Jay Silver created this awesome video of the studio session, which happened on day 2 of the conference. Check it out!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Holly Schmidt and I submitted our project Bio Circuit to the Explorations category at TEI ‘10 – Conference for Tangible, Embedded, Embodied Interaction – hosted at the MIT Media Lab. The conference is about HCI, design, interactive art, user experience, tools and technologies, with a strong focus on how computing can bridge atoms and bits into cohesive interactive systems. In early November we received the news that we were invited to participate in the conference, and a frenzy of work began. A couple months later, Holly and I flew from temperate Vancouver to chilly Boston to attend the conference from January 25-27.

The conference was amazing! It was extremely exciting to see the work that is going on within this field. The first day involved an interesting talk from keynote speaker John Frazer, who pioneered the development of intelligent and interactive building design systems. The afternoon consisted of extremely interesting paper presentations, and the afternoon concluded with the Demo Session, which we were a part of. The demos included projects that were of “visually and sensually rich content created by a diverse and broad group of practitioners, researchers, artists, designers, inventors, students, and independents” (TEI Explorations).

The Demo session was fast and furious, and Holly and I received a lot of great feedback. It was interesting to speak to people from such diverse backgrounds and to hear their perspective on our project.

Holly and I would like to extend a special thank you to Emily Carr University of Art + Design for supporting us in the opportunity to attend this fantastic conference.

Thanks to Fashioning Technology, MAKE Magazine, DIY Experts and others for mentioning us today!

Click here to view the embedded video.

This video depicts the collaborative wearable technology project of Bio Circuit in action. Bio Circuit was created at Emily Carr University by myself (Industrial Design student Dana Ramler), and MAA student Holly Schmidt.

Bio Circuit is a vest that provides a form of bio feedback using data from the wearer’s heart rate to determine what “sounds” they hear through the speaker embedded in the collar of the garment. The wearer places the heart rate monitor around the ribcage, resting against the skin and close to the heart. An MP3 audio player embedded in the vest plays the audio track related to that specific heart rate. The audio tracks are soundscapes mixed from a range of ambient sounds. If the wearer’s heart rate is low, the soundscape will reflect a quiet natural area with sounds such as water, birds and insects. If the wearer has a high heart rate then they will hear a cacophony of urban sounds such as people talking and traffic.

Bio Circuit stems from our concern for ethical design and the creation of media-based interactions that reveal human interdependence with the environment. With each beat of the heart, Bio Circuit connects the wearer with the inner workings of their body. In this sense the garment functions like other biofeedback devices that use sensors to provide a person with information about their physiological state. With Bio Circuit, we are proposing that these kinds of devices could extend a person’s awareness to include the environment.

* A special thank you to Suzi Webster, Bobbi Kozinuk, Emily Carr IDS, Bryan Rite and Angela Henderson.