Lecture4

Sensory engagement means that someone interacts with something by using his physical senses. Haptic is an input or output device that senses the body's movements by means of physical contact with the user.

Gesture and the screen
- Jessica Healfand: The digital world we live in is an immaterial world
- Paola Antonelli, "Digital by design": Designers learned to wear technology and not letting technology wear them. That means that designers have to use new tools offer by digital media instead of letting that media control them.

Gesture and interface
- Creation of a natural user interface (more natural forms of interaction such as touch, speech, gestures, handwriting, vision and movement -> relationship between our bodies and the new media)
- Donald Norman, „Natural user interfaces are not natural“: Gestural systems need to follow the basic rules of interaction design

Reactive environments
- Joachim Sauter: Artworks have left the screen, to manifest the virtual sphere in palpable spatial experiences (Example for an experiment that allows people to interact with digital media: Rain Room, Barbican Centre, London)
- Lev Manovich, „The language of new media“: The spectator is no longer chained, immobilized, anesthetized by the apparatus that serves her ready-made images; now she has to work, to speak, in order to see
- Kenya Hara, „Designing design“: Quality of information offered when senses have been mobilized, having the image permeate the 5 senses

Active objects
- Paolo Antonelli: „I communicate, therefore I am“ (Objects are now also expected to have personalities)
- Human Computer Balance: critiquing the impact of machine and human integration -> memories and knowledge are gone from the human brain because machines now have that functions

In this workshop we learned to work with Arduino (https://www.arduino.cc).

Arduino is an open-source electronics platform based on easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for anyone making interactive projects. We installed Arduino,and watched some interesting videos about things that you can create with Arduino. After that we got some Arduino UNO boards and USB-cables and connected them to our computers. Before we started the first exercise Emily explained some important things about the board and its functions.

I was in a group with the students Anni, Melly and Leopold. The first exercise was to make the LED light blink. In order to reach that aim, we typed a code in the program and put the LED into the right digital pin as constructed. The light started to blink in a special rhythm.
The second exercise was to control the brightness of the light by touching one of the contacts. We run a new code, connected some wires and restrictors and put the LDR into the right digital pin. The LED light started blinking and changed the brightness by touching the contact.
For the third exercise we got a potentiometer and a servo motor. In order to make the blades of the servo motor rotate we typed a completely new and more complicated code with more commands in it. In the end it started rotating!

I have never worked with something like Arduino before, so it was very interesting to see that you can build an interactive system by yourself and that you don't even need many tools for it. A huge inspiration!