Media design aesthetics: emotional and entertaining experience design for the ubiquitous society

ABSTRACT

Our society is in the midst of paradigm shift from mass media-based society to personal media-based society, driven by the digital revolution. Mass media and communication media are converging to form massively connected personal and everywhere media. In the personal and everywhere media, the interaction of people, artifacts, and the environment contributes to the emotional and entertaining experience in the daily life. Thus, the experience design is the core activity of media design, and aesthetics is the key component in the media design formula.

Our research has focused on the experience design of entertaining contents for personal and everywhere media. We have termed this emerging area of content genre as "Ubiquitous Content", and defined the genre as contents for living people, those which bond closely with life. They are content experienced through interaction between people, artifacts and the environment, all existing in the real world. Ubiquitous Content is realized through the embedding of ubiquitous technology such as sensors, and the designing of embodied human interactions.

The talk touches various areas of media design through the lens of content design and supporting technology research drawing on the recent research projects at our research team on Ubiquitous Content at Keio University.

As an example of Ubiquitous Content that uses the environment, "Breathing Network Edition" is a set of network-connected affective lamps that are breathing as if they are alive. The speed of breathing depends on the liveliness of the environment nearby. The lamp listens to the conversation and breathes to act as a conversation metronome. In the normal setting, each lamp breathes at its own rhythm but they occasionally all synchronize.

An example of entertaining artifact is "Clay Tone". Clay play is one of the acts of play partaken by children in many kindergartens. Clay Tone is a sound generation system that can be manipulated by physically handling bodies of clay. With Clay Tone, we aim to create a new kind of clay play that ties itself with music, encouraging imagination.

"livePic" is a drawing board which expands the drawing experience. "livePic" provides embodied interactions between users and users' drawings. Users can feel as if they magically bring their drawings to life. After they draw something, they can animate the picture with physical interactions, such as their breaths. "livePic" has possibilities to stimulate potential creativity and sensibility of the children and to grow their imagination throughout their youth.