Tinker it now!

Every time I go to an interactive art exhibit, I end up feeling frustrated, but not in a way I can easily explain. I can always point to some projects that are particularly well done and teach me something new, but I leave feeling that, overall, something was missing.

This weekend I stopped by the RCA Work in Progress show (featuring Design Interactions among others) and the Kinetica Art Fair. Both certainly had their high points, and here are a few of my favorites:

David Benque’s Acoustic Botany, RCA
This caught my eye, and then I was charmed by the idea. It is a concept piece considering bioengineering as a medium for cultural expression – in this instance, engineering plants and insects into musical instruments. Nut-tree cellos, lilypad speakers, termite-mound pipes, and the like.

Acoustic Botany

The designs extrapolated well from existing natural shapes, and I like that the concept posits experimental biology as another of the many fields of human endeavor in which cultural expression is a strong and natural counterpart to practical benefit.

Unknown, Unknown, RCA
(I always take a photo that I really like and fail to get the relevant info, and this time I couldn’t even track it down online)

iPhone motions

Next to this display of not-quite-gears was an iPhone cradle and a motor. When you attach one of the jigs and run the motor, the phone is shaken in a way characteristic of the labeled gait.

I’m not sure of the intended or practical benefit of this, except for cheating at Nike + iPod. I liked the shapes of the different gaits. I’ve seen some over-engineered answers to the question of what an emotion or type of movement might look like, and these were nice antidotes—simple and legible, and they rang true.

Margaret Michel’s Tree, Kinetica
There were several pieces at Kinetica that I liked quite a lot, but this was my favorite: a motorized tree that uses its branches to draw its own leaves.

Tree

Very simple in execution, and the metaphor hangs together beautifully.

But What Is Missing?

I was glad to see the two shows in juxtaposition. The RCA show was concept-heavy, while Kinetica emphasized mechanical and built objects, and each filled in some of the other’s gaps. But as usual I left feeling somehow dissatisfied, and not entirely sure why.

Part of it, I think, is that interaction design, especially in the realm of physical computing and digital art, is a new enough field that we’re all still working things out. We haven’t completely determined what the major themes are, and we keep revisiting the same concepts with incrementally improved sophistication. The technologies themselves are in such flux that there’s a lot of overlap between learning a new tool, developing new ways to use that tool, inventing another tool entirely, and making meaningful statements about how that tool is affecting or may affect our lives.

Perhaps as a consequence, physical interactive works often focus on function and/or concept, with esthetic decisions coming in at the last minute, if at all. On a good day, there’s time to hide the electronics in a box. On most days, the explanatory text is essential for viewers to figure out what’s going on.

And this is where at least some of my dissatisfaction lies. It’s not even that we’re making bad esthetic choices; we’re just not making choices at all.

With the right underlying structures, you can get far with no esthetic decisions. There’s something inherently beautiful in a functional machine; add some algorithmic structures that mimic natural processes, and you can’t go far wrong. But it’s not the same as designing the form to go with the function, much less using that design to illustrate or enhance the story a work tells.

Before I left the RCA show, I went downstairs to see the architecture, and I was instantly jealous. As I walked into this strange carnival of maquettes and shadow boxes, I had no idea what any of it meant, but I wanted more. This, I thought, is what we need.

Architecture Student Work

Or, more accurately, this is what we need to start bringing together. We need to spend time with architecture, puppetry, fabric crafts, furniture design, wood- and metal-working. We need to look at different ways to embody stories and emotions in our physical objects, and bring that earlier into the process of learning new technologies, making new technologies, and trying to make sense of what it all means.