Questions for Reflections

1. What attracted you to this piece of interactive art in the first place? 
    The sound, animation and the plastic shapes. It is very interesting that they have such a brilliant idea to combine interactive new media arts and healing therapy together.


2. How did you feel when you first saw this interactive art? 
   I was excited and impressed by this interactive art. Somehow I feel that I'm enjoying watching this video, because i like the creativity they create the ELEMENTS.

3. What element/s made this interactive art successful in engaging you? 
   The creativity of the combination of new media arts and the healing therapy. Never knew that new media arts can work with refining humans' movements, but to admit it, this is awesome, fun and useful.

4.What was the ‘wow’ factor for you? 
     The WOW factor for me is they can make different kinds of sounds and animations using different shapes. Different shapes creates different colours and sounds, when the combine together they'll come out different things that impressed the patients.

5.If there is one thing that you want to add to this
interactive artwork, what would it be? 
     Emotion reflection, when playing this system, the colours and the animation will show out the feelings and the emotions of the patient and change the animations slowly to cheer up the patient.

    

Critical Reflection on Interactivity as Expression

        The video I searched and chose is an interactive new media art for movement rehabilitation called ELEMENTS.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svXT16txEbg

ELEMENTS is a 42-inch tabletop TV on which patients who suffers and recovering Traumatic Brain Injury can paint, play games and mix sounds by gesturing with brightly coloured, soft plastic shapes. 

The creative and playful user interaction with different software applications is provided for the patients. ELEMENTS is create by Jonathan Duckworth, a new media artist as well as a psychologist and his colleague, Nick Mumford who was the founder of this system.They carried a lots of studies alongside with Peter Wilson and his researches towards patients who suffer brain injuries, the system was successfully created during May 2010. Mr Duckworth also wrote a thesis about this system but it is not officially published.
http://researchbank.rmit.edu.au/eserv/rmit:10224/Duckworth.pdf 

While playing this interactive media system, patients can refine their movements using sounds and animations to give feedback during games. Using the colourful plastic shapes to mix sounds,create musics and interesting animations.