What if the things around us could work with us to achieve shared goals about the future? Anticipatory behavior in designed environments demonstrates the potential of contextual interfaces in the time-domain.
The goal of this project was to design a demonstratable example of anticipatory behavior as exhibited by familiar elements. While contextual design is still becoming increasingly popular, designing anticipatory behavior addresses the progression of time with respect to constantly evolving future contexts. The installation, mutuality, demonstrates the presence of future-context anticipation through the use of machine learning and various sensors.
When a user picks any item up off of a table, a pendant engages, changing its position to approach the user. If the user does not wish to be engaged while they are reading, they can train the system by simply nudging the pendant away. After a number of interactions, the pendant's artificial neural network learns not to approach the user while they are engaging in an activity about the table.
'Mutuality' took direct inspiration from the topics in my research paper while on exchange at the Industrial Design Engineering Masters program at NTNU in Trondheim.