User Designer

Recently I came across JennyLC’s Intimate Controllers project (via the always interesting we-make-money-not-art). She writes that the project involved “building game controllers into undergarments so that games are played through players physically touching one another. The goal of this project was to research and create objects that challenge the traditional notions and orientation of video game play”. Her demo video is worth watching and if you’ve a bit of time to spare her thesis presentation video is online.

Her work touches on some ideas that have been running around in my head for years. A world where it’s easy to create arbitrary relationships between actions and effects. I wonder could you generalise her controllers so they can be used for creating arbitrary mappings?

For example imagine a product where you buy a box of flexible, durable and reusable controllers that easily attach to clothes, walls, floors, etc. Once the controllers self-network you start creating relationships between controller activations and resulting actions, i.e. press a controller and it turns on a light, or lay out a bunch of the controllers on the floor and walls to create a 3D dance mat for your game console.

Will people move away from buying physical artifacts with pre-build physical interfaces to buying artifacts that can have controls easily attached to them based on their preferences?

Imagine buying a cooker / stove that has heating elements but no buttons, controls or feedback for setting the temperature. When you get the cooker / stove home its up to you to stick a bunch of controllers onto the cooker. If you like you could setup a touch sensitive controller where you adjust the cooking temperature by sliding your hand instead of twisting a knob, or setup controllers so you increase the temperature by dancing fast on a dance mat in front of the cooker :) You could build your physical interfaces for mobiles phones, door handles, etc, in the same way and potentially with the same controllers.

How could you simplify creating a relationship between controller activations and resulting actions? Maybe by fusing Visual Programming Language, e.g. Toontalk, with Programming by Demonstration. That’s a hard but important question.

What kind of easily composable output / feedback / display components would you have? Maybe build souped up versions of LED throwies.

Will we ever have malleable physical interfaces?