Context Special: Beads as Remote Chat for Teenagers

"BuddyBeads: Techno-Jewelry for non verbal communication within Teenager Girls Groups" by Ruth Kikin-Gil of the Interaction Design Institute, Ivrea, Italy, got its first outing after completion at 3AD (see UN story: A Shift of Focus to Context).

As noted, the conference had turned its attention from product design issues to a greater consideration of the social or organisational context in which the designs are used. The most interesting example of the two aspects meeting appeared in Kikin-Gil's work, which plays with young girls' delight in secrets and tight circles of 'best' friends whom they make contact with several times a day.

'Coupling the extremity in teenagers' attitudes and actions with the opportunities of mobile communication creates new behaviours and reshapes existing ones. But however meaningful the phone is in teenagers' lives, it is not designed to support their need for emotional communication and group identity,' says Kikin-Gil.

So she developed a means by which girls could share their secret feelings at a distance.

A string of electronic beads make up a bracelet. Several identical bracelets are given or sold to such a group of close friends, so that each has one. Beads are activated by pressing and, through connections by mobile phone, will signal at the far end which bead was pressed, how often and the duration of the pressure.

There are two kinds of bead: one kind represents an emotion or message, decided by the group who are wearing a particular set of bracelets. The others represent each member of the group sharing bracelets. In this way, it is possible to indicate both a simple message and who it is being received from through pressing beads.

Kikin-Gil envisages a range of designs for both kinds of bead and that girls will go together to choose their designs and assign local meaning to them. As the series of beads will be limited, the bracelets will be made distinct by the codes that the groups assign to the beads, rather than any uniqueness of the beads themselves. The meaning of individual beads is wide open, though suggested by designs such as a heart, a flower, etc. The meaning of wearing the bracelet is less negotiable: it signals that you have close friends and secrets.

Kikin-Gil worked with teenage girls in developing the idea and has tested it with similar groups. When she tried it out with boys, she found that there was far less interest and that the codes assigned to the beads tended to have a very functional quality, lacking the emotional and social elements generally introduced by girls.

Anyway, you read about it here first. It looks the kind of product with the potential to sweep through a generation, spreading from small pockets of teenagers in-the-know to a mass market, via other generations of women who will find the idea entertaining for a few weeks before handing the beads on to their nieces.

Associated Link: More details

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