| D O O R S O F P E R C E P T I O N 5 | |
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| Childhood Creativity |  |
| Sarah Woods | |
We're going to begin by talking about some of the toys I did at the Royal College of Art in 1995. And it was in reaction to spending 12 months working on a CD-ROM for children, the main aim of which was to create a musical environment for children as a space that they could go into and explore musical instruments. Well after using this and doing some musical testing, I realised that what we were creating, although it was very visually appealing, was not really, truly interactive. They could just go in there and click and it was really what we put in there that they could go and discover. So on my return to the Royal College of Art, I thought about how could I create a true musical environment. How could I use computers to interact with sound and create pictures to really allow children to be creative in their own right? I began by going to watch how children play at a couple of schools. I also observed friend's children at home playing, and I realised that they didn't really need such elaborate surroundings, for this early age group (they were five- or six-year-olds). They were quite capable when just given some prods and tools and creating their very own elaborate scenarios. First video clip. The idea behind this is, through the coloured bricks a child could learn which notes the bricks represent. And then the different shapes and the cubes represent different instruments. So that they could actually stack up a tune. So I tried lots of ways of actually getting this to work properly, but I still felt that it was only a very singular activity that didn't allow children to play in groups, which is a lot of the stuff I've observed when I went to schools and things; how good they were at playing together and how they like to play together. Also, I didn't feel that it was really very tactile. So I was first thinking about how can I make a way through a computer of children creating their own sounds, but also being able to really alter the sounds. Second clip please. So what's happening is these 'tactile objects' can read the colour that they're going over. It's just four colours here. The idea is that you actually could really not have cues but you could actually paint a picture. And then just wield these things over, and then by pressing them (they're completely pressure sensitive), you could alter the sound in different ways. And of course the possibilities for software are endless with this. It's just one way that I just chose to show it. Just as you could wield it over colours and it and instead of playing sound, you could also play a story, just as you could with the cubes. You could stack up a story. This one isn't pressure sensitive. It just shows that you could make this an awful lot more musical. So there's these sorts of work that I did for my Master's. But it's just to point out that although this stuff rolls for quite young children, my audience, I feel that there's still a lot of scope for doing some of this physical computing for adults as well. Because very few people can actually play an instrument - probably because the learning curve is so great - that it would be very nice just to have some ways that people could without having to learn how to play various of complex instruments spending years and years doing scales and things. We're completely surrounded by music; we've got CD- players, radio's, very good sound quality on the television but we have hardly any means of creating our own. I want to talk about the second project which is what I 'm doing now. I need to put this into context. I work for the (NCR) Knowledge Lab and the focus of the lab is really to try and understand and hopefully help to shape the technologies of the emerging network society. We believe we're seeing the death of information technologies and the rise of what we call relationship technologies. We see relationship technologies as intelligent engines, agents, interfaces and devices that can help to form relationships between real people, between your friends, lovers and of course consumers. They embody key elements of relationship such as communication, trust, affinity and respect. Now one of these projects that fits into this relationship category and also hopefully into games and play, is the ATM project. It looks at the evolution of the ATM from a self-service device - cash machine - into a relationship technology. The ATM is quite an interesting piece of public computing that very few people think of as a computer. In fact a lot of users of ATMs would be horrified if you told them it was a computer. It's also a very trusted piece of public computing. But it could also be an interface for supporting future relationships to physical and virtual communities that everyone can access in the street. The community that we've chosen to address here is nine- to twelve-year-olds. And we've chosen this because it represents a challenge both from a research and a commercial perspective. How do we capture and develop affinity with a very largely unaddressed community that represent tomorrow's consumers? We are currently exploring how children of this age group play together, and how relationship technologies can be used to support that play and create new friendships and at the same time capture their attention. I've been observing children and tried to find out what it's like to be in this age group today. So I've been around and observed video games, and tried to find out what it is that brings children back time and time again and how to transport this onto an ATM machine, when this age group are quite PC-literate. Here's just a storyboard of some of the ideas that we've been looking at. What we're going to do now is create. It's just a few quick sketches. And then we are going to have beautiful storyboards made and show these to children, give them objects and pens and things and try to get them to recreate their own scenarios; to tell us what they want and how they see public computing. This is just one idea, a quick girlie one. Unfortunately, because it's a commercial project, I can't really tell you a lot of ideas. This is the idea that they'd go up and swap and also communicate with each other and at the same time what they can see is the latest 50 coolest things - the 'most wanted' objects of that age group. And then maybe purses, as it's all connected around the bank account. |
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url: DOORS OF PERCEPTION |
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