SENSORIAL PROSTHETICS_WORKSHOP PROPOSAL

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In this booklet you will find the premise and details to a potential speculative workshop.

Such a workshop allows for groups of curious individuals to get together around a common question, often a bit absurd and grapple with it together through design activities and games.

The content found in this book can be tailored to different age groups, skill sets, venues, and time frames.

- fitbit charge - fitness wristband / 2014 - concerto II - pacemaker implant

/ 2012

Why Sensorial Prosthetics?

INTRO

As of today, the most successful mobile devices, smartphones and tablets, offer predominantly visual interfaces with colored pixels to press and a couple of voice commands here and there to carry out an ever-diversifying array of tasks.

Though very functional and powerful it is clear that these devices use a limited set of inputs compared to the amount of information and actions or gestures the body can give. As these devices get closer to our bodies, often even within our bodies, it becomes imperative that they both work in perfect accord.

Most wearable technologies are designed to either help people document and share experiences, multi-task or as fitness assistants. These three tasks (as complex as they can be made to be) are close to insignificant compared to the amount of needs these devices could be made to answer, namely in the world of handicap assistance.

The world of prosthetics is a very insightful place, the challenges faced by the medical, engineering, social and design fields to create devices that graft themselves onto existing parts and mechanisms of the body can teach us a lot about future potentials for wearables. Moreover many of these devices are all too often crude in the way they provide the solution as less money is invested into their development. In parallel, many grassroots groups, often artists and biohackers, are starting to flirt with the notion of added, sixth or seventh senses. It is naive to assume these trends are too far ahead to take into consideration when thinking of the near future of “wearables.”

This workshop aims to learn from all the aforementioned movements and shifts to best ground the design of consumer-wearables while improving the user-experience of more technical often dismissed prosthetics.

Is it possible to imagine a future where people choose to surgically remove limbs to grant themselves access to augmented functionalities?

Or would a similar approach be used to mute or reduce the abilities and sensitivities of our bodies?

What if we only had one facial feature?

WORKSHOP

This workshop challenges participants to blur the line between wearable devices and prosthetics to discover new forms of interaction.

To do so we will spend one day in the LAND OF SENSORSHIP, a fictional world, in which, by a gradual numbing of the senses, people start being born with only one facial feature. What over the course of a decade seemed to be a rising amount of birth defects turned out to be nature’s next step in evolution.

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This workshop enables:

a convivial and quirky approach to designing wearables

keeping humans, rather than tech,at the core of the design process

gaining insights from neighboring fields such as healthcare

identifying new audiences who could benefit from wearable technologies

I. BRIEF INTRO II. EMPATHY EXERCISE III. IDEA COLLAGING

WORKSHOP WALK-THROUGH

When participants are first introduced to the prompt, a series of small games allow for everyone to start thinking about what this would mean to them, personally.

The empathy exercise challenges participants to get out of their comfort zone by having them all complete a simple task while having one or two of their senses obstructed.

After the series of games comes the time to write or sketch all the thoughts that came up throughout the beginning of the workshop. This is done through a series of quick phases.

IV. IDEA PROTOTYPING V. DESIGN DEMO VI. DAY DREAMING

A couple of sketches are chosen and prototyped using available materials. The prototypes are experimented with in groups and then reviewed or tweaked.

The workshop ends with a group exhibition and demonstration of each group’s concepts and how they relate to current events and trends.

The prototypes are documented and shared with everyone. The key take-away for this workshop is a fresh look at the devices that surround you, the photos are there to remind you!

Sensorial Prosthetic Designs

WORKSHOP RESULTS

In the next few pages, are collected four examples of PROTOTYPES that could be expected from a group at the end of one of these workshops.

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Olfactive Pixels

Date Finder

Augmented IV system

Dot Radio

Olfactive Pixels

A device that interprets the video input recorded by its camera into smells.

The smells can either be direct representations of the pixels’ colors or, using spacial recognition, help with navigation, recognizing friends and other “points of interest.”

The camera captures what an eye would see.

Small olfactive particles are misted to into either nostril for navigational help or to tell the user a friend is near by.

The user is more aware of their surroundings.

Date Finder

This artificial nose enables the user to pick up on various pheromones and hormones released by people around them.

The sensors constantly look for a potential match.

When one is found, the actuated arm that the sensor sits on shifts towards the source of the pheromone.

The shift in weight allows the user intuitively follow the guidance of their artificial nose towards their date.

A disposable feed-can is plugged into the permanent arm gate. Each feed-can is transparent and offers a visual cue as to what might be in it.

As the can is crunched the nutrients are pumped into the veins while the head display offers an immersive experience.

Augmented IV System

For those without a mouth, a wireless display interprets visually the nutrients consumed.

The radio is magnetically attached to the bone (a metal small plate had been surgically implanted in a prior operation).

It can be shifted around to change the station or the volume.

And removed after listening.

Dot Radio

Bone-fixed radio antenna. Every morning an ear-less user can temporarily tune into the news.

How to make this happen?

CONTACT

If you are interested in hosting such a workshop please REACH OUT TO US using the address bellow. We’d be happy to adapt to your own time and audience specific constraints.

If you’d just like to know more about us, you can also reach us at the same address with questions.

If you’d like to try applying the speculative workshop experiment to a topic of your own choosing, that is also possible, we’d love to help.

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info@thekalleidoscope.co

thekaleidoscope.co - 2015