Mapping Fabrics to Music: Lessons Learned

Paper in proceeding, 2003

The original aim of the Interactive Quilt project was to create an intuitive tangible interface, which was at the same time a beautiful object. The idea was to create a patchwork quilt that worked as a jukebox; the fabric of each patch being mapped to music genres to give the user a clue of what type of song would be played when touching a patch. From several user tests we found out that mapping fabrics to music is hard to do due to the highly subjective qualities involved. As a result, this forced us to leave our initial, HCI-oriented view behind to instead explore the qualities of ambiguity and calm technology. This gave the project an entirely new angle, and resulted in many new insights regarding the comprehension of fabrics and music, the qualities of exploration etc. In this paper we present our entire design process and our findings.