Anaid’s ITP blog

this my day…

I realized today that there isn’t enough explanation on my blog about why I worked on kokoro. It began as an idea of how to make digital devices “smarter” and find new inputs that relate to our bodies and can control digital devices. Music players are one of the most common interactions we have with digital files and sometimes having to take conscious choices by looking at a screen is just not very practical. One of the best indicators of the state of our bodies is heart rate so that is what I decided to use.

There are other attempts at interfacing with music in different ways. Most of the examples I can thing of are software, like the genius feature on iTunes. A prototype I found interesting is ColorSonic, that relates music to color. But I continued to look for a way to do this without needing our attention, to make it an almost magical thing, that our iPod can just choose the music that is well suited for this particular moment.

2.0

I’ve been working on another design for kokoro. this is one idea. i’ll keep posting and hoping for more comments to help me improve. thanks to everyone who has contacted me so far!

I read an article yesterday, Defining the New Singularity by Mark Rolston from Frog Design.

A few quotes:

“Today, we have reached the point at which new technologies can enable us, finally, to re-engage several of these natural modes of relation between self and other.”

“While data infrastructure and underlying technologies have changed radically, the means of getting at these experiences, the interface itself, has remained definitively old-world. We still stare at screens, conceptually no different from those found in our televisions and movie theaters. Their form was derived from the notion of “moving pictures,” itself firmly rooted in the traditional arts of photography, painting, and drawing: the two-dimensional surface and the frame.”

“To naturalize the interface, we must do more than refine our analog-to-virtual iconography; we must embrace and evolve the technologies that dictate our input methods and outputs. We must move the screen and keyboard experience paradigm out of its modality (“time to use the computer”) into the rest of our lives.”

It says a lot about why I work in this projects and how I feel about technology.

If you are in New York come say hello!

invitation

check it out!

thanks to Ellie and the rest of the rocketboom team.

This week is thesis week at ITP. The presentations are streamed live online. Mine will happen thursday, May 7th at 1pm. They will also be archived to watch later on.

still under construction, it is here:

http://anaiid.com/kokoro

make sure you watch the video!