As he mentioned different levels of interaction, from responding, varying, influencing to communicating. A lot of more are involved and taken into consideration besides the device and user. We can have the elements of time, environment and internal changes within the interaction. So now I would think interaction with a boarder range, not only the device and the user, everything else surrounding may be used as part of the interactive process.
I researched in the field of sound, since my midterm project is about sound pollution, I want to do some further research and find out whether my final project would continue focus on the sound and noice. The two projects above are both interactive, but I would think the Weather Thingy fits my definition of interaction more as it contains the environment as part of the interactive process. For the second one, the Soundmachines, this project also focuses on sound, but I would think it as restricted since the user own has limited options with the device and no surrounding element is involved. With the improvements that the producers said to make, I think this project would be more interactive and fits my definition of interaction more.
Work Cited
Crawford, Chris. The Art of Interactive Design. No Starch Press, 2002.
Edmonds, Ernest. “Art, Interaction And Engagement”. 2011 15Th International Conference On Information Visualisation, 2011. IEEE, doi:10.1109/iv.2011.73. Accessed 12 Nov 2020.
Scholz, Alexander. “Soundmachines [Arduino, Processing, Objects]”. Creativeapplications.Net, 2012, https://www.creativeapplications.net/processing/soundmachines-objects-sound/.
Visnjic, Filip. “Weather Thingy – Real Time Climate Sound Controller”. Creativeapplications.Net, 2018, https://www.creativeapplications.net/sound/weather-thingy-real-time-climate-sound-controller/.