So, as I mentioned the other day, I’m in Los Angeles this summer, being a visiting researcher at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. The project I’m working on there is called “CURIOUS RITUALS: Gestural Interaction in the Digital Everyday” and we’ve just set up a blog about it.
It’s actually a 7-weeks project conducted by Katherine Miyake, Nancy Kwon, Walton Chiu from the media design program and myself.
This research project is about gestures, postures and digital rituals that typically emerged with the use of digital technologies (computers, mobile phones, sensors, robots, etc.): gestures such as recalibrating your smartphone doing an horizontal 8 sign with your hand, the swiping of wallet with RFID cards in public transports, etc. These practices can be seen as the results of a co-construction between technical/physical constraints, contextual variables, designers intents and people’s understanding. We can see them as an intriguing focus of interest to envision the future of material culture.
The aim of the project is to envision the future of gestures and rituals like the one above based on:
- A documentation of current digital gestures
- The making of design fiction films that speculate about their evolution