Mapping Fabrics to Music: Lessons Learned
Paper in proceeding, 2003

The original aim of the Interactive Quilt project was to create an intuitive tangible interface, which was at the same time a beautiful object. The idea was to create a patchwork quilt that worked as a jukebox; the fabric of each patch being mapped to music genres to give the user a clue of what type of song would be played when touching a patch. From several user tests we found out that mapping fabrics to music is hard to do due to the highly subjective qualities involved. As a result, this forced us to leave our initial, HCI-oriented view behind to instead explore the qualities of ambiguity and calm technology. This gave the project an entirely new angle, and resulted in many new insights regarding the comprehension of fabrics and music, the qualities of exploration etc. In this paper we present our entire design process and our findings.

the Interactive Quilt

fabrics

Ambiguity

slow technology

music

tangible interface

Author

Sus Lundgren

Computing Science, Interaction Design Collegium (Chalmers)

Sara Johansson

Fredrik Nilsson

Pär Stenberg

Paula Thorin

Proceedings of The ninth IFIP TC13 international conference on Human-Computer Interaction (Interact 2003), Zürich, Switzerland

Subject Categories

Materials Engineering

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Latest update

11/5/2018