Last Monday I had the chance to attend at the sixth edition of the immensely popular event called This Happened, held at the HKU (Utrecht’s art academy) theatre. With the registations being closed within merely 58 (!) seconds you’d figure that there would be some quality keynotes to be held. And actually, there were some good ones.

Drumroll anyone?

Drumroll anyone?

First up, the co-creators Mijn naam is Haas (a pun that’s translated as ‘My name is Hare’) presented their findings and future plan around their graduating project that they continued to refine after their study. The main concept consists of an interactive learning-tool that helps toddlers train their language-skills. Especially the product’s artwork is outstanding, also their hands-on experience with fine-tuning of the product resulted in some valuable insights concerning the interaction between the software and the target group.

Thereafter, Matt Cottam (from Tellart) elaborated on his design study, entitled Wooden Logic, in which he mixed physical computing, affective computing, and experimented with different organic shapes and materials. The presentation was followed up by Sebastiaan de With, who developed an e-reader application for the iPhone that was visually appealing and used clever user interface design. The project was nice executed in both form and functionality, but not exactly mind-blowing. (Anyhow, for more extensive writing on these previous speakers I’d like to refer to Iskander Smit’s report).

The last presenter, Keez Duyves from the PIPS:lab collective, presented his experience with the music performances the lab developed. With their show called Archie and the Bees (a geeky reference to the RGB color-pallet), each musician would wear a solid colored suit (red, green or blue). Each suit would correspond with a certain sound sample (snare-, bass-drum or hi-hat), subsequently the samples triggered when a rotating marker ‘touched’ a body-part (or a colored object). With both the performer’s bodies projected on the ceiling as an interface, they were able to adept to the movements of their fellow musicians and thus engage in a generative music performance.

At a certain point in the show, the public would also be involved by pointing a webcam at them (again, the rotating marker recognized color and brightness) which would add another layer of generative sound. Additionally the artists would use ‘prototypical instruments’ to improvise upon the created loops. The instruments themselves also seem arbitrarily controlled and by doing so extend the concept of chance electronics.

Anyway, here’s some footage of the refined version (the original installation was created in 2009).

Archie and the bees UPGRADED 2.0! from PIPS:lab on Vimeo.

(Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem the show will be re-launched anytime soon. In the meantime: check their agenda for upcoming shows).

Overall, the keynotes were quite inspirational while they discussed interaction design from different angles. Personally, I found Tellart’s Wooden Logic and PIPS:lab’s Archie and the Bees projects to be more appealing due to their conceptual nature and theoretical approach, opposed to the work that relies more on conventional design methods.