Interaction Relabelling

I brought in two objects for this exercise: the innards of a music box and an old copper door knocker. I chose these because the former is a fantastically mechanistic object with nostalgic qualities and the later since it is more utilitarian but decorative. In the end, we primarily focused on the sound box.

The music box was build to generate sound, sound was not our primary focus in relabelling it: we were more interested in its movement. I extracted this particular note generator from a Sleeping Beauty music box: after winding it, you open the top to find the princess and her prince dance around the surface of a small mirror. When I took this apart, it was to my delight that I found the reason for this movement to be two magnets attached to a bar that rotated in a circular fashion with the turning of the piano roll. While the main affordance of the object is the knob to wind it, the particularly intriguing quality is its magnetic surface and consequent rotation. We began by playing with the sound a bit, finding that the sound was increbibly amplified when it was placed on a resonant surface. Way cool this was, and we were curious to see how this might change in relation to other objects by placing them on the magnets and having them rotate. Hence the relabelling began:

Idea no. 1: Our first relabelling: a sushi serving platter as suggested by Shan. Food would be placed on top of the magnets and the user could control its movement by winding it. We turned it on its head (with the magnets attached to the table) for the next few ideas.

Idea no. 2: Spin the Bottle

Idea no. 3: Decision Maker – highly customizable for any situation.

Interaction Relabelling from Liza Stark on Vimeo.