Saturday, 7 May 2005 | bengisu
F+R Hugs Body
How did this design improve life?
Technology occurs in most of our daily activities, it defines the way we relate to others, and becomes part of who we are and how we act. Technology is often adopted for utilitarian and practical reasons but turns out to be impractical to use because it is complex without being useful. Many of the computer operating systems and devices available are designed without any quality and emotion. Humans are made of emotions and it is necessary to construct technology able to fulfill our emotional needs and express the communicative function of human interaction. Interfaces and systems must be intuitive, natural, and compatible with our emotional status. Combining emotion and technology should be part of every design process. An increasing mobility of humans throughout the globe, due to business or study reasons, has brought family members to spend most of their time apart from each other. F+R Hugs could fill this gap. Humans need physical contact with each other. An infant may sink into depression and die without the closeness of her mother's body (studies refer of increased sudden infant death syndrome if children are not being hugged during the first 40 days of life). Adults, especially elderly people living far away from their families, deprived of tactile contact for a long period of time will tell you just how depressing it feels. A hug, a handshake, a pat on the back, and a kiss are all very important and bring us close to others, reconnect us to our memories and accentuates our present perceptions. There is an increasing need of human contact, not only for fun and pleasure, but also for improving healthcare and solve learning disabilities, that finally can be fulfilled through F+R Hugs. F+R Hugs (novelty version) has been presented at Design and Emotion Conference in 2004, and CIBERART Bilbao 2004 where it received 1st prize for Best Artistic Project, that helped for refining the prototype. We would like to manufacture this product and be able to bring it to market in 2006 and make it accessible to a larger audience. We hope that INDEX can help the further development of F+R Hugs, and make many people very happy!
Source: Index2005
|
