The Cave Studio (previously Blue Room) is an ongoing project in the creative hub Sliperiet in Umeå, Sweden by Intereactive Institute Swedish ICT. Together with Philémonne Jaasma, a PhD student from the TU/e, we designed a creative ideation space based on the principles of embodied co-design.
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After numerous user explorations in the Blue Room – named after its original, blue walls – a final design was created that capitalizes on the use of the body in creative processes. It invites the user to explore by means of lighting schemes, soundscapes and other forms of interaction in the rooms: magnets, capacitive sensing, and pressure sensing, amongst others. The Cave Studio is designed in such a way that participants forget about the outside world the moment they step into the room.
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The Cave Studio hosts three to six people per session, to work on a challenge together. They set the challenge on beforehand, using Sliperiet’s online booking system. Each session takes 30 minutes and leads to the creation of a Future Narrative; this is an ideated scenario wherein participants use the room’s materials to demonstrate opportunities for innovation. The Future Narrative is recorded in a 1-minute video, that is automatically sent out to the participants after the session.
More details about the Cave Studio were published at TEI’17:
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Philemonne Jaasma, Dorothé Smit, Jelle van Dijk, Thomas Latcham, Ambra Trotto, and Caroline Hummels. 2017. The Blue Studio: Designing an Interactive Environment for Embodied Multi-Stakeholder Ideation Processes. In Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI ’17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1-10. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3024969.3025002