Interaction Design: Scanners as Perfomance Art
Gizmodo linked to this demo by Murat N Konar, an interaction designer from the Royal College of Art. It’s a manequin head and a projector, and when you hit the manequin on the head with a drumstick, the face being projected onto it looks surprised for a second. That’s it. He’s definitely into “interaction design as art.” It’s pretty cool. But…
He has a WAY cooler project on his website called ScanJam. It looks like the assignment was to create something unique using everyday computer scanners, and he built something the size of a set of turntables for creating looping electronic music. The scanners continually swipe back and forth, and as a scanner passes over the items he puts on the glass, different synthesized notes get played. Outputs like pitch, duration, and type of sound are determined by the placement, shape, and color of the objects. And the sound gets played exactly as the bar of light passes under each object, so the timing of what gets produced is very visual and somewhat predictable. There’s a great intuitive mapping between the cluster of three squares in the video and the high-pitched sounds that you hear to go along with them.
Unfortunately for all of us, it’s a just a concept demo. But it would be really fun to play with. A science museum should hire him to build it and put it on display for kids.
