Laurent Mignonneau

The Art and Science of Interface and Interaction Design Vol. 1

Artists and creators in interactive art and interaction design have long been conducting research on human-machine interaction. Through artistic, conceptual, social and critical projects, they have shown how interactive digital processes are essential elements for their artistic creations. Resulting prototypes have often reached beyond the art arena into areas such as mobile computing, intelligent ambiences, intelligent architecture, fashionable technologies, ubiquitous computing and pervasive gaming. Many of the early artist-developed interactive technologies have influenced new design practices, products and services of todays media society. This book brings together key theoreticians and practitioners of this field. It shows how historically relevant the issues of interaction and interface design are, as they can be analyzed not only from an engineering point of view but from a social, artistic and conceptual, and even commercial angle as well.

Designing emotional, metaphoric, natural and intuitive interfaces for interactive art, edutainment and mobile communications

We are artists working since 1991 on the creation of interactive computer installations for which we design metaphoric, emotional, natural, intuitive and multi-modal interfaces. The interactive experiences we create are situated between art, design, entertainment and edutainment. When creating our interactive systems we often develop novel interface technologies that match conceptual and metaphoric content with technically novel interface solutions. While our main focus is to design interactive systems for the art context, our interactive or immersive systems also often find use in edutainment and in mobile communications areas. The following article summarizes some of our key concepts for our interface designs and presents some of our interactive technologies in more detail.

Gauntlet: a wearable interface for ubiquitous gaming

In this paper we present a wearable user interface for ubiquitous gaming activities, discussing the design choices that led to the implementation of a first, fully functional prototype. The Gauntlet takes the form of an unobtrusive arm piece that allows gestures and manipulation of real objects to be included as game-play elements. When paired to a mobile device it can be used ubiquitously, without need of a location-dependent hardware framework. Public demonstration of the prototype by means of an interactive installation has allowed us to conduct observations of its usage and achieve preliminary conclusions on our approach.

Modeling the Emergence of Complexity: Complex Systems, the Origin of Life and Interactive On-Line Art

The origin of this paper lies in the fundamental question of how complexity arose in the course of evolution and how one might construct an artistic interactive system to model and simulate this emergence of complexity. Relying on the idea that interaction and communication between entities of a system drive the emergence of structures that are more complex than the mere parts of that system, the authors propose to apply principles of complex system theory to the creation of VERBARIUM, an interactive, computer-generated and audience-participatory artwork on the Internet, and to test whether complexity can emerge within this system.

Media Facades as Architectural Interfaces

Artists who are creating interactive systems have begun to look for new display formats for their interactive art systems. Modern architecture allows building facades to become membranes for the display of interactive digital content.

Interface cultures. : artistic aspects of interaction

From media art archaeology to contemporary interaction design -- the term interface culture is based on a vivid and ongoing discourse in the fields of interactive art, interaction design, game design, tangible interfaces, auditory interfaces, fashionable technologies, wearable devices, intelligent ambiences, sensor technologies, telecommunication and new experimental forms of human-machine, human-human and machine-machine interactions and the cultural discourse surrounding them. This books aim is to give an overview of the current state of interactive art and interface technology as well as an outlook on new forms of hybridisation in art, media, scientific research and every-day media applications.

Modeling Complexity for Interactive Art Works on the Internet

Publisher Summary Based on the idea that interaction and communication between entities of a system are the driving forces behind the emergence of higher and more complex structures in life, it is proposed to apply principles of complex system theory to the creation of interactive, computer-generated and audience-participatory artworks and to test whether complexity within an artificial computer-generated system can emerge. Social systems formed (in part) out of people, the brain formed out of neurons, molecules formed out of atoms, the weather formed out of air currents are all examples of complex systems. The field of complex systems cuts across all traditional disciplines of science as well as engineering, management, and medicine. The topological complexity is a measure of the size of the minimal computational model (typically a finite automaton of some variety) in the minimal formal language in which it has a finite model. Model theory is the branch of mathematical logic dealing with the relationship between a formal language and its interpretation in mathematical structures. Effective measure complexity of a pattern is defined as the asymptotic behavior of the amount of information required to predict the next symbol to the level of granularity.

Living poetry

We introduce three of our interactive artworks that translate text into artificial creatures or creatures into text by means of user interaction. These installations make use of experimental literature, media archaeology, surrealism, artificial life, and algorithmic methods.

Noon: a secret told by objects

We present an interactive storytelling installation where the narrative unfolds through manipulation of real objects. In Noon - A Secret Told by Objects the spectator dons a special bracer to become an investigator, immersing herself in the storytelling process. By touching and using real objects, purportedly recovered from a tragic fire, she is tasked with navigating memories contained in these, in the hopes of piecing together the cause of the tragedy.

IKI-IKI phone: a multi-user alife art game for mobile phones

IKI-IKI Phone is a multi-user, networked Artificial Life (= Alife) art game for the I-mode mobile phones. In this system, subscribed users can create Artificial Life creatures (= IKI-IKI pets), interact with these pets, feed them, take care of them, and evolve them. Networked users can also share their pets with other mobile phones users, trade them, watch them compete against each other, become friends with each other, create offspring and develop an IKI-IKI pet society. Users can also start communicating with each other through their shared pets.