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.

RHYME members Anders-Petter Andersson and Birgitta Cappelen were invited to contribute with lecture and Polly World Workshop at the SPEDUTEC meeting in Goethenburg from November 2nd to 4th.

“SPEDUTEC is a project supported by the Nordplus Horizontal Programme under the Nordic Council of Ministers. The aim is to increase understanding on theory and pedagogical and technological practice on learning through assistive technologies (ATs) in multisensory environments. Furthermore, our goal is to build a new Nordic-Baltic network on the topic. The main working methods is sharing knowledge and experiences, and mutual learning.”

Birgitta and Anders-Petters lecture was called  “5 Generations of RHYME tangibles” and described the RHYME project through 4 generation of observations and development and the current 5 Generation platform used in the Vitalising Welfare Technology course at AHO in October 2015.

The “Vitalising Welfare Technology” course is a module within Tangible Interaction for master students in Interaction Design at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. The course is a starting collaboration on welfare technology, between Diakonhjemmet University College and  Institute of Design at AHO.

During the course, the students will create welfare technology based on the 5th generation of the RHYME technology platform, which is an upgraded version of what we used in Polly World for the wireless modules (Polly Planet, Polly Ocean and Polly Fire).  The goal is to create welfare technology for vitalisation and health improvement of the persons living at care homes. This is welfare technology designed from a person’s point-of-view (humanistic health approach), not, as often done today, as a mediation of existing health services, where the goal is  control, measurement and management of bio-medical data.

The end presentation will be at Sagenehjemmet 30th October at 13.00. The exhibition of the designed welfare technology will be in Sagenehuset and starts after the presentation at 16.00. Welcome!

At 18.00 on Tuesday April 14th is the opening of the first public exhibition of Polly World at Kunst og Designhall HiOA (old Art Academy in St. Olavgate 32).  Polly World will also be open for visitors from 16.00 to 19.00 on Wednesday April 15, Thursday April 16 and Friday April as part of the conference “Aesthetics and Children with Special Needs“.

During the conference both RHYME member Karette Stænseth, Anders-Petter Anderssson and Birgitta Cappelen will make presentations/talks about different perspectives on RHYME, related to the conference theme.

The second week of the course Sensorial and Musical interaction the students assignment was to develop new concepts of Musicking Tangibles. The Musicking Tangibles had to be wireless, interactive things, that motivated the whole family to music together in their home. The concepts should build on RHYME’s last developed hardware platform kDevice. kDevice is a Bluetooth based extention card to smartphone/ iPod Touch to add additional sensors and actuators like LEDs. The interactive music is written in SuperCollider, which runs on the smartphone. The six groups presented 3 new concepts each and a working technical sketch. The last week the students will develop one concept for the final presentation 2. November.