As an interaction designer I find myself often thinking about the material realities and complexities that are hidden behind the various interfaces I design for a living. This project aimed to see how people interacted with and responded to an interface that had complexities revealed rather than hidden.
Designed and built & exhibited at School for Poetic Computation .
The interaction is accomplished by a touch interface using the adcTouch library for Arduino to turn 8 rare earth magnets into inputs that control circles on an OLED screen along x/y axes. Various messages are presented when the task of connecting the circles is completed, including familiar phrases from digital services such as “your order has been shipped”, “You car has arrived” as well as the more general “you have achieved harmony”.
Each input has a cascading effect to different components on lower levels beneath, influencing reactions from motors LED’s and a small speaker. A small protoboard on the bottom layer contains two PWM dc motor drivers and a simple logic gate, as well as a main power strip to distribute to various devices.
The face plates were designed to be modular so that PFAHI can be reconstructed to take different forms in the future, or combined with more components and iterated upon. This was accomplished by laser cutting each plate with all of the various sizes for different components. With this in mind, none of the components were soldered but had headers attached for reconfiguration.
