Photo: J. Fagerlönn

RHYME member Anders-Petter Andersson won best paper presentation when he presented Birgitta Cappelen and his paper on AudioMostly2016 the 6th October 2016.  The motivation the committee gave was: “A very pedagogical, well-designed and passionate presentation with humorous and daring elements”

The paper is called ‘Health Improving Multi-Sensorial and Musical Environments’ and, “focus on the designed qualities of the Polly World environment, and specifically on the multi-sensorial and musical interaction design”. In the paper they present how they have designed the interactive music and multi-sensorial qualities of the environment, to make them health promoting, by combining knowledge from the field of interactive Music composition, Interaction Design and Tangible Interaction with knowledge from therapeutic disciplines such as Music and Health, Music Therapy and Sensory Integration. One of the main findings is the positive results moving from Multi-Sensory feedback, focusing on auditive, tactile, visual modalities, to Multi-Sensorial, motivating mastering over time, creating expectations, building on rhythmic, narrative, musical, relational and cultural.

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.

Intensive work in the Class Room

Material and shape explorations

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.

RHYME contributed with two keynote lectures at the 10th Nordic Snoezelen Conference 2014 in Helsingør. The two lectures were Birgitta Cappelen’s Designing Next Generation Interactive MSE and Anders-Petter Andersson’s lecture Music in RHYME.
In Birgitta’s lecture she argued based on a democratic and humanistic perspectives and a resource oriented approach for a design of Multi Sensory Environments  (MSE) that offers continuous positive experiences and challenging mastery curve for diverse users. This demands a design that is both sensorially stimulating and easy in use and complex at the same time. This demands a computational and software solution that offers many ways to interact and develop actability and mastery over time, not only simple switch solutions.

In Anders-Petter’s lecture Music in RHYME he explained how the musical simplicity and complexity is built up, based on musical sounds and programmed rules that are activated in different user-situations.

The Nordic Snoezelen (also called Multi-sensory Environment – MSE) Conference is a biannual conference and the most important community in the Nordic Countries for use of sensory stimulation in therapy and health promotion.
The Norwegian Community is called Norske Sanserom, the American Community is called AAMSE and the international organisation ISNA. Within MSE very little has been done regarding use of advanced computational possibilities, interactive music and professional design and aesthetic competence when creating the Multi-Sensory Environments. In this context  RHYME is a unique project internationally. If you  want to read more about MSE research you will find a list here.

During March we will user test 3rd Generation of  RHYME Co-creative Tangibles at Haug.
3rd Generation of tangibles are mobile and all built on iPod Touch as the running computer. Additional we have developed several mobile breakout card (iDevice, jDevice and kDevice) to extend interactional possibilities with sensors and actuators like speakers, LEDs and vibrators. All music is programmed in SuperCollider. More information will come soon.

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.