The Challenge of Interactive Furniture

1. The Challenge of Interactive Furniture Matt Gorbet
2. 11 +/- 2 years
3. bring environments to life
4. behaviour interactioncode color formmaterials
5. ?!
6. … ?
7. A Chair with a Soul Left Behind, 2001 Naoto Fukasawa / IDEO
8. A Chair with a Soul Left Behind, 2001 Naoto Fukasawa / IDEO
9. Claude Glass, 2013
10. Claude Glass, 2013
11. Float Table, 2013 Rock
12. Float Table, 2013 Rock
13. MADE Table, 2008 Gorbet Design, with Chris Stevenson
18. human Perceptions tech business kitsch, beep, blink „smart‟ home function cost knowledge complexity art vs. design? pricing & market r & d cycle longevity
19. human tech business kitsch, beep, blink „smart‟ home function cost knowledge complexity art vs. design? pricing & market r & d cycle longevity Perceptions
29. function “What does it do?” “…how do I use it?”
30. … if a product did not allow sitting, it would not be considered a chair. The chair, as a specific product, is defined by the fact that that it allows sitting. In order for a product to be a chair, it must fulfill this one quality, first and foremost. - Carl DiSalvo, 2006 functionmaterialform expression
31. … if a product did not allow sitting, it would not be considered a chair. The chair, as a specific product, is defined by the fact that that it allows sitting. In order for a product to be a chair, it must fulfill this one quality, first and foremost. - Carl DiSalvo, 2006 functionmaterialform expression
32. polished and pleasurable
33. A few design guidelines for interactive furniture Let the function of the object prevail. Let the behavior of the person prevail. … Enhance the union of the two. Ask the right question: Rather than “what will it do?” ask “how will it feel?” Avoid ephemeral systems and protocols. Let the object stand on its own. Subtlety goes a long, long way.
34. … let‟s continue to explore this. Thanks!

Editor's Notes

IN 1998 I left the MIT Media Lab to go work with Mark Weiser and Rich Gold at Xerox PARC. Mark was the ‘father of ubiquitous computing’ and Rich was an artist and visionary who had been involved in creative technology projects across many different industries. Rich used to say that it took about eleven-plus-or-minus-two years for a technology or innovation to go from the lab to the street. That is, the next big thing – be it the world wide web, mobile phones, or desktop manufacturing – was typically being toyed with in a research context somewhere around nine to 13 years before it became available to the public. In the intervening time, a bunch of things need to fall into place for this ‘next new thing’ to catch on, of course: the technology has to become cheaper and more robust, and the systems to support it need to be put into place; the niche it fills needs to develop to the point that there will be enough demand; there needs to be enough buzz and discussion to bring it onto people’s radar, and the economic model needs to make sense. In short, to be successful it needs to develop into something that has real value to people, and that can easily be acquired by them.Obviously, innovation is more nuanced than this, but this “eleven-plus-or-minus-two” has served as a healthy rule of thumb to use in tracing the roots of new innovations, and in following the trajectories of nascent ideas as they mature. Of course, it’s impossible to say exactly which of the crazy research ideas being prototyped right now is going to blossom into the next big thing, and moore’s law is spinning up the pace of many innovations.
Over the past 15 years, I’ve been watching as some of the experimental things that we worked with at PARC and MIT have become commonplace – things like computing on surfaces, desktop manufacturing, microcontrollers, During that interval, my focuswith my partner Susan, was on creating interactive installations for public spaces – retail, festivals, art commissions. We used to be met with blank stares when we would say ‘interactive installation’ -- of course now – interactive installations have become common and there are agencies and designers doing great commercial work to install them all over the place – museums, galleries, events and sometimes even as part of architectural spaces.
…… Designers have learned what ‘good design’ means in this space as it matures.So there seems to be critical mass for an industry of one-off, bespoke installation projects that bring spaces to life. (There have already been more than a few talks about that kind of work at this FITC Amsterdam conference.)
