Luxalive: a lamp that elicits human values in interaction

I designed and built a lamp that elicits human values through interaction with its user. Human values roughly are what people strive for in their lives. The key idea is that when products are designed so people can employ behavior suiting their value priorities, interaction with these products can be much more satisfying, because a resonance occurs with the dynamics of the product and the preferred dynamics of the human. The two values the lamp can elicit are 'social power' and 'helpful'. Depicted above is the lamp behaving subserviently, following the user's movements and making the user feel powerful and in control. The lamp can make its light flow dynamically through its body, but moreover it can also move physically through a four bar mechanism powered by a servo motor.

Central themes of this blog

Product designers are blinded by traditional ideas of beautiful form and featuritis!
(yes, this blog is fairly serious)

Located at the department of Industrial Design at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, I am exploring how innovation could be powered by very different ideas, drawn from fields like interaction design, nature, music, art, new media and even dance. My focus is on intelligent digital products.

With this blog I aspire to develop and share these ideas, as well as show design explorations in the form of experiential interactive prototypes.

Some important questions I continuously try to answer are:

What should be the role of technology towards people, and vice versa?

What should the form language of future intelligent products be?

How can products be created that allow for a rich, natural, expressive and symbiotic interaction with people, respecting man as a whole?

How can anything be an inspirator for industrial design?

To what extent should human forms of intelligence be implemented in digital products?

If you're interested, there's going to be good stuff here!