“Making the Temporary Last”

Interactive Installation _ Gogbot Festival 2012

‘Making the Temporary Last’ is an interactive installation in the form of a table to encourage affective bare-skin touching.  This installation was developed to allow the family members and caretakers of Alzheimer’s patients to engage the patients using the sense of touch as the agent.  It creates opportunities for newly shared experiences beyond speech.

The table made out of raw carbon fiber, MDF boards and Arduino technologies are able to sense the body current of the users when they are in contact with each other.  Furthermore, different types of affective touch such as holding, stroking, tapping, grabbing, kneading can be differentiated and translated to different types of sounds that match the motion and emotional intent of the gesture.