The thing that seems strange to me, and that I want to explore today, is that if there’s one industry that should be integrating responsive behaviour into physical objects – an industry that thrives on innovative use of form and materials to create expressive functional products, and that is concerned with how humans feel and connect to a product viscerally and emotionally, it is the furniture industry –
… specifically, designer furnishings. Every season brings new innovations in materials, manufacturing, and the expressive impulses of designers, and the result is a new crop of expensive, beautiful and static objects that coexist with people, but that don’t acknowledge or respond to the humans who share their space. They even call this industry “Design.” There is so much room for further connection between objects and humans, and the world of ‘design’, as it is called, seems like a great place for some… …experience design.
I’d like to see a world in which code, behavior and interaction are as much a part of the design palette for the objects that surround us as … colour, materials and form.Where interaction and experience design come together with structural and industrial design to add a layer of reactive expression and poetry to the objects we own - to add a behavioural layer to their basic functions as chairs, tables, lamps, clocks, floor coverings, room dividers, etc…
When I first mention this to people, they often react with shock or horror and say “I don’t want my carpet to react to me, thank you very much!”. That may be how you feel too, and it’s a valid point, given the way most of our interactions with technology go.
And you’re still thinking – OK, but what exactly is this interactive furniture going to do? The answer is – that depends. It’s a little like asking “what color is it going to be? Or ‘what will it be made of? … the idea is that interaction is simply a new axis of design, applied to the objects that surround us. I have a few examples to show that will start to explore the space a little.
A Chair with a soul left behind – Naoto Fukasawa/IDEO, 2001
A Chair with a soul left behind – Naoto Fukasawa/IDEO, 2001
Claude Glass – Jon Stam, 2013
Claude Glass – Jon Stam, 2013
Float Table – Rock Paper Robot, 2013
Float Table – Rock Paper Robot, 2013
MADE Table, Gorbet Design with Chris Stevenson, 2008This piece is about the contrast between ornamental, expressive design and flat, clean modernist design
…It is a table that holds a secret. When people interact with it, its surface comes to life with hidden images and intricate patterns.There is also a narrative aspect to the table – hidden images within the pattern tell a story, and they can be searched for and discovered.
…It is a table that holds a secret. When people interact with it, its surface comes to life with hidden images and intricate patterns.There is also a narrative aspect to the table – hidden images within the pattern tell a story, and they can be searched for and discovered.
Wall panels completed the prototype…
Coming to life when they were passed or approached.
Right now it is tough to know how it will feel to own, use and be in the presence of something like these examples for an extended period of time. To love the object so much that you’d want to ‘collect’ it, to pass it on to your kids as an heirloom…. So… it’s been 11 +/- 2 years since Naoto’s chair was shown at MoMA. What’s getting in the way of well-designed, beautiful interactive furniture we’d like to own?
Cost – technology seems expensive. Reality is that cheaper, smaller sensors, projectors, microcontrollers, and new manufacturing techniques are making it easier than ever to make physical things interactive cheap, and a tiny part of the materials cost for a high-end piece.Complexity – dropping – getting simpler all the time to put in high level, modular, robust bits of techKnowledge – design education is changing as design becomes more generalized - Every art and design school is now teaching how to embed and play with sensors and technology, so year after year there are more people - and no longer only computer scientists and engineers - proficient enough in physical computing, and they are making great projects and prototypes, experimenting with real people, and posting projects to YouTube.Kitsch – Adding technology to something ‘because we can’. For a while as RGB LEDs became more and more ubiquitous and cheap, it seems like everything had to have a color-cycling LED in it. From flower pots to computer mice to entire buildings in Shanghai. All set to that maddening, default, slow rainbow cycle. No meaning, no design, no connection to anything human. I once checked into a hotel room that had a color-cycling coffee maker. So the temptation to ‘stick a chip into it’ has the potential to kill off any perception of value. The ‘kitsch factor’ will keep everyone very wary of integrating any technology at all. Smart home (confusion): - it should be clear by now, when I talk about designing interactive furniture I’m not talking about adding technology to furniture that will that read your email, tell you the weather or let you order a pizza from your fridge. Embedding a device into a piece of furniture to fulfill another practical