The telephone – invented some 125 years ago and now augmented by radio, TV, computer etc. – allows real-time awareness of distant people and places. (We could call this ‘telepresence’ but this word is now commonly used to mean video-conference systems.)
All these media, however, are used mainly to transmit speech and images. And speech and images, although powerful, are the least ‘physical’ part of the broad range of information which – every second, consciously and unconsciously – engage our sensory, emotional and intellectual attention, and could be transmitted between remote people and places.
So this project, Keep-in-Touch, asks you to invent, design and prototype a system which allows communication between a) people and b) people, places and or information distant from them.
The communication must be in real time and have a strongly physical character.
The system’s behaviour must be interestingly interactive, and its components must be interesting to look at, lieten to, feel etc.