Martijn ten Bhömer

Food for talk : phototalk in the context of sharing a meal

Photographic mementos are important signifiers of our personal memories. Rather than simply passive representations of memories to “preserve” the past, these photos are actively displayed and consumed in the context of everyday behavior and social practices. Within the context of these settings, these mementos are invoked in particular ways to mobilize particular social relations in the present. Taking this perspective, we explore how photo mementos come to be used in the everyday social setting of sharing meal. Rather than a simple concern with nutritional consumption, the shared meal is a social event and important cultural site in the organization of family and social life with culturally specific rhythms, norms, rights, and responsibilities. We present a system—4 Photos—that situates photo mementos within the social concerns of these settings. The system collates photo mementos from those attending the meal and displays them at the dining table to be interacted with by all. Through a real-world deployment of the system, we explore the social work performed by invoking these personal memory resources in the context of real-world settings of shared eating. We highlight particular features of the system that enable this social work to be achieved.

Tactile Dialogues: Personalization of Vibrotactile Behavior to Trigger Interpersonal Communication

This article describes tests that have been conducted with Tactile Dialogues, a textile pillow that can react to touch with vibrotactile stimuli and haptic sensations. Tactile Dialogues is designed to stimulate movement and interpersonal contact for patients in the late stages of dementia, their family members and their caregivers. The most recent prototype of the pillow has been tested during 15 separate visits of family members or caregivers with patients. The aim of these tests is to find out whether personalization of the vibrotactile stimuli is appreciated over a mirroring vibrotactile behavior. We propose a three-scale measurement to help family members and caregivers examine the responses of the patient: muscular relaxation, physical movement and interpersonal contact. Through the semi-structured interviews we identified that family members and caregivers do appreciate the opportunity to personalize the vibrotactile behavior and that the pillow mainly functions as a way to establish communication with the patient.

Research through design : A way to drive innovative solutions in the field of smart textiles

Research through design allows creating a dialogue with the material. It uses making and reflection on action as a generator of knowledge. Our aim is to explore the opportunities and challenges of smart textiles. The Fablab is our set up, a place that allows us to combine the hacking- scientific-, and design community. It stimulates collaboration and the knowledge exchange needed for the development of smart textile systems. A collaborative prototyping workshop for medical products combined two worlds. The textile world in Saxion aims at incorporating conductive materials into textile structures and functional- / 3D printing to create systems for applications such as flexible heating systems and wearable technology. We combined this with the world of Industrial Design at TU/e, focused on the design of intelligent products, systems and services by the research through design approach. The collaboration between these different disciplines speeded up the process by reducing the resistance to the new and skipped the frustration on failure.

2013 e-textile swatchbook exchange: the importance of sharing physical work

The E-Textile Swatch Exchange is a platform for sharing physical work samples in the field of electronic textiles. The exchange wishes to emphasize the importance of physicality and quality workmanship in an increasingly digital world. Individuals and collaborative efforts participate in the exchange by submitting a unique swatch design of their own, and in turn receive a compiled collection of everybody elses swatches. This means that everybody participating needs to make as many multiples of their swatch as the total number of participants. There are no guidelines defining what the swatches could or should be, only that they relate to the field of E-Textiles.

Growth plan for an inspirational test-bed of smart textile services

In this pictorial we visualize the growth plan for an inspirational test-bed of smart textile product service systems. The goal of the test-bed is to inspire and inform the Dutch creative industries of textile, interaction and service design to combine their strengths and share opportunities. The pictures exemplify the characteristic tools, approaches and prototypes for three phases of growth: Incubation, Nursery and Adoption.

Dancing with myself: the interactive visual canon platform

The canon is a composition pattern with a long history and many forms. The concept of the canon has also been applied to experimental film making and on Japanese television. We describe our Interactive Visual Canon Platform (IVCP) that enables creators of visual canons to design their movements through rapid cycles of performance and evaluation. The IVCP system provides real time support for the actors; they can see the canon resulting from their movements while they are still performing. We describe some possible approaches to a solution, and reasons for choosing the approach that we have implemented. The hardware has reached a stable state, but we are still optimizing the visual processing of the system. A first user test is planned to provide us with information for improving the system.

7 – Designing ultra-personalised embodied smart textile services for well-being

Smart textiles are becoming more integrated with service ecosystems that go beyond the current horizontal textile value chain. This will extend the material and tangible properties of smart textiles to intangible properties from services, such as the ability to measure and store data and change the functionality of a material over time. It is thus becoming more urgent for textile developers and service providers to work closer together to develop these types of smart textile services (STSs). This opens up a vast field of opportunities for textile developers, product designers, and service designers to combine their disciplines to develop close-to-the-body applications in the area of well-being. The role of the body, the degree of personalisation, and the prototyping process provide opportunities for ultra-personalisation within these new types of embodied STSs. We present an overview of commercially available STSs based on these three elements. We then analyse three STSs that we have developed in the context of well-being. We advocate that within the exemplified STSs the service interface is strongly connected to the bodily senses of the people using the service. This connection is further specified with three notions of ultra-personalisation: personalisation through the material properties, the design of the garment, and the programming of the interactions with the wearer.

Interaction design for supporting communication between Chinese sojourners

In our global village, distance is not a barrier anymore for traveling. People experience new cultures and face accompanying difficulties in order to live anywhere. Social support can help these sojourners to cope with difficulties, such as culture shock. In this paper, we investigate how computer-mediated communication (CMC) tools can facilitate social support when living physically separated from loved-ones in different cultures. The goal is to understand the design considerations necessary to design new CMC tools. We studied communication practices of Chinese sojourners living in the Netherlands and the use of a technology probe with a novel video communication system. These results led to recommendations which can help designers to design interactive communication tools that facilitate communication across cultures. We conclude the paper with an interactive communication device called Circadian, which was designed based on these recommendations. We experienced the design recommendations to be abstract enough to leave space for creativity while providing a set of clear requirements which we used to base design decisions upon.In our global village, distance is not a barrier anymore for traveling. People experience new cultures and face accompanying difficulties in order to live anywhere. Social support can help these sojourners to cope with difficulties, such as culture shock. In this paper, we investigate how computer-mediated communication (CMC) tools can facilitate social support when living physically separated from loved-ones in different cultures. The goal is to understand the design considerations necessary to design new CMC tools. We studied communication practices of Chinese sojourners living in the Netherlands and the use of a technology probe with a novel video communication system. These results led to recommendations which can help designers to design interactive communication tools that facilitate communication across cultures. We conclude the paper with an interactive communication device called Circadian, which was designed based on these recommendations. We experienced the design recommendations to be abstract enough to leave space for creativity while providing a set of clear requirements which we used to base design decisions upon.

Wearable Senses, Department of Industrial Design, TU Eindhoven

As told by Oscar Tomico, Stephan Wensveen, Kristi Kuusk, Martijn ten Bhömer, René Ahn, Marina Toeters, and Maarten Versteeg