Interactions - September/October 2010

[ 13] Pullin, G. “Curating and Creating Design Collections, from Social Mobiles to the Museum of Lost Interactions and Six Speaking Chairs.” Design and Culture 2, 1 (2010).

[ 14] Cook, A. “Your Favourite Thing Would Like to Sing.” Presented at NIME, New York (2008).

[ 15] These descriptors are taken from a George Bernard Shaw’s stage directions. Shaw, G. B. Pygmalion. London: Penguin Classics, 2003.

[ 16] DynaVox. Tango!
2009. http://www.
dynavoxtech.com/prod-
ucts/tango/
September + October 2010

[ 17] Speaking Unit.
“Speech Hedge.” July
2010. http://speak-
ingunit.co.uk/speech-
hedge/
interactions

boxes, and the familiar controls out of contex—is designed to reflect this, designed to look not designed as much as displayed. The project is as much an exercise in curation as creation [ 13].

Chair No. 5. The Reassuring/Undermining Chair offers more abstract control. The user hits a drum pad, and the way in which it is hit and the material with which it is hit determine the timbre and intonation of the utterance. Confident hitting will trigger “yes” and “no” responses in different tones of voice; lighter tapping will produce the type of paralinguistic sounds (for instance, “uh-huh” and “ye-yeah”) that lubricate conversation, encouraging or undermining the other person while they are speaking without interrupting them, yet which are not even part of current TTS systems.

As with any musical instrument, practice would be required to explore this relationship between action and sound. We are interested in how accessible, rewarding, and expressive this might be for people with differing musical abilities. This approach has been informed and inspired by Cook’s “Tactophonics”, an exploration of intuitive interaction with computer music underpinned by the concepts of affordance and expressive performance through objects as varied and unexpected as tree branches and baseball bats [ 14].

... and materiality in interaction design

This has also led us to consider a role for physical materials as part of the user interface. How might the qualities of materials translate into voice quality? Waxy, woolly, glassy, porcelain, dark chocolate, even “rich fruitcake” might all bring to mind a particular voice quality. Here, as elsewhere in interaction design, material qualities offer underexplored opportunities for associations that are familiar and intuitive, yet abstract and open to interpretation.

Chair No. 6. Lastly, the Terse/Roaring Chair has 17 doorbells, each of which offers a different description of tone of voice, from coaxing to coyly, from whimpering to whispering. These descriptors are taken from stage directions by the playwright George Bernard Shaw [ 15].

In communication devices, a selection rather
than a manipulation may be more appropriate
after all, since speech impairment is so often
associated with other physical impairments.
But 17 choices are many more than existing
AAC devices. The “Tango!” by Blink Twice [ 16],
in many ways the state of the art, allows a child
to speak, shout, whisper, and whine (note that
none of these are emotions). This is wonderfully
expressive for a young child, but for adults, tone
of voice is richer still and more finely nuanced—
and more personal.

Following the Chairs

We believe the challenge ahead, on the project that is already following this [ 17], is to embrace this complexity of coexisting models while maintaining simplicity of interaction. It does sound very challenging—but at the same time, it is an appropriate contribution for interaction designers to make to this fascinating interdisciplinary area.

AbOut the AuthOrs Graham Pullin is the course director of Digital Interaction Design at the University of Dundee in Scotland, author of Design Meets Disability, and curator of the Museum of Lost Interactions (MoLI ). He spent nine years at IDEO as an interaction designer, project leader, and studio head.

Andrew Cook is a graduate of Interactive Media Design (the previous name of Digital Interaction Design) and an interaction designer currently com-pleting doctoral research. He is also a musician under the moniker Samoyed and co-founder of the record label flask.