Jive - Social Networking for your grandmother
by Imran Ali
I’ve long been fascinated by the potential of tangible media, a term popularised by MIT Media Lab’s Hiroshi Ishii and largely concerned with exploring physical forms of digital information.
British undergraduate product designer Ben Arent at Middlesex University recently began to explore similar themes in the design of physical representations for tangible messaging.
Arent’s thesis suggests that physicalising the artefacts of social networks and messaging services can help to make technology more accessible to those otherwise intimidated by digital interfaces. His concept design, Jive, is the first of a proposed series of devices which ‘you buy your grandparents to let them keep up to date and stay in touch with you’.
Members of a user’s social network are represented as physical ‘friend passes’ that can be placed into slots which then trigger an on screen update of everything that’s new about that member. Placing a pass to the side of the main screen enables communication - by email, voice call, IM - to be initiated.
Arent’s work raises some important questions about mobility - to date almost all design explorations around tangible media have been grounded in fixed communication networks. If we anticipate that physical and tangible media to play a large part in the design of future interfaces, how does this translate to mobility? In the case of Arent’s Jive - how does a ‘friend pass’ work with a mobile device…do we expect mobile devices themselves to become a physical actor in a tangible interface?
A confluence of cheap physical computing kits, gestural technologies and open source hardware suggests we can expect to see more examples of tangible media. As such it’s important to begin developing design guidelines and best practices (a parallel to Dan Saffer’s Designing Gestural Interfaces) that can be used to address the intersection of mobility and tangible media.