function isn’t the goal here – there are lots of initiatives working on ubicomp and smart environments, and products like Nest thermostats and cellphone-enabled lightbulbs already on the market. I have nothing against all that, but I don’t want to confuse information appliances with expressive objects of design. And there are risks that arise when trying to tie a piece of furniture to a bigger system – (the ‘internet of things’) – you need to settle on a protocol and be ready to do software updates, download the app, and it all quickly becomes a computer, no longer a great piece of furniture. It needs to be upgraded and updated and maintained, in a way that a well-designed, stand-alone piece does not. The ‘smart house’ model does not fit with the model of ownership of a great item of furniture – Think of your great apple iPhone…. It’s obsolete in a few years.You’re not going to pass it on to your kids, or even still love it in 3 years. [ mention Rich Gold: “how smart does your bed have to be before you are afraid to go to sleep at night”]Pricing and volume: the needs of the piece will determine where on the continuum between bespoke and mass-produced….. Art vs. design?: it’s easy to stream this kind of stuff into the ‘art’ world … and in a way, that seems better because art sells for 10x more than ‘design’. But long-term, that’s a bit of a trap because the art market is much more fickle and artists get pigeonholed. It’s interesting to look at work like the Claude Glass and the float table through this lens.R&D: time and money for development of prototypes …. But this is done already in the furniture business – they are used to developing and working with new technologies for manufacturing, etc.
Function: What does it DO?“The dimension of function in the product seems to carry a sort of precedence in the determination of the product. For example, if a product did not allow sitting, it would not be considered a chair. The chair, as a specific product, is defined by the fact that that allows sitting. In order for a product to be a chair, it must fulfill this one quality, first and foremost.” - Carl DiSalvo dissertation, 2006 – [Materiality, Expression, Form and Function] This is a framing problem. The furniture already has a function: a chair is for sitting, a table is for putting things on. That is what it ‘does’. Any behaviour on top of that should addressing not what it ‘does’ but ‘how does it feel?’. --if people should not be asking “is that all it does?” or “how do I use it?” it has become a ‘device’ – they have dropped from the ‘experience’ layer to a different part of the brain that needs to ‘figure things out’.A curious thing that happens when people experience an interactive object is that they sometimes seem to value it on a completely different set of criteria than a non-interactive one: Any time something plugs in or turns on, people are quick to ask “is that all it does?” Oddly, they never seem to ask that of a walnut coffee table or a bent-wood chair. There seems to be an ‘interaction layer’ that gets in the way of simply experiencing the object for its qualities. It’s like a different part of the brain is active – Sherry Turkle talks about how if you give a kid a stuffed dog, they’ll play all kinds of imagination games with it, but if you give them a robot dog, they’ll immediately try to figure out its limits instead of just going with it. This is something that can be designed, however. The trick is to shrink the interaction layer so that people are no longer thinking about how to use something or how it works, but rather just experiencing it. One way to bootstrap that is to add behaviours that respond to what people are already compelled to do – run their hands along a beautifully finished surface, grasp and twist a brass or glass handle, hang a piece of clothing on the back of a chair… etc. Cater to existing behaviours to enhance the experience.
The key is that in order to be desirable, the interaction has to feel good – it has to add value to your life. In other words, it needs to be well designed. … …. Any interactive or behavioural aspect of a piece of furniture needs to be as …
…. Any interactive or behavioural aspect of a piece of furniture needs to be as … polished and pleasurable as …. an exquisitely finished piece of fine millwork or leather.
let the function of the object prevaillet the behavior of the person prevailenhance the union of the two with polished responsiveness that feels good and adds value… something lyrical, poetic, and magical… capable of stirring emotion and/or empowering the human.Ask the right question: Instead of “what will it do?” – ask “how will it feel?”… Remove any hint of “how do I use it?” and “is that all it does?” Avoid depending on external systems and protocols… if you must, have a plan B.Subtlety: the louder, the shorter. (ref: Christian Moeller)
Q & A Notes:Upcoming technologies of interest: Micro-perforated and engineered texture surfaces, Organic LEDsPower requirements and sustainabilityDifferent standards as soon as you plug something in – a Brancusi sculpture never elicits “is that all it does?”Low-hanging fruit: Clocks, Lamps.

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Editor's Notes