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.

Intensive work in the Class Room

Material and shape explorations

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!

During November we user tested the 4th generation of the RHYME Co-creative Tangibles, the Polly World, at the Haug School and Resource Centre. This is the last user tests the RHYME project conduct at Haug with the children that have followed the project for 4 years .  We like to take this opportunity to thank all Haug personnel, children and parents for their unique contribution and engagement in the RHYME project.

During the user study both children, parents, personal assistants, teachers, music therapists and occupational therapists participated and gave their responses to the Polly World. With the Polly World we have tried to put together all the demands, suggestions and wishes from users and experts related to the three earlier generations of RHYME’s Co-creative Tangibles, in addition to new Social Media functionality.
In the 4th generation of tangibles, family and friends explore interaction with social media, sending musical messages, using the PollyCompose App with a graphical interface and text in twitter. The family and other persons interacted and sent messages with picture projected in the physical tangibles Polly Land and Compositions to the mobile tangibles Polly Fire, Polly Ocean and Polly Planet

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.

In his presentation Andersson argues that music is not longer only the sound object, instrument or piece of art, but the services around it. These are services in the form of actors with characters that behave coherent as they answer back musically, take initiative and develop over time. With perspectives from drama, game theory, actor-network-theory as well as from learning theories on motivation, Andersson explores two design cases from RHYME.

In the 4th generation we try to accomplish, develop and realize as many of the ideas, suggestions and wishes as possible, that we have received from the users, care persons, families and experts from several fields throughout the whole project. These many ideas, suggestions and wishes have been articulated through participation in the many workshops, tests, interviews, discussions and observations during the whole RHYME project.

Some of the users’ wishes, such as dynamic microphone input to the music together with different forms of sensorial stimulating input sensors in a mobile interactive thing, has been a major technological challenge. These user wishes have compelled us to develop six different hardware platforms throughout the project, which was not something we planned to do, but had to do because of its importance for the users and music therapists.

Including direct light response and projection in the tangible objects has also been an important user demand that has been a great design challenge. We try to include and prioritize as many user wishes as possible into a new 4th generation of distributed and social co-creative tangibles with new shapes, structures, surfaces, hardware,  software, music, set design, positive experiences and mastery levels, personalization and interaction forms. Here are some pictures from the ongoing development process:

New hardware solutions under development:
   

New shapes under development:
   

New materials, surfaces and joinery under development:
   

New light solutions under development:
   

New APP with graphical user interface under development: