The Haptics Bits Lab is an inspirational toolkit designed to encourage exploration through low-fi and haptic interactions, with the aim of enhancing bodily awareness.
The Haptics Bits Lab is an inspirational toolkit designed to encourage exploration through low-fi and haptic interactions, with the aim of enhancing bodily awareness.
Explore Haptic Actuation!
The toolkit introduces soma design theory and demonstrates how you, as a designer, developer, technician, or researcher, can create better experiences by actively engaging your entire body in the process. This kit is intended for individuals in roles such as designer, developer, technician, or researcher, whether at a university or in the industry.
While the kit may initially appear low-fi, it doesn't require any prior technical knowledge to use. However, it is open-ended, allowing more technically proficient designers to conduct in-depth explorations. The kit can be easily explored during a one-day workshop, even without prior knowledge.
Vibrator Bit
Heat Bit
Inflatable Bit
Air-fibre Bit
So what is Soma Design?
We are introducing a method that will help you design better experiences by being bodily aware. In soma design, you design by using your whole body to craft the interaction. That is, you sketch and design through touching, moving, feeling, crafting, and altering the technology using your entire body, going back and forth between sketching and feeling the resulting experience. This allows you to become more sensitive to the fine nuances of the interaction. A soma design experience has to be felt to make sense. You decide how low-fi or high-fi you want your sketches to be. And remember, this is the step before you start to prototype a solution. You are still in sketch phase here.
1) Explore Bit by Bit and get acquainted with Soma Design
Begin by sensing the affordances of the actuators and experiment with different intensities. We recommend having one person orchestrate the experience while another person experiences it in real-time. Utilise the accessories in the bag to secure and position actuators close to your body.
2) Shape Your Experience
Now connect bits and collect data through a MIDI interface in order to be able to re-play experiences. The kit includes four types of “actuator-bits”, some enabling data collection and the ability to relive recorded experiences by the connection to a MIDI interface. You can also document your experience in a low-fi way using the method material developed for this kit called the Experience notation sheet.
3) Evolve and Build Your Own
This step is for the more tech savvy user. Tweak the bits or build and code new ones. Once you've completed your sketching phase, it's likely the right time to create a prototype for your design scenario. You're welcome to utilise the hardware and software documentation provided in this kit as a foundation for your technical explorations, all of which can be accessed below.
Why Use MIDI? Isn't That for Recording Music?
MIDI is an affordable data collection system with a lot of open-source software and hardware. It is accessible, and that is one of the main reasons why we chose MIDI as the data collector, even though it is specialised in making and recording music.
We believe that orchestrating experiences has similar properties to designing and creating music. We talk about tempo, rhythm, baseline, and the experience over time. Using music as a thought construct for exploring interaction design is an intriguing one and helps us think outside the box.
We Are Researchers, Designers, and Developers
This kit is the result of research conducted at Uppsala University, within the Department of Materials Science and the Microsystems Technology program, as well as at KTH in the Department of Media Technology and Interaction Design.
This iteration is designed and developed by Charles Windlin, OK Trade, and Already Tomorrow. Special thanks to Anders Lundström.