Party Mode was an exploratory autobiographical design project, in which visitors’ interactions with my previous website remotely controlled an Internet of Things light within my apartment. When a visitor entered “Party Mode” at the bottom of a previous homepage, my portfolio transformed into a musical instrument. Using a combination of digital and physical prototyping tools, my flat was synchronously transformed into a party space.
This project prompted reflections regarding 1) the consequences of democratizing configuration, participation, maintenance, and creativity when disparate things have the ability to connect; 2) how humans’ relationships with each other and things transform when considering data a material and participation a medium; and 3) the ethics of communicating status, symptoms, and intent as things become increasingly connected and complex.
Publications
Karey Helms. Phygital Party Mode: A Relationship with Relationships. ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2017) Workshop “Designing the Social Internet of Things”, Denver, Colorado, USA 2017.
