PulsArt – IT, Salt and Water For Family Awareness

Recent years have seen a growing interest in considering the domestic household as a new and important domain for interaction design. In this article we present pulsArt - a physical and digital installation designed for the home to represent different family members’ level of activity by water running down blocks of salt based on a real-time reading of the individual family member’s pulse. We describe how pulsArt explores novel ways of looking at the interaction between the physical, the social and the digital and how it acts as a context-aware artefact, amplifying the domestic setting to provide a new kind of awareness in the family. In doing so, we seek to develop new perspectives on designing interactive and context-aware systems for the home and what values they might support.

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