On August 23rd RHYME members Birgitta Cappelen and Anders-Petter Andersson presented a paper at the Universal Design 2016 conference in York. The biannual Universal Design conference is together with the Inclusive Design conference the most important community within design for people with special needs. This years Universal Design conference have the title “Learning from the past, designing for the future”.
The title of Birgitta and Anders-Petters paper is “Embodied and Distributed Parallel DJing” and focuses on the innovative potential of including people with special needs when designing and creating cultural artifacts and activities. In the paper they argue that “…because of the users’ extreme demands and rich contribution, we ended up creating both a new genre of musical instruments and a new art form. We call this new art form Embodied and Distributed Parallel DJing, and the new genre of instruments for Empowering Multi-Sensorial Things.” Access the Proceedings and paper here.
Here is a video that demonstrate the new practice of Embodied Parallel DJing, where Anders and Birgitta are using their whole body when cutting, scratching (DJing) together in parallel with Polly Ocean and Polly Planet on familiar music tunes that they choose with the RFID-tagged objects.