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The Design Research Lab is a network of people, organisations, and non-human agents engaged at the intersection of technologies, materials, and social practices. Our aim is to design socially and ecologically sustainable tools, spaces, and knowledge that support people’s participation in a digital society – based on common principles of inclusiveness and respect for the planet. This puts the basic democratic right to take part in the digital sphere into practice. We start our research from individual lifeworlds and the needs of minoritized groups, beyond consumer majorities.
We are an interdisciplinary team of designers, researchers, tech-enthusiasts and critical thinkers from Berlin University of the Arts, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, as well as Einsteincenter Digital Future (ECDF).
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The Turn-Over Interface
The turn-over interface is an example of an electronic device that uses textile interactions as input. The donut-shaped knit structure is filled with beans and can be continuously turned around itself, in a rolling motion that is similar to rolling up a sleeve.
There are three sensors embedded in the knit that measure the motion and amount of stretch on the structure. Through these sensors, the interface perceives physical touch and the act of turning the donut-shaped object around itself. When a sensor is turned towards the object’s inner edge, it will give the highest response. By stretching or pressing the conductive yarn, more voltage can be measured for the individual sensor. An ATTiny microcontroller in the object‘s interior is connected via Bluetooth to a laptop where a program translates the sensor values into sound.
Each sensor is mapped to a particular auditory signal, a recognizable wave form: While the first sensor causes a sawtooth wave, the second one is linked to a triangle wave and the third one to a sine wave. The program always plays the sound of that sensor which is currently measuring the highest voltage value. The turn-over interface was designed as part of the EIT ICT activity “Connected Textiles” in 2013.