The Softness of Things
Week 3, Connect

How should people connect via distance? Telephones and video chat are
two ways which facilitate verbal communication, however they lack
tacitility. There are many ways in which our local space is defined
which we may be unaware of: background sounds, wind, lighting,
temperature, and so on. These details are essential in making a space
"shared".

Professor Ishii at MIT did interesting exploratory work into connecting
people via distance in his project inTouch (circa 1997-8).
While this was ground breaking work, I don't think many, if any new,
functional objects have been created to close the distance gap in
revolutionary ways.



My idea is to great a stick, about a foot in length and inch in
diameter. At each node it would be able to bend. Sticks work in pairs,
so each person has one. Like inTouch, as the stick is manipulated, the
other stick moves in the same direction. If you wrap it around your
arm, the complementary stick attempts to mimic the motion.

The Warmth Stick goes a step beyond shared movements, and the added
feature is in its name: "Warmth". It will be able to sense and generate
heat. While one party is holding a stick, the other will grow warm,
offering a sense of closeness or connectedness. If one were to fall
asleep holding the stick, the other party, after returning home, could
pick the stick up, sense that it was being held through its warmth and
then waggle it slightly to say hello (although not too hard!).

-- Thu, 27 Sep 2007 10:55 -0400

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