Objects of Wonderment

January 1st, 2008 | RESEARCH

While we should celebrate our success at evolving many vital aspects of the human-technology interactive experience, we question the scope of this progress. Step back with us for a moment. What really matters? Everyday life spans a wide range of emotions and experiences -- from improving productivity and efficiency to promoting wonderment and daydreaming. But our research and designs do not reflect this important life balance. The research we undertake and the applications we build employ technology primarily for improving tasks and solving problems. Our claim is that our successful future technological tools, the one we really want to cohabitate with, will be those that incorporate the full range of life experiences. In this paper we present wonderment as a design concept, introduce a novel toolkit based on mobile phone technology for promoting non-experts to participate in the creating of new objects of wonderment, and finally describe probe style interventions used to inform the design of a specific object of wonderment based on urban sounds and ringtones called Hullabaloo.

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Team Members

Eric Paulos, Author, Intel Research
Tom Jenkins, Author, The Royal College of Art
August Joki, Author, University of California, Los Angeles
Parul Vora, Author, Stanford University

Citation

Publication: ACM DIS 2008

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Tags

Audience: General Public | Museum | ISE Professionals | Scientists | Undergraduate | Graduate Students
Discipline: Computing and information science | Education and learning science | Engineering | Technology
Resource Type: Conference Proceedings | Reference Materials
Environment Type: Games | Simulations | Interactives | Media and Technology | Websites | Mobile Apps | Online Media