deLIGHTful Interactions | eLab Studio Project

The MoA Design Research studio project »deLIGHTful interactions« held its final presentation on February 14th, 2024 4-6 pm at Flughalle 4th floor, weißensee school of art and design berlin.

As designers, we act at a crucial point between the preservation of traditional forms and rituals on the one hand and the enthusiastic embrace of new possibilities and technologies on the other.
Using the example of light, we explored how civilizational practices and rituals evolve when technological conditions change. Light offers itself as an exciting and, above all, highly graspable topic to illuminate this field of tension in an exemplary way. In the studio project »deLIGHTfull interactions« we worked with light as an active material, having a wide range of technological possibilities at our disposal to develop meaningful and enjoyable interactions. Context of use, concept, and functional principles were translated into tangible prototypes and formed into adequate object and interaction qualities, allowing for new rituals to emerge.

The project built a bridge between interaction and classic product design by using UX as the filter for concept development. We therefore first explored UX methods to model and visualize processes. In a series of workshops, we also deepened our skills and knowledge in physical computing, current AI strategies for coding (with ML, GPT), haptic feedback technologies, and as well as the optical interaction of light and color. In a series of experiments, we investigated the relationship between texture, materiality, and translucency and their potency of filtering specific wavelengths thus shifting the visible color spectrum and the perception of the material properties involved. The results and learnings of these workshops informed the further prototyping process.

The studio project is part of MoA Design Research Studio within Filtering and supervised by Prof. Carola Zwick, Simon von Schmude (eLAB), Olaf Thiele, and Hans Illiger (Alela App).
Workshops by Janja Maidl (colors and light) and Thomas Müller (haptic interaction)