Strange Places

Abstract

The inspiration for designing tangible, embedded, and embodied interaction can come from stranger places than needs assessments and observations. In conceptualizing home+, a pair of interactive furnishings enabling independent living, our design-research team found inspiration in modern painting and contemporary dance. Giorgio de Chirico's painting "Furniture in the Valley" (1928) captures the curious vitality and intermingling of furniture outside their normal confines that our team translated into this active pair of home+ robots and their intimate rapport. Two contemporary dance works, Andrea Miller's "(C)arbon" and Ohad Naharin's "STOP," explore the interrelationships of three bodies, coping with their circumstances, which inspired the interoperability and control strategies across the pair of robots and a human "in-the-loop." This paper aims to inspire other design researchers to seek, in strange places, inspirations for tangible, embedded, and embodied interaction.