To Touch or not to Touch? Differences in Affordance Resonating with Materialities. Hard and Soft Sensors embedded in an Artistic Research Setting

In this paper, we present theoretical basics, creative development processes, and partial evaluation results of human behavior and attitude in a dramaturgically staged interactive environment. The installation is set up in a media lab and the separate rooms are carefully designed to provoke emotional and cognitive human reactions. The corresponding installed sensor-actuator system includes different types of embedded sensors and tangible interfaces to create a fully embodied experience for participants walking through the artistic research facility. We evaluate and compare two opposite design approaches to investigate the impact of dramaturgy, design strategies, and furnishing on affective human-machine correlations and appropriation processes.